Since then, in parallel with her study of the scuttlers, she had learned much about the life and times of Dan Sylveste. It was logical enough: there was no sense in studying the scuttlers in isolation, since they were merely the latest in a line of extinct galactic cultures to be encountered by human explorers. Sylveste’s name loomed large in the study of alien intelligence as a whole, so a passing knowledge of his exploits was essential.
Sylveste’s work on the Amarantin had spanned many of the years between 2500 and 2570. During most of that time he had either been a patient investigator or under some degree of incarceration, but even while under house arrest his interest in the Amarantin had remained steady. But without access to resources beyond anything the colony could offer, his ideas were doomed to remain speculative. Then Ultras had arrived in the Resurgam system. With the help of their ship, Sylveste had unlocked the final piece of the puzzle in the mystery of the Amarantin. His suspicions had turned out to be correct: the Amarantin had not been wiped out by some isolated cosmic accident, but by a response from a still-active mechanism designed to suppress the emergence of starfaring intelligence.
It had taken years for the news to make it to other systems. By then it was second- or third-hand, tainted with propaganda, almost lost in the confusion of human factional warfare. Independently, it seemed, the Conjoiners had arrived at similar conclusions to Sylveste. And other archaeological groups, sifting through the remains of other dead cultures, were coming around to the same unsettling view.
The machines that had killed the Amarantin were still out there, waiting and watching. They went by many names. The Conjoiners had called them wolves. Other cultures, now extinct, had named them the Inhibitors.
Over the last century, the reality of the Inhibitors had come to be accepted. But for much of that time the threat had remained comfortably distant: a problem for some other generation to worry about.
Recently, however, things had changed. There had long been unconfirmed reports of strange activity in the Resurgam system: rumours of worlds being ripped apart and remade into perplexing engines of alien design. There were stories that the entire system had been evacuated; that Resurgam was now an uninhabitable cinder; that something unspeakable had been done to the system’s sun.
But even Resurgam could be ignored for a while. The system was an archaeological colony, isolated from the main web of interstellar commerce, its government a totalitarian regime with a taste for disinformation. The reports of what had happened there could not be verified. And so for several more decades, life in the other systems of human-settled space continued more or less unaffected.
But now the Inhibitors had arrived around other stars.
The Ultras had been the first to bring the bad news. Communications between their ships warned them to steer clear of certain systems. Something was happening, something that transgressed the accepted scales of human catastrophe. This was not war or plague, but something infinitely worse. It had happened to the Amarantin and - presumably - to the scuttlers.
The number of human colonies known to have witnessed direct intervention by Inhibitor machines was still fewer than a dozen, but the ripples of panic spreading outwards at the speed of radio communications were almost as effective at collapsing civilisations. Entire surface communities were being evacuated or abandoned, as citizens tried to reach space or the hopefully safer shelter of underground caverns. Crypts and bunkers, disused since the dark decades of the Melding Plague, were hastily reopened. There were, invariably, too many people for either the evacuation ships or the bunkers. There were riots and furious little wars. Even as civilisation crumbled, those with an eye for the main chance accumulated small, useless fortunes. Doomsday cults flourished in the damp, inviting loam of fear, like so many black orchids. People spoke of End Times, convinced that they were living through the final days.
Against this background, it was hardly any wonder that so many people were drawn to Hela. In better times, Quaiche’s miracle would have attracted little attention, but now a miracle was precisely what people were looking for. Every new Ultra ship arriving in the system brought tens of thousands of frozen pilgrims. Not all of them were looking for a religious answer, but before very long, if they wanted to stay on Hela, the Office of Bloodwork got to them anyway. Thereafter, they saw things differently.
Rashmika could not really blame them for coming to Hela. Had she not been born here, she sometimes thought she might well have made the same pilgrimage. But her motives would have been different. It was truth she was after: the same drive that had taken Dan Sylveste to Resurgam; the same drive that had brought him into conflict with his colony and which, ultimately, had led to his death.
She thought back to Linxe’s question. Was it really Harbin driving her towards the Permanent Way, or was Harbin just the excuse she had made up to conceal - as much from herself as anyone else - the real reason for her journey?
Her reply that it was all to do with Harbin had been so automatic and flippant that she had almost believed it. But now she wondered whether it was really true. Rashmika could tell when anyone around her was lying. But seeing through her own deceptions was another matter entirely.
‘It’s Harbin,’ she whispered to herself. ‘Nothing else matters except finding my brother.’
But she could not stop thinking of the scuttlers, and when she dozed off with the mug of chocolate still clasped in her hands, it was the scuttlers that she dreamed of, the mad permutations of their insectile anatomy shuffling and reshuffling like the broken parts of a puzzle.
Rashmika snapped awake, feeling a rumble as the icejammer slowed, picking up undulations in the ice trail.
‘I’m afraid this is as far as we can go tonight,’ Crozet said. ‘I’ll find somewhere discreet to hide us away, but I’m near my limit.’ He looked drawn and exhausted to Rashmika, but then again that was how Crozet always looked.
‘Move over, love,’ Linxe said to Crozet. ‘I’ll take us on for a couple of hours, just until we’re safe and sound. You can both go back and catch forty winks.’
‘I’m sure we’re safe and sound,’ Rashmika said.
‘Never you mind about that. A few extra miles won’t hurt us. Now go back and try to get yourself some sleep, young lady. We’ve another long day ahead of us tomorrow and I can’t swear we’ll be out of the woods even then.’
Linxe was already easing into the driver’s position, running her thick babylike fingers over the icejammer’s timeworn controls. Until Crozet had mentioned pulling over for the night, Rashmika had assumed that the machine would keep travelling using some kind of autopilot, even if it had to slow down a little while it guided itself. It was a genuine shock to learn that they would be going nowhere unless someone operated the icejammer manually.
‘I can do a bit,’ she offered. ‘I’ve never driven one of these before, but if someone wants to show me . . .’
‘We’ll do fine, love,’ Linxe said. ‘It’s not just Crozet and me, either. Culver can do a shift in the morning.’
‘I wouldn’t want...’
‘Oh, don’t worry about Culver,’ Crozet said. ‘He needs something else to occupy his hands.’
Linxe slapped her husband, but she was smiling as she did it. Rashmika finished her now-cold chocolate drink, dog-tired but glad that she had at least made it through the first day. She was under no illusions that she was done with the worst of her journey, but she supposed that every successful stage had to be treated as a small victory in its own right. She just wished she could tell her parents not to worry about her, that she had made good progress so far and was thinking of them all the time. But she had vowed not to send a message home until she had joined the caravan.
Crozet walked her back through the rumbling innards of the icejammer. It moved differently under Linxe’s direction. It was not that she was a worse or even a better driver than Crozet, but she definitely favoured a different driving style. The icejammer flounced, flinging itself through the air in long, we
ightless parabolic arcs. It was all quite conducive to sleep, but a sleep filled with uneasy dreams in which Rashmika found herself endlessly falling.
She woke the next morning to troubling and yet strangely welcome news.
‘There’s been an alert on the news service,’ Crozet said. ‘The word’s gone out now, Rashmika. You’re officially missing and there’s a search operation in progress. Doesn’t that make you feel proud?’
‘Oh,’ she said, wondering what could have happened since the night before.
‘It’s the constabulary,’ Linxe said, meaning the law-enforcement organisation that had jurisdiction in the Vigrid region. ‘They’ve sent out search parties, apparently. But there’s a good chance we’ll make the caravan before they find us. Once we get you on the caravan, the constabulary can’t touch you.’
‘I’m surprised they’ve actually sent out parties,’ Rashmika said. ‘It’s not as if I’m in any danger, is it?’
‘Actually, there’s a bit more to it than that,’ Crozet said.
Linxe looked at her husband.
What did the two of them know that Rashmika didn’t? Suddenly she felt a tension in her belly, a line of cold trickling down her spine. ‘Go on,’ she said.
‘They say they want to bring you back for questioning,’ Linxe said.
‘For running away from home? Haven’t they got anything better to do with their time?’
‘It’s not for running away from home,’ Linxe said. Again she glanced at Crozet. ‘It’s about that sabotage last week. You know the one I mean, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Rashmika said, remembering the crater where the demolition store had been.
‘They’re saying you did it,’ Crozet said.
Hela, 2615
Out of orbit now, Quaiche felt his weight increasing as the Daughter slowed down to only a few thousand kilometres per hour. Hela swelled, its hectic terrain rising up to meet him. The radar echo - the metallic signature - was still there. So was the bridge.
Quaiche had decided to spiral closer rather than making a concerted dash for the structure. Even on the first loop in, still thousands of kilometres above Hela’s surface, what he had seen had been tantalising, like a puzzle he needed to assemble. From deep space the rift had been visible only as a change in albedo, a dark scar slicing across the world. Now it had palpable depth, especially when he examined it with the magnifying cameras. The gouge was irregular: there were places where there was a relatively shallow slope all the way down to the valley floor, but elsewhere the walls were vertical sheets of ice-covered rock towering kilometres high, as smooth and foreboding as granite. They had the grey sheen of wet slate. The floor of the rift varied between the flatness of a dry salt lake to a crazed, fractured quilt of tilted and interlocking ice panels separated by hair-thin avenues of pure sable blackness. The closer he came, the more it indeed resembled an unfinished puzzle, tossed aside by a god in a tantrum.
Once every minute or so he checked the radar. The echo was still there, and the Daughter had detected no signs of imminent attack. Perhaps it was just junk after all. The thought troubled him, for it meant someone else must have come this close to the bridge without finding it remarkable enough to report to anyone else. Or perhaps they had meant to report it, but some subsequent misfortune had befallen them. He wasn’t sure that was any less worrying, on balance.
By the time he had completed the first loop he had reduced his speed to five hundred metres a second. He was close enough to the surface now to appreciate the texturing of the ground as it changed from jagged uplands to smooth plains. It was not all ice; most of the moon’s interior was rocky, and a great deal of fractured rocky material was embedded in the ice, or lying upon it. Ash plumes radiated away from dormant volcanoes. There were slopes of fine talus and up-rearing sharp-sided boulders as big as major space habitats; some poked through the ice, tipped at absurd angles like the sterns of sinking ships; others sat on the surface, poised on one side in the manner of vast sculptural installations.
The Daughter’s thrusters burned continuously to support it against Hela’s gravity. Quaiche fell lower, edging closer to the lip of the rift. Overhead, Haldora was a brooding dark sphere illuminated only along one limb. Amused and distracted for a moment, Quaiche saw lightning storms play across the gas giant’s darkened face. The electrical arcs coiled and writhed with mesmerising slowness, like eels.
Hela was still catching starlight from the system’s sun, but shortly its orbit around Haldora would take it into the larger world’s shadow. It was fortuitous, Quaiche thought, that the source of the echo had been on this face of Hela, or else he would have been denied the impressive spectacle of the gas giant looming over everything. If he had arrived later in the world’s rotation cycle, of course, the rift would have been pointing away from Haldora. A difference of one hundred and sixty days and he would have missed this amazing sight.
Another lightning flash. Reluctantly, Quaiche turned his attention back to Hela.
He was over the edge of Ginnungagap Rift. The ground tumbled away with unseemly haste. Even though the pull of gravity was only a quarter of a standard gee, Quaiche felt as much vertigo as he would have on a heavier world. It made perfect sense, for the drop was still fatally deep. Worse, there was no atmosphere to slow the descent of a falling object, no terminal velocity to create at least an outside chance of a survivable accident.
Never mind. The Daughter had never failed him, and he did not expect her to start now. He focused on the thing he had come to examine, and allowed the Daughter to sink lower, dropping below the zero-altitude surface datum.
He turned, vectoring along the length of the rift. He had drifted one or two kilometres out from the nearest wall, but the more distant one looked no closer than it had before he crossed the threshold. The spacing of the walls was irregular, but here at the equator the sides of the rift were never closer than thirty-five kilometres apart. The rift was a minimum of five or six kilometres deep, pitching down to ten or eleven in the deepest, most convoluted parts of the valley floor. The feature was hellishly vast, and Quaiche came to the gradual conclusion that he did not actually like being in it very much. It was too much like hanging between the sprung jaws of a trap.
He checked the clock: four hours before the Dominatrix was due to emerge from the far side of Haldora. Four hours was a long time; he expected to be on his way back well before then.
‘Hang on, Mor,’ he said. ‘Not long now.’
But of course she did not hear him.
He had entered the rift south of the equator and was now moving towards the northern hemisphere. The fractured mosaic of the floor oozed beneath him. Measured against the far wall, the motion of his ship was hardly apparent at all, but the nearer wall slid past quickly enough to give him some indication of his speed. Occasionally he lost his grasp of scale, and for a moment the rift would become much smaller. These were the dangerous moments, for it was usually when an alien landscape became familiar, homely and containable that it would reach out and kill you.
Suddenly he saw the bridge coming over the horizon between the pinning walls. His heart hammered in his chest. No doubt at all now, if ever there had been any: the bridge was a made thing, a confection of glistening thin threads. He wished Morwenna were here to see it as well.
He was recording all the while as the bridge came closer, looming kilometres above him: a curving arc connected to the walls of the rift at either end by a bewildering filigree of supporting scrollwork. There was no need to linger. Just one sweep under the span would be enough to convince Jasmina. They could come back later with heavy-duty equipment, if that was what she wished.
Quaiche looked up in wonder as he passed under the bridge. The roadbed - what else was he meant to call it? - bisected the face of Haldora, glowing slightly against the darkness of the gas giant. It was perilously thin, a ribbon of milky white. He wondered what it would be like to cross it on foot.
The Daughter swerved violently, the gee-for
ce pushing red curtains into his vision.
‘What...’ Quaiche began.
But there was no need to ask: the Daughter was taking evasive action, doing exactly what she was meant to. Something was trying to attack him. Quaiche blacked out, hit consciousness again, blacked out once more. The landscape hurtled around him, pulsing bright light back at him, reflected from the Daughter’s steering thrusters. Blackout again. Fleeting consciousness. There was a roaring in his ears. He saw the bridge from a series of abrupt, disconnected angles, like jumbled snapshots. Below it. Above it. Below it again. The Daughter was trying to find shelter.
This wasn’t right. He should have been up and out, no questions asked. The Daughter was supposed to get him away from any possible threat as quickly as possible. This veering - this indecision - was not characteristic at all.
Unless she was cornered. Unless she couldn’t find an escape route.
In a window of lucidity he saw the situational display on the console. Three hostile objects were firing at him. They had emerged from niches in the ice, three metallic echoes that had nothing to do with the first one he had seen.
The Scavenger’s Daughter shook herself like a wet dog. Quaiche saw the exhaust plumes of his own miniature missiles whipping away, corkscrewing and zigzagging to avoid being shot down by the buried sentries. Blackout again. This time when he came around he saw a small avalanche oozing down one side of the cliff. One of the attacking objects was now offline: at least one of his missiles had found its mark.
The console flickered. The hull’s opacity switched to absolute black. When the hull cleared and the console recovered he was looking at emergency warnings across the board, scribbled in fiery red Latinate script. It had been a bad hit.
Another shiver, another pack of missiles streaking away. They were tiny things, thumb-sized antimatter rockets with kilotonne yields.
The Revelation Space Collection Page 239