The Revelation Space Collection (50 page)

‘You were slow,’ Sudjic said, on the general-suit, even as the attack continued. ‘This was real, we’d be hosing you off the walls.’

‘How many times you seen close-quarters action, Sudjic?’

Kjarval - who until then had said next to nothing - cut in on them. ‘We’ve all seen action, Khouri.’

‘Yeah? And did you ever get close enough to the enemy to hear them scream for mercy?’

‘What I mean is . . . fuck.’ Kjarval had just taken a hit. Her suit spasmed momentarily, flicking through a series of incorrect chameleoflage modes: space-black; snow-white and then florid, tropical foliage, making it look as if Kjarval were a door leading out of the chamber into the heart of some remote planetary jungle.

Her suit stammered, and then regained its reflective sheen.

‘I’m worried about those other suits.’

‘That’s what they’re for. To make you worry, and louse up.’

‘We need help to louse up? That’s a new one.’

‘Shut it, Khouri. Just concentrate on the damned war.’

She did. That part was easy.

Roughly a third of the attacking wolfhounds had been shot down, and no new forces were emerging through the chamber’s still-open end door. But the other suits - there were three of them, Khouri saw - had done nothing so far except loiter near the hole, and were now slowly moving towards the floor, correcting their descent with bursts of needle-thin thrust from their heels. As they did so they too assumed a colour and texture which matched the shot-up floor. It was impossible to tell which - if any - were occupied.

‘This is part of the scenario; those suits - they’ve got to mean something.’

‘I said shut it, Khouri.’

But she continued, ‘We’re on a mission, right? We have to assume that much. We have to impose some structure on the damned thing or we don’t know who the hell’s the enemy!’

‘Good idea,’ Sudjic said. ‘Let’s schedule a meeting.’

By now the wolfhounds, and their fire-returning suits, were using particle-beams. Maybe the lasers had been real - it was just within the bounds of possibility - but it seemed certain that any significantly more powerful weapon would be only simulated. After all, it would not be an auspicious end to the exercise if one of them blasted a hole in the chamber wall and vented all the air into space.

‘Let’s assume,’ Khouri said, ‘that we know who the hell we are and why we’re here - wherever here happens to be. The next question is, do we know those bastards in the other three suits?’

‘This is getting way too philosophical for me,’ Kjarval said, loping away to draw fire.

‘If we’re having this conversation,’ Khouri said, doggedly talking over Sudjic’s interjections, ‘then we have to assume we don’t know who they are. That they’re hostile. And that means we should shoot the scum first, before they do whatever they’re going to do to us.’

‘I think you could be fucking up big-time, Khouri.’

‘Yeah, well, as you kindly pointed out, I’m the one who isn’t going down anyway.’

‘Amen to that.’

‘Er . . . people . . .’ This was Kjarval, who had noticed what it took Khouri and Sudjic another moment to absorb. ‘I don’t like the look of that.’

What she had seen was that the wrists of the three other suits were morphing, each extruding an as yet unformed weapon. The process was unnervingly rapid, like watching a party balloon inflate into the shape of an animal.

‘Shoot the fuckers,’ Khouri said, with a voice so calm it almost scared her. ‘Full fire-convergence on the leftmost suit. Go to minimum-yield ack-am pulse mode, conic dispersal with lateral cross-sweep.’

‘Since when are you giving . . .’

‘Just fucking do it, Sudjic!’

But she was already firing, Kjarval too; the three of them were now standing apart by ten metres, directing their suits’ fire towards the enemy. The accelerated antimatter pulses were simulated . . . of course. If they had been real, there would have been little of the chamber left to stand on.

There was a flash, one so bright that Khouri felt it reach out and push taloned fingers into her eyes. It felt too intense to have been properly simulated . . . too concussive. The noise of the blast hit with a force that seemed almost gentle by comparison, but the shock was still enough to throw her backwards, keeling into the mottled chamber wall. The bump was like bouncing onto a mattress in an expensive hotel room. For a moment her suit was out cold; even when her eyes began to clear she could see that the readouts had either died or turned to unreadably cryptic mush. They lingered in that state for a few agonising seconds before the suit’s back-up brain staggered on line, reinstating what it could. A simpler - but at least comprehensible - display returned to life, detailing what remained and what had been destroyed. Most of the major weapons were out. Suit autonomy was down by fifty per cent, the persona slipping towards machine autism. There was extensive loss of servo-assistance in three articulation points. Flight capability was impaired, at least until the repair protocols could get to work, and they needed a minimum two hours to finesse a bypass solution.

Oh, and - according to the bio-medical readout - she was now minus one upper limb, from the elbow down.

She struggled to a sitting position and - though every instinct told her to spend the time getting safe and assessing the surroundings - she had to look at the shot-away limb. Her right arm ended just where the med-readout said it would; truncating in a crumpled mass of scorched bone, flesh and intermingled metal. Further up the stump, the gel-air would have shock-congealed to prevent pressure and blood loss, but that was a detail she had to take for granted. There was no pain, of course - another aspect in which the simulation was utterly realistic, since the suit would be telling her pain centre to shut down for the time being.

Assess, assess . . .

She had lost her orientation completely in the blast. She looked around, but the suit’s head articulation was jammed. There was suddenly an awful lot of smoke out there; hanging in coils in the air venting from the chamber itself. The intermittent illumination provided by the aerial drones was now only a stuttering strobe-effect. There were the wrecks of two suits over there, suffering the kind of comprehensive damage which might indicate that they had been hit by combined ack-am pulses. But the suits were too mangled up for her to tell if they had - or had ever had - occupants. A third suit - less critically damaged, and perhaps only stunned, as her own had been - rested ten or fifteen metres away around the great curve of the chamber’s scarred wall. The wolfhounds were gone, or destroyed; it was impossible to tell which.

‘Sudjic? Kjarval?’

Silence; not even her own voice properly audible, and certainly nothing resembling a reply. Intersuit comms were compromised, she saw now - a detail on the damage readout she had ignored until then. Bad, Khouri. Very bad.

Now she had no idea who the enemy was.

The ruined suit arm was fixing itself by the second, scorched parts sloughing to the ground, while the exterior skin crawled forwards to envelop the stump. It was faintly disgusting to watch, even though Khouri had seen it happen many times before, in other simulation scenarios on the Edge. What was really nauseating was knowing that no such immediate repair was possible for her own wounds; that they would have to wait until she was medevacked out of the zone.

The other suit, the one less damaged, was moving now, raising itself to a standing position, just as she was doing. The other suit had a full complement of limbs, and many of its weapons were still deployed, jutting from various apertures. They were locking onto Khouri, like a dozen vipers poising for the strike.

‘Who’s that?’ she asked, before remembering that the comms were offline, probably for good. Out of the corner of her eye she saw another two suits off to one side, emerging from banners of languid, charcoal-dark smoke. Who were they? Remnants of the original three which had come down with the wolfhounds, or her comrades?

The single suit with the weapons was approaching her, very slowly, as if she were a bomb which might go off at any moment. The suit stopped, motionless. Its skin was trying to mimic the combination of the background colour of the chamber wall and the smoke screens, with only moderate success. Khouri wondered how her own suit was doing. Was her faceplate opaque or transparent? It was impossible to tell from inside, and the minimalist readout told her nothing. If the one with the weapons saw a human face within, would that incite it to kill or hold fire? Khouri had locked her own usable weapons on the figure, but nothing she had seen told her whether she was pointed at the enemy or a mute comrade.

She moved to raise her good arm, to indicate her face, asking the other to make its faceplate transparent.

The other fired.

Khouri was blown back into the wall, an invisible piledriver ramming into her stomach. Her suit started screaming, all manner of gibberish scrolling across her vision. There was a roar of sound before she hit the wall, the compressed burst of a frantic return-fire from her own available weapons.

Fuck, Khouri thought. That actually hurt, at the visceral level which somehow betrayed it as not having been simulated.

She struggled to her feet again, just as another charge from the attacker slammed past and the third caught her on the thigh. She started wheeling back, both arms flailing at the periphery of vision. There was something wrong with her arms; or more accurately, something not wrong where something should have been. They were completely intact; no sign that one of them had just been blasted off.

‘Shit,’ she said. ‘What the fuck is happening?’

The attack was continuing, each blast impacting her and driving her back.

‘This is Volyova,’ said a voice, not in any way calm and detached. ‘Listen to me carefully, all of you! Something’s going wrong with the scenario! I want you all to stop firing—’

Khouri had hit the deck again, this time with enough force that she felt it through the gel-air cushion, like a slap against her spine. Her thigh felt injured, and the suit was doing nothing to ameliorate the discomfort.

It’s gone live, she thought.

The weapons were for real now; or at least those which belonged to the suit attacking her.

‘Kjarval,’ Volyova said. ‘Kjarval! You have to stop firing! You’re killing Khouri!’

But Kjarval - Khouri guessed that she was the attacker - was not listening, or not capable of listening, or, more terrifyingly, not capable of stopping.

‘Kjarval,’ the Triumvir said again, ‘if you don’t stop, I’m going to have to disarm you!’

But Kjarval did not stop. She kept on firing, Khouri feeling each impact like a lash, writhing under the assault, desperate to claw her way through the tortured alloy of the chamber into the sanctuary beyond.

And then Volyova descended from the chamber’s middle, where she had apparently been all along, unseen. As she descended, she opened fire on Kjarval, at first with the lightest weapons she had, but with steadily mounting force. Kjarval countered by directing some portion of her fire upwards, towards the lowering Triumvir. The blasts hit Volyova, gouging black scars into her armour, chipping fragments from the flexible integument, slicing off weapons as her suit tried to extrude and deploy them. But Volyova maintained an edge on the trainee. Kjarval’s suit began to wilt, losing integrity. Its weapons went haywire, missing their targets and then shooting haphazardly around the chamber.

Eventually - it could not have been more than a minute after she had first started firing on Khouri - Kjarval dropped to the ground. Her suit, where it was not blackened by the hits it had sustained, was a quilt of mismatched psychedelic colours and rapidly morphing hyper-geometric textures, sprouting half-realised weapons and devices. Her limbs were thrashing crazily. The ends of the limbs had gone berserk, extruding - and then budding off - various manipulators and rough, baby-sized approximations of human hands.

Khouri got to her feet, stifling a scream of pain as her thigh protested against the movement. Her suit was a stiffening deadweight around her, but somehow she managed to walk, or at least totter, to the place where Kjarval lay.

Volyova and another suited figure - she had to be Sudjic - were already there, leaning over what remained of the suit, trying to make some sense of its medical diagnostic readouts.

‘She’s dead,’ Volyova said.

FOURTEEN

Mantell, North Nekhebet, Resurgam, 2566

On the day that the newcomers announced their presence, Sylveste was woken by a stab of unforgiving white light. He held his arm up in supplication while he waited for his eyes to cycle through their initialisation routines. It was almost useless speaking to him in those moments; Sluka evidently realised this. With so many of their original functions gone, the eyes took longer than ever now to reach functionality. Sylveste experienced a slow rote of errors and warnings, little spectral prickles of pain as the eyes investigated critically impaired modes.

He was half aware of Pascale sitting up in bed next to him, lifting the sheets around her chest.

‘You’d better wake up,’ Sluka said. ‘Both of you. I’ll wait outside while you dress.’

The two of them struggled into clothes. Beyond the room, Sluka stood patiently with two guards, neither conspicuously armed. Sylveste and his wife were escorted towards Mantell’s commons, where the morning shift of True Path Inundationists were gathered around an oblong wallscreen. Flasks of coffee and breakfast rations lay undisturbed on the commons table. Whatever was going on, Sylveste surmised, was enough to kill any normal appetite. And the screen evidently held the key. He could hear a voice speaking, amplified and harsh, as if from a loudspeaker. There was so much background conversation taking place that he could do no more than snatch the odd word from the narrative. Unfortunately, that odd word tended to be his own name, spoken at too-frequent intervals by whoever was booming from the screen.