‘Can you put aside being a pig for five minutes?’ Khouri asked. ‘It would really help if everything didn’t keep coming back to that.’
‘It keeps coming back to that for me. Sorry if it offends you.’
He heard her sigh. ‘All I’m saying, Scorp, is that we can’t begin to guess how significant Hela is unless we go there. And we’ll have to go there carefully, not barging in with all guns blazing. We’ll have to find out what we need before we ask for it. And we’ll have to be ready to take it if necessary, and to make sure we do it right the first time. But first of all we have to go there.’
‘And what if going there is the worst thing we could do? What if all of this is a setup, to make the job easier for the Inhibitors?’
‘She’s working for us, Scorp, not them.’
‘That’s an assumption,’ he said.
‘She’s my daughter. Don’t you think I have some idea about her intentions?’
Vasko interrupted them, touching Scorpio’s shoulder. ‘I think you need to see this,’ he said.
Scorpio looked at the battle, seeing immediately what Vasko had noticed. It was not good. The beam of the cache weapon was being bent away from its original trajectory, like a ray of light hitting water. There was no sign of anything at the point where the beam changed direction, but it did not take very much imagination to conclude that it was some hidden focus of Inhibitor energy that was throwing the beam off course. There was no weapon left to re-aim and refire; all that could be done now was to sit back and watch what happened to the deviated beam.
Somehow Scorpio knew that it wasn’t just going to sail off into interstellar space, fading harmlessly as it fell into the night.
That was not how the enemy did things.
They did not have long to wait. Seen in magnification, the beam grazed the edge of Ararat’s nearest moon, cleaving its way through hundreds of kilometres of crust and then out the other side. The moon began to come apart like a broken puzzle. Red-hot rocky gore oozed from the wound with dreamlike slowness. It was like the time-lapse opening of some red-hearted flower at dawn.
‘That’s not good,’ Khouri said.
‘You still think this is going according to plan?’ Vasko asked.
The stricken moon was extending a cooling tentacle of cherry-red slurry along the path of its orbit. Scorpio looked at it in dismay, wondering what it would mean for the people on Ararat’s surface. Even a few million tonnes of rubble hitting the ocean would have dreadful consequences for the people left behind, but the amount of debris from the moon would be far, far worse than that.
‘I don’t know,’ Scorpio said.
A little while later, there was a different chime from the console.
‘Encrypted burst from Remontoire,’ Vasko said. ‘Shall I put him on?’
Scorpio told him to do it, watching as a fuzzy, pixellated image of Remontoire appeared on the console. The transmission was highly compressed, subject to jolting gaps and periods when the image froze while Remontoire continued speaking.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but it hasn’t worked quite as well as I’d hoped.’
‘How bad?’ Scorpio mouthed.
It was as if Remontoire had heard him. ‘A small aggregate of Inhibitor machines appears to be pursuing you,’ he said. ‘Not as large as the pack that followed us from Delta Pavonis, but not something you can ignore, either. Have you completed testing the hypometric weaponry? That should be a priority now. And it might not be a bad idea to get the rest of the machinery working as well.’ Remontoire paused, his image breaking up and reassembling. ‘There’s something you need to know,’ he continued. ‘The failure was mine. It had nothing to do with the number of cache weapons in our arsenal. Even if you had given all of them to me, the outcome would have been the same. As a matter of fact, it was good that you didn’t. Your instincts served you well, Mr Pink. I’m glad of that little conversation we had just before I left. You still have a chance.’ He smiled: the expression looked as forced as ever, but Scorpio welcomed it. ‘You may be tempted to respond to this transmission. I recommend that you do nothing of the sort. The wolves will be trying to refine their positional fix on you, and a clear signal like that would do you no favours at all. Goodbye and good luck.’
That was it: the transmission was over.
‘Mr Pink?’ Vasko said. ‘Who’s Mr Pink?’
‘We go back a way,’ Scorpio said.
‘He didn’t say anything about himself,’ Khouri said. ‘Nothing about what he’s going to do.’
‘I don’t think he considered it relevant,’ Scorpio said. ‘There’s nothing we can do to help them, after all. They’ve done what they could for us.’
‘But it wasn’t good enough,’ Malinin said.
‘Maybe it wasn’t,’ Scorpio said, ‘but it was still a lot better than nothing, if you ask me.’
‘The conversation he mentioned,’ Khouri said. ‘What was that about?’
‘That was between me and Mr Clock,’ Scorpio replied.
Hela, 2727
After the surgeon-general had taken her blood, he showed her to her quarters. It was a small room about a third of the way up the Clocktower. It had one stained-glass window, a small, austere-looking bed and a bedside table. There was an annexe containing a washbasin and a toilet. There was some Quaicheist literature on the bedside table.
‘I hope you weren’t expecting the height of luxury,’ Grelier said.
‘I wasn’t expecting anything,’ she said. ‘Until a few hours ago I expected to be working in a clearance gang for the Catherine of Iron.’
‘Then you can’t complain, can you?’
‘I wasn’t intending to.’
‘Play your cards right and we’ll sort out something a little larger,’ he said.
‘This is all I need,’ Rashmika said.
Grelier smiled and left her alone. She said nothing as he left. She had not liked him taking her blood, but had felt powerless to resist. It was not simply the fact that the whole business of the churches and blood made her feel queasy — she knew too much about the indoctrinal viruses that were part and parcel of the Adventist faith — but something else, something that related to her own blood and the fact that she felt violated when he sampled it. The syringe had been empty before he drew the sample, which meant — assuming that the needle was sterile — that he had not tried to put the indoctrinal virus into her. That would have been a violation of a different order, but not necessarily worse. The thought that he had taken her blood was equally distressing.
But why, she wondered, did it bother her so much? It was a reasonable thing to do, at least within the confines of the Lady Morwenna. Everything here ran on blood, so it was hardly objectionable that she had been made to supply a sample. By rights, she should have been grateful that it had stopped there.
But she was not grateful. She was frightened, and she did not exactly know why.
She sat by herself. In the quiet of the room, bathed in the sepulchral light from the stained-glass window, she felt desperately alone. Had all this been a mistake? she wondered. Now that she had reached its roaring heart, the church did not seem like such a distant, abstract entity. It felt more like a machine, something capable of inflicting harm on those who strayed too close to its moving parts. Though she had never specifically set out to reach Quaiche, it had seemed evident to her that only someone very high up in the Adventist hierarchy would be able to reveal the truth about Harbin. But she had also envisaged that the path there would be treacherous and time-consuming. She had been resigned to a long, slow, will-sapping investigation, a slow progress through layers of administration. She would have begun in a clearance gang, about as low as it was possible to get.
Instead, here she was: in Quaiche’s direct service. She should have felt elated at her good fortune. Instead she felt unwittingly manipulated, as if she had set out to play a game fairly and someone had turned a blind eye, letting her win by fiat. On one level she wanted to blame Grelier, b
ut she knew that the surgeon-general was not the whole story. There was something else, too. Had she come all this way to find Harbin, or to meet Quaiche?
For the first time, she was not completely certain.
She began to flick through the Quaicheist literature, looking for some clue that would unlock the mystery. But the literature was the usual rubbish she had disdained since the moment she could read: the Haldora vanishings as a message from God, a countdown to some vaguely defined event, the nature of which depended on the function of the text in which it was mentioned.
Her hand hesitated on the cover of one of the brochures. Here was the Adventist symbol: the strange spacesuit radiating light as if seen in silhouette against a sunrise, with the rays of light ramming through openings in the fabric of the suit itself. The suit had a curious welded-together look, lacking any visible joints or seams. There was no doubt in her mind now that it was the same suit that she had seen in the dean’s garret.
Then she thought about the name of the cathedral: the Lady Morwenna.
Of course. It all snapped into her head with blinding clarity. Morwenna had been Quaiche’s lover, before he came to Hela. Everyone who read their scripture knew that. Everyone also knew that something awful had happened to her, and that she had been imprisoned inside a strange welded-up suit when it happened. A suit that was itself a kind of punishment device, fashioned by the Ultras Quaiche and Morwenna had worked for.
The same suit she had seen in the garret; the same one that had made her feel so ill at ease.
She had rationalised away that fear at the time, but now, sitting all alone, the mere thought of being in the same building as the suit frightened her. She wanted to be as far away from it as possible.
There’s something in it, she thought. Something more than just a mechanism to put the jitters on rival negotiators.
A voice said, [Yes. Yes, Rashmika. We are inside the suit.]
She dropped the booklet, letting out a small gasp of horror. She had not imagined that voice. It had been faint, but very clear, very precise. And its lack of resonance told her that it had sounded inside her head, not in the room itself.
‘I don’t need this,’ she said. She spoke aloud, hoping to break the spell. ‘Grelier, you bastard, there was something on that needle, wasn’t there?’
[There was nothing on the needle. We are not a hallucination. We have nothing to do with Quaiche or his scripture.]
‘Then who the hell are you?’ she said.
[Who are we? You know who we are, Rashmika. We are the ones you came all this way to find. We are the shadows. You came to negotiate with us. Don’t you remember?]
She swore, then pummelled her head against the pillow at the end of the bed.
[That won’t do any good. Please stop, before you hurt yourself.]
She snarled, smashing her fists against the sides of her skull.
[That won’t help either. Really, Rashmika, don’t you see it yet? You aren’t going mad. We’ve just found a way into your head. We speak to Quaiche as well, but he doesn’t have the benefit of all that machinery in his head. We have to be discreet, whispering aloud to him when he’s alone. But you’re different.]
‘There’s no machinery in my head. And I don’t know anything about any shadows.’
The voice shifted its tone, adjusting its timbre and resonance until it sounded exactly as if there was a small, quiet friend whispering confidences into her ear.
[But you do know, Rashmika. You just haven’t remembered yet. We can see all the barricades in your head. They’re beginning to come down, but it will take a little while yet. But that’s all right. We’ve waited a long time to find a friend. We can wait a little longer.]
‘I think I should call Grelier,’ she said. Before he left, the surgeon-general had shown her how to access the cathedral’s pneumatic intercom system. She leant over the bed, towards the bedside table. There was a grilled panel above it.
[No, Rashmika,] the voice warned. [Don’t call him. He’ll only look at you more closely, and you don’t want that, do you?]
‘Why not?’ she demanded.
[Because then he’ll find out that you aren’t who you say you are. And you wouldn’t want that.]
Her hand hesitated above the intercom. Why not press it, and summon the surgeon-general? She didn’t like the bastard, but she liked voices in her head even less.
But what the voice had said reminded her of her blood. She visualised him taking the sample, drawing the red core from her arm.
[Yes, Rashmika, that’s part of it. You don’t see it yet, but when he analyses that sample he’ll be in for a shock. But he may leave it at that. What you don’t want is him crawling over your head with a scanner. Then he’d really find something interesting.]
Her hand still hovered above the intercom, but she knew she was not going to press the connecting button. The voice was right: the one thing she did not want was Grelier taking an even deeper interest in her, beyond her blood. She did not know why, but it was enough to know it.
‘I’m scared,’ she said, moving her hand away.
[You don’t have to be. We’re here to help you, Rashmika.]
‘Me?’ she said.
[All of you,] the voice said. She sensed it pulling away, leaving her alone. [All we ask of you is a little favour in return.]
Afterwards, she tried to sleep.
Interstellar space, 2675
Scorpio looked over the technician’s shoulder. Glued to one wall was a large flexible screen, newly grown by the manufactories. It showed a cross-section through the ship, duplicated from the latest version of the hand-drawn map that had been used to track the Captain’s apparitions. Rather than the schematic of a spacecraft, it resembled a blow-up of some medieval anatomy illustration. The technician was marking a cross next to a confluence of tunnels, near to one of the acoustic listening posts.
‘Any joy?’ Scorpio asked.
The other pig made a noncommittal noise. ‘Probably not. False positives from this area all day. There’s a hot bilge pump near this sector. Keeps clanging, setting off our ’phones.’
‘Better check it out all the same, just to be on the safe side,’ Scorpio advised.
‘There’s a team already on their way down there. They’ve never been far away.’
Scorpio knew that the team would be going down in full vacuum-gear, warned that they might encounter a breach at any point, even deep within the ship. ‘Tell them to be careful,’ he said.
‘I have, Scorp, but they could be even more careful if they knew what they needed to be careful about.’
‘They don’t need to know.’
The pig technician shrugged and went back to his task, waiting for another acoustic or barometric signal to appear on his read-out.
Scorpio’s thoughts drifted to the hypometric weapon moving in its shaft, a corkscrewing, meshing, interleaving gyre of myriad silver blades. Even immobile, the weapon had felt subtly wrong, a discordant presence in the ship. It was like a picture of an impossible solid, one of those warped triangles or ever-rising staircases; a thing that looked plausible enough at first glance but which on closer inspection produced the effect of a knife twisting in a particular part of the brain — an area responsible for handling representations of the external universe, an area that handled the mechanics of what did and didn’t work. Moving, it was worse. Scorpio could barely look at the threshing, squirming complexity of the operational weapon. Somewhere within that locus of shining motion, there was a point or region where something sordid was being done to the basic fabric of space-time. It was being abused.
That the technology was alien had come as no surprise to Scorpio. The weapon — and the two others like it — had been assembled according to instructions passed to the Conjoiners by Aura, before Skade had stolen her from Khouri’s womb. The instructions had been precise and comprehensive, a series of unambiguous mathematical prescriptions, but utterly lacking any context — no hint of how the weapon actually funct
ioned, or which particular model of reality had to apply for it to work. The instructions simply said: just build it, calibrate it in this fashion, and it will work. But do not ask how or why, because even if you were capable of understanding the answers, you would find them upsetting.
The only other hint of context was this: the hypometric weapon represented a general class of weakly acausal technologies usually developed by pre-Inhibitor-phase Galactic cultures within the second or third million years of their starfaring history. There were layers of technology beyond this, Aura’s information had implied, but they could certainly not be assembled using human tools. The weapons in that theoretical arsenal bore the same abstract relationship to the hypometric device as a sophisticated computer virus did to a stone axe. Simply grasping how such weapons were in some way disadvantageous to something loosely analogous to an enemy would have required such a comprehensive remapping of the human mind that it would be pointless calling it human any more.
The message was: make the most of what you have.
‘Teams are there,’ the other pig said, pressing a microphone into the little pastrylike twist of his ear.
‘Found anything?’
‘Just that pump playing up again.’
‘Shut it down,’ Scorpio said. ‘We can deal with the bilge later.’
‘Shut it down, sir? That’s a schedule-one pump.’
‘I know. You’re probably going to tell me it hasn’t been turned off in twenty-three years.’
‘It’s been turned off, sir, but always with a replacement unit standing by to take over. We don’t have a replacement available now, and won’t be able to get one down there for days. All service teams are tied up following other acoustic leads.’
‘How bad would it be?’
‘About as bad as it gets. Unless we install a replacement unit, we’ll lose three or four decks within a few hours.’
‘Then I guess we’ll have to lose them. Is your equipment sophisticated enough to filter out the sounds of those decks being flooded?’
The technician hesitated for a moment, but Scorpio knew that professional pride would win out in the end. ‘That shouldn’t be a problem, no.’
The Revelation Space Collection (revelation space) Page 287
