‘Would you care to speculate?’ Clavain asked Remontoire.
‘She was desperate to escape us, desperate to pull ahead. She might have considered something extreme.’
‘Extreme?’ Xavier asked. He had one hand around Antoinette’s waist. The two of them were filthy with machine oil.
‘She already had inertia suppression,’ Remontoire said. ‘But I think this was something else — a modification of the same equipment to push it into a different state.’
‘Such as?’ Xavier asked.
Clavain looked at Remontoire, too.
Remontoire said, ‘The technology will suppress inertial mass — that’s what Skade called a state-two field — but it doesn’t remove it entirely. In a state-three field, however, all inertial mass drops to zero. Matter becomes photonic, unable to travel at anything other than the speed of light. Time dilation becomes infinite, so the ship would remain frozen in the photonic state until the end of time.’
Clavain nodded at his friend. Remtontoire appeared perfectly willing to wear the exoskeleton even though it was functioning as a form of restraint, capable of immobilising him should Clavain decide that he could not be trusted.
‘What about state four?’ Clavain asked.
‘That might be more useful,’ Remontoire said. ‘If she could tunnel through state three, skipping it entirely, she might be able to achieve a smooth transition to a state-four field. Inside that field, the ship would flip into a tachyonic mass state, unable to do anything but travel faster than light.’
‘Skade tried that?’ Xavier asked reverently.
‘It’s as good an explanation as any I can think of,’ Remontoire said.
‘What do you think happened?’ Antoinette asked.
‘Some sort of field instability,’ Pauline Sukhoi said, the pale reflection of her haunted face hanging in the display tank. She spoke slowly and solemnly. ‘Managing a bubble of altered space-time makes fusion containment look like the kind of game children play on their birthdays. My suspicion is that Skade first created a microscopic bubble, probably sub-atomic, certainly no larger than a bacterium. At that scale, it’s deceptively easy to manipulate. See those sickles and arms?’ She nodded at the image, which had rotated slightly since it had first appeared. ‘Those would have been her field generators and containment systems. They would have been supposed to allow the field to expand in a stable fashion until it encased the ship. A bubble expanding at light-speed would take less than half a millisecond to swallow a ship the size of Nightshade, but altered vacuum expands superluminally, like inflationary space-time. A state-four bubble has a characteristic doubling time in the order of ten to the minus forty-three seconds. That doesn’t give much time to react if things start going wrong.’
‘And if the bubble kept growing… ?’ Antoinette asked.
‘It won’t,’ Sukhoi said. ‘At least, you wouldn’t ever know about it if it does. No one would.’
‘Skade’s lucky she has a ship left,’ Xavier said.
Sukhoi nodded. ‘It must have been a small accident, probably during the transition between states. She may have hit state three, converting a small chunk of her ship to pure white light. A small photo-leptonic explosion.’
‘It looks survivable,’ Scorpio said.
‘Are there life-signs?’ Antoinette asked.
Clavain shook his head. ‘None. But there wouldn’t be, not with Nightshade. The prototype’s designed for maximum stealth. Our usual scanning methods won’t work.’
Scorpio adjusted some settings, causing the colours of the image to shift to spectral greens and blues. ‘Thermal,’ he said. ‘She still has power, Clavain. If there’d been a major systems blow-out, her hull would be five degrees cooler by now.’
‘I don’t doubt that there are survivors,’ Clavain said.
Scorpio nodded. ‘Some, maybe. They’ll lie low until we’re ahead of them, out of sensor range. Then they’ll kick into repair mode. Before you know it they’ll be on our tail, just as much a problem as they ever were.’
‘I’ve thought about that, Scorp,’ said Clavain.
The pig nodded. ‘And?’
‘I’m not going to attack them.’
Scorpio’s wild dark eyes flared. ‘Clavain…’
‘Felka is still alive.’
There was an awkward silence. Clavain felt it press around him. They were all looking at him, even Sukhoi, each of them thanking their stars that they did not have to take this decision.
‘You don’t know that,’ Scorpio said. Clavain saw the lines of tension etched into his jaw. ‘Skade lied before and killed Lasher. She hasn’t given us any evidence that she really has Felka. That’s because she doesn’t have her, or because Felka is dead now.’
Calmly, Clavain said, ‘What evidence could she give? There isn’t anything she couldn’t fake.’
‘She could have learned something from Felka, something only she would know.’
‘You never met Felka, Scorp. She’s strong — much stronger than Skade assumes. She wouldn’t give Skade anything Skade could use to control me.’
‘Then perhaps she does have her, Clavain. But that doesn’t mean she’s awake. She’s probably in reefersleep, so she doesn’t cause any trouble.’
‘What difference would that make?’ Clavain asked.
‘She wouldn’t feel anything,’ Scorpio said. ‘We have enough weapons now, Clavain. Nightshade is a sitting duck. We can take her out instantly, painlessly. Felka won’t know a thing.’
Clavain reached for his anger, forcing it to lie low. ‘Would you say that if she hadn’t murdered Lasher?’
The pig thumped the railing. ‘She did, Clavain. That’s all that matters.’
‘No…’ Antoinette said. ‘It isn’t all that matters. Clavain’s right. We can’t start acting like a single human life doesn’t matter. We become as bad as the wolves if we do that.’
Xavier, next to her, beamed proudly. ‘I agree,’ he said. ‘Sorry, Scorpio. I know she killed Lasher, and I know how much that pissed you off.’
‘You have no idea,’ Scorpio said. He did not sound angry so much as regretful. ‘And don’t tell me a single human life suddenly matters. It’s just because you know her. Skade is human, too. What about her, and her allies aboard that ship?’
Cruz, who had been silent until then, spoke softly. ‘Listen to Clavain. He’s right. We’ll get another chance to kill Skade. This just doesn’t feel right.’
‘Might I make a suggestion?’ Remontoire said.
Clavain looked at Remontoire uneasily. ‘What, Rem?’
‘We are just — just — within shuttle range. It would cost us more antimatter, a fifth of our remaining stocks, but we may never get another chance like this.’
‘Another chance to do what?’ Clavain asked.
Remontoire blinked, surprised, as if this was entirely too obvious to state. ‘To rescue Felka, of course.’
TWENTY-NINE
Remontoire’s calculation had been unerringly accurate; so much so that Clavain suspected he had already costed the energy expenditure of the shuttle flight before the rescue operation had been more than a glint in Clavain’s eye.
Three of them went out: Scorpio, Remontoire and Clavain.
There was mercifully little time to make the shuttle ready. Merciful because had Clavain been granted hours or days, he would have spent the entire time convulsed in doubt, endlessly balancing one additional weapon or piece of armour against the fuel that would be saved by leaving it behind. As it was they had to make do with one of the stripped-down shuttles that had been used to resupply the defence shuttle before they had brought the laser-powered shield sail into use. The shuttle was just a skeleton, a wispy geodesic sketch of black spars, struts and naked silvery subsystems. It looked, to Clavain’s eyes, faintly obscene. He was used to machines that kept their innards decently covered. But it would do the job well enough, he supposed. If Skade mounted any serious defence, armour wouldn’t help them anyway.
The flight deck was the only part of the ship that was shielded from space, and even then it was not pressurised. They would have to wear suits for the entire operation and take an additional suit with them for Felka to wear on the return leg. There was also room to stow a reefersleep casket if it turned out she was frozen. But in that case, Felka’s return mass would have to be offset by leaving behind weapons and fuel tanks at the halfway point.
Clavain took the middle seat, with the flight controls plugged into his suit. Scorpio sat on his left, Remontoire on his right; both could assume control of the avionics should Clavain need a rest.
‘Are you sure you trust me enough to have me along for the operation?’ Remontoire had asked with a playful smile when they were deciding who would go on the mission.
‘I guess I’ll find out, won’t I?’ Clavain had said.
‘I won’t be much use to you in an exoskeleton. You can’t put a standard suit over one, and we don’t have powered armour ready.’
Clavain had nodded at Blood, Scorpio’s deputy. ‘Get him out of the exoskeleton. If he tries anything, you know what to do.’
‘I won’t, Clavain,’ Remontoire had assured him.
‘I almost believe you. But I’m not sure I’d take the risk if there was someone else who knew Nightshade as well as you do. Or Skade, for that matter.’
‘I’m coming too,’ Scorpio had insisted.
‘We’re going to get Felka,’ Clavain had said. ‘Not to avenge Lasher.’
‘Perhaps.’ In so far as Clavain could read his expression, Scorpio had not looked fully convinced. ‘But let’s be honest. Once you’ve got Felka, you’re not going to walk out of there without doing some damage, are you?’
‘I’ll accept Skade’s surrender gratefully,’ Clavain had said.
‘We’ll take pinhead munitions,’ Scorpio had said. ‘You won’t miss a little hot dust, Clavain, and it’ll sure put a hole in Nightshade.’
‘I’m grateful for your help, Scorpio. And I understand your feelings towards Skade after what she did. But we need you here, to supervise the weapons programme.’
‘And we don’t need you?’
‘This is about me and Felka,’ Clavain had said.
Scorpio had put a hand on his arm. ‘So take help when it’s offered. I’m not in the habit of co-operating with people, Clavain, so make the most of this rare display of magnanimity and shut the fuck up.’
Clavain had shrugged. He had not felt optimistic about the mission, but Scorpio’s enthusiasm for a fight was oddly infectious.
He had turned to Remontoire. ‘Looks as if he’s along for the ride, Rem. Certain you want to be on the team now?’
Remontoire had looked at the pig, then back at Clavain. ‘We’ll manage,’ he had said.
Now that the mission had begun the two of them were silent, letting Clavain concentrate on the business of flying. He gunned the shuttle away from Zodiacal Light, homing in on the drifting Nightshade, trying not to think of how fast they were actually moving. The two major ships were falling through space at only two per cent below the speed of light, but there was still no strong visual cue that they were moving so rapidly. The stars had been shifted in both position and colour by relativistic effects, but they still appeared perfectly fixed and stationary, even at this high tau factor. Had their trajectory taken them close to a luminous body like a star, they might have seen it swing by in the night, squashed away from sphericity by Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction. But even then it would not have slammed past unless they were nearly skimming its atmosphere. The exhaust flare of another ship, heading back to Yellowstone, would have been visible, but they had the corridor to themselves. And though the hulls of both ships glowed in the near infra-red, heated by the slow, constant abrasion of interstellar hydrogen and microscopic dust grains, this was nothing Clavain’s mind could process into any visceral sense of speed. He was aware that the same collisions were a problem for the shuttle, too, though its much smaller cross section made them less likely. But cosmic rays, relativistically boosted by their motion, were eating into him every second. That was why there was armour around the flight deck.
The trip to Nightshade passed quickly, perhaps because Clavain was fearful of what he would find upon his arrival. The trio spent most of the journey unconscious, conserving suit power, knowing that there was realistically nothing they could do should Skade launch an attack.
Clavain and his companions came around when they were in visual range of the crippled lighthugger.
She was dark, of course — they were in true interstellar space here — but Clavain could see her because Zodiacal Light was shining one of its optical lasers on to her hull. He could not make out all the details he wanted to, but he could see enough to feel decidedly ill at ease. The effect was that of moonlight on a foreboding gothic edifice. The shuttle threw a tracery of moving shadows across the larger ship, making it appear to squirm and move.
The weird augmentations looked even stranger up close. Their complexity had not really been apparent before, nor the extent to which they had been twisted and sheared by the accident. But Skade had been remarkably fortunate, since the damage was largely confined to the tapering rear part of her ship. The two Conjoiner drives, thrust out from either side of the thoraxlike hull, had suffered only superficial harm. Clavain steered the shuttle closer, convincing himself that any attack would already have happened. Delicately, he nosed the skeletal craft between the stingerlike curves and arcs of the ruined faster-than-light drive.
‘She was desperate,’ he said to his companions. ‘She must have known there was no way we were going to get to Resurgam ahead of her, but that wasn’t good enough for Skade. She wanted to get there years ahead of us.’
Scorpio said, ‘She had the means, Clavain. Why are you surprised that she used them?’
‘He’s right to be surprised,’ Remontoire cut in before Clavain could answer. ‘Skade was perfectly aware of the risks of toying with the state-four transition. She denied any interest in it when I asked her about it, but I had the impression she was lying. Her own experiments must already have revealed the risks.’
‘Once thing’s for sure,’ Scorpio said. ‘She wanted those guns badly, Clavain. They must mean a fuck of a lot to her.’
Clavain nodded. ‘But we’re not really dealing with Skade, I think. We’re dealing with whatever it was that got to her in the Château. The Mademoiselle wanted the weapons, and she just planted the idea in Skade’s mind.’
‘This Mademoiselle interests me greatly,’ Remontoire said. He had been told some of what had happened in Chasm City. ‘I’d have liked to have met her.’
‘Too late,’ Scorpio said. ‘H had her corpse in a box — didn’t Clavain tell you?’
‘He had something in a box,’ Remontoire said testily. ‘But evidently not the part of her that mattered. That part reached Skade. Is Skade now, for all we know.’
Clavain slid the shuttle through the last pair of scissorlike blades and back into open space. This side of Nightshade was pitch black, save where the shuttle’s own floods picked out details. Clavain crept along the hull, observing that the antiship weapons were all stowed behind their invisibly seamed hatches. It meant very little: it would only require an eyeblink to deploy them, but it was undeniably reassuring that they were not already pointed at the shuttle.
‘You two know your way around this thing?’ Scorpio said.
‘Of course,’ Remontoire said. ‘It used to be our ship. You should recognise it as well. It’s the same one that pulled you out of Maruska Chung’s cruiser.’
‘The only thing I remember about that is you trying to put the fear of the devil into me, Remontoire.’
With some relief, Clavain realised that they had reached the airlock he had been looking for. There was still no sign of a reaction from the crippled ship: no lights or indications of proximity sensors coming alive. Clavain guyed them to the hull with epoxy-tipped grapples, holding his breath as the suckerlike grapple feet adhered to
the ablative hull armour. But nothing happened.
‘This is the difficult part,’ Clavain said. ‘Rem, I want you to remain here on the shuttle. Scorpio’s coming inside with me.’
‘Might I ask why?’
‘Yes, although I was hoping you wouldn’t. Scorp has more experience of hand-to-hand combat than you do, almost more than me. But the main reason is I don’t trust you enough to have you inside.’
‘You trusted me to come this far.’
‘And I’m prepared to trust you to sit tight on the shuttle until we get out.’ Clavain checked the time. ‘In thirty-five minutes we’re out of return range. Wait half an hour and then leave. Not a minute more, even if Scorp and I are already coming back out of the airlock.’
‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’
‘We’ve budgeted enough fuel to return the three of us plus Felka. If you return alone you’ll have fuel to spare — fuel that we’ll badly need later. That’s what I trust you with, Rem: that responsibility.’
‘But not to come aboard,’ Remontoire said.
‘No. Not with Skade on that ship. I can’t run the risk of you defecting back to her side.’
‘You’re wrong, Clavain.’
‘Am I?’
‘I didn’t defect. Neither did you. It was Skade and the rest of them that changed sides, not us.’
‘C’mon,’ Scorpio said, tugging at Clavain’s arm. ‘We’ve got twenty-nine minutes now.’
The two of them crossed over to Nightshade. Clavain fumbled around the rim of the airlock until he found the nearly invisible recess that concealed the external controls. It was just wide enough to take his gloved hand. He felt the familiar trinity of manual switches — standard Conjoiner design — and tugged them to the open position. Even if there had been a general shipwide power failure, cells within the lock would have retained power to open the door for about a century. Even if that failed, there was a manual mechanism on the other side of the rim.
The Revelation Space Collection (revelation space) Page 205
