‘Captain,’ she said now, holding aloft the helmet, ‘you left a calling card, didn’t you? I’ve come to give it back. Now you have to keep your side of the bargain.’
There was no response.
‘I’ll be honest with you,’ she said. ‘I really don’t like it down here. Matter of fact, it scares the hell out of me. I like my ships small and cosy, with décor I chose myself.’ She cast the torch beam around, picking out an overhanging globular mass filling half the corridor. She stooped under the shock-frozen black bubbles, brushing her fingers against their surprising warmth and softness. ‘No, this isn’t me at all. But I guess this is your empire, not mine. All I’m saying is that I hope you realise what it takes to bring me down here. And I hope you’re going to make it worthwhile for me.’
Nothing happened. But she had never expected success at first bite.
‘John,’ she said, deciding to risk familiarity, ‘we think something may be happening in the wider system. My guess is you may have some suspicions about this as well. I’ll tell you what we think, anyway - then you can decide for yourself.’
The character of the breeze changed. It was warmer now, with an irregularity about it that made her think of ragged breathing.
Antoinette said, ‘Khouri came back. She dropped out of the sky a couple of days back. You remember Khouri, don’t you? She spent a lot of time aboard, so I’d be surprised if you didn’t. Well, Khouri says there’s a battle going on around Ararat, something that makes the Demarchist-Conjoiner war look like a snowball fight. If she isn’t lying, we’ve got two squabbling human factions up there, plus a really frightening number of wolf machines. You remember the wolves, don’t you, Captain? You saw Ilia throw the cache weapons at them, and you saw what good it did.’
There it was again. The breeze had become a faint suction.
In Antoinette’s estimation that already made it a class-one apparition. ‘You’re here with me, aren’t you?’
Another shift in the wind. The breeze returned, sharpened to a howl. The howl ripped her hair loose, whipping it in her eyes.
She heard a word whispered in the wind: Ilia.
‘Yes, Captain. Ilia. You remember her well, don’t you? You remember the Triumvir. I do, too. I didn’t know her for long, but it was long enough to see that she isn’t the kind of woman you’d forget in a hurry.’
The wind had died down. All that remained was a nagging suction.
A small, sane voice warned Antoinette to stop now. She had achieved a clear result: a class one by anyone’s definition, and almost certainly (if she had not imagined the voice) a class two. That was enough for one day, wasn’t it? The Captain was nothing if not temperamental. According to the records she had left behind, Ilia Volyova had pushed him into a catatonic sulk many times by trying to coax just one more response from him. Often it had taken the Captain weeks to emerge from one of those withdrawals.
But the Triumvir had had months or years to build up her working relationship with the Captain. Antoinette did not think she had anywhere near as much time.
‘Captain,’ she said, ‘I’ll lay the cards on the table. The seniors are worried. Scorpio’s so worried he’s pulled Clavain back from his island. They’re taking Khouri seriously. They’ve already gone to see if they can get her baby back for her. If she’s right, there’s a Conjoiner ship already in our ocean, and it was damaged by the wolves. They’re here, Captain. It’s crunch time. Either we sit here and let events happen around us, or we think about the next move. I’m sure you know what I mean by that.’
Abruptly, as if a door or valve had slammed shut somewhere, the suction stopped. No breeze, no noise, only Antoinette standing alone in the corridor with the small puddle of light from her torch.
‘Holy shit,’ Antoinette said.
But then, ahead of her, a cleft of light appeared. There was a squeal of metal and part of the corridor wall hinged aside. A new sort of breeze hit her face, a new concoction of biomechanical smells.
Through the cleft she saw a new corridor, curving sharply down towards underlying decks. Golden-green light, firefly pale, oozed up from the depths.
‘I guess I was right about the calling card,’ she said.
NINETEEN
Ararat, 2675
The boats rammed through the thickening water on the periphery of the fringe, and then into the fringe itself. A blizzard of ice shards sprayed away on either side of the hulls. The boats surged forwards for ten or twelve metres and then scraped to a grinding halt, electric motors howling.
The rectangular hulls had cut neat channels into the fringe, but the oily grey water had no sooner stopped sloshing than it began to turn suspiciously immobile and pearly. Scorpio thought of coagulating blood, the way it turned sticky and viscid. In a few minutes, he estimated, the channels would be frozen solid again.
The two Security Arm people were the first out of the craft, establishing that the ice was firm enough to take the weight of the party. The others followed a minute later, carrying what weapons and equipment they could manage but leaving much else - including the incubator - in the boats. The firm part of the fringe formed a belt of land, five or six metres wide in most places, around the main peak of the iceberg. The huge crystalline structure rose up, steep-sided, above them. Scorpio, stiff-necked, found it awkward to look at the top for more than a few moments.
He waited for Clavain to disembark, then moved over to him. They stood shivering, stamping their feet up and down. The ice beneath them had a braided texture, thick tuberous strands woven together into a kind of matting. It was treacherous, both slippery and uneven. Every footfall had to be taken with caution.
‘I was expecting a welcome by now,’ Scorpio said. ‘The fact that we haven’t had one is starting to worry me.’
‘Me, too.’ Clavain kept his voice very low. ‘We haven’t discussed the possibility, but Skade could well be dead. I just don’t think . . .’ He trailed off, eyeing Khouri. She was sitting on her haunches, assembling the remaining parts of the Breitenbach cannon. ‘I just don’t think she is quite ready to deal with that yet.’
‘You believe everything she’s said, don’t you?’
‘I’m sure we’ll find a ship in here. But she had no reason to believe that Skade survived the crash.’
‘Skade’s a survivor type,’ Scorpio said.
‘There is that, but I never thought I’d find myself wishing it were the case.’
‘Sirs?’
They followed the voice. It was Vasko. He had made his way some distance around the fringe, until he was almost about to vanish around the corner.
‘Sirs,’ he said again, eyeing Scorpio and Clavain in turn, ‘there’s an opening here. I saw it from the sea. I think it’s the largest one all the way around.’
‘How deep does it go?’ Scorpio asked.
‘Don’t know. More than a few metres, at least. I could easily squeeze through, I think.’
‘Wait,’ Scorpio said. ‘Let’s take this one step at a time, shall we?’
They followed Vasko to the gap in the ice. As they neared the wall, it was necessary to duck under and between the jutting horizontal spikes, shielding their eyes and faces with the backs of their arms. Some instinct made Scorpio loath to harm any part of the structure. It was next to impossible not to, for even as he stepped cautiously around one spike, protecting himself against the rapierlike tip of another, he shattered half a dozen smaller ones. They tinkled as they broke into pieces, and set off a cascade of secondary fractures metres away.
‘Is it still singing to you?’ he asked Vasko.
‘No, sir,’ he said, ‘not the way it was just now. I think that was only when the sun was coming up.’
‘But you can still hear something?’
‘I don’t know, sir. It’s lower, much lower. It comes in waves. I might be imagining it.’
Scorpio could not hear a thing. He had not been able to hear the iceberg singing, either. Nor had Clavain. Clavain was an old man, with an old
man’s ailing faculties. Scorpio was a pig, with faculties about as good as they had ever been.
‘I’m ready to squeeze inside, sir.’
The opening that Vasko had found was merely a larger-than-usual pocket between the ragged weave of interthreading ice branches and needle-pointed spurs. It began at chest height: a vaguely oval widening, with the hint of a larger clearing beyond it. It was impossible to tell how far in they could reach.
‘Let me see,’ Khouri said. She carried the cannon on a shoulder strap, slung down her back, its weight shifted on to one hip.
‘There are other ways in,’ Vasko said, ‘but I think this is the easiest.’
‘We’ll take it,’ Khouri said. ‘Stand aside. I’m going first.’
‘Wait,’ Clavain said.
Her lip curled. ‘My daughter’s in there. Someone go fetch the incubator.’
‘I know how you feel,’ Clavain said.
‘Do you?’
His voice was marvellously calm. ‘Yes, I do. Skade took Felka once. I went in after her, just the way you’re doing. I thought it was the right way to proceed. I see now that it was foolish and that I came very close to losing her. That’s why you shouldn’t be the first one in. Not if you want to see Aura again.’
‘He’s right,’ Scorpio said. ‘We don’t know what we’ll find in that thing, or how Skade will react when she knows we’re here. We might lose someone. The one person we can’t afford to lose is you.’
‘You can still fetch the incubator.’
‘No,’ Scorpio said. ‘It stays out here, out of harm’s way. I don’t want it getting smashed in a firefight. And if it turns out that we can negotiate our way through this, there’ll be time to come back and get it.’
Khouri appeared to see the sense in his argument, even though she didn’t look very happy about it. She stepped back from the side of the berg. ‘I’m going in second,’ she said.
‘I’ll lead,’ Scorpio said. He turned to the two Security Arm officers. ‘Jaccottet, you follow Khouri. Urton, stay here with Vasko. Keep an eye on the boats and watch out for anything emerging from any other part of the ice. The instant you see something unusual . . .’ He paused, noticing the way his companions were looking around. ‘The instant you see something really unusual . . . let us know.’
He would let Clavain decide for himself what he did.
Scorpio negotiated the forest of impaling spikes. Daggers and fronds shattered with every movement, every breath. The air was a constant iridescent haze of crystals. With great effort he pulled himself through the aperture, his short stature and limbs making it more difficult for him than for any of the others. The tip of an icy blade kissed his skin, not quite breaking it but scraping painfully along the surface. He felt another push into his thigh.
Then he was through, landing on his feet on the other side. He dusted himself off and looked around. Everywhere, the ice gleamed with a neon-blue intensity. There were almost no shadows, just different intensities of that same pastel radiance. The spikes were here in abundance, as well as the rootlike structures that composed the fringe. They thrust through underfoot, thick as industrial pipes. He reminded himself that nothing here was static: the iceberg was growing, and this inclusion might only have existed for a few hours.
The air was as cold as steel.
Behind him, Khouri crunched to the ground. The muzzle of the Breitenbach cannon pulverised a whole fan of miniature stalactites as it swung around. Other weapons, too numerous to list, hung from her belt like so many shrunken trophies.
‘What Vasko said . . .’ she began. ‘The low noise. I can hear it as well. It’s like a throbbing.’
‘I don’t hear it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real,’ Scorpio acknowledged.
‘Skade’s here,’ she said. ‘I know what you think: that she might be dead. But she’s alive. She’s alive and she knows we’ve landed.’
‘And Aura?’
‘I can’t feel her yet.’
Clavain emerged into the chamber, picking his way through the opening with the methodical slowness of a tarantula. His thin dark-clad limbs seemed built for precisely this purpose. Scorpio noticed that he managed to enter without breaking any of the ornamentation. He also noticed that the only weapon that Clavain appeared to be carrying was the short-bladed knife he had taken from his tent. He had it clutched in one hand, the blade vanishing when he turned it edge-on.
Behind Clavain came Jaccottet, much less stealthily. The Security Arm man stopped to brush the ice shards from his uniform.
Scorpio lifted his sleeve, revealing his communicator. ‘Blood, we’ve found a way inside the iceberg. We’re going deeper. I’m not sure what will happen to comms, but stay alert. Malinin and Urton are staying outside. If all else fails, we may be able to relay communications through them. I’m guessing we might be inside this thing for a couple of hours, maybe more.’
‘Be careful,’ Blood said.
What was this, Scorpio wondered: concern from Blood? Things were truly worse than he had feared. ‘I will be,’ he said. ‘Anything else I need to know?’
‘Nothing immediately related to your mission. Reports of enhanced Juggler activity from many of the monitoring stations, but that might just be a coincidence.’
‘Right now I’m not sure if anything is a coincidence.’
‘And - uh - just to cheer you up - some reports of lights in the sky. Not confirmed.’
‘Lights in the sky? It gets better.’
‘Probably nothing. If I were you, I’d put it all out of your mind. Concentrate on the job in hand.’
‘Thanks. Sterling advice. All right, pal, speak to you later.’
Clavain had heard the conversation. ‘Lights in the sky, eh? Maybe next time you’ll believe an old man.’
‘I didn’t not believe you for one instant.’ Scorpio reached down to his own belt and pulled out a gun. ‘Here, take this. I can’t stand to see you walking around with just that silly little knife.’
‘It’s a very good knife. Did I mention that it saved my life once?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s a wonder I’ve held on to it all this time. Honestly, don’t you think there’s something very chivalrous about a knife?’
‘Personally,’ Scorpio said, ‘I think it’s time to stop thinking chivalry and start thinking artillery.’
Clavain took the gun the way one took a gift out of politeness, a gift of which one did not entirely approve.
They moved deeper into the iceberg, following the path of least resistance. The texture of the ice, braided and tangled like a wildly overgrown wood, made Scorpio think of some of the buildings in the Mulch layers of Chasm City. When the plague had hit them, their repair and redesign systems had produced something of the same organic fecundity. Here, it seemed, the growth of the ice was driven entirely by weird localised variations in temperature and air flow. Between one step and the next, the air shifted from lungcrackingly frigid to merely chilly, and any attempt to navigate by means of the draughts was doomed to failure. More than once he had the feeling he was inside a huge, cold, respiring lung.
But their path was always clear: away from the daylight, into the pastel blue core.
‘It’s music,’ Jaccottet said.
‘What?’ Scorpio asked.
‘Music, sir. That low noise. There were too many echoes before. I couldn’t make sense of it. But I’m sure it’s music now.’
‘Music? Why the fuck would there be music?’
‘I don’t know, sir. It’s faint, but it’s definitely there. Advise caution.’
‘I can hear it, too,’ Khouri said. ‘And I advise hurrying the fuck up.’
She removed one of the weapons from her belt and shot at the thickest spar in front of her. It exploded into white marble dust. She stepped through the ruins and raised the gun towards another obstruction.
Clavain did something to his knife. It began to hum, just at the limit of Scorpio’s hearing. The blade became a blur. Clavain swe
pt it through one of the smaller spars, severing it neatly and cleanly.
They moved on, further from the light. In waves, the air became colder still. They huddled deeper into their clothes and spoke only when it was strictly necessary. Scorpio had been grateful for his gloves, but now it felt as if he had forgotten to wear them at all. He had to keep looking down to remind himself they were still in place. It was said that hyperpigs felt the cold more acutely than baseline humans: some quirk of pig biochemistry that the designers had never seen any compelling reason to rectify.
He was thinking about that when Khouri spoke excitedly. She had pushed ahead of them all despite their best efforts to hold her back.
‘There’s something ahead,’ she said, ‘and I think I can feel Aura now. We must be near.’
Clavain was immediately behind her. ‘What can you see?’
‘The side of something dark,’ she said. ‘Not like the ice.’
‘Must be the corvette,’ Clavain said.
They advanced another ten or twelve metres, taking at least two minutes to gain that distance. The ice was so thick now that Clavain’s little knife could only hack and pare away insignificant parts of it, and Khouri was wise enough not to use her weapon so close to the heart of the iceberg. Around them, the ice formations had taken on an unsettling new character. Jaccottet’s torch beam glanced off conjunctions resembling thigh bones or weird sinewy articulations of bone and gristle.
Then the density of the obstructions thinned out. They were suddenly in the core of the iceberg. A sort of roof folded over them, veined and buttressed by enormous trunks of scaly ice rising up from the floor below. The thick weavelike tangle was also visible on the far side of the chamber.
In the middle was the ruin of a ship.
The Revelation Space Collection Page 256