The Revelation Space Collection (37 page)

‘Some of us got out of the crawler before Girardieau’s henchmen reached it. We took what equipment we could; made it into the Bird’s Claw canyons and set up bubbletents. That’s all I saw for a year, you know: the inside of a bubbletent. I was hurt quite badly in the attack.’

Sylveste brushed his fingers over the mottled surface of one of Sluka’s pedestal-mounted globes. What they represented, he saw now, was the topography of Resurgam at different epochs during the planned Inundationist terraforming program. ‘Why didn’t you join Girardieau in Cuvier?’ he asked.

‘He considered me too embarrassing to admit back into his fold. He was prepared to let us live, but only because killing us would have attracted too much attention. There were lines of communication, but they broke down.’ She paused. ‘Fortunately we took some of Remilliod’s trinkets with us. The scavenger enzymes were the most useful. The dust doesn’t hurt us.’

He studied the globes again. With his impaired vision, he could only guess at the colours of the planetscapes, but he assumed that the spheres represented a steady march towards blue-green verdure. What were now merely upraised plateaux would become landmasses limned by ocean. Forests would fester across steppes. He looked to the furthest globes, which represented some remote version of Resurgam several centuries hence. Nightside, cities glistened in chains, and a spray of tinkertoy habitats girdled the planet. Gossamer starbridges reached from the equator towards orbit. How would that delicate future vision fare, he wondered, if Resurgam’s sun again erupted, as it had done nine hundred and ninety thousand years ago, just when Amarantin civilisation was approaching a human level of sophistication?

Not, he ventured, terribly well.

‘Apart from the biotech,’ he said, ‘what else did Remilliod give you? You appreciate I’m curious.’

She seemed ready to humour him.

‘You haven’t asked me about Cuvier. That surprises me.’ She added: ‘Or your wife.’

‘Falkender told me Pascale was safe.’

‘She is. Perhaps I’ll allow you to join her at some point. For now, I wish your attention. We haven’t secured the capital. The rest of Resurgam is ours, but Girardieau’s people still hold Cuvier.’

‘The city’s still intact?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘We . . .’ She looked over his shoulder, directly at Falkender. ‘Fetch Delaunay, will you? And have him bring one of Remilliod’s gifts.’

Falkender left, leaving them alone.

‘I understand there was some agreement between you and Nils,’ Sluka said. ‘Although the rumours I’ve heard are too contradictory to make much sense. Do you mind enlightening me?’

‘There was never anything formal,’ Sylveste said. ‘No matter what you may have heard.’

‘I understand his daughter was brought in to paint you in an unflattering light.’

‘It made sense,’ Sylveste said wearily. ‘There’d be a certain cachet in having the biography scripted by a member of the family who was holding me prisoner. And Pascale was young, but not so young that it wasn’t time for her to make her mark. There were no losers: Pascale could hardly fail, though in fairness she applied herself to the task excellently.’ He winced inwardly, remembering how close she had come to exposing the truth about Calvin’s alpha-level simulation. More than ever he was convinced that she had correctly guessed the facts, but had held back from committing them to the biography. Now, of course, she knew much more: what had happened around Lascaille’s Shroud, and how Carine Lefevre’s death was not the clear-cut thing he had made it seem upon his return to Yellowstone. But he had not spoken to her since that announcement. ‘As for Girardieau,’ he said, ‘he had the satisfaction of seeing his daughter associated with a genuinely important project. Not to mention the fact that I was opened to the world for closer scrutiny. I was the prize butterfly in his collection, you see - but until the biography, he’d had no easy means of showing me off.’

‘I’ve experienced the biography,’ Sluka said. ‘I’m not entirely sure Girardieau got what he wanted.’

‘All the same, he promised to keep his word.’ His eyes faltered, and for a moment the woman he was addressing seemed to be a woman-shaped hole cut in the fabric of the room’s volume, a hole through which infinities lay.

The odd moment passed. He continued, ‘I wanted access to Cerberus/Hades. I think - towards the end - Nils was almost ready to give it to me, provided the colony had the means.’

‘You think there’s something out there?’

‘If you’re acquainted with my ideas,’ Sylveste said, ‘then you must bow to their logic.’

‘I find them intriguing - like any delusional construct.’

As she spoke, the door opened and a man Sylveste had not seen before entered, shadowed by Falkender. The new man - whom he assumed to be Delaunay - was bulldog-stocky. His wore several days’ growth of beard, a purple beret resting on his scalp. There were red weals around his eyes and a pair of dust goggles around his neck. His chest was crossed by webbing and his feet vanished into ochre mukluks.

‘Show the nasty little thing to our guest,’ Sluka said.

Delaunay was carrying an obviously heavy black cylinder in one hand, gripped in a thick handle.

‘Take it,’ Sluka told Sylveste.

He did; it was as heavy as he had expected. The handle was attached to the top of the cylinder; beneath it was a single green key. Sylveste put the cylinder down on the table; it was too heavy to hold comfortably for any length of time.

‘Open it,’ Sluka said.

He pressed the key - it was the obvious thing to do - and the cylinder split open like a Russian doll, the top half rising on four metal supports which surrounded a slightly smaller cylinder hidden until now. Then the inner cylinder split open similarly, revealing another nested layer, and the process continued until six or seven shells had been revealed.

Inside was a thin silver column. There was a tiny window set into the column’s side, showing an illuminated cavity. Cradled in the cavity was what looked like a bulbous-headed pin.

‘I assume by now you understand what this is,’ Sluka said.

‘I can guess it wasn’t manufactured here,’ Sylveste said. ‘And I know nothing like this was brought with us from Yellowstone. Which leaves our excellent benefactor Remilliod. He sold this to you?’

‘This and nine others,’ she said. ‘Eight now, since we used the tenth against Cuvier.’

‘It’s a weapon?’

‘Remilliod’s people called it hot-dust,’ she said. ‘Antimatter. The pinhead contains only a twentieth of a gramme of antilithium, but that’s more than sufficient for our purposes.’

‘I didn’t realise such a weapon was possible,’ he said. ‘Something so small, I mean.’

‘That’s understandable. The technology’s been outlawed for so long almost nobody remembers how to actually make one.’

‘What yield does this have?’

‘About two kilotonnes. Enough to put a hole in Cuvier.’

Sylveste nodded, absorbing the implication of what she had said. In his mind’s eye he tried to imagine what it must have been like, for those who had either died in or had been blinded by the pinhead True Path had used against the capital. The slight pressure differential between the domes and the outside air would have led to ferocious winds combing through the ordered municipal spaces. He imagined the trees and plants of the arboreta uprooted and shredded by the force of it, the birds and other animals carried aloft on the hurricane. Those people who survived the initial breach - no guessing how many - would have had to seek shelter underground, quickly, before the choking outside air replaced the leaking dome air. Admittedly the air was closer to being breathable now than it had been twenty years ago, but it took skill to learn how to do it, even for a few minutes only. Most of the inhabitants of the capital had never left it. He did not greatly value their chances.

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘It was a . . .’ She paused. ‘I was going to call it a mistake, but you could argue that there are no mistakes in war, only fortunate and less fortunate events. The intention, at least, was not to use the pinhead. Girardieau’s loyals were to surrender the city once they knew we possessed the weapon. But it didn’t work like that. Girardieau himself had known of the existence of the pinheads, but he hadn’t communicated that knowledge to his subordinates. No one would believe we had it.’

It was not necessary for her to tell him the rest; what had taken place was clear enough. Frustrated by the fact that their weapon was not taken seriously, the brigands had used it anyway. Yet the capital was still inhabited; Sluka had made that clear early on. Girardieau’s loyals still held it. He imagined them running things from subsurface bunkers, while overhead dust storms fingered through the open latticework of the ruined domes.

‘So you see,’ the woman said, ‘no one should underestimate us, much less anyone who retains any lingering attachment to Girardieau’s rule.’

‘What do you plan to use the others for?’

‘Infiltration. Remove the shrouding, and the pinhead itself is tiny enough to be implanted in a tooth. You’d never find it, except with the most detailed medical scan.’

‘Is that your plan?’ he asked. ‘To find eight volunteers, and have those things surgically implanted? Then have your eight infiltrate the capital again? This time they’d believe you, I think.’

‘Except we don’t even need volunteers,’ Sluka said. ‘They might be preferable, but they’re not necessary.’

Ignoring his own better judgement, Sylveste said, ‘Gillian, I think I liked you better fifteen years ago.’

‘You can take him back to his cell,’ she said to Falkender. ‘I’m bored with him for now.’

He felt the surgeon tug at his sleeve.

‘May I spend more time with his eyes, Gillian? There was more I could do, but at the expense of greater discomfort.’

‘Do what you like,’ Sluka said. ‘But don’t feel any obligation. Now that I have him, I have to confess I’m a little disappointed. I think I liked him better in the past as well, before Girardieau turned him into a martyr.’ She shrugged. ‘He’s too valuable to throw away, but in the absence of anything better, I might just have him frozen, until I find a use for him. That might be a year from now, or it might be five years. All I’m saying is, it would be a shame to invest very much time in something we might soon tire of, Dr Falkender.’

‘Surgery has its own rewards,’ the man said.

‘I can see well enough now,’ Sylveste said.

‘Oh no,’ Falkender answered. ‘There’s much more I can do for you, Dr Sylveste. Very much more. I’ve barely begun.’

Volyova was down with Captain Brannigan when a janitor-rat informed her that the pebbles had sent back their reports. She was gathering fresh samples from the Captain’s periphery, encouraged by recent successes of one of her retrovirus strains against the plague. Her virus was adapted from one of the military cyberviruses which had struck the ship, suitably modifed for Plague-compatibility. Amazingly, it actually seemed to be working - at least against the tiny samples she had so far tried it against. How irritating to be snatched from this by something she had set in motion nine months earlier, and had in the meantime all but forgotten. For a moment she refused to believe that so much time could possibly have passed. Yet she was excited by what she might learn.

She took the lift upship. Nine months, yes. It hardly seemed possible - but that was what happened when you were working. And she should have been expecting it. Rationally she had known that so much time had passed - but the information had managed not to tunnel into the part of her mind where she actually acknowledged such things and began to deal with them. But the clues had been there all along. The ship was now cruising at only one quarter of lightspeed. In about a hundred days they would be making final insertion into Resurgam orbit, and they would need a strategy when they got there. That was where the pebbles came in.

Snapshots of Resurgam and near-Resurgam space were assembling in the bridge, in various EM and exotic-particle bands. It was the first recent glimpse of a possible enemy. Volyova let the salient facts mole deep into her consciousness, so that she could recall them with instinctive ease during a crisis. The pebbles had whipped past either side of Resurgam so that there was data from both its day and night sides. Additionally, the pebble cloud had elongated itself in the line of flight until fifteen hours spaced the passage of its first and last unit through the system, enabling the entire surface of Resurgam to be glimpsed under both illumination and darkness. The dayside pebbles were looking away from Delta Pavonis, so they snooped for neutrino leakage from fusion and antimatter power units on the surface. The nightside pebbles snooped for the heat signatures of population centres and orbital facilities. Other sensors sniffed the atmosphere, measuring oxygen, ozone and nitrogen levels; sensing the extent to which the colonists had tampered with the native biome.

Given that the colonists had been here for more than half a century, it was striking how much they had managed to live without. There were no large structures in orbit; no evidence of local spaceflight within the system. Only a few comsats girdled the planet, and given the lack of large-scale industrialisation on the surface, it was doubtful whether they could be repaired or replaced if any were damaged. It would be a simple matter to disable or confuse those that remained, if that fitted in with the as yet unformulated plan.