The Revelation Space Collection (249 page)

‘Our records don’t agree.’

Clavain raised an eyebrow. ‘They don’t?’

‘No. Our intelligence indicates that Clavain did not live for more than a century and a half after his defection. You can’t possibly be him.’

‘I left human space on an interstellar expedition and only returned recently. That’s why there hasn’t been much record of me lately. Does it matter, though? The Convention’s already verified that I’m a Conjoiner.’

‘You could be a trap. Why would you wish to defect?’

Again, she had surprised him. ‘Why shouldn’t I?’

‘Maybe you’ve been reading too many of our newspapers. If you have, I’ve got some real news for you: your side is about to win this war. A single spider defection won’t make any difference now.’

‘I never thought it would,’ Clavain said.

‘And?’

‘That’s not why I’d like to defect.’

Down, down they went, always remaining ahead of the transonic shock wave of the Inhibitor machinery. The smudge on the passive radar display - the thing that shadowed them at a distance of thirty thousand kilometres - remained present, fading in and out of clarity but never leaving them completely. The daylight grew steadily darker, until the sky overhead was only fractionally lighter than the unmoving black depths below. Ana Khouri turned off the spacecraft’s cabin illumination, hoping that it would make the exterior brighter, but the improvement was marginal. The only real source of light was the cherry-red slash of the tube’s leading edge, and even that was duller than it had been before. The tube moved at only twenty-five kilometres per second now, relative to the atmosphere: it had steepened its descent, too, plunging nearly vertically towards the transition zones where the atmosphere thickened to liquid hydrogen.

She winced as another pressure warning sounded. ‘We can’t go much deeper. I’m serious now. We’ll crush. It’s already fifty atmospheres outside, and that thing is still sitting on our tail.’

‘Just a little closer, Ana. Can we reach the transition zone?’

‘No,’ she said emphatically. ‘Not in this ship. She’s an airbreather. She’ll stall in liquid hydrogen, and then we’ll fall and be crushed by hull implosion. It’s
not
a nice way to go, Thorn.’

‘The tube doesn’t seem bothered by the pressure, does it? I think it probably goes a lot deeper. How much do you think they’ve laid already? One kilometre every four seconds, isn’t it? That’s not far off a thousand kilometres in an hour. By now there must be enough to loop around the planet quite a few times.’

‘We don’t know that that’s what’s happening.’

‘No, but we can make an educated guess. Do you know what I keep thinking of, Ana?’

‘I’m sure you’re going to tell me.’

‘Windings. Like in an electric motor. I could be wrong, of course.’ Thorn smiled at her.

He moved suddenly. She was not expecting it and for a moment - for all her soldier training - she was frozen in surprise. He was out of his seat, pushing himself towards her across the cabin. He had some weight, since they were moving at much less than orbital speed, but he still swung across with ease, his movements fluid and pre-planned. Gently, he pulled her out of the pilot’s position. She fought back, but Thorn was much stronger and knew enough to parry her defensive moves. It was not that she had forgotten her soldiering, but there was only so much advantage that technique could give, especially against an equally skilled opponent.

‘Easy, Ana, easy. I’m not going to hurt you.’

Before she knew what was happening, Thorn had her in the passenger seat. He forced her to sit on her hands, then tugged the crash webbing tight across her chest. He asked her if she could breathe, then tugged it tighter. She wriggled, but the webbing contracted snugly, holding her in place.

‘Thorn ...’ she said.

Thorn eased himself into the pilot’s seat. ‘Now. How shall we play this? Are you going to tell me everything I want to know, or do I have to supply some additional persuasion?’

He worked the controls. The ship lurched; alarms sounded.

‘Thorn . . .’

‘Sorry. It looked easy enough when I watched you do it. Maybe there’s a bit more to it than meets the eye, eh?’

‘You can’t fly this thing.’

‘I’m having a damned good go, aren’t I? Now ... what does this do? Let’s see ...’ There was another violent reaction from the ship. More alarms sounded. But, sluggishly, the ship had begun to answer his commands. Khouri saw the artificial horizon indicator tilt. They were banking. Thorn was executing a hard turn to starboard.

‘Eighty degrees ...’ he read off. ‘Ninety ... one hundred . . .’

‘Thorn, no. You’re taking us straight back towards the shock wave.’

‘That’s pretty much the idea. Do you think the hull will cope? You seemed to think it was already a little on the stressed side. Well, I suppose we’re about to find out, aren’t we?’

‘Thorn, whatever you’re planning—’

‘I’m not planning anything, Ana. I’m just trying to put us in a position of real and imminent danger. Isn’t that abundantly clear?’

She had another go at wriggling free, but it was futile. Thorn had been very clever. No wonder the bastard had eluded the government for so long. She had to admire him for that, even if her admiration was grudging. ‘We won’t make it,’ she said.

‘No, perhaps we won’t. And my flying won’t help matters, I think. Which makes it all the easier, then. Answers, that’s what I want.’

‘I’ve told you everything . . .’

‘You’ve told me precisely nothing. I want to know who you are. Do you know when I started having suspicions?’

‘No,’ she said, realising that he would do nothing until she answered.

‘It was Irina’s voice. I was certain I’d heard it before, you know. Well, finally I remembered. It was Ilia Volyova’s address to Resurgam, shortly before she started blasting colonies off the surface. It was a long time ago, but old wounds take a long time to heal. More than a family resemblance there, I’d say.’

‘You’ve got it all wrong, Thorn.’

‘Have I? Then are you going to enlighten me?’

More alarms sounded. Thorn had pulled their speed down, but they were still moving at several kilometres per second towards the shock wave. She hoped it was her imagination, but she thought she could see that slash of cherry-red coming at them through the blackness.

‘Ana . . . ?’ he asked again, his voice all sweetness and light.

‘Damn you, Thorn.’

‘Ah. Sounds like progress to me.’

‘Pull up. Turn us around.’

‘In a moment. Just as soon as I hear the magic words from you. A confession, that’s all I’m looking for.’

She breathed in deeply. Here it was, then. The ruination of all their slow and measured plans. They had bet on Thorn and Thorn had been cleverer than them. They should have seen it coming, really they should. And Volyova, damn her too, had been right. It had been a mistake ever allowing him anywhere near
Nostalgia for Infinity.
They should have found another way to convince him. Volyova should have ignored Khouri’s protests ...

‘Say the words, Ana.’

‘All right.
All right
, God damn it. She is the Triumvir. We told you a pack of fucking lies from word one. Happy now?’

Thorn did not answer immediately. To her gratitude, he took the time to swing the ship around. Acceleration pressed her even further into the couch as he applied thrust to outrun the shock wave. And from the blackness it came hurtling towards them, a livid line of red, like the bloody edge of an executioner’s sword. She watched it swell until the rear view was a wall of scarlet as bright as molten metal. The collision alarms whooped and the multilingual warning voices merged into a single agitated chorus. Then a background of sky started to close in on either side of the red line, like two iron-grey curtains. The thread began to diminish in width, falling behind them.

‘I think we made it,’ Thorn said.

‘Actually, I think we didn’t.’

‘What?’

She nodded at the radar display. There was now no sign of the smudge that had been behind them ever since they had entered Roc’s atmosphere, but a host of radar signatures were crowding in on all sides. There were at least a dozen new objects, and they lacked the transient quality of the earlier echo. They were closing at kilometres per second, clearly converging on Khouri’s ship.

‘I think we just provoked a response,’ she said, her own voice sounding much calmer than she had expected. ‘Looks like there is a threshold after all, and we just crossed it.’

‘I’ll get us up and out as quickly as possible.’

‘You think it’ll make any damned difference? They’re going to be here in about ten seconds. Guess you got the proof you wanted, Thorn. Either that or you’re about to get it. Enjoy the moment, because it might not last very long.’

He looked at her with what she thought was quiet admiration. ‘You’ve been here before, haven’t you?’

‘Here, Thorn?’

‘On the point of death. It doesn’t mean much to you.’

‘I’d rather be somewhere else, don’t get me wrong.’

The converging forms had transgressed the final concentric circle on the display. They were now within a few kilometres of the ship, slowing as they neared it. Khouri knew there was no longer any harm in directing the active sensors at the approaching things. Their position was already betrayed, and they would lose nothing by taking a closer look at the converging objects. They were approaching from all sides, and although there were still large gaps between them, it would have been utterly futile to attempt to run away. A minute ago the things had not been there at all; clearly, they were able to slip through the atmosphere as if it hardly existed. Thorn had put them into a steep climb, and while she would have done exactly the same thing, she knew it was not going to make any difference. They had come too close to the heart of things, and now they were going to pay for their curiosity, just as Sylveste had all those years ago.

The active radar returns were confused by the shifting forms of the approaching machines. Mass sensors registered phantom signals at the edge of their sensitivity, barely separable from the background of Roc’s own field. But the visual evidence was unequivocal. Discrete dark shapes were swimming towards the ship through the atmosphere. Swimming was the right word, Khouri realised, because that was exactly how it appeared: a squirming, flowing, undulating complexity of motion, the way an octopus moved through water. The machines were as large as her ship and formed of many millions of smaller elements, a slithering, restless dance of black cubes on many scales. Almost no detail was visible beyond the absolute shifting black of the silhouettes, but every now and then blue or mauve light flickered within the blocky masses, throwing this or that appendage into relief. Clouds of smaller black shapes attended each major assemblage, and as the assemblages neared each other they threw out extensions between each other, umbilical lines of flowing black daughter machines. Waves of mass pulsed between the main cores, and now and then one of the primaries fissioned or merged with its neighbour. The purple lightning continued to flicker between the inky shapes, occasionally forming a geometric shell around Khouri’s ship, before collapsing back to something which appeared much more random. Despite herself, despite the certain feeling that she was going to die, the approach was fascinating. It was also sickening: simply looking at the Inhibitor machines inspired a feeling of dreadful nausea, for she was apprehending something that had clearly never been shaped by human intelligence. It was breathtakingly strange, the way the machines moved, and in her heart she knew that Volyova and she had - if such a thing were possible - terribly underestimated their enemy. They had seen nothing yet.

The machines were now only a hundred metres from her ship. They formed a closing black shell, oozing tighter around their prey. The sky was being locked out, visible only between the tentacular filaments of the exchanging machines. Limned in violet arcs and sprays of lightning - quivering sheets and dancing baubles of contained plasma energy - Khouri saw thick trunks of shifting machinery probing inwards, obscenely and hungrily. The ship’s exhaust was still thrusting behind them, but the machines were quite oblivious to it, and it seemed to pass right through the shell.

‘Thorn?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, with what sounded like genuine regret. ‘It’s just that I had to know. I’ve always been one to push things.’

‘I don’t really blame you. I might have done the same thing, if the tables were turned.’

‘That means we’d have both been stupid, Ana. It isn’t any excuse.’

The hull clanged, then clanged again. The whooping alarm changed its tone: no longer reporting imminent pressure collapse or a stall warning, but indicating that the hull was being damaged, prodded from outside. There was a vile metallic scraping sound, like nails dragged down tin, and the wide, grasping end of a trunk of Inhibitor machinery splayed itself across the cockpit windows. The circular end of the trunk squirmed with a moving mosaic of tiny thumb-sized black cubes, the swirling motion possessing a weird hypnotic quality. Khouri tried to reach the controls that would shutter the windows, imagining it might make one or two seconds’ difference.