The Revelation Space Collection

by Alastair Reynolds

  Khouri stepped closer to the bed. It was Volyova; there was no doubt about that. But she looked like a version of her friend who had been subjected to some appalling experiment in accelerated ageing, something involving drugs to suck the flesh back to the bone and more drugs to reduce the skin to the merest glaze. She looked astonishingly delicate, as if liable to splinter into dust at any moment. It was not the first time Khouri had seen Volyova here, in the medical bay. There had been the time after the gunfight on the surface of Resurgam, when they were capturing Sylveste. Volyova had been injured then, but there had never been any question of her dying. Now it took close examination to tell that she was not already dead. Volyova looked desiccated.

  Khouri turned to the beta-level, horrified. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I still don’t really know. Before she put me to sleep there was nothing the matter with her. Then I came back around and found myself here, in this room. She was in the bed. The machines had stabilised her, but that was about the best they could do. In the long term, she was still dying.’ Clavain nodded at the displays looming above Volyova. ‘I’ve seen these kinds of injuries before, during wartime. She breathed vacuum without any kind of protection against internal moisture loss. Decompression must have been rapid, but not quite quick enough to kill her instantly. Most of the damage is in her lungs - scarring of the alveoli, where ice crystals formed. She’s blind in both eyes, and there is some damage to brain function. I don’t think it’s cognitive. There’s tracheal damage as well, which makes it difficult for her to speak.’

  ‘She’s an Ultra,’ Thorn said with a touch of desperation. ‘Ultras don’t die just because they swallow a little vacuum.’

  ‘She isn’t much like the other Ultras I’ve met,’ Clavain said. ‘There were no implants in her. If there had been, she might have walked it off. At the very least, the medichines could have buffered her brain. But she had none. I understand she was repulsed by the idea of anything invading her.’

  Khouri looked at the beta-level. ‘What have you done, Clavain?’

  ‘What it took. It was requested that I do what I could. The obvious thing was to inject a dose of medichines.’

  ‘Wait.’ Khouri raised a hand. ‘Who requested what?’

  Clavain scratched his beard. ‘I’m not sure. I just felt an obligation to do it. You have to understand that I’m just software. I wouldn’t claim otherwise. It’s entirely possible that something booted me up and intervened in my execution, forcing me to act in a certain manner.’

  Khouri and Thorn exchanged glances. They were both thinking the same thing, Khouri knew. The only agency that could have switched Clavain back on and made him help Volyova was the Captain.

  Khouri felt cold, intensely aware that she was being observed. ‘Clavain,’ she said. ‘Listen to me. I don’t know what you are, really. But you have to understand: she would sooner have died than have you do what you’ve just done.’

  ‘I know,’ Clavain said, extending his palms in a gesture of helplessness. ‘But I had to do it. It’s what I would have done had I been here.’

  ‘Ignored her deepest wish, is that what you mean?’

  ‘Yes, if you want to put it like that. Because someone once did the same for me. I was in the same position as her, you see. Injured - dying, in fact. I’d been wounded, but I definitely didn’t want any stinking machines in my skull. I’d have rather died than that. But someone put them in there anyway. And now I’m grateful. She gave me four hundred years of life I wouldn’t have had any other way.’

  Khouri looked at the bed, at the woman lying in it, and then back to the man who had, if not saved her life, at the very least postponed her moment of death.

  ‘Clavain ...’ she said. ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘Clavain is a Conjoiner,’ said a voice as thin as smoke. ‘You should listen to him very carefully, because he means what he says.’

  Volyova had spoken, yet there had been no movement from the figure on the bed. The only indication that she was now conscious, which had not been the case when they arrived, was a shift in the biomedical traces hovering above her.

  Khouri wrenched her helmet off. Clavain’s apparition vanished, replaced by the skeletal machine. She placed the helmet on the floor and knelt by the bed. ‘Ilia?’

  ‘Yes, it’s me.’ The voice was like sandpaper. Khouri observed the tiniest movement of Volyova’s lips as she formed the words, but the sound came from above her.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘There was an incident.’

  ‘We saw the damage to the hull when we arrived. Is . . .’

  ‘Yes. It was my fault, really. Like everything. Always my fault. Always my damned fault.’

  Khouri glanced back at Thorn. ‘Your fault?’

  ‘I was tricked.’ The lips parted in what might almost have been a smile. ‘By the Captain. I thought he had finally come around to my way of thinking. That we should use the cache weapons against the Inhibitors.’

  Khouri could almost imagine what must have happened. ‘How did he trick ...’

  ‘I deployed eight of the weapons beyond the hull. There was a malfunction. I thought it was genuine, but it was really just a way to get me outside the ship.’

  Khouri lowered her voice. It was an absurd gesture - there was nothing that could be hidden from the Captain now - but she could not help it. ‘He wanted to kill you?’

  ‘No,’ Volyova said, hissing her answer. ‘He wanted to kill himself, not me. But I had to be there to see it. Had to be a witness.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To understand his remorse. To understand that it was deliberate, and not an accident.’

  Thorn joined them. He too had removed his helmet, tucking it respectfully under one arm. ‘But the ship’s still here. What happened, Ilia?’

  Again that weary half-smile. ‘I drove my shuttle into the beam. I thought it might make him stop.’

  ‘Seems as if it did.’

  ‘I didn’t expect to survive. But my aim wasn’t quite right.’

  The servitor strode towards the bed. Unclothed of Clavain’s image, its motions appeared automatically more machinelike and threatening.

  ‘They know that I injected medichines into your head,’ it said, its voice no longer humanoid. ‘And now they know that you know.’

  ‘Clavain ... the beta-level ... had no choice,’ Volyova said before either of her two human visitors could speak. ‘Without the medichines I’d be dead now. Do they horrify me? Yes. Utterly, to the absolute core of my being. I am racked with revulsion at the thought of them crawling inside my skull like so many spiders and snakes. At the same time, I accept the necessity of them. They are the tools I have always worked with, after all. And I am fully aware that they cannot work miracles. Too much damage has been done. I am not amenable to repair.’

  ‘We’ll find a way, Ilia,’ Khouri said. ‘Your injuries can’t be ...’

  Volyova’s whisper of a voice cut her off. ‘Forget me. I don’t matter. Only the weapons matter now. They are my children, spiteful and wicked as they may be, and I won’t have them falling into the wrong hands.’

  ‘Now we seem to be getting to the crux of things,’ Thorn said.

  ‘Clavain - the real Clavain - wants the weapons,’ Volyova said. ‘By his own estimation he has the means to take them from us.’ Her voice grew louder. ‘Isn’t that so, Clavain?’

  The servitor bowed. ‘I’d much rather negotiate their handover, Ilia, as you know, especially now that I’ve invested time in your welfare. But make no mistake. My counterpart is capable of a great deal of ruthlessness in pursuit of a just cause. He believes he has right on his side. And men who think they have right on their side are always the most dangerous sort.’

  ‘Why are you telling us that?’ Khouri said.

  ‘It’s in his - our - best interests,’ the servitor said amiably. ‘I’d far rather convince you to give up the weapons without a fight. At the very least we’d avoid any risk of damaging the dam
ned things.’

  ‘You don’t seem like a monster to me,’ Khouri said.

  ‘I’m not,’ the servitor replied. ‘And nor is my counterpart. He’ll always choose the path of least bloodshed. But if some bloodshed is required . . . well, my counterpart won’t flinch from a little surgical butchery. Especially not now.’

  The servitor said the last with such emphasis that Thorn asked, ‘Why not now?’

  ‘Because of what he has had to do to get this far.’ The servitor paused, its openwork head scanning each of them. ‘He betrayed everything that he had believed in for four hundred years. That wasn’t done lightly, I assure you. He lied to his friends and left behind his loved ones, knowing that it was the only way to get this done. And lately he took a terrible decision. He destroyed something that he loved very much. It cost him a great deal of pain. In that sense, I am not an accurate copy of the real Clavain. My personality was shaped before that dreadful act.’

  Volyova’s voice rasped out again, instantly commanding their attention. ‘The real Clavain isn’t like you?’

  ‘I’m a sketch taken before a terrible darkness fell across his life, Ilia. I can only speculate on the extent to which we differ. But I would not like to trifle with my counterpart in his current state of mind.’

  ‘Psychological warfare,’ she hissed.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘That is why you’ve come, isn’t it? Not to help us negotiate a sensible settlement, but to put the fear of God into us.’

  The servitor bowed again, with something of the same mechanical modesty. ‘If I were to achieve that,’ Clavain said, ‘I would consider my work well done. The path of least bloodshed, remember?’

  ‘You want bloodshed,’ Ilia Volyova said, ‘you’ve come to the right woman.’

  Shortly afterwards she fell into a different state of consciousness, something perhaps not too far from sleep. The displays relaxed, sine waves and Fourier harmonic histograms reflecting a seismic shift in major neural activity. Her visitors observed her in that state for several minutes, wondering to themselves whether she was dreaming or scheming, or if the distinction even mattered.

  The next six hours went by quickly. Thorn and Khouri returned to the transfer shuttle and conferred with their immediate underlings. They were gratified to hear that no crises had occurred while they were visiting Volyova. There had been some minor flare-ups, but for the most part the two thousand passengers had accepted the cover story about a problem with the atmospheric compatibility of the two ships. Now the passengers were assured that the technical difficulty had been resolved - it had been a sensor malfunction all along - and that disembarkation could commence in the orderly fashion that had already been agreed. A large holding area had been prepared a few hundred metres from the parking bay, just into the spun part of the ship. It was a region that was relatively unafflicted by the Captain’s plague transformations, and Khouri and Volyova had worked hard to disguise the most overtly disturbing parts of the area that the plague had affected.

  The holding area was cold and dank, and though they had done their best to make it comfortable, it still had the atmosphere of a crypt. Interior partitions had been put up to divide the space into smaller chambers which were each capable of containing a hundred passengers, and those chambers were in turn equipped with partitions to allow some privacy for family units. The holding area could accommodate ten thousand passengers - four further arrivals of the transfer shuttle - but by the time the sixth flight arrived, they would have to begin dispersing passengers into the main body of the ship. And then, inevitably, the truth would dawn: that they had been brought not only aboard a ship which was carrying the feared Melding Plague, but aboard a ship which had been subsumed and reshaped by its own Captain; that they were, in every sense that mattered, now inside that selfsame Captain.

  Khouri expected panic and terror to accompany that realisation. Very likely it would be necessary to enforce a state of martial emergency even more stringent than that now operating on Resurgam. There would be deaths, and there would probably have to be more executions, to make a point.

  And yet none of that would matter a damn when the real truth got out, which was that Ilia Volyova, the hated Triumvir, was still alive, and that she had orchestrated this very evacuation.

  Only then would the real trouble start.

  Khouri watched the transfer shuttle undock and begin its return trip to Resurgam. Thirty hours of flight time, she calculated, plus - if they were lucky - no more than half that in turnaround at the other end. In two days Thorn would be back. If she could hold things together until then, she would already feel as if she had climbed a mountain.

  But there would still be ninety-eight further flights to bring aboard after that ...

  One step at a time, she thought. That was what they had taught her in her soldiering days: break a problem down into doable units. Then, no matter how stupendous the problem seemed, you could tackle it piece by piece. Focus on the details and worry about the bigger picture later.

  Outside, the distant space battle continued to rage. The flashes resembled the random firing of synapses in a splayed-out brain. She was certain that Volyova knew something about what was going on, and perhaps Clavain’s beta-level did, too. But Volyova was sleeping and Khouri did not trust the servitor to tell her anything except subtle lies. That left the Captain, who probably knew something as well.

  Khouri made her way through the ship alone. She took the dilapidated elevator system down to the cache chamber, just as she had done hundreds of times before in Volyova’s company. She felt an odd sense of mischief to be making the journey unaccompanied.

  The chamber was as weightless and dark as it had been on their recent visits. Khouri halted the elevator on the lock level, and then shrugged on a spacesuit and propulsion pack. In a few breathless moments she was inside the chamber, floating into darkness. She jetted from the wall, doing her best to ignore the sense of unease she always felt in the presence of the cache weapons. She keyed on the suit’s navigation system and waited for it to align itself with the chamber’s transponder beacons. Annotated grey-green forms hoved on to her faceplate, at distances ranging from tens to hundreds of metres. The spidery lattice of the monorail system was a series of harder lines transecting the chamber at various angles. There were still weapons in the chamber. But not as many as she had expected.

  There had been thirty-three before she had left for Resurgam. Volyova had deployed eight of them before the Captain tried to destroy himself. But just from the paucity of hovering shapes, Khouri could see that there were a lot fewer than twenty-five weapons left here. She counted the hovering shapes and then counted again, steering her suit deeper into the chamber just in case there was a problem with the transponder. But her first suspicion had been correct. There were only thirteen weapons left aboard Nostalgia for Infinity. Twenty of the damned things were unaccounted for.

  Except she knew exactly where they were, didn’t she? Eight were outside somewhere, and so - presumably - were the other twelve that had gone missing. And, very probably, they were halfway across the system, responsible for at least some of the glints and flashes she had seen from the shuttle.

  Volyova - or someone, anyway - had thrown twenty cache weapons into battle against the Inhibitors.

  And it was anyone’s guess who was winning.

  Know thine enemy, Clavain thought.

  Except he didn’t know his enemy at all.

  He was alone on the bridge of Zodiacal Light, sitting in rapt concentration. With his eyes nearly closed and his forehead creased by habitual worry lines, he resembled a chess master about to make the most vital move of his career. Beyond the steeple of his fingers hung a projected form: a deeply nested composite view of the lighthugger that held the long-lost weapons.

  He recalled what Skade had told him, back in the Mother Nest. The evidence trail pointed to this ship being Nostalgia for Infinity; her commander most likely a woman named Ilia Volyova. He could
even remember the picture of the woman that Skade had shown him. But even if that evidence trail was correct, and he really would be dealing with Volyova, it told him almost nothing. The only thing he could trust was what he learned with his own extended senses, in the present.

  The image before him composited all salient tactical knowledge of the enemy craft. Its details were constantly shifting and re-layering as Zodiacal Light’s intelligence-gathering systems improved their guesswork. Long baseline interferometry teased out the electromagnetic profile of the ship across the entire spectrum from soft gamma rays to low-frequency radio. At all wavelengths the backscatter of radiation was perplexing, making the interpretive software crash or come up with nonsensical guesses. Clavain had to intervene every time the software threw up another absurd interpretation. For some reason the software kept insisting that the vessel resembled some weird fusion of ship, cathedral and sea urchin. Clavain could see the underlying form of a plausible spacecraft, and had to constantly nudge the software away from its more outlandish solution minima. He could only imagine that the lighthugger had cloaked itself in a shell of confusing material, like the obfuscatory clouds that Rust Belt habitats occasionally employed.

  The alternative - that the software was correct, and that he was merely enforcing his own expectations on it - was too unnerving to consider.

  There was a knock against the frame of the door.

  He turned around with a stiff whirr of his exoskeleton. ‘Yes?’

  Antoinette Bax stalked into the room, followed by Xavier. They both wore exoskeletons as well, though they had ornamented theirs with swirls of luminous paint and welded-on baroquework. Clavain had observed a lot of that amongst his crew, especially amongst Scorpio’s army, and had seen no reason to enforce a more disciplined regime. Privately, he welcomed anything that instilled a sense of camaraderie and purpose.

  ‘What is it, Antoinette?’ Clavain asked.

  ‘There’s something we wanted to discuss, Clavain.’

  ‘It’s about the attack,’ Xavier Liu added.