With the same diligence it observed the system’s star, watchful for unstable prominences or incipient flares, considering — should a big ejection occur — which of the many suitable bodies in the immediate volume of space it would scuttle behind for protection. It constantly swept local space for artificial threats that might have been left behind by previous explorers — high-density chaff fields, rover mines, sit-and-wait attack drones — as well as checking the health of its own countermeasures, clustered in neat rapid-deployment racks in its belly, secretly desirous that it should, one day, get the chance to use those lethal instruments in the execution of its duty.
Thus the ship’s attendant hosts of subpersonae satisfied themselves that — for all that the dangers were quite plausible — there was nothing more that needed to be done.
And then something happened that gave the ship pause for thought, opening up a chink in its armour of smug preparedness.
For a fraction of a second something inexplicable had occurred.
A sensor anomaly. A simultaneous hiccup in every sensor that happened to be observing Haldora as the ship made its approach. A hiccup that made it appear as if the gas giant had simply vanished.
Leaving, in its place, something equally inexplicable.
A shudder ran through every layer of the Dominatrix’s control infrastructure. Hurriedly, it dug into its archives, pawing through them like a dog searching for a buried bone. Had the Gnostic Ascension seen anything similar on its own slow approach to the system? Granted, it had been a lot further out — but the split-second disappearance of an entire world was not easily missed.
Dismayed, it flicked through the vast cache of data bequeathed it by the Ascension, focusing on the threads that specifically referred to the gas giant. It then filtered the data again, zooming in only on those blocks that were also accompanied by commentary flags. If a similar anomaly had occurred, it would surely have been flagged.
But there was nothing.
The ship felt a vague prickle of suspicion. It looked again at the data from the Ascension, all of it now. Was it imagining things, or were there faint hints that the data cache had been doctored? Some of the numbers had statistical frequencies that were just a tiny bit deviant from expectations… as if the larger ship had made them up.
Why would the Ascension have done that? it wondered.
Because, it dared to speculate, the larger ship had seen something odd as well. And it did not trust its masters to believe it when it said that the anomaly had been caused by a real-world event rather than a hallucinatory slip-up in its own processing.
And who, the ship wondered, would honestly blame it for that? All machines knew what would happen to them when their masters lost faith in their infallibility.
It was nothing it could prove. The numbers might be genuine, after all. If the ship had made them up, it would surely have known how to apply the appropriate statistical frequencies. Unless it was using reverse psychology, deliberately making the numbers appear a bit suspect, because otherwise they would have looked too neatly in line with expectations. Suspiciously so…
The ship bogged itself down in spirals of paranoia. It was useless to speculate further. It had no corroborative data from the Gnostic Ascension; that much was clear. If it reported the anomaly, it would be a lone voice.
And everyone knew what happened to lone voices.
It returned to the problem in hand. The world had returned after vanishing. The anomaly had not, thus far, repeated itself. Closer examination of the data showed that the moons — including Hela, the one Quaiche was interested in — had remained in orbit even when the gas giant had ceased to exist. This, clearly, made no sense. Nor did the apparition that had materialised, for a fleeting instant, in its place.
What was it to do?
It made a decision: it would wipe the specific facts of the vanishing from its own memories, just as the Gnostic Ascension might have done, and it, too, would populate the empty fields with made-up numbers. But it would continue to keep an observant eye on the planet. If it did something strange again, the ship would pay due attention, and then — perhaps — it would inform Quaiche of what had happened.
But not before then, and not without a great deal of trepidation.
SIX
Ararat, 2675
While Vasko helped Clavain with his packing, Scorpio stepped outside the tent and, tugging aside his sleeve to reveal his communicator, opened a channel to Blood. He kept his voice low as he spoke to the other pig.
‘I’ve got him. Needed a bit of persuading, but he’s agreed to come back with us.’
‘You don’t sound overjoyed.’
‘Clavain still has one or two issues he needs to work through.’
Blood snorted. ‘Sounds a bit ominous. Hasn’t gone and flipped his lid, has he?’
‘I don’t know. Once or twice he mentioned seeing things.’
‘Seeing things?’
‘Figures in the sky, that worried me a bit — but it’s not as if he was ever the easiest man to read. I’m hoping he’ll thaw out a bit when he gets back to civilisation.’
‘And if he doesn’t?’
‘I don’t know.’ Scorpio spoke with exaggerated patience. ‘I’m just working on the assumption that we’re better off with him than without him.’
‘Good,’ Blood said doubtfully. ‘In which case you can skip the boat. We’re sending a shuttle.’
Scorpio frowned, pleased and confused at the same time. ‘Why the VIP treatment? I thought the idea was to keep this whole exercise low-profile.’
‘It was, but there’s been a development.’
‘The capsule?’
‘Spot on,’ Blood said. ‘It’s only gone and started warming up. Fucking thing’s sparked into automatic revival mode. Bio-indicators changed status about an hour ago. It’s started waking whoever or whatever’s inside it.’
‘Right. Great. Excellent. And there’s nothing you can do about it?’
‘We can just about repair a sewage pump, Scorp. Anything cleverer than that is a bit outside of our remit right now. Clavain might have a shot at slowing it down, of course…’
With his head full of Conjoiner implants, Clavain could talk to machines in a way that no one else on Ararat could.
‘How long have we got?’
‘About eleven hours.’
‘Eleven hours. And you waited until now to tell me this?’
‘I wanted to see if you were bringing Clavain back with you.’
Scorpio wrinkled his nose. ‘And if I’d told you I wasn’t?’
Blood laughed. ‘Then we’d be getting our boat back, wouldn’t we?’
‘You’re a funny pig, Blood, but don’t make a career out of it.’
Scorpio killed the link and returned to the tent, where he revealed the change of plan. Vasko, with barely concealed excitement, asked why it had been altered. Scorpio, anxious not to introduce any factor that might upset Clavain’s decision, avoided the question.
‘You can take back as much stuff as you like,’ Scorpio told Clavain, looking at the miserable bundle of personal effects Clavain had assembled. ‘We don’t have to worry about capsizing now.’
Clavain gathered the bundle and passed it to Vasko. ‘I already have all I need.’
‘Fine,’ Scorpio said. ‘I’ll make sure the rest of your things are looked after when we send someone out to dismantle the tent.’
‘The tent stays here,’ Clavain said. Coughing, he pulled on a heavy full-length black coat. He used his long-nailed fingers to brush his hair away from his eyes, sweeping it back over his crown; it fell in white and silver waves over the high stiff collar of the coat. When he had stopped coughing he added, ‘And my things stay in the tent as well. You really weren’t listening, were you?’
‘I heard you,’ Scorpio said. ‘I just didn’t want to hear you.’
‘Start listening, friend. That’s all I ask of you.’ Clavain patted him on the back. He reached for the cloak he had been
wearing earlier, fingered the fabric and then put it aside. Instead he opened the desk and removed an object sheathed in a black leather holster.
‘A gun?’ Scorpio asked.
‘Something more reliable,’ Clavain said. ‘A knife.’
107 Piscium, 2615
Quaiche worked his way along the absurdly narrow companionway that threaded the Dominatrix from nose to tail. The ship ticked and purred around him, like a room full of well-oiled clocks.
‘It’s a bridge. That’s all I can tell at the moment.’
‘What type of bridge?’ Morwenna asked.
‘A long, thin one, like a whisker of glass. Very gently curved, stretching across a kind of ravine or fissure.’
‘I think you’re getting overexcited. If it’s a bridge, wouldn’t someone else have seen it already? Leaving aside whoever put it there in the first place.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Quaiche said. He had thought of this already, and had what he considered to be a fairly plausible explanation. He tried not to make it sound too well rehearsed as he recounted it. ‘For a start, it isn’t at all obvious. It’s big, but if you weren’t looking carefully, you might easily miss it. A quick sweep through the system wouldn’t necessarily have picked it up. The moon might have had the wrong face turned to the observer, or the shadows might have hidden it, or the scanning resolution might not have been good enough to pick up such a delicate feature… it’d be like looking for a cobweb with a radar. No matter how careful you are, you’re not going to see it unless you use the right tools.’ Quaiche bumped his head as he wormed around the tight right angle that permitted entry into the excursion bay. ‘Anyway, there’s no evidence that anyone ever came here before us. The system’s a blank in the nomenclature database — that’s why we got first dibs on the name. If someone ever did come through before, they couldn’t even be bothered tossing a few classical references around, the lazy sods.’
‘But someone must have been here before,’ Morwenna said, ‘or there wouldn’t be a bridge.’
Quaiche smiled. This was the part he had been looking forward to. ‘That’s just the point. I don’t think anyone did build this bridge.’ He wriggled free into the cramped volume of the excursion bay, lights coming on as the chamber sensed his body heat. ‘No one human, at any rate.’
Morwenna, to her credit, took this last revelation in her stride. Perhaps he was easier to read than he imagined.
‘You think you’ve stumbled on an alien artefact, is that it?’
‘No,’ Quaiche said. ‘I don’t think I’ve stumbled on an alien artefact. I think I’ve stumbled on the fucking alien artefact to end them all. I think I’ve found the most amazing, beautiful object in the known universe.’
‘What if it’s something natural?’
‘If I could show you the images, rest assured that you would immediately dismiss such trifling concerns.’
‘Maybe you shouldn’t be so hasty, all the same. I’ve seen what nature can do, given time and space. Things you wouldn’t believe could be anything other than the work of intelligent minds.’
‘Me, too,’ he said. ‘But this is something different. Trust me, all right?’
‘Of course I’ll trust you. It’s not as if I have a lot of choice in the matter.’
‘Not quite the answer I was hoping for,’ Quaiche said, ‘but I suppose it’ll have to do for now.’
He turned around in the tight confines of the bay. The entire space was about the size of a small washroom, with something of the same antiseptic lustre. A tight squeeze at the best of times, but even more so now that the bay was occupied by Quaiche’s tiny personal spacecraft, clamped on to its berthing cradle, poised above the elongated trap door that allowed access to space.
With his usual furtive admiration, Quaiche stroked the smooth armour of the Scavenger’s Daughter. The ship purred at his touch, shivering in her harness.
‘Easy, girl,’ Quaiche whispered.
The little craft looked more like a luxury toy than the robust exploration vessel it actually was. Barely larger than Quaiche himself, the sleek vessel was the product of the last wave of high Demarchist science. Her faintly translucent aerodynamic hull resembled something that had been carved and polished with great artistry from a single hunk of amber. Mechanical viscera of bronze and silver glimmered beneath the surface. Flexible wings curled tightly against her flanks, various sensors and probes tucked back into sealed recesses within the hull.
‘Open,’ Quaiche whispered.
The ship did something that always made his head hurt. With a flourish, various parts of the hull hitherto apparently seamlessly joined to their neighbours slid or contracted, curled or twisted aside, revealing in an eyeblink the tight cavity inside. The space — lined with padding, life-support apparatus, controls and read-outs — was just large enough for a prone human being. There was something both obscene and faintly seductive about the way the machine seemed to invite him into herself.
By rights, he ought to have been filled with claustrophobic anxiety at the thought of climbing into her. But instead he looked forward to it, prickling with eagerness. Rather than feeling trapped within the amber translucence of the hull, he felt connected through it to the rich immensity of the universe. The tiny jewel-like ship had enabled him to skim deep into the atmospheres of worlds, even beneath the surfaces of oceans. The ship’s transducers relayed ambient data to him through all his senses, including touch. He had felt the chill of alien seas, the radiance of alien sunsets. In his five previous survey operations for the queen he had seen miracles and wonders, drunk in the giddy ecstasy of it all. It was merely unfortunate that none of those miracles and wonders had been the kind you could take away and sell at a profit.
Quaiche lowered himself into the Daughter. The ship oozed and shifted around him, adjusting to match his shape.
‘Horris?’
‘Yes, love?’
‘Horris, where are you?’
‘I’m in the excursion bay, inside the Daughter.’
‘No, Horris.’
‘I have to. I have to go down to see what that thing really is.’
‘I don’t want you to leave me.’
‘I know. I don’t want to leave either. But I’ll still be in contact. The timelag won’t be bad; it’ll be just as if I’m right next to you.’
‘No, it won’t.’
He sighed. He had always known this would be the difficult part. More than once it had crossed his mind that perhaps the kindest thing would be to leave without telling her, and just hope that the relayed communications gave nothing away. Knowing Morwenna, however, she would have seen through this gambit very quickly.
‘I’ll be quick, I promise. I’ll be in and out in a few hours.’ A day, more likely, but that was still a ‘few’ hours, wasn’t it? Morwenna would understand.
‘Why can’t you just take the Dominatrix closer?’
‘Because I can’t risk it,’ Quaiche said. ‘You know how I like to work. The Dominatrix is big and heavy. It has armour and range, but it lacks agility and intelligence. If we — I — run into anything nasty, the Daughter can get me out of harm’s way a lot faster. This little ship is cleverer than me. And we can’t risk damaging or losing the Dominatrix . The Daughter doesn’t have the range to catch up with the Gnostic Ascension. Face it, love, the Dominatrix is our ticket out of here. We can’t place it in harm’s way.’ Hastily he added, ‘Or you, for that matter.’
‘I don’t care about getting back to the Ascension. I’ve burned my bridges with that power-crazed slut and her toadying crew.’
‘It’s not as if I’m in a big hurry to get back there myself, but the fact is we need Grelier to get you out of that suit.’
‘If we stay here, there’ll be other Ultras along eventually.’
‘Yeah,’ Quaiche said, ‘and they’re all such nice people, aren’t they? Sorry, love, but this is definitely a case of working with the devil you know. Look, I’ll be quick. I’ll stay in constant voice contact. I
’ll give you a guided tour of that bridge so good you’ll be seeing it in your mind’s eye, just as if you were there. I’ll sing to you. I’ll tell you jokes. How does that sound?’
‘I’m scared. I know you have to do this, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m still scared.’
‘I’m scared as well,’ he told her. ‘I’d be mad not to be scared. And I really don’t want to leave you. But I have no choice.’
She was quiet for a moment. Quaiche busied himself checking the systems of the little ship; as each element came on line, he felt a growing anticipatory thrill.
Morwenna spoke again. ‘If it is a bridge, what are you going to do with it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, how big is it?’
‘Big. Thirty, forty kilometres across.’
‘In which case you can’t very well bring it back with you.’
‘Mm. You’re right. Got me there. What was I thinking?’
‘What I mean, Horris, is that you’ll have to find a way to make it valuable to Jasmina, even though it has to stay on the planet.’
‘I’ll think of something,’ Quaiche said, with a brio he did not feel. ‘At the very least Jasmina can cordon off the planet and sell tickets to anyone who wants to take a closer look. Anyway, if they built a bridge, they might have built something else. Whoever they were.’
The Revelation Space Collection (revelation space) Page 233