The Revelation Space Collection (299 page)

‘Ilia ...’ Khouri began, when she saw what was happening.

‘Khouri,’ she said, her voice still a croak, but finally imbued with something resembling the old fire. ‘Khouri ... do this for me, and never once stop to question me or talk me out of it. Understood?’

‘Understood . . . I think.’

Volyova clicked her fingers at the nearest servitor. It scuttled towards her, dodging between the squawking medical monitors. ‘Captain ... have the servitor assist me to the spacecraft bay, will you? I will expect a suit and a shuttle to be waiting for me.’

Khouri steadied her, holding her in a sitting position. ‘Ilia, what are you planning?’

‘I’m going outside. I need to have a word - a serious word - with weapon seventeen.’

‘You’re in no state . . .’

Volyova cut her off with a chop of one frail hand. ‘Khouri, I may have a weak and feeble body, but give me weightlessness, a suit and possibly a weapon or two and you’ll find I can still do some damage. Understood?’

‘You haven’t given up, have you?’

The servitor helped her to the floor. ‘Given up, Khouri? It’s not in my dictionary.’

Khouri helped her as well, taking the Triumvir’s other arm.

On the edge of the combat swarm, though still within range of potentially damaging weapons, Antoinette disengaged the evasive pattern she had been running and throttled
Storm Bird
down to one gee. Through
Storm Bird’
s windows she could see the elongated shape of the Triumvir’s lighthugger, visible at a distance of two thousand kilometres as a tiny scratch of light. Most of the time it was dark enough that she did not see the ship at all, but two or three times a minute a major explosion - some detonating mine, warhead, drive-unit or weapons-trigger - threw light against the hull, momentarily picking it out the way a lighthouse might glance against a jagged pinnacle rising from the depths of a storm-racked ocean. But there was never any doubt about where the ship was. Sparks of flame were swarming around it, so bright that they smeared across her retina, etching dying pink arcs and helices against the stellar backdrop, the trails reminding her of the fiery sticks children had played with during fireworks shows in the old carousel. Pinpricks of light within the swarm signified smaller armaments detonating, and very occasionally Antoinette saw the hard red or green line of a laser precursor beam, caught in outgassing air or propellant from one or other of the ships. Absently, cursing her mind’s ability to focus on the most trivial of things at the wrong time, she realised that this was a detail that they always got wrong in the space opera holo-dramas, where laser beams were invisible, the sinister element of invisibility adding to the drama. But a real close-range space battle was a far messier affair, with gas clouds and chaff shards erupting all over the place, ready to reflect and disperse any beam weapon.

The swarm was tighter towards the middle, thinning out through dozens of kilometres. Though she was on the edge of it, she was aware of how tempting a target
Storm Bird
must present. The Triumvir’s defences were preoccupied with the closer attack elements, but Antoinette knew that she could not afford to count on that continuing.

Xavier’s voice came over the intercom. ‘Antoinette? Scorpio’s ready for departure. Says you can open the bay door any time you like.’

‘We’re not close enough,’ she said.

Scorpio’s voice cut over the intercom. She no longer had any difficulty distinguishing his voice from those of the other pigs. ‘Antoinette? This is close enough. We have the fuel to cross from here. There’s no need for you to risk
Storm Bird
by taking us any closer.’

‘But the closer I take you, the more fuel you’ll have in reserve. Isn’t that true?’

‘I can’t argue with that. Take us five hundred kilometres closer, then. And Antoinette? That really will be close enough.’

She magnified the battle view, tapping into the telemetry stream from the many cameras that now whipped around the Triumvir’s ship. The image data had been seamlessly merged and then processed to remove the motion, and while there were occasional snags and dropouts as the view was refreshed, the impression was as if she were hovering in space only two or three kilometres beyond the ship itself. The silence was one thing that the holo-dramas got right, she realised, but she had never realised how terribly, profoundly wrong that silence would be when accompanying an actual battle. It was an abject void into which her imagination projected endless screams. What did not help was the way that the Triumvir’s ship loomed out of darkness in random, fitful flashes of light, never lingering long enough for her to comprehend the form of the ship in its entirety. What she saw of the ship’s perverted architecture was nonetheless adequately disturbing.

Now she saw something that she had not seen before: a rectangle of light, like a golden door, opened somewhere along the wrinkled complexity of
Nostalgia for Infinity’
s hull. It was open for only a moment, but that was long enough for something to slip through. The glare from the engine of the shuttle that had emerged caught the stepped spinal edge of a flying buttress, and as the ship gyred, orientating itself with strobing flashes of thrust, the black shadow of the buttress crawled across an acre of hull material that had the scaled texture of lizardskin.

What about the wolves, Felka?

[Everything, Clavain. At least, everything that I learned. Everything that the Wolf was prepared to let me know.]

It may not be all of the picture, Felka. It may not even be part of it.

[I know. But I still think I should tell you.]

It was not simply about the war against intelligence,
she told Clavain.
That was only part of it; only one detail in their vast, faltering program of cosmic stewardship. Despite all evidence to the contrary the wolves were not trying to rid the galaxy of intelligence altogether. What they were striving to do was akin to pruning a forest back to a few saplings rather than incinerating or defoliating completely; or reducing a fire to a few carefully managed flickering flames rather than extinguishing it utterly.

Think about it,
Felka told him.
The existence of the wolves solved one cosmic riddle: the killing machines explained why it was that humanity found itself largely alone in the universe; why the Galaxy appeared barren of other intelligent cultures. It might have been that humanity was just a statistical quirk in an otherwise lifeless cosmos; that the emergence of intelligent, tool-using life was astonishingly rare and that the universe had to be a certain number of billion years old before there was a chance of such a culture arising. This possibility had lingered on until the dawn of the starfaring era, when human explorers began to pick through the ruins of other cultures around nearby stars. Far from being rare, it looked as if tool-using technological life was actually rather common. But for some reason, these cultures had all become extinct.

The evidence suggested that the extinction events happened on a short timescale compared with the evolutionary development cycles of species: perhaps no more than a few centuries. The extinctions also seemed to happen at around the time each culture attempted to make a serious expansion into interstellar space.

In other words, at around the development point that humanity - fractured, squabbling, but still essentially one species - now found itself.

Given that premise,
she said,
it was not too surprising to find that something like the wolves - or the Inhibitors, as some of their victims called them - existed; they were almost inevitable given the pattern of extinctions: remorseless droves of killer machines lurking between the stars, waiting patiently across the aeons for the signs of emergent intelligence ...

Except that didn’t make any real sense,
Felka continued.
If intelligence was worth wiping out, for whatever reason, why not do it at source? Intelligence sprang from life; life - except in very rare and exotic niches - sprang from a common brew of chemicals and preconditions. So if intelligence were the enemy, why not intervene earlier in the development cycle?

There were a thousand ways it might have been done, especially if you were working on a timescale of billions of years. You could interfere in the formation processes of planets themselves, delicately perturbing the swirling clouds of accreting matter that gathered around young stars. You could make it happen that no planets formed in the right orbits for water to occur, or that only very heavy or very light worlds were formed. You could fling worlds into interstellar cold or dash them into the roiling faces of their mother stars.

Or you could poison planets, subtly disturbing the stew of elements in their crusts, oceans and atmospheres so that certain kinds of organic carbon chemistry became unfavourable. Or you could ensure that the planets never settled down into the kind of stable middle age that allowed complex multi-cellular life to arise. You could keep ramming comets into their crusts so that they shuddered and convulsed under an eternity of bombardment, locked in permanent winters.

Or you could tamper with their stars so that the worlds were periodically doused in flame from massive coronal flares, or thrown into terrible deep ice ages.

Even if you were late, even if you had to accept that complex life had arisen and had perhaps even achieved intelligence and technology, there were ways . . .

Of course there were ways.

A single determined culture could wipe out all life in the Galaxy by the deft manipulation of superdense stellar corpses. Neutron stars could be nudged together until they annihilated each other in sterilising storms of gamma rays. The jets from binary stars could be engineered into directed-energy weapons: flame-throwers reaching a thousand light-years ...

And even if that were not feasible, or desirable, life could be wiped out by sheer force. A single machine culture could dominate the entire Galaxy in less than a million years, crushing organic life out of existence.

But that’s not what they are here for,
Felka told him.

Why, then?
he asked.

There’s a crisis,
she told him.
A crisis in the deep galactic future, three billion years from now. Except it wasn’t really ‘deep’ at all.

Thirteen turns of the Galactic spiral, that was all. Before the glaciers had rolled in, you could have walked on to a beach on Earth and picked up a sedimentary rock that was older than three billion years.

Thirteen turns of the wheel? It was nothing in cosmic terms. It was almost upon them.

What crisis?
Clavain asked.

A collision,
Felka told him.

THIRTY-EIGHT

When she was five hundred kilometres closer to the battle, Antoinette left the bridge unattended, trusting the ship to take care of itself for three or four minutes while she said goodbye to Scorpio and his squad. By the time she reached the huge depressurised bay where the pigs were waiting, the exterior door had eased open and the first of the three shuttles had already launched. She saw the blue spark of its exhaust flame veering towards the glittering nest of light that was the core of the battle. Two trikes followed immediately behind it, and then the second shuttle was jacked forward, pushed by the squat hydraulic rams that were normally used for moving bulky cargo pallets.

Scorpio was already buckling himself into his trike alongside the third shuttle. Since the trikes aboard
Storm Bird
had not needed to make the journey all the way from
Zodiacal Light
, they carried far more armour and weaponry than the other units. Scorpio’s own armour was an eye-wrenching combination of luminous colour and reflective patches. The frame of his trike was almost impossible to make out behind the layers of armour and the flanged and muzzled shapes of projectile and beam weapons. Xavier was helping him with his final systems checks, disconnecting a compad from a diagnostics port under the saddle of the trike. He gave a thumbs-up sign and patted Scorpio’s armour.

‘Looks like you’re ready,’ Antoinette said through her suit’s general comm channel.

‘You didn’t have to risk your ship,’ Scorpio said. ‘But since you did, I’ll make the extra fuel count.’

‘I don’t envy you this, Scorpio. I know you’ve already lost quite a few of your soldiers.’

‘They’re our soldiers, Antoinette, not just mine.’ He made the control fascia of his trike light up with displays, luminous dials and targeting grids, while beyond him the second shuttle departed from the bay, shoved into empty space by the loading rams. The ignition of its drive painted a hard blue radiance against Scorpio’s armour. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘There’s something you ought to appreciate. If you knew what the life expectancy of a pig in the Mulch was, nothing that’s happened today would seem quite so tragic. Most of my army would have died years ago if they hadn’t signed up for Clavain’s crusade. I figure they owe Clavain, not the other way round.’