A thought occurred to him. ‘Is she awake?’
‘She is now approaching consciousness,’ the ship replied.
With her Ultra physiology, Morwenna would have been much better equipped to tolerate slowdown than Quaiche, but it still seemed likely that the scrimshaw suit had been modified to protect her in some fashion.
‘Can we communicate?’
‘You can speak to her when you wish. I will handle ship-to-suit protocols.’
‘All right, put me through now.’ He waited a second, then said, ‘Morwenna?’
‘Horris.’ Her voice was stupidly weak and distant. He had trouble believing she was only separated from him by mere centimetres of metal: it might as well have been fifty light-years of lead. ‘Horris, where am I? What’s happened?’
Nothing in his experience gave him any clue about how you broke news like this to someone. How did you gently wend the topic of a conversation around to being imprisoned alive in a welded metal suit? Well, funny you should mention incarceration . . .
‘Morwenna, something’s up, but I don’t want you to panic. Everything will be all right in the end, but you mustn’t, mustn’t panic. Will you promise me that?’
‘What’s wrong?’ There was now a distinctly anxious edge to Morwenna’s voice.
Memo to himself: the one way to make people panic was to warn them not to.
‘Morwenna, tell me what you remember. Calmly and slowly.’ He heard the catch in her voice, the approaching onset of hysteria. ‘Where do you want me to begin?’
‘Do you remember me being taken to see the queen?’
‘Yes.’
‘And do you remember me being taken away from her chamber?’
‘Yes . . . yes, I do.’
‘Do you remember trying to stop them?’
‘No, I . . .’ She stopped and said nothing. He thought he had lost her - when she wasn’t speaking, the connection was silent. ‘Wait. Yes, I do remember.’
‘And after that?’
‘Nothing.’
‘They took me to Grelier’s operating theatre, Morwenna. The one where he did all those other things to me.’
‘No . . .’ she began, misunderstanding, thinking that the dreadful thing had happened to Quaiche rather than herself.
‘They showed me the scrimshaw suit,’ he said. ‘But they put you in it instead. You’re in it now, and that’s why you mustn’t panic.’
She took it well, better than he had been expecting. Poor, brave Morwenna. She had always been the more courageous half of their partnership. If she’d been given the chance to take the punishment upon herself, he knew she would have done so. Equally, he knew that he lacked that strength. He was weak and cowardly and selfish. Not a bad man, but not exactly one to be admired either. It was the flaw that had shaped his life. Knowing this did not make it any easier.
‘You mean I’m under the ice?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, it’s not that bad.’ He realised as he spoke how absurdly little difference it made whether she was buried under ice or not. ‘You’re in the suit now, but you’re not under the ice. And it isn’t because of anything you did. It’s because of me. It’s to force me to act in a certain way.’
‘Where am I?’
‘You’re with me, aboard the Dominatrix. I think we just completed slowdown into the new system.’
‘I can’t see or move.’
He had been looking at the suit while he spoke, holding an image of her in his mind. Although she was clearly doing her best to hide it, he knew Morwenna well enough to understand that she was terribly frightened. Ashamed, he looked sharply away. ‘Ship, can you let her see something?’
‘That channel is not enabled.’
‘Then fucking well enable it.’
‘No actions are possible. I am to inform you that the occupant can only communicate with the outside world via the current audio channel. Any attempt to instate further channels will be viewed as...’
He waved a hand. ‘All right. Look, I’m sorry, Morwenna. The bastards won’t let you see anything. I’m guessing that was Grelier’s little idea.’
‘He’s not my only enemy, you know.’
‘Maybe not, but I’m willing to bet he had more than a little say in the matter.’ Quaiche’s brow was dripping with condensed beads of zero-gravity sweat. He mopped himself with the back of his hand. ‘All of this is my fault.’
‘Where are you?’
The question surprised him. ‘I’m floating next to you. I thought you might be able to hear my voice through the armour.’
‘All I can hear is your voice in my head. You sound a long way away. I’m scared, Horris. I don’t know if I can handle this.’
‘You’re not alone,’ he said. ‘I’m right by you. You’re probably safer in the suit than out of it. All you have to do is sit tight. We’ll be home and dry in a few weeks.’
Her voice had a desperate edge to it now. ‘A few weeks? You make it sound as if it’s nothing at all.’
‘I meant it’s better than years and years. Oh, Christ, Morwenna, I’m so sorry. I promise I’ll get you out of this.’ Quaiche screwed up his eyes in pain.
‘Horris?’
‘Yes?’ he asked, through tears.
‘Don’t leave me to die in this thing. Please.’
‘Morwenna,’ he said, a little while later, ‘listen carefully. I have to leave you now. I’m going up to the command deck. I have to check on our status.’
‘I don’t want you to go.’
‘You’ll still be able to hear my voice. I must do this, Morwenna. I absolutely must. If I don’t, neither of us will have any kind of a future to look forward to.’
‘Horris.’
But he was already moving. He drifted away from the slowdown coffin and the scrimshaw suit, crossing the compartment space to reach a set of padded wall grips. He began to make his way down the narrow companionway towards the command deck, pulling himself along hand over hand. Quaiche had never developed a taste for weightlessness, but the needle-hulled survey craft was far too small for centrifugal gravity. It would be better once they were underway again, for then he would have the illusion of gravity provided by the Dominatrix’s engines.
Under pleasanter circumstances, he would have been enjoying the sudden isolation of being away from the rest of the crew. Morwenna had not accompanied him on most of his previous excursions, but, while he missed her, he had generally revelled in the enforced solitude of his periods away from the Gnostic Ascension. It was not strictly the case that he was antisocial; admittedly, during his time in mainstream human culture, Quaiche had never been the most gregarious of souls, but he had always ornamented himself with a handful of strong friendships. There had always been lovers, some tending towards the rare, exotic, or - in Morwenna’s case - the downright hazardous. But the environment of Jasmina’s ship was so overwhelmingly claustrophobic, so cloyingly saturated with the pheromonal haze of paranoia and intrigue, that he found himself longing for the hard simplicity of a ship and a mission.
Consequently the Dominatrix and the tiny survey craft it contained had become his private empire within the greater dominion of the Ascension. The ship nurtured him, anticipating his desires with the eagerness of a courtesan. The more time he spent in it, the more it learned his whimsies and foibles. It played music that not only suited his moods, but was precisely calibrated to steer him from the dangerous extremes of morbid self-reflection or careless euphoria. It fed him the kinds of meals that he could never persuade the food synthesisers on the Ascension to produce, and seemed able to delight and surprise him whenever he suspected he had exhausted its libraries. It knew when he needed sleep and when he needed bouts of feverish activity. It amused him with fancies when he was bored, and simulated minor crises when he showed indications of complacency. Now and then it occurred to Quaiche that because the ship knew him so well he had in a sense extended himself into it, permeating its machine systems. The merging had even taken place on a biolo
gical level. The Ultras did their best to sterilise it every time it returned to its storage bay in the belly of the Ascension, but Quaiche knew that the ship now smelt different from the first time he had boarded it. It smelt of places he had lived in.
But any sense that the ship was a haven, a place of sanctuary, was now gone. Every glimpse of the scrimshaw suit was a reminder that Jasmina had pushed her influence into his fiefdom. There would be no second chances. Everything that mattered to him now depended on the system ahead.
‘Bitch,’ he said again.
Quaiche reached the command deck and squeezed into the pilot’s seat. The deck was necessarily tiny, for the Dominatrix was mostly fuel and engine. The space he sat in was little more than a bulbous widening of the narrow companionway, like the reservoir in a mercury thermometer. Ahead was an oval viewport showing nothing but interstellar space.
‘Avionics,’ he said.
Instrument panels closed around him like pincers. They flickered and then lit up with animated diagrams and input fields, flowing to meet the focus of his gaze as his eyes moved.
‘Orders, Quaiche?’
‘Just give me a moment,’ he said. He appraised the critical systems first, checking that there was nothing wrong that the subpersona might have missed. They had eaten slightly further into the fuel budget than Quaiche would ordinarily have expected at this point in a mission, but given the additional mass of the scrimshaw suit it was only to be expected. There was enough in reserve for it not to worry him. Other than that all was well: the slowdown had happened without incident; all ship functions were nominal, from sensors and life support to the health of the tiny excursion craft that sat in the Dominatrix’s belly like an embryonic dolphin, anxious to be born.
‘Ship, were there any special requirements for this survey?’
‘None that were revealed to me.’
‘Well, that’s splendidly reassuring. And the status of the mother ship?’
‘I am receiving continuous telemetry from Gnostic Ascension. You will be expected to rendezvous after the usual six- to seven-week survey period. Fuel reserves are sufficient for the catch-up manoeuvre.’
‘Affirmative.’ It would never have made much sense for Jasmina to have stranded him without enough fuel, but it was gratifying to know, on this occasion at least, that she had acted sensibly.
‘Horris?’ said Morwenna. ‘Talk to me, please. Where are you?’
‘I’m up front,’ he said, ‘checking things out. Everything looks more or less OK at this point, but I want to make certain.’
‘Do you know where we are yet?’
‘I’m about to find out.’ He touched one of the input fields, enabling voice control of major ship systems. ‘Rotate plus one-eighty, thirty-second slew,’ he said.
The console display indicated compliance. Through the oval viewport, a sprinkling of faintly visible stars began to ooze from one edge to the other.
‘Talk to me,’ Morwenna said again.
‘I’m slewing us around. We were pointed tailfirst after slowdown. Should be getting a look at the system any moment now.’
‘Did Jasmina say anything about it?’
‘Not that I remember. What about you?’
‘Nothing,’ she said. For the first time since waking she sounded almost like her old self. He imagined it was a coping mechanism. If she acted normally, she would keep panic at bay. Panicking was the last thing she needed in the scrimshaw suit. Morwenna continued, ‘Just that it was another system that didn’t look particularly noteworthy. A star and some planets. No record of human presence. Dullsville, really.’
‘Well, no record doesn’t mean that someone hasn’t passed through here at some point, just like we’re doing. And they may have left something behind.’
‘Better bloody hope they did,’ Morwenna remarked caustically.
‘I’m trying to look on the optimistic side.’
‘I’m sorry. I know you mean well, but let’s not expect the impossible, shall we?’
‘We may have to,’ he said under his breath, hoping that the ship would not pick it up and relay it to Morwenna.
By then the ship had just about completed its rotation, flipping nose-to-tail. A prominent star slid into view and centred itself in the oval. At this distance it was really more a sun than a star: without the command deck’s selective glare shields it would have been uncomfortably bright to look at.
‘I’ve got something,’ Quaiche said. His fingers skated across the console. ‘Let’s see. Spectral type’s a cool G. Main sequence, about three-fifths solar luminosity. A few spots, but no worrying coronal activity. About twenty AU out.’
‘Still pretty far away,’ Morwenna said.
‘Not if you want to be certain of including all the major planets in the same volume.’
‘What about the worlds?’
‘Just a sec.’ His nimble fingers worked the console again and the forward view changed, coloured lines of orbits springing on to the read-out, squashed into ellipses, each flattened hoop tagged by a box of numbers showing the major characteristics of the world belonging to that orbit. Quaiche studied the parameters: mass, orbital period, day length, inclination, diameter, surface gravity, mean density, magnetospheric strength, the presence of moons or ring systems. From the confidence limits assigned to the numbers he deduced that they had been calculated by the Dominatrix, using its own sensors and interpretation algorithms. If they had been dredged out of some pre-existing database of system parameters they would have been significantly more precise.
The numbers would improve as the Dominatrix got closer to the system, but until then it was worth keeping in mind that this region of space was essentially unexplored. Someone else might have passed through, but they had probably not stayed long enough to file an official report. That meant that the system stood a chance of containing something that someone, somewhere, might possibly regard as valuable, if only on novelty grounds.
‘In your own time,’ the ship said, anxious to begin its work.
‘All right, all right,’ Quaiche said. ‘In the absence of any anomalous data, we’ll work our way towards the sun one world at a time, and then we’ll take those on the far side as we head back into interstellar space. Given those constraints, find the five most fuel-efficient search patterns and present them to me. If there’s a significantly more efficient strategy that requires skipping a world and returning to it later, I’d like to know about it as well.’
‘Just a moment, Quaiche.’ The pause was barely enough time for him to pick his nose. ‘Here we are. Given your specified parameters, there is no strongly favoured solution, nor is there a significantly more favourable pattern with an out-of-order search.’
‘Good. Now display the five options in descending order of the time I’d need to spend in slowdown.’
The options reshuffled themselves. Quaiche stroked his chin, trying to decide between them. He could ask the ship to make the final decision itself, applying some arcane selection criteria of its own, but he always preferred to make this final selection himself. It wasn’t simply a question of picking one at random, for there was always a solution that for one reason or another just happened to look more right than the others. Quaiche was perfectly willing to admit that this amounted to decision by hunch, rather than any conscious process of elimination. But he did not think it was any less valid for that. The whole point of having Quaiche conduct these in-system surveys was precisely to use those slippery skills that could not be easily cajoled into the kind of algorithmic instruction sets that machines ran. Intervening to select the pattern that best pleased him was just what he was along to do.
This time it was far from obvious. None of the solutions were elegant, but he was used to that: the arrangement of the planets at a given epoch could not be helped. Sometimes he got lucky and arrived when three or four interesting worlds were lined up in their orbits, permitting a very efficient straight-line mapping path. Here, they were all strung out at various angles fr
om each other. There was no search pattern that did not look like a drunkard’s walk.
There were consolations. If he had to change direction regularly, then it would not cost him much more fuel to slow down completely and make close-up inspections of whichever worlds caught his eye. Rather than just dropping instrument packages as he made highspeed flybys, he could take the Scavenger’s Daughter out and have a really good look.
For a moment, as the thought of flying the Daughter took hold, he forgot about Morwenna. But it was only for an instant. Then he realised that if he were to leave the Dominatrix, he would be leaving her as well.
He wondered how she would take that.
‘Have you made a decision, Quaiche?’ the ship asked.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We’ll take search pattern two, I think.’
‘Is that your final answer?’
‘Let’s see: minimal time in slowdown; one week for most of the larger planets, two for that gas-giant system with a lot of moons . . . a few days for the tiddlers . . . and we should still have fuel to spare in case we find anything seriously heavy.’
‘I concur.’
‘And you’ll tell me if you notice anything unusual, won’t you, ship? I mean, you haven’t been given any special instructions in that area, have you?’
‘None whatsoever, Quaiche.’
‘Good.’ He wondered if the ship detected his note of distrust. ‘Well, tell me if anything crops up. I want to be informed.’
‘Count on me, Quaiche.’
‘I’ll have to, won’t I?’
‘Horris?’ It was Morwenna now. ‘What’s happening?’
The ship must have locked her out of the audio channel while they discussed the search pattern.
‘Just weighing the options. I’ve picked us a sampling strategy. We’ll be able to take a close look-see at anything we like down there.’
‘Is there anything of interest?’
‘Nothing startling,’ he said. ‘It’s just the usual single star and a family of worlds. I’m not seeing any obvious signs of a surface biosphere, or any indications that anyone’s been here before us. But if there are small artefacts dotted around the place, we’d probably miss them at this range unless they were making an active effort to be seen, which, clearly, they aren’t. But I’m not despondent yet. We’ll go in closer and take a very good look around.’
The Revelation Space Collection Page 232