Again that horrible lupine glint of a smile. ‘Very few organisms have ever travelled faster than light, Skade.’
‘I’m prepared to become one of them. What do I need to do?’
‘You know full well. The machinery you have made is almost capable of it, but it will require a few modifications. Nothing that your manufactories can’t handle. But to make the changes you will need to take advice from Exordium.’
Skade nodded. ‘That’s why I’m here. That’s why I brought Felka.’ ‘Then let us begin.’
Felka went back to her game, ignoring the two of them. Skade issued the coded sequence of neural commands that would make the Exordium machinery initiate coherence coupling.
‘It’s starting, Wolf.’
‘I know. I can feel it, too.’
Felka looked up from her game.
Skade sensed herself become plural. From out of the sea fog, from a direction she could neither describe nor point to, came a feeling of something receding into vast, chill distance, like a white corridor reaching to the bleak edge of eternity. The hairs on the back of Skade’s neck prickled. She knew that there was something profoundly wrong about what she was doing. The premonitionary sense of evil was quite tangible. But she had to stand her ground and do what had to be done.
Like the Wolf said, fears had to be faced.
Skade listened intently. She thought she heard voices whispering down the corridor.
‘Beast?’
‘Yes, Little Miss?’
‘Have you been completely honest with me?’
‘Why would one have been anything other than honest, Little Miss?’
‘That’s exactly what I’m wondering, Beast.’
Antoinette was alone on the lower flight deck of Storm Bird. Her freighter was locked in a loom of heavy repair scaffolding in one of Zodiacal Light’s shuttle bays, braced to withstand even the increased acceleration rate of the lighthugger. The freighter had been here ever since they had taken the lighthugger, the damage it had sustained painstakingly being put right under Xavier’s expert direction. Xavier had relied on hyperpigs and shipboard servitors to help him do the work, and at first the repairs had gone more slowly than they would have with a fully trained monkey workforce. But although they had some dexterity problems, the pigs were ultimately cleverer than hyperprimates, and once the initial difficulties had been overcome and the servitors programmed properly, the work had gone very well. Xavier hadn’t just repaired the hull; he had completely re-armoured it. The engines, from docking thrusters right up to the main tokamak fusion powerplant, had been overhauled and tweaked for improved performance. The deterrents, the many weapons buried in camouflaged hideaways around the ship, had been upgraded and linked into an integrated weapons command net. There was no point pussyfooting now, Xavier had said. They had no reason to pretend that Storm Bird was just a freighter any more. Where they were headed, there would be no nosey authorities to hide anything from.
But once the acceleration rate had increased and they all had to either stay still or submit to the use of awkward, bulky exoskeletons, Antoinette had made fewer visits to her ship. It was not just that the work was nearly done, and there was nothing for her to supervise; there was something else that kept her away.
She supposed that on some level she had always had her suspicions. There had been times when she felt that she was not alone on Storm Bird; that Beast’s vigilance extended to more than just the mindless watchful scrutiny of a gamma-level persona. That there had been something more to him.
But that would have meant that Xavier — and her father — had lied to her. And that was something she was not prepared to deal with.
Until now.
During a brief lull when the acceleration was throttled back for technical checks, Antoinette had boarded Storm Bird. Out of sheer curiosity, expecting the information to have been erased from the ship’s archives, she had looked for herself to see whether they had anything to say on the matter of the Mandelstam Ruling.
They had, too.
But even if they hadn’t, she thought she would have guessed.
The doubts had begun to surface properly after the whole business with Clavain had started. There had been the time when Beast jumped the gun during the banshee attack, exactly as if her ship had ‘panicked’, except that for a gamma-level intelligence that was simply not possible.
Then there had been the time when the police proxy, the one that was now counting out the rest of its life in a dank cellar in the Château, had quizzed her on her father’s relationship with Lyle Merrick. The proxy had mentioned the Mandelstam Ruling.
It had meant nothing to her at the time.
But now she knew.
Then there had been the time when Beast had inadvertently referred to itself as ‘I’, as if a scrupulously maintained façade had just, for the tiniest of moments, slipped aside. As if she had glimpsed the true face of something.
‘Little Miss… ?’
‘I know.’
‘Know what, Little Miss?’
‘What you are. Who you are.’
‘Begging your pardon, Little Miss, but…’
‘Shut the fuck up.’
‘Little Miss… if one might…’
‘I said shut the fuck up.’ Antoinette hit the panel of the flight deck console with the heel of her hand. It was the closest thing she could find to hitting Beast, and for a moment she felt a warm glow of retribution. ‘I know all about what happened. I found out about the Mandelstam Ruling.’
‘The Mandelstam Ruling, Little Miss?’
‘Don’t sound so fucking innocent. I know you know all about it. It’s the law they passed just before you died. The one about irreversible neural death sentences.’
‘Irreversible neural death, Little…’
‘The one that says that the authorities — the Ferrisville Convention — have the right to impound and erase any beta- or alpha-level copies of someone sentenced to permanent death. It says that no matter how many backups of yourself you make, no matter whether they’re simulacra or genuine neural scans, the authorities get to round them up and wipe them out.’
‘That sounds rather extreme, Little Miss.’
‘It does, doesn’t it? And they take it seriously, too. Anyone caught harbouring a copy of a sentenced felon is in just as much trouble themselves. Of course, there are loopholes — a simulation can be hidden almost anywhere, or beamed to somewhere beyond Ferrisville jurisdiction. But there are still risks. I checked, Beast. The authorities have caught people who sheltered copies, against the Mandelstam Ruling. They all got the death sentence, too.’
‘It would seem a rather cavalier thing to do.’
She smiled. ‘Wouldn’t it just? But what if you didn’t even know you were sheltering one? How would that change the equation?’
‘One hesitates to speculate.’
‘I doubt it would change the equation one fucking inch. Not where the cops are concerned. Which would make it all the more irresponsible, don’t you think, for someone to trick someone else into harbouring an illegal simulation?’
‘Trick, Little Miss?’
She nodded. She was there now. No more pussyfooting here either. ‘The police proxy knew, didn’t it? Just couldn’t get the evidence together, I guess — or maybe it was just letting me stew, waiting to see how much I knew.’
The mask slipped again. ‘I’m not entire—’
‘I guess Xavier had to be in on it. He knows this ship like the back of his hand, every subsystem, every goddamned wire. He certainly would have known how to hide Lyle Merrick aboard it.’
‘Lyle Merrick, Little Miss?’
‘You know. You remember. Not the Lyle Merrick, of course, just a copy of him. Beta- or alpha-level, I don’t know. Don’t very much care either. Wouldn’t have made a fuck of a lot of difference in a court of law, would it?’
‘Now…’
‘It’s you, Beast. You’re him. Lyle Merrick died when the authorities executed him fo
r the collision. But that wasn’t the end, was it? You kept on going. Xavier hid a copy of Lyle aboard my father’s fucking ship. You’re it.’
Beast said nothing for several seconds. Antoinette watched the slow, hypnotic play of colours and numerics on the console. She felt as if a part of her had been violated, as if everything in the universe she had ever felt she could trust had just been wadded up and thrown away.
When Beast answered, the tone of his voice was mockingly unchanged. ‘Little Miss… I mean Antoinette… You’re wrong.’
‘Of course I’m not wrong. You’ve as good as admitted it.’
‘No. You don’t understand.’
‘What part don’t I understand?’
‘It wasn’t Xavier who did this to me. Xavier helped — Xavier knew all about it — but it wasn’t his idea.’
‘No?’
‘It was your father, Antoinette. He helped me.’
She hit the console again, harder this time. And then walked out of her ship, intending never to set foot in it again.
Lasher the pig slept for most of the trip out from Zodiacal Light. There was nothing for him to do, Scorpio had said, except at the very end of the operation, and even then there was only a one-in-four chance that he would be required to do anything other than turn his ship around. But at the back of his mind he had always known it would be him who had to do the dirty work. He registered no surprise at all when the tight-beam message from Zodiacal Light told him that his shuttle was the one in the right quadrant of the sky to intercept the vessel Skade had dropped behind her larger ship.
‘Lucky old Lasher,’ he said to himself. ‘You always wanted the glory. Now’s your big chance.’
He did not take the duty lightly, nor underestimate the risks to himself. The recovery operation was fraught with danger. The amount of fuel his shuttle carried was precisely rationed, just enough so that he could get back home again with a human-mass payload. But there was no room for error. Clavain had made it clear that there were to be no pointless heroics. If the trajectory of Skade’s shuttle took it even a kilometre outside the safe volume in which a rendezvous was possible, Lasher — or whoever the lucky one was — was to turn back, ignoring it. The only concession to be made was that each of Clavain’s shuttles carried a single modified missile, the warhead stripped out and replaced with a transponder. If they got within range of Skade’s shuttle they could attach the beacon to its hull. The beacon would keep emitting its signal for a century of subjective time, five hundred years of worldtime. It would not be easy, but there would remain a faint chance of homing in on it again, before it fell beyond the well-mapped sphere of human space. It was enough to know that they would not have abandoned Felka entirely.
Lasher saw it now. His shuttle had homed in on Skade’s, following updated coordinates from Zodiacal Light. Skade’s shuttle was now in free-fall, having burned its last microgram of antimatter. It was visible in his forward window: a gunmetal barb illuminated by his forward floods.
He opened the channel back to the lighthugger. ‘This is Lasher. I see it now. It’s definitely a shuttle. Can’t tell you what type, but it doesn’t look like one of ours.’
He slowed his approach. It would have been nice to wait for Scorpio’s response, but that was a luxury he did not have. There was already a twenty-minute timelag back to Zodiacal Light, and the distance was stretching continually as the larger ship maintained its ten-gee acceleration. He was permitted exactly thirty minutes here, and then he had to begin his return journey. If he stayed a minute longer he would never catch up with the lighthugger.
It would be just enough time to establish airlock connections between two unfamiliar ships, just enough time for him to get aboard and find Clavain’s daughter, or whoever she was.
He didn’t care who he was rescuing, only that Scorpio had told him to do it. So what if Scorpio was only doing what Clavain had told him to do? It didn’t matter, did not reduce in any way the burning soldierly admiration Lasher felt for his leader. He had followed Scorpio’s career almost from the moment Scorpio had arrived in Chasm City.
It was impossible to underestimate the effect of Scorpio’s coming. Before, the pigs had been a squabbling rabble, content to snuffle around in the shittiest layers of the fallen city. Scorpio had galvanised them. He had become a criminal messiah, a figure so mythic that many pigs doubted that he even existed. Lasher had collected Scorpio’s crimes, committing them to memory with the avidity of a religious acolyte. He had studied them, marvelling at their brutal ingenuity, their haiku-like simplicity. How must it feel, he had wondered, to have been the author of such jewel-like atrocities? Later, he had moved into Scorpio’s realm of influence, and then ascended through the shadowy hierarchies of the criminal underworld. He remembered his first meeting with Scorpio, the sense of mild disappointment when he turned out to be just another pig like himself. Gradually, however, that realisation had only sharpened his admiration. Scorpio was flesh and blood, and that made his achievements all the more remarkable. Lasher, nervously at first, became one of Scorpio’s main operatives, and then one of his deputies.
And then Scorpio had vanished. It was said that he had gone into space, off to engage in sensitive negotiations with some other criminal group elsewhere in the system — the Skyjacks, perhaps.
It was unsafe for Scorpio to move at any time, but most especially during war. Lasher had forced himself to deal with the likely but unpalatable truth: Scorpio was probably dead.
Months had passed. Then Lasher had heard the news: Scorpio was in custody, or a kind of custody. The spiders had captured him, it turned out, maybe after the zombies had already picked him up. And now the spiders were being pressured into turning Scorpio over to the Ferrisville Convention.
That was it, then. Scorpio’s bright, inglorious reign had come to an end. The Convention could make any charge stick, and in wartime there was almost no crime that didn’t carry the death penalty. They had Scorpio, the prize they had sought for so long. There would be a show trial and then an execution, and Scorpio’s passage into legend would be complete.
But it hadn’t happened that way. There had been the usual contradictory rumours, but some of them had spoken of the same thing — that Scorpio was alive and well, and no longer in anyone’s custody; that Scorpio had made it back to Chasm City and was now holed up in the darkly threatening structure some of the pigs knew as the Château des Corbeaux, the one they said had the haunted cellar. And that he was the guest of the Château’s mysterious tenant, and was now putting together the fabled thing that had often been spoken of but which had never quite come into existence before.
The army of pigs.
Lasher had rejoined his old master and learned that the rumours were true. Scorpio was working for, or in some strange collaboration with, the old man they called Clavain. And the two of them were plotting the theft of a ship belonging to the Ultras, something that the orthodox criminal rulebook said could not even be contemplated, let alone attempted. Lasher had been intrigued and terrified, even more so when he learned that the theft was just the prelude to something even more audacious.
How could he resist?
And so here, light-years from Chasm City, light-years from anything he could call familiar, he was. He had served Scorpio and served him well, not just treading in his footsteps but anticipating them; even, sometimes, dancing ahead of his master, earning Scorpio’s quiet praise.
He was near the shuttle now. It had the smooth worn-pebble look of Conjoiner machinery. It was completely dark. He tracked the floods across it, searching for the point where Clavain had told him he would find an airlock: an almost invisibly fine seam in the hull that would only reveal itself when he was close by. Distance to the hull was now fifteen metres, with a closing speed of one metre per second. The shuttle was small enough that he would have no difficulty finding the hostage aboard it, provided Skade had kept her word.
It happened when he was ten metres from the hull. It grew from the heart of
the Conjoiner spacecraft: a mote of light, like the first spark of the rising sun.
Lasher did not have time to blink.
Skade saw the fairy-light glint of the crustbuster proximity device. It was not difficult to recognise. There were no stars aft of Nightshade now, only an inky spreading pool of total blackness. Relativity was squeezing the visible universe into a belt that encircled the ship. But Clavain’s ship was in nearly the same velocity frame as Nightshade, so it still appeared to lie directly behind her. The pinprick flare of the weapon studded that darkness like a single misplaced star.
Skade examined the light, corrected it for modest differential red shift and determined that the multiple-teratonne blast yield was consistent only with the device itself detonating, plus a small residual mass of antimatter. A shuttle-sized spacecraft had been destroyed by her weapon, but not a starship. The explosion of a lighthugger, a machine which had already sunk claws deep into the infinite energy well of the quantum vacuum, would have outshone the crustbuster by three orders of magnitude.
So Clavain had been cleverer than her again. No, she corrected herself: not cleverer, but precisely as clever. Skade had made no mistakes yet, and though Clavain had parried all her attacks, he had yet to strike at her. The advantage was still hers, and she was certain that she had inconvenienced him with at least one of her attacks. At the very least she had forced him to burn fuel he would sooner have conserved. More probably she had made him divert his efforts into countering her attacks rather than preparing for the battle that lay ahead around Resurgam. In every military sense she had lost nothing except the ability ever to bluff convincingly again.
But she had never been counting on that anyway.
It was time to do what had to be done.
‘You lying fuck.’
Xavier looked up as Antoinette stormed into their quarters. He was lying on his back on the bunk, a compad balanced between his knees. Antoinette had a momentary glimpse of lines of source code scrolling down the ’pad, the symbols and sinuous indentations of the programming language resembling the intricately formalised stanzas of some alien poetry. Xavier had a stylus gripped between his teeth. It dropped from his mouth as he opened it in shock. The compad tumbled to the floor.
The Revelation Space Collection (revelation space) Page 202