The Revelation Space Collection (220 page)

She nodded at him over the top of her menu. ‘Fair enough.’

The gimmick at Robotnik’s was that the staff were all servitors. It was one of the few places in the carousel, barring the heavy-industrial repair shops, where you saw any kind of machines doing manual labour. Even then the machines were ancient and clapped-out, the kind of cheap, rugged servitors that had always been immune to the plague, and which could still be manufactured despite the system’s much reduced industrial capability in the wake of the plague and the war. There was a certain antique charm to them, Antoinette supposed, but by the time she had watched one limping machine drop their beers four times between the bar and their table, the charm had begun to wear a little thin.

‘You don’t actually like this place, do you?’ she asked later. ‘It’s just that you like Lyle’s even less.’

‘You ask me, there’s something a tiny bit sick about that place, turning a major civic catastrophe into a bloody tourist attraction.’

‘Dad would probably have agreed with you.’

Xavier grunted something unintelligible. ‘So what happened with the spiders, anyway?’

Antoinette began picking the label off her beer bottle, just the way she had all those years ago when her father had first mentioned his preferred mode of burial. ‘I don’t really know.’

Xavier wiped foam from his lip. ‘Have a wild stab in the dark.’

‘I got into trouble. It was all going nicely - I was making a slow, controlled approach to Tangerine Dream - and then
wham
.’ She picked up a beer mat and stabbed a finger at it by way of explanation.

‘I’ve got a zombie ship dead ahead of me, about to hit the atmosphere itself. I painted it with my radar by mistake and got a bunch of attitude from the zombie pilot.’

‘But she didn’t chuck a missile at you by way of thanks?’

‘No. She must have been all out, or she didn’t want to make things worse by revealing her position with a tube launch. See, the reason she was doing the big dive - the same as me - was that she had a spider ship chasing
her
.’

‘That wasn’t good,’ Xavier said.

‘No, not good at all. That’s why I had to get into the atmosphere so quickly. Fuck the safeguards, let’s get down there. Beast obliged, but there was a lot of damage on the way in.’

‘If it was that or get captured by the spiders, I’d say you did the right thing. I take it you waited down there until the spiders had passed on?’

‘Not exactly, no.’

‘Antoinette ...’ Xavier chided.

‘Hey, listen. Once I’d buried my father, that was the last place I wanted to hang around. And Beast wasn’t enjoying it one bit. The ship wanted out as much as I did. Problem is, we got tokamak failure on the up and out.’

‘You were dead meat.’

‘We should have been,’ Antoinette said, nodding. ‘Especially as the spiders were still nearby.’

Xavier leant back in his chair and swigged an inch of beer. Now that he had her safe, now that he knew how things had turned out, he was obviously enjoying hearing the story. ‘So what happened - did you get the tokamak to reboot?’

‘Later, yes, when we were back in empty space. It lasted long enough to get me back to Yellowstone, but I needed the tugs for the slow-down.’

‘So you managed to reach escape velocity, or were you still able to insert into orbit?’

‘Neither, Xave. We were falling back to the planet. So I did the only thing I could, which was ask for help.’ She finished her own beer, watching his reaction.

‘Help?’

‘From the spiders.’

‘No shit? You had the nerve - the balls - to do that?’

‘I’m not sure about the balls, Xave. But yes, I guess I had the nerve.’ She grinned. ‘Hell, what else was I going to do? Sit there and die? From my point of view, with a fuck of a lot of cloud coming up real fast, being conscripted into a hive mind suddenly didn’t seem like the worst thing in the world.’

‘I still can’t believe ... even after that dream you’ve been replaying?’

‘I figured that had to be propaganda. The truth couldn’t be
quite
that bad.’

‘But maybe nearly as bad.’

‘When you’re about to die, Xave, you take what you can get.’

He pointed the open neck of the beer bottle at her. ‘But ...’

She read his mind. ‘I’m still here, yeah. I’m glad you noticed.’

‘What happened?’

‘They saved me.’ She said it again, almost having to reassure herself that it had really happened. ‘The spiders saved me. Sent down some kind of drone missile, or tug, or whatever it was. The thing clamped on to the hull and gave me a shove - a big shove - all the way out of Tangerine Dream’s gravity well. Next thing I knew I was falling back to Yellowstone. Had to get the tokamak up and running, but at least now I had more than a few minutes to do it in.’

‘And the spiders ... they left?’

She nodded vigorously. ‘Their main guy, this old geezer, he spoke to me just before they sent the drone. Gave me one hell of a warning, I admit. Said if we ever crossed paths again - like,
ever
- he’d kill me. I think he meant it, too.’

‘I suppose you have to count yourself lucky. I mean, not everyone gets let off with a warning where the spiders are concerned.’

‘I guess so, Xave.’

‘This old man - the spider - anyone we’d have heard of?’

She shook her head. ‘Said his name was Clavain, that’s all. Didn’t mean shit to me.’

‘Not
the
Clavain, obviously?’

She stopped fiddling with the beer mat and looked at him. ‘And who would
the
Clavain be, Xave?’

He looked at her as if she was faintly stupid, or at the very least worryingly forgetful. ‘History, Antoinette, that boring stuff about the past. You know - before the Melding Plague, all that jazz?’

‘I wasn’t born then, Xave. It’s not even of academic interest to me.’ She held her bottle up to the light. ‘I need another one. What are the chances of getting it in the next hour, do you think?’

Xavier clicked a finger at the nearest servitor. The machine spun around, stiffened itself, took a step in their direction and fell over.

But when she was back at their place, Antoinette began to wonder. In the evening, when she had blasted away the worst effects of the beer, leaving her head clear but ringingly delicate, she squirrelled herself into Xavier’s office, powered up the museum-piece terminal and set about querying the carousel’s data hub for information on Clavain. She had to admit that she was curious now, but even if she had been curious during the journey home from the gas giant she would have had to wait until now to access any extensive systemwide archives. It would have been too risky to send a query from
Storm Bird
, and the ship’s own memories were not the most compendious.

Antoinette had never known anything except a post-plague environment, so she had no expectations of actually finding any useful information, even if the data she was looking for might once have existed. The system’s data networks had been rebuilt almost from scratch during the post-plague years, and much that had been archived before then had been corrupted or erased during the crisis.

But to her surprise there was rather a lot out there about Clavain, or at least about
a
Clavain. The famous Clavain, the one that Xavier had known about, had been born on Earth way back in the twenty-second century, in one of the last perfect summers before the glaciers rolled in and the place became a pristine snowball. He had gone to Mars and fought against the Conjoiners in their earliest incarnation. Antoinette read that again and frowned:
against
the Conjoiners? But she read on.

Clavain had gained notoriety during his Martian days. They called him the Butcher of Tharsis, the man who had turned the course of the Battle of the Bulge. He had authorised the use of red-mercury, nuclear and foam-phase weapons against spider forces, gouging glassy kilometre-wide craters across the face of Mars. In some accounts his deeds made him an automatic war criminal. Yet according to some of the less partisan reports, Clavain’s actions could be interpreted as having saved many millions of lives, both spider and allied, that would otherwise have been lost in a protracted ground campaign. Equally, there were reports of his heroism: of Clavain saving the lives of trapped soldiers and civilians; of him sustaining many injuries, recovering and going straight back to the front line. He had been there when the spiders brought down the aerial docking tower at Chryse, and had been pinned in the rubble for eighteen days with no food or water except the supplies in his skinsuit. When they pulled him out they found him clutching a cat that had also been trapped in the ruins, its spine snapped by masonry and yet still alive, nourished by portions from Clavain’s own rations. The cat died a week later. It took Clavain three months to recover.

But that hadn’t been the end of his career. He had been captured by the spider queen, the woman called Galiana who had created the whole spider mess in the first place. For months Galiana had held him prisoner, finally releasing him when the cease-fire was negotiated. Thereafter, there had always been a weird bond between the two former adversaries. When the uneasy peace had begun to crumble, it had been Clavain who went down to try to iron things out with the spider queen. And it was on that mission that he was presumed to have ‘defected’, throwing in his lot with the Conjoiners, accepting their remodelling machines into his skull and becoming one of the hive-mind spiders.

And that was when Clavain more or less dropped out of history. Antoinette skimmed the remaining records and found numerous anecdotal reports of him popping up here and there over the next four-hundred-odd years. It was possible; she could not deny that. Clavain had been getting on a bit before he defected, but with freezing and the time dilation that naturally accompanied any amount of star travel, he might not have lived through more than a few decades of those four centuries. And that was not even allowing for the kind of rejuvenation therapies that had been possible before the plague. No, it
could
have been Clavain - but it could equally well have been someone else with the same name. What were the chances of Antoinette Bax’s life intersecting with that of a major historical figure? Things like that just didn’t happen to her.

Something disturbed her. There was a commotion outside the office, the sound of things toppling and scraping, Xavier’s voice raised in protest. Antoinette killed the terminal and went outside.

What she found made her gasp. Xavier was up against one wall, his feet an inch from the floor. He was pinned there - painfully, she judged - by one manipulator of a multi-armed gloss-black police proxy. The machine - again it made her think of a nightmarish collision of pairs of huge black scissors - had barged into the office, knocking over cabinets and potted plants.

She looked at the proxy. Although they all appeared to be more or less identical, she just knew this was the same one, being slaved by the same pilot, that had come to pay her a visit aboard
Storm Bird
.

‘Fuck,’ Antoinette said.

‘Miss Bax.’ The machine lowered Xavier to the ground, none too gently. Xavier coughed, winded, rubbing a raw spot beneath his throat. He tried to speak, but all that came out was a series of hoarse hacking vowels.

‘Mr Liu was impeding me in the course of my inquiries,’ the proxy said.

Xavier coughed again. ‘I ... just ... didn’t get out of the way fast enough.’

‘Are you all right, Xave?’ Antoinette asked

‘I’m all right,’ he said, regaining some of the colour he had lost a moment earlier. He turned to the machine, which was occupying most of the office, flicking things over and examining other things with its multitude of limbs. ‘What the fuck do you want?’

‘Answers, Mr Liu. Answers to exactly the questions that were troubling me upon my last visit.’

Antoinette glared at the machine. ‘This fucker paid you a visit while I was away?’

The machine answered her. ‘I most certainly did, Miss Bax - seeing as you were so unforthcoming, I felt it necessary.’

Xavier looked at Antoinette.

‘He boarded
Storm Bird
,’ she confirmed

‘And?’

The proxy overturned a filing cabinet, rummaging with bored intent through the spilled paperwork. ‘Miss Bax showed me that she was carrying a passenger in a reefersleep casket. Her story, which was verified by Hospice Idlewild, was that there had been some kind of administrative confusion, and that the body was in the process of being returned to the Hospice.’

Antoinette shrugged, knowing she was going to have to bluff this one out. ‘So?’

‘The body was already dead. And you never arrived at the Hospice. You steered for interplanetary space shortly after I departed.’

‘Why would I have done that?’

‘That, Miss Bax, is precisely what I would like to know.’ The proxy abandoned the paperwork, kicking the cabinet aside with a whining flick of one sharp-edged piston-driven limb. ‘I asked Mr Liu, and he was no help at all. Were you, Mr Liu?’