The Revelation Space Collection (231 page)

Felka remembered being told that Skade’s injuries were so severe that it required a roomful of Doctor Delmar’s equipment just to keep her alive. ‘I didn’t think . . .’

The crab waved a manipulator, dismissing her protestations. ‘It doesn’t matter. Come down later; we’ll have a little chat.’

‘I’d like that,’ Felka said. ‘There’s a great deal you and I need to talk about, Skade.’

‘Of course there is. Well, I must be going; urgent matters to attend to.’

A hole puckered open in one wall; the crab scuttled through it, vanishing into the ship’s hidden innards.

Felka looked at Remontoire. ‘Seeing as we’re all Closed Council, I suppose I can talk freely. Did she say anything more about the Exordium experiments when you were with Clavain?’

Remontoire kept his voice very low. It was no more than a gesture; they had to assume that Skade would be able to hear everything that went on in the ship, and would also be able to read their minds at source. But Felka understood precisely why he felt the need to whisper. ‘Nothing. She even lied about where the edict to cease shipbuilding came from.’

Felka glared at the wall, forcing it to provide her with somewhere to sit down. A ledge pushed out from the wall opposite Remontoire and she eased herself on to it. It was good to be off her feet; she had spent far too long of late in the weightless environment of her atelier, and the gee of shipboard thrust was wearying.

She stared out through the cupola and down, and saw the lobed shadow of one of
Nightshade’
s engines silhouetted against an aura of chill flame.

‘What did she tell him?’ Felka asked.

‘Some story about the Closed Council piecing together the evidence of the wolf attacks from a variety of ship losses.’

‘Implausible.’

‘I don’t think Clavain believed her. But she couldn’t mention Exordium; she obviously wanted him to know the bare minimum for the job, and yet she couldn’t avoid talking about the edict to some extent.’

‘Exordium’s at the heart of all this,’ Felka said. ‘Skade must have known that if she gave Clavain a thread to pull on he’d have unravelled the whole thing, right back to the Inner Sanctum.’

‘That’s as far as he’d have been able to take it.’

‘Knowing Clavain, I wouldn’t be so sure. She wanted him as an ally because he isn’t the kind to stop at a minor difficulty.’

‘But why couldn’t she have just told him the truth? The idea that the Closed Council picked up messages from the future isn’t so shocking, when you think about it. And from what I’ve gathered the content of those messages was sketchy at best, little more than vague premonitionary suggestions.’

‘Unless you were part of it, it’s difficult to describe what happened. But I only participated once. I don’t know what happened in the other experiments.’

‘Was Skade involved in the programme when you participated?’

‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘But that was after our return from deep space. The edict was issued much earlier, long before Skade was recruited to the Conjoined. The Closed Council must have already been running Exordium experiments before Skade joined us.’

Felka eyed the wall again. It was entirely reasonable to indulge in speculation about something like Exordium, Felka knew - Skade could hardly object to it, given the fact that it was so central to what was now happening - but she still felt as if they were on the brink of committing some unspeakably treasonous act.

But Remontoire continued speaking, his voice low yet assured. ‘So Skade joined us ... and before very long she was in the Closed Council and actively involved in the Exordium experiments. At least one of the experiments coincided with the edict, so we can assume there was a direct warning about the tau-neutrino effect. But what about the other experiments? What warnings came through during those? Were there even warnings?’ He looked at Felka intently.

She was about to answer, about to tell him something, when the seat beneath her forced itself upwards, the suddenness of it taking her breath away. She expected the pressure to abate, but it did not. By her own estimation her weight, which had been uncomfortable enough beforehand, had just doubled.

Remontoire looked out and downwards, as Felka had done a few minutes before.

‘What just happened? We seem to be accelerating harder,’ she observed.

‘We are,’ he said. ‘Definitely.’

Felka followed his gaze, hoping to see something different in the view. But as accurately as she could judge, nothing had changed. Even the blue glow behind the engines seemed no brighter.

Gradually, the acceleration became tolerable, if not something she would actually describe as pleasant. With forethought and economy she could manage most of what she had been doing before. The ship’s servitors did their best to assist, helping people get in and out of seats, always ready to spring into action. The other Conjoiners, all somewhat lighter and leaner than Felka, adapted with insulting ease. The interior surfaces of the ship hardened and softened themselves on cue, aiding movement and limiting injury.

But after an hour it increased again. Two and a half gees. Felka could stand it no longer. She asked to be allowed back to her quarters, but learned it was still not possible to go into that part of the ship. Nonetheless the ship partitioned a fresh room for her and extruded a couch she could lie on. Remontoire helped her on to it, making it perfectly clear that he had no better idea than she did of what was happening.

‘I don’t understand,’ Felka said, wheezing between words. ‘We’re just accelerating. It’s what we always knew we’d have to do if we stood a chance of reaching Clavain.’

Remontoire nodded. ‘But there’s more to it than that. Those engines were already operating near their peak efficiency when we boosted to one gee.
Nightshade
may be smaller and lighter than most lighthuggers, but the engines are smaller as well. They were designed to sustain a one-gee cruise up to light-speed, no more than that. Over short distances, yes, greater speed is possible, but that isn’t what’s happening.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning we shouldn’t have been able to accelerate so much harder. And definitely not three times as hard. I didn’t see any auxiliary boosters attached to our hull, either. The only other way Skade could have done it would be by jettisoning two-thirds of the mass we had when we left the Mother Nest.’

With some effort Felka shrugged. She had a profound lack of interest in the mechanics of spaceflight - ships were a means to an end as far as she was concerned - but she could work her way through an argument easily enough. ‘So the engines must be capable of working harder than you assumed.’

‘Yes. That’s what I thought.’

‘And?’

‘They can’t be. We both looked out. You saw that blue glow? Scattered light from the exhaust beam. It would have had to get a lot brighter, Felka, bright enough that we’d have noticed. It didn’t.’ Remontoire paused. ‘If anything, it got fainter, as if the engines had been throttled back a little. As if they weren’t having to work as hard as before.’

‘That wouldn’t make any sense, would it?’

‘No,’ Remontoire said. ‘No sense at all. Unless Skade’s secret machinery had something to do with it.’

FOURTEEN

Triumvir Ilia Volyova gazed into the abyss of the cache chamber, wondering if she was about to make the kind of dreadful mistake she had always feared would end her days.

Khouri’s voice buzzed in her helmet. ‘Ilia, I really think we should give this just a tiny bit more thought.’

‘Thank you.’ She checked the seals on her spacesuit again, and then flicked through her weapon status indicators.

‘I mean it.’

‘I know you mean it. Unfortunately I’ve already given it more than enough thought. If I gave it any more thought I might decide not to do it. Which, given the wider circumstances, would be even more suicidally dangerous and stupid than doing it.’

‘I can’t fault your logic, but I’ve a feeling the ship ... I mean the Captain ... really isn’t going to like this.’

‘No?’ Volyova considered that a far from remote possibility herself. ‘Then perhaps he’ll decide to co-operate with us.’

‘Or kill us. Have you considered that?’

‘Khouri?’

‘Yes, Ilia?’

‘Please shut up.’

They were floating inside an airlock that allowed entry into the chamber. It was a large lock, but there was still only just enough room for the two of them. It was not simply that their suits had been augmented with the bulky frames of thruster-packs. They also carried equipment, supplemental armour and a number of semi-autonomous weapons, clamped to the frames at strategic points.

‘All right; let’s just get it over with,’ Khouri said. ‘I’ve never liked this place, not from the first time you showed it to me. Nothing that’s happened since has made me like it any more.’

They powered out into the chamber, propelling themselves with staccato puffs of micro-gee thrust.

It was one of five similarly sized spaces in
Nostalgia for Infinity’
s interior: huge inclusions large enough to stow a fleet of passenger shuttles or several megatonnes of cargo, ready to be dropped down to a needy colony world. So much time had passed since the days when the ship had carried colonists that only scant traces of its former function remained, overlaid by centuries of adaptation and corruption. For years the ship had rarely carried more than a dozen inhabitants, free to wander its echoing interior like looters in an evacuated city. But beneath the accretions of time much remained more or less intact, even allowing for the changes that had come about since the Captain’s transformations.

The smooth sheer walls of the chamber reached away in all directions, vanishing into darkness and only fitfully illuminated by the roving spotlights of their suits. Volyova had not been able to restore the chamber’s main lighting system: that was one of the circuits the Captain now controlled, and he clearly did not like them entering this territory.

Gradually the wall receded. They were immersed in darkness now, and it was only the head-up display in Volyova’s helmet that gave her any indication of where to aim for or how fast she was moving.

‘It feels as if we’re in space,’ Khouri said. ‘It’s hard to believe we’re still inside the ship. Any sign of the weapons?’

‘We should be coming up on weapon seventeen in about fifteen seconds.’

On cue, the cache weapon loomed out of the darkness. It did not float free in the chamber, but was embraced by an elaborate arrangement of clamps and scaffolds, which were in turn connected to a complicated three-dimensional monorail system which plunged through the darkness, anchored to the chamber walls by enormous splayed pylons.

This was one of thirty-three weapons that remained from the original forty. Volyova and Khouri had destroyed one of them on the system’s edge after it went rogue, possessed by a splinter of the same software parasite that Khouri herself had carried aboard the ship. The other six weapons had been abandoned in space after the Hades episode. They were probably recoverable, but there was no guarantee they would work again, and by Volyova’s estimate they were considerably less potent than those that remained.

They fired their suit thrusters and came to a halt near the first weapon.

‘Weapon seventeen,’ Volyova said. ‘Ugly son of a
svinoi
, don’t you think? But I’ve had some success with this one - reached all the way down to its machine-language syntax layer.’

‘Meaning you can talk to it?’

‘Yes. Isn’t that just what I said?’

None of the cache weapons looked exactly alike, though they were all clearly the products of the same mentality. This one looked like a cross between a jet engine and a Victorian tunnelling machine: an axially symmetric sixty-metre-long cylinder faced with what could have been cutting teeth or turbine blades, but which were probably neither. The thing was sheathed in a dull, battered alloy that seemed either green or bronze, depending on the way their lights played across it. Cooling flanges and fins leant it a rakish art deco look.

‘If you can talk to it,’ Khouri said, ‘can’t we just tell it to leave the ship and then use it against the Inhibitors?’