The Revelation Space Collection (296 page)

‘I agree that it will serve our short-term interests if we possess the weapons. Beyond that, I’m not sure.’

Clavain looked at her carefully. ‘We need those weapons, Felka.’

‘I know. But what if she - the Triumvir - needs them as well? Your proxy said she was trying to evacuate Resurgam.’

He chose his words. ‘That’s ... not my immediate concern. If she is engaged in evacuating the planet, and I’ve no evidence that she is, then she has all the more reason to give me what I want so that I don’t interfere with the evacuation.’

‘And it wouldn’t cross your mind to think for a moment about helping her?’

‘I’m here to get those weapons, Felka. Everything else, no matter how well intentioned, is just a detail.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Felka said.

Clavain knew that it was better that he say nothing in answer.

In silence, they watched the violet flames of the attack ships fall towards Resurgam, and the Triumvir’s starship.

When Khouri had finished responding to Thorn’s latest message she arrived at a troubling conclusion. Walking was even harder than it had been before, the apparent slope of the floor even more severe. It was exactly as Ilia Volyova had predicted: the Captain had increased his rate of thrust, no longer satisfied with a mere tenth of a gee. By Khouri’s estimation, and the Clavain beta-level agreed with her, the rate was now double that and probably climbing. Previously horizontal surfaces now felt as if they were sloping at twelve degrees, enough to make some of the more slippery passages difficult to traverse. But that was not what was concerning her.

‘Ilia, listen to me. We have a serious fucking problem.’

Volyova emerged from contemplation of her battlescape. The icons floated within the squashed sphere of the projection like dozens of bright frozen fish. The view had changed since the last time she had seen it, Khouri was certain.

‘What is it, child?’

‘It’s the holding bay, where we have the newcomers.’

‘Continue.’

‘It’s not designed to deal with the ship moving under thrust. We built it as a temporary holding bay, to be used while we were parked. It’s spun for gravity so that the force acts radially, away from the ship’s long axis. But now that’s changing. The Captain’s applying thrust, so we’ve got a new source acting along the axis. It’s only a fifth of a gee at the moment, but you can bet it’s going to get worse. We can turn off the spin, but that won’t change things. The walls are becoming floors.’

‘This is a lighthugger, Khouri. This is a normal transition to starflight mode.’

‘You don’t understand, Ilia. We’ve got two thousand people crammed into one chamber, and they can’t stay there. They’re already freaking out because the floor is sloping so much. They feel as if they’re on the deck of a sinking ship, and no one is telling them anything’s wrong.’ She paused; she was a little out of breath. ‘Ilia, here’s the deal. You were right about the bottleneck. I told Thorn to get things moving faster at the Resurgam end. That means we’re going to be getting thousands of people arriving very soon indeed. We always knew we’d have to start emptying the holding bay. Now we’ll just have to start doing it a bit sooner.’

‘But that would mean ...’ Volyova appeared unable to complete the thought.

‘Yes, Ilia. They’re going to have to get the tour of the ship. Whether they like it or not.’

‘This could turn out very badly, Khouri. Very badly indeed.’

Khouri looked down at her old mentor. ‘You know what I like about you, Ilia? You’re such a frigging optimist.’

‘Shut up and take a look at the battle display, Khouri. We are under attack - or we will be very shortly.’

‘Clavain?’

The merest hint of a nod. ‘
Zodiacal Light
has released squadrons of attack craft, around a hundred in total. They’re headed here, most of them at three gees. They won’t take more than four hours to reach us, no matter what we do.’

‘Clavain can’t have those weapons, Ilia.’

The Triumvir, who now looked far older and frailer than Khouri ever remembered, shook her head by the barest degree. ‘He isn’t going to get them. Not without a fight.’

They exchanged ultimatums. Clavain gave Ilia Volyova one last chance to surrender the hell-class weapons; if she complied he would recall his attack fleet. Volyova told Clavain that if he did not recall his fleet immediately, she would turn the thirteen remaining weapons against him.

Clavain readied his response. ‘Sorry. Unacceptable. I need those weapons very badly.’

He transmitted it and was only slightly startled when the Triumvir’s answer came back three seconds later. It was identical to his own. There had not been enough time for her to see his response.

THIRTY-FIVE

Volyova watched five of the thirteen remaining cache weapons assume attack positions beyond
Nostalgia for Infinity
. Their coloured icons floated above her bed like the kinds of bauble that were used to amuse infants in cots. Volyova raised a hand and poked it through the ghostly representation, pushing against the icons, adjusting the positions of the weapons relative to her ship, using its hull for camouflage wherever possible. The icons moved stubbornly, reflecting the sluggish real-time movements of the weapons themselves.

‘Are you going to use them immediately?’ Khouri asked.

Volyova glanced at the woman. ‘No. Not yet. Not until he forces my hand. I don’t want the Inhibitors to know that there are more cache weapons than the twenty they already know about.’

‘You’ll have to use them eventually.’

‘Unless Clavain sees sense and realises he can’t possibly win. Maybe he will. It isn’t too late.’

‘But we don’t know anything about the kinds of weapons he has,’ Khouri said. ‘What if he has something equally powerful?’

‘It won’t make a blind bit of difference if he has, Khouri. He wants something from me, understand? I want nothing from him. That gives me a distinct advantage over Clavain.’

‘I don’t ...’

Volyova sighed, disappointed that it was necessary to spell this out. ‘His strike against us has to be surgical. He can’t risk damaging the weapons he so badly wants. In crude terms, you don’t rob someone by dropping a crustbuster on them. But I’m bound by no such constraint. Clavain has nothing that I want.’

Well
, Volyova admitted to herself,
almost nothing
. She had a vague curiosity concerning whatever it was that had allowed him to decelerate so savagely. Even if it was nothing as exotic as inertia-suppression technology ... but no. It was nothing she needed desperately. That meant she could use all the force in her arsenal against him. She could wipe him out of existence, and her only loss would be something she was not even sure had ever existed.

But something still troubled her. Clavain, surely, could see all that for himself? Especially if she was dealing with
the
Clavain, the real Butcher of Tharsis. He had not lived through four hundred or more dangerous years of human history by making tragically simple errors.

What if Clavain knew something she didn’t?

She moved her fingers through the projection, nervously reconfiguring her pieces, wondering which of them she should use first, thinking also that, given Clavain’s limitations, it would be more interesting to let the battle escalate rather than taking his main ship out instantly.

‘Any news from Thorn?’ she asked.

‘He’s
en route
from Resurgam with another two thousand passengers. ’

‘And does he know about our little difficulty with Clavain?’

‘I told him we were moving closer to Resurgam. I didn’t see any sense in giving him anything more to worry about.’

‘No,’ Volyova said, agreeing with her for once. ‘The people are at least as safe in space as they’d be on Resurgam. At least once they’re off the planet they’ve got a hope of survival. Not much of one, but . . .’

‘Are you certain you won’t use the cache weapons?’

‘I
will
use them Khouri, but not a moment sooner than I have to. Haven’t you ever heard of the expression “whites of their eyes”? Perhaps not; it’s the sort of thing only a soldier would be likely to know.’

‘I’ve forgotten more about soldiering than you’ll ever know, Ilia.’

‘Just trust me. Is it so much to ask?’

Twenty-two minutes later the battle began. Clavain’s opening salvo was almost insultingly inadequate. She had detected the signatures of railgun launchers, ripples of electromagnetic energy designed to slam a small dense slug up to one or two thousand kilometres per second. The slugs took an hour to reach her from their launch points near
Zodiacal Light
. At the very limit of her resolution she could make out the skeletal cruciform shapes of the launchers themselves, and then watch the pulse of sequenced matter-antimatter explosions that drove the slugs up to their terminal velocities, gobbling up the railguns in the process. Clavain did not have enough railguns to saturate the immediate volume of space around her ship, so she could avoid being hit simply by making sure she - or rather the Captain - kept
Nostalgia for Infinity
in a constant random-walk pattern, never entering the volume of space where it had been an hour earlier, which was where any arriving railgun slug would have been aimed.

At first, that was exactly what happened. She did not even have to ask it of the Captain. He was privy to the same tactical information as Volyova, and appeared capable of arriving at the same conclusions. She felt the faint yawing and pitching, as if her bed was adrift on a raft on a mildly choppy sea, as
Nostalgia for Infinity
moved, shifting with short, thunderous bursts of the many station-keeping thrusters which dotted the hull.

But she could do better than that.

With the long-range grabs of the railguns and the electromagnetic launch signatures, she could determine the precise direction in which a particular slug had been aimed. There was a margin of error, but it was not large, and it amused Volyova to remain exactly where she was until the last possible moment, only then moving her ship. She ran simulations in the tactical display, showing the Captain the projected impact point of each new slug launch, and was gratified when the Captain revised his strategy. She liked it better this way. It was far more elegant and fuel-efficient, and she hoped that the lesson was not lost on Clavain.

She wanted him to become cleverer, so that she could become cleverer still.

Clavain watched as the last of his railguns fired and launched, destroying itself in a cascade of quick, bright explosions.

It was an hour since he had begun the attack, and he had never seriously expected that it would do more than occupy the Triumvir’s time, diverting her attention away from the other elements of the attack. If one of the slugs had hit her ship it would have delivered about a kilotonne of kinetic energy on impact; enough to cripple the lighthugger, perhaps even to rip it open, but not enough to destroy it entirely. There remained a chance of success - four slugs were still on their way - but the Triumvir had already shown every indication that she could deal with this particular threat. Clavain felt little in the way of regret; more a sense of quiet relief that they were past the negotiating stage and into the infinitely more honest arena of actual battle. He suspected that the Triumvir felt likewise.

Felka and Remontoire were floating next to him in the observation cupola, which was decoupled from the spinning part of the ship. Now that
Zodiacal Light
had slowed to a halt on the edge of the battle volume they no longer had need of their exoskeletons, and Clavain felt oddly vulnerable without his.

‘Disappointed, Clavain?’ asked Remontoire.

‘No. As a matter of fact I’m reassured. If anything feels too easy, I start looking for a trap.’

Remontoire nodded. ‘She’s no fool, that’s for certain, no matter what she’s done to her ship. You still don’t believe that story about an evacuation attempt, I take it?’

‘There’s more reason to believe it now than there was before,’ Felka said. ‘Isn’t that right, Clavain? We’ve seen shuttles moving between surface and orbit.’

‘That’s all we’ve seen,’ Clavain said.

‘And a larger ship moving between orbit and the lighthugger,’ she continued. ‘What more evidence do we need that she’s sincere?’

‘It doesn’t necessarily indicate an evacuation programme,’ Clavain said through gritted teeth. ‘It could be many things.’

‘So give her the benefit of the doubt,’ Felka said.

Clavain turned to her, brimming with sudden fury but hoping that it did not show. ‘It’s her choice. She has the weapons. They’re all I want.’

‘The weapons won’t make any difference in the long run.’

Now he made no attempt to hide his anger. ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

‘Exactly what I said. I know, Clavain. I know that everything that is happening here, everything that means so much to you, to us, means precisely nothing in the long run.’