The Revelation Space Collection (169 page)

I knew he was not mad, of course - at least not screamingly insane. If he had been, he would have been no use to Reivich as a lure. Voronoff had to have some residual grasp on reality. His mental state was almost certainly unlike anything I had ever experienced - and I had certainly known boredom - but it would be lethal to assume he was in anything other than absolute control of his faculties.

‘You could end it all,’ I said, helpfully. ‘Suicide can’t be the hardest thing to arrange in a city like this.’

‘People do,’ Zebra said. ‘People like Voronoff. They don’t call it suicide, of course. But they suddenly take an unhealthy interest in activities with a very low survival-probability, like diving into the gas giant or saying hello to the Shrouders.’

‘Why not, Voronoff?’ And then it was my turn to smile. ‘No, wait. You almost did it, didn’t you? Posing as Reivich. You were hoping I’d kill you, weren’t you? A way out of the pain with something approaching dignity. The wise old immortal gunned down by the out-of-town thug, just because he happened to take on the persona of a murderous fugitive?’

‘With no bullets? That’d be a trick worth dying to see, Mirabel.’

‘Good point.’

‘Except,’ Zebra said, ‘you realised you liked it too much.’

Voronoff looked at her with ill-concealed venom. ‘Liked what too much, Taryn?’

‘Being hunted. It actually eased the pain, didn’t it?’

‘What would you know about the pain?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Be honest, Voronoff. She’s right, isn’t she? For the first time in years you actually remembered what it was like to live. That’s why you started taking stupid risks - to keep that buzz alive. But nothing was good enough, was it? Even jumping into the chasm was just mildly amusing.’

He looked at us with new eagerness. ‘Have you ever been hunted? Have you any idea what it’s like?’

‘I’m afraid I have had that pleasure,’ I said. ‘And fairly recently, too.’

‘I’m not talking about your little hunting games,’ Voronoff said, spitting the words with total contempt. ‘Scum in pursuit of scum - present company excepted, of course. When they hunted you, Mirabel, they stacked the odds so heavily in their favour they might as well have blindfolded you and put a slug through your head before they even let you run.’

‘Funnily enough, I would have almost agreed with you at the time.’

‘But it could have been different. They could have made it fair. Let you get further away before they came after you, so that your death wasn’t absolutely inevitable. Allowed you to find your hiding places and use them. That would have made a difference, wouldn’t it?’

‘Almost,’ I said. ‘Of course, there would have been the small matter that I never volunteered for it.’

‘Maybe you would have, too. If it was worth it. If there was a prize. If you thought you could make it through the game.’

‘What was your prize, Voronoff?’

‘The pain,’ he said. ‘Its absolution. For a few days at least.’

I started to answer him, probably. I think I did, anyway. It might have been Zebra, or it might have been the taciturn heavy with the bludgeon-sized gun. All I remember with any clarity is what happened several seconds later, the intervening moments neatly edited from memory. There must have been a pulse of light and heat, at first, as the other car opened fire on us. Then there would have been a blast of eardrum-piercing sound as the shockwave of the beam weapon slammed through the flensed-open cabin, followed by an explosion of metal and plastic and composites as the car’s innards eviscerated themselves in a hot cloud of fused machinery. Then we would have dropped, as the shattered roof-mounted arms, amputated and twisted by the attack, lost their grip on the cables.

A second or so later our descent was arrested, violently, and that was when, approximately, something like normal consciousness resumed. My first memory - before the pain hit - was that the car was upside down, with the moundlike table now dimpling down from the ceiling, and the neon-patterned floor evincing a gaping, jagged hole, through which the lower reaches of the city - the festering complexity of the Mulch - was far too clear, and far too far below.

The heavy was gone, except for his gun, which was rattling to and fro on the new floor as the car lurched and swayed, adjusting to its precarious new equilibrium. The heavy’s hand was still present, clasped around the gun. It had been neatly severed by shrapnel. Seeing the bony details of the wrist reminded me of the absence of my foot in the tent, after we had been ambushed by Reivich’s people; the way I had pawed at the stump and held my blood-drenched palm to my face, in abject denial that a part of me had been removed, like a strip of annexed territory.

Except - as I now knew - none of that had happened to me.

Zebra and I had tumbled into one corner of the cabin, thrown together in an untidy embrace. There was no sign of Voronoff - or any parts of Voronoff. I was being assailed by waves of pain, but as I began to pay particular attention to my discomfort, I decided there was nothing sharp enough to be actual broken bones.

The car swayed and creaked. It was remarkably quiet, apart from our breathing and the soft moaning which came from Zebra.

‘Tanner?’ she said, opening her eyes to pained slits. ‘What just happened?’

‘We were attacked,’ I said, realising that she had had no knowledge of the other vehicle; that she had not been expecting anything at all, whereas I had been mentally tensed for some kind of intervention. ‘A heavy beam weapon, probably. I think we’re stuck in the Canopy.’

‘Are we safe?’ she asked, wincing as she untangled one limb. ‘No; wait. Stupid question. Incredibly stupid question.’

‘Are you hurt?’

‘I umm . . . just a moment.’ Her eyes, glazed as they were, conspired to glaze a degree more, for an instant. ‘No; nothing that can’t wait for a few hours.’

‘What did you just do?’

‘Checked my body-image for damage.’ She said it dismissively. ‘How about you, Tanner?’

‘I’ll make it. Assuming any of us makes it.’

The car lurched, slipping vertically downwards before something arrested its progress, shakily. I tried to keep my gaze away from the maw in the floor, but if anything, the Mulch looked further away than ever, like a street map held at arm’s length. A few of the lowermost merged limbs of the Canopy intersected the view, but they were spindly and uninhabited, and served only to enhance the sense of tremendous height. Shadows moved beyond the smoky partition, and the vehicle budged again.

‘Someone will rescue us,’ Zebra said. ‘Won’t they?’

‘Someone may not want to intervene in what is clearly a private matter.’ Then I nodded at the partition. ‘At least one of them is alive in there. I think we’d better move before they do anything we might regret, like shooting us.’

‘Move where, Tanner?’

I looked down at the gap in the floor. ‘We’re not exactly spoilt for choice, are we?’

‘You’re mad.’

‘Just possibly,’ I said, kneeling at the edge of the hole, spreading my arms wide around the rim and preparing to lower my head through it. ‘But I find it goes with the territory, Zebra.’

I lowered myself through the aperture until my feet found purchase against the gnarled top-surface of the Canopy branch against which we’d come to rest. It was a narrow branch; we were very close to its extremity, where it tapered to a fine, tendrilled point, like the nub of an onion. Once I had my balance, I reached up and helped Zebra through, though with the extreme elongation of her limbs, she hardly needed my assistance.

Zebra looked up, appraising the looming bulk of the ruined vehicle. What had been the roof was a mass of scorched and melted components, only one of the telescopic arms remaining, which was the arm which was holding the vehicle in place, clutching precariously and twistedly at a somewhat higher branch. It looked like it would take very little more than a breeze to send the whole mass careering down to the Mulch. Quirrenbach and the other heavy, who’d been in the forward compartment, were inside, but they were struggling with the door, which was wedged against a protrusion from the branch.

‘Voronoff’s still alive,’ I said, gesturing a little distance up the branch, where it thickened. He was crawling along it, slowly but methodically, and I decided the branch must have broken an otherwise unintentional fall.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘He won’t get very far.’

The shot was precise and surgical; sufficient yield to make a point, yet not enough to risk cutting through the branch. It made Voronoff stop in his tracks, but for a moment he did not look back in our direction.

Zebra looked up, into the overlying mass of structural branches, where the figure who had fired the shot was standing. She stood with her hips slightly canted to one side, the stock of a heavy rifle resting against the convexity of one thigh.

Chanterelle shouldered the weapon, then commenced climbing down via an improvised staircase of linking branches. Above, her car was parked intact, and three other dark-clad figures had spilled out onto the branch. They were covering her as she worked her way down to our level with even larger and nastier weapons.

It was a small thing at first; just a smudge of phosphors on the deep radar screen. But it signified volumes. For the first time since leaving the Flotilla they had encountered something that lay behind them; something other than light years of empty space. Sky turned up the beam intensity and focused the phased-array on the specific region where the echo had come back from.

‘It’s got to be it,’ Gomez said, leaning over his shoulder. ‘Got to be the Caleuche. There can’t be anything else out there.’

‘Maybe we’re just seeing another piece of discarded junk,’ Norquinco said.

‘No.’ Sky watched as the phased-array teased out details, turning the smudge into something with density and shape. ‘It’s much too big for that. I think it is the ghost ship. Nothing else that big could be trailing us.’

‘How big is it, exactly?’

‘Wide enough,’ Sky said. ‘But I can’t get an estimate of the length. She’s keeping her long axis aligned with us, just as if she still has some navigational control.’ He tapped keys, squinting as more numbers popped up next to the echo. ‘Width is spot-on for a Flotilla ship. Same profile too - the radar’s even picking out some asymmetries which line up with where we’d expect the antennae clusters to be on the forward sphere. She doesn’t seem to be rotating - they must have sapped her spin for some reason.’

‘Maybe they got bored with gravity. How far away is she?’

‘Sixteen thousand klicks. Which, considering we’ve come half a light second, isn’t bad. We can reach her in a few hours at minimal burn.’

They debated it for a few minutes, then agreed that a quiet approach made the best sense now. The fact that the ship had kept herself aligned with the Flotilla meant that it was no longer possible to think of her as a drifting, dead hulk. She still had some autonomy. Sky doubted that there could be living crew aboard her, but it must now be considered a real - if remote - possibility. At the very least, automated defence systems might be functioning. And they might or might not take kindly to the swift, unannounced approach of another ship.

‘We could always announce ourselves,’ Gomez said.

Sky shook his head. ‘They’ve been following us quietly for the best part of a century without ever making any attempt to talk to us. Call me paranoid, but I think that just might suggest they’re not particularly interested in visitors, whether they announce themselves or not. Anyway, I don’t believe for one minute that there’s anyone aboard. She has some systems still running, that’s all - just enough to keep her antimatter safe and make sure she doesn’t drift too far from the Flotilla.’

‘We’ll know soon enough,’ Norquinco said. ‘As soon as we get within visual range. Then we can take a look at the damage.’

The next two hours passed agonisingly slowly. Sky modified their approach trajectory to take them slightly to one side, so that the phased-array could begin to pick out some elongation in the radar echo. The results, when they came in, were no surprise: the Caleuche fitted the profile of a Flotilla ship almost exactly, except for some small but puzzling deviations.

‘Probably damage marks,’ Gomez said. He looked at the radar echo, bright now, and the absence of anything else on the screen only served to emphasise how isolated they were. There had not even been any response from the rest of the Flotilla; no sign that any of the other ships had noticed anything going on. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’m almost disappointed.’

‘You are?’

‘At the back of my mind I kept wondering if it wouldn’t turn out to be something stranger.’

‘A ghost ship isn’t strange enough for you?’ Sky adjusted the course again, swinging them around to approach the ship from the other side.

‘Yes, but now that we know what it is, so many possibilities are ruled out. You know what I used to think it might be? Another ship sent out from home, much later than the Flotilla - something a lot faster and more advanced. Sent here to follow us at a safe distance - maybe just to observe us, but perhaps to step in and help us if anything went seriously wrong.’

Sky did his best to look contemptuous, but secretly he shared some of Gomez’s feelings. What if it got worse, he thought? What if the Caleuche turned out to have no useful supplies on her at all, and no safe way of exploiting her antimatter? Just because something had spawned a myth did not automatically mean it had to contain anything of substance. He thought of the original Caleuche: the ghost ship which was to supposed to haunt the waters of southern Chile, the dead aboard her trapped in an eternal and grisly celebration, sending mournful accordion music out across the waves. But whenever the real Caleuche was sighted, it always had the magical ability to turn into a seaweed-infested lump of rock or a piece of driftwood.