Sylveste placed his elbows on the tree stump. Khouri studied the man. She had seen plenty of lifelike evocations of Sylveste before, but this image seemed more real than any she had yet experienced. She guessed it was because Sylveste was in conversation with two people she knew, rather than anonymous figures from Yellowstone’s history. That made a lot of difference. He was handsome; improbably so, in her opinion, but she doubted that the image had been cosmetically doctored. His long hair hung in tangles either side of his magisterial brow; his eyes were acutely green. Even if she had to look him in the eyes before killing him - and the Mademoiselle’s specifications about the killing did not make that unlikely - it would be something to see those eyes for real.
‘That sounds awfully like blackmail,’ Sylveste said, his voice the lowest of those present. ‘You talk as if you Ultras have some kind of binding agreement. It might fool some people, Sajaki, but I’m afraid I’m not one of them.’
‘Then you may be in for a surprise the next time you attempt to enlist Ultra assistance,’ Sajaki answered, toying with a splinter of wood. ‘Let’s be quite clear on this. If you refuse us - in addition to whatever else that might bring upon yourself - you’d ensure that you never leave your home planet.’
‘I doubt that that would greatly inconvenience me.’
Volyova - the seated version - shook her head. ‘Not what our spies tell us. Rumour has it you’re trying to find funding for an expedition to the Delta Pavonis system, Dr Sylveste.’
‘Resurgam?’ Sylveste snorted. ‘I don’t think so. There’s nothing there.’
The real, standing Volyova said, ‘He’s clearly lying. It’s obvious now, though at the time I just assumed the rumour I had heard was false.’
Sajaki had replied to Sylveste, and now Sylveste was speaking again, defensively. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I don’t care what rumours you’ve heard - you’d better ignore them. There’s not a scrap of a reason to go there. Check the records if you don’t believe me.’
‘But that’s the odd thing,’ the standing Volyova said. ‘I did just that, and damned if he wasn’t right. Based on what was known at the time, there was absolutely no reason to consider an expedition to Resurgam.’
‘But you just said he was lying . . .’
‘And he was, of course - hindsight proves that much.’ She shook her head. ‘You know, I’ve never really thought about this, but it’s actually very strange - paradoxical, even. Thirty years after this meeting took place the expedition left for Resurgam, which means the rumour was correct after all.’ She nodded at Sylveste, embroiled in heated discussion with her seated image. ‘But back then nobody knew about the Amarantin! So what in hell’s name gave him the idea to go to Resurgam in the first place?’
‘He must have known he’d find something there.’
‘Yes, but where did that information come from? There were automated surveys of the system prior to his expedition, but none of them were thorough. As far as I know, none of them scanned the planetary surfaces close enough to find evidence that there’d once been intelligent life on Resurgam. Yet Sylveste knew.’
‘Which makes no sense.’
‘I know,’ Volyova said. ‘Believe me, I know.’
At which point she joined her twin next to the stump and leant so close to the image of Sylveste that Khouri could see the reflection of his unwavering green eyes in the smoky facets of her goggles. ‘What did you know?’ she asked. ‘More to the point, how did you know?’
‘He isn’t going to tell you,’ Khouri said.
‘Maybe not now,’ Volyova said. And then smiled. ‘But before very long it’ll be the real one sitting there. And then we may get some answers.’
As she was speaking, her bracelet began to emit a sonorous chiming. The sound was unfamiliar, but it obviously connoted alarm. Above, without any fuss, the synthetic daylight turned blood-red and began to pulse in rhythm with the chiming.
‘What’s that?’ Khouri asked.
‘An emergency,’ Volyova said, holding the bracelet close to her jaw. She snatched the retinal-projection goggles from her face and studied a little display inset into the bracelet. It was also pulsing red, in perfect time with the sky and the chiming. Khouri could see words trickling onto the display, but not clearly enough to read them.
‘What sort of emergency?’ Khouri breathed, wary of disturbing the woman’s attention. Though she had not noticed their departure, the trio had vanished quietly back into whatever portion of the ship’s memory had tricked them to life.
Volyova looked up from the bracelet, face quite pale. ‘One of the cache-weapons.’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s arming itself.’
ELEVEN
Approaching Delta Pavonis, 2565
They were running down a curving corridor, one that led from the glade towards the nearest radial elevator shaft.
‘What do you mean?’ Khouri shouted, straining to be heard above the klaxon. ‘What do you mean it’s arming itself?’
Volyova wasted no breath replying, not until they had reached the waiting elevator car, and she had ordered the thing to shuttle them straight to the nearest spinal-trunk elevator shaft, ignoring all the usual acceleration limits. When the car began to move she and Khouri were rammed back into its glass walling, almost knocking what wind they had left from their chests. The car’s interior lights were pulsing red; Volyova could feel her heart starting to pulse in sympathy. But somehow she managed to talk.
‘Exactly what I said. There are systems monitoring each cache-weapon - and one has just detected a power-surge in its weapon.’
Volyova did not add that the reason she had installed those monitors in the first place was because of the weapon which had appeared to move. Ever since, she had clung to the hope that the move had been imagined - a hallucination brought on by the loneliness of her vigil - but she now knew that it had been nothing of the sort.
‘How can it arm itself?’
The question was perfectly reasonable. It was one for which Volyova had a decided absence of glib answers.
‘I’m just hoping the glitch is in the monitoring systems,’ she said, if only to be saying something. ‘Not the weapon itself.’
‘Why would it be arming itself?’
‘I don’t know! Haven’t you noticed I’m not exactly taking this calmly?’
The axial lift decelerated abruptly, transitioning to the trunk shaft with a series of nauseous lurches. Then they were dropping quickly, so fast that their apparent weight dwindled almost to nothing.
‘Where are we going?’
‘The cache chamber, of course.’ Volyova glared at the recruit. ‘I don’t know what’s going on, Khouri, but whatever it is, I want visual confirmation. I want to see what the damned things are actually doing.’
‘It arms itself, what else can it do?’
‘I don’t know,’ Volyova said, as calmly as possible. ‘I’ve tried all the shutdown protocols - nothing worked. This isn’t exactly a situation I anticipated.’
‘But surely it can’t deploy? It can’t actually find a target and go off?’
Volyova glanced down at her bracelet. Maybe the readings were going haywire; maybe there really had been a glitch in the watchdog systems. She hoped that was the case, because what the bracelet was telling her now was very bad news indeed.
The cache-weapon was moving.
Falkender was true to his word: the operations he performed on Sylveste’s eyes were seldom pleasant and frequently much worse, with occasional forays into absolute agony. For days now Sluka’s surgeon had been exploring the envelope of his skill, promising to restore such basic human functions as colour perception and the ability to sense depth and smooth movement, but not quite convincing Sylveste that he had the means or the expertise to do so. Sylveste had told Falkender that the eyes had never been perfect in the first place; Calvin’s tools had been too limited for that. But even the crude vision which Calvin had given him would have been preferable to the insi
pidly coloured, flicker-motion parody of the world through which he now moved. Not for the first time, Sylveste found himself doubting that the discomfort of the repair was likely to be justified by the results.
‘I think you should give up,’ he said.
‘I fixed Sluka,’ Falkender said, a lividly coloured laminate of flat, man-shaped apertures dancing into Sylveste’s visual field. ‘You’re no great challenge.’
‘So what if you restore my vision? I can’t see my wife because Sluka won’t let us be together. And a cell wall’s a cell wall, no matter how clearly you see it.’ He stopped as waves of pain lashed his temples. ‘Matter of fact, I’m not sure it isn’t better being blind. At least that way you don’t have reality rammed down your optic nerve every time you open your eyes.’
‘You don’t have eyes, Doctor Sylveste.’ Falkender twisted something, sending pink pain-rosettes into his vision. ‘So stop feeling sorry for yourself, please; it’s most unbecoming. Besides, it’s possible you won’t have to stare at these particular walls for very much longer.’
Sylveste perked up.
‘Meaning what?’
‘Meaning things may soon start moving, if what I’ve heard is halfway to the truth.’
‘Very informative.’
‘I’ve heard that we may soon have visitors,’ Falkender said, punctuating his remark with another stab of pain.
‘Stop being cryptic. When you say “we”, which faction do you mean? And what kind of visitors?’
‘All I’ve heard is rumour, Doctor Sylveste. I’m sure Sluka will tell you in good time.’
‘Don’t count on it,’ Sylveste said, who happened to be under no illusions as to his usefulness from Sluka’s point of view. Since the time of his arrival in Mantell he had come to the forcible conclusion that Sluka was retaining him only because he offered her some transient entertainment; that he was some fabulous captured beast of dubious use but undoubted novelty. It was not at all clear that she would ever confide in him regarding any matter of true seriousness - and even if she did, it would be for only one of two reasons: either because she wanted something other than a wall to talk to, or because she had devised some new means of tormenting him verbally. More than once she had spoken of putting him to sleep until she thought of a use for him. ‘I was right to capture you,’ she would say. ‘And I’m not saying you don’t have your uses - they’re just not immediately apparent to me. But I don’t see why anyone else should be allowed to exploit you.’ From that point of view, as Sylveste had soon realised, it mattered little to Sluka whether or not she kept him alive. Alive, he provided her with some amusement - and there was always the possibility he might become more useful to her in the future, as the colony’s balance of power shifted. But, equally, it would not greatly inconvenience her to have him killed now. At least that way he would never become a liability; could never turn against her.
Eventually there came an end to the tenderly administered agonies, a passage into calmer light and almost plausible colours. Sylveste held his own hand before his gaze and turned it slowly, absorbing its solidity. There were furrows and traceries embossed into his skin which he had almost forgotten, yet it could not be more than tens of days - a few weeks - since he had been blinded in the Amarantin tunnel system.
‘Good as new,’ Falkender said, placing his tools back into their wooden autoclave. The strange, ciliated glove went last of all; as Falkender peeled it from his womanly fingers, it twitched and spasmed like a beached jellyfish.
‘Get some illumination here,’ Volyova said into her bracelet as the elevator entered the cache chamber.
Weight rushed back as the box slowed to a halt. Immediately they had to squint as the chamber lights glared on, shining on the enormous, cradled shapes of the weapons.
‘Where is it?’ Khouri asked.
‘Wait,’ Volyova said. ‘I have to get my orientation.’
‘I don’t see anything moving.’
‘Me neither . . . yet.’
Volyova was squashed flat against the glass side of the elevator, straining to peer around the corner of the weapon which bulked largest. Swearing, she made the elevator descend another twenty, thirty metres, then found the order which killed the pulsing red lighting and the interior klaxon.
‘Look,’ Khouri said, in the relative calm which followed. ‘Is that something moving?’
‘Where?’
She pointed, almost vertically downwards. Volyova squinted after her, then spoke into the bracelet again. ‘Auxiliary lighting - cache chamber quadrant five.’ Then to Khouri: ‘Let’s see what the svinoi’s up to.’
‘You weren’t really serious, were you?’
‘About what?’
‘A glitch in the monitoring systems.’
‘Not really,’ Volyova said, squinting even more as the auxiliaries came online, spotlighting a portion of the chamber far beneath their feet. ‘It’s called optimism - but I’m losing the hang of it fast.’
The weapon, Volyova said, was one of the planet-killers. She was not really sure how it functioned; still less exactly what it was capable of doing. But she had her suspicions. She had tested it years ago at the very lowest range of its destructive settings . . . against a small moon. Extrapolating - and she was very good at extrapolating - the weapon would have no trouble dismantling a planet even at a range of hundreds of AU. There were things inside it which had the gravitational signatures of quantum black holes, yet which, strangely, refused to evaporate. Somehow the weapon created a soliton - a standing-wave - in the geodesic structure of spacetime.
And now the weapon had come alive, without her bidding. It was gliding through the chamber, riding the network of tracks which would eventually deliver it to open space. It was like watching a skyscraper crawl through a city.
‘Can we do anything?’
‘I’m open to suggestions. What did you have in mind?’
‘Well, you have to appreciate I haven’t given this a hell of a lot of thought . . .’
‘Say it, Khouri.’
‘We could try blocking it.’ Khouri’s forehead was furrowed, as if, on top of all this, she was battling with a sudden migraine attack. ‘You’ve got shuttles on this thing, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Then use one to block the exit. Or is that too crude for you?’
‘Right now, the expression “too crude” isn’t in my vocabulary.’
Volyova glanced at her bracelet. All the while the weapon was moving down the chamber wall, for all the world like an armoured slug retracing its own slime-trail. At the bottom of the chamber a vast iris was opening; the track led through the aperture into the dark chamber nested below this one. The weapon was almost level with the aperture.
‘I can move one of the shuttles . . . but it’ll take too long to get it outside the ship. I don’t think we’d get there in time . . .’
‘Do it!’ Khouri said, every muscle in her face screaming tension. ‘Piss around any more and we won’t even have this option!’
Volyova nodded, regarding the recruit suspiciously. What did Khouri know about all this? She seemed less bewildered than Volyova, although she also looked far more agitated than Volyova would have expected. But she had a point; the shuttle idea was worth a try, even though it was unlikely to succeed.
‘We need something else,’ she said, calling up the shuttle-control subpersona.
The weapon was halfway through the transfer iris, sliding into the second chamber.
‘Something else?’
‘In case this doesn’t work. The problem’s in the gunnery, Khouri - and maybe that’s where we should attack it.’
She blanched. ‘What?’
‘I want you in the seat.’
While they dropped towards the gunnery, accelerating so hard that the floor inverted to become the ceiling - and Khouri’s stomach felt like it had done something similar - Volyova whispered frantic, breathless instructions into her bracelet. It took a maddening few seconds to ac
cess the right subpersona, another few to bypass the safeguards which prevented unauthorised remote control of the shuttles. Still more to warm up the engines of one of the shuttles, and then longer still while the machine declamped from the docking restraints and vectored out of its holding bay, beyond the hull, handling - Volyova said - like the damn thing was still half asleep. The lighthugger was still under thrust, so the manoeuvre was doubly tricky.
‘What worries me,’ Khouri said, ‘is what the weapon plans to do once it gets outside. Are we in range of anything?’
‘Resurgam, conceivably.’ Volyova raised her eyes from the bracelet. ‘But maybe now it won’t get a chance.’
The Mademoiselle chose that moment to blink into existence, somehow managing to accommodate herself within the elevator without intruding on the volume already claimed by Khouri and the Triumvir. ‘She’s wrong. This isn’t going to work. I control more than just the cache-weapon.’
‘Admitting it now, are you?’
‘What’s to deny?’ The Mademoiselle smiled pridefully. ‘You recall that I downloaded an avatar of myself into the gunnery? Well my avatar now controls the cache. Nothing I can do can influence her actions. She’s as far beyond my reach as I am beyond the reach of my original self on Yellowstone.’
The elevator was slowing now, Volyova engrossed by the complex little readouts patterning her bracelet. A schematic holo showed the shuttle moving along the lighthugger’s hull; a tiny remora nosing along the smooth flank of a basking shark.
‘But you gave her orders,’ Khouri said. ‘You know what the hell she’s up to, don’t you.’
‘Oh, her orders were very simple. If control of the gunnery placed at her disposal any systems which could quicken the completion of the mission, she was to make whatever arrangements were necessary to hasten that end.’
The Revelation Space Collection Page 28
