The Revelation Space Collection (281 page)

They approached it carefully, pulling themselves along from one padded wall-staple to another. Clavain was mindful of every minute that elapsed; every half-minute of each minute; every cruel second.

They reached the body.

‘Do you recognise it?’ Scorpio asked, fascinated.

‘I’m not sure whether anyone would be able to recognise it for certain,’ Clavain said, ‘but it isn’t Felka. I don’t think it could have been Skade, either.’

Something dreadful had happened to the body. It had been sliced down the middle, exactly and neatly, in the fastidious fashion of an anatomical model. The interior organs were packed into tightly coiled or serpentine formations, glistening like glazed sweetmeats. Scorpio reached out a gloved trotter and pushed the half-figure; it drifted slackly away from the slick walling where it had come to rest.

‘Where do you think the rest of it is?’ he asked.

‘Somewhere else,’ Clavain replied. ‘This half must have drifted here.’

‘What did that to it? I’ve seen what beam-weapons can do and it isn’t nice, but there isn’t any sign of scorching on this body.’

‘It was a causal gradient,’ said a third voice.

‘Skade . . .’ Clavain breathed.

She was behind them. She had approached with inhuman silence, not even breathing. Her armoured bulk filled the corridor, black as night save for the pale oval of her face.

‘Hello, Clavain. And hello, Scorpio, too, I suppose.’ She looked at him with mild interest. ‘So you didn’t die then, pig?’

‘Actually, Clavain was just pointing out how lucky I am to have met the Conjoiners.’

‘Sensible Clavain.’

Clavain looked at her, horrified and awestruck at the same time. Remontoire had forewarned him about Skade’s accident, but that warning had been insufficient to prepare him for this meeting. Her mechanical armour was androform, even - in an exaggerated, faintly medieval way - feminine, swelling at the hips and with the suggestion of breasts moulded into the chest plate. But Clavain knew now that it was not armour at all but a life-support prosthesis; that the only organic part of her was her head. Skade’s crested skull was plugged stiffly into the neckpiece of the armour. The brutal conjunction of flesh and machinery screamed wrongness, a wrongness that became even more acute when Skade smiled.

‘You did this to me,’ she said, obviously speaking aloud for Scorpio’s benefit. ‘Aren’t you proud?’

‘I didn’t do it to you, Skade. I know exactly what happened. I hurt you, and I’m sorry it happened that way. But it wasn’t intentional and you know it.’

‘So your defection was involuntary? If only it were that easy.’

‘I didn’t cut your head off, Skade,’ Clavain said. ‘By now Delmar could have healed the injuries I gave you. You’d be whole again. But that didn’t fit with your plans.’

‘You dictated my plans, Clavain. You and my loyalty to the Mother Nest.’

‘I don’t question your loyalty, Skade. I just wonder exactly what it is you’re loyal to.’

Scorpio whispered, ‘Thirteen minutes, Clavain. Then we have to be out of here.’

Skade’s attention snapped on to the pig. ‘In a hurry, are you?’ ‘Aren’t we all?’ Scorpio said.

‘You’ve come for something. I don’t doubt that your weapons could already have destroyed
Nightshade
were that your intention.’

‘Give me Felka,’ Clavain said. ‘Give me Felka, then we’ll leave you alone.’

‘Does she mean that much to you, Clavain, that you’d have held back from destroying me when you had the chance?’

‘She means a great deal to me, yes.’

Skade’s crest rippled with turquoise and orange. ‘I’ll give you Felka, if it makes you leave. But first I want to show you something.’

She reached up with the gauntleted arms of her suit, placing one hand on either side of her neck as if about to strangle herself. But her metal hands were evidently capable of great gentleness. Clavain heard a click somewhere within Skade’s chest, and then the metal pillar of her neck began to rise from between her shoulders. She was removing her own head. Clavain watched, entranced and repelled, as the lower part of the pillar emerged. It ended in thrashing, segmented appendages. They dribbled pink baubles of coloured fluid - blood, perhaps, or something entirely artificial.

‘Skade ...’ he said. ‘This isn’t necessary.’

‘Oh, it is very necessary, Clavain. I want you to apprehend fully what it is you’ve done to me. I want you to feel the horror of it.’

‘I think he’s getting the picture,’ Scorpio said.

‘Just give me Felka, then I’ll leave you.’

She hefted her own head, cradling it in one hand. It continued to speak. ‘Do you hate me, Clavain?’

‘None of this is personal, Skade. I just think you’re misguided.’

‘Misguided because I care about the survival of our people?’

‘Something got to you, Skade,’ Clavain said. ‘You were a good Conjoiner once, one of the best. You truly served the Mother Nest, just as I did. But then you were sent on the Château operation.’

He had pricked her interest. He saw the involuntary widening of her eyes. ‘The Château des Corbeaux? What does that have to do with anything?’

‘A lot more than you’d like to think,’ Clavain said. ‘You were the only survivor, Skade, but you didn’t come back alone. You probably don’t remember very much of what actually happened down there, but that doesn’t matter. Something got to you, I’m certain of that. It’s responsible for everything that’s happened lately.’ He tried to smile. ‘That’s why I don’t hate you, or even much blame you. You’re either not the Skade I knew, or you think you’re serving something higher than yourself.’

‘Ridiculous.’

‘But possibly true. I should know, Skade, I went there myself. How do you think we stayed on your tail all this time? The Château was the source for the technology you and I both used. Alien technology, for manipulating inertia. Except you used it for much more than that, didn’t you?’

‘I used it to serve an end, that’s all.’

‘You tried to move faster than light, just the way Galiana did.’ He saw another flicker of interest at the mention of Galiana’s name.

‘Why, Skade? What was so important that you had to do this? They’re just weapons.’

‘You want them badly, too.’

Clavain nodded. ‘But only because I’ve seen how badly you want them. You showed me that fleet, too, and that made me think you were planning on getting away from this part of space. What is it, Skade? What have you seen in your crystal ball?’

‘Shall I show you, Clavain?’

‘Show me?’ he asked.

‘Allow me access to your mind and I’ll implant exactly what I was shown. Then you will know. And perhaps see things my way.’

‘Don’t . . .’ Scorpio said.

Clavain lowered his mental defences. Skade’s presence was sudden and intrusive, so much so that he flinched. But she did not attempt to do more than paint images in his mind, as she had promised.

Clavain saw the end of everything. He saw chains of human habitats spangling with bright pinpricks of annihilating fire. Nuclear garlands dappled the surfaces of worlds too unimportant to dismantle. He saw comets and asteroids being steered into colonies, wave upon wave of them, far too many to be neutralised by the existing defences. Flares were lifted from the surfaces of stars, focused and daubed across the faces of worlds, sterilising all in their path. He saw rocky worlds being pulverised, smashed into hot clouds of interplanetary rubble. He saw gas giants being spun apart, ruined like the toys of petulant children. He saw stars themselves dying, poisoned so that they shone too hot or too cold, or ripped apart in a dozen different ways. He saw ships detonating in interstellar space, when they imagined they were safe from harm. He heard a panicked chorus of human radio and laser transmissions that was at first a multitude, but which thinned out to a handful of desperate lone voices, which were themselves silenced one by one. Then he heard only the mindless warbling of machine transmissions, and even those began to fall silent as humanity’s last defences crumbled.

The cleansing was spread across a volume many dozens of light-years wide. It took many decades to complete, but it was over in a flash compared with the slow grind of galactic history.

And all around, orchestrating this cleansing, he sensed dim, ruthless sentience. It was an ensemble of machine minds, most of which hovered just beneath the threshold of consciousness. They were old, older than the youngest stars, and they were expert only in the art of extinction. Nothing else concerned them.

‘How far in the future is this?’ he asked Skade.

‘It’s already begun. We just don’t know it yet. But within half a century the wolves reach the core colonies, those closest to the First System. Within a century, the human race consists of a few huddling groups too afraid to travel or attempt any communication with each other.’

‘And the Conjoiners?’

‘We’re amongst them but just as vulnerable, just as predated. No Mother Nest remains. Conjoiner nests in some systems have been wiped out completely. That’s when they send the message back in time.’

He absorbed what she had said and nodded guardedly, prepared to accept it for the time being. ‘How did they do it?’

‘Galiana’s Exordium experiments,’ Skade’s decorporated head answered. ‘She explored the linkage of human minds with coherent quantum states. But matter in a state of quantum superposition is entangled, in a ghostly sense, with every particle that has ever existed, or ever
will
exist. Her experiments were only intended to explore new modes of parallel consciousness, but she opened a window to the future, too. The conduit was imperfect, so that only faint echoes reached back to Mars. And every message sent through the channel increased the background noise. The conduit had a finite information capacity, you see. Exordium was a precious resource that could only be used at times of extreme crisis.’

Clavain felt a dizzying sense of vertigo. ‘Our history’s already been changed, hasn’t it?’

‘Galiana learned enough to make the first starship drive. It was a question of energy, Clavain, and the manipulation of quantum wormholes. At the heart of a Conjoiner drive is one end of a microscopic wormhole. The other end is anchored fifteen billion years in the past, sucking energy out of the quark-gluon plasma of the primordial fireball. Of course, the same technology can be applied to the manufacturing of doomsday weapons.’

‘The hell-class weapons,’ he said.

‘In our original history we had neither of these advantages. We did not achieve starflight until a century later than the
Sandra Voi’
s first flight. Our ships were slow, heavy, fragile, incapable of reaching more than a fifth of light-speed. The human expansion was necessarily retarded. In four hundred years only a handful of systems were successfully settled. Yet still we attracted the wolves, even in that timeline. The cleansing was brutally efficient. This version of history - the one you have known - was an attempt at an improvement. The pace of human expansion was quickened and we were given better weapons to deal with the threat once it arose.’

‘I see now,’ Clavain said, ‘why the hell-class weapons couldn’t be made again. Once Galiana had been shown how to make them, she destroyed the knowledge.’

‘They were a gift from the future,’ she said pridefully. ‘A gift from our future selves.’

‘And now?’

‘Even in this timeline decimation happened. Again the wolves were alerted to our emergence. And it turned out that the drives were easy for them to track, across light-years of space.’

‘So our future selves tried another tweak.’

‘Yes. This time they reached back only into the recent past, intervening much later in Conjoiner history. The first message was an edict warning us to stop using Conjoiner drives. That was why we stopped shipbuilding a century ago. Later, we were given clues that enabled us to build stealthed drives of the kind
Nightshade
carries. The Demarchists thought we had built her to gain a tactical advantage over them in the war. In fact, she was designed to be our first weapon against the wolves. Later, we were given information regarding the construction of inertia-suppressing machinery. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was sent to the Château to obtain the fragments of alien technology which would enable us to assemble the prototype inertia-suppressing machine.’

‘And now?’

She answered him with a smile. ‘We’ve been given another chance. This time, flight is the only viable solution. The Conjoiners must leave this volume of space before the wolves arrive
en masse
.’

‘Run away, you mean?’

‘Not really your style, is it, Clavain? But sometimes it’s the only response that makes any sense. Later, we can consider a return - even a confrontation with the wolves. Other species have failed, but we are different, I think. We have already had the nerve to alter our past.’

‘What makes you think the other poor suckers didn’t try it as well?’

‘Clavain ...’ It was Scorpio. ‘We really need to be out of here, now.’

‘Skade ... you’ve shown me enough,’ Clavain said. ‘I accept that you believe you are acting justly.’