The Revelation Space Collection (276 page)

Lasher saw it now. His shuttle had homed in on Skade’s, following updated coordinates from
Zodiacal Light
. Skade’s shuttle was now in free-fall, having burned its last microgram of antimatter. It was visible in his forward window: a gunmetal barb illuminated by his forward floods.

He opened the channel back to the lighthugger. ‘This is Lasher. I see it now. It’s definitely a shuttle. Can’t tell you what type, but it doesn’t look like one of ours.’

He slowed his approach. It would have been nice to wait for Scorpio’s response, but that was a luxury he did not have. There was already a twenty-minute timelag back to
Zodiacal Light
, and the distance was stretching continually as the larger ship maintained its ten-gee acceleration. He was permitted exactly thirty minutes here, and then he had to begin his return journey. If he stayed a minute longer he would never catch up with the lighthugger.

It would be just enough time to establish airlock connections between two unfamiliar ships, just enough time for him to get aboard and find Clavain’s daughter, or whoever she was.

He didn’t care who he was rescuing, only that Scorpio had told him to do it. So what if Scorpio was only doing what Clavain had told him to do? It didn’t matter, did not reduce in any way the burning soldierly admiration Lasher felt for his leader. He had followed Scorpio’s career almost from the moment Scorpio had arrived in Chasm City.

It was impossible to underestimate the effect of Scorpio’s coming. Before, the pigs had been a squabbling rabble, content to snuffle around in the shittiest layers of the fallen city. Scorpio had galvanised them. He had become a criminal messiah, a figure so mythic that many pigs doubted that he even existed. Lasher had collected Scorpio’s crimes, committing them to memory with the avidity of a religious acolyte. He had studied them, marvelling at their brutal ingenuity, their haiku-like simplicity. How must it feel, he had wondered, to have been the author of such jewel-like atrocities? Later, he had moved into Scorpio’s realm of influence, and then ascended through the shadowy hierarchies of the criminal underworld. He remembered his first meeting with Scorpio, the sense of mild disappointment when he turned out to be just another pig like himself. Gradually, however, that realisation had only sharpened his admiration. Scorpio was flesh and blood, and that made his achievements all the more remarkable. Lasher, nervously at first, became one of Scorpio’s main operatives, and then one of his deputies.

And then Scorpio had vanished. It was said that he had gone into space, off to engage in sensitive negotiations with some other criminal group elsewhere in the system - the Skyjacks, perhaps.

It was unsafe for Scorpio to move at any time, but most especially during war. Lasher had forced himself to deal with the likely but unpalatable truth: Scorpio was probably dead.

Months had passed. Then Lasher had heard the news: Scorpio was in custody, or a kind of custody. The spiders had captured him, it turned out, maybe after the zombies had already picked him up. And now the spiders were being pressured into turning Scorpio over to the Ferrisville Convention.

That was it, then. Scorpio’s bright, inglorious reign had come to an end. The Convention could make any charge stick, and in wartime there was almost no crime that didn’t carry the death penalty. They had Scorpio, the prize they had sought for so long. There would be a show trial and then an execution, and Scorpio’s passage into legend would be complete.

But it hadn’t happened that way. There had been the usual contradictory rumours, but some of them had spoken of the same thing - that Scorpio was alive and well, and no longer in anyone’s custody; that Scorpio had made it back to Chasm City and was now holed up in the darkly threatening structure some of the pigs knew as the Château des Corbeaux, the one they said had the haunted cellar. And that he was the guest of the Château’s mysterious tenant, and was now putting together the fabled thing that had often been spoken of but which had never quite come into existence before.

The army of pigs.

Lasher had rejoined his old master and learned that the rumours were true. Scorpio was working for, or in some strange collaboration with, the old man they called Clavain. And the two of them were plotting the theft of a ship belonging to the Ultras, something that the orthodox criminal rulebook said could not even be contemplated, let alone attempted. Lasher had been intrigued and terrified, even more so when he learned that the theft was just the prelude to something even more audacious.

How could he resist?

And so here, light-years from Chasm City, light-years from anything he could call familiar, he was. He had served Scorpio and served him well, not just treading in his footsteps but anticipating them; even, sometimes, dancing ahead of his master, earning Scorpio’s quiet praise.

He was near the shuttle now. It had the smooth worn-pebble look of Conjoiner machinery. It was completely dark. He tracked the floods across it, searching for the point where Clavain had told him he would find an airlock: an almost invisibly fine seam in the hull that would only reveal itself when he was close by. Distance to the hull was now fifteen metres, with a closing speed of one metre per second. The shuttle was small enough that he would have no difficulty finding the hostage aboard it, provided Skade had kept her word.

It happened when he was ten metres from the hull. It grew from the heart of the Conjoiner spacecraft: a mote of light, like the first spark of the rising sun.

Lasher did not have time to blink.

Skade saw the fairy-light glint of the crustbuster proximity device. It was not difficult to recognise. There were no stars aft of
Nightshade
now, only an inky spreading pool of total blackness. Relativity was squeezing the visible universe into a belt that encircled the ship. But Clavain’s ship was in nearly the same velocity frame as
Nightshade
, so it still appeared to lie directly behind her. The pinprick flare of the weapon studded that darkness like a single misplaced star.

Skade examined the light, corrected it for modest differential red shift and determined that the multiple-teratonne blast yield was consistent only with the device itself detonating, plus a small residual mass of antimatter. A shuttle-sized spacecraft had been destroyed by her weapon, but not a starship. The explosion of a lighthugger, a machine which had already sunk claws deep into the infinite energy well of the quantum vacuum, would have outshone the crustbuster by three orders of magnitude.

So Clavain had been cleverer than her again. No, she corrected herself: not cleverer, but precisely
as clever
. Skade had made no mistakes yet, and though Clavain had parried all her attacks, he had yet to strike at her. The advantage was still hers, and she was certain that she had inconvenienced him with at least one of her attacks. At the very least she had forced him to burn fuel he would sooner have conserved. More probably she had made him divert his efforts into countering her attacks rather than preparing for the battle that lay ahead around Resurgam. In every military sense she had lost nothing except the ability ever to bluff convincingly again.

But she had never been counting on that anyway.

It was time to do what had to be done.

‘You lying fuck.’

Xavier looked up as Antoinette stormed into their quarters. He was lying on his back on the bunk, a compad balanced between his knees. Antoinette had a momentary glimpse of lines of source code scrolling down the ’pad, the symbols and sinuous indentations of the programming language resembling the intricately formalised stanzas of some alien poetry. Xavier had a stylus gripped between his teeth. It dropped from his mouth as he opened it in shock. The compad tumbled to the floor.

‘Antoinette?’

‘I know.’

‘You know what?’

‘About the Mandelstam Ruling. About Lyle Merrick. About
Storm Bird
. About Beast. About you.’

Xavier slid around on the bunk, his feet touching the floor. He pushed a few fingers through the black mop of his hair, bashfully.

‘About what?’

‘Don’t lie to me, you fuck!’

Then she was on him in a blind, pummelling rage. There was no real violence behind her punches; under any other circumstances they would have been playful. But Xavier hid his face, absorbing her anger against his forearms. He was trying to say something to her. She was blanking him out in her fury, refusing to listen to his snivelling little justifications.

Finally the rage turned to tears. Xavier stopped her from hitting him, taking her wrists gently.

‘Antoinette,’ he said.

She hit him one last time, then started weeping in earnest. She hated him and loved him at the same time.

‘It’s not my fault,’ Xavier said. ‘I swear it’s not my fault.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

He looked at her, she returning his gaze through the blur of her tears. ‘Why didn’t I tell you?’

‘That’s what I asked.’

‘Because your father made me promise not to.’

When Antoinette had calmed down, when she was ready to listen, Xavier told her something of what had happened.

Jim Bax had been a friend of Lyle Merrick’s for many years. The two of them had been freighter pilots, both working within and around the Rust Belt. Normally two pilots operating in the same trading sphere would have found it difficult to sustain a genuine friendship through the ups and downs of a systemwide economy; there would have been too many occasions where their interests overlapped. But because Jim and Lyle operated in radically different niches with very different client lists, rivalry had never threatened their relationship. Jim Bax hauled heavy loads on rapid high-burn trajectories, usually at short notice and usually, though not always, more or less within the bounds of legality. Certainly Jim did not court criminal clients, although it was not exactly true to say that he turned them away, either. Lyle, by contrast, worked almost exclusively with criminals. They recognised that his slow, frail, unreliable chemical-drive scow was about the least likely ship to attract the attention of the Convention’s customs and excise cutters. Lyle could not guarantee that his loads would arrive at their destinations quickly, or sometimes at all, but he could almost always guarantee that they would arrive uninspected, and that there would be no inconvenient lines of questioning extending back to his clients. So, in a more than modest fashion, Lyle Merrick prospered. He went to a great deal of trouble to hide his earnings from the authorities, maintaining a fastidious illusion of being constantly on the edge of insolvency. But behind the scenes, and by the standards of the day, he was a moderately wealthy man, far wealthier, in fact, than Jim Bax would ever be. Wealthy enough, indeed, to afford to have himself backed-up once a year at one of the alpha-level scanning facilities in Chasm City’s high canopy.

And for many years his act worked. Until the day a bored police cutter decided to pick on Lyle for no other reason than that he had never troubled them before, and so therefore had to be up to something. The cutter had no difficulty matching trajectories with Lyle’s scow. It requested that he initiate main-engine cut-off and prepare for boarding. But Lyle knew he could not possibly comply with the enforced main-engine cutoff. His entire reputation hinged on the fact that his hauls were never inspected. Had he allowed the proxy aboard, he would have been signing his own bankruptcy notice.

He had no choice but to run.

Fortunately - or not, as the case proved - he was already on final approach for Carousel New Copenhagen. He knew that there was a repair well on the rim just large enough to hold his ship. It would be tight, but if he could get inside the bay, he would at least be able to destroy the cargo before the proxies forced their way aboard. He would still be in a lot of trouble, but at least he would not have broken client confidentiality, and that, for Lyle, mattered a lot more than his own wellbeing.

Lyle, of course, never made it. He screwed up his last approach burn, harried by the cutters - there were now four of them swooping in to escort him, and they had already fired retarder grapples on to his hull - and collided with the outer face of the rim itself. Surprisingly, and no one was more surprised than Lyle, he survived the impact. The blunt life-support and habitat module of his freighter had pushed itself through the skin of the carousel like a baby bird’s beak ripping through eggshell. His velocity at impact had only been a few tens of metres per second, and although he had been bruised and battered, he suffered no serious injuries. His luck continued even when the main propulsion section - the swollen lungs of the chemical fuel tanks - went up. The blast rammed the nose module further into the carousel, but again Lyle survived.

But even as he realised his good fortune, he knew that he was in grave trouble. The impact had not occurred in the most densely inhabited portion of the carousel’s ring, but there were still many casualties. A vault of the rim interior had decompressed as his ship plunged through the rim, the air gushing through the wound in the carousel’s fabric. The chamber had been a recreational zone, a miniature glade and forest lit by suspended lamps.

On any other night, there might have been no more than a few dozen people and animals enjoying the synthetic scenery by moonlight. But on the night Lyle crashed there had been a midnight recital of one of Quirrenbach’s more populist efforts, and several hundred people had been there. Thankfully most had survived, though many had been seriously injured. But there had still been fatalities: forty-three dead at the final count, excluding Lyle himself. It was certainly possible that more had been killed.