The Revelation Space Collection (237 page)

‘It was on Mars, Clavain, when you were Galiana’s prisoner for the first time. She kept you there for months and then released you. You must remember what it was like back then.’

He nodded. Of course he remembered. What difference did four hundred years make?

‘Galiana’s nest was hemmed in from all sides. But she wouldn’t give up. She had plans for the future, big plans, the kind that involved expanding the numbers of her disciples. But the nest lacked genetic diversity. Whenever new DNA came her way, she seized it. You and Galiana never made love on Mars, Clavain, but it was easy enough for her to obtain a cell scraping without your knowledge.’

‘And?’ he whispered.

Felka’s message continued seamlessly. ‘After you’d gone back to your side, she combined your DNA with her own, splicing the two samples together. Then she created me from the same genetic information. I was born in an artificial womb, Clavain, but I am still Galiana’s daughter. And still your daughter, too.’

‘Skip to next message,’ he said, before she could say another word. It was too much; too intense. He could not process the information in one go, even though she was only telling him what he had always suspected - prayed - was the case.

But there were no other messages.

Fearfully, Clavain asked the corvette to spool back and replay Felka’s transmission. But he had been much too thorough: the ship had dutifully erased the message, and now all that remained was what he carried in his memory.

He sat in silence. He was far from home, far from his friends, embarked on something that even he was not sure he believed in. It was entirely likely that he would die soon, uncommemorated except as a traitor. Even the enemy would not do him the dignity of remembering him with any more affection than that. And now this: a message that had reached across space to claw at his feelings. When he had said goodbye to Felka he had managed a singular piece of self-deception, convincing himself that he no longer thought of her as his daughter. He had believed it, too, for the time it took to leave the Nest.

But now she was telling him that he had been right all along. And that if he did not turn around he would never see her again.

But he could not turn around.

Clavain wept. There was nothing else to do.

SIXTEEN

Thorn took his first tentative steps aboard
Nostalgia for Infinity
. He looked around with frantic, wide-eyed intent, desperate not to miss a single detail or nuance of detail that might betray deception or even the tiniest hint that things were not completely as claimed. He was afraid to blink. What if some vital slip that would have exposed the whole thing as a façade happened when he had his eyes closed? What if the two of them were
waiting
for him to blink, like conjurors playing with an audience’s attention?

Yet there appeared to be no deception here. Even if the trip in the shuttle had not convinced him of that fact - and it was difficult to imagine how that could have been faked - the supreme evidence was here.

He had travelled through space. He was no longer on Resurgam, but inside a colossal spacecraft: the Triumvir’s long-lost lighthugger. Even the gravity felt different.

‘You couldn’t have made this ...’ he said, as he walked alongside his two companions. ‘Not in a hundred years. Not unless you were Ultras to begin with. And then why would you need to fake it anyway?’

‘So you’re prepared to believe our story?’ the Inquisitor asked him.

‘You’ve got your hands on a starship. I can hardly deny that. But even a ship this size, and from what I’ve seen it’s at least as big as
Lorean
ever was, even a ship this size can’t accommodate two hundred thousand sleepers. Can it?’

‘It won’t need to,’ the other woman told him. ‘Remember, this is an evacuation operation, not a pleasure cruise. Our objective is only to get people away from Resurgam. We’ll put the most vulnerable into reefersleep. But the majority will have to stay awake and suffer rather cramped conditions. They won’t enjoy it, but it’s a hell of an improvement on being dead.’

There was no arguing with that. None of his own plans had ever guaranteed a luxurious ride off the planet.

‘How long do you think people will have to spend here, before they can return to Resurgam?’ he asked.

The women exchanged glances. ‘Returning to Resurgam may never be an option,’ the older one said.

Thorn shrugged. ‘It was a sterile rock when we arrived. We can start from scratch if we have to.’

‘Not if the planet doesn’t exist. It
could
be that bad, Thorn.’ She knuckled the wall of the ship as they walked on. ‘But we can keep people here as long as we need to - years, decades even.’

‘We could reach another star system, then,’ he countered. ‘This is a starship, after all.’

Neither of them said anything.

‘I still want to see what it is we’re so frightened of,’ he said. ‘Whatever it is that’s posing such a threat.’

The older one, Irina, said, ‘Do you sleep well at night, Thorn?’

‘As well as anyone.’

‘I’m afraid all that’s about to end. Follow me, will you?’

Antoinette was aboard
Storm Bird
, running systems checks, when the message came in. The freighter was still berthed in the rim repair bay in Carousel New Copenhagen, but most of the serious damage had been rectified or patched over. Xavier’s monkeys had worked around the clock, since neither he nor Antoinette could afford to occupy this bay for an hour longer than necessary. The monkeys had agreed to work even though most of the other hyperprimate workers in the carousel were on strike or sick with an extremely rare prosimian virus that had mysteriously crossed a dozen species barriers overnight. Xavier detected, so he claimed, a degree of sympathy from the workers. None of them were great fans of the Ferrisville Convention, and the fact that Antoinette and Xavier were being persecuted by the police only made the primates more willing to break the usual labour rules. Nothing came without costs, of course, and Xavier would end up owing the workers rather more than he might have wished, but there were certain trade-offs that one simply had to accept. That was a rule Antoinette’s father had quoted often enough, and she had grown up with the same resolutely pragmatic approach.

Antoinette was tapping through tokamak field configuration settings, a compad tucked under one arm and a pen between her teeth, when the console chimed. Her first thought was that something she had done had triggered an error somewhere else in the ship’s control web.

She spoke with the pen still in place, knowing that Beast would be able to make sense of her gruntings. ‘Beast ... fix that, will you?’

‘Little Miss, the signal in question is a notification of the arrival of a message.’

‘Xavier?’

‘Not Mr Liu, Little Miss. The message, in so far as one can deduce from the header information, originated well outside the carousel.’

‘Then it’s the cops. Funny. They don’t usually call; they just show up, like a turd on the doorstep.’

‘It doesn’t appear to be the authorities either, Little Miss. Might one suggest that the most prudent course of action would be to view the message in question?’

‘Clever clogs.’ She pulled the pen from her mouth and tucked it behind her ear. ‘Pipe it through to my ’pad, Beast.’

‘Very well, Little Miss.’

The screen of tokamak data shuffled aside. In its place a face resolved, speckled with coarse-resolution pixels. Whoever was sending was trying to get away with taking up as little bandwidth as possible. Nonetheless, she recognised the face very well.

‘Antoinette ... it’s me again. I hope you made it back safely.’ Nevil Clavain paused, scratching at his beard. ‘I’m bouncing this transmission through about fifteen relays. Some of them are pre-plague, some of them may even go back to the Amerikano era, so the quality may not be of the best. I’m afraid there’s no possibility of you being able to reply, and no possibility of my being able to send another message; this is emphatically my one and only shot. I need your help, Antoinette. I need your help very badly.’ He smiled awkwardly. ‘I know what you’re thinking: that I said I’d kill you if our paths ever crossed again. I meant it, too, but I said it because I hoped you’d take me seriously and stay out of trouble. I really hope you believe that, Antoinette, or else there isn’t much chance that you’re likely to agree to my next request.’

‘Your next request?’ she mouthed, staring in disbelief at the compad.

‘What I need, Antoinette, is for you to come and rescue me. I’m in rather a lot of trouble, you see.’

She listened to what he had to say, but there was not a great deal more to the message. Clavain’s request was simple enough, and it was, she admitted, within her capabilities to do what he wanted. Even the co-ordinates he had given her were precise enough that she would not have to do any real searching. There was a tight time window, very tight, actually, and there was a not inconsiderable degree of physical risk, quite aside from any associated with Clavain himself. But it was all very feasible. She could tell that Clavain had worked through the details himself before calling her, anticipating almost all the likely problems and objections she might have. In that respect, she could not help but admire his dedication.

But it still didn’t make a shred of difference. The message was from Clavain, the Butcher of Tharsis; the same Clavain who had lately started inhabiting her dreams, personifying what had previously been the merely faceless terror of the spider induction wards. It was Clavain who presided over the glistening machines as they lowered themselves into her brainpan.

It didn’t matter that he had once saved her life.

‘You have got to be fucking kidding,’ Antoinette said.

Clavain floated alone in space. Through his spacesuit visor he watched the corvette curve away on automatic pilot, dwindling slowly but surely until its sleek flintlike shape was difficult to distinguish from a faint star. Then the corvette’s main drive flicked on, a hard and bright violet-blue spike, carefully angled away from his best guess for the position of
Nightshade
. The acceleration would certainly have crushed him had he remained aboard. He watched until even that spike of light had become the slightest pale scratch against the stars, until the point where he blinked and lost it altogether.

He was alone, about as truly alone as it was possible to be.

As rapid as the corvette’s acceleration now was, it was nothing that the ship could not sustain. In a few hours the burn would take it to a point in space and give it a velocity consistent with its last recorded position as determined by
Nightshade
. The drive would ramp down then, back to a thrust level consistent with carrying a human passenger. Skade would redetect the corvette’s flame, but she would also see that the flame was flickering with some irregularity, indicating an unstable fusion burn. That, at least, was what Clavain hoped she would think.

For the last fifteen hours of his flight he had pushed the corvette’s motors as hard as he could, deliberately circumventing the safety overrides. With all the excess mass aboard the corvette - weapons, fuel, life-support mechanisms - the corvette’s effective acceleration ceiling had not been far above his own physiological tolerance limit. It had been prudent to accelerate as hard as he could stand, of course, but Clavain had also wanted Skade to think that he was pushing things just slightly too hard.

He had known that she must be watching his flame, studying it for any hint of a mistake on his part. So, by tapping into the engine-management system he had introduced evidence of an imminent failure mode. He had forced the engine to operate erratically, cycling its temperature, allowing unfused impurities to clot the exhaust, showing every sign that it was about to blow.

After fifteen hours he had simulated an abrupt stuttering drive failure. Skade would recognise the failure mode; it was almost textbook stuff. She would doubtless think that Clavain had been unlucky not to die in an instant painless blast. Now she would be able to catch up with him, and his death would be rather more protracted. If Skade recognised the type of failure mode he had hoped to simulate, she would conclude that it would require about ten hours for the ship’s own auto-repair mechanisms to fix the fault. Even then, for that particular failure mode only a partial repair would be possible. Clavain might be able to get the antimatter-catalysed fusion torch re-lit, but the drive would never function at full capacity. At the very best, Clavain might manage to squeeze six gees out of the corvette, and he would not be able to sustain that acceleration for long.

As soon as she saw the corvette’s flame, as soon as she recognised the telltale flicker, Skade would know that success was hers. She would never know that he had used the ten hours of grace not to repair a defective engine, but to deposit himself somewhere else entirely. At least, he hoped she would never guess that.

His last act had been to send a message to Antoinette Bax, making sure that the signal could not possibly be interdicted by Skade or any other hostile forces. He had told Antoinette where he would be floating, and he had told her exactly how long he could reasonably survive in a single low-endurance spacesuit with no sophisticated recycling systems. By his own estimation she could reach him in time and then ferry him out of the war zone before Skade had a chance to realise what was happening. All Antoinette would need to do was approach the rough volume of space he had defined and then sweep it with her radar; sooner or later she would pick out his figure.