The Revelation Space Collection (303 page)

Clavain sat on the edge of the casket for several minutes until he had enough strength in his legs to hobble across the chamber. He stumbled at the last moment and yet made the fall appear graceful, as if he had intended to lean suddenly against the support of the porthole’s armoured frame. He peered through the glass. He could see nothing beyond except blackness, with his own ghastly reflection hovering in the foreground. He appeared strangely eyeless, his sockets crammed with shadows which were the precise black of the background vacuum. He felt a savage jolt of
déjà vu
, the feeling that he had been here before, contemplating his own masklike face. He tugged and nagged at the thread of memory until it spooled free, recalling a last-minute diplomatic mission, a shuttle falling towards occupied Mars, an imminent confrontation with an old enemy and friend called Galiana ... and he remembered that even then, four hundred years ago - though it was more now, he thought - he had felt too old for the world, too old for the role it forced upon him. Had he known what lay before him then, he would have either laughed or gone insane. It had felt like the end of his life, and yet it had been only a moment from its beginning, barely separable in his memories now from his childhood.

He looked back at the people who had brought him around and then up at the ceiling.

‘Dim the lights,’ someone said.

His reflection disappeared. Now he could see something other than blackness. It was a swarm of stars, squashed into one hemisphere of the sky. Reds and blues and golds and frigid whites. Some were brighter than others, though he saw no familiar constellations. But the clumping of the stars, stirred into one part of the sky, meant only one thing. They were still moving relativistically, still skimming near the speed of light.

Clavain turned back to the small huddle of people. ‘Has the battle taken place?’

A pale dark-haired woman spoke for the group. ‘Yes, Clavain.’ She spoke warmly, but not with the absolute assurance Clavain had expected. ‘Yes, it’s over. We engaged the trio of Conjoiner ships, destroying one and damaging the other two.’

‘Only damaged?’

‘The simulations didn’t get it quite right,’ said the woman. She moved to Clavain’s side and pushed a beaker of brown fluid under his nose. He looked at her face and hair. There was something familiar about the way she wore it, something that sparked the same ancient memories that had been stirred by his reflection in the porthole. ‘Here, drink this. Recuperative medichines from Ilia’s arsenal. It’ll do you the world of good.’

Clavain took the beaker from the woman’s hand and sniffed at the broth. It smelt of chocolate when he had expected tea. He tipped some down his throat. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if I ask your name?’

‘Not at all,’ the woman said. ‘I’m Felka. You know me quite well.’

He looked at her and shrugged. ‘You seem familiar . . .’

‘Drink up. I think you need it.’

His memory came back in swathes, like a city recovering from a power failure: block by random block, utilities stuttering and flickering before normal service was resumed. Even when he felt all right, there came other medichine therapies, each of which dealt with specific areas of brain function, each of which was administered in doses more carefully tuned than the last, while Clavain grimaced and cooperated with the minimum of good grace. By the end of it he did not want to see another thimbleful of chocolate in his life.

After several hours he was deemed to be neurologically sound. There were still things that he did not recall with great precision, but he was told this was within the error margins of the usual amnesia that accompanied reefersleep fugue, and did not indicate any untoward lapses. They gave him a lightweight bio-monitor tabard, assigned a spindly bronze servitor to him and told him he was free to move around as he pleased.

‘Shouldn’t I be asking why you’ve woken me?’ he said.

‘We’ll get to that later,’ said Scorpio, who seemed to be in charge. ‘There’s no immediate hurry, Clavain.’

‘But I take it there’s a decision that needs to be made?’

Scorpio glanced at one of the other leaders, the woman called Antoinette Bax. She had wide eyes and a freckled nose and he felt that there were memories of her that he had yet to unearth. She nodded back, almost imperceptibly.

‘We wouldn’t have woken you for the view, Clavain,’ Scorpio said. ‘It’s a piece of crap even with the lights out.’

Somewhere in the heart of the immense vessel was a place that felt like it belonged in some entirely different part of the universe. It was a glade, a place of grass and trees and synthetic blue skies. There were holographic birds in the air: parrots and hornbills and suchlike, skimming from tree to tree in cometlike flashes of bright primary colour, and there was a waterfall in the distance which looked suspiciously real, hazed in a swirling talcum-blue mist where it emptied into a small dark lake.

Felka escorted Clavain on to a flat apron of cool glistening grass. She wore a long black dress, her feet lost under the black spillage of the hem. She did not seem to mind it dragging through the dew-laden grass. They sat down facing each other, resting on tree stumps whose tops had been polished to mirrored smoothness. They had the place to themselves, except for the birds.

Clavain looked around. He felt much better now and his memory was nearly whole, but he did not remember this place at all. ‘Did you create this, Felka?’

‘No,’ she said cautiously, ‘but why do you ask?’

‘Because it reminds me a little of the forest at the core of the Mother Nest, I suppose. Where you had your atelier. Except it has gravity, of course, which your atelier didn’t.’

‘So you do remember, then.’

He scratched at the stubble on his chin. Someone had thoughtfully shaved off his beard when he was asleep. ‘Dribs and drabs. Not as much of what happened before I went under as I’d like.’

‘What do you remember, exactly?’

‘Remontoire leaving to make contact with Sylveste. You almost going with him, and then deciding not to. Not much else. Volyova’s dead, isn’t she?’

Felka nodded. ‘We got the planet evacuated. You and Volyova agreed to split the remaining hell-class weapons. She took
Storm Bird
, loaded as many weapons on to it as she could manage and rode it straight into the heart of the Inhibitor machine.’

Clavain pursed his lips and whistled quietly. ‘Did she make much difference?’

‘None at all. But she went out with a bang.’

Clavain smiled. ‘I never expected anything less of her. And what else?’

‘Khouri and Thorn - you remember them? They joined Remontoire’s expedition to Hades. They have shuttles, and they’ve initiated
Zodiacal Light’
s self-repair systems. All they have to do is keep supplying it with raw material and it will repair itself. But it will take a little while, time enough for them to make contact with Sylveste, Khouri thinks.’

‘I didn’t know quite what to make of her claim to have already been into Hades,’ Clavain said, picking blades of grass from the area around his feet. He crushed them and sniffed the pulpy green residue that stained his fingers. ‘But the Triumvir seemed to think it was true.’

‘We’ll find out sooner or later,’ Felka said. ‘After they’ve made contact - however long that takes - they’ll take
Zodiacal Light
out of the system and follow our trajectory. As for us, well, it’s still your ship, Clavain, but day-to-day affairs are handled by a Triumvirate. Triumvirs Blood, Cruz and Scorpio, by popular vote. Khouri would be one of them, of course, if she hadn’t chosen to stay behind after the evacuation.’

‘My memory says they rescued one hundred and sixty thousand people,’ Clavain said. ‘Is that shockingly wide of the mark?’

‘No, it’s about right. Which sounds pretty impressive until you realise that we didn’t manage to save forty thousand others ...’

‘We were the thing that went wrong, weren’t we? If we hadn’t intervened ...’

‘No, Clavain.’ Her voice was admonitionary, as if he was an old man who had committed some awful
faux pas
in polite company. ‘No. You mustn’t think like that. Look, it was like this, understand?’ They were close enough for Conjoined thought. She piped images into his head, pictures from the death of Resurgam. He saw the last hours as the wolf machine - that was what they were now all calling the Inhibitor weapon - bored its gravitation sinkhole into the very heart of the star, stabbing an invisible curette deep into the nuclear-burning core. The tunnel that it had opened was exceedingly narrow, no more than a few kilometres wide at its deepest point - and though the star was being drained of blood, the process was no uncontrolled haemorrhage. Instead the fusing matter in the nuclear-burning core was allowed to squirt out in a fine jetting arc, a column of expanding, cooling hellfire that speared from the star’s surface at half the speed of light. Constrained and guided by pulses of the same gravitational energy that had cored the star in the first place, the spike was bent in a lazy parabola that caused it to douse against the dayside of Resurgam. By the time it impacted, the starfire flame was a thousand kilometres across. The effect was catastrophic and practically instantaneous. The atmosphere was boiled away in a searing flash, the icecaps and the few areas of open water following instants later. Arid and airless, the crust under the beam became molten, the spike gouging a cherry-red scar across the face of the planet. Hundreds of vertical kilometres of the planet’s surface were incinerated, gouting into space in a hot cloud of boiled rock. Shockwaves from the initial impact reached around the world and destroyed all life on the nightside: every human being, every organism that humans had brought to Resurgam. And yet they would have died soon enough without that shockwave. Within hours, the nightside had turned to face the sun. The spike continued to boil, the well of the energy at the heart of the star barely tapped. Resurgam’s crust burned away, and still the beam continued to chew into the planet’s mantle.

It took three weeks to reduce the planet to a smoking red-hot cinder, four-fifths of its previous size. Then the beam flicked to another target, another world, and began the same murderous sweep. The depletion of matter from the star’s heart would eventually bleed Delta Pavonis down to a cool husk of itself, until so much matter had been removed that fusion came to an abrupt halt. It had not happened yet, Felka said - at least not according to the light-signals that were catching up with them from the system - but when it did, it stood every chance of being a violent event.

‘So you see,’ Felka said, ‘we were actually lucky to rescue as many as we did. It wasn’t our fault that more died. We just did what was right under the circumstances. There’s no sense feeling guilty about it. If we hadn’t shown up, a thousand other things could have gone wrong. Skade’s fleet would still have arrived, and she wouldn’t have been any more inclined to negotiate than you were.’

Clavain remembered the vile flash of a dying starship, and remembered also the ultimate death of Galiana that he had sanctioned with the decision to destroy
Nightshade
. Even now the thought of that was painful.

‘Skade died, didn’t she? I killed her, in interstellar space. The other elements of her fleet were acting autonomously, even when we engaged them.’

‘Everything was autonomous,’ Felka said, with curious evasion.

Clavain watched a macaw orbit from tree to tree. ‘I don’t mind being consulted on strategic matters, but I’m not seeking a position of authority on this ship. It isn’t
mine
, for a start, no matter what Volyova might have thought. I’m too old to take command. And besides, what would the ship need with me anyway? It already has its own Captain.’

Felka’s voice was low. ‘So you remember the Captain?’

‘I remember what Volyova told us. I don’t remember ever talking with the Captain himself. Is he still running things, the way she said he would?’

Her voice remained guarded. ‘Depends what you mean by running things. His infrastructure is still intact, but there’s been no sign of him as a conscious entity since we left Delta Pavonis.’

‘Then the Captain’s dead, is that it?’

‘No, that can’t be it either. He had fingers in too many aspects of routine shipwide functioning, so Volyova said. When he used to go into one of his catatonic states, it was like pulling the plug on the entire ship. That hasn’t happened. The ship’s still taking care of itself, keeping itself ticking over, indulging in self-repair and the occasional upgrade.’

Clavain nodded. ‘Then it’s as if the Captain’s still functioning on an involuntary level, but there’s no sentience there any more? Like a patient who still has enough brain function to breathe, but not much else?’

‘That’s our best guess. But we can’t be totally sure. Sometimes there are little glimmers of intelligence, things that the ship does to itself without asking anyone. Flashes of creativity. It’s more as if the Captain’s still there, but buried more deeply than was ever the case before.’

‘Or perhaps he just left behind a ghost of himself,’ Clavain said. ‘A mindless shell, pottering through the same behavioural patterns.’

‘Whatever it was, he redeemed himself,’ Felka said. ‘He did something terrible, but in the end he also saved one hundred and sixty thousand lives.’