‘If you hurt her . . .’ he found himself saying.
But Skade was still talking. ‘But there may still be time to make a difference, to repair some of the harm, if not all of it. It’s up to you, Clavain. Our velocity differential is small enough now that a transfer operation is possible. If you turn away from my course and show no sign of returning to it, I will send Felka to you aboard a corvette - fired into deep space, of course.’
‘Skade . . .’
‘I will expect your response immediately. A personal transmission would be nice, but, failing that, I will expect to see a change in your thrust vector.’ She sighed, and it was in that moment that Clavain realised what had been troubling him about Skade since the start of the transmission. It was the way she never drew breath, never once stopped to take in air.
‘One final thing. I’ll give you a generous margin of error before I decide that you have rejected my offer. But when that margin has ended, I will still put Felka aboard a corvette. The difference is, I won’t make it easy for you to find her. Think of that, Clavain, will you? Felka, all alone between the stars, so far from companionship. She might not understand. Then again, she very well might.’ Skade hesitated, then added, ‘You’d know, I suppose, better than anyone. She’s your daughter, after all. The question is, how much does she really mean to you?’
Skade’s transmission ended.
Remontoire was conscious. He smiled with quiet amusement as Clavain entered the room that served as both his quarters and his prison. He could not be said to look sparklingly well - that would never be the case - but neither did he look like a man who had only recently been frozen, and before that, technically, deceased.
‘I wondered when you’d pay me a visit,’ he said, with what struck Clavain as disarming cheerfulness. He lay on his back, his head on a pillow, his hands steepled across his chest, but in every sense appearing relaxed and calm.
Clavain’s exoskeleton eased him into a sitting position, shifting pressure from one set of sores to another.
‘I’m afraid things have been a tiny bit difficult,’ Clavain said. ‘But I’m glad to see that you’re in one piece. It wasn’t propitious to have you thawed until now.’
‘I understand,’ Remontoire said, with a dismissive wave of one hand. ‘It can’t ...’
‘Wait.’ Clavain looked at his old friend, taking in the slight changes in his facial appearance that had been necessary for Remontoire to function as an agent in Yellowstone society. Clavain had become used to him being totally hairless, like an unfinished mannequin.
‘Wait what, Clavain?’
‘There are some ground rules you need to be aware of, Rem. You can’t leave this room, so please don’t embarrass me by making an attempt to do so.’
Remontoire shrugged, as if this was no great matter. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it. What else?’
‘You can’t communicate with any system beyond this room, not while you’re in here. So, again, please don’t try.’
‘How would you know if I did try?’
‘I would.’
‘Fair enough. Anything else?’
‘I don’t know if I can trust you yet. Hence the precautions, and my general reluctance to wake you before now.’
‘Perfectly understandable.’
‘I’m not finished. I dearly want to trust you, Rem, but I’m not certain that I can. And I can’t afford to risk the success of this mission.’ Remontoire started to speak, but Clavain raised a finger and continued talking. ‘That’s why I won’t be taking any chances. None at all. If you do anything, no matter how apparently trivial, that I think might be in any way to the detriment of the mission, I’ll kill you. No ifs, no buts. Absolutely no trial. We’re a long way from the Ferrisville Convention now, a long way from the Mother Nest.’
‘I gathered we were on a ship,’ Remontoire said. ‘And we’re accelerating very, very hard. I wanted to find something I could drop to the floor, so that I might have an idea of exactly how hard. But you’ve done a very good job of leaving me with nothing. Still, I can guess. What is it now - four and a half gees?’
‘Five,’ Clavain said. ‘And we’ll soon be pushing to six and higher.’
‘This room doesn’t remind me of any part of Nightshade. Have you captured another lighthugger, Clavain? That can’t have been easy.’
‘I had some help.’
‘And the high rate of acceleration? How did you manage that without Skade’s magic box of tricks?’
‘Skade didn’t create that technology from scratch. She stole it, or enough pieces to figure out the rest. She wasn’t the only one with access to it, however. I met a man who had tapped the same mother-lode. ’
‘And this man is aboard the ship?’
‘No, he left us to our own devices. It’s my ship, Rem.’ Clavain whipped out an arm encased in the support rig and patted the rough metal wall of Remontoire’s cell. ‘She’s called Zodiacal Light. She’s carrying a small army. Skade’s ahead of us, but I’m not going to let her get her hands on those weapons without a struggle.’
‘Ah. Skade.’ Remontoire nodded, smiling.
‘Something amusing you?’
‘Has she been in touch?’
‘In a manner of speaking, yes. That’s why I woke you. What are you getting at?’
‘Did she make it clear what had ...’ Remontoire trailed off, leaving Clavain aware that he was being observed closely. ‘Evidently not.’
‘What?’
‘She nearly died, Clavain. When you escaped from the comet, the one where we met the Master of Works.’
‘Clearly she got better.’
‘Well, that very much depends . . .’ Again, Remontoire trailed off. ‘This isn’t about Skade, is it? I can see that concerned paternal look in your eye.’ In one easy movement he swung himself off the bed, sitting quite normally on the edge, as if the five gees of acceleration did not apply to him at all. Only a tiny twitching vein in the side of his head betrayed the tension he was under. ‘Let me guess. She still has Felka, doesn’t she.’
Clavain said nothing, waiting for Remontoire to continue.
‘I tried to have Felka come with me and the pig,’ he said, ‘but Skade wasn’t having it. Said Felka was more useful to her as a bargaining chip. I couldn’t talk her out of it. If I’d have argued too strenuously, she wouldn’t have let me come after you at all.’
‘You came to kill me.’
‘I came to stop you. My intention was to persuade you to come back with me to the Mother Nest. Of course, I’d have killed you if it came to it, but then you’d have done precisely the same to me if it was something you believed in sufficiently.’ Remontoire paused. ‘I believed I could talk you out of it. No one else would have given you a chance.’
‘We’ll talk about that later. It’s Felka who matters now.’
There was a long silence between the two men. Clavain adjusted his position, determined that Remontoire should not see how uncomfortable he was.
‘What’s happened?’ Remontoire asked.
‘Skade’s offered to turn Felka over provided I abandon the chase. She’ll drop her behind Nightshade, in a shuttle. At maximum burn it can shift to a rest frame we can reach with one of our shuttles.’
Remontoire nodded. Clavain sensed his friend thinking deeply, chewing over permutations and possibilities.
‘And if you refuse?’
‘She’ll still ditch Felka, but she won’t make it easy for us to catch her. At best, I’ll have to forfeit the chase to ensure a safe recovery. At worst, I’ll never find her. We’re in interstellar space, Rem. There’s a hell of a lot of nothing out there. With Skade’s flame ahead of us and ours behind, there are huge deadspots in our sensor coverage.’
There was another long silence while Remontoire thought again. He eased back on to the bed, assisting the flow of blood to his brain.
‘You can’t trust Skade, Clavain. She has absolutely no need to convince you of her sincerity, since she doesn’t think you’l
l ever have anything she needs or anything that can hurt her. This is not a two-prisoner game, like they taught you back on Deimos.’
‘I must have scared her,’ Clavain said. ‘She wasn’t expecting us to catch up so easily.’
‘Even so ...’ Remontoire hovered on the edge of saying something for several minutes.
‘You realise why I woke you now.’
‘Yes, I think I do. Run Seven was in a similar position to Skade when he had Irravel Veda on his tail, trying to get back her passengers.’
‘Seven made you serve him. You were forced to give him advice, tactics he could use against Irravel.’
‘It’s an entirely different situation, Clavain.’
‘There are enough similarities for me.’ Clavain made his frame elevate him to a standing position. ‘Here’s the picture, Rem. Skade will expect a response from me in a matter of days. You’re going to help me choose that response. Ideally, I want Felka back without losing sight of the objective.’
‘You thawed me out in desperation, then? Better the devil you know, as they say?’
‘You’re my oldest and closest friend, Rem. I just don’t know if I can trust you any more.’
‘And should the advice I give you be good ... ?’
‘That might put me in a more trusting frame of mind, I suppose.’ Clavain forced a smile. ‘Of course, I’d also have Felka’s advice on that as well.’
‘And if we fail?’
Clavain said nothing. He just turned and left.
Four small shuttles arced away from Zodiacal Light, each falling into its own half-hemisphere of the relativistically distorted starscape. The exhaust streams of the ships glittered in the backwash from Zodiacal Light’s main flames. The trajectories were achingly beautiful, flung out from the mother ship like the curved arms of a chandelier.
If only this wasn’t an action in a war, Clavain thought, then it might almost be something to be proud of ...
He watched their departure from an observation cupola near the prow of his ship, feeling an obligation to wait until he could no longer make them out. Each shuttle carried a valued crewmember, plus a quota of fuel that he would rather not have had to spend before reaching Resurgam. If all went well, Clavain would get back the four shuttles and their crew. But he would never see most of the fuel again. There was only a tiny margin of error, enough that one ship could bring back a human-mass payload in addition to its pilot.
He hoped he was playing this one correctly.
It was said that the taking of hard decisions was something that became easier with repetition, like any difficult activity. There was, perhaps, some truth in that assertion. But if so, Clavain found that it most certainly did not apply in his own case. He had taken several extraordinarily difficult decisions lately, and each had been, in its own unique way, harder than the last. So it was with the matter of Felka.
It was not that he did not want Felka back, if there was a way that could be achieved. But Skade knew how much he wanted the weapons as well. She also knew that it was not a selfish issue with Clavain. He could not be bargained with in the usual sense, since he did not want the weapons for his own personal gain. But with Felka she had the perfect instrument of negotiation. She knew that the two of them had a special bond, one that went back to Mars. Was Felka really his daughter? He didn’t know, even now. He had convinced himself that she might be, and she had told him she was . . . but that had been under possible duress, when she had been trying to persuade him not to defect. If anything, that admission had only served to slowly undermine his own certainties. He would not know for sure until he was again in her presence, and he could ask her properly.
And should it really matter? Her value as a human being had nothing to do with any hypothetical genetic connection with himself. Even if she was his daughter, he hadn’t known that, or even suspected it, until long after he had rescued her from Mars. And yet something had made him go back into Galiana’s nest, at great risk to himself, because he had felt a need to save her. Galiana had told him it was pointless, that she wasn’t a thinking human being in any sense that he recognised it, just a mindless information-processing vegetable.
And he had proven her wrong. It was probably the only time in his life when he had ever done that to Galiana.
And yet still it didn’t matter. This was all about humanity, Clavain thought, not about blood ties or loyalty. If he forgot that, then he might as well let Skade take the weapons with her. And he might as well defect back to the spiders and leave the rest of the human race to its fate. And yet if he failed to recover the weapons, what use was a single human gesture, no matter how well intentioned?
The four ships were gone. Clavain hoped and prayed that he had made the right decision.
A beetle-backed government car hissed through the streets of Cuvier. It had been raining again, but recently the clouds had cleared. The dismantled planet was now clearly visible during many hours of each evening. The cloud of liberated matter was a lacy many-armed thing. It gleamed red and ochre and pale green and occasionally flickered with slow electrical storms, pulsing like the courtship display of some uncatalogued deep-sea animal. Hard shadows and bright symmetric foci marked the sites within the cloud where Inhibitor machinery was coming into existence, aggregating and solidifying. There had been a time when it was possible to think that what had happened to the planet was some rare but natural event. Now no such comfort existed.
Thorn had seen the way people in Cuvier dealt with the phenomenon. For the most part they ignored it. When the thing was in the sky they walked down the streets without looking up. Even when the fact of its existence could not be ignored, they seldom looked at the thing directly, or even referred to it in anything but the most oblique terms. It was as if a massive act of collective denial might make it go away, an omen that the people had decided to reject.
Thorn sat in one of the car’s two rear seats, behind the driver’s partition. There was a small flickering television screen sunk into the back of the driver’s seat. Blue light played across Thorn’s face as he watched footage taken from far outside the city. The clip was fuzzy and hand-held shaky, but it showed all that it needed to. The first of the two shuttles was still on the ground - the camera panned over it, lingering on the surreal juxtaposition of sleek machine and jumbled rockscape - but the second was in the air, coming back down from orbit. The shuttle had already made several trips to just above Resurgam’s atmosphere where the much larger in-system craft was in orbit. Now the camera view jogged upwards, catching the descending ship as it lowered itself towards the landing site, settling down on a tripod of flames.
‘It could be faked,’ Thorn said quietly. ‘I know it isn’t, but that’s what people will think.’
Khouri was sitting next to him, dressed as Vuilleumier. She said, ‘You can fake anything if you try hard enough. But it isn’t as easy as it used to be, not now that everything’s stored using analogue media. I’m not sure even a whole government department could produce something convincing enough.’
‘The people will still be suspicious.’
The camera panned across the sparse, nervous-looking crowd that was still on the ground. There was a small encampment three hundred metres from the parked shuttle, the dusty tents difficult to distinguish from fallen boulders. The people looked like refugees from any world, any century. They had come thousands of kilometres, converging on this point from a variety of settlements. It had cost them greatly: roughly a tenth of their number had not completed the journey. They had brought enough possessions to make the overland crossing, while knowing - if the underground intelligence network was efficient in its dissemination of information - that they would be allowed to bring nothing aboard the ship but the clothes they stood in. Near the encampment was a small hole in the ground where belongings were tossed before each party boarded the shuttle. These were possessions that had been treasured until the last possible moment, even though the logical thing would have been to leave them behind at h
ome, before making the difficult journey across Resurgam. There were photographs and children’s toys, and all of them would be buried, human relics to add to the million-year-old store of Amarantin artefacts that the planet still held.
‘We’ve taken care of that,’ Khouri said. ‘Some of the witnesses who made it this far have returned to the major population centres. They needed persuading, of course, to turn around when they’d got that far, but . . .’
‘How did you manage it?’
The car negotiated a bend with a swish of tyres. The cubiform buildings of the Inquisition House district loomed into view, grey and slab-sided as granite cliffs. Thorn eyed them apprehensively.
‘They were told they’d be allowed to take a small quota of personal effects on to the ship with them when they came back.’
‘Bribery, in other words.’ Thorn shook his head, wondering if any great good deed could be entirely untainted by corruption, no matter how useful a purpose that corruption served. ‘But I suppose you had to get the word back somehow. How many, now?’
Khouri had the numbers ready. ‘Fifteen hundred in orbit, at the last count. A few hundred still on the ground. When we’ve got five hundred we’ll make the next trip up from the surface, and then the transfer ship will be full, ready to shuttle them to Nostalgia.’
‘They’re brave,’ Thorn said. ‘Or very, very foolish. I’m not sure which.’
‘Brave, Thorn, there’s no doubt about that. And scared, too. But you can’t blame them for that.’
They were brave, it was true. They had made the journey to the shuttles based only on the scantiest of evidence that the machines even existed. After Thorn’s arrest, rumours had run rife amongst the exodus movement. The government had continued to issue carefully engineered denials, each of which was designed to nurture in the populace’s mind the idea that Thorn’s shuttles might in fact be real. Those people who had made it to the shuttles so far had done so expressly against government advice, risking imprisonment and death as they trespassed into prohibited territory.
The Revelation Space Collection Page 200