The Revelation Space Collection (268 page)

‘I know what you did,’ she said. ‘And you know that I abhor it. But you have suffered for it, Captain; no one would deny that. It’s time to put it behind us and move on, I think.’

‘I feel tremendous guilt for what I did.’

‘And I feel tremendous guilt for what I did to the gunnery officer. I’m as much to blame for any of this as you, Captain. If I hadn’t driven him mad, I doubt that any of this would have happened.’

‘I’d still have my crime to live with.’

‘It was a long time ago. You were frightened. What you did was terrible, but it was not the work of a rational man. That doesn’t make it excusable, but it does make it a little easier to understand. Were I in your situation, Captain - barely human, and perhaps infected with something I
knew
was going to kill me, or worse - I can’t say for sure that I wouldn’t consider something just as extreme.’

‘You would never murder, Ilia. You are better than that.’

‘They think of me as a war criminal on Resurgam, Captain. Sometimes I wonder if they are right, you know. What if we
did
destroy Phoenix after all?’

‘You didn’t.’

‘I hope not.’

There was another long pause. She walked on through the slime, noting how the texture and colour of the secreted matter was never quite the same from district to district of the ship. Left to its own devices, the ship would be engulfed by the slime in a few short months. She wondered if that would help or hinder the Captain, and hoped that it was an experiment she would never see performed.

‘What exactly do you want, Ilia?’

‘The weapons, Captain. Ultimately, you control them. I’ve attempted to work them myself, but it wasn’t a roaring success. They’re too thoroughly integrated into the old gunnery weapons network.’

‘I don’t like the weapons, Ilia.’

‘I don’t either, but now I think we need them. You have sensors, Captain. You’ve seen what we’ve seen. I showed you when the rocky worlds were dismantled. That was only the start.’

After another worrying silence, he said, ‘I’ve seen what they’ve done to the gas giant.’

‘Then you’ll also have seen that something new is taking shape, assembling in the cloud of liberated matter from the giant. It’s sketchy at the moment, no more fully formed than a foetus. But it is clearly deliberate. It is something vast, Captain, vaster than anything in our experience. Thousands of kilometres across, even now, and it may become larger still as it grows.’

‘I have seen it.’

‘I don’t know what it is, or what it will do. But I can guess. The Inhibitors are going to do something to the sun, to Delta Pavonis. Something terminal. We’re not just talking about triggering a major flare now. This is going to be much bigger than any mass ejection we’ve ever heard of.’

‘What kind of weapon can kill a sun?’

‘I don’t know, Captain. I don’t know.’ She drew hard on the butt of the cigarette, but it was well and truly dead. ‘That isn’t, however, my primary concern at the moment. I’m more interested in another question. What kind of weapon can kill a weapon like that?’

‘You think the cache may suffice?’

‘One of those thirty-three horrors ought to do the trick, don’t you think?’

‘You want my assistance,’ the Captain said.

Volyova nodded. She had reached the critical point in the conversation now. If she got through this bit without triggering a catatonic shutdown, she would have made significant progress in her dealings with Captain John Brannigan.

‘Something like that,’ she said. ‘You control the cache, after all. I’ve done my best, but I can’t make it do much without your co-operation. ’

‘It would be very dangerous, Ilia. We’re safe now. We haven’t done anything to provoke the Inhibitors. Using the cache ... even a single weapon from the cache ...’ The Captain trailed off. There was absolutely no need to labour the point.

‘It’s a bit on the risky side, I know.’

‘A bit on the risky side?’ The Captain’s chuckle of amusement was like a small earthquake. ‘You were always one for understatement, Ilia.’

‘Well. Are you going to help me or not, Captain?’

After a glacial intermission he said, ‘I’ll give it quite some thought, Ilia. I’ll give it quite some thought.’

That, she supposed, had to count as progress.

TWENTY-SIX

There was almost no warning of Skade’s strike. For weeks Clavain had expected something, but there had been no guessing the exact nature of the attack. His own knowledge of
Nightshade
was useless: with the manufactories aboard a military lighthugger, Skade could weave new weapons almost as quickly as she could imagine them, tailoring each to the flexing demands of battle. Like a crazed toy-maker, she could spin the darkest of fabulations into existence in mere hours, and then unleash them against her enemy.

Zodiacal Light
had reached half the speed of light. Relativistic effects were now impossible to ignore. For every hundred minutes that passed on Yellowstone, eighty-six passed aboard Clavain’s ship. That time-dilation effect would become steadily more acute as they nosed closer and closer to light-speed. It would compress the fifteen actual years of the journey into only four years of shiptime; still fewer if a higher rate of acceleration was used.

Yet half the speed of light was still not radically relativistic, especially when they were dealing with an enemy moving in almost the same accelerated frame. At their fastest, the mines that Skade had dropped behind her had slammed past
Zodiacal Light
with relative velocities of only a few thousand kilometres per second. It was fast only by the standards of solar war. Although the mines were difficult to detect until
Zodiacal Light
was within their ‘volume of denial’, there was no danger of actually colliding with them. A direct collision would be a very effective way of taking out a starship, but Clavain’s simulations argued that it was beyond Skade’s capability to mount such an attack. His analyses showed that for any conceivable spread of obstacles that Skade dropped in her wake - even if she dismantled most of
Nightshade
to convert into mines - he could always detect the obstacles sufficiently far ahead to steer a path through them.

And yet there was a terrible flaw in Clavain’s thinking, and in the thinking of all his advisors.

The obstacle, when
Zodiacal Light’
s forward sensors detected it, was moving much faster towards him than Clavain had expected. Relativity distorted classical expectations in a way that Clavain still did not find entirely intuitive. Slam two objects towards each other, each with individual velocities just below light-speed, and the classical result for their closing velocity would be the sum of their individual speeds: just under twice the speed of light. Yet the true result, confirmed with numbing precision, was that the objects saw each other approach with a combined speed that was
still
just below the speed of light. Similarly, the relativistic closing velocity for two objects moving towards each other with individual speeds of one-half of light-speed was not light-speed itself, but eight-tenths of it. It was the way the universe was put together, and yet it was not something the human mind had evolved to accept.

The Doppler echo from the approaching obstacle indicated a closing speed of just above 0.8 c, which meant that Skade’s obstacle was itself moving back towards Yellowstone at half the speed of light. And it was also astonishingly large: a circular structure one thousand kilometres from side to side. The mass sensor could not see it at all.

Had the object been on a direct collision course, nothing could have been done to avoid it. But the projected impact point was only a dozen kilometres from one edge of the oncoming obstacle.
Zodiacal Light’
s systems instigated an emergency collision-avoidance procedure.

That was what killed them, not the obstacle itself.

Zodiacal Light
was forced to execute a five-gee swerve, with only seconds of warning. Those who were near seats were able to get into them and allow cushioning webs to engulf their bodies. Those who were near servitors were offered some protection by them. In certain parts of the ship, its structural fabric was able to deform to minimise injuries as bodies slammed into walls. But not all were that lucky. Those who were training in the larger bays were killed by the impact. Machinery that had not been adequately secured killed others, including Shadow and two of his senior platoon leaders. Most of the pigs who had been working outside on the hull, preparing attachment points for future armaments, were swept into interstellar space; none were recovered.

The damage to the ship was equally grave. It had never been designed for such a violent course correction, and the hull suffered many fractures and fatigue points, particularly along the attachment spars that held the Conjoiner motors. By Clavain’s estimate there was at least a year’s worth of repairs to be done merely to get back to where they had been before the attack. Interior damage had been just as bad. Even
Storm Bird
had been harmed as it strained against its scaffolding, all of Xavier’s work undone in a moment.

But, Clavain reminded himself, it could have been so much worse. They had not actually hit Skade’s obstacle. If they had, the dissipation of relativistically boosted kinetic energy would almost certainly have ripped his ship apart in an eyeblink.

They had almost hit a light-sail, possibly one of many hundreds that Skade had dropped behind her. The sails were probably close to being monolayers: films of matter stretched to a thickness of one atom, but with artificially boosted inter-atomic rigidity. The sails must have been unfurled when they were some distance behind
Nightshade
, so that its exhaust would not incinerate them. Probably they had been spun up for additional rigidity.

Then she had trained her lasers on them. That was why they had seen coherent light emanating from
Nightshade
. The photon pressure from the lasers had rammed against the sails, pushing them back, decelerating them at hundreds of gees until they were moving only slowly in the local stellar rest frame. But the tightly focused lasers had kept pushing, accelerating and kicking the sails back towards Clavain. Skade’s positional fix was sufficiently good that the sails could be aimed directly at
Zodiacal Light.

It was, as ever, a numbers game. God only knew how many sails they had nearly collided with, until one appeared directly in front of them. Perhaps Skade’s gambit had never had a high probability of success, but knowing her the odds would not have been too bad.

There were, Clavain was certain, many other sails out there.

Even when the worst of the damage was being repaired, Clavain and his cohort of experts were devising a counter-strategy. Simulations showed that it should be possible to blast their way through an incoming sail, opening an aperture large enough to fly through, but only if the sails were detected further out than was currently possible. They would also need something to blast with, but the program to install hull weapons had been one of those hampered by Skade’s attack. The short-term solution was for a shuttle to fly one hundred thousand kilometres ahead of
Zodiacal Light
, serving as a buffer against any further sail strikes. The shuttle was uncrewed, stripped down to little more than an unpressurised shell. Periodically it had to be refuelled with antimatter from the other craft parked in the lighthugger’s spacecraft hold, which necessitated an energy-costly round-trip with another ship, including a hazardous fuel transfer operation.
Zodiacal Light
needed no antimatter herself, but it was essential to conserve some for operations around Delta Pavonis. Clavain was only prepared to use half of his reserve supplying the buffer shuttle, which gave them one hundred days to find a longer-term solution.

In the end the answer was obvious: a single sail could kill a starship, but it would only take another sail to kill a sail.
Zodiacal Light’
s own manufactories could be programed to make light-sails - the process did not require complex nanotechnology - and they did not need to be anywhere near as large as Skade’s, nor manufactured in any great number. The ship’s anti-collision lasers, never sufficiently effective as weapons, could be easily tuned to provide the necessary photon pressure. Skade’s sails had to be pushed at hundreds of gees; Clavain’s only had to be pushed at two.

They called it the shield sail. It was ready in ninety-five days, with a reserve of sails ready to be pushed out and deployed should the first be destroyed. In any case, the sails had a fixed lifetime due to the steady ablation caused by interstellar dust grains. This only became worse as
Zodiacal Light
climbed closer and closer to light-speed. But they could keep replacing the sails all the way to Resurgam and they would only have expended one per cent of the ship’s total mass.