THIRTY-NINE
‘Hello, Clavain,’ Ilia Volyova said, her voice a fine papery rasp that he had to struggle to understand. ‘It’s good to see you, finally. Come closer, will you?’
He walked to the side of her bed, unwilling to believe that this was the Triumvir. She looked dreadfully ill, and yet at the same time he could feel a profound calm about the woman. Her expression, as well as he could read it, for her eyes were hidden behind blank grey goggles, spoke of quiet accomplishment, of the weary elation that came with the concluding of a lengthy and difficult business.
‘It’s good to meet you, Ilia,’ he said. He shook her hand as gently as he could. She had already been injured, he knew, and had then gone back into space, into the battle. Unprotected, she had received the kind of radiation dose that even broad-spectrum medichines could not remedy.
She was going to die, and she was going to die sooner rather than later.
‘You are very like your proxy, Clavain,’ she said in that quiet rasp. ‘And different, too. You have a gravitas that the machine lacked. Or perhaps it is simply that I know you better now as an adversary. I am not at all sure I respected you before.’
‘And now?’
‘You have given me pause for thought, I will certainly say that much.’
There were nine of them present. Next to Volyova’s bed was Khouri, the woman Clavain took to be her deputy. Clavain, in turn, was accompanied by Felka, Scorpio, two of Scorpio’s pig soldiers, Antoinette Bax and Xavier Liu. Clavain’s shuttle had docked with Nostalgia for Infinity after the immediate declaration of cease-fire, with Storm Bird following shortly after.
‘Have you considered my proposal?’ Clavain asked, delicately.
‘Your proposal?’ she said, with a sniff of disdain.
‘My revised proposal, then. The one that didn’t involve your unilateral surrender.’
‘You’re hardly in a position to be putting proposals to anyone, Clavain. The last time I looked, you only had half a ship left.’
She was right. Remontoire and most of the remaining crew were still alive, but the damage to the ship was acute. It was a minor miracle that the Conjoiner drives had not detonated.
‘By proposal I meant . . . suggestion. A mutual arrangement, to the benefit of both of us.’
‘Refresh my memory, will you, Clavain?’
He turned to Bax. ‘Antoinette, introduce yourself, will you?’
She came closer to the bed with something of the same trepidation that Clavain had shown. ‘Ilia . . .’
‘It’s Triumvir Volyova, young lady. At least until we’re better acquainted.’
‘What I meant to say is ... I’ve got this ship . . . this freighter ...’
Volyova glared at Clavain. He knew what she meant. She was acutely conscious that she did not have a great deal of time left, and what she did not need was indirection.
‘Bax has a freighter,’ Clavain said urgently. ‘It’s docked with us now. It has limited transatmospheric capability - not the best, but it can cope.’
‘And your point, Clavain?’
‘My point is that it has large pressurised cargo holds. It can take passengers, a great many passengers. Not in anything you’d call luxury, but...’
Volyova gestured for Bax to come closer. ‘How many?’
‘Four thousand, easily. Maybe even five. The thing’s crying out to be used as an ark, Triumvir.’
Clavain nodded. ‘Think of it, Ilia. I know you’ve got an evacuation plan going here. I thought it was a ruse before, but now I’ve seen the evidence. But you haven’t made a dent in the planet’s population.’
‘We’ve done what we could,’ Khouri said, with a trace of defensiveness.
Clavain held up a hand. ‘I know. Given your constraints, you did well to get as many off the surface as you’ve managed to. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do a lot better now. The wolf weapon - the Inhibitor device - has nearly bored its way through to the heart of Delta Pavonis. There simply isn’t time for any other plan. With Storm Bird we’d need only fifty return trips. Maybe fewer, as Antoinette says. Forty, perhaps. She’s right - it’s an ark. And it’s a fast one.’
Volyova let out a sigh as old as time. ‘If only it were that simple, Clavain.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We aren’t simply moving faceless units off the surface of Resurgam. We’re moving people. Frightened, desperate people.’ The grey goggles tilted a fraction. ‘Aren’t we, Khouri?’
‘She’s right. It’s a mess down there. The administration ...’
‘Before, there were just two of you,’ Clavain said. ‘You had to work with the government. But now we have an army, and the means to enforce our will. Don’t we, Scorpio?’
‘We can take Cuvier,’ the pig said. ‘I’ve already looked into it. It’s no worse than taking a single block of Chasm City. Or this ship, for that matter.’
‘You never did take my ship,’ Volyova reminded him. ‘So don’t overestimate your capabilities.’ She turned her attention to Clavain and her voice became sharper, more probing than it had been upon his arrival. ‘Would you seriously consider a forced takeover?’
‘If that’s the only way to get those people off the planet, then yes, that’s exactly what I’d consider.’
Volyova looked at him craftily. ‘You’ve changed your tune, Clavain. Since when was evacuating Resurgam your highest priority?’
He looked at Felka. ‘I realised that the possession of the weapons was not quite the clear-cut issue I’d been led to believe. There were choices to be made, harder choices than I would have liked, and I realised that I had been neglecting them because of their very difficulty.’
Volyova said, ‘Then you don’t want the weapons, is that it?’
Clavain smiled. ‘Actually, I still do. And so do you. But I think we can come to an agreement, can’t we?’
‘We have a job to do here, Clavain. I’m not just talking about the evacuation of Resurgam. Do you honestly think I’d leave the Inhibitors to get on with their business?’
He shook his head. ‘No. As a matter of fact, I already had my suspicions.’
‘I’m dying, Clavain. I have no future. With the right intervention I might survive a few more weeks, no more than that. I suppose they might be able to do something for me on another world, assuming anyone still retains a pre-plague technology, but that would entail the tedious business of being frozen, something I have had quite enough of for one existence. So I am calling it a day.’ She raised a bird-boned wrist and thumped the bed. ‘I bequeath you this damned monstrosity of a ship. You can take it and the evacuees away from here once we’re done airlifting them from Resurgam. Here, I give it to you. It’s yours.’ She raised her voice, an effort that must have cost her more than he could even begin to imagine. ‘Are you listening, Captain? It’s Clavain’s ship now. I hereby resign as Triumvir.’
‘Captain ... ?’ Clavain ventured.
She smiled. ‘You’ll find out, don’t you worry.’
‘I’ll take care of the evacuees,’ Clavain said, moved at what had just happened. He nodded at Khouri as well. ‘You have my word on that. I promise you I will not let you down, Triumvir.’
Volyova dismissed him with one weary wave of her hand. ‘I believe you. You appear to be a man who gets things done, Clavain.’
He scratched his beard. ‘Then there’s just one other thing.’
‘The weapons? Who gets them in the end? Well, don’t worry. I’ve already thought of that.’
He waited, studying the series of abstract grey curves that was the Triumvir’s bed-ridden form.
‘Here’s my proposal,’ she said, her voice as thin as the wind. ‘It happens to be non-negotiable.’ Then her attention flicked to Antoinette again. ‘You. What did you say your name was?’
‘Bax,’ Antoinette said, almost stuttering on her answer.
‘Mm.’ The Triumvir sounded as if this was the least interesting thing she had heard in her life. ‘And this s
hip of yours ... this freighter . . . is it really as large and fast as is claimed?’
She shrugged. ‘I suppose so.’
‘Then I’ll take it as well. You won’t need it once we’ve finished evacuating the planet. You’d just better make sure you get the job done before I die.’
Clavain looked at Bax, and then back to the Triumvir. ‘What do you want her ship for, Ilia?’
‘Glory,’ Volyova said dismissively. ‘Glory and redemption. What else did you imagine?’
Antoinette Bax sat alone on the bridge of her ship, the ship that had been hers and her father’s before that, the ship that she had loved once and hated once, the ship that was as much a part of her as her own flesh, and knew that this would be the last time. For better or for worse, nothing would be the same from this moment on. It was time to finish the process that had begun with that trip from Carousel New Copenhagen to honour a ridiculous and stupid childhood vow. For all its foolishness it had been a vow born out of kindness and love, and it had taken her into the heart of the war and into the great crushing machine of history itself. Had she known - had she had the merest inkling of what would happen, of how she would become embroiled in Clavain’s story, a story that had been running for centuries before her birth and which would see her yanked out of her own environment and flung light-years from home and decades into the future - then perhaps she might have quailed. Perhaps. But she might also have stared into the face of fear and been filled with an even more stubborn determination to do what she had promised herself all those years ago. It was, Antoinette thought, entirely possible that she would have done just that. Once a stubborn bitch, always a stubborn bitch - and if that wasn’t her personal motto, it was about time she adopted it. Her father might not have approved, but she was sure that in his heart of hearts he would have agreed and perhaps even admired her for it.
‘Ship?’
‘Yes, Antoinette?’
‘It’s all right, you know. I don’t mind. You can still call me Little Miss.’
‘It was only ever an act.’ Beast - or Lyle Merrick, more properly - paused. ‘I did it rather well, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Dad was right to trust you. You did look after me, didn’t you?’
‘As well as I was able to. Which wasn’t as well as I hoped. But then again, you didn’t exactly make it easy. I suppose that was inevitable, given the family connection. Your father was not exactly the most cautious of individuals, and you are very much a chip off the old block.’
‘We came through, Ship,’ Antoinette said. ‘We still came through. That has to count for something, doesn’t it?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Ship ... Lyle ...’
‘Antoinette?’
‘You know what the Triumvir wants, don’t you?’
Merrick did not answer her for several seconds. All her life she had imagined that the pauses were inserted cosmetically into the subpersona’s conversation, but she knew now that they had been quite real. Merrick’s simulation experienced consciousness at a rate very close to normal human thought, so his pauses indicated genuine introspection.
‘Xavier did inform me, yes.’
Antoinette was glad at least that she did not have to reveal that particular piece of the arrangement. ‘When the evacuation is done, when we’ve got as many people away from the planet as we can, then the Triumvir wants to use Storm Bird for herself. She says it’s for glory and redemption. It sounds like a suicide mission, Lyle.’
‘I more or less came to the same conclusion as well, Antoinette.’ Merrick’s synthesised voice was quite unnervingly calm. ‘She’s dying, so I gather, so I suppose it isn’t suicide in the old sense . . . but that’s a fairly pointless distinction. I gather she wishes to make amends for her past.’
‘Khouri, the other woman, says she isn’t the monster the people on the planet make out.’ Antoinette struggled to keep her own voice as level and collected as Merrick’s. They were skirting around something dreadful, orbiting an absence neither wished to acknowledge. ‘But I guess she must have done some bad stuff in the past anyway.’
‘Then I suppose that makes two of us,’ Merrick said. ‘Yes, Antoinette, I know what you are concerned about. But you mustn’t worry about me.’
‘She thinks you’re just a ship, Lyle. And no one will tell her the truth because they need her co-operation so badly. Not that it would make any difference if they did ...’ Antoinette trailed off, hating herself for feeling so sad. ‘You’ll die, won’t you? Finally, the way it would have happened all those years ago if Dad and Xavier hadn’t helped you.’
‘I deserved it, Antoinette. I did a terrible thing, and I escaped justice.’
‘But Lyle . . .’ Her eyes were stinging. She could feel tears welling inside her, stupid irrational tears that she despised herself for. She had loved her ship, then hated it - hated it because of the lie in which it had implicated her father, the lie that she had been told; and then she had come to love it again, because the ship, and the ghost of Lyle Merrick that haunted it, were both tangible links back to her father. And now that she had come to that accommodation, the knife was twisting again. What she had learned to love was being taken away from her, the last link back to her father snatched from her hands by that bitch Volyova ...
Why was it never easy? All she had wanted to do was keep a vow.
‘Antoinette?’
‘We could remove you,’ she said. ‘Take you out of the ship and replace you with an ordinary subpersona. Volyova wouldn’t have to know, would she?’
‘No, Antoinette. It’s my time as well. If she wants glory and redemption, then why can’t I take a little of that for myself?’
‘You’ve already made a difference. There isn’t any need for a larger sacrifice.’
‘But this is still what I choose to do. You can’t begrudge me that, can you?’
‘No,’ she said, her voice breaking up. ‘No, I can’t. And I wouldn’t.’
‘Promise me something, Antoinette?’
She rubbed her eyes, ashamed at her tears and yet oddly exultant at the same time. ‘What, Lyle?’
‘That you will continue to take good care of yourself, no matter what happens from here on in.’
She nodded. ‘I will. I promise.’
‘That’s good. There’s one other thing I want to say, and then I think we should go our separate ways. I can continue with the evacuation unaided. In fact, I positively refuse to let you put yourself in further danger by continuing to fly aboard me. How does that sound for an order? Impressed, aren’t you? You didn’t think I was capable of that, did you?’
‘No, Ship. I didn’t.’ She smiled despite herself.
‘One final thing, Antoinette. It was a pleasure to serve under you. A pleasure and an honour. Now, please go away and find another ship - preferably something bigger and better - to captain. I am sure you will make an excellent job of it.’
She stood up from the seat. ‘I’ll do my best, I promise.’
‘Of that I have no doubt.’
She stepped towards the door, hesitating on the threshold. ‘Goodbye Lyle,’ she said.
‘Goodbye, Little Miss.’
FORTY
They pulled him shivering from the open womb of the casket. He felt like a man who had been rescued from drowning in winter. The faces of the people around him sharpened into focus, but he did not recognise any of them immediately. Someone threw a quilted thermal blanket around the narrow frame of his shoulders. They eyed him without speaking, guessing that he was in no mood for conversation and would wish instead to orientate himself by his own efforts.
Clavain sat on the edge of the casket for several minutes until he had enough strength in his legs to hobble across the chamber. He stumbled at the last moment and yet made the fall appear graceful, as if he had intended to lean suddenly against the support of the porthole’s armoured frame. He peered through the glass. He could see nothing beyond except blackness, with his own ghastly reflection hoveri
ng in the foreground. He appeared strangely eyeless, his sockets crammed with shadows which were the precise black of the background vacuum. He felt a savage jolt of déjà vu, the feeling that he had been here before, contemplating his own masklike face. He tugged and nagged at the thread of memory until it spooled free, recalling a last-minute diplomatic mission, a shuttle falling towards occupied Mars, an imminent confrontation with an old enemy and friend called Galiana ... and he remembered that even then, four hundred years ago - though it was more now, he thought - he had felt too old for the world, too old for the role it forced upon him. Had he known what lay before him then, he would have either laughed or gone insane. It had felt like the end of his life, and yet it had been only a moment from its beginning, barely separable in his memories now from his childhood.
He looked back at the people who had brought him around and then up at the ceiling.
‘Dim the lights,’ someone said.
His reflection disappeared. Now he could see something other than blackness. It was a swarm of stars, squashed into one hemisphere of the sky. Reds and blues and golds and frigid whites. Some were brighter than others, though he saw no familiar constellations. But the clumping of the stars, stirred into one part of the sky, meant only one thing. They were still moving relativistically, still skimming near the speed of light.
Clavain turned back to the small huddle of people. ‘Has the battle taken place?’
A pale dark-haired woman spoke for the group. ‘Yes, Clavain.’ She spoke warmly, but not with the absolute assurance Clavain had expected. ‘Yes, it’s over. We engaged the trio of Conjoiner ships, destroying one and damaging the other two.’
‘Only damaged?’
‘The simulations didn’t get it quite right,’ said the woman. She moved to Clavain’s side and pushed a beaker of brown fluid under his nose. He looked at her face and hair. There was something familiar about the way she wore it, something that sparked the same ancient memories that had been stirred by his reflection in the porthole. ‘Here, drink this. Recuperative medichines from Ilia’s arsenal. It’ll do you the world of good.’
The Revelation Space Collection Page 222