The Revelation Space Collection (85 page)

They had fallen a hundred kilometres when the attack began.

‘It’s moving,’ Volyova said.

Ten hours had passed since leaving the lighthugger. She was exhausted, despite having catnapped for odd hours, knowing that she would need the energy soon. But it had not really helped; she needed more than little intermissions of unconsciousness to begin to heal all the physiological and mental stress of recent days. Now, though, she was fully awake, as if at the limits of fatigue her body had grudgingly accessed some stagnant pool of reserve energy. Doubtless it would not last, and there would be an even heavier premium to pay when she had exhausted this stop-gap - but for now she was glad of the alertness, however transitory.

‘What’s moving?’ Khouri asked.

Volyova nodded at the shuttle’s glaringly white console, at the readout windows she had called into being across its horseshoe profile.

‘What else but the damned ship?’

Pascale yawned awake. ‘What’s up?’

‘What’s up is we have trouble,’ Volyova said, fingers dancing on the keyboard to call up other readouts, though she did not really need confirmation of this. Bad news carried its own certification. ‘The lighthugger is on the move again. This means two things, neither of them good. Sun Stealer must have reinstated the major systems I disabled with Palsy.’

‘Well, ten hours wasn’t bad - at least it allowed us to get this far.’ Pascale nodded at the nearest positional display, which showed the shuttle more than one third of the distance to Cerberus.

‘What else?’ Khouri asked.

‘What it implies, which is that Sun Stealer must now have gained enough experience to manipulate the drive. Previously it was something he was only cautiously investigating, in case he harmed the ship.’

‘Meaning what?’

Volyova indicated the same positional readout. ‘Let’s assume he now has total control of the drive and knows the tolerances. The ship’s current vector puts it on an intercept trajectory with us. Sun Stealer’s trying to reach us before we reach Dan, or even the bridgehead. We’re too small a target at this range - beam weapons would disperse too much to hit us, and we could outmanoeuvre all the sub-relativistic projectiles just by executing a random flight path - but it won’t be long before we’re within kill-range.’

‘Just how long is that?’ Pascale frowned. It was not, Volyova thought, the woman’s most endearing habit, but she endured it expressionlessly. ‘Don’t we already have a massive head-start?’

‘We do, but now there’s nothing to stop Sun Stealer ramping the lighthugger’s thrust all the way up to multiple tens of gees - accelerations we simply can’t match without pulping ourselves in the process. But that’s not a problem for him. There’s nothing left alive aboard that ship which doesn’t run around on four legs and squeak and make a mess when you shoot it.’

‘And maybe the Captain,’ Khouri said. ‘Except I don’t think he’ll be much of a consideration.’

‘I asked how long,’ Pascale said.

‘If we’re lucky, we might just reach Cerberus,’ Volyova said. ‘But it wouldn’t give us much time to scout around and have second thoughts. We’d have to get inside just to avoid the ship’s weapons. And even then we’d have to get pretty deep inside.’ She dredged a clucking laugh from somewhere inside herself. ‘Maybe your husband had the right idea all along. He might be in a much safer position than any of us. For the time being at least.’

Patterns resolved in the walls of the shaft, areas of crystal beginning to glow a little more intently than the rest. The patterns were so vast that Sylveste did not immediately recognise them for what they were: vast Amarantin graphicforms. It was not simply their size, in fact, but also the fact that they were rendered differently from any he had seen before; almost another language entirely. In an intuitive flash he realised that he was seeing the language used by the Banished; the flock which had followed Sun Stealer into exile, and eventually to the stars. Tens of thousands of years spaced this writing from any example he had ever seen, which made it even more of a miracle that he was able to tease any sense out of it at all.

‘What are they telling us?’ Calvin asked.

‘That we’re not welcome,’ Sylveste said, half astonished that the graphicforms spoke to him. ‘To put it mildly.’

Sajaki must have picked up his subvocalisation. ‘What, exactly?’

‘They’re saying that they made this level,’ Sylveste said. ‘That they manufactured it.’

‘I guess,’ Calvin said, ‘that you’ve finally been vindicated - this place really was the handiwork of the Amarantin.’

‘In any other circumstances this would call for a drink,’ Sylveste said, but he was only paying half attention to the conversation now; fascinated by what he was reading; by the thoughts which were springing into his mind. More than once he had felt this feeling when deep into the process of translating Amarantin script, but never before with this fluency, or this sense of total certainty. It was enthralling, and not a little terrifying.

‘Please go on,’ Sajaki said.

‘Well, it’s what I said: a warning. It’s saying we shouldn’t progress any further.’

‘That probably means we’re not far from what we came for.’

Sylveste had that feeling as well, though he could not justify it. ‘The warning says there’s something below we shouldn’t see,’ he said.

‘See? Is that what it says, literally?’

‘Amarantin thought is very visual, Sajaki. Whatever it is, they don’t want us anywhere near it.’

‘Which suggests that whatever it is has value - don’t you agree?’

‘What if it really is a warning?’ Calvin said. ‘I don’t mean a threat; I mean a genuine heart-felt plea to keep away. Can you tell from the context if that’s the case?’

‘If it was conventional Amarantin script, perhaps.’ What Sylveste did not add was that he felt that the message was exactly what Calvin had implied, though there was no way he could rationalise that feeling. It did not deter him, though. Instead, he found himself wondering just what could have driven the Amarantin to this; what was so bad that it had to be encased in a facsimile of a world and defended by the most awesome weapons known to a civilisation? What was so unspeakable that it could not simply be destroyed? What kind of monster had they created?

Or found?

The thought jarred home, seeming to find a vacant hole in his mind where it fitted precisely. As if it belonged there.
They found something; Sun Stealer’s flock. Far out on the edge of the system, they found something.

He was still trying to deal with the certainty of that feeling when the closest of the graphicforms detached from the shaft, leaving a hollow recess where it had been a second earlier. Others followed; whole words, clauses and sentences unpeeled from the shaft and loomed around him, vast as buildings, circling Sajaki and Sylveste with raptorial patience. They floated free, suspended by some unguessable mechanism invisible to the suit defences; no gravitational or magnetic fluctuation. For a moment Sylveste was stunned at the sheer alienness behind the objects, but then he grasped that there was a kind of indisputable logic at play here. What made more sense than a warning message which, when transgressed, enforced itself?

But suddenly there was no time for detached consideration.

‘Suit defences to automatic,’ Sajaki said, voice rising an octave only above his routine implacable calm. ‘I believe these things seek to crush us to death.’

As if he really needed telling.

The floating words had them spherically corralled now, and had commenced a ponderous spiralling-in. Sylveste let his suit do its thing, visual shields snicking down to guard against the retina-melting glare of plasma-bursts, all manual control modes temporarily suspended. It was for the best: the last thing his suit needed was a human being trying to do the job better than it could. Even with the dense shielding in place, Sylveste’s vision was aflame with fireworks, photon events triggering his circuits, and he knew that there must have been fryingly intense multi-spectrum radiation just beyond the skin of his suit. He registered bucking surges of motion; episodes of up/down thrust (he assumed) so intense that he passed in and out of consciousness like a train threading a series of short mountain tunnels. He assumed that his suit was trying to cut and run, and with each crushing deceleration was being thwarted.

Finally he blacked out long and hard.

Volyova ramped up the
Melancholia
’s thrust, until it was nudging four gees of steady acceleration, with intermittent random-swerves programmed in for extra effect, in case the lighthugger launched any kinetics. It was the most they could withstand without protective suits or tabards; more than was comfortable, especially for Pascale, who was even less accustomed to this sort of thing than Khouri. It meant they could not leave their seats, and that movement of their arms had to be restricted to a minimum. But they could speak, after a fashion, and even hold something approximating a coherent discussion.

‘You spoke to him, didn’t you?’ Khouri said. ‘Sun Stealer. I could tell by the look on your face when you rescued us from the rats in the infirmary. I’m right, aren’t I?’

Volyova’s voice sounded slightly choked, as if she were in the process of slow strangulation.

‘If I had any doubts about your story, they vanished the instant I looked into his face. There was never any question that I was confronting something alien. And I began to understand some of what Boris Nagorny must have gone through.’

‘What drove him mad, you mean.’

‘Believe me, I think I’d have suffered something similar if I’d had that in my head. What worries me, too, is that some of Boris might have corrupted Sun Stealer.’

‘Then how do you think I feel?’ Khouri asked. ‘I have got that thing in my head.’

‘No, you haven’t.’

Volyova was shaking her head now, a gesture which verged on the reckless in the four-gee field. ‘You had him in your head for a while, Khouri - just long enough for him to crush what remained of the Mademoiselle. But then he got out.’

‘Got out when?’

‘When Sajaki trawled you. It was my fault, I suppose. I should not have allowed him even to switch on the trawl.’ For someone admitting guilt she sounded remarkably devoid of repentance. Perhaps for Volyova the act of admission was enough in itself. ‘When your neural patterns were scanned, Sun Stealer embedded himself in them and reached the trawl, encoded in the data. From there it was only a short hop to every other system in the ship.’

They absorbed that in silence, until Khouri said, ‘Letting Sajaki do that wasn’t your smartest ever move, Ilia.’

‘No,’ she said, as if the thought had only just struck her. ‘I don’t think it was.’

When he came round - it might have been tens of seconds later, or tens of minutes - the visual shields had retracted and he was falling unimpeded down the shaft. He looked up, and though it was now kilometres overhead, he saw the residual glow of their skirmish, the shaft walls pocked and scarred by energy impacts. Some of the words were still circling, but parts of them had been chipped off so that they no longer made much sense. As if in recognition that their warning was now hopelessly corrupted, the words seemed to have given up being weapons. Even as he watched, they were returning to their hollows, like sullen rooks returning to the rookery.

But something was wrong.

Where was Sajaki?

‘What the hell happened?’ he asked, hoping that his suit would interpret the query successfully. ‘Where’s he gone?’

‘There was an engagement against an autonomous defence system,’ the suit informed him, as if commenting on the weather earlier that morning.

‘Thank you, I realised that, but where’s Sajaki?’

‘His suit sustained critical damage during the evasive action. Crypted telemetry squirts indicate extensive and possibly irreparable damage to both primary and secondary thrust units.’

‘I said where is he?’

‘His suit would not have been able to restrict his rate of fall or counteract Coriolis drift towards the wall. Telemetry bursts indicate he is fifteen kilometres below and still falling, with a blueshift relative to your position of one point one kilometres a second and climbing.’

‘Still falling?’

‘It is likely that, owing to the non-functionality of his thruster units, and the inability to deploy a monofilament braking line at his current speed, he will fall until further descent is inhibited by the termination of the shaft.’

‘You mean he’s going to die?’

‘At his predicted terminal velocity, survival is excluded in all models except as an extreme statistical outlier.’

‘One chance in a million,’ Calvin said.

Sylveste angled himself so that he was able to peer vertically down the shaft. Fifteen kilometres - more than seven times the shaft’s echoless width. He looked and looked, all the while falling himself . . . and thought that perhaps he saw a flash, once or twice, at the extreme limit of his vision. He wondered if the flash had been the spark of friction, as Sajaki brushed against the walls in his unstoppable descent. If he had seen it at all, it was fainter each time, and soon he stopped seeing anything except the uninterrupted walls of the shaft.