Thirty-nine, Skade? I thought there were forty.
[Didn’t I mention that one of the weapons has already been destroyed?]
You missed that part out, I think.
[We can’t be certain at this range. The weapons slip in and out of hibernation, like restless monsters. Certainly one weapon hasn’t been detected since 2565, local Resurgam time. We presume it lost, or damaged at the very least. And six of the remaining thirty-nine weapons have become detached from the main grouping. We still have intermittent signals from those weapons, but they are much closer to the neutron star on the system’s edge. The other thirty-three weapons are within an AU of Delta Pavonis, at the trailing Lagrange point of the Resurgam-Delta Pavonis system. In all likelihood they are within the hull of the Triumvir’s lighthugger.]
Clavain raised a hand. Wait. You detected some of these signals as long ago as 2565?
[Local Resurgam time, Clavain.]
Nonetheless, you’d still have detected the signals here around… when, 2580? Thirty-three years ago, Skade. Why the hell didn’t you act sooner?
[This is wartime, Clavain. We’ve hardly been in a position to mount an extensive, logistically complex recovery operation.]
Until now, that is.
Skade conceded his point with the slightest of nods. [Now the tide is turning in our favour. Finally we can afford to divert some resources. Make no mistake, Clavain, recovering these weapons will not be easy. We will be attempting to repossess items that were stolen from a stronghold that we would even now have grave difficulty breaking into ourselves. Volyova has her own weapons, quite apart from those she has stolen from us. And the evidence of her crimes on Resurgam suggests that she has the nerve to use them. But we simply must have the weapons back, no matter the cost in assets and time.]
Assets? You mean lives?
[You have never flinched from accepting the costs of war, Clavain. That is why we want you to co-ordinate this recovery operation. Peruse these memories if you doubt your own suitability.]
She did not give him the dignity of a warning. Chunks of his past crashed into his immediate consciousness, jolting him back to past campaigns and past actions. War movies, Clavain thought, remembering the old two-dimensional, monochrome recordings he had watched during his earliest days in the Coalition for Neural Purity, sifting them — usually in vain — for any hint of a lesson that he might use against real enemies. But now the war movies that Skade showed him, slamming past in accelerated bursts, were ones in which he was the protagonist. And for the most part they were historically accurate, too: a parade of actions he had participated in. There was a hostage release in the warrens of Gilgamesh Isis, during which Clavain had lost a hand to a sulphur burn, an injury that took a year to heal. There was the time Clavain and a female Conjoiner had smuggled the brain of a Demarchist scientist out of the custody of a faction of renegade Mixmasters around Marco’s Eye. Clavain’s partner had been surgically modified so that she could keep the brain alive in her womb, following simple reverse Caesarean surgery that Clavain had administered. They had left the man’s body behind for his captors to discover. Afterwards, the Conjoiners had cloned the man a new body and packed the traumatised brain back into it.
Then there was Clavain’s recovery of a stolen Conjoiner drive from dissident Skyjacks camped in one of the outer nodes of the Bloater agrarian hive, and the liberation of an entire Pattern Juggler world from Ultra profiteers who wanted to charge for access to the mind-altering alien ocean. There were more, many more. Clavain always survived and nearly always triumphed. There were other universes, he knew, where he had died much earlier: he hadn’t been any less skilled in those histories, but his luck had just played out differently. He could not extrapolate from this run of successes and assume that he was bound to succeed at the next hurdle.
Even though he was not guaranteed to succeed, it was clear that Clavain stood a better chance than anyone else in the Closed Council.
He smiled ruefully. You seem to know me better than I know myself.
[I know that you will help us, Clavain, or I would not have brought you this far. I’m right, of course, aren’t I? You will help us, won’t you?]
Clavain looked around the room, taking in the gruesome menagerie of wraithlike seniors, wizened elders and obscene glass-bottled end-state Conjoiners. They were all hanging on his answer, even the visible brains seeming to hesitate in their wheezing pulsations. Skade was right, of course. There was no one Clavain would have trusted to do the job other than himself, even now, at this late hour in both his career and his life. It would take decades, nearly twenty years just to reach Resurgam, and another twenty to come back with the prize. But forty years was really not a very long time when set against four or five centuries. And for most of that time he would be frozen, anyway.
Forty years; maybe five years at this end to prepare for it, and perhaps as much as a year for the operation itself… altogether, something close to half a century. He looked at Skade, observing the expectant way the ripples on her crest slowed to a halt. He knew that Skade had trouble reading his mind at the deepest level — it was his very opacity which made him both fascinating and infuriating to her — but he suspected that she could read his assent well enough.
I’ll do it. But there are conditions.
[Conditions, Clavain?]
I pick my team. And I say who travels with me. If I ask for Felka and Remontoire, and if they agree to come with me to Resurgam, then you’ll allow it.
Skade considered, then nodded with the precise delicacy of a shadow puppet. [Of course. Forty years is a long time to be away. Is that all?]
No, of course not. I won’t go against Volyova unless I have a crushing tactical superiority from the word go. That’s how I’ve always worked, Skade: full-spectrum dominance. That means more than one ship. Two at the very least, three ideally, and I’ll take more if the Mother Nest can manufacture them in time. I don’t care about the edict, either. We need lighthuggers, heavily armed with the nastiest weapons we’ve got. One prototype isn’t enough, and given the time it takes to build anything these days, we’d better start work immediately. You can’t just click your fingers at an asteroid and have a starship pop out of the end four days later.
Skade touched a finger to her lower lip. Her eyes closed for an instant longer than a blink. For that moment Clavain had the intense feeling that she was in heated dialogue with another. He thought that he saw her eyelids quiver, like a fever-racked dreamer.
[You’re right, Clavain. We will need ships; new ones, incorporating the refinements built into Nightshade. But you don’t have to worry. We’ve already started making them. As a matter of fact, they’re coming on nicely.]
Clavain narrowed his eyes. New ships? Where?
[A little way from here, Clavain.]
He nodded. Good. Then it won’t hurt to take me to see them, will it? I’d like to have a look over them before it’s too late to change anything.
[Clavain…]
That isn’t open to negotiation either, Skade. If I want to get the job done, I’ll need to see the tools of my trade.
NINE
The Inquisitor relaxed her seat restraints and sketched a window for herself in the opaque hull material of the Triumvir’s shuttle. The hull obligingly opened a transparent rectangle, offering the Inquisitor her first view of Resurgam from space in fifteen years.
Much had changed even in that relatively brief span of planetary time. Clouds which had previously been vapid streaks of high-altitude moisture now billowed in thick creamy masses, whipped into spiral patterns by the blind artistry of Coriolis force. Sunlight glared back at her from the enamelled surfaces of lakes and miniature seas. There were hard-edged expanses of green and gold stitched across the planet in geometric clusters, threaded by silver-blue irrigation channels deep enough to carry barges. There were the faint grey scratches of slev lines and highways. Cities and settlements were smears of crosshatched streets and buildings, barely resolved even
when the Inquisitor asked the window to flex into magnification mode. Near the hubs of the oldest settlements, like Cuvier, were the remnants of the old habitat domes or their foundation rings. Now and then she saw the bright moving bead of a transport dirigible high in the stratosphere, or the much smaller speck of an aircraft on government duty. But on this scale most human activity was invisible. She might as well have been studying surface features on some hugely magnified virus.
The Inquisitor, who after years of suppressing that part of her personality was again beginning to think of herself as Ana Khouri, did not have any particularly strong feelings of attachment to Resurgam, even after all the years she had spent incognito on its surface. But what she saw from orbit was sobering. The planet was more than the temporary colony it had been when she had first arrived in the system. It was a home to many people, all they had known. In the course of her investigations she had met many of them and she knew that there were still good people on Resurgam. They could not all be blamed for the present government or the injustices of the past. They at least deserved the chance to live and die on the world they had come to call their home. And by dying she meant by natural causes. That, unfortunately, was the part that could no longer be guaranteed.
The shuttle was tiny and fast. The Triumvir, Ilia Volyova, was snoozing in the other seat, with the peak of a nondescript grey cap tugged down over her brow. It was the shuttle that had brought her down to Resurgam in the first place, before she contacted the Inquisitor. The shuttle’s avionics program knew how to dodge between the government radar sweeps, but it had always seemed prudent to keep such excursions to a minimum. If they were caught, if there was even a suspicion that a spacecraft was routinely entering and leaving Resurgam’s atmosphere, heads would roll at every level of government. Even if Inquisition House was not directly implicated, Khouri’s position would become extremely unsafe. The backgrounds of key government personnel would be subjected to a deep and probing scrutiny. Despite her precautions, her origins might be revealed.
The stealthy ascent had necessitated a shallow acceleration profile, but once it was clear of atmosphere and outside the effective range of the radar sweeps the shuttle’s engines revved up to three gees, pressing the two of them back into their seats. Khouri began to feel drowsy and realised, just as she slid into sleep, that the shuttle was pumping a perfumed narcotic into the air. She slept dreamlessly, and awoke with the same mild sense of objection.
They were somewhere else.
‘How long were we under?’ she asked Volyova, who was smoking.
‘Just under a day. I hope that alibi you cooked up was good, Ana; you’re going to need it when you get back to Cuvier.’
‘I said I had to go into the wilderness to interview a deep-cover agent. Don’t worry; I established the background for this a long time ago. I always knew I might have to be away for a while.’ Khouri undid her seat restraints — the shuttle was no longer accelerating — and attempted to scratch an itch somewhere near the small of her back. ‘Any chance of a shower, whenever we get where we’re going?’
‘That depends. Where exactly do you think we’re headed?’
‘Let’s just say I have a horrible feeling I’ve already been there.’
Volyova stubbed out her cigarette and made the front of the hull turn glassy. They were in deep interplanetary space, still in the ecliptic, but good light-minutes from any world, yet something was blocking the view of the starfield ahead of them.
‘There she is, Ana. The good ship Nostalgia for Infinity. Still very much as you left her.’
‘Thanks. Any other cheering sentiments, while you’re at it?’
‘The last time I checked the showers were out of order.’
‘The last time you checked?’
Volyova paused and made a clucking sound with her tongue. ‘Buckle up. I’m taking us in.’
They swooped in close to the dark misshapen mass of the lighthugger. Khouri remembered her first approach to this same ship, back when she had been tricked aboard it in the Epsilon Eridani system. It had looked just about normal then, about what one would expect of a large, moderately old trade lighthugger. There had been a distinct absence of odd excrescences and protuberances, a marked lack of daggerlike jutting appendages or elbowed turretlike growths. The hull had been more or less smooth — worn and weathered here and there, interrupted by machines, sensor-pods and entry bays in other places — but there had been nothing about it that would have invited particular comment or disquiet. There had been no acres of lizardskin texturing or dried-mudplain expanses of interlocked platelets; no suggestion that buried biological imperatives had finally erupted to the surface in an orgy of biomechanical transformation.
But now the ship did not look much like a ship at all. What it did resemble, if Khouri had to associate it with anything, was a fairytale palace gone sick, a once-glittering assemblage of towers and oubliettes and spires that had been perverted by the vilest of magics. The basic shape of the starship was still evident: she could pick out the main hull and its two jutting engine nacelles, each larger than a freight-dirigible hangar; but that functional core was almost lost under the baroque growth layers that had lately stormed the ship. Various organising principles had been at work, ensuring that the growths, which had been mediated by the ship’s repair and redesign subsystems, had a mad artistry about them, a foul flamboyance which both awed and revolted. There were spirals like the growth patterns in ammonites. There were whorls and knots like vastly magnified wood grain. There were spars and filaments and netlike meshes, bristling hairlike spines and blocky chancrous masses of interlocked crystals. There were places where some major structure had been echoed and re-echoed in a fractal diminuendo, vanishing down to the limit of vision. The crawling intricacies of the transformations operated on all scales. If one looked for too long, one started seeing faces or parts of faces in the juxtapositions of warped armour. Look longer and one started seeing one’s own horrified reflection. But under all that, Khouri thought, it was still a ship.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I see it hasn’t got a fuck of a lot better since I was away.’
Volyova smiled beneath the brim of her cap. ‘I’m encouraged. That sounds a lot less like the Inquisitor and a lot more like the old Ana Khouri.’
‘Yeah? Pity it took a fucking nightmare like that to bring me back.’
‘Oh, this is nothing,’ Volyova said cheerfully. ‘Wait until we’re inside.’
The shuttle had to swerve through a wrinkled eyelike gap in the hull growth to reach the docking bay. But the interior of the bay was still more or less rectangular, and the major servicing systems, which had never much depended on nanotechnology, were still in place and recognisable. An assortment of other in-system craft was packed into the chamber, ranging from blunt-nosed vacuum tugs to major shuttles.
They docked. This part of the ship was not spun for gravity, so they disembarked under weightless conditions, pulling themselves along via grab rails. Khouri was more than willing to let Volyova go ahead of her. Both of them carried torches and emergency oxygen masks, and Khouri was very tempted to start using her supply. The air in the ship was horribly warm and humid, with a rotten taste to it. It was like breathing someone else’s stomach gas.
Khouri covered her mouth with her sleeve, fighting the urge to retch. ‘Ilia…’
‘You’ll get used to it. It isn’t harmful.’ She extracted something from her pocket. ‘Cigarette?’
‘Have you ever known me to say yes to one of those damned things before?’
‘There’s always a first time.’
Khouri waited while Volyova lit the cigarette for her and then drew on it experimentally. It was bad, but still a marked improvement on unfiltered ship air.
‘Filthy habit, really,’ Volyova said, with a smile. ‘But then filthy times call for filthy habits. Feeling better now?’
Khouri nodded, but without any great conviction.
They moved through gulletlike tunnels whose
walls glistened with damp secretions or beguilingly regular crystal patterns. Khouri brushed herself along with gloved hands. Now and then she recognised some old aspect of the ship — a conduit, bulkhead or inspection box — but typically it would be half-melted into its surroundings or surreally distorted. Hard surfaces had become fuzzily fractal, extending blurred grey boundaries into thin air. Varicoloured slimes and unguents threw back their torchlights in queasy diffraction patterns. Amoebalike blobs drifted through the air, following — or at times swimming against, it seemed — the prevailing shipboard air-currents.
Via grinding locks and wheels they transferred to the part of the ship that was still rotating. Khouri was grateful for the gravity, but with it came an unanticipated unpleasantness. Now there was somewhere for the fluids and secretions to run to. They dripped and dribbled from the walls in miniature cataracts, congealing on the floor before finding their way to a drainage aperture or hole. Certain secretions had formed stalagmites and stalactites, amber and snot-green prongs fingering between floor and ceiling. Khouri did her best not to brush against them, but it was not the easiest of tasks. She noticed that Volyova had no such inhibitions. Within minutes her jacket was smeared and swabbed with several varieties of shipboard effluent.
‘Relax,’ Volyova said, noticing her discomfort. ‘It’s perfectly safe. There’s nothing on the ship that can harm either of us. You — um — have had those gunnery implants taken out, haven’t you?’
‘You should remember. You did it.’
‘Just checking.’
‘Ha. You’re actually enjoying this, aren’t you?’
‘I’ve learned to take my pleasures where I can find them, Ana. Especially in times of deep existential crisis…’ Ilya Volyova flicked a cigarette butt into the shadows and lit herself another.
They continued in silence. Eventually they reached one of the elevator shafts that threaded the ship lengthwise, like the main elevator shaft in a skyscraper. With the ship rotating rather than being under thrust it was much easier to move along its lateral axis. But it was still four kilometres from the tip of the ship to its tail, so it made sense to use the shafts wherever possible. To Khouri’s surprise, a car was waiting for them in the shaft. She followed Volyova into it with moderate trepidation, but the car looked normal inside and accelerated smoothly enough.
The Revelation Space Collection (revelation space) Page 159
