The Revelation Space Collection (201 page)

Looking ahead, now that her eyes had adapted she saw that the light had an overcast silver-grey quality. Gradually it became duller, taking on an iron or dull bronze pall. Epsilon Eridani was not a bright star to begin with, and much of its light was now being filtered out by the layers of atmosphere above them. If they went deeper it would get darker and darker, until it was like being at the bottom of an ocean.

But this was what her father had wanted.

‘All right, Beast, hold her nice and steady. I’m about to do the deed.’

‘Take care now, Little Miss.’

There were cargo-bay entrance ports all over
Storm Bird
, but the one that had been opened was in the ship’s belly, facing backwards along the direction of flight. Antoinette had reached the lip now, the toes of her boots hanging an inch over the edge. It felt precarious, but she was still safely anchored. Her view above was obstructed by the dark underside of the hull, curving gently up towards the tail; but to either side, and down, nothing impeded her vision.

‘You were right, Dad,’ she breathed, quietly enough that she hoped Beast would not pick up her words. ‘It is a pretty amazing place. I think you made a good choice, all things told.’

‘Little Miss?’

‘Nothing, Beast.’

She began to undo the coffin’s fastenings. The ship lurched and swayed once or twice, making her stomach twist and the coffin knock against the lattice’s spars, but by and large Beast was doing an excellent job of holding altitude. The speed was now highly subsonic relative to the current airstream, so that Beast was doing little more than hover, but that was good. The wind’s ferocity had died down except for the odd squall, as she had hoped it would.

The coffin was almost loose now, almost ready to be tipped over the side. Her father looked like a man catching up on forty winks. The embalmers had done a superlative job, and the coffin’s faltering refrigeration mechanism had done the rest. It was impossible to believe that her father had been dead for a month.

‘Well, Dad,’ Antoinette said, ‘this is it, I guess. We’ve made it now. Not much more needs to be said, I think.’

The ship did her the courtesy of saying nothing.

‘I still don’t know whether I’m really doing the right thing,’ Antoinette continued. ‘I mean, I know this is what you once said you wanted, but ...’
Stop it
, she told herself.
Stop going over that again.

‘Little Miss?’

‘Yes?’

‘One would strongly advise against taking too much longer.’

Antoinette remembered the label of the beer bottle. She did not have it with her now, but there was no detail of it that she could not call immediately to mind. The brilliance of the silver and gold inks had faded a little since the day when she had lovingly peeled the label from the bottle, but in her mind’s eye they still shone with a fabulous rare lustre. It was a cheap, mass-produced item, but in her hands, and in her mind, the label had assumed the significance of a religious icon. She had been much younger when she had removed the label, only twelve or thirteen years old, and, flush from a lucrative haul, her father had taken her to one of the drinking dens that the traders sometimes frequented. Though her experience was limited, it had seemed to be a good night, with much laughter and telling of stories. Then, somewhere towards the end of the evening, the talk had turned to the various ways in which the remains of spacefarers were dealt with, whether by tradition or personal preference. Her father had kept quiet during most of the discussion, smiling to himself as the conversation veered from the serious to the jocular and back again, laughing at the jokes and insults. Then, much to Antoinette’s surprise, he had stated his own preference, which was to be buried inside the atmosphere of a gas-giant planet. At any other time she might have assumed him to be mocking his comrades’ proposals, but there was something about his tone that had told her that he was absolutely earnest, and that although he had never spoken of the matter before, it was not something he had just conjured out of thin air. And so she had made a small, private vow to herself. She had peeled the label from the bottle as a memento, swearing that if her father should ever die, and should she ever be in a position to do anything about it, she would not forget his wish.

And for all the years that had followed it had been easy to imagine that she would hold to her vow, so easy, in fact, that she had seldom thought of it at all. But now he was dead, and she had to face up to what she had promised herself, no matter that the vow now struck her as faintly ridiculous and childlike. What did matter was the utter conviction that she believed she had heard in his voice that night. Though she had been only twelve or thirteen, and might even have imagined it, or been fooled by his poker-face façade of seriousness, she had made the vow, and however embarrassing or inconvenient, she had to stick to it, even if it meant placing her own life in jeopardy.

She undid the final restraints, and then budged the coffin forwards until a third of its length projected over the edge. One good shove and her father would get the burial he had wanted.

It was madness. In all the years after that one drunken conversation in the spacer’s bar he had never again mentioned the idea of being buried in the Jovian. But did that necessarily mean it had not been a heartfelt wish? He had not known when he was going to die, after all. There had been no time to put his affairs in order before the accident; no reason for him to explain patiently to her what he wanted doing with his mortal remains.

Madness, yes . . . but heartfelt madness.

Antoinette pushed the coffin over the edge.

For a moment it seemed to hang in the air behind the ship, as if unwilling to begin the long fall into oblivion. Then, slowly, it did begin to fall. She watched it tumble, dropping behind the ship as the wind retarded it. Quickly it diminished: now a thing the size of her outstretched thumb; now a tiny, tumbling hyphen at the limit of vision; now a dot that only intermittently caught the weakly transmitted starlight, glinting and fading as it fell through billowing pastel cloud layers.

She saw it one more time, and then it was gone.

Antoinette leant back against the rig. She had not expected it, but now that the deed was done, now that she had buried her father, exhaustion came crushing down on her. She felt suddenly the entire leaden weight of all the air pressing down from above. There was no actual sadness, no tears; she had cried enough already. There would be more, in time. She was sure of that. But for now all she felt was utter exhaustion.

Antoinette closed her eyes. Several minutes passed.

Then she told Beast to close the bay door, and began the long journey back to the flight deck.

THREE

From his vantage point in an airlock, Nevil Clavain watched a circular part of
Nightshade’
s hull iris open. The armoured proxies that bustled out resembled albino lice, carapaced and segmented and sprouting many specialised limbs, sensors and weapons. They quickly crossed the open space to the enemy ship, sticking to her claw-shaped hull with adhesive-tipped legs. Then they scuttled across the damaged surface, hunting for entry locks and the known weak spots of that type of ship.

The proxies moved with the random questing motion of bugs. The scarabs could have swept through the ship very quickly, but only at the risk of killing any survivors who might have been sheltering in pressurised zones. So Clavain insisted that the machines use the airlocks, even if that meant a delay while each robot passed through.

He need hardly have worried. As soon as the first scarab made its way through, it became clear that he was going to encounter neither resistance nor armed survivors. The ship was dark, cold and silent. He could almost smell death aboard her. The proxy edged its way through the enemy craft, the faces of the dead coming into view as it passed their duty stations. Similar reports came back from the other machines as they scuttled through the rest of the ship.

He withdrew most of the scarabs and then sent a small detachment of Conjoiners into the ship via the same route the machines had used. Through the eyes of a scarab, he watched his squad emerge from the lock one at a time: bulbous white shapes like hard-edged ghosts.

The squad swept the ship, moving through the same cramped spaces that the proxies had explored, but with the additional watch-fulness of humans. Gun muzzles were poked into hideaways, equipment hatches opened and checked for cowering survivors. None were found. The dead were discreetly prodded, but none of them showed the slightest signs of faking it. Their bodies were beginning to cool, and the thermal patterns around their faces showed that death had already occurred, albeit recently. There was no sign of violent death or injury.

He composed a thought and passed it back to Skade and Remontoire, who were still on the bridge.
I’m going inside. No ifs, no buts. I’ll be quick and I won’t take any unnecessary risks.

[No, Clavain.]

Sorry, Skade, but you can’t have it both ways. I’m not a member of your cosy little club, which means I can go where the hell I like. Like it or lump it, but that’s part of the deal.

[You’re still a valued asset, Clavain.]

I’ll be careful. I promise.

He felt Skade’s irritation bleeding into his own emotional state. Remontoire was not exactly thrilled either.

As Closed Council members, it would have been unthinkable for either of them to do anything as dangerous as board a captured enemy ship. They were taking enough of a risk by leaving the Mother Nest. Many of the other Conjoiners, Skade included, wanted him to join the Closed Council, where they could tap his wisdom more efficiently and keep him out of harm’s way. With her authority in the Council, Skade could make life awkward for him if he persisted in remaining outside, relegating him to token duties or even some kind of miserable forced retirement. There were other avenues of punishment and Clavain took none of them lightly. He had even begun to consider the possibility that perhaps he should join the Closed Council after all. At least he would learn some answers that way, and perhaps begin to exert influence over the aggressors.

But until he took a bite of that apple he was still a soldier. No restrictions applied to him, and he was damned if he was going to act as if they did.

He continued with the business of readying his suit. For a time, a good two or three centuries, that process had been much easier and quicker. You donned a mask and some communications gear and then stepped through a membrane of smart matter stretched over a door that was otherwise open to vacuum. As you went through it, a layer of the membrane slithered around you, forming an instant skintight suit. Upon your return, you stepped through the same membrane and your suit returned to it, oozing off like enchanted slime. It made the act of stepping outside a ship about as complex as slipping on a pair of sunglasses. Of course, such technologies had never made much sense in wartime - too vulnerable to attack - and they made even less sense in the post-plague era, when only the hardiest forms of nanotechnology could be deployed in sensitive applications.

Clavain supposed that he should have been irritated at the extra effort that was now needed. But in many ways he found the act of suiting-up - the martial donning of armour plating, the rigorous subsystem criticality checks, the buckling-on of weapons and sensors - to be strangely reassuring. Perhaps it was because the ritualistic nature of the exercise felt like a series of superstitious gestures against ill fortune. Or perhaps it was because it reminded him of what things had been like during his youth.

He left the airlock, kicking off towards the enemy ship. The claw-shaped craft was bright against one dark limb of the gas giant. It was damaged, certainly, but there had been no outgassing to suggest a loss of hull integrity. There had even been a chance of a survivor. Although the infra-red scans had been inconclusive, laser-ranging devices had detected slight back-and-forth movement of the entire ship. There could be any number of explanations for that movement, but the most obvious was the presence of at least one person still moving around inside, kicking off from the hull now and then. But the scarabs hadn’t found any survivors, and neither had his sweep team.

Something caught his eye: a writhing pale green filament of lightning in the dark crescent of the gas giant. He had barely given the freighter a second thought since the Demarchist vessel had emerged, but Antoinette Bax’s ship had never emerged from the atmosphere. In all likelihood she was dead, killed in one of the several thousand ways it was possible to die in an atmosphere. He had no idea what she had been doing, and doubted that it would have been anything he would have approved of. But she had been alone - hadn’t she? - and that was no way to die in space. Clavain remembered the way she had ignored the shipmaster’s warning and realised that he rather admired her for it. Whatever else she had been, he could not deny that she had been brave.

He thudded into contact with the enemy ship, absorbing the impact by bending his knees. Clavain stood up, his soles adhering to the hull. Holding a hand against his visor to cut down sun glare, he turned back to look at
Nightshade
, relishing the rare opportunity to see his ship from the outside.
Nightshade
was so dark that at first he had trouble making it out. Then his implants boxed it in with a pulsing green overlay, scale and distance annotated by red gradations and numerals. The ship was a lighthugger, with interstellar capability.
Nightshade’
s slender hull tapered to a needle-sharp prow, streamlined for maximum near-light cruise efficiency. Braced near the thickest point of the hull, just before it retapered to a blunt tail, was a pair of engines, thrown out from the hull on slender spars. They were what the other human factions called Conjoiner drives, for the simple reason that the Conjoiners had a monopoly on their construction and distribution. For centuries the Conjoiners had allowed the Demarchists, Ultras and other starfaring factions to use the technology, while never once hinting at the mysterious physical processes that allowed the tamperproof engines to function in the first place.