‘Then look on the bright side. Those fluids have to come from somewhere. We’ll be taking the load off some other pumps, more than likely.’
‘Yes, sir,’ the pig said, more resigned than convinced. He gave the order to his team, telling them to sacrifice those levels. He had to repeat the instruction several times before the message got through that he was serious and that he had Scorpio’s authorisation.
Scorpio understood his reservations. Bilge management was a serious business aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity, and the turning off of pumps was not something that was ever done lightly. Once a deck had been flooded with the Captain’s chemical humours and exudations, it could be very difficult to reclaim it for human use. But what mattered more now was the calibration of the weapon. Turning off the pump made more sense than turning off the listening devices in that area. If losing three or four decks meant having a realistic hope of defeating the pursuing wolves, it was a small price to pay.
The lights dimmed; even the constant background churn of bilge pumps became muted. The weapon was being discharged.
As the weapon rotated up to speed, it became a silent columnar blur of moving parts, a glittering whirlwind. In vacuum, it moved with frightening speed. Calculations had shown that it would only take the failure of one tiny part of the hypometric weapon to rip the Nostalgia for Infinity to pieces. Scorpio remembered the Conjoiners putting the thing together, taking such care, and now he understood why.
They followed the calibration instructions to the letter. Because their effects depended critically on atomic-scale tolerances, Remontoire had said, no two versions of the weapon could ever be exactly alike. Like handmade rifles, each would have its own distinct pull, an unavoidable effect of manufacture that had to be gauged and then compensated for. With a hypometric weapon it was not just a case of aiming-off to compensate — it was more a case of finding an arbitrary relationship between cause and effect within a locus of expectations. Once this pattern was determined, the weapon could in theory produce its effect almost anywhere, like a rifle able to fire in any direction.
Scorpio had already seen the weapon in action. He didn’t have to understand how it worked, only what it did. He had heard the sonic booms as spherical volumes of Ararat’s atmosphere were deleted from existence (or, conceivably, shifted or redistributed somewhere else). He had seen a hemispherical chunk of water removed from the sea, the memory of those inrushing walls of water — even now — making him shiver at the sheer wrongness of what he had witnessed.
The technology, Remontoire had told him, was spectacularly dangerous and unpredictable. Even when it was properly constructed and calibrated, a hypometric weapon could still turn against its maker. It was a little like grasping a cobra by the tail and using it to lash out against enemies while hoping that the snake didn’t coil around and bite the hand that held it.
The trouble was, they needed that snake.
Thankfully, not all aspects of the h-weapon’s function were totally unpredictable. The range was limited to within light-hours of the weapon itself, and there was a tolerably well-defined relationship between weapon spin-rate (as measured by some parameter Scorpio didn’t even want to think about) and radial reach in a given direction. What was more difficult to predict was the direction in which the extinction bubble would be launched, and the resulting physical size of the bubble’s effect.
The testing procedure required the detection of an effect caused by the weapon’s discharge. On a planet, this would have presented no real difficulties: the weapon’s builders would simply tune the spin-rate to allow the effect to show itself at a safe distance, and then make some guess as to the size of the effect and the direction in which it would occur. After the weapon had been fired, they would examine the predicted zone of effect for any indication that a spherical bubble of space-time — including all the matter within it — had simply winked out of existence.
But in space it was much more difficult to calibrate a hypometric weapon. No sensors in existence could detect the disappearance of a few atoms of interstellar gas from a few cubic metres of vacuum. The only practical solution, therefore, was to try to calibrate the weapon within the ship itself. Of course, this was scarily dangerous: had the bubble appeared within the core of one of the Conjoiner drives, the ship would have been destroyed instantly. But the mid-flight calibration procedure had been done before, Remontoire had said, and none of his ships had been destroyed in the process.
The one thing they didn’t do was immediately select a target within the ship. They were aiming for an effect on the skin of the vessel, safely distant from any critical systems. The procedure, therefore, was to set the weapon’s initial coordinates to generate a small, unobserved extinction bubble beyond the hull. The weapon would then be fired repeatedly, with the spin-rate adjusted by a tiny amount each time, decreasing the radial distance and therefore drawing the bubble closer and closer to the hull. They couldn’t see it out there; they could only imagine it approaching, and could never be sure whether it was about to nibble the ship’s hull or was still hundreds of metres distant. It was like summoning a malevolent spirit to a seance: the moment of arrival was a thing of both dread and anticipation.
The test area around the weapon had been sealed off right out to the skin of the ship, save for automated control systems. Everyone not already frozen had been moved as far away from the weapon as possible. After each firing — each squirming, rebounding collapse of the threshing mechanisms — Scorpio’s technicians pored over their data to see if the weapon had generated an effect, scanning the network of microphones and barometers to see if there was any hint that a spherical chunk of the ship a metre in diameter had just ceased to exist. And so the calibration process continued, the technicians tuning the weapon time and again and listening for results.
The lights dimmed again.
‘Getting something,’ the technician said, after a moment. Scorpio saw a cluster of red indicators appear on his read-out. ‘Signals coming in from…’
But the technician did not complete his sentence. His words were drowned out by a rising howl, a noise unlike anything Scorpio had ever heard aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity. It was not the shriek of air escaping through a nearby breach, nor the groan of structural failure. It was much closer to a low, agonised vocalisation, to the sound of something huge and bestial being hurt.
The moan began to subside, like the dying after-rumble of a thunder-clap.
‘I think you have your effect,’ Scorpio said.
He went down to see it for himself. It was much worse than he had feared: not a one-metre-wide nibble taken out of the ship, but a gaping fifteen-metre-wide wound, the edges where bulkheads and floors had been sheared gleaming a bright, untarnished silver. Greenish fluids were raining down through the cavity from severed feed-lines; an electrical cable was thrashing back and forth in the void, gushing sparks each time it contacted a metallic surface.
It could have been worse, he told himself. The volume of the ship nipped out of existence by the weapon had not coincided with any of the inhabited parts, nor had it intersected critical ship systems or the outer hull. There had been a slight local pressure loss as the air inside the volume ceased to exist, but, all told, the weapon had had a negligible effect on the ship. But it had unquestionably had an effect on the Captain. Some part of his vaguely mapped nervous system must have passed through this volume, and the weapon had evidently caused him pain. It was difficult to judge how severe that pain must have been, whether it had been transitory or was even now continuing. Perhaps there was no exact analogue for it in human terms. If there was, Scorpio was not certain that he really wished to know, because for the first time a disturbing thought had occurred to him: if this was the pain the Captain felt when a tiny part of the ship was harmed, what would it be like if something much worse happened?
Yes, it could have been worse.
He visited the technicians who were calibrating the weapon, taking in their nervous expressio
ns and gestures. They were expecting a reprimand, at the very least.
‘Looks like it was a bit larger than one metre,’ he said.
‘It was always going to be uncertain,’ their leader flustered. ‘All we could do was take a lucky guess and hope—’
Scorpio cut her off. ‘I know. No one ever said this was going to be easy. But knowing what you know now, can you adjust the volume down to something more practical?’
The technician looked relieved and doubtful at the same time, as if she could not really believe that Scorpio had no intention of punishing her.
‘I think so… given the effect we’ve just observed… of course, there’s still no guarantee…’
‘I’m not expecting one. I’m just expecting the best you can do.’
She nodded quickly. ‘Of course. And the testing?’
‘Keep it up. We’re still going to need that weapon, no matter how much of a bastard it is to use.’
THIRTY-FIVE
Hela, 2727
The dean had called Rashmika to his garret. When she arrived, she was relieved to find him alone in the room, with no sign of the surgeon-general. She had no great affection for the dean’s company, but even less for the skulking attentions of his personal physician. She imagined him lurking somewhere else in the Lady Morwenna, busy with his Bloodwork or one of the unspeakable practices he was rumoured to favour.
‘Settling in nicely?’ the dean asked her as she took her appointed seat in the middle of the forest of mirrors. ‘I do hope so. I’ve been very impressed with your acumen, Miss Els. It was an inspired suggestion of Grelier’s to have you brought here.’
‘I’m glad to have been of service,’ Rashmika said. She prepared herself a small measure of tea, her hands shaking as she held the china. She had no appetite — the mere thought of being in the same room as the iron suit was enough to unsettle her nerves — but it was necessary to maintain the illusion of calm.
‘Yes, a bold stroke of luck,’ Quaiche said. He was nearly immobile, only his lips moving. The air in the garret was colder than usual, and with each word she saw a jet of exhalation issue from his mouth. ‘Almost too lucky, one might say.’
‘I beg your pardon, Dean?’
‘Look at the table,’ he said. ‘The malachite box next to the tea service.’
Rashmika had not noticed the box until then, but she was certain it had not been there during any of her earlier visits to the garret. It sat on little feet, like the paws of a dog. She picked it up, finding it lighter than she had expected, and fiddled with the gold-coloured metal clasps until the lid popped open. Inside was a great quantity of paper: sheets and envelopes of all colours and bonds, neatly gathered together with an elastic band.
‘Open them,’ the dean said. ‘Have a gander.’
She took out the bundle, slipped the elastic band free. The paperwork spilled on to the table. At random, she selected a sheet and unfolded it. The lilac paper was so thin, so translucent that only one side had been written on. The neatly inked letters, seen in reverse, were already familiar to her before she turned it over. The dark-scarlet script was hers: childish but immediately recognisable.
‘This is my correspondence,’ she said. ‘My letters to the church-sponsored archaeological study group.’
‘Does it surprise you to see them gathered here?’
‘It surprises me that they were collected and brought to your attention,’ Rashmika said, ‘but I’m not surprised that it could have happened. They were addressed to a body within the ministry of the Adventist church, after all.’
‘Are you angered?’
‘That would depend.’ She was, but it was only one emotion amongst several. ‘Were the letters ever seen by anyone in the study group?’
‘The first few,’ Quaiche replied, ‘but almost all the others were intercepted before they reached any of the researchers. Don’t take it personally: it’s just that they receive enough crank literature as it is; if they had to answer it all they’d never get anything else done.’
‘I’m not a crank,’ Rashmika said.
‘No, but — judging by the content of these letters — you are coming from a slightly unorthodox position on the matter of the scuttlers, wouldn’t you agree?’
‘If you consider the truth to be an unorthodox position,’ Rashmika countered.
‘You aren’t the only one. The study teams receive a lot of letters from well-meaning amateurs. The majority are really quite worthless. Everyone has their own cherished little theory on the scuttlers. Unfortunately, none of them has the slightest grasp of scientific method.’
‘That’s more or less what I’d have said about the study teams,’ Rashmika said.
He laughed at her temerity. ‘Not greatly troubled by self-doubt, are you, Miss Els?’
She gathered the papers into an untidy bundle, stuffed them back in the box. ‘I’ve broken no rules with this,’ she said. ‘I didn’t tell you about my correspondence because I wasn’t asked to tell you about it.’
‘I never said you had broken any rules. It just intrigued me, that’s all. I’ve read the letters, seen your arguments mature with time. Frankly, I think some of the points you raise are worthy of further consideration.’
‘I’m very pleased to hear it,’ Rashmika said.
‘Don’t sound so snide. I’m sincere.’
‘You don’t care, Dean. No one in the church cares. Why should they? The doctrine disallows any other explanation except the one we read about in the brochures.’
He asked, playfully, ‘Which is?’
‘That the scuttlers are an incidental detail, their extinction unrelated to the vanishings. If they serve any theological function it’s only as a reminder against hubris, and to emphasise the urgent need for salvation.’
‘An extinct alien culture isn’t much of a mystery these days, is it?’
‘Something different happened here,’ Rashmika said. ‘What happened to the scuttlers wasn’t what happened to the Amarantin or any of the other dead cultures.’
‘That’s the gist of your objection, is it?’
‘I think it might help if we knew what happened,’ she said. She tapped her fingernails against the lid of the box. ‘They were wiped out, but it doesn’t bear the hallmarks of the Inhibitors. Whoever did this left too much behind.’
‘Perhaps the Inhibitors were in a hurry. Perhaps it was enough that they’d wiped out the scuttlers, without worrying about their cultural artefacts.’
‘That’s not how they work. I know what they did to the Amarantin. Nothing survived on Resurgam unless it was under metres of bedrock, deliberately entombed. I know what it was like, Dean: I was there.’
The light flared off his eye-opener as he turned towards her. ‘You were there?’
‘I meant,’ she said hastily, ‘that I’ve read so much about it, spent so much time thinking about it, it’s as if I was there.’ She shivered: it was easy to gloss over the statement in retrospect, but when she had said it she had felt a burning conviction that it was completely true.
‘The problem is,’ Quaiche said, ‘that if you remove the Inhibitors as possible agents in the destruction of Hela, you have to invoke another agency. From a philosophical standpoint, that’s not the way we like to do things.’
‘It may not be elegant,’ she said, ‘but if the truth demands another agency — or indeed a third — we should have the courage to accept the evidence.’
‘And you have some idea of what this other agency might have been, I take it?’
She could not help but glance towards the welded-up space suit. It was an involuntary shift in her attention, unlikely to have been noticed by the dean, but it still annoyed her. If only she could control her own reactions as well as she read those of others.
‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘But I do have some suspicions.’
The dean’s couch shifted, sending a wave of accommodating movement through the mirrors. ‘The first time Grelier told me about you — when it seemed l
ikely that you might prove of use to me — he said that you were on something of a personal crusade.’
‘Did he?’
‘In Grelier’s view, it had something to do with your brother. Is that true?’
‘My brother came to the cathedrals,’ she said.
‘And you feared for him, anxious because you had heard nothing from him for a while, and decided to come after him. That’s the story, isn’t it?’
There was something about the way he said ‘story’ that she did not care for. ‘Why shouldn’t it be?’
‘Because I wonder how much you really care about your brother. Was he really the reason you came all this way, Rashmika, or did he just legitimise your quest by making it seem less intellectually vain?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘I think you gave up on your brother years ago,’ the dean said. ‘I think you knew, in your heart, that he was gone. What you really cared about was the scuttlers, and your ideas about them.’
‘That’s preposterous.’
‘That bundle of letters says otherwise. It speaks of a deep-rooted obsession, quite unseemly in a child.’
‘I came here for Harbin.’
He spoke with the calm insistence of a Latin tutor emphasising some subtlety of tense and grammar. ‘You came here for me, Rashmika. You came to the Way with the intention of climbing to the top of the cathedral administration, convinced that only I had the answers you wanted, the answers you craved, like an addict.’
‘I didn’t invite myself here,’ she said, with something of the same insistence. ‘You brought me here, from the Catherine of Iron.’
‘You’d have found your way here sooner or later, like a mole burrowing its way to the surface. You’d have made yourself useful in one of the study groups, and from there you’d have found a connection to me. It might have taken months; it might have taken years. But Grelier — bless his sordid little heart — expedited something that was already running its course.’
The Revelation Space Collection (revelation space) Page 288