She waited for his reply to crawl back to her. The delay could be artificial, but it almost certainly meant he was still aboard Zodiacal Light.
‘Why would you want to cut me any slack, Triumvir?’
‘You’re not a bad man, Clavain. Just… misguided. You think you need the weapons more than I do, but you’re wrong, mistaken. I won’t hold it against you. No serious harm has yet been done. Turn your forces around and we’ll call it a misunderstanding.’
‘You speak as someone who thinks they hold the upper hand, Ilia. I wouldn’t be so certain, if I were you.’
‘I have the weapons, Clavain.’ She found herself smiling and frowning at the same time. ‘That makes rather a lot of difference, don’t you think?’
‘I’m sorry, Ilia, but I think one ultimatum is enough for anyone, don’t you?’
‘You’re a fool, Clavain. The sad thing is that you’ll never know how much of a fool.’
He did not respond.
‘Well, Ilia?’ Khouri asked.
‘I gave the bastard his chance. Now it’s time to stop playing games.’ She raised her voice. ‘Captain? Can you hear me? I want you to give me full control of cache weapon seventeen. Are you willing to do that?’
There was no answer. The moment stretched. The back of her neck crawled with anticipation. If the Captain was not prepared to let her actually use the five deployed weapons, then all her plans crumbled to dust and Clavain would suddenly seem a lot less foolish than he had a minute earlier.
Then she noticed the subtle change in the weapon’s icon status, signifying that she now had full military control of cache weapon seventeen.
‘Thank you, Captain,’ Volyova said sweetly. Then she addressed the weapon. ‘Hello, Seventeen. Nice to be doing business with you again.’
She pushed her hand into the projection, pinching the floating icon of the weapon between her fingers. Again the icon responded sluggishly, reflecting the dead weight of the weapon as it was brought out from the sensor shadow of Infinity’s hull. As it moved it was aligning itself, bringing its long killing axis to bear on the distant, but not really so distant, target of Zodiacal Light. At any time, Volyova’s knowledge of the position of Clavain’s ship was twenty seconds out of date, but that was only a minor annoyance. In the unlikely event that he suddenly moved, she was still guaranteed a kill. She would sweep his volume of possible occupancy with the weapon, knowing that she was sure to hit him at some point. She would know when she did; the detonation of his Conjoiner drives would light up the entire system. If anything was guaranteed to prick the interest of the Inhibitors, it would be that.
Still, she had to do it.
Yet Volyova trembled on the verge of execution. It felt wrong: too final; too abrupt; too — and this surprised her — unsporting. She felt she owed him a last chance to back down; that some final, direly urgent warning should be given. He had come such a long way, after all. And he had clearly imagined himself to be in with a chance of gaining the weapons.
Clavain… Clavain… she thought to herself. It should not have been like this…
But it was, and that was that.
She tapped the icon, like a baby poking a bauble.
‘Goodbye,’ Volyova whispered.
The moment passed. The status indices and symbols next to the cache weapon’s icon changed, signifying a profound alteration in the weapon’s condition. She looked at the real-time image of Clavain’s ship, mentally counting down the twenty seconds it would take before the ship was torn apart by the beam from weapon seventeen. The beam would chew a canyon-sized wound in Clavain’s ship, assuming it did not trigger an immediate and fatal Conjoiner-drive detonation.
After ten seconds he had not moved. She knew then that her aim had been good, that the impact would be precise and devastating. Clavain would know nothing of his own death, nothing of the oblivion that was coming.
She waited out the remaining ten seconds, anticipating the bitter sense of triumph that would accompany the kill.
The time elapsed. Involuntarily, she flinched against the coming brightness, like a child waiting for the biggest and best firework.
Twenty seconds became twenty-one… twenty-one became twenty-five… thirty. Half a minute passed. Then a minute.
Clavain’s ship remained in view.
Nothing had happened.
THIRTY-SIX
She heard his voice again. It was calm, polite, almost apologetic.
‘I know what you just tried, Ilia. But don’t you think I’d already have considered the possibility of you turning the weapons against me?’
She stammered an answer. ‘What… did… you… do?’
Twenty seconds stretched to an eternity.
‘Nothing, really,’ Clavain said. ‘I just told the weapon not to fire. They’re our property, Ilia, not yours. Didn’t it occur to you for one moment that we might have a way to protect ourselves against them?’
‘You’re lying,’ she said.
Clavain sounded amused, as if he had secretly hoped she would demand more proof. ‘I can show it to you again, if you like.’
He told her to turn her attention to the other cache weapons, the ones that she had already thrown against the Inhibitors.
‘Now concentrate on the weapon closest to the remains of Roc, will you? You’re about to see it stop firing.’
It was a different kind of war after that. Within an hour the first waves of Clavain’s assault force were reaching the immediate volume of space around Nostalgia for Infinity. He watched it at the dead remove of ten light-seconds, feeling as distant from the battle he had initiated as some antiquated hill-top general gazing at his armies through field glasses, the din and fury of combat too far away to hear.
‘It was a good trick,’ Volyova told him.
‘It wasn’t any trick. Just a precaution you should never have assumed we wouldn’t have taken. Our own weapons, Ilia? Be serious.’
‘A signal, Clavain?’
‘A coded neutrino burst. You can’t block it or jam it, so don’t even think of trying. It won’t work.’
She came back with a question he had not been expecting, one that reminded him not to underestimate her for an instant.
‘Fair enough. But I would have thought, assuming you have the means to stop them from working, that you’d also have the means to destroy them.’
Despite the timelag he knew he only had a second or so to concoct an answer. ‘What good would that do me, Ilia? I’d be destroying the very things I’ve come to collect.’
Volyova’s response snapped back twenty seconds later. ‘Not necessarily, Clavain. You could just threaten to destroy them. I presume the destruction of a cache weapon would be fairly spectacular no matter which way you went about it? Actually, I don’t need to presume anything. I’ve already seen it happen, and yes, it was spectacular. Why not threaten to detonate one of the weapons still inside my ship and see where that takes you?’
‘You shouldn’t give me ideas,’ he told her.
‘Why not? Because you might do it? I don’t think you can, Clavain. I don’t think you have the means to do anything but stop the weapons from firing.’
She had led him into a trap by then. He could do nothing but follow her. ‘I do…’
‘Then prove it. Send a destruction signal to one of the other weapons, one of those across the system. Why not destroy the one you’ve already stopped?’
‘It would be silly to destroy an irreplaceable weapon just to make a point, wouldn’t it?’
‘That would very much depend on the point you wanted to make, Clavain.’
He realised that he gained nothing more by lying to her. He sighed, feeling a tremendous weight lift off his shoulders. ‘I can’t destroy any of the weapons.’
‘Good…’ she purred. ‘Negotiation is all about transparency, you see. Tell me, can the weapons ever be destroyed remotely, Clavain?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There is a code, unique to each weapon.’
‘And?’
‘I don’t know those codes. But I am searching for them, trying permutations.’
‘So you might get there eventually?’
Clavain scratched his beard. ‘Theoretically. But don’t hold your breath.’
‘You’ll keep searching, though?’
‘I’d like to know what they are, wouldn’t you?’
‘I don’t have to, Clavain. I have my own self-destruct systems grafted to each weapon, entirely independent of anything your own people might have installed at root level.’
‘You strike me as a prudent woman, Ilia.’
‘I take my work very seriously, Clavain. But then so do you.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘So what happens now? I’m still not going to give you the things, you know. I still have other weapons.’
Clavain watched the battle on extreme magnification, glints of light peppering the space around the Triumvir’s ship. The first fatalities had already been recorded. Fifteen of Scorpio’s pigs were dead, killed by Volyova’s hull defences before they got within thirty kilometres of the ship. Other assault teams were reportedly closer — one team might even have reached the hull — but whatever the outcome, it no longer stood any chance of being a bloodless campaign.
‘I know,’ Clavain said, before ending the conversation.
He placed Remontoire in complete control of Zodiacal Light, and then assigned himself one of the last remaining spacecraft in the ship’s bay. The ex-civilian shuttle was one of H’s; he recognised the luminous arcs and slashes of the banshee war markings as they stammered into life. The wasp-waisted ship was small and lightly armoured, but it carried the last functioning inertia-suppression device and that was why he had kept it back until now. On some subconscious level he must have always known he would want to join the battle, and this ship would get him there in little more than an hour.
Clavain was suited-up, cycling through the airlock connection that allowed access to the berthed ship, when she caught up with him.
‘Clavain.’
He turned around, his helmet tucked under his arm. ‘Felka,’ he said.
‘You didn’t tell me you were leaving.’
‘I didn’t have the nerve.’
She nodded. ‘I’d have tried talking you out of it. But I understand. This is something you have to do.’
He nodded without saying anything.
‘Clavain…’
‘Felka, I’m so sorry about what I…’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, taking a step closer. ‘I mean, it does matter — of course it matters — but we can talk about it later. On the way.’
‘On the way where?’ he said stupidly.
‘To battle, Clavain. I’m coming with you.’
It was only then that he realised that she was carrying a suit herself, bundled under one arm, the helmet dangling from her fist like an overripe fruit.
‘Why?’
‘Because if you die, I want to die as well. It’s as simple as that, Clavain.’
They fell away from Zodiacal Light. Clavain watched the ship recede, wondering if he would ever set foot in it again. ‘This won’t be comfortable,’ he warned as he gunned the thrust up to its ceiling. The inertia-suppression bubble swallowed four-fifths of the banshee craft’s mass, but the bubble’s effective radius did not encompass the flight deck. Clavain and Felka felt the full crush of eight gees building up like a series of weights being placed on their chests.
‘I can take it,’ she told him.
‘It’s not too late to turn back.’
‘I’m coming with you. There’s a lot we need to discuss.’
Clavain called a battle realisation into view, appraising any changes that had taken place since he had gone to fetch his spacesuit. His ships swarmed around Nostalgia for Infinity like enraged hornets, arcing tighter with each loop. Twenty-three members of Scorpio’s army were now dead, most of them pigs, but the closest of the attack swarm were now within kilometres of the great ship’s hull; at such close range they became very difficult targets for Volyova’s medium-range defences. Storm Bird, identified by its own fat icon, was now approaching the edge of the combat swarm. The Triumvir had pulled all but one of her hell-class weapons back within cover of the lighthugger. Elsewhere, on the general system-wide view, the wolf weapon continued to sink its single gravitational fang into the meat of the star. Clavain contracted the displays until they were just large enough to view, and then turned to Felka. ‘I’m afraid talking isn’t going to be too easy.’
[Then we won’t talk, will we?]
He looked at her, startled that she had spoken to him in the Conjoiner fashion, opening a window between their heads, pushing words and much more than words into his skull. Felka…
[It’s all right, Clavain. Just because I didn’t do this very often doesn’t mean I couldn’t…]
I never thought you couldn’t… it’s just… They were close enough for Conjoined thought, he realised, even though there was no Conjoiner machinery in the ship itself. The fields generated by their implants were strong enough to influence each other without intermediate amplification, provided they were no more than a few metres apart.
[You’re right. Normally I didn’t want to. But you aren’t just anyone.]
You don’t have to if you don’t…
[Clavain: a word of warning. You can look all the way into my head. There are no barriers, no partitions, no mnemonic blockades. Not to you, at least. But don’t look too deeply. It’s not that you’d see anything private, or anything I’m ashamed of… it’s just…]
I might not be able to take it?
[Sometimes I can’t take it, Clavain, and I’ve lived with it since I was born.]
I understand.
He could see into the surface layers of her personality, feel the surface traffic of her thoughts. The data was calm. There was nothing that he could not examine; no sensory experience or memory that he could not unravel and open as if it were one of his own. But beneath that calm surface layer, glimpsed like something rushing behind smoked glass, there lay a howling storm of consciousness. It was frantic and ceaseless, like a machine always on the point of ripping itself apart, but one that would never find respite in its own destruction.
He pulled back, terrified that he might fall in. [You see what I mean?]
I always knew you lived with something like that. I just didn’t…
[It isn’t your fault. It isn’t anyone’s fault, not even Galiana’s. It’s just the way I am.]
He understood then, perhaps more thoroughly than at any point since he had known her, just what Felka’s craving was like. Games, complex games, sated that howling machine, gave it something to work on, slowed it to something less furious. When she had been a child, the Wall had been all that she needed, but the Wall had been taken from her. After that, nothing had ever been enough. Perhaps the machine would have evolved as Felka grew. Or perhaps the Wall would always have turned out to be inadequate. All that mattered now was that she find surrogates for it: games or puzzles, labyrinths or riddles, which the machine could process and thereby give her the tiniest degree of inner calm.
Now I understand why you think the Jugglers might be able to help.
[Even if they can’t change me — and I’m not even sure I want them to change me — they might at least give me something to think about, Clavain. So many alien minds have been imprinted in their seas, so many patterns stored. I might even be able to make sense of something that the other swimmers haven’t. I might even be valuable.]
I always said I’d do what I could. But it hasn’t got any easier. You understand that, don’t you?
[Of course.]
Felka…
She must have read enough of his mind to see what he was about to ask. [I lied, Clavain. I lied to save you, to get you to turn around.]
He already knew; Skade had told him. But until now he had never entirely dismissed the possibility that Skade herself might have been lying; tha
t Felka was indeed his daughter. It would have been a white lie, in that case. I’ve been responsible for enough of those in my time.
[It was still a lie. But I didn’t want Skade to kill you. It seemed better not to tell the truth…]
You must have known that I’d always wondered…
[It was natural for you to wonder, Clavain. There was always a bond between us, after you saved my life. And you were Galiana’s prisoner before I was born. It would have been easy for her to harvest genetic material…] Her thoughts became hazy. [Clavain… do you mind if I ask you something?]
There aren’t any secrets between us, Felka.
[Did you make love with Galiana, when you were her prisoner?]
He answered with a calm clarity of mind that surprised even himself. I don’t know. I think so. I remember it. But then what do memories mean, after four hundred years? Maybe I’m just remembering a memory. I hope that isn’t the case. But afterwards… when I had become one of the Conjoined…
[Yes?]
We did make love. Early on, we made love often. The other Conjoiners didn’t like it, I think — they saw it as an animal act, a primitive throwback to baseline humanity. Galiana didn’t agree, of course. She was always the sensual one, the one who revelled in the realm of the senses. That was what her enemies never truly understood about her — that she honestly loved humanity more than they did. It was why she made the Conjoined. Not to be something better than humanity, but as a gift, a promise of what humanity could be if we only realised our potential. Instead, they painted her as some coldly reductionist monster. They were so terribly wrong. Galiana didn’t think of love as some ancient Darwinian trick of brain chemistry that had to be eradicated from the human mind. She saw it as something that had to be brought to its culmination, like a seed that needed to be nurtured as it grew. But they never understood that part. And the trouble was you had to be Conjoined before you appreciated what it was that she had achieved.
Clavain paused, taking a moment to review the disposition of his forces around the Triumvir’s ship. There had been two more deaths in the last minute, but the steady encroachment of his forces continued. Yes, we did make love, back in my first days amongst the Conjoined. But there came a time when it was no longer necessary, except as a nostalgic act. It felt like something that children do: not wrong, not primitive, not even dull, just no longer of any interest. It wasn’t that we had stopped loving each other, or had lost our thirst for sensory experience. It was simply that there were so many more rewarding ways of achieving that same kind of intimacy. Once you’ve touched someone else’s mind, walked through their dreams, seen the world through their eyes, felt the world through their skin… well… there never seemed to be any real need to go back to the old way. And I was never much one for nostalgia. It was as if we had stepped into a more adult world, crammed with its own pleasures and enticements. We had no reason to look back at what we were missing.
The Revelation Space Collection (revelation space) Page 218
