When the Wall had collapsed in the final assault by Clavain’s old comrades, the Coalition for Neural Purity, Galiana, Felka and he had made a last-ditch escape from the nest. Galiana had tried to dissuade him from taking Felka, warning him that without the Wall she would experience a state of deprivation far crueller than death itself. But Clavain had taken her anyway, convinced that there had to be some hope for the girl; that there had to be something else her mind could latch on to as a surrogate for the Wall.
He had been right, but it had taken many years to prove the point.
Through the years that followed — four hundred of them, although neither of them had experienced more than a century of subjective time — Felka had been coaxed and guided towards her current fragile state of mind. Subtle and delicate neural manipulation gave her back some of the brain functions that had been destroyed in the foetal intervention: language, and a growing sense that other people were more than mere automata. There were setbacks and failures — she had never learned to distinguish faces, for instance — but the triumphs outweighed them. Felka found other things to snare her mind, and during the long interstellar expedition she was happier than she had ever been. Every new world offered the prospect of a shatteringly difficult puzzle.
Eventually, however, she had decided to return home. There had been no rancour between her and Galiana, merely a sense that it was time to begin collating the knowledge that she had helped gather so far, and that the best place to do so was the Mother Nest, with its vast analytic resources.
But she returned to find the Mother Nest embroiled in war. Clavain was soon off fighting the Demarchists, and Felka found that interpreting the data from the expedition was no longer viewed as a high-priority task.
Slowly, so slowly that it was barely evident from year to year, Clavain had watched her retreat back into her own private world. She had begun to play a less and less active role in Mother Nest affairs, isolating her mind from the other Conjoiners except on rare occasions. Things had only worsened when Galiana had come back, neither dead nor alive, but in some horrible intermediate state.
The wooden toys Felka surrounded herself with were symptoms of a desperate need to engage her mind with a problem worthy of her cognitive abilities. But for all that they held her interest, they were doomed to fail in the long run. Clavain had seen it happen already. He knew that what Felka needed was beyond his powers to give.
‘Perhaps when the war’s over…’ he said lamely. ‘If starflight becomes routine once more, and we start exploring again…’
‘Don’t make promises you can’t fulfil, Clavain.’
Felka took her own drinking bulb and cast off into the midst of her chamber. Absently, she began to chisel away at one of her solid compositions. The thing she was working on looked like a cube made from smaller cubes, with square gaps in some of the faces. She poked the chisel into one of these gaps and rasped back and forth, barely looking at the thing.
‘I’m not promising anything,’ he said. ‘I’m just saying I’ll do what I can.’
‘The Jugglers might not even be able to help me.’
‘Well, we won’t know until we try, will we?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘That’s the spirit,’ Clavain said.
Something clunked inside the object she was working on. Felka hissed like a scalded cat and flung the ruined contraption at the nearest wall. It shattered into a hundred blocky pieces. Almost without hesitation she hauled in another piece and began working on that instead.
‘And if the Pattern Jugglers don’t help, we could try the Shrouders.’ Clavain smiled. ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. If the Jugglers don’t work, then we can think about other possibilities. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. There’s the small matter of winning a war first.’
‘But they say it will soon be over.’
‘They do, don’t they?’
Felka slipped with the tool she was using and gouged a little flap of skin from the side of her finger. She pressed the finger against her mouth and sucked on it hard, like someone working the last drop of juice from a lemon. ‘What makes you think otherwise?’
He felt an absurd urge to lower his voice, even though it made no practical difference. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps I’m just being a silly old fool. But what are silly old fools for, if not to have the occasional doubt now and then?’
Felka smiled tolerantly. ‘Stop speaking in riddles, Clavain.’
‘It’s Skade and the Closed Council. Something’s going on and I don’t know what it is.’
‘Such as?’
Clavain chose his words carefully. As much as he trusted Felka, he knew that he was dealing with a member of the Closed Council. The fact that she had not participated in the Council for some time, and was presumably out of the loop on its latest secrets, did not count for much.
‘We stopped building ships a century ago. No one ever told me why, and I quickly realised it wasn’t much use asking. In the meantime I heard the odd rumour of mysterious goings-on: secret initiatives, secret technology-acquisition programmes, secret experiments. Then suddenly, just when the Demarchists are about to cave in and admit defeat, the Closed Council unveils a brand-new starship design. Nightshade is nothing if it isn’t a weapon, Felka, but who the hell are they planning to use it against if it isn’t the Demarchists?’
‘“They”, Clavain?’
‘I mean us.’
Felka nodded. ‘But you occasionally wonder if the Closed Council isn’t planning something behind the scenes.’
Clavain sipped at his tea. ‘I’m entitled to wonder, aren’t I?’ Felka was quiet for several long moments, the silence interrupted only by the rasp of her file against wood. ‘I could answer some of your questions here and now, Clavain. You know that. You also know that I won’t ever reveal what I learned in the Closed Council, just as you wouldn’t if you were in my position.’
He shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t expect anything less.’
‘But even if I wanted to tell you, I don’t think I know everything. Not any more. There are layers within layers. I was never privy to Inner Sanctum secrets, and I haven’t been allowed near Closed Council data for years.’ Felka tapped the file against her temple.
‘Some of the Closed Council members even want me to have my memories permanently scrubbed, so that I’ll forget what I learned during my active Council years. The only thing that’s stopping them is my odd brain anatomy. They can’t swear they wouldn’t scrub the wrong memories.’
‘Every cloud has a silver lining.’
She nodded. ‘But there is a solution, Clavain. A pretty simple one, when you think about it.’
‘Which is?’
‘You could always join the Closed Council.’
Clavain sighed, grasping for an objection and knowing that even if he found one it would be unlikely to satisfy Felka. ‘I’ll have some more of that tea, if you don’t mind.’
Skade strode through the curving grey corridors of the Mother Nest, her crest flaming with the scarlet of intense concentration and anger. She was on her way to the privy chamber, where she had arranged to meet Remontoire and a quorum of corporeal Closed Council members.
Her mind was running near its maximum processing rate. She was contemplating how she would handle what was sure to be a delicate meeting, perhaps the most crucial in her campaign to recruit Clavain to her side. Most of the Closed Council were putty in her hands, but there were a few that worried her, a few that would need more than the usual amount of convincing.
Skade was also reviewing the digested final performance data from the secret systems inside Nightshade, which were feeding into her skull via the compad now resting across her abdomen like a piece of armour. The numbers were encouraging; there was nothing, other than the problem of keeping the breakthrough secret, to prevent a more extensive test of the machinery. She had already informed the Master of Works of the good news, so that the final technical refinements could be incorporate
d into the exodus fleet.
Although she had assigned a large fraction of herself to these issues, Skade was also replaying and processing a recording, a transmission that had recently arrived from the Ferrisville Convention.
It was not good.
The spokesperson hovered ahead of Skade, his back to the direction of her travel, his feet sliding ineffectually above the flooring. Skade was replaying the transmission at ten times normal speed, lending the man’s gestures a manic quality.
‘This is a formal request to any representative of the Conjoined faction,’ said the Convention spokesman. ‘It is known to the Ferrisville Convention that a Conjoiner vessel was involved in the interception and boarding of a Demarchist ship in the neighbourhood of the Contested Volume around gas-giant…’
Skade fast-forwarded. She had already played the message eighteen times, searching for nuance or deception. She knew that what followed was a supremely tedious list of legal strictures and Convention statutes, all of which she had checked and found to be watertight.
‘… Unknown to the Conjoined faction, Maruska Chung, the shipmaster of the Demarchist vessel, had already made formal contact with officers of the Ferrisville Convention regarding the transfer into our custody of a prisoner. The prisoner in question had been detained aboard the Demarchist vessel after his arrest on a military asteroid under Demarchist jurisdiction, in accordance with…’
More boiler-plate. Fast-forward again.
‘… prisoner in question, a hyperpig known to the Ferrisville Convention as “Scorpio”, is already sought for the following crimes in contravention of emergency powers general statute number…’
She allowed the message to cycle over again, but detected nothing that had not already been clear. The bureaucratic gnome of the Convention seemed too obsessed with the minutiae of treaties and sub-clauses to be capable of real deception. He was almost certainly telling the truth about the pig.
Scorpio was a criminal known to the authorities, a vicious murderer with a predilection for killing humans. Chung had told the Convention that she was bringing him back into their care, presumably tight-beaming ahead before Nightshade had been close enough to snoop on her transmissions.
And Clavain, damn him again, had not done what he should have done, which was wipe the Demarchists out of existence the first chance he got. The Convention would have grumbled at that, but he would have been entirely within his rights. He could not have been expected to know about the shipmaster’s prisoner of war, and he was not obliged to ask questions before opening fire. Instead, he had rescued the pig.
‘… request the immediate return of the prisoner into our custody, unharmed and uncontaminated by Conjoiner neural-infiltration systems, within twenty-six standard days. Failure to comply with this request…’ The Convention spokesman paused, wringing his hands in miserly anticipation. ‘… Failure to comply would be greatly to the detriment of relations between the Conjoined faction and the Convention, as I need hardly stress.’
Skade understood perfectly. It was not that the prisoner was of any tangible value to the Convention. But as a coup — as a trophy — the prisoner’s value was incalculable. Law and order were already in a state of extreme collapse in Convention airspace, and the pigs were a powerful, and not always lawful, group in their own right. It had been bad enough when Skade had gone to Chasm City herself on covert Council business and had almost ended up dead. Matters had certainly not improved since. The pig’s recapture and execution would send a powerful signal to other miscreants, especially the more criminally inclined pig factions. Had Skade been in the spokesman’s position, she would have made much the same demand.
But that didn’t make the pig any less of a problem. On the face of it, knowing what Skade knew, there was no need to comply. It would not be long now before the Convention was of no consequence at all. The Master of Works had assured her that the exodus fleet would be ready in seventy days, and she had no reason to doubt the accuracy of the Master’s estimate.
Seventy days.
In eighty or ninety it would be done. In barely three months nothing else would matter. But there was the problem. The fleet’s existence, and the reason for its existence, had to remain a matter of total secrecy. The impression had to be given that the Conjoiners were pressing ahead towards the military victory that every neutral observer expected. Anything else would invite suspicion both from within and without the Mother Nest. And if the Demarchists discovered the truth, there was a chance — a slim one, but not something she could dismiss — that they might rally, using the information to gain allies that had previously remained neutral. Right now they were a spent force, but if they combined with the Ultras, they might present a real obstacle to Skade’s ultimate objective.
No. The charade of coming victory demanded a degree of obeisance to the Convention. Skade would have to find a way of returning the pig, and it would have to happen before suspicion was roused.
Her fury reached a crescendo. She made the spokesman freeze ahead of her. His body blackened to a silhouette. She strode through him, scattering him like a flock of startled ravens.
SIX
The Inquisitor’s private aircraft could have made extremely short shrift of the journey to Solnhofen, but she decided to make the final leg of the trip by surface transport, having the plane drop her off at the nearest reasonably sized community to her destination.
The place was called Audubon, a sprawl of depots, shacks and domes pierced by slev rails, cargo pipelines and highways. From the perimeter, the fine-filigreed fingers of dirigible docking masts poked into the slate-grey northern sky. But there were no airships moored today and no sign that any had come in lately.
The plane had dropped her off on a patch of concreted ground between two depots. The concrete was scabbed and rutted. She walked across it swiftly, her booted feet scuffing the bristlelike tufts of Resurgam-tolerant grass that ripped through the concrete here and there. With some trepidation she watched the plane arc back towards Cuvier, ready to serve some other government official until she requested that it take her back home.
‘Get in, get out fast,’ she muttered under her breath.
She had been observed by workers going about their business, but this far from Cuvier the activities of the Inquisition were not the subject of intense speculation. Most people would correctly assume she was from the government, even though she wore plain clothes, but they would not immediately guess that she was on the trail of a war criminal. She could equally well be a police officer, or she might be an inspector from one of the government’s many bureaucratic arms, come to check that funds were not being misappropriated. Had she arrived with armed assistance — a servitor or a squad of guards — her appearance would definitely have attracted more comment. As it was most people did their best not to meet her eye, and she was able to make her way to the roadhouse without incident.
She wore dark, unostentatious clothes covered by a long coat of the kind people used to wear when the razorstorms were more common, with a fold-down pouch beneath the chin for a breather mask. Black gloves completed the outfit, and she carried a few personal items in a small knapsack. Her hair was a glossy black bowl-cut which she occasionally had to flick out of her eyes. It effectively concealed a radio transmitter with throat-mike and earpiece, which she would only use to retrieve the aircraft. She carried a small Ultra-manufactured boser-pistol, aided by a targeting contact lens covering one eye. But the gun was there for her sanity only. She did not anticipate using it.
The roadhouse was a two-storey structure slung across the main route to Solnhofen. Big balloon-wheeled freight transports rumbled up and down the road at irregular intervals, with ribbed cargo containers tucked beneath their elevated spines like overripe fruit. The drivers sat inside pressurised pods mounted near the fronts of the machines, each pod articulated on a double-hinged arm so that it could be lowered to ground level or raised higher for boarding from one of the roadhouse’s overhead access gates. Typically,
three or four transports trundled in robot-mode behind a crewed rig. No one trusted the machines to make the journey totally unsupervised.
The roadhouse’s faded decor had a permanent greasy ambience that made the Inquisitor anxious to keep her gloves on. She approached a huddle of drivers sitting around a table, bitching about their working conditions. Snacks and coffee lay on the table in various states of consumption. A poorly printed newspaper contained the latest artist’s impression of the terrorist Thorn, alongside a catalogue of his most recent crimes against the people. A ring-shaped coffee stain surrounded Thorn’s head, like a halo.
She stood by the drivers for what felt like several minutes until one of them deigned to look at her and nod.
‘My name is Vuilleumier,’ she said. ‘I need a lift to Solnhofen.’
‘Vuilleumier?’ said one of the drivers. ‘As in… ?’
‘Draw your own conclusions. It’s not that unusual a name on Resurgam.’
The driver coughed. ‘Solnhofen,’ he said dubiously, as if it was a place he had barely heard of.
‘Yes, Solnhofen. It’s a small settlement up that road. In fact it’s the first one you’re going to hit if you head in that direction for more than about five minutes. Who knows, you may even have passed through it once or twice.’
The Revelation Space Collection (revelation space) Page 152