‘Xavier, Little Miss? In what way is Mr Liu culpable?’
‘Xave swore the tok was at least three trips away from life-expiry.’
‘Perhaps, Little Miss. But before you ascribe too much blame to Mr Liu, perhaps you should keep in mind the enforced main-engine cutoff that the police demanded of us as we were departing the Rust Belt. The hard shutdown did the tokamak no favours at all. Then there was the additional matter of the vibrational damage sustained during the atmospheric insertion.’
Antoinette scowled. Sometimes she wondered whose side Beast was really on. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Xave’s off the hook. For now. But that doesn’t help me much, does it?’
‘A failure is predicted, Little Miss, but not guaranteed.’
Antoinette checked the read-outs. ‘We’ll need another ten klicks per second just to make orbit. Can you manage that, Beast?’
‘One is doing one’s utmost, Little Miss.’
She nodded, accepting that this was all that could be asked of her ship. Above, the clouds were beginning to thin out, the sky darkening to a deep midnight blue. Space looked close enough to touch.
But she still had a long way to go.
Clavain watched while the last layer of concealment was removed from the survivor’s hiding place. One of his soldiers shone a torch into the gloomy enclosure. The survivor was huddled in a corner, cocooned in a stained grey thermal blanket. Clavain felt relief; now that this minor detail was attended to, the enemy ship could be safely destroyed and Nightshade could return to the Mother Nest.
Finding the survivor had been much easier than Clavain had expected. It had only taken thirty minutes to pinpoint the location, narrowing down the search with acoustic and biosensor scanners. Thereafter, it had simply been a question of stripping away panels and equipment until they found the concealed niche, a volume about the size of two cupboards placed back to back. It was in a part of the ship that the human crew would have avoided visiting too often, bathed as it was in elevated radiation from the fusion engines.
The hideaway, Clavain quickly decided, looked like a hastily arranged brig; a place of confinement in a ship never designed to carry prisoners. The captive must have been placed in the hole and the panelling and equipment bolted and glued back into place around him, leaving only a conduit along which to pass air, water and food. The hole was filthy. Clavain had his suit sample the air and pass a little through to his nose: it reeked of human waste. He wondered if the prisoner had been neglected all the while, or only since the crew’s attention had been diverted by Nightshade’s arrival.
In other respects, the prisoner seemed to have been well looked after. The walls of the hole were padded, with a couple of restraining hoops that could have been used to avoid injury during combat manoeuvres. There was a microphone rigged through for communication, though as far as Clavain could tell it only worked one way, allowing the prisoner to be talked to. There were blankets and the remains of a meal. Clavain had seen worse places of confinement. He had even been a guest in some of them.
He pushed a thought into the head of the soldier with the torch. Get that blanket off him, will you? I want to see who we’ve found.
The soldier reached into the hole. Clavain wondered who the prisoner would turn out to be, his mind flashing through the possibilities. He was not aware of any Conjoiners having been taken prisoner lately, and doubted that the enemy would have gone to this much trouble to keep one alive. A prisoner from the enemy’s own ranks was the next most likely thing: a traitor or deserter, perhaps.
The soldier whipped the blanket away from the huddled figure.
The prisoner, crouched into a small foetal shape, squealed against the sudden intrusion of light, hiding its dark-adapted eyes.
Clavain stared. The prisoner was nothing that he had been expecting. At first glance it might have been taken for an adolescent human, for the proportions and size were roughly analogous. A naked human at that — unclothed pink human-looking flesh folded away into the hole. There was a horrid expanse of burned skin around its upper arm, all ridges and whorls of pink and deathly white.
Clavain was looking at a hyperpig: a genetic chimera of pig and human.
‘Hello,’ Clavain said aloud, his amplified voice booming out of his suit speaker.
The pig moved. The motion was sudden and springlike and none of them were expecting it. The pig lashed out with something long and metallic clutched in one fist. The object gleamed, its edge reverberating like a tuning fork. The pig daggered it hard into Clavain’s chest. The tip of the blade shivered across the armour, leaving only a narrow shining furrow, but found the point near Clavain’s shoulder where two plaques slid across each other. The blade slipped into the gap, Clavain’s suit registering the intrusion with a shrill pulsing alarm in his helmet. He jerked back before the blade was able to penetrate his inner suit layer and reach his skin, and then collided with a sharp crack against the wall behind him. The weapon tumbled from the pig’s grip, spinning away like a ship that had lost gyroscopic control. Clavain recognised it as a piezo-knife; he carried something similar on his own suit’s utility belt. The pig must have stolen it from one of the Demarchists.
Clavain got his breath back. ‘Let’s start again, shall we?’
The other Conjoiners had the pig pinned down. Clavain inspected his suit, calling up damage schematics. There was a mild loss of pressure integrity near the shoulder. He was in no danger of suffocating to death, but he was still mindful of the possibility of undiscovered contaminants aboard the enemy ship. Almost as a reflex action he unhitched a sealant spray from his belt, selected nozzle diameter and pasted the rapidly hardening epoxy around the general area of the knife wound, where it solidified in the form of a sinuous grey cyst.
Somewhere before the dawn of the Demarchist era, in the twenty-first or twenty-second century, not far from the time of Clavain’s own birth, a spectrum of human genes had been spliced into those of the domestic pig. The intention had been to optimise the ease with which organs could be transplanted between the two species, enabling pigs to grow body parts that could be harvested later for human utilisation. There were better ways to repair or replace damaged tissue now, had been for centuries, but the legacy of the pig experiments remained. The genetic intervention had gone too far, achieving not just cross-species compatibility but something entirely unexpected: intelligence.
But no one, not even the pigs, really knew what had happened. There might not have been deliberate tinkering to bring their cognitive faculties up to human level, but the pigs had certainly not gained language by accident. Not all of them had it — there were distinct subgroups of pigs with various mental and vocal capacities — but those that could speak had been engineered that way by someone who had known exactly what they were doing. It was not simply that their brains had the right grammatical machinery wired in. They had also had their throats, lungs and jaws adapted so that they could form human speech sounds.
Clavain eased forwards to speak to the prisoner. ‘Can you understand me?’ he asked, first in Norte and then in Canasian, the Demarchists’ main language. ‘My name is Nevil Clavain. You’re in the custody of Conjoiners.’
The pig answered, his remodelled jaw and throat anatomy enabling him to form perfect human sounds. ‘I don’t care who I’m in the custody of. You can fuck off and die.’
‘Neither happens to be on my agenda for the day.’
The pig warily uncovered one pink-red eye. ‘Who the fuck are you anyway? Where are the rest of them?’
‘The shipmaster’s crew? I’m afraid they’re all dead.’
The pig showed no detectable gratitude at this news. ‘You killed them?’
‘No. They were already dead when we got aboard.’
‘And you are?’
‘As I said, Conjoiners.’
‘Spiders…’ The pig contorted its almost human mouth into a semblance of disgust. ‘You know what I do to spiders? I piss them off toilet seats.’
�
�Very nice.’
Clavain could see this was going nowhere fast; subvocally he asked one of the nearby troops to get the prisoner sedated and ferried back to Nightshade. He had no idea who or what the pig represented, how it slotted into the spiralling endgame of the war, but he would know a great deal more once the pig had been trawled. And a dose of Conjoiner medichines would do wonders for the pig’s reticence.
Clavain remained on the enemy ship while the sweep teams completed the last of their checks, ensuring that the enemy had left behind no tactically useful information. But there was nothing; the ship’s data stores had been wiped clean. A parallel search revealed no technologies that were not already well understood by the Conjoiners, and no weapons systems that were worth appropriating. The standard procedure at this point was to destroy the searched vessel, to prevent it falling back into enemy possession.
Clavain was thinking about the best way to scuttle the ship — a missile or a demolition charge? — when he felt Remontoire’s presence invade his head.
[Clavain?]
What is it?
[We’re picking up a general distress message from the freighter.]
Antoinette Bax? I thought she was dead.
[She isn’t, but she might soon be. Her ship has engine problems — a tokamak failure, it seems. She hasn’t made escape velocity, and she hasn’t managed an orbital injection either.]
Clavain nodded, more for his benefit than Remontoire’s. He imagined the kind of parabolic trajectory Storm Bird had to be on. She might not have reached the apex of that parabola yet, but sooner or later Antoinette Bax was going to start sliding back towards the cloud deck. He imagined, too, the kind of desperation that would have led her to issue a general distress signal when the only ship within answering distance was a Conjoiner vessel. In Clavain’s experience, the majority of pilots would have chosen death rather than capture by the spiders.
[Clavain… you realise we can’t possibly acknowledge her call.]
I realise.
[That would set a precedent. We’d be endorsing illegal activity. At the very least, we’d have no choice but to recruit her.]
Clavain nodded again, thinking of the times he had seen prisoners scream and thrash as they were led to the recruitment theatres, where their heads would be pumped full of Conjoiner neural machinery. They were wrong to fear it; he knew that better than anyone, since he had once resisted it himself. But he understood how they felt.
And he wondered if he wanted to inflict that terror upon Antoinette Bax.
A little while later Clavain saw the bright blue spark as the enemy ship hit the gas giant’s atmosphere. The timing had been accidental, but she had hit on the dark side, illuminating stacked cloud layers in purple strobe flashes as she plummeted deeper. It was impressive, beautiful, even, and Clavain momentarily wanted to show it to Galiana, for it was exactly the kind of visual spectacle that would have delighted her. She would have approved of his scuttling method, too: nothing as wasteful as a missile or a demolition charge. Instead, he had attached three tractor rockets from Nightshade, tiny drones which had glued themselves to the enemy’s hull like remora. The tractors had whisked the enemy ship towards the gas giant, only detaching when she was minutes from re-entry. The angle of attack had been steep, and the enemy craft had incinerated impressively.
The tractors were haring home now, accelerating at high burn to catch up with Nightshade, which had already turned back towards the Mother Nest. Once the tractors had returned the operation could be considered closed; there would only be the matter of the prisoner to attend to, but the pig’s fate was of no great urgency. Of Antoinette Bax… well, irrespective of her motives, Clavain admired her bravery; not just because she had come so far into a war zone, but also because of the way she had so brazenly ignored the shipmaster’s warning and, when it became necessary, the way she had summoned the courage to ask the Conjoiners for help. She must have known that it was an unreasonable request; that by the illegality of her trespass into the war zone she had forfeited any right to assistance, and that a military ship was hardly likely to waste time or fuel helping her out. She must also have known that even if the Conjoiners did save her life, the penalty she would pay for that would be conscription into their ranks, a fate that the Demarchist propaganda machine had made to seem hellish in the extreme.
No. She could not have reasonably expected rescue. But it had been brave of her to ask.
Clavain sighed, teetering on the edge of self-disgust. He issued a neural command instructing Nightshade to tight-beam the stricken freighter. When the link was established, he spoke aloud. ‘Antoinette Bax… this is Nevil Clavain. I am aboard the Conjoiner vessel. Can you hear me?’
There was some timelag now, and the return signal was poorly focused. Her voice sounded as if it was coming from somewhere beyond the furthest quasar.
‘Why are you answering me now, you bastard? I can see you’ve left me to die.’
‘I’m curious, that’s all.’ He held his breath, half-expecting that she would not reply.
‘About what?’
‘About what made you ask for our help. Aren’t you terrified of what we’ll do to you?’
‘Why should I be terrified?’
She sounded nonchalant but Clavain wasn’t fooled. ‘It’s generally our policy to assimilate captured prisoners, Bax. We’d bring you aboard and feed our machines into your brain. Doesn’t that concern you?’
‘Yes, but I’ll tell you what concerns me a fuck of a lot more right now, and that’s hitting this fucking planet.’
Clavain smiled. ‘That’s a very pragmatic attitude, Bax. I admire it.’
‘Good. Now will you fuck off and let me die in peace?’
‘Antoinette, listen to me carefully. There’s something I need you to do for me, with some urgency.’
She must have detected the change of tone in his voice, although she still sounded suspicious. ‘What?’
‘Have your ship transmit a blueprint of itself to me. I want a complete map of your hull’s structural integrity profile. Hardpoints, that kind of thing. If you can persuade your hull to colour itself to reveal maximum stress contours, all the better. I want to know where I can safely put a load without having your ship fold under the strain.’
‘There’s no way you can save me. You’re too far away. Even if you turned around now, it’d be too late.’
‘There’s a way, trust me. Now, that data, please, or I’ll have to trust my instincts, and that may not be for the best.’
She did not answer for a moment. He waited, scratching his beard, and only breathed again when he felt Nightshade’s acknowledgement that the data had been uploaded. He filtered the transmission for neuropathic viruses and then allowed it into his skull. Everything he needed to know about the freighter bloomed in his head, crammed into short-term memory.
‘Thank you very much, Antoinette. That will do nicely.’
Clavain sent an order to one of the returning tractor rockets. The tractor peeled away from its brethren at whiplash acceleration, executing a hairpin reversal that would have reduced an organic passenger to paste. Clavain authorised the tractor to ignore all its internal safety limits, removing the need for it to conserve enough fuel for a safe return to Nightshade.
‘What are you going to do?’ Bax asked.
‘I’m sending a drone back. It will latch on to your hull and drag you to clear space, out of the Jovian’s gravity well. I’ll have the tractor give you a modest nudge in the direction of Yellowstone, but I’m afraid you’ll be on your own from then. I hope you can fix your tokamak, or else you’ll be in for a very long fall home.’
It seemed to take an eternity for his words to sink in. ‘You’re not going to take me prisoner?’
‘Not today, Antoinette. But if you ever cross my path again, I promise one thing: I’ll kill you.’
He had not enjoyed delivering the threat, but hoped it might knock some sense into her. Clavain closed the link before she could answer.
FOUR
In a building in Cuvier, on the planet Resurgam, a woman stood at a window, facing away from the door with her hands clasped tightly behind her back.
‘Next,’ she said.
While she waited for the suspect to be dragged in, the woman remained at the window, admiring the tremendous and sobering view that it presented. The raked windows reached from floor to ceiling, leaning outwards at the top. Structures of utilitarian aspect marched away in all directions, cubes and rectangles piled atop one another. The ruthlessly rectilinear buildings inspired a sense of crushing conformity and subjugation; mental waveguides designed to exclude the slightest joyful or uplifting thought.
Her office, which was merely one slot in the much larger Inquisition House itself, was situated in the rebuilt portion of Cuvier. Historical records — the Inquisitor had not been there herself during the events — established that the building lay more or less directly above the ground-zero point where the True Path Inundationists had detonated the first of their terrorist devices. With a yield in the two-kilotonne range, the pinhead-sized antimatter bombs had not been the most impressive destructive devices in her experience. But, she supposed, it was not how big your weapon was that mattered, but what you did with it.
The terrorists could not have picked a softer target, and the results had been appropriately calamitous.
‘Next…’ the Inquisitor repeated, a little louder this time.
The door creaked open a hand’s width. She heard the voice of the guard who stood outside. ‘That’s it for today, ma’am.’
Of course — Ibert’s file had been the last in the pile.
‘Thank you,’ the Inquisitor replied. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard any news on the Thorn inquiry?’
The guard answered with a trace of unease, as well he might given that he was passing information between two rival government departments. ‘They’ve released a man after questioning, I gather. He had a watertight alibi, though it took a little persuasion to get it out of him. Something about being with a woman other than his wife.’ He shrugged. ‘The usual story…’
The Revelation Space Collection (revelation space) Page 149