The Revelation Space Collection (279 page)

The bubble quivered again, hiccoughed and twitched. Molenka’s expression - it was quite visible - became obviously frightened. Even through the faint neural channel that connected them, Skade felt the woman’s fear and apprehension. It was as if the glaze was tightening around her.

[Help me, Skade. I can’t breathe.]

I can’t. I don’t know what to do.

Molenka’s skin was tight against the membrane. She was starting to suffocate. Normal speech would have been impossible by now, but the automatic routines in her head would have already started shutting down non-essential parts of her brain, conserving vital resources to squeeze three or four extra minutes of consciousness from her last breath. [Help me. Please . . .]

The membrane tightened further. Skade watched, unable to turn away, as it squeezed Molenka. Her pain gushed across the neural link. It was all that Skade recognised: there was no further room for rational thought. She reached out, desperate to do something even if the gesture was hopeless. Her fingers skimmed the surface of the membrane. It shrank further, hastened by the contact. The neural link began to break up. The collapsing membrane was crushing Molenka alive, the pressure destroying the delicate loom of Conjoiner implants that floated in her skull.

The membrane halted, quivered, and then shrank down with shocking speed. When Molenka was three-quarters of her normal size, the figure within the membrane turned abruptly scarlet. Skade felt the screaming howl of abrupt neural severance before her own implants curtailed the link. Molenka was dead. But the human-shaped form lingered even as it collapsed further. Now it was a mannequin, now a horrid marionette, now a doll, now a thumb-sized figurine, losing shape and definition as the material within liquefied. Then the contraction stopped, the milky envelope stabilising.

Skade reached out and grasped the marble-sized thing that had been Molenka, knowing that she must dispose of it into vacuum before the field contracted even further. The matter within the membrane - that matter that had once been Molenka - was already under savage compression, and she did not want to think about what would happen should it spontaneously expand.

She tugged at the marble, but the thing barely moved, as if it were locked rigid at that precise point in space and time. She increased her suit’s strength and finally the marble began to shift. It had all of Molenka’s inertial mass within it, perhaps more, and it would be just as difficult to stop or steer.

Skade began to make her laborious way to the nearest dorsal airlock.

The projection helix spun up to speed. Clavain stood with his hands on the railing that surrounded it, peering at the indistinct shape that appeared within the cylinder. It resembled a squashed bug, a fan of soft ropelike entrails spilling from one end of a hard, dark carapace.

‘She isn’t going anywhere in a hurry,’ Scorpio said.

‘Dead in the water,’ Antoinette Bax concurred. She whistled. ‘She’s drifting, just falling through space. Holy shit. What do you think happened to her?’

‘Something bad, but not something catastrophic,’ Clavain said quietly, ‘or else we wouldn’t see her at all. Scorp, can you zoom in and enhance the rear section? It looks like something happened there.’

Scorpio was controlling the hull cameras, slaved to pan over the drifting starship as they slammed past it with a velocity differential of more than a thousand kilometres per second. They would be within effective weapons range for only an hour.
Zodiacal Light
was not even accelerating at the moment; the inertia-suppressing systems were switched off and the engines were quiet. Great flywheels had spun the lighthugger’s habitation core up to one gee of centrifugal gravity. Clavain enjoyed not having to struggle around under higher gravity or wear an exoskeletal rig. It was even more pleasant not having to suffer the disturbing physiological effects of the inertia-suppression field.

‘There,’ Scorpio said when he had finished adjusting the settings. ‘That’s as clear as it’s going to get, Clavain.’

‘Thanks.’

Remontoire, the only one amongst them still wearing an exoskeletal rig, stepped closer to the cylinder, brushing past Pauline Sukhoi with a whirr of servos.

‘I don’t recognise those structures, Clavain, but they look intentional. ’

Clavain nodded. That was his opinion as well. The basic shape of the lighthugger was still as it should have been, but from her rear erupted a complicated splay of twisted filaments and arcs, like the mainsprings and ratchets of some clockwork mechanism caught in the act of exploding.

‘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.