Clavain nodded and made the effort of a smile. ‘If we are very lucky, there won’t be one. The crew will see reason and hand over the weapons, and we can go home without firing a shot.’
Of course, that outcome was looking less likely by the hour. He had already learned from the weapon traces that twenty of them had been dispersed from the ship, leaving only thirteen aboard. Worse than that, the specific diagnostic patterns suggested that some of the weapons had actually been activated. Three of the patterns had even vanished in the last eight hours of shiptime. He didn’t know what to make of that, but he had a nasty feeling that he knew exactly what it meant.
‘And if they don’t hand them over?’ Antoinette asked, easing into a seat.
‘Then some force may be in order,’ Clavain said.
Xavier nodded. ‘That’s what we figured.’
‘I hope it will be brief and decisive,’ Clavain said. ‘And I have every expectation that it will be. Scorpio’s preparations have been thorough. Remontoire’s technical assistance has been invaluable. We have a well-trained assault force and the weapons to back them up.’
‘But you haven’t asked for our help,’ Xavier said.
Clavain turned back to the image of the ship, examining it to see if there had been any changes in the last few minutes. To his annoyance, the software had started building up scablike accretions and spirelike spines along one flank of the hull. He swore under his breath. The ship looked like nothing so much as one of the plague-stricken buildings in Chasm City. The thought hovered in his mind, worryingly.
‘You were saying?’ he said, his attention drifting back to the youngsters.
‘We want to help,’ Antoinette said.
‘You’ve already helped,’ Clavain told her. ‘Without you we probably wouldn’t have seized this ship in the first place. Not to mention the fact that you helped me to defect.’
‘That was then. Now we’re talking about helping in the attack,’ Xavier said.
‘Ah.’ Clavain scratched his beard. ‘You mean really help, in a military sense?’
‘Storm Bird’s hull can take more weapons,’ Antoinette said. ‘And she’s fast and manoeuvrable. Had to be, to make a profit back home.’
‘She’s armoured, too,’ Xavier said. ‘You saw the damage she did when we busted out of Carousel New Copenhagen. And there’s a lot of room inside her. She could probably carry half of Scorpio’s army, with space to spare.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’
‘Then what’s your objection?’ Antoinette asked.
‘This isn’t your fight. You helped me, and I’m grateful for that. But if I know Ultras, and I think I do, they won’t give up anything without some trouble. There’s been enough bloodshed already, Antoinette. Let me handle the rest of it.’
The two youngsters - he wondered if they had really seemed so young to him before - exchanged coded looks. He had the sense that they were privy to a script he had not been shown.
‘You’d be making a mistake, Clavain,’ Xavier said.
Clavain looked into his eyes. ‘Thought this through, have you, Xavier?’
‘Of course ...’
‘I really don’t think you have.’ Clavain returned his attention to the hovering image of the lighthugger. ‘Now, if you don’t mind . . . I’m a little on the busy side.’
THIRTY-THREE
‘Ilia. Wake up.’
Khouri stood by Ilia’s bedside, watching the neural diagnostics for a sign that Volyova was returning to consciousness. The possibility that she might have died could not be dismissed - there was certainly very little visual indication that she was alive - but the diagnostics looked very much as they had before Khouri had taken her trip to the cache chamber.
‘May I help?’
Khouri turned around, startled and ashamed at the same time. The skeletal servitor had just spoken to her again.
‘Clavain . . .’ she said. ‘I didn’t think you were still switched on.’
‘I wasn’t until a moment ago.’ The servitor advanced out of the shadows, coming to a halt on the opposite side of the bed from Khouri. It moved to one of the squat hunks of machinery attending the bed and made a series of adjustments to the controls.
‘What are you doing?’ Khouri asked.
‘Elevating her to consciousness. Isn’t that what you wanted?’
‘I ... I’m not sure if I should trust you or smash you apart,’ she said.
The servitor stepped back from its handiwork. ‘You should certainly not trust me, Ana. My primary goal is to convince you to turn over the weapons. I can’t use force, but I can use persuasion and disinformation.’ Then it reached down beneath the bed and tossed something to her with a lithe sweep of one limb.
Khouri caught a pair of goggles equipped with an earpiece. They appeared to be perfectly normal shipboard issue, scuffed and discoloured. She slipped them on and watched Clavain’s human form cloak itself over the skeletal frame of the servitor. His voice came through the earpiece with human timbre and inflection.
‘That’s better,’ he said.
‘Who’s running you, Clavain?’
‘Ilia told me a little about your Captain,’ the servitor said. ‘I haven’t seen or heard from him, but I think he must be using me. He switched me on when Ilia was injured, and I was able to help her. But I’m just a beta-level simulation. I have Clavain’s expertise, and Clavain has detailed medical training, but then I imagine the Captain must be able to draw on many other sources for that kind of thing, including his own memories. My only conclusion is that the Captain does not wish to intervene directly, so he has elected to use me as an intermediary. I’m his puppet, more or less.’
Khouri felt an urge to disagree with him, but nothing in Clavain’s manner suggested that he was lying or aware of a more plausible explanation. The Captain had only emerged from his isolation in order to orchestrate his suicide, but now that the attempt had failed, and Ilia had been hurt in the process, he had retreated into some even darker psychosis. She wondered whether that made Clavain the Captain’s puppet or his weapon.
‘What can I trust you to do, in that case?’ Khouri looked from Clavain to Volyova. ‘Could you kill her?’
‘No.’ He shook his head vigorously. ‘Your ship, or your Captain, wouldn’t allow me to do it. I’m certain of that. And I wouldn’t think of doing it anyway - I’m not a cold-blooded murderer, Ana.’
‘You’re just software,’ she said. ‘Software’s capable of anything.’
‘I won’t kill her, I assure you. I want those weapons because I believe in humanity. I’ve never believed that the ends justify the means. Not in this war, not in any damned war I’ve ever served in. If I have to kill to get what I want, I will. But not before I’ve done all that I can to avoid it. Otherwise I’m no better than the other Conjoiners.’
Without warning, Ilia Volyova spoke from her bed. ‘Why do you want them, Clavain?’
‘I could ask you the same question.’
‘They’re my damned weapons.’
Khouri studied Volyova’s figure, but she appeared no more awake than she had five minutes earlier.
‘Actually, they don’t belong to you,’ Clavain said. ‘They’re still Conjoiner property.’
‘Taken your damned time reclaiming them, haven’t you?’
‘It isn’t me who’s doing the reclaiming, Ilia. I’m the nice man who’s come to take them off your hands before the really nasty people arrive. Then they’ll be my worry, not yours. And when I say nasty, I mean it. Deal with me and you’ll be dealing with someone reasonable. But the Conjoiners won’t even bother negotiating. They’ll just take the weapons without asking.’
‘I still find this defection story a little hard to believe, Clavain.’
‘Ilia ...’ Khouri leaned closer to the bed. ‘Ilia, never mind Clavain for now. There’s something I need to know. What have you done with the cache weapons? I only counted thirteen in the chamber.’
Volyova clucked before answeri
ng. Khouri thought she sounded amused at her own cleverness. ‘I dispersed them. Killed two birds with one stone. Put them out of Clavain’s easy reach, strewn across the system. I also let them go into autonomous firing mode against the Inhibitor machinery. How are my little beauties doing, Khouri? Are the fireworks impressive tonight?’
‘There are fireworks, Ilia, but I haven’t got a fucking clue who’s winning.’
‘At least the battle is still continuing, then. That has to be a good sign, doesn’t it?’ She did nothing visibly, but a flattened globe popped into existence above her head, looking for all the world like a cartoon thought-bubble. Though she had been blinded in the attack by the cache weapon, she now wore slender grey goggles that communicated with the implants Clavain’s proxy had installed in her head. In some respects she was now better sighted than she had been before, Khouri thought. She could see in all the wavelength and non-EM bands offered by the goggles, and she could tap into machine-generated fields with far greater clarity than had been possible before. For all that, however, she must have been quietly repulsed by the presence of the foreign machines inside her skull. Such things had always revolted her, and she would accept them now only out of necessity.
The projected globe was a mutual hallucination rather than a hologram. It was gridded with the green lines of an equatorial coordinate system, bulging at the equator and narrowing at the poles. The system’s ecliptic was a milky disc spanning the bubble from side to side, dotted with many annotated symbols. In the middle was the hard orange eye of the star, Delta Pavonis. A vermilion smudge was the ruined corpse of Roc, with a harder, offset core of red indicating the bugle-shaped vastness of the Inhibitor weapon, now locked in rotational phase with the star. The star was itself gridded with glowing lilac contour lines. The spot on the surface of the star immediately below the weapon was shown to be bulging inwards for an eighth of the star’s diameter, a quarter of the way to the nuclear-burning core. Furious violet-white rings of fusing matter radiated out from the depression, frozen like ripples on a lake, but those hotspots of fusion were mere sparks compared with the power-house of the core itself. And yet, as disturbing as these transformations were, the star was not the immediate centre of attention. Khouri counted twenty black triangles in the same approximate quadrant of the ecliptic as the Inhibitor weapon, and judged that those were the cache weapons.
‘This is the state of play,’ Volyova said. ‘A real-time battle display. Aren’t you jealous of my toys, Clavain?’
‘You have no idea of the importance of those weapons,’ the servitor replied.
‘Don’t I?’
‘They mean the difference between the extinction or survival of the entire human species. We know about the Inhibitors as well, Ilia, and we know what they can do. We’ve seen it in messages from the future, the human race on the brink of extinction, almost totally wiped out by Inhibitor machines. We called them the wolves, but there’s no doubt that we’re talking about the same enemy. That’s why you can’t squander the weapons here.’
‘Squander them? I am not squandering them.’ She sounded mortally affronted. ‘I am using them tactically to delay the Inhibitor processes. I’m buying valuable time for Resurgam.’
Clavain’s voice became probing. ‘How many weapons have you lost since you started the campaign?’
‘Precisely none.’
The servitor arched over her. ‘Ilia . . . listen to me very carefully. How many weapons have you lost?’
‘What do you mean, “lost”? Three weapons malfunctioned. So much for Conjoiner engineering, in that case. Another two were only designed to be used once. I hardly call those “losses”, Clavain.’
‘So no weapons have been destroyed by return fire from the Inhibitors? ’
‘Two weapons have suffered some damage.’
‘They were destroyed entirely, weren’t they?’
‘I’m still receiving telemetry from their harnesses. I won’t know the extent of the damage until I examine the scene of the battle.’
Clavain’s image stepped back from the bed. He had turned, if that was possible, a shade paler than before. He closed his eyes and muttered something under his breath, something that might almost have been a prayer.
‘You had forty weapons to begin with. Now you have lost nine of them, by my reckoning. How many more, Ilia?’
‘As many as it takes.’
‘You can’t save Resurgam. You’re dealing with forces beyond your comprehension. All you’re doing is wasting the weapons. We need to keep them back until we can use them properly, in a way that will really make a difference. This is just an advance guard of wolves, but there’ll be many more. Yet if we can examine the weapons perhaps we can make more like them; thousands more.’
She smiled again; Khouri was certain of it. ‘So all that fine talk just now, Clavain, about how the ends don’t justify the means - did you believe a word of it?’
‘All I know is that if you squander the weapons, everyone on Resurgam will still die. The only difference is that they’ll die later, and their deaths will be outnumbered by millions more. But hand over the weapons now, and there’ll still be time to make a difference.’
‘And let two hundred thousand people die so millions can live in the future?’
‘Not millions, Ilia. Billions.’
‘You had me going for a minute there, Clavain. I was almost starting to think you might be someone I could do business with.’ She smiled, as if it was the last time she would ever smile in her life. ‘I was wrong, wasn’t I?’
‘I’m not a bad man, Ilia. I’m just somone who knows exactly what needs to be done.’
‘Like you said, always the most dangerous sort.’
‘Please don’t underestimate me. I will take those weapons.’
‘You’re weeks away, Clavain. By the time you arrive, I’ll be more than ready for you.’
Clavain’s figure said nothing. Khouri had no idea what to read into that lack of response, but it troubled her greatly.
Her ship towered over her, barely contained by its prison of repair scaffolding. Storm Bird’s internal lights were on, and in the upper row of flight deck windows Antoinette saw Xavier’s silhouetted form hard at work. He had a compad in one hand and a stylus gripped between his teeth, and he was flicking ancient toggle switches above his head, taking typically diligent notes. Always the bookkeeper, she thought.
Antoinette eased her exoskeleton into a standing position. Now and then Clavain allowed the crew a few hours under conditions of normal gravity and inertia, but this was not one of those periods. The exoskeleton gave her dozens of permanent sores where the support pads and haptic motion sensors touched her skin. In a perverse way, she was almost looking forward to arriving around Delta Pavonis, since they would then be able to discard the skeletons.
She took a good long look at Storm Bird. She had not seen it since the time she had walked away, refusing to enter what no longer felt like her own territory. It felt like months ago, and some of the anger - though not all of it - had abated.
She was still pretty pissed off.
Her ship was certainly ready for the fight. To the untrained eye, there had been no drastic alteration in Storm Bird’s external appearance. The extra weapons that had been grafted on, in addition to the deterrents already present, merely amounted to a few more bulges, spines and asymmetries to add to those that were already present. With the manufactories churning out armaments by the tonne, it had been an easy enough matter to divert some of that output her way, and Scorpio had been perfectly willing to turn a blind eye. Remontoire and Xavier had even worked together to couple the more exotic weapons into Storm Bird’s control net.
For a time, she had wondered why she felt the urge to fight. She did not consider herself given to violence or heroic gestures. Pointless, stupid gestures - such as burying her father in a gas giant - were another thing entirely.
She climbed up through the ship until she reached the flight deck. Xavier carried on w
orking after she had entered. He was too engrossed in what he was doing, and he must have become used to her never visiting Storm Bird.
She sat in the seat next to him, waiting for him to notice her and look up from his work. When he did he just nodded, giving her the space and time to say what she needed to. She appreciated that.
‘Beast?’ Antoinette said quietly.
The pause before Lyle Merrick replied was probably no longer than usual, but it felt like an eternity. ‘Yes, Antoinette?’
‘I’m back.’
‘Yes ... I gathered.’ There was another long intermission. ‘I’m pleased that you’ve returned.’
The voice had the same tonal quality as ever, but something had changed. She supposed that Lyle was no longer obliged to mimic the old subpersona, the one that he had replaced sixteen years before.
‘Why?’ she asked sharply. ‘Did you miss me?’
‘Yes,’ Merrick said. ‘Yes, I did.’
‘I don’t think I can ever forgive you, Lyle.’
‘I wouldn’t ever want or expect your forgiveness, Antoinette. I certainly wouldn’t deserve it.’
‘No, you wouldn’t.’
‘But you understand that I made a promise to your father?’
‘That’s what Xavier said.’
‘Your father was a good man, Antoinette. He only wanted the best for you.’
‘The best for you as well, Lyle.’
‘I’m in his debt. I wouldn’t argue with that.’
‘How do you live with what you did?’
There was something that might have been a laugh, or even a self-deprecating snigger. ‘The part of me that mattered the most isn’t greatly troubled by that question, you know. The flesh-and-blood me was executed. I’m just a shadow, the only shadow that the eraserheads missed.’
‘A shadow with a highly evolved sense of self-preservation.’
‘Again, that’s nothing I’d deny.’
‘I want to hate you, Lyle.’
‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Millions already do.’
She sighed. ‘But I can’t afford to. This is still my ship. You are still running it whether I like it or not. True, Lyle?’
The Revelation Space Collection Page 215
