The Revelation Space Collection (501 page)

‘I’m ready. Dexia’s ready. Why don’t you bring on the dessert?’

Colonel Jax looked to the right, straining his neck. Beyond Jax’s border, a circular door opened in part of the wall. Light rammed through the opening. Something floated in silhouette, held in suspension by three or four squid robots. The floating thing was dark, rounded, irregular. It looked like half a dozen pieces of dough balled together. I couldn’t make out what it was.

Then the robots pushed it into the chamber, and I saw, and then I screamed.

‘It’s time for you to join your friends now,’ the ship said.

That was three months ago - an eternity, until we remember being held down on the surgical bed while the machines emerged and prepared to work on us, and then it feels as if everything happened only a terror-filled moment ago.

We made it safely back to Sky’s Edge. The return journey was arduous, as one might expect, given our circumstances. But the shuttle had little difficulty flying itself back into a capture orbit, and once it fell within range it emitted a distress signal that brought it to the attention of the planetary authorities. We were off-loaded and taken to a secure orbital holding facility, where we were examined and our story subjected to what limited verification was actually possible. Dexia had bluffed the Voice of Nightingale when she told the ship that Martinez was certain to have revealed the coordinates of the hospital ship to someone else. It turned out that he hadn’t informed a soul, too wary of alerting Jax’s allies. The Ultras, who had found the ship in the first place, were now a fifth of a light-year away, and falling further from Sky’s Edge with every passing hour. It would be decades, or longer, before they returned this way.

All the same, we don’t think anyone seriously doubted our story. As outlandish as it was, no one could suggest a more likely alternative. We did have the head of Colonel Brandon Jax, or at least a duplicate that passed all available genetic and physiological tests. And we had clearly been to a place that specialised in extremely advanced surgery, of a kind that simply wasn’t possible in and around Sky’s Edge. That was the problem, though. The planet’s best surgeons had examined us with great thoroughness, each eager to advance their own prestige by undoing the work of
Nightingale.
But all had quailed, fearful of doing more harm than good. No separation of Siamese twins could compare in complexity and risk with the procedure that would be necessary to unknot the living puzzle
Nightingale
had made of us. None of the surgeons was willing to bet on the survival of more than a single one of us, and even the odds of that weren’t overwhelmingly optimistic. That pact we’d made with each other was that we would only consent to the operation if the vote was unanimous.

At massive expense (not ours, for by then we were the subject of considerable philanthropy), a second craft was sent out to snoop the coordinates where we’d left the hospital ship. It had the best military scanning gear money could buy. But it found nothing out there but ice and dust.

From that, we were free to draw two possible conclusions. Either Nightingale had destroyed herself soon after our departure, or had relocated to avoid being found again. We couldn’t say which alternative pleased us less. At least if we’d known that the ship was gone for good, we could have resigned ourselves to the surgeons, however risky that might have been. But if the ship was hiding herself, there was always the possibility that someone might find her again. And then somehow persuade her to undo us.

But perhaps Nightingale will need no persuasion, when she decides the time is right. It seems to us that the ship will return one day, of her own volition. She will make orbit around Sky’s Edge and announce that the time has come for us to be separated. Nightingale will have decided that we have served our purpose, that we have walked the world long enough. Perhaps by then she will have some other memorial in mind. Or she will conclude that her message has finally been taken to heart, and that no further action is needed. That, we think, will depend on how the ceasefire holds.

It’s in our interests, then, to make sure the planet doesn’t slip back into war. We want the ship to return and heal us. None of us likes things this way, despite what you may have read or heard. Yes, we’re famous. Yes, we’re the subject of a worldwide out-pouring of sympathy and goodwill. Yes, we can have almost anything we want. None of that compensates, though. Not even for a second.

It’s hard on all of us, but especially so for Martinez. We’ve all long since stopped thinking of the big man as Norbert. He’s the one who has to carry us everywhere: more than twice his own bodyweight. Nightingale thought of that, of course, and made sure that our own hearts and respiratory systems take some of the burden off Martinez. But it’s still his spine bending under this load; still his legs that have to support us. The doctors who’ve examined us say his condition is good, that he can continue to play his part for years to come - but they’re not talking about for ever. And when Martinez dies, so will the rest of us. In the meantime we just keep hoping that
Nightingale
will return sooner than that.

You’ve seen us up close now. You’ll have seen photographs and moving images before, but nothing really compares with seeing us in the flesh. We make quite a spectacle, don’t we? A great tottering tree of flesh, an insult to symmetry. You’ve heard us speak, all of us, individually. You know by now how we feel about the war. All of us played our part in it to some degree, some more than others. Some of us were even enemies. Now the very idea that we might have hated each other - hated that which we depend on for life itself - lies beyond all comprehension. If
Nightingale
sought to create a walking argument for the continuation of the ceasefire, then she surely succeeded.

We are sorry if some of you will go home to nightmares tonight. We can’t help that. In fact, if truth be told, we’re not sorry at all. Nightmares are what we’re all about. It’s the nightmare of us that will stop this planet falling back into war.

If you have trouble sleeping tonight, spare us a thought.

GALACTIC NORTH

Luyten 726-8 Cometary Halo - AD 2303

The two of them crouched in a tunnel of filthy ice, bulky in spacesuits. Fifty metres down the tunnel, the servitor straddled the bore on skeletal legs, transmitting a thermal image onto their visors. Irravel jumped whenever the noise shifted into something human, cradling her gun nervously.

‘Damn this thing,’ she said. ‘Hardly get my finger around the trigger.’

‘It can’t read your blood, Captain.’ Markarian, next to her, managed not to sound as if he was stating the obvious. ‘You have to set the override to female.’

Of course. Belatedly remembering the training session on Fand where they’d been shown how to use the weapons - months of subjective time ago; years of worldtime - Irravel told the gun to reshape itself. The memory-plastic casing squirmed in her gloves to something more manageable. It still felt wrong.

‘How are we doing?’ she asked.

‘Last team’s in position. That’s all the tunnels covered. They’ll have to fight their way in.’

‘I think that might well be on the agenda.’

‘Maybe so.’ Markarian sighted along his weapon like a sniper. ‘But they’ll get a surprise when they reach the cargo.’

True: the ship had sealed the sleeper chambers the instant the pirates had arrived near the comet. Counter-intrusion weaponry would seriously inconvenience anyone trying to break in, unless they had the right authorisation. And there, Irravel knew, was the problem; the thing she would rather not have had to deal with.

‘Markarian,’ Irravel said, ‘if we’re taken prisoner, there’s a chance they’ll try to make us give up the codes.’

‘Don’t think that hasn’t crossed my mind already.’ Markarian rechecked some aspect of his gun. ‘I won’t let you down, Irravel.’

‘It’s not a question of letting me down,’ she said, carefully. ‘It’s whether or not we betray the cargo.’

‘I know.’ For a moment they studied each other’s faces through their visors, acknowledging what had once been more than professional friendship; the shared knowledge that they would kill each other rather than place the cargo in harm’s way.

Their ship was the ramliner
Hirondelle.
She was damaged; lashed to the comet for repair. Improbably sleek for a creature of vacuum, her four-kilometre-long conic hull tapered to a needle-sharp prow and sprouted trumpet-shaped engines from two swept-back spars at the rear. It had been Irravel’s first captaincy: a routine seventeen-year hop from Fand, in the Lacaille 9352 system, to Yellowstone, around Epsilon Eridani - with twenty thousand reefersleep colonists aboard. What had gone wrong should only have happened once in a thousand trips: a speck of interstellar dust had slipped through the ship’s screen of anti-collision lasers and punched a cavernous hole in the ablative ice shield, vaporising a quarter of its mass. With a vastly reduced likelihood of surviving another collision, the ship had automatically steered towards the nearest system capable of supplying repair materials.

Luyten 726-8 had been no one’s idea of a welcoming destination. No human colonies had flourished there. All that remained were droves of scavenging machines sent out by various superpowers. The ship had locked into a scavenger’s homing signal, eventually coming within visual range of the inert comet the machine had made its home, and which ought to have been chequered with resupply materials. Irravel had been revived from reefersleep just in time to see that none of the goods were there - just acres of barren comet.

‘Dear God,’ she’d said. ‘Do we deserve this?’

After a few days, despair became steely resolve. The ship couldn’t safely travel anywhere else, so they would have to process the supplies themselves, doing the work of the malfunctioning surveyor. It would mean stripping the ship just to make the machines to mine and shape the cometary ice - years of work by any estimate. That hardly mattered. The detour had already added years to the mission.

Irravel ordered the rest of her crew - all ninety of them - to be warmed, and then delegated tasks, mostly programming. Servitors were not particularly intelligent outside of their designated functions. She considered activating the other machines she carried as cargo - the greenfly terraformers - but that cut against all her instincts. Greenfly machines were von Neumann breeders, unlike the sterile servitors. They were a hundred times cleverer. She would only consider using them if the cargo was placed in immediate danger.

‘If you won’t unleash the greenflies,’ Markarian said, ‘at least think about waking the Conjoiners. There may only be four of them, but we could use their expertise.’

‘I don’t trust them. I never liked the idea of carrying them in the first place. They unsettle me.’

‘I don’t like them either, but I’m willing to bury my prejudices if it means fixing the ship faster.’

‘Well, that’s where we differ. I’m not, so don’t raise the subject again.’

‘Yes,’ Markarian said, and only when its omission was insolently clear added: ‘Captain.’

Eventually the Conjoiners ceased to be an issue, when the work was clearly under way and proceeding normally. Most of the crew were able to return to reefersleep. Irravel and Markarian stayed awake a little longer, and even after they’d gone under, they woke every seven months to review the status of the works. It began to look as if they would succeed without assistance.

Until the day they were woken out of schedule, and a dark, grapple-shaped ship was almost upon the comet. Not an interstellar ship, it must have come from somewhere nearby - probably within the same halo of comets around Luyten 726-8. Its silence was not encouraging.

‘I think they’re pirates,’ Irravel said. ‘I’ve heard of one or two other ships going missing near here, but it was always put down to accident.’

‘Why did they wait so long to attack us?’

‘They had no choice. There are billions of comets out here, but they’re never less than light-hours apart. That’s a long way if you only have in-system engines. They must have a base somewhere else to keep watch, maybe light-weeks from here, like a spider with a very wide web.’

‘What do we do now?’

Irravel gritted her teeth. ‘Do what anything does when it’s stuck in the middle of a web: fight back.’

But the Hirondelle’s minimal defences had only scratched the enemy ship.

Oblivious, it fired penetrators and winched closer. Dozens of crab-shaped machines swarmed out and dropped below the comet’s horizon, impacting with seismic thuds. After a few minutes, sensors in the furthest tunnels registered intruders. Only a handful of crew had been woken. They broke guns out of the armoury - small arms designed for pacification in the unlikely event of a shipboard riot - and then established defensive positions in all the cometary tunnels.

Nervously now, Irravel and Markarian advanced around a bend in the tunnel, cleated shoes whispering through ice barely more substantial than smoke. They had to keep their suit exhausts from touching the walls if they didn’t want to get blown back by superheated steam. Irravel jumped again at the pattern of photons on her visor and then forced calm, telling herself it was another mirage.

Except this time it stayed.