The Revelation Space Collection (315 page)

‘So I’ve heard. Well, I really need to get this suit off . . . would you mind telling me where I’m sleeping?’

Culver showed her a tiny compartment tucked away between two throbbing generators. There was a mattress, a pillow and a blanket made of slippery quilted silver material. A curtain could be tugged across for privacy.

‘I hope you weren’t expecting luxury,’ Culver said.

‘I was expecting the worst.’

Culver lingered. ‘You sure you don’t want any help getting that suit off?’

‘I’ll manage, thanks.’

‘Got something to wear afterwards, have you?’

‘What I’m wearing under the suit, and what I brought with me.’ Rashmika patted the bag which was now tucked beneath her life-support pack. Through the fabric she could feel the hard edge of her compad. ‘You didn’t seriously think I’d forget to bring any clothes with me, did you?’

‘No,’ Culver said, sullenly.

‘Good. Now why don’t you run along and tell your parents that I’m safe and sound? And please let them know that the sooner we clear the village, the happier I’ll be.’

‘We’re moving as fast as we can go,’ Culver said.

‘Actually,’ Rashmika said, ‘that’s just what’s worrying me.’

‘In a bit of a hurry, are you?’

‘I’d like to reach the cathedrals as soon as I can, yes.’

Culver eyed her. ‘Got religion, have you?’

‘Not exactly,’ she said. ‘More like some family business I have to take care of.’

107 Piscium, 2615

Quaiche awoke, his body insinuated into a dark form-fitting cavity.

There was a moment of blissful disconnection while he waited for his memories to return, a moment in which he had no cares, no anxieties. Then all the memories barged into his head at once, announcing themselves like rowdy gate-crashers before shuffling themselves into something resembling chronological order.

He remembered being woken, to be greeted with the unwelcome news that he had been granted an audience with the queen. He remembered her dodecahedral chamber, furnished with instruments of torture, its morbid gloom punctuated by the flashes of electrocuted vermin. He remembered the skull with the television eyes. He remembered the queen toying with him the way cats toyed with sparrows. Of all his errors, imagining that she had it in her to forgive him had been the most grievous, the least forgivable.

Quaiche screamed now, grasping precisely what had happened to him and where he was. His screams were muffled and soft, uncomfortably childlike. He was ashamed to hear such sounds coming out of his mouth. He could move no part of himself, but he was not exactly paralysed - rather, there was no room to move any part of his body by more than a fraction of a centimetre.

The confinement felt oddly familiar.

Gradually Quaiche’s screams became wheezes, and then merely very hard rasping breaths. This continued for several minutes, and then Quaiche started humming, reiterating six or seven notes with the studied air of a madman or a monk. He must already be under the ice, he decided. There had been no entombment ceremony, no final chastising meeting with Jasmina. They had simply welded him into the suit and buried him within the shield of ice that
Gnostic Ascension
pushed ahead of itself. He could not guess how much time had passed, whether it was hours or larger fractions of a day. He dared not believe it was any longer than that.

As the horror hit him, so did something else: a nagging feeling that some detail was amiss. Perhaps it was the sense of familiarity he felt in the confined space, or perhaps it was the utter absence of anything to look at.

A voice said, ‘Attention, Quaiche. Attention, Quaiche. Deceleration phase is complete. Awaiting orders for system insertion.’

It was the calm, avuncular voice of the
Dominatrix’
s cybernetic subpersona.

He realised, joltingly, that he was not in the iron suit at all, but rather inside the slowdown coffin of the
Dominatrix
, packed into a form-fitting matrix designed to shield him during the high-gee deceleration phase. Quaiche stopped humming, simultaneously affronted and disorientated. He was relieved, no doubt about that. But the transition from the prospect of years of torment to the relatively benign environment of the
Dominatrix
had been so abrupt that he had not had time to depressurise emotionally. All he could do was gasp in shock and wonderment.

He felt a vague need to crawl back into the nightmare and emerge from it more gradually.

‘Attention, Quaiche. Awaiting orders for system insertion.’

‘Wait,’ he said. His throat was raw, his voice gummy. He must have been in the slowdown coffin for quite some time. ‘Wait. Get me out of here. I’m . . .’

‘Is everything satisfactory, Quaiche?’

‘I’m a bit confused.’

‘In what way, Quaiche? Do you need medical attention?’

‘No, I’m . . .’ He paused and squirmed. ‘Just get me out of here. I’ll be all right in a moment.’

‘Very well, Quaiche.’

The restraints budged apart. Light rammed in through widening cracks in the coffin’s walls. The familiar onboard smell of the
Dominatrix
hit his olfactory system. The ship was nearly silent, save for the occasional tick of a cooling manifold. It was always like that after slowdown, when they were in coast phase.

Quaiche stretched, his body creaking like an old wooden chair. He felt bad, but not nearly as bad as he had felt after his last hasty revival from reefersleep on board the
Gnostic Ascension
. In the slowdown coffin he had been drugged into a state of unconsciousness, but most bodily processes had continued normally. He only spent a few weeks in the coffin during each system survey, and the medical risks associated with being frozen outweighed the benefits to the queen of arresting his ageing.

He looked around, still not quite daring to believe he had been spared the nightmare of the scrimshaw suit. He considered the possibility that he might be hallucinating, that he had perhaps gone mad after spending several months under the ice. But the ship had a hyper-reality about it that did not feel like any kind of hallucination. He had no recollection of ever dreaming in slowdown before - at least, not the kind of dreams that resulted in him waking screaming. But the more time that passed, and the more the ship’s reality began to solidify around him, the more that seemed to be the most likely explanation.

He had dreamed every moment of it.

‘Dear God,’ Quaiche said. With that came a jolt of pain, the indoctrinal virus’s usual punishment for blasphemy, but the feeling of it was so joyously real, so unlike the horror of being entombed, that he said it again. ‘Dear God, I’d never have believed I had
that
in me.’

‘Had what in you, Quaiche?’ Sometimes the ship felt obliged to engage in conversation, as if secretly bored.

‘Never mind,’ he said, distracted by something. Normally when he emerged from the coffin he had plenty of room to twist around and align himself with the long, thin axis of the little ship’s main companionway. But now something chafed his elbow, something that was not usually there. He turned to look at it, half-knowing as he did so exactly what it would be.

Corroded and scorched metal skin the colour of pewter. A festering surface of manic detail. The vague half-formed shape of a person with a dark grilled slot where the eyes would have been.

‘Bitch,’ he said.

‘I am to inform you that the presence of the scrimshaw suit is a spur to success in your current mission,’ the ship said.

‘You were actually programmed to say that?’

‘Yes.’

Quaiche observed that the suit was plumbed into the life-support matrix of the ship. Thick lines ran from the wall sockets to their counterparts in the skin of the suit. He reached out again and touched the surface, running his fingers from one rough welded patch to another, tracing the sinuous back of a snake. The metal was mildly warm to the touch, quivering with a vague sense of subcutaneous activity.

‘Be careful,’ the ship said.

‘Why - is there something alive inside that thing?’ Quaiche said. Then a sickening realisation dawned. ‘Dear God.
Someone
’s inside it. Who?’

‘I am to inform you that the suit contains Morwenna.’

Of course.
Of course
. It made delicious sense.

‘You said I should be careful. Why?’

‘I am to inform you that the suit is rigged to euthanise its occupant should any attempt be made to tamper with the cladding, seams or life-support couplings. I am to inform you that only Surgeon-General Grelier has the means to remove the suit without euthanising the occupant.’

Quaiche pulled away from the suit. ‘You mean I can’t even touch it?’

‘Touching it would not be your wisest course of action, given the circumstances.’

He almost laughed. Jasmina and Grelier had excelled themselves. First the audience with the queen to make him think that she had at last run out of patience with him. Then the charade of being shown the suit and made to think that punishment was finally upon him. Made to believe that he was about to be buried in ice, forced into consciousness for what might be the better part of a decade. And then this: the final, mocking reprieve. His last chance to redeem himself. And make no bones about it: this
would
be his last chance. That was clear to him now. Jasmina had shown him exactly what would happen if he failed her one more time. Idle threats were not in Jasmina’s repertoire.

But her cleverness ran deeper than that, for with Morwenna imprisoned in the suit he had no hope of doing what had sometimes occurred to him, which was to hide in a particular system until the
Gnostic Ascension
had passed out of range. No - he had no practical choice but to return to the queen. And then hope for two things: firstly, that he would not have disappointed her; and secondly, that she would free Morwenna from the suit.

A thought occurred to him. ‘Is she awake?’

‘She is now approaching consciousness,’ the ship replied.

With her Ultra physiology, Morwenna would have been much better equipped to tolerate slowdown than Quaiche, but it still seemed likely that the scrimshaw suit had been modified to protect her in some fashion.

‘Can we communicate?’

‘You can speak to her when you wish. I will handle ship-to-suit protocols.’

‘All right, put me through now.’ He waited a second, then said, ‘Morwenna?’

‘Horris.’ Her voice was stupidly weak and distant. He had trouble believing she was only separated from him by mere centimetres of metal: it might as well have been fifty light-years of lead. ‘Horris, where am I? What’s happened?’

Nothing in his experience gave him any clue about how you broke news like this to someone. How did you gently wend the topic of a conversation around to being imprisoned alive in a welded metal suit?
Well, funny you should mention incarceration . . .

‘Morwenna, something’s up, but I don’t want you to panic. Everything will be all right in the end, but you mustn’t,
mustn’t
panic. Will you promise me that?’

‘What’s wrong?’ There was now a distinctly anxious edge to Morwenna’s voice.

Memo to himself: the one way to make people panic was to warn them not to.

‘Morwenna, tell me what you remember. Calmly and slowly.’ He heard the catch in her voice, the approaching onset of hysteria. ‘Where do you want me to begin?’

‘Do you remember me being taken to see the queen?’

‘Yes.’

‘And do you remember me being taken away from her chamber?’

‘Yes . . . yes, I do.’

‘Do you remember trying to stop them?’

‘No, I . . .’ She stopped and said nothing. He thought he had lost her - when she wasn’t speaking, the connection was silent. ‘Wait. Yes, I do remember.’

‘And after that?’

‘Nothing.’

‘They took me to Grelier’s operating theatre, Morwenna. The one where he did all those other things to me.’

‘No . . .’ she began, misunderstanding, thinking that the dreadful thing had happened to Quaiche rather than herself.

‘They showed me the scrimshaw suit,’ he said. ‘But they put you in it instead. You’re in it now, and that’s why you mustn’t panic.’

She took it well, better than he had been expecting. Poor, brave Morwenna. She had always been the more courageous half of their partnership. If she’d been given the chance to take the punishment upon herself, he knew she would have done so. Equally, he knew that he lacked that strength. He was weak and cowardly and selfish. Not a bad man, but not exactly one to be admired either. It was the flaw that had shaped his life. Knowing this did not make it any easier.

‘You mean I’m under the ice?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, it’s not that bad.’ He realised as he spoke how absurdly little difference it made whether she was buried under ice or not. ‘You’re in the suit now, but you’re not under the ice. And it isn’t because of anything you did. It’s because of me. It’s to force me to act in a certain way.’