The Revelation Space Collection (275 page)

‘Only Galiana would know that, wouldn’t she?’

The Wolf did not answer Skade directly. ‘What was your response, when Clavain failed to retreat?’

‘I did what I said I would. Launched a shuttle, which he will now have great difficulty in intercepting.’

‘But an interception is still possible?’

Skade nodded. ‘That was the idea. He won’t be able to reach it with one of his own shuttles, but his main ship will still be able to achieve a rendezvous.’

There was amusement in the Wolf’s voice. ‘Are you certain that one of his shuttles can’t reach yours?’

‘It isn’t energetically feasible. He would have had to launch long before I made my move, and guess the direction I was going to send my shuttle in.’

‘Or cover every possibility,’ the Wolf said.

‘He couldn’t do that,’ Skade said, with a great deal less certainty than she thought she should feel. ‘He’d need to launch a flotilla of shuttles, wasting all that fuel on the off-chance that one ...’ She trailed off.

‘If Clavain deemed the effort worth it, he would do exactly that, even if it cost him precious fuel. What did he expect to find in the shuttle, incidentally?’

‘I told him I’d return Felka.’

The Wolf shifted. Now its form lingered near Felka, though it was no more distinct that it had been an instant earlier. ‘She’s still here.’

‘I put a weapon in the shuttle. A crustbuster warhead, set for a teratonne detonation.’

She saw the Wolf nod appreciatively. ‘You hoped he would have to steer his ship to the rendezvous point. Doubtless you arranged some form of proximity fuse. Very clever, Skade. I’m actually quite impressed by your ruthlessness.’

‘But you don’t think he’ll fall for it.’

‘You’ll know soon enough, won’t you?’

Skade nodded, certain now that she had failed. Distantly, the sea mist parted again, and she was afforded another glimpse of the pale tower. In all likelihood it was actually very dark when seen up close. It rose high and sheer, like a sea-stack. But it looked less like a natural formation than a giant taper-sided building.

‘What is that?’ Skade asked.

‘What is what?’

‘That . . .’ But when Skade looked back towards the tower, it was no longer visible. Either the mist had closed in to conceal it, or it had ceased to exist.

‘There’s nothing there,’ the Wolf said.

Skade chose her words carefully. ‘Wolf, listen to me. If Clavain survives this, I am prepared to do what we discussed before.’

‘The unthinkable, Skade? A state-four transition?’

Even Felka halted her game, looking up at the two adults. The moment was pregnant, stretching eternally.

‘I understand the dangers. But we need to do it to finally slip ahead of him. We need to make a jump through the zero-mass boundary into state four. Into the tachyonic-mass phase.’

Again that horrible lupine glint of a smile. ‘Very few organisms have ever travelled faster than light, Skade.’

‘I’m prepared to become one of them. What do I need to do?’

‘You know full well. The machinery you have made is almost capable of it, but it will require a few modifications. Nothing that your manufactories can’t handle. But to make the changes you will need to take advice from Exordium.’

Skade nodded. ‘That’s why I’m here. That’s why I brought Felka.’ ‘Then let us begin.’

Felka went back to her game, ignoring the two of them. Skade issued the coded sequence of neural commands that would make the Exordium machinery initiate coherence coupling.

‘It’s starting, Wolf.’

‘I know. I can feel it, too.’

Felka looked up from her game.

Skade sensed herself become plural. From out of the sea fog, from a direction she could neither describe nor point to, came a feeling of something receding into vast, chill distance, like a white corridor reaching to the bleak edge of eternity. The hairs on the back of Skade’s neck prickled. She knew that there was something profoundly wrong about what she was doing. The premonitionary sense of evil was quite tangible. But she had to stand her ground and do what had to be done.

Like the Wolf said, fears had to be faced.

Skade listened intently. She thought she heard voices whispering down the corridor.

‘Beast?’

‘Yes, Little Miss?’

‘Have you been completely honest with me?’

‘Why would one have been anything other than honest, Little Miss?’

‘That’s exactly what I’m wondering, Beast.’

Antoinette was alone on the lower flight deck of
Storm Bird
. Her freighter was locked in a loom of heavy repair scaffolding in one of
Zodiacal Light’
s shuttle bays, braced to withstand even the increased acceleration rate of the lighthugger. The freighter had been here ever since they had taken the lighthugger, the damage it had sustained painstakingly being put right under Xavier’s expert direction. Xavier had relied on hyperpigs and shipboard servitors to help him do the work, and at first the repairs had gone more slowly than they would have with a fully trained monkey workforce. But although they had some dexterity problems, the pigs were ultimately cleverer than hyperprimates, and once the initial difficulties had been overcome and the servitors programmed properly, the work had gone very well. Xavier hadn’t just repaired the hull; he had completely re-armoured it. The engines, from docking thrusters right up to the main tokamak fusion powerplant, had been overhauled and tweaked for improved performance. The deterrents, the many weapons buried in camouflaged hideaways around the ship, had been upgraded and linked into an integrated weapons command net. There was no point pussyfooting now, Xavier had said. They had no reason to pretend that
Storm Bird
was just a freighter any more. Where they were headed, there would be no nosey authorities to hide anything from.

But once the acceleration rate had increased and they all had to either stay still or submit to the use of awkward, bulky exoskeletons, Antoinette had made fewer visits to her ship. It was not just that the work was nearly done, and there was nothing for her to supervise; there was something else that kept her away.

She supposed that on some level she had always had her suspicions. There had been times when she felt that she was not alone on
Storm Bird
; that Beast’s vigilance extended to more than just the mindless watchful scrutiny of a gamma-level persona. That there had been something more to him.

But that would have meant that Xavier - and her father - had lied to her. And that was something she was not prepared to deal with.

Until now.

During a brief lull when the acceleration was throttled back for technical checks, Antoinette had boarded
Storm Bird
. Out of sheer curiosity, expecting the information to have been erased from the ship’s archives, she had looked for herself to see whether they had anything to say on the matter of the Mandelstam Ruling.

They had, too.

But even if they hadn’t, she thought she would have guessed.

The doubts had begun to surface properly after the whole business with Clavain had started. There had been the time when Beast jumped the gun during the banshee attack, exactly as if her ship had ‘panicked’, except that for a gamma-level intelligence that was simply not possible.

Then there had been the time when the police proxy, the one that was now counting out the rest of its life in a dank cellar in the Château, had quizzed her on her father’s relationship with Lyle Merrick. The proxy had mentioned the Mandelstam Ruling.

It had meant nothing to her at the time.

But now she knew.

Then there had been the time when Beast had inadvertently referred to itself as ‘I’, as if a scrupulously maintained façade had just, for the tiniest of moments, slipped aside. As if she had glimpsed the true face of something.

‘Little Miss ... ?’

‘I know.’

‘Know what, Little Miss?’

‘What you are. Who you are.’

‘Begging your pardon, Little Miss, but ...’

‘Shut the fuck up.’

‘Little Miss ... if one might...’

‘I said shut the fuck up.’ Antoinette hit the panel of the flight deck console with the heel of her hand. It was the closest thing she could find to hitting Beast, and for a moment she felt a warm glow of retribution. ‘I know all about what happened. I found out about the Mandelstam Ruling.’

‘The Mandelstam Ruling, Little Miss?’

‘Don’t sound so fucking innocent. I know you know all about it. It’s the law they passed just before you died. The one about irreversible neural death sentences.’

‘Irreversible neural death, Little ...’

‘The one that says that the authorities - the Ferrisville Convention - have the right to impound and erase any beta- or alpha-level copies of someone sentenced to permanent death. It says that no matter how many backups of yourself you make, no matter whether they’re simulacra or genuine neural scans, the authorities get to round them up and wipe them out.’

‘That sounds rather extreme, Little Miss.’

‘It does, doesn’t it? And they take it seriously, too. Anyone caught harbouring a copy of a sentenced felon is in just as much trouble themselves. Of course, there are loopholes - a simulation can be hidden almost anywhere, or beamed to somewhere beyond Ferrisville jurisdiction. But there are still risks. I checked, Beast. The authorities have caught people who sheltered copies, against the Mandelstam Ruling. They all got the death sentence, too.’

‘It would seem a rather cavalier thing to do.’

She smiled. ‘Wouldn’t it just? But what if you didn’t even know you were sheltering one? How would that change the equation?’

‘One hesitates to speculate.’

‘I doubt it would change the equation one fucking inch. Not where the cops are concerned. Which would make it all the more irresponsible, don’t you think, for someone to trick
someone else
into harbouring an illegal simulation?’

‘Trick, Little Miss?’

She nodded. She was there now. No more pussyfooting here either. ‘The police proxy knew, didn’t it? Just couldn’t get the evidence together, I guess - or maybe it was just letting me stew, waiting to see how much I knew.’

The mask slipped again. ‘I’m not entire—’

‘I guess Xavier had to be in on it. He knows this ship like the back of his hand, every subsystem, every goddamned wire. He certainly would have known how to hide Lyle Merrick aboard it.’

‘Lyle Merrick, Little Miss?’

‘You know. You remember. Not
the
Lyle Merrick, of course, just a copy of him. Beta- or alpha-level, I don’t know. Don’t very much care either. Wouldn’t have made a fuck of a lot of difference in a court of law, would it?’

‘Now . . .’

‘It’s you, Beast. You’re him. Lyle Merrick died when the authorities executed him for the collision. But that wasn’t the end, was it? You kept on going. Xavier hid a copy of Lyle aboard my father’s fucking ship. You’re it.’

Beast said nothing for several seconds. Antoinette watched the slow, hypnotic play of colours and numerics on the console. She felt as if a part of her had been violated, as if everything in the universe she had ever felt she could trust had just been wadded up and thrown away.

When Beast answered, the tone of his voice was mockingly unchanged. ‘Little Miss . . . I mean Antoinette ... You’re wrong.’

‘Of course I’m not wrong. You’ve as good as admitted it.’

‘No. You don’t understand.’

‘What part don’t I understand?’

‘It wasn’t Xavier who did this to me. Xavier helped - Xavier knew all about it - but it wasn’t his idea.’

‘No?’

‘It was your father, Antoinette. He helped me.’

She hit the console again, harder this time. And then walked out of her ship, intending never to set foot in it again.

Lasher the pig slept for most of the trip out from
Zodiacal Light
. There was nothing for him to do, Scorpio had said, except at the very end of the operation, and even then there was only a one-in-four chance that he would be required to do anything other than turn his ship around. But at the back of his mind he had always known it would be him who had to do the dirty work. He registered no surprise at all when the tight-beam message from
Zodiacal Light
told him that his shuttle was the one in the right quadrant of the sky to intercept the vessel Skade had dropped behind her larger ship.

‘Lucky old Lasher,’ he said to himself. ‘You always wanted the glory. Now’s your big chance.’

He did not take the duty lightly, nor underestimate the risks to himself. The recovery operation was fraught with danger. The amount of fuel his shuttle carried was precisely rationed, just enough so that he could get back home again with a human-mass payload. But there was no room for error. Clavain had made it clear that there were to be no pointless heroics. If the trajectory of Skade’s shuttle took it even a kilometre outside the safe volume in which a rendezvous was possible, Lasher - or whoever the lucky one was - was to turn back, ignoring it. The only concession to be made was that each of Clavain’s shuttles carried a single modified missile, the warhead stripped out and replaced with a transponder. If they got within range of Skade’s shuttle they could attach the beacon to its hull. The beacon would keep emitting its signal for a century of subjective time, five hundred years of worldtime. It would not be easy, but there would remain a faint chance of homing in on it again, before it fell beyond the well-mapped sphere of human space. It was enough to know that they would not have abandoned Felka entirely.