Revelation Space (59 page)

“Irrelevant what he thinks about me,” Sylveste said. “Sajaki still has to do whatever I say.”

“He has a point,” Calvin said.

Pascale asked the room to extrude an escritoire, with controls and readouts in the Resurgam style. She made a seat and sat herself beneath the escritoire’s curved ivory fascia. Then she called up a map of the data connections in the suite, and set about establishing the necessary links between Calvin’s module and the suite’s medical systems. She looked like she was spinning an elaborate cat’s cradle in thin air. As the connections were created, Calvin acknowledged them, and told her whether to increase or decrease bandwidth along certain pathways, or whether additional topologies were needed. The procedure lasted only a few minutes, and when it was complete Calvin was able to operate the medical suite’s servo-mechanical equipment, causing a mass of tipped alloy arms to descend from the ceiling, like the sculpture of a medusa.

“You have no idea how this feels,” Calvin said. “It’s the first time in years I’ve been able to act on a part of the physical universe—not since I first repaired your eyes.” And as he spoke, the multi-jointed arms executed a shimmering dance, blades, lasers, claws, molecular-manipulators and sensors scything the air in a whirl of vicious silver.

“Very impressive,” Sylveste said, feeling the breeze on his face. “Just be careful.”

“I could rebuild your eyes in a day,” Calvin said. “I could make them better than they ever were. I could make them look human—hell; with the technology here I could implant biological eyes just as easily.”

“I don’t want you to rebuild them,” Sylveste said. “Right now they’re all I have on Sajaki. Just repair Falkender’s work.”

“Ah, yes—I’d forgotten about that.” Calvin, who remained essentially immobile, raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure this procedure is wise?”

“Just be careful what you poke.”

 

 

Alicia Keller Sylveste had been his last wife before Pascale. They had married on Yellowstone, during the long years when the Resurgam expedition had been planned in excruciating detail. They had been together at the founding of Cuvier and had worked in harmony during the earliest years of the digs. She had been brilliant; too much so, perhaps, to stay comfortably within his orbit. Independently minded, she had begun to draw away from him—both personally and professionally—as their time on Resurgam entered its third decade. Alicia was not alone in her conviction that enough had been learned of the Amarantin; that it was time for the expedition—never meant to be permanent—to return to Epsilon Eridani. After all, if they had not learned anything shattering in thirty years, there was no promise that the next thirty years, or the next century, would bring anything more overwhelming. Alicia and her sympathisers believed that the Amarantin did not merit further detailed study; that the Event had only been an unfortunate accident of no actual cosmic significance. It was not hard to see the sense in this. The Amarantin, after all, were not the only dead species known to humankind. Out in the ever-expanding bubble of explored space, it was entirely possible that other cultures were about to be discovered, potent with archaeological treasures waiting to be unearthed. Alicia’s faction felt that Resurgam should be abandoned; that the colony’s finest minds should return to Yellowstone and select new targets of study.

Sylveste’s faction, of course, disagreed in the strongest terms. By then Alicia and Sylveste were estranged, but even in the depths of their enmity they preserved a cool respect of each other’s abilities. If love had withered, detached admiration remained.

Then came the mutiny. Alicia’s faction had done just what they always threatened to do: abandoned Resurgam. Unable to convince the rest of the colony to travel with them, they had stolen the
Lorean
from its parking orbit. The mutiny had been quite bloodless, but in their theft of the ship, Alicia’s faction had inflicted a much more insidious harm upon the colony. The
Lorean
had contained all the intra-system vessels and shuttles, meaning that the colonists were confined to Resurgam’s surface. They had no means to repair or upgrade the comsat girdle until Remilliod’s arrival, decades later. Servitors, replicating technology and implants had all been in excruciatingly short supply after Alicia’s departure.

But, in fact, Sylveste’s faction had been the fortunate ones.

“Log entry,” said Alicia’s ghost, floating disembodied in the bridge. “Twenty-five days out from Resurgam. We’ve decided—against my better judgement—to approach the neutron star on our way out. The alignment’s propitious; it doesn’t take us very far from our planned heading for Eridani, and the net delay to our journey will be tiny compared with the years of flight that are ahead of us in any case.”

She was not quite what Sylveste remembered. It had been a long time, in any case. She no longer seemed hateful to him; merely errant. She wore dark green clothes of a kind no one had worn in Cuvier since the mutiny itself, and her hairstyle seemed almost theatrical in its antiquity.

“Dan was convinced there was something important out here, but the evidence was always lacking.”

That surprised him. She was speaking from a time long before the unearthing of the obelisk with its curious orrery-like inscriptions. Had his obsession been that strong, even then? It was entirely possible, but the realisation was not a comfortable one. Alicia was right in what she said. The evidence had been lacking.

“We saw something strange,” Alicia said. “A cometary impact on Cerberus, the planet orbiting the neutron star. Such impacts must be quite rare, this far out from the main Kuiper swarm. It naturally drew our attention. But when we were close enough to examine the surface of Cerberus, there was no sign of a new impact crater.”

Sylveste felt the hairs on the back of his neck tingle. “And?” he found himself mouthing, almost silently, as if Alicia were standing before them in the bridge, and not a projection dredged from the memory banks of the wrecked ship.

“It was not something we could ignore,” she said. “Even if it seemed to lend tacit support to Dan’s theory that there was something strange about the Hades/Cerberus system. So we altered our course to come in closer.” She paused. “If we find something significant . . . something we can’t explain . . . I don’t think we’ll have any ethical choice but to inform Cuvier. Otherwise we could never again hold our heads high as scientists. We will know better tomorrow, anyway. We’ll be within probe range by then.”

“How much more of this is there?” Sylveste asked Volyova. “How much longer did she continue with log entries?”

“About a day,” Volyova said.

 

 

Now they were in the spider-room, safe—or so Volyova wished to believe—from the prying eyes of Sajaki and the others. They had still not listened to everything Alicia had to say, for the very act of sifting through the spoken records was time-consuming and emotionally draining. Yet the basic shape of the truth was emerging, and it was far from encouraging. Alicia’s crew had been attacked by something near Cerberus, suddenly and decisively. Shortly Volyova and her crewmates would know a great deal more about the danger they were being impelled towards.

“You realise,” Volyova said, “that if we encounter trouble, you may have to enter the gunnery.”

“I don’t think that would necessarily be for the best,” Khouri said. Justifying herself, she added, “We both know there have been some worrying events related to the gunnery recently.”

“Yes. As a matter of fact . . . during my convalescence, I convinced myself that you know more than you admit.” Volyova relaxed back into the maroon plush of her seat, toying with the brass controls in front of her. “I think you told me the truth when you said you were an infiltrator. But I think that was as far as it went. The rest was a lie, designed to satisfy my curiosity and yet stop me taking the matter to the rest of the Triumvirate . . . which worked, of course. But there were too many things you didn’t explain to my satisfaction. Take the cache-weapon, for instance. When it malfunctioned, why did it point itself at Resurgam?”

“It was the closest target.”

“Sorry; too glib. It was something
about
Resurgam, wasn’t it? And the fact that you infiltrated this ship only when you knew our destination . . . yes; an out-of-the-way place would have made a good venue for staging an attempted takeover of the cache—but that was never on the cards anyway. You may have been resourceful, Khouri, but there was no way you were ever going to wrest control of those weapons from either myself or the rest of the Triumvirate.” She put her hand beneath her chin now. “So—the obvious question. If your initial story was untrue, what exactly ate you doing aboard this ship?” She looked at Khouri, awaiting an answer. “You may as well tell me now, because I swear the next person to ask you will be Sajaki. It can’t have escaped your notice that Sajaki has his suspicions, Khouri—especially since Kjarval and Sudjic died.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with . . . ” Then her voice lost conviction. “Sudjic had her own vendetta against you; that was none of my doing.”

“But I had already disabled your suit’s weapons. Only I could have undone that order, and I was too busy being killed to do so. How did you manage to override the lock in order to kill Sudjic?”

“Someone else did it.” Khouri paused before continuing. “Something else, I should say. It was the same something that got into Kjarval’s suit and made her turn against me in the training session.”

“That wasn’t Kjarval’s doing?”

“No . . . not really. I don’t think I was her favourite person in the universe . . . but I’m fairly sure that she wasn’t planning to kill me in the training chamber.”

This was a lot to take in, even if it did finally feel like the truth. “So what happened, exactly?”

“The thing inside my suit had to arrange matters so I’d be on the team to recover Sylveste. Getting Kjarval out of the picture was the only option.”

Yes; she could almost see the logic in that. She had never once questioned the manner in which Kjarval had died. It had seemed so predictable that one of the crew would turn against Khouri—especially Kjarval or Sudjic. Equally, one or other would surely have turned against Volyova before too long. Both things had happened, but now she saw them as part of something else. . . ripples of something she did not pretend to understand, but which moved with sharklike stealth beneath the surface of events.

“What was so important about being in on the Sylveste recovery?”

“I . . . ” Khouri had been on the verge of saying something, but now she faltered. “I’m not sure this is the best time, Ilia—not when we’re so close to whatever destroyed the Lorean.”

“I didn’t bring you here just to admire the view, in case you thought otherwise. Remember what I said about Sajaki? It’s either me, now—the closest thing on this ship you have to either an ally or a friend—or it’s Sajaki, later, with some hardware you probably don’t want to even think about.” That was no great exaggeration, either. Sajaki’s trawl techniques were not exactly state-of-the-art in their subtlety.

“I’ll start at the beginning, then.” What Volyova had just said seemed to have done the trick. That was good—or else she would have to think about dusting off her own coercion methods. “The part about being a soldier . . . all that was true. How I got to Yellowstone is . . . complicated. Even now I’m not sure how much of it was an accident; how much of it was her doing. All I know is, she singled me out early on for this mission.”

“Who was she?”

“I don’t really know. Someone with a lot of power in Chasm City; maybe the whole planet. She called herself the Mademoiselle. She was careful never to use a real name.”

“Describe her. She may be someone we know; someone we’ve had dealings with in the past.”

“I doubt it. She wasn’t . . . ” Khouri paused. “She wasn’t one of you. Maybe once, but not now. I got the impression she’d been in Chasm City for a long time. But it wasn’t until after the Melding Plague that she came to power.”

“She came to power and I haven’t heard of her?”

“That was the whole point of her power. It wasn’t blatant, and she didn’t have to make her presence known to get something done. She just made shit happen. She wasn’t even rich—but she controlled more resources than anyone else on the planet, by sleight of hand. Not enough to conjure up a ship, though—which is why she needed you.”

Volyova nodded. “You said she might have been one of us, once. What did you mean by that?”

Khouri hesitated. “It wasn’t anything obvious. But the man working for her—Manoukhian, he called himself—definitely used to be an Ultra. He dropped enough clues to suggest that he’d found her in space.”

“Found—as in rescued?”

“That was how it sounded to me. She had these jagged metal sculptures, too—at least I thought they were sculptures to start with. Later, they began to look like parts of a wrecked spaceship. Like she was keeping them around her as a reminder of something.”

Something tugged at Volyova’s memory, but for the moment she allowed the thought process to remain below the level of consciousness. “Did you get a good look at her?”

“No. I saw a projection, but it needn’t have been accurate. She lived inside a palanquin, like the other hermetics.”

Volyova knew a little about the hermetics. “She needn’t have been one at all. A palanquin could simply have been a way of masking her identity. If we knew more about her origin . . . Did this Manoukhian tell you anything else?”

“No; he wanted to—I could tell that much—but he managed not to give anything useful anyway.”

Volyova leaned closer. “Why do you say he wanted to tell you?”

“Because that was his style. The guy never stopped mouthing off. The whole time I was being driven around by him, he never stopped telling me stories about all the things he’d done; all the famous people he’d known. Except for anything to do with the Mademoiselle. That was a closed subject; maybe because he was still working for her. But you could tell he was just itching to tell me stuff.”