The Revelation Space Collection (293 page)

Clavain’s figure said nothing. Khouri had no idea what to read into that lack of response, but it troubled her greatly.

Her ship towered over her, barely contained by its prison of repair scaffolding.
Storm Bird’
s internal lights were on, and in the upper row of flight deck windows Antoinette saw Xavier’s silhouetted form hard at work. He had a compad in one hand and a stylus gripped between his teeth, and he was flicking ancient toggle switches above his head, taking typically diligent notes.
Always the bookkeeper
, she thought.

Antoinette eased her exoskeleton into a standing position. Now and then Clavain allowed the crew a few hours under conditions of normal gravity and inertia, but this was not one of those periods. The exoskeleton gave her dozens of permanent sores where the support pads and haptic motion sensors touched her skin. In a perverse way, she was almost looking forward to arriving around Delta Pavonis, since they would then be able to discard the skeletons.

She took a good long look at
Storm Bird.
She had not seen it since the time she had walked away, refusing to enter what no longer felt like her own territory. It felt like months ago, and some of the anger - though not all of it - had abated.

She was still pretty pissed off.

Her ship was certainly ready for the fight. To the untrained eye, there had been no drastic alteration in
Storm Bird’
s external appearance. The extra weapons that had been grafted on, in addition to the deterrents already present, merely amounted to a few more bulges, spines and asymmetries to add to those that were already present. With the manufactories churning out armaments by the tonne, it had been an easy enough matter to divert some of that output her way, and Scorpio had been perfectly willing to turn a blind eye. Remontoire and Xavier had even worked together to couple the more exotic weapons into
Storm Bird’
s control net.

For a time, she had wondered why she felt the urge to fight. She did not consider herself given to violence or heroic gestures. Pointless, stupid gestures - such as burying her father in a gas giant - were another thing entirely.

She climbed up through the ship until she reached the flight deck. Xavier carried on working after she had entered. He was too engrossed in what he was doing, and he must have become used to her never visiting
Storm Bird
.

She sat in the seat next to him, waiting for him to notice her and look up from his work. When he did he just nodded, giving her the space and time to say what she needed to. She appreciated that.

‘Beast?’ Antoinette said quietly.

The pause before Lyle Merrick replied was probably no longer than usual, but it felt like an eternity. ‘Yes, Antoinette?’

‘I’m back.’

‘Yes ... I gathered.’ There was another long intermission. ‘I’m pleased that you’ve returned.’

The voice had the same tonal quality as ever, but
something
had changed. She supposed that Lyle was no longer obliged to mimic the old subpersona, the one that he had replaced sixteen years before.

‘Why?’ she asked sharply. ‘Did you miss me?’

‘Yes,’ Merrick said. ‘Yes, I did.’

‘I don’t think I can ever forgive you, Lyle.’

‘I wouldn’t ever want or expect your forgiveness, Antoinette. I certainly wouldn’t deserve it.’

‘No, you wouldn’t.’

‘But you understand that I made a promise to your father?’

‘That’s what Xavier said.’

‘Your father was a good man, Antoinette. He only wanted the best for you.’

‘The best for you as well, Lyle.’

‘I’m in his debt. I wouldn’t argue with that.’

‘How do you live with what you did?’

There was something that might have been a laugh, or even a self-deprecating snigger. ‘The part of me that mattered the most isn’t greatly troubled by that question, you know. The flesh-and-blood me was executed. I’m just a shadow, the only shadow that the eraserheads missed.’

‘A shadow with a highly evolved sense of self-preservation.’

‘Again, that’s nothing I’d deny.’

‘I want to hate you, Lyle.’

‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Millions already do.’

She sighed. ‘But I can’t afford to. This is still my ship. You are still running it whether I like it or not. True, Lyle?’

‘I was already a pilot, Little ... I mean Antoinette. I already had an intimate knowledge of spacecraft operations before my small mishap. It hasn’t been difficult for me to integrate myself with
Storm Bird
. I doubt that a real subpersona would ever prove an adequate replacement. ’

She sneered. ‘Oh, don’t worry. I’m not going to replace you.’

‘You’re not?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘But my reasons are pragmatic. I can’t afford to, not without seriously fucking up my ship’s performance. I don’t want to go through the learning curve of integrating a new gamma-level, especially not now.’

‘That’s reason enough for me.’

‘I’m not finished. My father made a deal with you. That means you made a deal with the Bax family. I can’t renege on that, even if I wanted to. It wouldn’t be good for business.’

‘We’re a little far from any business opportunities now, Antoinette.’

‘Well, maybe. But there’s one other thing. Are you listening?’

‘Of course.’

‘We’re going into battle. You’re going to help me. And by that I mean you’re going to fly this ship and make it do whatever the fuck I ask of it. Understood? I mean
everything
. No matter how much danger it puts me in.’

‘Vowing to protect you was also part of the arrangement I made with your father, Antoinette.’

She shrugged. ‘That was between you and him, not me. From now on I take my own risks, even if they’re the kind that might get me killed. Got that?’

‘Yes . . . Antoinette.’

She stood up from her seat. ‘Oh, and one other thing.’

‘Yes?’

‘No more “Little Miss”.’

Khouri was down in the reception bay, showing her face and generally doing her best to reassure the evacuees that they had not been forgotten, when she felt the entire ship lurch to one side. The movement was sudden and violent, enough to knock her off her feet and send her crashing bruisingly into the nearest wall. Khouri swore, a thousand possibilities flashing through her mind, but her thoughts were immediately drowned under the vast roar of panic that emanated from the two thousand passengers. She heard screams and shouts, and it was many seconds before the sound began to die down to a general rumble of disquiet. The motion had not repeated itself, but any illusions they had that the ship was a solid and unchanging thing had just been annihilated.

Khouri snapped into damage-limitation mode. She made her way through the maze of partitions that divided the chamber, offering nothing more than a reassuring wave to the families and individuals who tried to stop her to ask what was going on. At that point she was still trying to work it out for herself.

It had already been agreed that her immediate deputies would assemble together in the event of anything unexpected happening. She found a dozen of them waiting for her, all looking only slightly less panicked than the people in their care.

‘Vuilleumier . . .’ they said, in near unison, on her arrival.

‘What the hell just happened?’ one asked. ‘We’ve got broken bones, fractures, people scared shitless. Shouldn’t someone have warned us?’

‘Collision avoidance,’ she said. ‘The ship detected a piece of debris heading towards it. Didn’t have time to shoot it away, so it moved itself.’ It was a lie, and it did not even sound convincing to her, but it was at least a stab at a rational explanation. ‘That’s why there was no warning,’ she added, by way of an afterthought. ‘It’s good, really: it means the safety subsystems are still working.’

‘You never said they wouldn’t be,’ the man told her.

‘Well, now we know for sure, don’t we?’ And with that she told them to spread the word that the sudden movement had been nothing to worry about, and to make sure that the injured got the care they needed.

Fortunately, no one had been killed, and the broken bones and fractures turned out to be clean breaks that could be attended to with simple procedures, without the need to take anyone beyond the chamber to the medical bay. An hour passed, and then two, and a nervous calm descended. Her explanation, it appeared, had been accepted by the majority of the evacuees.

Great
, she thought.
Now all I have to do is convince myself
.

But an hour later the ship moved again.

This time it was less violent than before, and the only effect was to make Khouri sway and reach hastily for a support. She swore, but now it was less out of surprise than annoyance. She had no idea what she was going to tell the passengers next, and her last explanation was going to start looking less than convincing. She decided, for the time being, not to offer any explanation at all, and to let her underlings figure out what had happened. Give them time and they might come up with something better than she was capable of.

She made her way back to Ilia Volyova, thinking all the while that something was wrong, experiencing a sense of dislocation that she could not quite put her finger on. It was as if every vertical surface in the ship was minutely askew. The floor was no longer perfectly level, so that the liquid effluent in the flooded zones built up more on one side of the corridor than the other. Where it dripped from the walls it no longer fell vertically, but at a pronounced angle. By the time she reached Volyova’s bed, she could not ignore the changes. It was an effort to walk upright, and she found it easier and safer to move along one wall at a time.

‘Ilia.’

She was, mercifully, awake, engrossed in the swollen bauble of her battle display. Clavain’s beta-level was by her side, the servitor’s fingers forming a contemplative steeple beneath its nose as it viewed the same abstract realisation.

‘What is it, Khouri?’ came Volyova’s scratch of a voice.

‘Something’s happening to the ship.’

‘Yes, I know. I felt it as well. So did Clavain.’

Khouri slipped her goggles on and viewed the two of them properly: the ailing woman and the elderly white-haired man who stood patiently at her bedside. They looked as if they had known each other all their lives.

‘I think we’re moving,’ Khouri said.

‘More than just moving, I’d say,’ Clavain replied. ‘Accelerating, aren’t we? The local vertical is shifting.’

He was right. When the ship was parked in orbit somewhere it generated gravity for itself by spinning sections of its interior. The occupants felt themselves being flung outwards, away from the ship’s long axis. But when
Nostalgia for Infinity
was under thrust, the acceleration created another source of false gravity exactly at right angles to the spin-generated pseudo-force. The two vectors combined to give a force that acted at an angle between them.

‘About a tenth of a gee,’ Clavain added, ‘or thereabouts. Enough to distort local vertical by five or six degrees.’

‘No one asked the ship to move,’ Khouri said.

‘I think it decided to move itself,’ Volyova said. ‘I imagine that was why we experienced some jolts earlier on. Our host’s fine control is a little rusty. Isn’t it, Captain?’

But the Captain did not answer her.

‘Why are we moving?’ Khouri asked.

‘I think
that
might have something to do with it,’ Volyova said.

The squashed bauble of the battle realisation swelled larger. At first glance it looked much as it had before. The remaining cache weapons were still displayed, together with the Inhibitor device. But there was something new: an icon that she did not remember being displayed before. It was arrowing into the arena of battle from an oblique angle to the ecliptic, exactly as if it had come in from interstellar space. Next to it was a flickering cluster of numbers and symbols.

‘Clavain’s ship?’ Khouri asked. ‘But that isn’t possible. We weren’t expecting to see it for weeks ...’

‘Seems we were wrong,’ Volyova said. ‘Weren’t we, Clavain?’

‘I can’t possibly speculate.’

‘His blue shift was falling too swiftly,’ Volyova said. ‘But I didn’t believe the evidence of my sensors. Nothing capable of interstellar flight could decelerate as hard as Clavain’s ship appeared to be slowing. And yet...’

Khouri finished the sentence for her. ‘It has.’

‘Yes. And instead of being a
month
out, he was two or three days out, maybe fewer. Clever, Clavain, I’ll give you that. How do you manage that little trick, might I ask?’

The beta-level shook its head. ‘I don’t know. That particular piece of intelligence was edited from my personality before I was transmitted here. But I can speculate as well as you can, Ilia. Either my counterpart has a more powerful drive than anything known to the Conjoiners, or he has something worryingly close to inertia-suppression technology. Take your pick. Either way, I’d say it wasn’t exactly good news, wouldn’t you?’