The Revelation Space Collection (516 page)

‘So Anthony Theobald got what he wanted?’

‘Not exactly. My family had expectations that I’d become another partner in the defence-design business. Unfortunately, I had other plans. I decided to leave Industrial, severing ties to both my family and the business, and join Delphine in the Bubble. I’d become inspired by her art, convinced that I might have something of the same genius lying untapped within myself. It took me about three months to realise that I had no undeveloped talent whatsoever.’

‘Takes some people a lifetime.’

‘But I did realise that I could help Delphine. I decided to become her agent, publicist, broker, whatever you want to call it. That’s why I was so reluctant to accept Dravidian’s offer.’

‘I take it Anthony Theobald wasn’t exactly thrilled by either course of events: you severing ties with your rich family, and then souring the Dravidian deal.’

‘I sensed some issues there, yes.’

‘Do you think he was angry enough to want to kill his own daughter and family?’

‘No. Anthony Theobald and I might not have seen eye to eye, but I knew he loved his daughter. He’d have played no part in this.’ Vernon Tregent looked intently at Dreyfus. ‘Why look for another angle, though, when you already have Dravidian?’

‘I’m just making sure I don’t miss anything. If you think of something, you’ll be sure to tell me, won’t you?’

‘Certainly.’ But then a shadow of suspicion crossed the young man’s face. ‘I’d have to know I could trust you, of course.’

‘Why wouldn’t you trust me?’

‘How do I know that you’re really a prefect, to begin with, or that Ruskin-Sartorious really has been destroyed? For all I know I could have been kidnapped by data-pirates. I don’t have any evidence that this is Panoply.’

‘Nothing I can show you or tell you will make any difference to that.’

Vernon pondered that for a long while before responding. ‘I know. And right now I’m not sure I’ve seen or heard enough to be able to make a sound judgement.’

‘If you know anything that could assist in the investigation, you should tell me now.’

‘I want to talk to Delphine.’

‘Out of the question. You’re both material witnesses. I can’t have your individual testimonies invalidated by cross-contamination.’

‘We’re in love, Prefect.’

‘Your human counterparts were in love. There’s a difference.’

‘You really don’t believe in us, do you?’

‘Nor do you.’

‘But Delphine does. She believes, Prefect. That’s all that matters to me.’ Vernon’s eyes seemed to shine right through him. ‘Crush me, by all means. But don’t crush Delphine.’

‘Hold invocation,’ Dreyfus said.

When the room was empty, Dreyfus retrieved the compad from between his knees and began to organise his thoughts about Vernon, using the ancient stylus entry mode that he favoured. Yet something stilled his hand, however: some tingle of disquiet that he could not ignore. He’d interviewed beta-level simulations on many previous occasions, and he considered himself well versed in their ways. He had never sensed a soul behind the clockwork, and he would not have said that he sensed one now. But
something
was different. He had never before felt that he had to earn the trust of a beta-level, nor had he ever considered what the earning of that trust might signify.

One trusted machines. But one never expected machines to return the favour.

‘Invoke Delphine Ruskin-Sartorious,’ Dreyfus said.

The woman assumed solidity in the interview room. She was taller than Dreyfus, dressed in a simple white smock and trousers, her sleeves rolled up to the elbow, the trousers rolled to just below the knee, flat white slippers on her feet, arms crossed. She was leaning to one side, weight on one leg, as if waiting for something to happen. She had silver bracelets on her wrists, but no other ornamentation. Her heart-shaped face was plain without being ugly. She had simple, minimalist features, unadorned with cosmetics. Her eyes were a very pale sea-green. Her hair was scrunched back from her brow, tied with what looked like a dirty rag. A few coiled strands had escaped to frame the side of her face.

‘Delphine?’ Dreyfus asked.

‘Yes. Where am I?’

‘You’re in Panoply. I’m afraid I have very bad news. Ruskin-Sartorious has been destroyed.’

Delphine nodded, as if the news was something she’d been quietly dreading. ‘I asked your colleague about Vernon. She wouldn’t tell me anything, but I read between the lines. I knew it had to be something bad. Did Vernon—’

‘Vernon died. So did everyone else. I’m sorry. But we managed to recover Vernon’s beta-level.’

She closed her eyes briefly, reopened them. ‘I want to speak to him.’

‘That isn’t possible.’ Some impulse made Dreyfus add: ‘Not right now, at any rate. Maybe later. But I need to talk to you alone first. What happened to the Bubble doesn’t look like an accident. If it was deliberate, it ranks as one of the worst crimes committed since the Eighty. I want to see justice served. But to do that I need the full cooperation of all surviving witnesses.’

‘You said no one survived.’

‘All we have are three beta-levels. I think I’ve begun to piece together what happened, but your testimony will count just as much as the others.’

‘If I can help, I will.’

‘I need to know what went on right at the end. I understand you were hoping to sell some of your artwork to a third party.’

‘Dravidian, yes.’

‘Tell me everything you know about Dravidian, starting from the beginning. Then tell me about the art.’

‘Why would you care about the art?’

‘It’s connected to the crime. I feel I need to know about it.’

‘Then that’s it? No interest in the art beyond that?’

‘I’m a man of simple tastes.’

‘But you know what you like.’

Dreyfus smiled slightly. ‘I saw that sculpture you were working on - the big one with the face.’

‘And what did you think of it?’

‘It unsettled me.’

‘It was meant to. Perhaps you’re not a man of such simple tastes as you think.’

Dreyfus studied her for several moments before speaking. ‘You appear to be taking the matter of your death quite lightly, Delphine.’

‘I’m not dead.’

‘I’m investigating your murder.’

‘As well you should - a version of me has been killed. But the one that counts - the one that matters to me now - is the one talking to you. As difficult as it may be for you to accept, I feel completely alive. Don’t get me wrong: I want justice. But I’m not going to mourn myself.’

‘I admire the strength of your convictions.’

‘It’s not about conviction. It’s about the way I feel. I was raised by a family that regarded beta-level simulation as a perfectly natural state of existence. My mother died in Chasm City, years before I was born from a cloned copy of her womb. I only knew her from her beta-level, but she’s been as real to me as any person I’ve ever known.’

‘I don’t doubt it.’

‘If someone close to you died, would you refuse to acknowledge the authenticity of their beta-level?’

‘The question’s never arisen.’

She looked sceptical. ‘Then no one close to you - no one with a beta-level back-up - has ever died? In
your
line of work?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Then someone has died?’

‘We’re not here to talk about abstract matters,’ Dreyfus said.

‘I’m not sure I can think of anything less abstract than life and death.’

‘Let’s get back to Dravidian.’

‘I touched a nerve, didn’t I?’

‘Tell me about the Ultras.’

But just as Delphine started speaking - the look on her face said she wasn’t going to answer his question directly - the black outline of a door appeared in the passwall behind her. The white surface within the outline flowed open enough to admit the stocky form of Sparver, then resealed behind him.

‘Freeze invocation,’ Dreyfus said, irritated that he’d been disturbed. ‘Sparver, I thought I said that I wasn’t to be—’

‘Had to reach you, Boss. This is urgent.’

‘Then why didn’t you summon me on my bracelet?’

‘Because you’d turned it off.’

‘Oh.’ Dreyfus glanced down at his sleeve. ‘So I did.’

‘Jane told me to pull you out of whatever you were doing, no matter how much you screamed and kicked. There’s been a development.’

Dreyfus whispered a command to return Delphine to storage. ‘This had better be good,’ he told Sparver when the beta-level had vanished. ‘I was close to getting a set of watertight testimonies tying the
Accompaniment of Shadows
to the Bubble. That’s all the ammunition I need to take back to Seraphim. He’d have no choice but to hand over the ship then.’

‘I don’t think you need to persuade him to hand over the ship.’

Dreyfus frowned momentarily, still irked. ‘What?’

‘It’s already on its way. It’s headed straight for us.’

CHAPTER 6

When Sparver prodded Dreyfus awake, they’d arrived within visual range of the
Accompaniment of Shadows
. Dreyfus untangled himself from the hammock webbing and followed his deputy into the spacious flight deck of the deep-system cruiser. Field prefects were authorised to fly cutters, but a ship as big and powerful as the
Democratic Circus
needed a dedicated team. There were three operatives on the flight deck, all wearing immersion glasses and elbow-length black control gloves. The chief pilot was a man named Pell, a Panoply operative Dreyfus knew and respected. Dreyfus grunted acknowledgement, had Sparver conjure him a bulb of coffee, then asked his deputy to bring him up to date.

‘Jane polled on the nukes,’ the hyperpig said. ‘We’re good to go.’

‘What about the harbourmaster?’

‘No further contact with Seraphim, or any other representative of the Ultras. But we do have a shipload of secondary headaches to worry about.’

‘Just when I was starting to get used to the ones we already had.’

‘Headquarters says there’s a storm brewing over Ruskin-Sartorious - the news is beginning to break. Not the full facts - no one else knows exactly which ship was involved - but there are a hundred million citizens out there capable of joining the dots.’

‘Are people starting to work out that Ultras had to be involved?’

‘Definite speculation along those lines. A handful of spectators have noticed the drifting ship and are beginning to think it must be tied to the atrocity.’

‘Great.’

‘In a perfect world, they’d see the ship as evidence that a crime has been committed and that the Ultras have acted with the necessary swiftness, punishing their own.’

Dreyfus scratched at stubble. He needed a shave. ‘But if this was a perfect world, you and I’d be out of a job.’

‘Jane says we have to consider the very real possibility that some parties may attempt unilateral punitive action if they conclude that Ultras were responsible.’

‘In other words, we could be looking at war between the Glitter Band and the Ultras.’

‘I’m hoping no one will be
quite
that stupid,’ Sparver said. ‘Then again, this is baseline humans we’re dealing with.’

‘I’m a baseline human.’

‘You’re weird.’

Captain Pell turned away from the console towards them and flipped up his goggles. ‘Final approach now, sir. There’s a lot of debris and gas boiling off, so I suggest we hold at three thousand metres.’

Pell had turned most of the hull transparent, so that the
Accompaniment of Shadows
was visible alongside. Something was very wrong with it, Dreyfus observed. The engine spars ended in ragged, splayed stumps of tangled metal and hull plating, with no sign of the engines themselves. It was as if they had been ripped off; amputated. The vessel was crabbing, moving sideways instead of nose-first. The hull itself showed evidence of grave assault: great fissures and sucking wounds where armour had been plucked away to reveal hidden innards; machinery that was now glowing red-hot from some unspecified assault. Coils of blue-grey vapour bled into space, forming a widening spiral trail behind the slowly tumbling wreck.

The ship, Dreyfus realised, was burning from inside.

‘I guess we’re seeing what passes for justice in Ultra circles,’ Sparver said.

‘They can call it what they like,’ Dreyfus snapped back. ‘I asked for witnesses, not a shipload of charred corpses.’ He turned to Pell. ‘How long until it hits the edge of the Glitter Band?’

‘Four hours and twenty-eight minutes.’

‘I told Jane we’d destroy it three hours before it reaches the outer habitat orbit. That gives us ninety minutes’ grace. How are the nukes coming along?’

‘Dialled and ready to go. We’ve identified impact sites, but we’ll be happier if we stabilise the tumble before we blow. We’re looking at options for tug attachment now.’