The Revelation Space Collection (285 page)

‘I thought I understood Ultras,’ Clavain’s beta-level said thoughtfully. ‘You surprise me, I admit. But you must have some way of viewing projected information, surely, when a hologram won’t work?’

‘I have goggles,’ she admitted.

‘Fetch them. It will make life a lot easier, I assure you.’

She did not like being told what to do by the beta-level, but she was prepared to admit that its suggestion made sense. She had another servitor bring her the goggles and an earpiece. She slipped the ensemble on, and then allowed the beta-level to modify the view she saw through the goggles. The spindly robot was edited out of her visual field and replaced by an image of Clavain, much as she had seen him during the transmission. The illusion was not perfect, which was a useful reminder that she was not dealing with a flesh-and-blood human. But on the whole it was a great improvement on the servitor.

‘There,’ Clavain’s real voice said in her ear. ‘Now we can do business. I’ve asked already, but will you consider uplinking a beta-level of yourself to
Zodiacal Light
?’

He had her in a spot. She did not want to admit that she had no provision for such a thing; that would really have made her look odd.

‘I’ll consider it. In the meantime, Clavain, let’s get this little chat over with, shall we?’ Volyova smiled. ‘You caught me in the middle of something.’

Clavain’s image smiled back. ‘Nothing too serious, I hope.’

Even while she busied herself with the servitor, she continued the operation to deploy the cache weapons. She had told the Captain that she did not want him to make his presence known while the servitor was on, so his only means of speaking to her was through the same earpiece. He, in turn, was able to read her subvocal communications.

‘I don’t want Clavain learning any more than he has to,’ she had told the Captain. ‘Especially about you, and what’s happened to this ship.’

‘Why should Clavain learn anything? If the beta-level discovers something we don’t want it to know, we’ll just kill it.’

‘Clavain will ask questions later.’

‘If there
is
a later,’ the Captain had said.

‘Meaning what?’

‘Meaning . . . we aren’t intending to negotiate, are we?’

She escorted the servitor through the ship to the bridge, doing her best to pick a route that took her through the least strange parts of the interior. She observed the beta-level taking in its surroundings, obviously aware that something peculiar had happened to the ship. Yet it did not ask her any questions directly related to the plague transformations. It was, frankly, a lost battle in any case. The approaching ship would soon have the necessary resolution to glimpse
Infinity
for itself, and then it would learn of the baroque external transformations.

‘Ilia,’ Clavain’s voice said. ‘Let’s not beat about the bush. We want the thirty-three items now in your possession, and we want them very badly. Do you admit knowledge of the items in question?’

‘It would be a tiny bit implausible to deny it, I think.’

‘Good.’ Clavain’s image nodded emphatically. ‘That’s progress. At least we’re clear that the items exist.’

Volyova shrugged. ‘So if we’re not going to beat about the bush, why don’t we call them what they are? They’re weapons, Clavain. You know it. I know it.
They
know it, in all likelihood.’

She slipped her goggles off for a moment. Clavain’s servitor strode around the room, its movements almost but not quite fluidly human. She replaced the goggles, and the overlaid image moved with the same puppetlike strides.

‘I like you better already, Ilia. Yes, they’re weapons. Very old weapons, of rather obscure origin.’

‘Don’t bullshit me, Clavain. If you know about the weapons, you probably have just as much idea as me about who made them, maybe more. Well, here’s my guess: I think the Conjoiners made them. What do you say to that?’

‘You’re warm, I’ll give you that.’

‘Warm?’

‘Hot. Very hot, as it happens.’

‘Start telling me what the hell this is all about, Clavain. If they’re Conjoiner weapons, how have you only just found out about them?’

‘They emit tracer signals, Ilia. We homed in on them.’

‘But you’re not Conjoiners.’

‘No . . .’ Clavain conceded this point with a sweep of one arm, neatly synchronised with the servitor. ‘But I’ll be honest with you, if only because it might help swing the negotiations in my favour. The Conjoiners do want those weapons back. And they’re on their way here as well. As a matter of fact, there’s a whole fleet of heavily armed Conjoiner vessels immediately behind
Zodiacal Light
.’

She remembered what the pig, Scorpio, had said about Clavain’s crew bloodying the noses of the spiders. ‘Why tell me this?’ Volyova said.

‘It alarms you, I see. I don’t blame you for that. I’d be alarmed, too.’ The image scratched its beard. ‘That’s why you should consider negotiating with me first. Let me take the weapons off your hands. I’ll deal with the Conjoiners.’

‘Why do you think you’d have any more luck than me, Clavain?’

‘Couple of reasons, Ilia. One, I’ve already outsmarted them on a few occasions. Two, and perhaps more pertinent, until very recently I was one.’

The Captain whispered in her ear. ‘I’ve done a check, Ilia. There was a Nevil Clavain with Conjoiner connections.’

Volyova addressed Clavain. ‘And you think that would make a difference, Clavain?’

He nodded. ‘The Conjoiners aren’t vindictive. They’ll leave you alone if you have nothing to offer them. If you still have the weapons, however, they’ll take you apart.’

‘There’s a small flaw in your thinking,’ Volyova said. ‘If I had the weapons, wouldn’t I be the one doing the taking apart?’

Clavain winked at her. ‘Know how to use them that well, do you?’

‘I have some experience.’

‘No, you don’t. You’ve barely switched the bloody things on, Ilia. If you had, we’d have detected them centuries ago. Don’t overestimate your familiarity with technologies you barely understand. It could be your undoing.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that, won’t I?’

Clavain - she had to stop thinking of
it
as Clavain - scratched his beard again. ‘I didn’t mean to offend. But the weapons are dangerous. I’m quite sincere in my suggestion that you hand them over now and let me worry about them.’

‘And if I say no?’

‘We’ll do just what we promised: take them by force.’

‘Look up, Clavain, will you? I want to show you something. You alluded to some knowledge of it before, but I want you to be completely certain of the facts.’

She had programmed the display sphere to come alive at that moment, filled with an enlargement of the dismantled world. The cloud of matter was curdled and torn, flecked by dense nodes of aggregating matter. But the trumpetlike object growing at its heart was ten times larger than any other structure, and now appeared almost fully formed. Although it was difficult for her sensors to see with any clarity through the megatonnes of matter that still lay along the line of sight, there was a suggestion of immense complexity, a bewildering accretion of lacy detail, from a scale of many hundreds of kilometres across to the limit of her scanning resolution. The machinery had a muscular, organic look, knotted and swollen with gristle, sinews and glandular nodes. It did not look like anything a human imagination would have produced by design. And even now layers of matter were being added to the titanic machine: she could see the density streams where mass flows were still taking place. But the thing looked worrying close to being finished.

‘Have you seen much of that before now, Clavain?’ she asked.

‘A little. Not as clearly as this.’

‘What did you make of it?’

‘Why don’t you tell me what you’ve made of it first, Ilia?’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘I came to the obvious conclusion, Clavain. I watched three small worlds get ripped apart by machines, before

they moved on to this one. They’re alien. They were drawn here by something Dan Sylveste did.’

‘Yes. We assumed he had something to do with it. We know about these machines, too - at least, we’ve had our suspicions that they exist.’

‘Who is “we”, exactly?’ she asked.

‘The Conjoiners, I mean. I only defected recently.’ He paused before continuing. ‘A few centuries ago, we launched expeditions into deep interstellar space, much further out than anything achieved by any other human faction. Those expeditions encountered the machines. We codenamed them wolves, but I think we can assume we’re seeing essentially the same entities here.’

‘They have no name for themselves,’ Volyova said. ‘But we call them the Inhibitors. It’s the name they gained during their heyday.’

‘You learned all that from observation?’

‘No,’ Volyova said. ‘Not as such.’

She was telling him too much, she thought. But Clavain was so persuasive that she could almost not help herself. Before very long, if she were not careful, she would have told him everything about what had happened around Hades: how Khouri had been given a glimpse into the galaxy’s dark prehuman history, endless chapters of extinction and war stretching back to the dawn of sentient life itself ...

There were things she was prepared to discuss with Clavain, and there were things she would rather keep to herself, for now.

‘You’re a woman of mystery, Ilia Volyova.’

‘I’m also a woman with a lot of work to do, Clavain.’ She made the sphere zoom in on the burgeoning machine. ‘The Inhibitors are building a weapon. I have strong suspicions that it will be used to trigger some kind of cataclysmic stellar event. They triggered a flare to wipe out the Amarantin, but I think this will be different - much larger and probably more terminal. And I simply cannot allow it to happen. There are two hundred thousand people on Resurgam, and they will all die if that weapon is used.’

‘I sympathise, believe me.’

‘Then you’ll understand that I won’t be handing over any weapons, now or at any point in the future.’

For the first time Clavain appeared exasperated. He rubbed a hand through his shock of hair, bristling it into a mess of jagged white spikes. ‘Give me the weapons and I’ll see that they’re used against the wolves. What’s wrong with that?’

‘Nothing,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Except that I don’t believe you. And if these weapons are as potent as you say, I’m not sure I’m willing to hand them over to any other party. We’ve looked after them for centuries, after all. No harm was done. I’d say that puts us in rather a good light, wouldn’t you? We’ve been responsible custodians. It would be quite cavalier of us to let any old bunch of rogues get their hands on them now, wouldn’t it?’ She smiled. ‘Especially as you admit that you’re not the rightful owners, Clavain.’

‘You’ll regret dealing with the Conjoiners, Ilia.’

‘Mm. But at least I’ll be dealing with a legitimate faction.’

Clavain pushed the fingers of his right hand against his brow, like someone fighting a migraine. ‘No, you won’t be. Not in the sense you think. They only want the weapons so they can scuttle off into deep space with them.’

‘And I suppose you have some vastly more magnanimous use in mind?’

Clavain nodded. ‘I do, as a matter of fact. I want to put them back into the hands of the human race. Demarchists . . . Ultras . . . Scorpio’s army ... I don’t care who takes them over, so long as they convince me that they’ll do the right thing with them.’

‘Which is?’

‘Fight the wolves. They’re coming closer. The Conjoiners knew it, and what’s happening here proves it. The next few centuries are going to be very interesting, Ilia.’

‘Interesting?’ she repeated.

‘Yes. But not in quite the way we’d wish.’

She switched the beta-level off for the time being. The image of Clavain shattered into speckles and then faded away, leaving only the skeletal shape of the servitor where he had been standing. The transition was quite jarring: she had felt a palpable sense of being in his presence.

‘Ilia?’ It was the Captain. ‘We’re ready now. The last cache weapon is outside the hull.’

She tugged the earpiece out and spoke normally. ‘Good. Anything to report?’

‘Nothing major. Five weapons deployed without incident. Of the remaining three, I noted a transient anomaly with the propulsion harness of weapon six, and an intermittent fault with the guidance subsystems of weapons fourteen and twenty-three. Neither has recurred since deployment.’

She lit a cigarette and smoked a quarter of it before answering. ‘That doesn’t sound like nothing major to me.’

‘I’m sure the faults won’t happen again,’ boomed the Captain’s voice. ‘The electromagnetic environment of the cache chamber is quite different from that beyond the hull. The transition probably caused some confusion, that’s all. The weapons will settle down now that they’re outside.’

‘Make a shuttle ready, please.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You heard me. I’m going outside to check on the weapons.’ She stamped her feet, waiting for his answer.