‘Disclose all our confidential practices while you’re at it, Mirsky,’ Seven said.
She glared at him through her visor. ‘Veda would have figured it out.’
‘We’ll never know now, will we?’
‘What does it matter?’ she said. ‘Gonna kill them anyway, aren’t you?’
Seven flashed an arc of teeth filed to points and waved a hand towards the female pirate. ‘Allow me to introduce Mirsky, our loose-tongued but efficient information-retrieval specialist. She’s going to take you on a little trip down memory lane, see if you can’t remember those access codes.’
‘What codes?’
‘It’ll come back to you,’ Seven said.
They were taken through the tunnels, past half-assembled mining machines, onto the surface and then into the pirate ship. The ship was huge, most of it living space. Cramped corridors snaked through hydroponics galleries of spring wheat and dwarf papaya, strung with xenon lights. The ship hummed constantly with carbon dioxide scrubbers, the foetid air making Irravel sneeze. There were children everywhere, frowning at the captives. The pirates obviously had no reefersleep technology: they stayed warm the whole time, and some of the children Irravel saw had probably been born after the Hirondelle had arrived there.
They arrived at a pair of interrogation rooms where they were separated. Irravel’s room held a couch converted from an old command seat, still carrying warning decals. A console stood in one corner. Painted torture scenes fought for wall space with racks of surgical equipment: drills, blades and ratcheted contraptions speckled with rust.
Irravel breathed deeply. Hyperventilation could have an anaesthetic effect. Her conditioning would in any case create a state of detachment: the pain would be no less intense, but she would feel it at one remove.
She hoped.
The pirates fiddled with her suit, confused by the modern design, until they stripped her down to her shipboard uniform.
Mirsky leaned over her. She was small-boned and dark-skinned, dirty hair rising in a topknot, eyes mismatched shades of azure. Something clung to the side of her head above the left ear: a silver box with winking status lights. She fixed a crown to Irravel’s head, then made adjustments on the console.
‘Decided yet?’ Captain Run Seven said, sauntering into the room. He was unlatching his helmet.
‘What?’
‘Which of our portfolio of interrogation packages you’re going to opt for.’
She was looking at his face now. It wasn’t really human. Seven had a man’s bulk and a man’s shape, but there was at least as much of the pig in his face. His nose was a snout, his ears two tapered flaps framing a hairless pink skull. His pale eyes evinced animal cunning.
‘What the hell are you?’
‘Excellent question,’ Seven said, clicking a finger in her direction. His bare hand was dark-skinned and feminine. ‘To be honest, I don’t really know. A genetics experiment, perhaps? Was I the seventh failure, or the first success?’
‘Do I get two guesses?’
He ignored her. ‘All I know is that I’ve been here - in the halo around Luyten 726-8 - for as long as I can remember.’
‘Someone sent you here?’
‘In a tiny automated spacecraft; perhaps an old lifepod. The ship’s governing personality raised me as well as it could, attempted to make of me a well-rounded individual . . .’ Seven trailed off momentarily. ‘Eventually I was found by a passing ship. I staged what might be termed a hostile takeover bid. From then on I’ve built an organisation largely recruited from my client base.’
‘You’re insane. It might have worked once, but it won’t work with us.’
‘Why should you be any different?’
‘Neural conditioning. I regard the cargo as my offspring - all twenty thousand of them. I can’t betray them in any way.’
Seven smiled his piggy smile. ‘Funny; the last client thought that, too.’
Sometime later, Irravel woke alone in a reefersleep casket. She remembered only dislocated episodes of interrogation. There was the memory of a kind of sacrifice, and, later, of the worst terror she could imagine - so intense that she could not bring its cause to mind. Underpinning everything was the certainty that she had not given up the codes.
So why was she still alive?
Everything was quiet and cold. Once she was able to move, she found a suit and wandered the Hirondelle until she reached a porthole. They were still lashed to the comet. The other craft was gone; presumably en route back to the base in the halo where the pirates must have had a larger ship.
She looked for Markarian, but there was no sign of him.
Then she checked the twenty crew sleeper chambers; the thousand-berth dormitories. The chamber doors were all open. Most of the sleepers were still there. They’d been butchered, carved open for implants, minds pulped by destructive memory-trawling devices. The horror was too great for any recognisable emotional response. The conditioning made each death feel like a stolen part of her.
Yet something kept her on the edge of sanity: the discovery that two hundred sleepers were missing. There was no sign that they’d been butchered like the others, which left the possibility that they’d been abducted by Captain Run Seven. It was madness - it would not begin to compensate for the loss of the others - but her psychology allowed no other line of thought.
She could find them again.
Her plan was disarmingly simple. It crystallised in her mind with the clarity of a divine vision. It would be done.
She would repair the ship. She would hunt down Seven. She would recover the sleepers from him. And enact whatever retribution she deemed fit.
She found the chamber where the four Conjoiners had slept, well away from the main dormitories, in a part of the ship through which the pirates were not likely to have wandered. She was hoping she could revive them and seek their assistance. There seemed no way they could make things worse for her now.
But hope faded when she saw the scorch marks of weapon blasts around the bulkhead; the door forced.
She stepped inside anyway.
They’d been a sect on Mars, originally; a clique of cyberneticists with a particular fondness for self-experimentation. In 2190, their final experiment had involved distributed processing - allowing their enhanced minds to merge into one massively parallel neural net. The resultant event - a permanent, irrevocable escalation to a new mode of consciousness - was known as the Transenlightenment.
There’d been a war, of course.
Demarchists had long seen both sides. They used neural augmentation themselves, policed it so that they never approached the Conjoiner threshold. They’d brokered the peace, defusing the suspicion surrounding the Conjoiners. Conjoiners had fuelled Demarchist expansion from Europa with their technologies, fused in the white heat of Transenlightenment. Four of them were along as observers because the Hirondelle used their ramscoop drives.
Irravel still didn’t trust them.
And maybe it didn’t matter. The reefersleep units - fluted caskets like streamlined coffins - were riddled with blast holes. Grimacing against the smell, Irravel examined the remains inside. They’d been cut open, but the pirates seemed to have abandoned the job halfway through, not finding the kinds of implants they were expecting. And maybe not even recognising that they were dealing with anything other than normal humans, Irravel thought - especially if the pirates who’d done this hadn’t been amongst Seven’s more experienced crewmembers; just trigger-happy thugs.
She examined the final casket, the one furthest from the door. It was damaged, but not so badly as the others. The display car-touches were still alive, a patina of frost still adhering to the casket’s lid. The Conjoiner inside looked intact: the pirates had never reached him. She read his nameplate: Remontoire.
‘Yeah, he’s a live one,’ said a voice behind Irravel. ‘Now back off real slow.’
Heart racing, Irravel did as she was told. Slowly, she turned around, facing the woman whose voice s
he recognised.
‘Mirsky?’ she said.
‘Yeah, it’s your lucky day.’ Mirsky was wearing her suit, but without the helmet, making her head appear shrunken in the moat of her neck-ring. She had a gun on Irravel, but she pointed it half-heartedly, as if this was a stage in their relationship she wanted to get over as quickly as possible.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘Same as you, Veda. Trying to figure out how much shit we’re in; how difficult it’ll be to get this ship moving again. Guess we had the same idea about the Conjoiners. Seven went berserk when he heard they’d been killed, but I figured it was worth checking how thorough the job had been.’
‘Stop; slow down. Start at the beginning. Why aren’t you with Seven?’
Mirsky pushed past her and consulted the reefersleep indicators. ‘Seven and me had a falling out. Fill in the rest yourself.’ With quick jabs of her free hand she called up different display modes, frowning at each. ‘Shit; this ain’t gonna be easy. If we wake the guy without his three friends, he’s gonna be psychotic; no use to us at all.’
‘What kind of falling out?’
‘Seven reckoned I was holding back too much in the interrogation, not putting you through enough hell.’ She scratched at the silver box on the side of her head. ‘Maybe we can wake him, then fake the cybernetic presence of his friends - what do you think?’
‘Why am I still alive, if Seven broke into the sleeper chambers? Why are you still alive?’
‘Seven’s a sadist. Abandonment’s more his style than a quick and clean execution. As for you, the pig cut a deal with your second-in-command.’
The implication of that sunk in. ‘Markarian gave him the codes?’
‘It wasn’t you, Veda.’
Strange relief flooded Irravel. She could never be absolved of the crime of losing the cargo, but at least her degree of complicity had lessened.
‘But that was only half the deal,’ Mirsky continued. ‘The rest was Seven promising not to kill you if Markarian agreed to join the Hideyoshi, our main ship.’ She told Irravel that there’d been a transmitter rigged to her reefersleep unit, so that Markarian would know she was still alive.
‘Seven must have known he was taking a risk leaving both of us alive.’
‘A pretty small one. The ship’s in pieces and Seven will assume neither of us has the brains to patch it back together.’ Mirsky slipped the gun into a holster. ‘But Seven assumed the Conjoiners were dead. Big mistake. Once we figure out a way to wake Remontoire safely, he can help us fix the ship; make it faster, too.’
‘You’ve got this all worked out, haven’t you?’
‘More or less. Something tells me you aren’t absolutely ready to start trusting me, though.’
‘Sorry, Mirsky, but you don’t make the world’s most convincing turncoat.’
Mirsky reached up and gripped the box attached to the side of her head. ‘Know what this is? A loyalty shunt. Makes simian stem cells; pumps them into the internal carotid artery, just above the cavernous sinus. They jump the blood-brain barrier and build a whole bunch of transient structures tied to primate dominance hierarchies; alpha-male shit. That’s how Seven kept us under his command - he was King Monkey. But I’ve turned it off now.’
‘That’s supposed to reassure me?’
‘No, but maybe this will.’
Mirsky tugged at the box, ripping it away from the side of her head in curds of blood.
Luyten 726-8 Cometary Halo - AD 2309
Irravel felt the Hirondelle turn like a compass needle. The ram-scoops gasped at interstellar gas, sucking lone atoms of cosmic hydrogen from cubic metres of vacuum. The engines spat twin beams of thrust, pressing Irravel into her seat with two gees of acceleration. Hardly moving now, still in the local frame of the cometary halo, but in only six months she would be nudging light-speed.
Her seat floated on a boom in the middle of the dodecahedral bridge. ‘Map,’ Irravel said, and was suddenly drowning in stars: an immense thirty-light-year-wide projection of human settled space, centred on the First System.
‘There’s the bastard,’ Mirsky said, pointing from her own hovering seat, her voice only slightly strained under the gee-load. ‘Map - give us projection of the Hideyoshi’s vector, and plot our intercept.’
The pirate ship’s icon was still very close to Luyten 726-8; less than a tenth of a light-year out. They had not seen Seven until now. The thrust from his ship was so tightly focused that it had taken until this point for the widening beams of the exhaust to sweep over Hirondelle’s sensors. But now they knew where he was headed. A dashed line indicated the likely course, arrowing right through the map’s heart and out towards the system Lalande 21185. Now came the intercept vector: a near-tangent that sliced Seven’s course beyond Sol.
‘When does it happen?’ Irravel said.
‘Depends on how much attention Seven’s paying to what’s coming up behind him, for a start, and what kind of evasive stunts he can pull.’
‘Most of my simulations predict an intercept between 2325 and 2330,’ Remontoire said.
Irravel savoured the dates. Even for someone trained to fly a starship between systems, they sounded uncomfortably like the future.
‘Are you sure it’s him - not just some other ship that happened to be waiting in the halo?’
‘Trust me,’ Mirsky said. ‘I can smell the swine from here.’
‘She’s right,’ Remontoire said. ‘The destination makes perfect sense. Seven was prohibited from staying here much longer, once the number of missing ships became too large to be explained away as accidents. Now he must seek a well-settled system to profit from what he has stolen.’
The Conjoiner looked completely normal at first glance - a bald man wearing a ship’s uniform, his expression placid - but then one noticed the unnatural bulge of his skull, covered only with a fuzz of baby hair. Most of his glial cells had been supplanted by machines, which served the same structural functions but also performed specialised cybernetic duties, like interfacing with other commune partners or external machinery. Even the organic neurons in his brain were now webbed together by artificial connections which allowed transmission speeds of kilometres per second; factors of ten faster than in normal brains. Only the problem of dispersing waste heat denied the Conjoiners even faster modes of thought.
It was six years since they’d woken him. Remontoire had not dealt well with the murder of his three compatriots, but Irravel and Mirsky had managed to keep him sane by feeding input into the glial machines, crudely simulating rapport with other commune members.
‘It provides the kind of comfort to me that a ghost limb offers an amputee,’ Remontoire had said. ‘An illusion of wholeness - but no substitute for the real thing.’
‘What more can we do?’ Irravel had said.
‘Return me to another commune with all speed.’
Irravel had agreed, provided Remontoire helped with the ship.
He hadn’t let her down. Under his supervision, half the ship’s mass had been sacrificed, permitting twice the acceleration. They had dug a vault in the comet, lined it with support systems and entombed what remained of the cargo. The sleepers were nominally dead - there was no real expectation of reviving them again, even if medicine improved in the future - but Irravel had nonetheless set servitors to tend the dead for however long it took, and programmed the beacon to lure another ship, this time to pick up the dead.
All that had taken years, of course - but it had also taken Seven as much time to cross the halo to his base; time again to show himself.
‘Be so much easier if you didn’t want the others back,’ Mirsky said. ‘Then we could just slam past Seven at relativistic speed and hit him with seven kinds of shit.’ She was very proud of the weapons she’d built into the ship, copied from pirate designs with Remontoire’s help.
‘I want the sleepers back,’ Irravel said.
‘And Markarian?’
‘He’s mine,’ she said, after
due consideration. ‘You get the pig.’
Near Lalande 21185 - AD 2328
Relativity squeezed stars until they bled colour. Half a kilometre ahead, the side of Seven’s ship raced towards Irravel like a tsunami.
The Hideyoshi was the same shape as the Hirondelle; honed less by human whim than the edicts of physics. But the Hideyoshi was heavier, with a wider cross section, incapable of matching the Hirondelle’s acceleration or of pushing so close to C. It had taken years, but they’d caught up with Seven, and now the attack was in progress.
Irravel, Mirsky and Remontoire wore thruster-pack-equipped suits, of the type used for inspections outside the ship, with added armour and weapons. Painted for effect, they looked like mechanised samurai. Another forty-seven suits were slaved to theirs, acting as decoys. They’d crossed fifty thousand kilometres of space between the ships.
‘You’re sure Seven doesn’t have any defences?’ Irravel had asked, not long after waking from reefersleep.
‘Only the in-system ship had any fire power,’ Mirsky said. She looked older now; new lines engraved under her eyes. ‘That’s because no one’s ever been insane enough to contemplate storming another ship in interstellar space.’
‘Until now.’
But it wasn’t so stupid, and Mirsky knew it. Matching velocities with another ship was only a question of being faster; squeezing fractionally closer to light-speed. It might take time, but sooner or later the distance would be closed. And it had taken time, none of which Mirsky had spent in reefersleep. Partly it was because she lacked the right implants - ripped out in infancy when she was captured by Seven. Partly it was a distaste for the very idea of being frozen, instilled by years of pirate upbringing. But also because she wanted time to refine her weapons. They had fired a salvo against the enemy before crossing space in the suits, softening up any weapons buried in his ice and opening holes into the Hideyoshi’s interior.
The Revelation Space Collection Page 369