FORTY-THREE
Rashmika had a premonitory sense that something was about to trespass into her head. In the moments before the shadows spoke to her, she had learned to identify a specific sensation: a faint tingle of neural intrusion, like the feeling that somewhere in a huge and rambling old house a door had just opened.
She steeled herself: aware of the proximity of the scrimshaw suit, conscious of the ease with which the shadows were able to slip in and out of her skull.
But the voice was different this time.
[Rashmika. Listen to me. Don’t react. Don’t pay any more attention to me than you would to a stranger.]
Rashmika shaped an answer, without speaking. It was as if she had been born to it, as if the skill had always been there. Who are you?
[I’m the only other woman in this room.]
Despite herself, Rashmika glanced towards Khouri. The woman’s face was impassive: not hostile, not even unkind, but utterly blank of any kind of expression. It was as if she were looking at a wall, rather than Rashmika.
You?
[Me, Rashmika. Yes.]
Why are you here?
[To help you. How much do you remember? All of it, or only some of it? Do you remember anything at all?]
Aloud, Vasko said, ‘Propulsion, Dean? Are you saying you want our ship to take you somewhere?’
‘Not exactly, no,’ Quaiche replied.
Rashmika tried not to look at the woman, keeping her attention focused on the men instead. I don’t remember much, only that I don’t belong here. The shadows already found me out. Do you know about the shadows, Khouri?
[A little. Not as much as you.]
Can you answer any of my questions? Who sent me here? What was I supposed to do?
[We sent you here.] In her peripheral vision Rashmika saw the woman’s head nod by the slightest of degrees: silent, discreet affirmation that it was really her voice Rashmika was hearing. [But it was your decision. Nine years ago, Rashmika, you told us we had to put you on Hela, in the care of another family.]
Why?
[To learn things, to find out as much as you could about Hela and the scuttlers, from the inside. To reach the dean.]
Why?
[Because the dean was the only way of reaching Haldora. We thought Haldora was the key: the only route to the shadows. We didn’t know he’d already used it. You told us that, Rashmika. You found the short cut.]
The suit?
[That’s what we came for. And you, of course.]
Whatever your plan was, it’s going wrong. We’re in trouble, aren’t we?
[You’re safe, Rashmika. He doesn’t know you have anything to do with us.]
If he finds out?
[We’ll protect you. I’ll protect you, no matter what happens. You have my word on that.]
She looked into the woman’s face, daring Quaiche to notice. Why would you care about me?
[Because I’m your mother.]
Look into my eyes. Say it again.
Khouri did. And though Rashmika watched her face intently for the slightest indication of a lie, there was none. She supposed that meant Khouri was telling the truth.
There was shock, a stinging sense of denial, but it was not nearly as great as Rashmika might have expected. She had, by then, already begun to doubt much of what passed for her assumed history. The shadows - and, of course, Surgeon-General Grelier - had already convinced her that she had not been born on Hela, and that the people in the Vigrid badlands could not be her real parents. So what remained was a void waiting to be filled with facts, rather than one truth waiting to be displaced by another.
So here it was. There was still much she needed to remember for herself, but the essence was this: she was an agent of Ultras - these Ultras, specifically - and she had been put on Hela on an intelligence-gathering mission. Her actual memories had been suppressed, and in their place she had a series of vague, generic snapshots of early life on Hela. They were like a theatrical backdrop: convincing enough to pass muster provided they were not the object of attention themselves. But when the shadows had told her about her false past, she had seen the early memories for what they were.
The woman said she was Rashmika’s mother. She had no reason to doubt her - her face had conveyed no indication of a lie, and Rashmika already knew that her supposed mother in the badlands was only a foster parent. She felt sadness, a sense of loss, but no sense of betrayal.
She shaped a thought. I think you must be my mother.
[Do you remember me?]
I don’t know. A little. I remember someone like you, I think.
[What was I doing?]
You were standing in a palace of ice. You were crying.
Hela Orbit, 2727
Ribbons of grey-blue smoke twisted in the corridor, writhing with the shifts of air pressure. Fluid sluiced from weeping wounds in the walls and ceiling, raining down in muddy curtains. From some nearby part of the ship, Captain Seyfarth heard shouts and the rattle of automatic slug-guns, punctuated by the occasional bark of an energy weapon. He stepped through an obstacle course of bodies, his booted feet squashing limbs and heads into the ankle-deep muck that seemed to flood every level of the ship. One gauntleted hand gripped the rough handle of a throwing knife formed from the armour he had been wearing upon his arrival. The knife was already bloodied - by Seyfarth’s estimate he had killed three Ultras so far, and left another two with serious injuries - but he was still looking for something better. As he passed each body he kicked it over, checking the hands and belt for something promising. All he needed was a slug-gun.
Seyfarth was alone, the rest of his group either dead or cut off, wandering some other part of the ship. He had anticipated nothing less. Of the twenty units of the first infiltration team, Seyfarth would have been surprised if more than half a dozen survived to see the taking of the ship. Of course, he counted himself amongst the likely survivors, but based on past experience that was only to be expected. It was not, never had been, a suicide mission: just an operation with a low survival probability for most of those involved. The infiltration squad wasn’t required to survive, just to signal the fitness of the ship for the full takeover effort, using the massed ships of the Cathedral Guard. If the infiltrators were able to disrupt the defensive activities aboard the ship, creating pockets of internal confusion, then all the better. But once that signal had been sent to the surface, the survival or otherwise of Seyfarth’s unit had no bearing on subsequent events.
Given that, he thought, things were actually going tolerably well. There had been reports - fragmented, not entirely trustworthy - that the massed assault had met more resistance than expected. Certainly, the Cathedral Guard had appeared to suffer greater losses than Seyfarth had ever planned. But the massed assault had been overwhelming in scale for precisely the reason that it needed to be able to absorb huge losses and still succeed. It was shock and awe: no one needed to lecture Seyfarth on that particular doctrine. And the reports of weapons fire from elsewhere in the ship confirmed that elements of the second wave had indeed reached the Nostalgia for Infinity, together with the slug-guns they could never have smuggled past the pig.
His foot touched something.
Seyfarth knelt down, grimacing at the smell. He pushed the body over, bringing a sodden hip out of the brown muck in which it lay. He spied the tarnished gleam of a slug-gun.
Seyfarth pulled the weapon from the belt of the dead Cathedral Guardsman, shaking loose most of the muck. He checked the clip: fully loaded. The slug-gun was crudely made, mass-produced from cheap metal, but there were no electronic components in it, nothing that would have suffered from being immersed in the shipboard filth. Seyfarth tested it anyway, releasing a single slug into the nearest wall. The ship groaned as the slug went in. Now that he paid attention to it, it occurred to Seyfarth that the ship had been groaning rather a lot lately - more than he would have expected if the groans were merely structural noises. For a moment this troubled him.
Only for a moment, though.
He threw the knife away, grateful for the weighty heft of the slug-gun. It had taken nerve to come aboard the ship with only knives and a few concealed gadgets, but he had always known that if he made it this far - to the point where he had a real gun in his hand - he would make it all the way through.
It was like the end of a bad dream.
‘Going somewhere?’
The voice had come from behind him. But that simply wasn’t possible: he had been checking his rearguard constantly, and there had been no one coming along the corridor behind him when he knelt down to recover the slug-gun. Seyfarth was a good soldier: he never left his back uncovered for more than a few seconds.
But the voice sounded very near. Very familiar, too.
The safety catch was still off. He turned around slowly, holding the slug-gun at waist level. ‘I thought I took care of you,’ he said.
‘I need a lot of taking care of,’ the pig replied. He stood there, unarmed, not even a slug-gun to his name. Looming behind him, like an adult above an infant, stood the hollow shell of a spacesuit. Seyfarth’s lip twisted in a sneer of incomprehension. The pig, just possibly, could have hidden in the darkness, or even pretended to be a body. But the hulking spacesuit? There was no conceivable way he had walked past that without noticing it. And it didn’t seem very likely that the suit could have sprinted from the far end of the corridor in the few seconds during which he’d had his back turned.
‘This is a trick,’ Seyfarth said, ‘isn’t it?’
‘I’d put down that gun if I were you,’ the pig said.
Seyfarth’s finger squeezed the trigger. Part of him wanted to blow the snout-faced abortion away. Another part wanted to know why the pig thought he had the right to speak to him in that kind of tone.
Didn’t the pig know his place?
‘I hung you out to dry,’ Seyfarth said. He wasn’t mistaken: this was the same pig. He could even see the wounds from where he had pinned him to the wall.
‘Listen to me,’ the pig said. ‘Put down the gun and we’ll talk. There are things I want you to tell me. Like what the hell Quaiche wants with my ship.’
Seyfarth touched one finger to his helmeted head, as if scratching an itch. ‘Which one of us is holding the gun, pig?’
‘You are.’
‘Right. Just felt that needed clearing up. Now step away from the suit and kneel in the shit, where you belong.’
The pig looked at him, the sly white of an eye catching the light. ‘Or what?’
‘Or we’ll be looking at pork.’
The pig made a move towards him. It was only a flinch, but it was enough for Seyfarth. There were questions he’d have liked answered, but they would all have to wait for now. Once they had taken the ship, there would be all the time in the world for a few forensic investigations. It would actually give him something to do.
He made to squeeze the trigger. Nothing happened. Furious, imagining that the slug-gun had jammed after all, Seyfarth glanced down at the weapon.
It wasn’t the weapon that was the problem. The problem was his arm. Two spikes had appeared through it: they had shot out from one wall, speared his forearm and emerged on the other side, their sharp tips a damp ruby-red.
Seyfarth felt the pain arrive, felt the spikes grinding against bone and tendon. He bit down on the agony, sneering at the pig. ‘Nice ...’ he tried to say.
The spikes slid out of his arm, making a slick, slithery sound as they retracted. Seyfarth watched, fascinated and appalled, as they vanished back into the smooth wall.
‘Drop the gun,’ the pig said.
Seyfarth’s arm quivered. He raised the barrel towards the pig and the suit, made one last effort to squeeze the trigger. But there was something badly amiss with the anatomy of his arm. His forefinger merely spasmed, tapping pathetically against the trigger like a worm wriggling on a hook.
‘I did warn you,’ the pig said.
All around Seyfarth, walls, floor and ceiling erupted spikes. He felt them slide into him, freezing him in place. The gun fell from his hand, clattering to the ground through the labyrinth of interlaced metal rods.
‘That’s for Orca,’ the pig said.
It went quickly after that. The Captain’s control over his own local transformations seemed to grow in confidence and dexterity with each kill. It was, at times, quite sickening to watch. How much more terrible it must have been for the Adventists, to suddenly have the ship itself come alive and turn against them. How shocking, when the supposedly fixed surfaces of walls and floors and ceilings became mobile, crushing and pinning, maiming and suffocating. How distressing, when the fluids that ran throughout the ship - the fluids that the bilge pumps strove to contain - suddenly became the liquid instruments of murder, gushing out at high pressure, drowning hapless Adventists caught in the Captain’s hastily arranged traps. Growing up on Hela, drowning probably hadn’t been amongst the ways they expected to die. But that, Scorpio reflected, was life: full of nasty little surprises.
The tide had been turning against the Adventists, but now it was in full ebb. Scorpio felt his strength redouble, tapping into some last, unexpected reserve. He knew he was going to pay for it later, but for now it felt good to be pushing the enemy back, doing - as the Captain had promised - some actual damage. The slug-gun wasn’t designed for a pig, but that didn’t stop him finding a way to fire it. Sooner or later he was able to trade up for a shipboard boser pistol, pig-issue. Then, as he had always liked to say in Chasm City, he was really cooking.
‘Do what you have to do,’ the Captain told him. ‘I can take a little pain, for now.’
Pushing through the ship, following the Captain’s lead, he soon met up with surviving members of the Security Arm. They were shell-shocked, confused and disorganised, but on seeing him they rallied, realising that the ship had not yet fallen to the Adventists. And when word began to spread that the Captain was assisting in the effort, they fought like devils. The nature of the battle changed from minute to minute. Now it was no longer a question of securing control of their ship, but of mopping up the few outstanding pockets of Adventist resistance holed up in volumes of the ship where the Captain had only limited control.
‘I could kill them now,’ he told Scorpio. ‘I can’t reshape those parts of me, but I can depressurise them, or flood them. It will just take a little longer than usual. I could even turn the hypometric weapon against them.’
‘Inside yourself?’ Scorpio asked, remembering the last time that had happened, during the calibration exercise.
‘I wouldn’t do it lightly.’
Scorpio tightened his grip on the boser pistol. His heart was hammering in his chest, his eyesight and hearing no better than when he had been revived.
None of that mattered.
‘I’ll deal with them,’ he said. ‘You’ve done your bit for the day, Captain.’
‘I’ll leave things to you, then,’ the suit said, stepping back into a perfectly formed aperture that had just appeared in the wall. The wall resealed itself. It was as if the Captain had never been with him.
Beyond the Nostalgia for Infinity, the Captain’s manifold attention was at least partly occupied by the progress of the cache weapon. Even as the battle raged within him, even as the ship was brought slowly back under orthodox control, he was mindful of the weapon, anxious that it should not be wasted. For years he had carried the forty hell-class weapons within him, treasuring them against the predations of theft and damage. His degree of transformation had been much less than it was now, but he still felt an intense bond of care towards the weapons that had played such a central role in his recent history. Besides, the weapons themselves had been the beloved playthings of the old Triumvir, Ilia Volyova. He still had fond thoughts for the Triumvir, despite what she had done to him. As long as he remembered Ilia - who had always found time to speak to the Captain, even when he had been at his least communicative - he was not going to let her down by misusing the last of those
dark toys.
Telemetry from the cache weapon reached him through multiply secure channels. The Captain had already sewn tiny spysat cameras around himself during the fiercest phase of the Cathedral Guard assault. Now that same swarm of eyes permitted continuous communication with the weapon, even as the Nostalgia for Infinity swung around the far side of Hela.
Haldora, from the cache weapon’s perspective, now swallowed half the sky. The gas giant was a striped behemoth of primal cold oozing exotic chemistries, its bands of colour so wide that you could drown a rocky world in them. It looked very real: every sensor on the cache weapon’s harness reported exactly what would have been expected this close to a gas giant. It sniffed the cruel strength of its magnetic field, felt the hard sleet of charged particles entrained by that field. Even at extreme magnification, the whorls and flurries of the atmosphere looked absolutely convincing.
The Captain had listened to the conversations of the humans in his care, to their speculations concerning the nature of the Haldora enigma. He knew what they expected to find behind this mask of a world: a mechanism for signalling between adjacent realities, entire universes fluttering there like ribbons, adjacent braneworlds in the higher-dimensional reality of the bulk: a kind of radio, capable of tuning into the whisper of gravitons. The details, as yet, didn’t matter. What they needed, now, was to make contact with the entities on the other side as quickly as possible. The suit in the Lady Morwenna was one possible means - perhaps the easiest, since it was already open - but it couldn’t be relied upon. If Quaiche destroyed it, then they would need to find another way to contact the shadows. Quaiche had waited until a vanishing occurred before sending his probe into the planet. They didn’t have time for that.
They needed to provoke a vanishing, to expose the machinery for themselves.
The weapon began to slow, taking up its firing posture. Within it, grave preparations were being made. Arcane physical processes began to occur: sequences of reactions, tiny at first, but growing towards an irreversible cascade. The commanding sentience of the device had settled into a state of calm acceptance. After so many years of inaction, it was now going to do the thing for which it had been created. The fact that it would die in the process did not alarm it in the slightest. It felt only a microscopic glimmer of regret that it was the last of its kind, and that no other cache weapons would be around to witness its furious proclamation.
The Revelation Space Collection Page 303
