The Revelation Space Collection (228 page)

So he had acted, knowing that he would probably not see Felka again, since he did not expect to remain a free man - or even a living one - after he had entered into the next and most difficult phase of his defection. It would have been far better if he had been able to see her one last time; there would have been no hope of persuading her to come with him, and no way of arranging her escape even if she had been willing, but he could have let her know his intentions, certain that his secret was safe with her. He also thought she would have understood - not necessarily agreed, but she would not have tried to argue him out of it. And if there had been a final farewell, he thought, then she might have answered the question he had never quite had the courage to ask her; the question that went back to the time of Galiana’s nest and the war-weary days on Mars when they had met for the first time. He would have asked her if she was his daughter, and she might have answered.

Now he would have to live without ever knowing, and though he might never have summoned the courage - in all the years before he had never managed it, after all - the permanence of his exile and the impossibility of ever knowing the truth felt as bleak and cold as stone.

Clavain decided he had better learn to live with it.

He had defected before, throwing away one life, and he had survived both emotionally and physically. He was older now, but not so old and weary that he could not do it again. The trick, for now, was to focus only on immediates: fact one was that he was still alive and that his injuries were minor. He thought it likely that missiles were on their way to him, but they could not have been launched until long after he had taken the corvette or they would have already shown up on the passive sensors. Someone, very probably Remontoire, had managed to delay matters sufficiently to give him this edge. It was not much of an edge, but it was a lot better than being already dead, surfing his own expanding cloud of ionised debris. That at least was worth another rueful smile. They might yet kill him, but it would not be close to home.

He scratched his beard, muscles labouring against the continual pull of acceleration. The corvette’s motors were still firing at maximum sustainable thrust: three gees that felt as rock-solid and smooth as the pull of a star. Each second, the ship was annihilating a bacterium-sized speck of anti-matter, but the anti-matter and metallic-hydrogen reaction-mass cores had barely been scratched. The corvette would take him anywhere he wanted in the system, and it would get him there in only tens of days. He could even accelerate harder if he wished, though it would stress the engines.

Fact two was that he had a plan.

The corvette’s antimatter thrusters were advanced - far more so than anything in the enemy’s fleet - but they did not employ the same technology as the Conjoiner starship drive. They could not have pushed a million-tonne starship to within a whisker of light-speed, but they did have one significant tactical advantage: they were silent across the entire neutrino-emission spectrum. Since Clavain had disabled all the usual transponders, he could be tracked only by his emission flame: the torch of relativistic particles slamming from the corvette’s exhaust apertures. But the corvette’s exhaust was already as tightly collimated as a rapier blade. There was negligible scattering away from the axis of thrust, so effectively he could only be seen by anything or anyone sitting in a very narrow cone immediately to his rear. The cone widened as it reached further behind him, but it also became steadily attenuated, like a torch beam growing weaker with distance. Only an observer near its centre would detect sufficient numbers of photons to obtain an accurate fix on his position, and if Clavain allowed the cone’s angle to tilt by no more than a handful of degrees, the beam would become too dim to betray him.

But a change in beam vector implied a change in course. The Mother Nest would not expect him to do that, only for him to maintain a minimum-time trajectory towards Epsilon Eridani, and then to Yellowstone, which huddled in a tight, warm orbit around the same star. He would get there in twelve days. Where else could he go? The corvette could not reach another system - it barely had the range to reach the cometary halo - and almost any other world apart from Yellowstone was still in nominal Demarchist control. Their hold might be faltering, but in their present paranoid state they would still attack Clavain, even if he claimed to be defecting with tactically valuable secrets. But Clavain knew all that. Even before he plunged the piezo-knife into the membrane around Skade’s comet, he had formulated a plan - maybe not the most detailed or elegant of his career, and it was far from the most likely to succeed, but he had only had minutes to assemble it and he did not think he had done too badly. Even after reconsideration, nothing better had presented itself.

And all it needed was a little trust.

I want to know what happened to me.

They looked at her, and then at each other. She could almost feel the intense buzz of their thoughts crackling through the air like the ionisation breakdown that presaged a thunderstorm.

The first of the surgeons projected calm and reassurance. [Skade . . .]

I said I want to know what happened to me.

[You are alive. You were injured, but you survived. You are still in need of ...] The surgeon’s gloss of calm faltered.

In need of what?

[You still need to be properly healed. But everything can be made good.]

For some reason she could not see into any of their heads. For most Conjoiners, waking to experience such isolation would have been a profoundly disturbing experience. But Skade was equipped for it. She endured it stoically, reminding herself that she had experienced degrees of isolation almost as extreme during her time in the Closed Council. Those had ended; this would end. It would only be a matter of time until ...

What is wrong with my implants?

[Nothing’s wrong with your implants.]

She knew that the surgeon was a man named Delmar.
So why am I isolated?

But almost before she had phrased the question she knew what the answer would be. It was because they did not want her to be able to see what she looked like through their eyes. Because they did not want her to know the immediate truth of what had happened to her.

[Skade ...]

Never mind ... I know. Why did you bother waking me?

[There is someone to see you.]

She could not move her head, only her eyes. Through the blur of peripheral vision she saw Remontoire approach the bed, or table, or couch, where they had woken her. He wore an electric-white medical tunic against a background of pure white. His head was an oddly disconnected sphere bobbing towards her. Swan-necked medical servitors moved out of his way. The surgeon folded his arms across his chest and looked on with an expression of stern disapproval. His colleagues had made a discreet exit, leaving only the three of them in the room.

Skade peered ‘down’ towards the foot of the bed but could see only an out-of-focus whiteness that might have been illusory. There was a quiet mechanical humming, but nothing that she would not have expected in a medical room.

Remontoire knelt down beside her. [How much do you remember?]

You tell me what happened and I’ll tell you what I remember.

Remontoire glanced back at the surgeon. He allowed Skade to hear the thought he pushed into Delmar’s head. [I’m afraid you’ll have to leave us. Your machines as well, since I’m certain that they have recording devices.]

[We’ll leave you alone for exactly five minutes, Remontoire. Will that be sufficient?]

[It’ll have to do, won’t it?] Remontoire nodded and smiled as the man ushered his machines from the room, their swan-necks lowering elegantly to pass through the doorway. [Sorry...]

[Five minutes, Remontoire.]

Skade tried moving her head again, but still without success.
Come closer, Remontoire. I can’t see you very easily. They won’t show me what happened.

[Do you remember the comet? Clavain was with us. You were showing him the buried ships.]

I remember.

[Clavain stole the corvette before you or I could get aboard. It was still tethered to the surface of the comet.]

She remembered taking Clavain to the comet but not the rest of it.
And did he get away?

[Yes, but we’ll come to that. The problem is what happened during his escape. Clavain applied thrust until the tethers gave way under the strain. They whiplashed back towards the comet. I’m afraid one of them caught you.]

It was difficult to respond, though she had known from the moment of waking that something bad had happened to her.
Caught me?

[You were injured, Skade. Badly. If you hadn’t been Conjoiner, hadn’t had the machines in your head to help your body cope with the shock, you would very probably not have survived, even with the assistance that your suit was able to give you.]

Show me, damn you.

[I would if there was a mirror in this room. But there isn’t, and I can’t bypass the neural blockades that Delmar has installed.]

Describe it, then. Describe it, Remontoire!

[This isn’t why I came, Skade ... Delmar will put you back into a recuperative coma very shortly, and when you next wake you’ll be healed again. I came to ask you about Clavain.]

For a moment she pushed aside her own morbid curiosity.
I take it he’s dead?

[Actually, they haven’t managed to stop him yet.]

As angry as she was, she had to admit that the matter of Clavain was at least as fascinating to her as her own predicament. And the two things were not unconnected, were they? She did not yet fully understand what had happened to her, but it was enough to know that it had been Clavain’s doing. It did not matter that it might not have been intentional.

There were no
accidents
in treason.

Where is he?

[That’s the funny thing. No one seems to know. They had a fix on his exhaust. He was heading towards Eridani - towards what we assumed would be Yellowstone or the Rust Belt.]

The Demarchists would crucify him
.

Remontoire nodded. [Clavain especially. But now it doesn’t look as if he was going there at all - not directly, anyway. He turned away from the sunward vector. We don’t know how far into his journey, since we lost his drive flame.]

We have optical monitors strewn through the halo. Surely he’ll have fallen into the line of sight of another one by now.

[The problem is that Clavain knows the positions of those monitors. He can make sure his beam doesn’t sweep across them. We have to keep reminding ourselves that he’s one of ours, Skade.]

Were missiles launched?

[Yes, but they never got close enough to establish their own fixes. They didn’t have enough fuel to make it back to the Nest, so we had to detonate them.]

She felt drool loosen itself and trail down her chin.
We have to stop him, Remontoire. Grasp that.

[Even if we pick up Clavain’s signal again, he’d be out of effective missile range. And no other ships can catch a corvette.]

She bit down on her fury.
We have the prototype.

[Even
Nightshade
isn’t that fast, not over solar-system-type distances.]

Skade said nothing for several seconds, calculating how much she could prudently reveal. This was Inner Sanctum business, after all, sensitive even by the clandestine standards of Closed Council.
It is, Remontoire.

The door opened. One of the servitors ducked under and in, followed by Delmar. Remontoire stood and extended his hands, palms facing forwards.

[We just need another moment ...]

Delmar stood by the door, arms folded. [I’m staying here, I’m afraid.]

Skade hissed at Remontoire. He moved closer, bending down so that their heads were only centimetres apart, permitting mind-to-mind contact without amplification by the room’s systems.
It can be done. The prototype has a higher acceleration ceiling than you have assumed.

[How much higher?]

A lot. You’ll see. But all you need to know is that the prototype can get close enough to Clavain’s approximate position to pick up his trail again, and then close within weapons range
.
I’ll need you on the crew, of course. You’re a soldier, Remontoire. You know the weapons better than I do.

[Shouldn’t we be thinking of ways to bring him back alive?]

It’s a little bit late for that, wouldn’t you say?

Remontoire said nothing, but she knew she had made her point. And he would come around to her viewpoint soon enough. He was a Conjoiner to the core, and would therefore accept any course of action, no matter how ruthless, that benefited the Mother Nest. That was the difference between Remontoire and Clavain.

[Skade ...]