The Revelation Space Collection (147 page)

I looked down. We had lost another hundred metres, but it was still too high for my tastes. I wondered how the vehicle would manage with only one arm.

I flicked on Zebra’s rifle, praying that the weapon was not equipped with a user-recognition facility. If it was, she’d disabled it. Sensing that I was bringing the weapon to shoulder level, the sight adjusted itself to bring its retinal-projection systems into line with my eyes. I felt the weapon shiver as gyroscopes and accumulators came online, making it seem as if some magic energy coursed through it. Reserve ammo-cells weighing down my pockets like lead ballast, I waited for the retinal aiming system to adjust to my eyes so I could get off a shot. For a moment the system was confused, perhaps because it was configured for Zebra’s own peculiarly dark and equine eyes and was having trouble adjusting to my own. The retinal graphics kept springing up, almost focusing - and then crashing in a morass of indecipherable error symbols.

Another line of pink air ripped past me, then another, gouging a silver scratch in the side of the cable-car. The stench of hot metal and plastic filled the cabin for an instant.

‘Shit,’ I said. The retinal system was down, but it wasn’t as if my target was halfway to the horizon, or that I was trying for pinpoint precision. I just wanted to shoot the bastards out of the sky, and if the act ended up being rather messy and involving more than the usual amount of collateral damage, so be it.

I squeezed off a shot, feeling the beam-recoil nudge my shoulder.

My own beam-trail knifed backward, just missing the closest car. That was good. I had intended to just miss, on my first shot. I drew some return fire, throwing myself back into the cabin while the shot lanced past. Now I was forcing my opponent to spread his fire, forcing him to choose between disabling my vehicle and taking me out. I leaned out, shouldered the weapon in one quick fluid movement, something almost beneath conscious thought, and this time I wasn’t planning on missing.

I fired.

Because I was aiming for the front of the closest vehicle, I had an easier, more vulnerable target than my opponent. I watched the lead cable-car blow apart in a grey cloud of fused innards. The driver must have died instantly, I assumed, but the gunner had fallen out of the car during the first instant of the explosion. I watched the black-clad figure plummet towards the Mulch, weapon dropping alongside, and then heard nothing as the person hit the ground amidst a confusion of stalls and lashed-together dwelling places.

Something felt wrong. I could feel it coming; unravelling into mind. Another Haussmann episode. I fought it; tried desperately to anchor myself to the present, but it was already as if a second, faint layer of reality was trying to settle over me.

‘Go to hell,’ I said.

The other car loitered, continuing its descent for a moment, then turning around with a quick and elegant exchange of cable-arms. I watched it rise to the Canopy, and then - for the first time since I had become aware of the attack - realised that the siren was still shrieking in the cabin. Except that now it had gained a new level of urgency.

I placed the weapon down, then navigated the bucking car to the control chair. I could feel the Haussmann episode clawing its way to the front of my head, like a seizure on the point of happening.

The ground was coming up too fast. We were almost dropping, I realised - probably just skimming down a single strand of cable. People, rickshaws and animals were fleeing the area below, although with no real agreement on where it was I was likely to touch down. I got into the chair and worked the controls, largely randomly, hoping that there was something I could do which would level off the rate of descent. And then the ground was so close I could read the expressions on the Mulch people below and none of them looked overjoyed at my arrival.

And then I hit the Mulch.

The conclave room was deep inside the Palestine; sealed from the rest of the ship by massive bulkhead doors which had been decorated in ornate metal scrollwork, festooning like alloy vines. Inside was a massive rectangular table surrounded by twenty high-backed seats, less than a dozen of which were occupied. The matter of the messages from home was one of utmost security, and it was considered normal that the other vessels had sent only two or three delegates apiece. They sat around the table now, their stiffly suited figures reflected in the table’s polished mahogany surface, so dark and mirrorlike that it resembled a slab of perfectly still moonlit water. Rising from the centre of the table was a projection apparatus which was cycling through the technical schematics contained in the first message, skeletal graphics of dazzling complexity flashing into existence.

Sky sat next to Balcazar, listening to the faint labours of the old man’s medical tabard.

‘. . . and this modification would appear to give us more elaborate control of the confinement bottle topology than we yet have,’ said the Palestine’s senior propulsion theorist, freezing one of the schematics. ‘Coupled with the other things we’ve seen, it should give us a steeper deceleration profile . . . not to mention the ability to throttle back the flow without experiencing magnetic blow-back. That would let us turn off an anti-matter engine while there’s still fuel in the reservoir - and restart it later - something we can’t do with the current design.’

‘Could we make those mods, even if we trusted them?’ asked Omdurman, the Baghdad’s commanding officer. He wore a glossily black tunic flashed with grey and white sigils of rank. Coupled with the paleness of his skin and the deep black of his hair and beard, he was a study in monochrome.

‘In principle, yes.’ Beneath a sheen of perspiration, the propulsion tech’s face was impassive. ‘But I’ll be honest with you. We’d be making large-scale alterations within centimetres of the confinement bottle, which has to keep functioning perfectly the whole time we’re working. We can’t shunt the anti-matter somewhere else until we’re done. One wrong move and you won’t need so many seats at the next conclave.’

‘Damn the next conclave,’ murmured Balcazar.

Sky sighed and dug a finger between the damp edge of his collar and the skin of his neck. It was unpleasantly warm in the conclave room, almost soporifically so. Nothing felt right on this ship. There was an aura of strangeness aboard the Palestine that Sky had not been expecting; one that was heightened all the more by the things that were not strange at all. The ship’s layout and design had been instantly familiar, so that as soon as the Captain and he were escorted from their shuttle, he felt he knew exactly where he was. Though they were diplomatic visitors rather than prisoners, they were under constant armed guard, but had that supervision been lax enough for him to vanish into the ship, he was certain he would have been able to find his way to any part of it unaided and perhaps even unseen, exploiting his own knowledge of the Santiago’s blind spots and short-cuts, all of which were probably replicated on the Palestine. But in nearly every respect other than basic topology, the ship was subtly different, as if he had awakened into a world almost but not quite correct in the most mundane of details. The décor was different, signs and markings in unfamiliar script and language, with slogans and murals painted where the Santiago had blank walling. The crew wore different uniforms, flashed with sigils of rank he could not quite interpret, and when they spoke amongst themselves he understood almost nothing they said. They had different equipment and they saluted each other aggressively at every opportunity. Their body language was like a tune being played slightly offkey. The internal temperature felt warmer than on his own ship, and more humid - and there was a constant smell, as of cooking, wherever they went. It was not actually unpleasant, but it served to reinforce the feelings of foreignness he felt. It might have been his imagination, too, but even the gravity felt heavier, his footsteps hammering hard against the flooring. Perhaps they had upped their spin rate slightly so that when they arrived at Journey’s End they would have an advantage over the other colonists. Perhaps they had done it just to make everyone uncomfortable during the conclave, and turned up the heating while they were at it. Or perhaps he was imagining it.

The conclave itself had been tense, but not quite tense enough that he feared - if that was the word - for the Captain’s health. Balcazar had become more alert by then, almost fully lucid, for the relaxant that Rengo had administered had been designed to wear off by the time of their arrival. Some of the other senior crew members, Sky observed, were almost as infirm as his own Captain; supported by their own bio-medical rigs and fussed over by their own aides. It was quite an idiosyncratic collection of wheezing ironmongery; almost as if the machines had decided to meet and had dragged their fleshly hosts along for the ride.

They had talked mainly about the messages from home, of course. Everyone agreed that the two messages had been genuine in origin, if not necessarily guaranteed to be truthful, and that they were probably not a complex hoax perpetrated by one of the ships against the rest of the Flotilla. Each frequency component in either radio message had been subjected to a specific delay relative to its neighbour, due to the clouds of interstellar electrons lying between Sol and the Flotilla. That smearing would have been very difficult to fake convincingly, even if a transmitter could have been dropped sufficiently far behind the ships to send the message. There was never any mention of the sixth ship, and the Captain never alluded to anything connected to it. Perhaps it was truly the case that the existence of the sixth ship was only known about on the Santiago. A secret worth keeping, in other words.

‘Of course,’ said the propulsion theorist, ‘it could all be a trick.’

‘But why would anyone want to send us harmful information?’ asked Zamudio, the commander of the host ship. ‘Whatever happens to us won’t make any difference to anyone back home, so why try and hurt us?’

‘The same argument applies to any beneficial data,’ said Omdurman. ‘There’s no reason for them to send that either. Except common human decency.’

‘Damn human decency . . . damn it to hell,’ Balcazar said.

Sky spoke up at that point, raising his voice above that of the Captain. ‘I can think of arguments either way, actually.’ They looked at him patiently, as one might humour a child attempting to tell a joke. Hardly anyone in the room must have known who he was, beyond the fact that he was supposedly Titus Haussmann’s son. It suited him perfectly well: being underestimated was a highly satisfactory state of affairs.

He continued, ‘The organisation that launched the Flotilla might still exist in some shape and form back home, perhaps clandestinely. They’d still have an interest in helping us on our way, if only to ensure that their earlier efforts weren’t wasted. We might still be the only interstellar expedition under way; don’t forget that. We might still be the only hope anyone has of reaching another star.’

Omdurman stroked his bearded chin. ‘I suppose that’s possible. We’re like a great mosque being built: a project that will take hundreds of years and which no one will see in its entirety . . .’

‘Damn them . . . damn them all.’

Omdurman faltered, but pretended not to have heard. ‘. . . yet those who know they’ll die before the end is reached can still feel some satisfaction at having contributed something to the whole, even if it’s only the tiniest chip in the least significant pattern. The trouble is we know precious little about what’s really happened back home.’

Zamudio smiled. ‘And even if they did send more thorough news updates, we still wouldn’t know how much to trust them.’

‘Back to square one, in other words,’ said Armesto, from the Brazilia. He was the youngest of the Captains; not much older than Sky. Sky studied him carefully, taking the outline of a possible enemy; one that might not assume definition until years or decades hence.

‘Equally, I can think of reasons they might want to kill us,’ Sky said. He turned to Balcazar. ‘With your permisssion, of course?’

The Captain’s head jolted up, as if he had been on the point of sleep.

‘Go head, Titus, dear boy.’

‘Suppose we’re not the only game in town.’ Sky leaned forward, his elbows hard against the mahogany. ‘It’s a century since we left home. There may be faster ships on the drawing board now; maybe even on their way. Maybe there are factions that want to stop us reaching Swan so they can claim it for themselves. Granted, they could always fight us for it, but we’re four large ships and we do have nuclear armaments.’ The devices he was talking about had been put aboard for landscape engineering when they reached Journey’s End - blasting mountain passes, or scooping out natural harbours - but they were perfectly capable of being used as weapons. ‘We wouldn’t be a pushover. From their point of view, it would be a lot simpler to persuade us to destroy ourselves.’

‘So what you’re saying is, there are equally strong reasons for trusting the message as not trusting it?’

‘Yes. And the same argument applies to the second one; the one warning us from adopting the modifications.’

The propulsion theorist coughed. ‘He’s right. All we can do is assess the technical content of the message for ourselves.’

‘That won’t be easy.’

‘Then we take a massive risk.’

So it had gone on; arguments for and against trusting the messages bounced around fruitlessly. There had been suggestions that one or other party was withholding valuable knowledge - true enough, Sky thought - but no fingers had been pointed directly and the conclave had ended in a mood of unease rather than outright hostility. All the ships had agreed to continue sharing their interpretation of the messages, together with the establishment of a special pan-Flotilla expert group to examine the technical feasibility of the suggested modifications. It was agreed that no ship would act unilaterally, and there would be no attempt to implement the modifications without the express agreement of all other parties. It was even suggested that any ship that wanted to go it alone was welcome to do so, but they would have to pull away from the main body of the Flotilla, increasing their separation to four times the current distance.