The Revelation Space Collection (252 page)

Clavain raised a hand and began to fiddle with the connecting latch of the Demarchist suit. He could not find the release mechanism. After a moment the man with the pierced ear shook his head and brushed Clavain’s hand aside. He worked the latch and the soft voice in Clavain’s ear became shriller, more insistent. The status displays flicked mostly into red.

The helmet came off with a gasp of air. Clavain’s ears popped. The pressure on the black ship was not quite Demarchist standard. He breathed cold air, his lungs working hard.

‘Who ... who are you?’ he asked, when he had the energy for words.

The man with the pierced eyebrow replaced the yellow axe on the wall. He drew a finger across his own throat.

Then another voice, one that Clavain did not recognise, said, ‘Hello.’

Clavain looked around. The third person also wore a spacesuit, though it was much less cumbersome than the suits worn by her fellows. Despite its bulk she still managed to appear thin and spare. She hovered within the frame of a bulkhead door, resting calmly with her head cocked slightly to one side. Perhaps it was the play of light on her face, but Clavain thought he saw ghostly blades of faded black against the perfect white of her skin.

‘I hope the Talkative Twins treated you well, Mr Clavain.’

‘Who are you?’ Clavain said again.

‘I am Zebra. That’s not my real name, of course. You won’t ever need to know my real name.’

‘Who are you, Zebra? Why have you done this?’

‘Because I was told to. What did you expect?’

‘I didn’t expect anything. I was trying ...’ He paused and waited until his breath had returned. ‘I was trying to defect.’

‘We know.’

‘We?’

‘You’ll find out soon enough. Come with me, Mr Clavain. Twins, secure and prepare for high-burn. The Convention will be swarming like flies by the time we get back to Yellowstone. It’s going to be an interesting trip home.’

‘I’m not worth killing innocent people for.’

‘No one died, Mr Clavain. The two Convention escorts we destroyed were remotes, slaved to the third. We wounded the third, but its pilot won’t have been harmed. And we conspicuously avoided harming the zombies’ shuttle. Did they make you step outside, I wonder?’

He followed her forwards, through the bulkhead into a flight deck area. There was only one other person aboard as far as Clavain could tell: a wizened-looking man strapped into the pilot’s position. He was not wearing a suit. His ancient age-spotted hands gripped the controls like prehensile twigs.

‘What do you think?’ Clavain asked.

‘It’s possible they might have, but I think it more likely that you chose to leave.’

‘It doesn’t matter now, does it? You’ve got me.’

The ancient man glanced at Clavain with only a flicker of interest. ‘Normal insertion, Zebra, or do we take the long way home?’

‘Follow the normal corridor, Manoukhian, but be ready to deviate. I don’t want to engage the Convention again.’

Manoukhian, if that was indeed his name, nodded and applied pressure to the ivory-handled control sticks. ‘Get the guest strapped down, Zebra. You too.’

The striped woman nodded. ‘Twins? Help me secure Mr Clavain.’

The two men shifted Clavain’s suited form into a contoured acceleration couch. He let them do whatever they wanted; he was too weak to offer more than token resistance. His mind probed the immediate cybernetic environment of the spacecraft, and while his implants sensed something of the data traffic through the control networks, there was nothing he could influence. The people were also beyond his reach. He did not even think any of them had implants.

‘Are you the banshees?’ Clavain asked.

‘Sort of, but not exactly. The banshees are a bunch of thuggish pirates. We do things with a little more finesse. But their existence gives us the cover we need for our own activities. And you?’ The stripes on her face bunched as she smiled. ‘Are you really Nevil Clavain, the Butcher of Tharsis?’

‘You didn’t hear that from me.’

‘That’s what you told the Demarchists. And those kids in Copenhagen. We have spies everywhere, you see. There’s not a lot that escapes us.’

‘I can’t prove I’m Clavain. But then why should I bother?’

‘I think you are,’ Zebra said. ‘I
hope
you are, anyway. It would be such a letdown if you turned out to be an impostor. My boss wouldn’t be at all happy.’

‘Your boss?’

‘The man we’re on our way to meet,’ Zebra said.

TWENTY-ONE

When they were safely clear of the atmosphere and the carnelian-red marble had vanished from the extreme range of her ship’s radar, Khouri found the courage to take hold of one of the black cubes that had been left behind when the main mass of Inhibitor machinery had fragmented. The cube was shockingly cold to the touch, and when she let go of it she left behind two thin films of detached flesh on opposite faces of the cube, like pink fingerprints. Her fingertips were now red-raw and smooth. For a moment she thought the removed skin would stay adhered to the smooth black sides, but after a few seconds the two sheets of flesh peeled away of their own accord, forming delicate translucent flakes like insects’ discarded wings. The cube’s cold black sides were as pitilessly dark and unmarred as before. But she noticed that the cube was shrinking, the contraction so odd and unexpected that her mind interpreted it as the cube receding into an impossible distance. All around her, the other cubes were echoing the contraction, their size diminishing by a half with every second that passed.

Within a minute there was nothing left in the cabin but films of grey-black ash. She even felt ash accumulate at the corners of her eyes, like a sudden attack of sleepy dust, and was reminded that the cubes had reached into her head before the marble had arrived.

‘Well, you got your demonstration,’ she said to Thorn. ‘Was it worth it, just to make a point?’

‘I had to know. But I couldn’t know
what
was going to happen.’

Khouri rubbed circulation back into her hands where they had grown numb. It was good to be out of the restraint webbing that Thorn had put her in. He apologised for that, without very much in the way of conviction. She had to admit that she would never have confessed to the truth without such extreme coercion.

‘What did happen, by the way?’ Thorn added.

‘I don’t know. Not all of it anyway. We provoked a response, and I’m pretty sure we were about to die, or at least to be swallowed up by that machinery.’

‘I know. I had that feeling as well.’

They looked at each other, conscious that the period of union in the Inhibitor data-gathering network had permitted them a level of intimacy neither had expected. They had shared very little other than fear, but Thorn at least had been shown that her fear was every bit as intense as his own, and that the Inhibitor attack had not been something she had arranged for his benefit. But there had been something more than fear, hadn’t there? There had been concern for each other’s welfare. And when the third mind had arrived, there had also been something very close to remorse.

‘Thorn . . . did you feel the other mind?’ Khouri asked.

‘I felt something. Something other than you, and something other than the machinery.’

‘I know who it was,’ she said, knowing that it was far too late for lies and evasion now, and that Thorn needed to be told as much of the truth as she understood. ‘At least, I think I recognised him. The mind was Sylveste’s.’

‘Dan Sylveste?’ he asked cautiously.

‘I knew him, Thorn. Not well, and not for long, but enough to recognise him again. And I know what happened to him.’

‘Start at the beginning, Ana.’

She rubbed the grit from the edge of her eye, hoping that the machinery was truly inert and not simply sleeping. Thorn was right. Her admission had been the first crack in an otherwise perfect façade. But the crack could not be unmade. It would spread, extending fracturing fingers. All she could offer now was damage limitation.

‘Everything you think you know about the Triumvir is wrong. She isn’t the maniacal tyrant that the populace thinks. The government built up her image. It needed a demon, a hate figure. If the people hadn’t had the Triumvir to hate, they would have directed their anger, their sense of frustration, at the government itself. That couldn’t be allowed to happen.’

‘She murdered a whole settlement.’

‘No ...’ She was suddenly weary. ‘No. It didn’t happen like that. She just made it seem that way, don’t you understand? Nobody actually died.’

‘And you can be sure of that, can you?’

‘I was there.’

The hull creaked and reconfigured itself again. Shortly they would be outside the electromagnetic influence of the gas giant. The Inhibitor processes continued unabated: the slow laying of the sub-atmospheric tubes, the building of the great orbital arc. What had just happened within Roc had made no difference to that grander scheme.

‘Tell me about it, Ana. Is that really your name, or is it another layer of untruth that I need to peel back?’

‘It is my name,’ she said. ‘But Vuilleumier isn’t. That was a cover. It was a colonist name. We created a history for me, the necessary past that enabled me to infiltrate the government. My true name is Khouri. And yes, I was part of the Triumvir’s crew. I came here aboard
Nostalgia for Infinity
. We came to find Sylveste.’

Thorn folded his arms. ‘Well, now we’re finally getting somewhere. ’

‘The crew wanted Sylveste, that’s all. They had no grudge against the colony. They used misinformation to make you think that they were more willing to use force than was really the case. But Sylveste double-crossed us. He needed a way to explore the neutron star and the thing in orbit around it, the Cerberus/Hades pair. He persuaded the Ultras to help him with their ship.’

‘And afterwards? What happened then? Why did the two of you come back to Resurgam if you had a starship to yourselves?’

‘There was trouble on the ship, as you guessed. Serious fucking trouble.’

‘A mutiny?’

Khouri bit her lip and nodded. ‘Three of us, I suppose, turned against the rest. Ilia and myself, and Sylveste’s wife, Pascale. We didn’t want Sylveste to explore the Hades pair.’

‘Pascale? As in Pascale Girardieau, you mean?’

Khouri remembered that Sylveste’s wife had been the daughter of one of the most powerful colonial politicians; the man whose regime had taken power after Sylveste was deposed for his beliefs.

‘I didn’t know her that well. She’s dead now. Well, sort of.’

‘Sort of?’

‘This isn’t going to be easy, Thorn. You’ll just have to accept what I say, understand? No matter how insane or unlikely it sounds. Although given what’s just happened, I have a feeling you’ll be more receptive than before.’

He touched a finger to his lip. ‘Try me.’

‘Sylveste and his wife entered Hades.’

‘You mean the other object, surely? Cerberus?’

‘No,’ she said emphatically. ‘I mean Hades. They entered the neutron star, although it turned out that it’s a lot more than just a neutron star. It’s not really a neutron star at all, actually; more a kind of giant computer, left behind by aliens.’

He shrugged. ‘Like you say, it’s not as if I haven’t seen some strange things today. And? What happened next?’

‘Sylveste and his wife are inside the computer, running like programs. Like alpha-levels, I guess.’ She raised a finger, anticipating his point. ‘I know this, Thorn, because I took a stroll inside it myself. I encountered Sylveste, after he’d been mapped into Hades. Pascale too. As a matter of fact, there’s probably a copy of me in there as well. But I - this me - didn’t stay. I came back out here into the real universe, and I haven’t been back since. Matter of fact, I’m not planning on ever going back. There’s no easy way into Hades, not unless you count dying by being ripped apart by gravitational tidal stresses.’

‘But you think the mind we met was Sylveste’s?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, sighing. ‘Sylveste’s been inside Hades for subjective centuries, Thorn - subjective aeons, probably. What happened to us all sixty years ago must just be a dim, distant memory from the dawn of time for him. He’s had time to evolve beyond anything our imaginations can deal with. And he’s immortal, since nothing within Hades has to die. I can’t guess how he’d act now, whether we’d even recognise his mind. But it sure as hell felt like Sylveste to me. Maybe he was able to recreate himself the way he used to be, just so I’d know what it was that saved us.’

‘He’d take an interest in us?’

‘He’s never shown any sign of it before. But then again, nothing very much has happened in the outside world since he was mapped into Hades. But now, all of a sudden, the Inhibitors have arrived and they’ve started ripping the place up. Information must still be reaching him inside Hades, even if it’s only on an emergency basis. But think about it, Thorn. There is some serious shit going down here. It might even affect Sylveste. We can’t know that, but we can’t say for sure it isn’t true either.’