The Revelation Space Collection (240 page)

Yes.

[Tell us, Skade.]

Clavain is dead. Our missiles reached him. The kill still has to be confirmed ... but I’m certain of it.

[Did he die well, in the Roman sense?]

He didn’t surrender. He kept running all the while, even though he must have known he’d never get far enough away with his engines damaged.

[We didn’t think he would ever surrender, Skade. Still, it was quick for him. You’ve done well, Skade. We are satisfied. More than satisfied.]

Skade wanted to nod, but the pedestal prevented it.
Thank you
.

The Night Council allowed her time to gather her thoughts. It was always mindful of her, always patient with her. On more than one occasion the voice had told Skade that it valued her as highly as it valued any of the elite few, perhaps more so. The relationship, in so far as Skade appreciated it, was like that between a teacher and a gifted, keenly inquisitive pupil.

Skade did not often ask herself where the voice came from or what precisely it represented. The Night Council had warned her not to dwell on such matters, for fear that her thoughts might be intercepted by others.

Skade found herself recalling the occasion on which the Night Council had first made itself known to her and revealed something of its nature.

[We are a select core of Conjoiners,] it had told her, [a Closed Council so secret, so hyper-secure, that our existence is not known, or even suspected, by the most senior orthodox Council members. We are deeper than the Inner Sanctum, though the Sanctum is at times our unwitting client, our puppet in wider Conjoiner affairs. But we do not lie within it. Our relationship to these other bodies can only be expressed in the mathematical language of intersecting sets. The details need not concern you, Skade.]

The voice had gone on to tell her that she had been singled out. She had performed excellently in the most dangerous of recent Conjoiner operations, a covert mission deep into Chasm City to recover key elements vital to the inertia-suppression technology programme. No one else had made it out alive except Skade.

[You did well. Our collective eye had been on you for some time, Skade, but that was your chance to shine. It did not escape our attention. That is why we have made ourselves known to you now: because you are the kind of Conjoiner capable of the difficult work that lies ahead. This is not flattery, Skade, but a cold statement of the facts.]

It was true that she had been the only survivor of the Chasm City operation. The precise details of that job had necessarily been scrubbed from her memory, but she knew that it had been an exquisitely dangerous high-risk venture that had not played out according to Closed Council plans.

There was a paradox in Conjoiner operations. Those troops who could be deployed along battle lines, within Contested Volumes, could never be allowed to hold sensitive information in their heads. But deep insertions, covert forays into enemy space, were a different matter. They were highly delicate operations that drew on expert Conjoiners. More than that, they required the use of agents who had been psychologically primed to tolerate isolation from their fellows. Those individuals who could work alone, far behind enemy lines, were rare indeed, and regarded with ambivalence by the others. Clavain was one.

Skade was another.

When she had returned to the Mother Nest, the voice had entered her skull for the first time. It had told her that she must speak of the matter to no one.

[We value our secrecy, Skade. We will protect it at all costs. Serve us, and you will be serving the greater good of the Mother Nest. But betray us, even involuntarily, and we will be forced to silence you. It will not amuse us, but it will be done.]

Am I the first?

[No, Skade. There are others like you. But you will never know who they are. That is our will.]

What do you want of me?

[Nothing, Skade. For now. But you will hear from us when we have need of you.]

And so it had been. Over the months, and then years, that followed she had come to assume that the voice had been illusory, no matter how real it had seemed at the time. But the Night Council had returned, in a quiet moment, and its guidance had begun. The voice did not ask much of her at first: action by omission, mostly. Skade’s promotion into the Closed Council appeared to have been won through her own efforts, not the intervention of the voice. Later, the same could be said of her admission into the Inner Sanctum.

She often wondered who exactly made up the Night Council. Amongst the faces she saw in Closed Council sessions, and in the wider Mother Nest, it was certain that some belonged to the officially nonexistent Council which the voice represented. But there was never a hint, not even a glance that appeared out of place. In the wash of their thoughts there was never a suspicious note; never a sense that the voice was speaking to her through other channels. And she did her best not to think about the voice when she was not in its presence. At other times she merely did its bidding, refusing to examine the source of her compulsion. It felt good to serve something higher than herself.

By turns, Skade’s influence reached further and further. The Exordium programme had already been re-opened by the time Skade became one of the Conjoined, but she was instructed to manoeuvre herself into a position where she could dominate the programme, make maximum use of its discoveries and determine its future direction. As she ascended through layers of secrecy, Skade became aware of just how vital had been the technological items she had harvested from Chasm City. The Inner Sanctum had already made faltering attempts to construct inertia-suppressing machinery, but with the items from Chasm City - and still Skade did not remember exactly what had happened during that mission - the pieces fell into place with beguiling ease. Perhaps it was the case that there were other individuals serving the voice, as the voice itself had suggested, or perhaps it was simply that Skade was herself a skilled and ruthless organiser. The Closed Council was her shadow theatre. Its players moved to her will with contemptible eagerness.

And still the voice had urged her on. It drew her attention to the signal from the Resurgam system, to the diagnostic pulse that indicated that the remaining hell-class weapons had been re-armed.

[The Mother Nest needs those weapons, Skade. You must expedite their recovery.]

Why?

The voice had crafted images in her skull: a swarm of implacable black machines, dark and heavy and busy like a flutter of ravens’ wings. [There are enemies between the stars, Skade, worse than anything we have imagined. They are coming closer. We must protect ourselves.]

How do you know?

[We know, Skade. Trust us.]

She had felt something in that childlike voice that she had not sensed until then. It was pain, or torment, or both.

[Trust us. We know what they can do. We know what it is like to be harried by them.]

And then the voice had fallen silent again, as if it had said too much.

Now the voice pushed a new, nagging thought into her head, pulling her out of her reverie. [When can we be
certain
that he is dead, Skade?]

Ten, eleven hours
.
We’ll sweep through the kill zone and sift the interplanetary medium for an enhancement in trace elements, the kind we’d expect to find in this situation. And even if the evidence is not conclusive, we can be confident ...

The response was brusque, petulant. [No, Skade. Clavain cannot be allowed to reach Chasm City.]

I’ve killed him, I swear.

[You are clever, Skade, and determined. But so is Clavain. He tricked you once. He can always trick you again.]

It doesn’t matter
.

[No?]

If Clavain reaches Yellowstone, the information he has still won’t be of any ultimate benefit to the enemy or the Convention. They can attempt to recover the hell-class weapons for themselves, if they wish. But we have Exordium and the inertia-suppression machinery. They give us an edge. Clavain, and whatever bunch of allies he manages to surround himself with, won’t succeed.

The voice hovered in her head. For a moment she wondered if it had gone, leaving her alone.

She was wrong.

[So you think he might still be alive?]

She fumbled for an answer.
I ...

[He had better not be, Skade. Or we will be bitterly disappointed with you.]

He was cradling an injured cat, its spine severed somewhere near the lower vertebrae so that its rear legs hung limply. He was trying to persuade it to sip water from the plastic teat of his skinsuit rations pack. His own legs were pinned under tonnes of collapsed masonry. The cat was blind, burned, incontinent and in obvious pain. But he would not give it the easy way out.

He mumbled a sentence, more for his own benefit than the cat’s. ‘You are going to live, my friend. Whether you want to or not.’

The words came out sounding like one sheet of sandpaper being scraped against another. He needed water badly. But there was only a tiny amount left in the rations pack, and it was the cat’s turn.

‘Drink, you little fucker. You’ve come this far ...’

‘Let me ... die,’ the cat told him.

‘Sorry, puss. Not the way it’s going to happen.’

He felt a breeze. It was the first time he had felt any stirring at all of the air bubble in which the cat and he lay trapped. From somewhere distant he heard the thunderous rumble of collapsing concrete and metal. He hoped to God that the sudden airflow was only caused by a shifting of the air bubble; that perhaps an obstruction had collapsed, linking one bubble to another. He hoped it was not part of the external wall giving way, or else the cat would shortly get its wish. The air bubble would depressurise and they would be left trying to breathe Martian atmosphere. He had heard that dying that way was not at all pleasant, despite what they tried to make you think in the Coalition’s morale-boosting holo-dramas.

‘Clavain ... save yourself.’

‘Why, puss?’

‘I die anyway.’

The first time the cat had spoken to him he had assumed that he had begun to hallucinate, imagining a loquacious companion where none actually existed. Then, belatedly, he had realised that the cat really was talking, that the animal was a rich tourist’s bioengineered affectation. A civilian dirigible had been parked on the top of the aerial docking tower when the spiders had hit it with their foam-phase artillery shells. The pet must have escaped from the dirigible gondola long before the attack itself, making its way down to the basement levels of the tower. Clavain thought that bioengineered talking animals were an affront against God, and he was reasonably certain that the cat was not a legally recognised sentient entity. The Coalition for Neural Purity would have had fits if it had known he had dared share his water rations with the forbidden creature. It hated genetic augmentation as much as it hated Galiana’s neural tinkering.

Clavain forced the teat into the cat’s mouth. Some reflex made it gulp down the last few drops of water.

‘We all get it one day, puss.’

‘Not so ... soon.’

‘Drink up and stop moaning.’

The cat lapped up the last few drops. ‘Thank ... you.’

That was when he felt the breeze again. It was stronger this time, and with it came a more insistent rumble of shifting masonry. In the dim illumination that was afforded by the biochemical thermal/light-stick he had cracked open an hour earlier, he saw dust and debris scud across the ground. The cat’s golden fur rippled like a field of barley. The injured animal tried to raise its head in the direction of the wind. Clavain touched the animal’s head with his hand, doing his best to comfort it. Its eyes were bloody sockets.

The end was coming. He knew it. This was no relocation of air within the ruin; it was a major collapse on the perimeter of the fallen structure. The cell of air was leaking out into the Martian cold.

When he laughed it was like scraping his own throat with razor wire.

‘Something ... funny?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No. Not at all.’

Light speared through the darkness. A wave of pure cold air hit his face and rammed into his lungs.

He stroked the cat’s head again. If this was dying, then it was nowhere near as bad as he had feared.

‘Clavain.’

His name was being spoken calmly and insistently.

‘Clavain. Wake up.’

He opened his eyes, an effort that immediately sapped half the strength he felt he had left. He was somewhere so bright that he wanted to squint, resealing the eyelids that had nearly gummed shut. He wanted to retreat back into his own past, no matter how painful and claustrophobic the dream might be.

‘Clavain. I’m warning you ... if you don’t wake up I’m going to ...’

He forced his eyes as wide as he could, realising that just before him was a shape that had yet to shift into focus. It was leaning over him. It was the shape that was talking to him.