The Revelation Space Collection (294 page)

‘Are you saying the Captain saw the other ship coming in?’ Khouri asked.

‘You can be certain of it,’ Volyova said. ‘Everything I see, he sees.’

‘So why are we moving? Doesn’t he
want
to die?’

‘Not here, it would seem,’ Clavain said. ‘And not now. This trajectory will bring us back into local Resurgam space, won’t it?’

‘In about twelve days,’ Volyova confirmed. ‘Which strikes me as too long to be of any use. Of course, that’s assuming he sticks to one-tenth of a gee ... he has no need to, ultimately. At a gee he could reach Resurgam in two days, ahead of Clavain.’

‘What good will it do?’ Khouri asked. ‘We’re just as vulnerable there as here. Clavain can reach us wherever we move to.’

‘We’re not remotely vulnerable,’ Volyova said. ‘We still have thirteen damned cache weapons and the will to use them. I can’t guess at the Captain’s deeper motive for moving us, but I know one thing: it makes the evacuation operation a good deal easier, doesn’t it?’

‘You think he’s trying to help, finally?’

‘I don’t know, Khouri. I’ll admit it is a distinct theoretical possibility, that is all. You’d better tell Thorn, anyway.’

‘Tell him what?’

‘To start accelerating things. The bottleneck may be about to change.’

THIRTY-FOUR

A figure grew to flickering solidity within
Zodiacal Light’
s imaging tank. Clavain, Remontoire, Scorpio, Blood, Cruz and Felka sat in a rough semicircle around the device as the man’s form sharpened and then took on animation.

‘Well,’ Clavain’s beta-level said. ‘I’m back.’

Clavain had the uneasy sense that he was looking at his own reflection flipped left-to-right, all the subtle asymmetries of his face thrown into exaggerated relief. He did not like beta-levels, especially not of himself. The whole idea of being mimicked rankled him, and the more accurate the mimicry the less he liked it.
Am I supposed to be flattered
, he thought,
that my essence is so easily captured by an assemblage of mindless algorithms?

‘
You’ve been hacked,’ Clavain told his image.

‘I’m sorry?’

Remontoire leaned towards the tank and spoke. ‘Volyova stripped out large portions of you. We can see her handiwork, the damage she left, but we can’t tell exactly what she did. Very probably all she managed was to delete sensitive memory blocks, but since we can’t know for sure, we’ll have to treat you as potentially viral. That means that you’ll be quarantined once this debriefing is over. Your memories won’t be neurally merged with Clavain’s, since there’s too much risk of contamination. You’ll be frozen on to a solid-state memory substrate and archived. Effectively, you’ll be dead.’

Clavain’s image shrugged apologetically. ‘Let’s just hope I can be of some service before then, shall we?’

‘Did you learn anything?’ Scorpio asked.

‘I learned a lot, I think. Of course, I can’t be sure which of my memories are genuine, and which are plants.’

‘We’ll worry about that,’ Clavain said. ‘Just tell us what you found out. Is the commander of the ship really Volyova?’

The image nodded keenly. ‘Yes, it’s her.’

‘And does she know about the weapons?’ asked Blood.

‘Yes, she does.’

Clavain looked at his fellows, then back to the tank. ‘Right, then. Is she going to hand them over without a fight?’

‘I don’t think you can count on that, no. As a matter of fact, I think you’d better assume she’s going to make matters a little on the awkward side.’

Felka spoke now. ‘What does she know about the weapons’ origin?’

‘Not much, I think. She might have some vague inkling, but I don’t think it is a great interest of hers. She does know a little about the wolves, however.’

Felka frowned. ‘How so?’

‘I don’t know. We never got that chatty. We’d better just assume that Volyova has already had some tangential involvement with them - and survived, as I need hardly point out. That makes her at least worthy of our respect, I think. She calls them the Inhibitors, incidentally. I never got to the bottom of
why
.’

‘I know why,’ Felka said quietly.

‘She may not have had any direct involvement with them,’ Remontoire said. ‘There is already wolf activity in this system, and must have been for some time. Very probably all she’s done is make some shrewd deductions.’

‘I think her experience goes a little deeper than that,’ Clavain’s beta-level answered, but made no further elaboration.

‘I agree,’ Felka said.

Now they all looked at her for a moment.

‘Did you impress on her our seriousness?’ Clavain asked, turning his attention back to the beta-level. ‘Did you let her know that she would be much better off dealing with us than the rest of the Conjoiners?’

‘I think she got the message, yes.’

‘And?’

‘Thanks, but no thanks, was the general idea.’

‘She’s a very foolish woman, this Volyova,’ Remontoire said. ‘That’s a shame. It would be so much easier if we could proceed in a cordial manner, without all this unfortunate need to use aggressive force.’

‘There’s another matter,’ the simulated Clavain said. ‘There’s some kind of evacuation operation in progress. You’ve already seen what the wolf machine is doing to the star, gnawing into it with some kind of focused gravity-wave probe. Soon it will reach the nuclear-burning core, releasing the energy at the heart of the star. It will be like drilling a hole into the base of a dam, unleashing water under tremendous pressure. Except it won’t be water. It will be fusing hydrogen, at stellar-core pressure and temperature. My guess is that it will convert the star into a form of flame-thrower. The core’s energy will be bled away very rapidly once the drill has reached it, and the star will die - or at least become a much dimmer and cooler star in the process. But at the same time I imagine the star itself will become a weapon capable of incinerating any planet within a few light-hours of Delta Pavonis, simply by dousing that arterial spray of fusion fire across the face of a world. I imagine it would strip the atmosphere from a gas giant and smelt a rocky world to metallic lava. They don’t necessarily know what will happen on Resurgam, but you can be certain that they wish to get away from there as soon as possible. There are already people aboard the ship, airlifted from the surface. A few thousand, at the very least.’

‘And you have evidence of this, do you?’ asked Scorpio.

‘Nothing I can prove, no.’

‘Then we’ll assume that they don’t exist. It’s obviously a crude attempt at convincing us not to attack.’

Thorn stood on the surface of Resurgam, his coat buttoned high against the harsh polar wind that scraped and scoured every exposed inch of his skin. It was not quite what they would once have called a razorstorm, but it was unpleasant enough when there was no nearby shelter. He adjusted flimsy dust goggles, squinting into starlight, looking for the tiny moving star of the transfer ship.

It was dusk. The sky overhead was a deep velvet purple which shaded to black at the southern horizon. Only the brightest stars were visible through his goggles, and now and then even these would appear to dim as his eyes readjusted to the sudden flash of one of the warring weapons. To the north, and reaching some way to east and west, soft pink auroral curtains trembled in invisible wind. The lightshow was only beautiful if one had no idea what was causing it, and therefore no grasp of how portentous it was. The aurorae were fuelled by ionised particles that were being clawed and gouged off the surface of the star by the Inhibitor weapon. The inwards bulge, the tunnel that the weapon was boring into the star, now reached halfway to the nuclear-burning core. Around the walls of the tunnel, propped apart by standing waves of pumped gravitational energy, the interior structure of the star had undergone a series of drastic changes as the normal convective processes struggled to adjust to the weapon’s assault. Already the core was beginning to change its shape as the overlying mass density shifted. The song of neutrinos streaming out from the star’s heart had changed tune, signifying the imminence of the core breakthrough. There was still no clear idea about exactly what would happen when the weapon finished its work, but in Thorn’s view the best they could do was not hang around to find out.

He was waiting for the last of the day’s shuttle flights to finish boarding. The elegant craft was parked below him, surrounded by a throbbing insectile mass of potential evacuees. Fights broke out constantly as people struggled to jump the queue for the next departure. The mob revolted him, even though he felt nothing but admiration and sympathy for its individual elements. In all his years of agitation he had only ever had to deal with small numbers of trusted people, but he had always known it would come to this. The mob was an emergent property of crowds, and as such he had to take credit for bringing this particular mob into being. But he did not have to like what he had done.

Enough
, Thorn thought. Now was not the time to start despising the people he had saved simply because they allowed their fears to surface. Had he been amongst them, he doubted that he would have behaved with any great saintliness. He would have wanted to get his family off the planet, and if that meant stamping on someone else’s escape plans, so be it.

But he wasn’t in the mob, was he? He was the one who had actually found a way off the planet. He was the one who had actually made it possible.

He supposed that had to count for something.

There - sliding overhead. The transfer ship crossed his zenith and then dove into shadow. He felt a flicker of relief that it was still there. Its orbit was tightly proscribed, for any deviation was likely to trigger an attack from the surface-to-orbit defence system. Although Khouri and Volyova had dug their claws into many branches of government, there were still certain departments that they had only been able to influence indirectly. The Office of Civil Defence was one, and it was also one of the most worrying, entrusted as it was with the defences to prevent a recurrence of the Volyova incident. The Office had rapid-response surface-to-orbit missiles equipped with hot-dust warheads, designed to take out an orbiting starship before it became a threat to the colony as a whole. The Ultras’ smaller ships had been able to duck and dive under the radar nets, but the transfer shuttle was too large for such subterfuge. So there had been brokering and behind-the-scenes leverage and the result was that the Office’s missiles would be held in their bunkers provided that the transfer ship or any of the transatmospheric shuttles did not deviate from rigidly defined flight corridors. Thorn knew this, and was confident that the various ships’ avionics systems knew it too, but he still felt an irrational moment of relief every time the transfer ship came into view again.

His portable telephone chimed. Thorn fished the bulky item from his coat pocket, fiddling with the controls through thick-fingered gloves. ‘Thorn.’ He recognised the voice of one of the Inquisition House operators.

‘Recorded message from
Nostalgia for Infinity
, sir. Shall I put it through to you, or will you take the call when you are in orbit?’

‘Put it through, please.’ He waited a moment, hearing the faint chatter of electromechanical relays and the hiss of analogue tape, imagining the dark telephonic machinery of Inquisition House moving to serve him.

‘Thorn, it’s Vuilleumier. Listen carefully. There’s been a slight change of plan. It’s a long story, but we’re moving closer to Resurgam. I’ll have updated navigation coordinates for the transfer ship, so you won’t have to worry about that. But now we may be looking at much less than thirty hours’ round trip. We might even be able to get close enough that we don’t need to use the transfer ship at all, just bring them straight aboard
Infinity
. That means we can accelerate the surface-to-orbit flights. We only need five hundred rounds of shuttle flights and we’ve evacuated the entire planet. Thorn, suddenly it seems as if we might have a chance. Can you arrange things at your end?’

Thorn looked down at the brewing mob. Khouri appeared to be waiting for him to reply. ‘Operator, record and transmit this, will you?’ He waited a decent interval before responding. ‘This is Thorn. Message understood. I’ll do what I can to speed up the evacuation process when I know that it makes sense to do so. But in the meantime, might I inject a note of caution? If you can reduce the thirty hours’ round trip, great. I endorse that wholeheartedly. But you can’t bring the starship too close to Resurgam. Even if you don’t succeed in scaring half the planet out of their skins, you’ll have the Office of Civil Defence to worry about. And I mean worry. We’ll speak later, Ana. I have work to do, I’m afraid.’ He looked down at the mob, noting a disturbance where all had been quiet a minute earlier. ‘Perhaps a little more than I feared.’

Thorn told the operator to send the message and alert him if a reply was forthcoming. He slipped the phone back into his pocket, where it lay as heavy and inert as a truncheon. Then he began to scramble and skid his way back down towards the mob, kicking up dust as he descended.