Ships could be made arbitrarily cold, and could therefore be made to blend in with the background radiation of the early universe, which was still shining after fifteen billion years. But the background map was not smooth: cosmic inflation had magnified tiny flaws in the expanding universe to produce subtle variations in the background, depending on which way one looked. They were deviations from true anisotropy: wrinkles in the face of creation. Unless they could adjust their hull temperatures to match those fluctuations, ships could only achieve an imperfect match with the background spectrum. Under some circumstances, hunting for those tiny signs of mismatch was the only way to detect enemy ships at all.
But the Conjoiner ship was maintaining the coldness of its hull purely as camouflage against Inhibitor forces in the vicinity. It was making no real effort to hide itself from Remontoire. In fact, it was even trying to speak to him.
There was one thing about Conjoiners that even the non-augmented had to admire: they didn’t give up. Twenty-eight thousand unanswered requests for negotiation wouldn’t deter a twenty-eight thousand and first.
Remontoire allowed the narrow line of the message laser to scribe against his hull until it found one of the few sensor patches.
He examined the transmission through copious layers of mental fire-walling. Eventually, after many seconds of cogitation, he decided that it was safe to unpack the transmission into the most sensitive parts of his own mind. The message format was in natural language rather than any of the high-level Conjoiner protocols. Nicely insulting touch, he thought: from the perspective of Skade’s allies, it was the Conjoiner equivalent of baby talk.
[Remontoire? It’s you, isn’t it? Why won’t you talk to us?]
He composed a thought in the same format. Why are you so certain I’m Remontoire?
[You were always more fond of wild gestures than you’d ever admit. This is straight out of Clavain’s book of daring escapades.]
Someone has to do it.
[It’s a brave effort, Remontoire, but it’s pointless worrying about those people on the planet. Nothing we can do can help them now. They’re not even relevant to the future outcome of the war.]
We’d best let them hang, then. That’d be Skade’s way, wouldn’t it?
[Skade would do what she could for them if she thought they were going to make a difference. But you’re only making things worse. Don’t take the battle down there. Don’t stretch things up here when we most need to consolidate our forces.]
Another plea for co-operation? Skade must be turning in her grave.
[She was a pragmatist, Remontoire, much like yourself. She would have seen that now is the time to amalgamate our parties, to pool our knowledge-base and inflict real damage on the enemy machines.]
What you mean is that you’ve achieved all you can through deception and theft. You know I’ll never trust you that way again. Now you have nothing to lose by negotiating.
[With regret, we acknowledge that tactical errors were made. But now that Skade is - as you have alluded - very probably dead . . .]
The ducklings are waddling around looking for a new mother duck. [Adopt the analogy of your choice, Remontoire. We only offer the outstretched hand of friendship. The situation here is more complex than we’ve hitherto realised. You must have seen this for yourself: the teasing hints in the data, the scraps - too small and insignificant on their own - but which add up to a clear conclusion. We’re not just dealing with wolves, Remontoire. There is something else.]
I’ve seen nothing I couldn’t explain.
[Then you haven’t been looking hard enough. Here, Remontoire: examine our data, if you doubt us. See if that changes your opinion. See if that makes it any clearer to you.]
The data nugget was scripted into his head. An instinct told him to delete it still compressed, still unread. But he decided to leave it there for the time being.
You’re suggesting a partnership?
[Disunited, we’ll never beat them. Together, we could make a difference.]
Perhaps. But it’s not me you really want, is it?
[Of course not, Remontoire.]
He smiled: Skade’s Conjoiners might have been leaderless, might even have been driven towards him by some instinctive imperative to fill that void, but mainly it was the hypometric weapon. It was the one technology they hadn’t managed to steal or reverse-engineer, despite Skade’s theft of Aura. All that they needed was one prototype; it didn’t even have to be intact, so long as they could reconstruct its working configuration.
Thanks for the offer, but I’m actually a tiny bit preoccupied at the moment. Why don’t we chat about this later? Say, in a few months?
[Remontoire . . . don’t make us do this.]
He applied lateral thrust, veering rudely away from the other ship. He mapped areas of brain function dropping in and out as the blood sloshed through his skull. A moment later the corvette shadowed him, mimicking his vicious moves with a finesse verging on the sarcastic.
[We need that weapon, Remontoire.]
So I guessed. Why didn’t you just come out and say it at the beginning?
[We wanted to give you the chance to see things our way.]
I suppose I should be grateful, in that case.
He felt his ship judder. His head lit up with damage reports, bright and geometric as a migraine. They had hit him with multiple hull-penetrating slugs targeted for ship-critical functions. It was very surgical: they wanted to leave him drifting, ripe for theft, rather than to blow his ship apart. Whether they cared about his survival was another matter entirely.
[Surrender the weapon now, Rem, and we’ll leave you with enough flight-capability to escape that wolf aggregate closing in on us.]
Sorry, but that’s not really in my plans for today.
His vessel rattled again: more vital functions faltered or dropped out of service. The ship was already trying to find work-arounds, doing its best to keep flying, but there was a limit to the damage it could soak up. He considered retaliating, but he was keen to save his conventional ordnance for the aggregates. That left the hypometric weapon itself, barely tested since its laborious calibration.
He issued the mental command that caused it to spin up to activation energy, compensating for the drift in the ship’s vector as angular momentum transferred to the shining innards of the weapon. Externally, there was no evidence of any change in the device at all. He wondered what kind of sensors the corvette had trained on him, and whether they were good enough to pick up the subtle signatures of activation.
It was a small weapon with a correspondingly limited precision and radial volume of effect (conventional terminology - things like ‘range’ and ‘accuracy’ - were only vaguely applicable to hypometric weapons). But it also spun up very quickly. He tuned its scale of effect, found the solution in the complex topography of weapon parameters that corresponded to a specific point in the three-dimensional volume of surrounding space.
He re-established a communications channel to the corvette. Pull back.
[Again, don’t make us do this, Remontoire.]
The weapon discharged. In the microwave-frequency map of the corvette’s cold spots, a wound had suddenly appeared: a perfectly hemispherical bite in the side of the hull. The cryogenic temperature gradients flowed like water around a sinkhole, gyring and wheeling as they tried to find a new equilibrium. Pairs of cooling nodes locked into unstable oscillation modes.
The weapon spun up again. He put another hole in the corvette’s hull, deeper this time, so that the wound was concave.
The corvette responded. Reluctantly, he parried the ship-to-ship munitions with a spread of countermeasures while still holding some back for the Inhibitor machines.
The weapon spun up a third time. He concentrated, forcing himself to examine the solution from every angle. An error now could be fatal for all involved.
Discharge. His third attack was not visible at all. If he had done his sums correctly he had just put a spherical hole insid
e the ship without touching the hull. It would not have touched any vital internal systems. And - his coup de grâce - the centre of the final hole would be exactly in line with the centres of the last two, to micron accuracy.
He waited a moment for the precision - and essential restraint - of his attack to sink in before contacting them again. The next one takes out your life-system. Got the message?
The corvette hesitated. Seconds oozed by, time for Skade’s acolytes to examine thousands of possible response scenarios, toying with them the way children toyed with building blocks, constructing huge, wobbling edifices of event and counter-event. Almost certainly they had not expected him to turn the weapon against them. Their best intelligence would never have suggested he had that degree of control over the weapon’s effects. Even if it had - and even if they had considered the possibility of an attack - they must have assumed he would strike at their ship’s drive core, taking it out in an instant of blinding light.
Instead, he had let them off with a warning. This wasn’t, Remontoire had thought to himself, a time to be making new enemies.
There was no further transmission. He watched, fascinated, as the cryo-arithmetic engines smoothed out the temperature gradients around the two exterior wounds, doing their best to camouflage the damage. Then the corvette flipped over, pushed its thrust to the limit and made itself scarce.
Remontoire allowed himself a miserly instant of self-congratulation. He had played that one well. His ship was still spaceworthy despite the damage it had sustained. And all he had to worry about now was the approaching aggregate of Inhibitor machines. The machines would arrive in three minutes.
Two thousand kilometres, then a thousand, then five hundred. Closer, his sensors struggled to deal with the clump of Inhibitor machines as a single entity, throwing back wildly conflicting estimates for distance, scale and geometric disposition. The best he could do was to focus his efforts on the larger nodes, refining his hull-camouflaging to provide a better line-of-sight match with the cosmic background. He adjusted his thrust vectoring, losing some acceleration but steering his ship’s exhaust beams away from the shifting concentrations of enemy machines. The exhausts were invisible, all but undetectable via the methods available to Remontoire. He hoped the same disadvantage applied to the aliens, but it paid not to take chances.
The clumps reorganised, shifting nearer. They were still too far away and too vaguely dispersed to make an effective target for the hypometric weapon. He was also wary of using it against them except as a tool of last resort. There was always the danger that he’d show it to them too many times, giving them enough data to conjure up a response. It had already happened with other weapons: time and again the Inhibitors had evolved effective defences against human technologies, including some of those already bequeathed by Aura. It was possible that the alien machines were not evolving them at all, but simply retrieving countermeasures from some ancient, jumbled racial memory. This conjecture alarmed Remontoire more than the idea that they might have developed their adaptations and responses through intelligent thinking. There was always the hope that one kind of intelligence could be beaten by the application of another kind, or that intelligence - self-regarding, prone to doubt - might even conspire in its own downfall. But what if there was no intelligence in the Inhibitor activities, just a process of archival retrieval, an utterly mindless bureaucracy of systematised extinction? The galaxy was a very old place and it had seen many clever ideas. More than likely, the Inhibitors already possessed ancient data on the humans’ new weapons and technologies. If they had not yet developed effective responses, it was only because that retrieval system was slow, the archive itself vastly distributed. What that meant was that there was nothing the humans could do, in the long run. No way to outgun the Inhibitors, except on a very local scale. Think galactically, think beyond the immediate handful of solar systems, and it was already over.
But through the channel of her mother, Aura had told them that it wasn’t over, not yet. According to Aura there was a means of buying time, if not outright victory, over the Inhibitors.
Snatches, fragments: that was all they could glean from Aura’s confused messages. But out of the noise had emerged hints of a signal. Time and again a cluster of words had appeared.
Hela. Quaiche. Shadows.
These were shards broken loose from a larger whole that Aura had been too young to articulate. All Remontoire could do was guess at the shape of that bigger picture, using what they had learned before Skade had kidnapped her. Skade and Aura were both gone now, he believed, but he still had those shards. They had to mean something, no matter how unlikely it appeared. And there was, tantalisingly, a clear link between two of them. Hela and Quaiche: the words meant something in association. But of the Shadows he knew nothing at all.
What were they, and what difference would they make?
The aggregate was very close now. It had begun to grope horns around either side of his ship, dark pincers flickering with buried violet lightning. Hints of cubic symmetries could now be glimpsed in sheared edges and stepped curves. He reviewed his options, taking account of the systems damaged in the Conjoiner attack. He wasn’t willing to use the hypometric weapon just yet, and doubted that he’d be able to spin up for a second attack before the undamaged elements took him out.
Ahead, the planet had grown noticeably larger. He had pushed the other aggregate from his mind, but it was still ahead of him, still skimming towards the fragile Juggler biosphere and its human parasites. Half the world was in darkness, the rest a marbled turquoise speckled by white clouds and swirling storm systems.
Remontoire made up his mind: it would have to be the bladder-mines.
In a fraction of a second, apertures popped open along the habitat hull of his trident-shaped ship. In another fraction of a second, launchers flung half a dozen melon-sized munitions in all directions. The hull clanged as the weapons were deployed.
Then there was silence.
An entire second passed, then the munitions detonated in an exactly choreographed sequence. There was no stutter of blinding-white flashes; these were not fusion devices or antimatter warheads. They were, in fact, only bombs in the very loosest sense of the word. Where each munition had detonated there was, suddenly, a twenty-kilometre-wide sphere of something just sitting there, like a rapidly inflated barrage balloon. The surface of each sphere was wrinkled, like the skin of a shrivelling fruit, shaded a purple-black and prone to nauseating surges of colour and boundary radius. Where two spheres happened to intersect - because their munitions had been closer than twenty kilometres apart when they detonated - the merged boundaries twinkled with sugary emanations of violet and pastel-blue.
The mechanisms inside the bladder mines were as intricate and unfathomable as those inside the hypometric weapon. There were even weird points of correspondence between the two technologies - odd parts that looked vaguely similar, suggesting that, perhaps, they had originated from the same species, or the same epoch of galactic history.
Remontoire’s suspicion was that the bladder-mines represented an early step towards the metric-engineering technology of the Shrouders. Whereas the Shrouders had learned how to encase entire stellar-sized volumes of space in shells of re-engineered space-time (with its own uncanny defensive properties), the bladder-mines produced unstable shells a mere twenty kilometres wide. They decayed back to normal space-time within a few seconds, popping out of existence in a shiver of exotic quanta. Where they had been, the local properties of the metric showed tiny indications of earlier stress. But the shells could never be made larger or more permanent, at least not by using the technology Aura had given them.
His spread of munitions was already decaying. The spheres popped away one by one, in random sequence.
Remontoire surveyed the damage. Where the shells had detonated, the intersected Inhibitor machinery had been ripped out of existence. There were curved mathematically smooth wounds in the groping aggregation of cubic elements. The
lightning was arcing through the ruined structure, its mad flickering suggesting nothing so much as pain and rage.
Hit them when they’re down, Remontoire thought. He issued the mental command that would fling a final spread of bladder-mines into the surrounding machinery.
This time, nothing happened. Error messages stormed his brain: the launcher mechanism had failed, succumbing to damage from the earlier attack. He had been fortunate that it had worked once.
For the first time, Remontoire permitted himself more than an instant of real, blood-freezing fear. His options were now seriously diminished. He had no hull-armouring: that was another alien technology they had gleaned from Aura, but like inertial suppression it did not work well in proximity with the hypometric weapon. The hull-armouring came from the grubs; the h-weapon and the bladder-mines from a different culture. There were, unfortunately, compatibility issues. All he had left was the hypometric weapon and his conventional armaments, but there was still no clear focus for an attacking move.
The hull shuddered as his conventional mines were released from their hatches. Fusion detonations painted the sky. He felt the electromagnetic backwash play havoc with his implants, strobing abstract shapes through his visual field.
The Inhibitors were still there. He fired two Stinger missiles, watching them slam away on hundred-gee intercepts. Nothing happened: they hadn’t even detonated properly. He had no beam weapons, nothing more to offer.
The Revelation Space Collection Page 263