The Revelation Space Collection (390 page)

Elsewhere, Conjoiners crawled through the skin of the ship, installing a network of cryo-arithmetic engines. Tiny as hearts, each limpetlike engine was a sucking wound in the corpus of classical thermodynamics. Scorpio recalled what had happened to Skade’s corvette when the cryo-arithmetic engines had gone wrong. The runaway cooling must have begun with a tiny splinter of ice, smaller than a snowflake. But it had been growing all the while, as the engines locked into manic, spiralling feedback loops, destroying more heat with every computational cycle, the cold feeding the cold. In space, the ship would simply have cooled down to within quantum spitting distance of absolute zero. On Ararat, however, with an ocean at hand, it had grown an iceberg around itself.

Other Conjoiners were crawling through the ship’s original engines, tinkering with the hallowed reactions at their core. More were out on the hull, tethered to the encrusted architecture of the Captain’s growth patterns. They were installing additional weapons and armouring devices. Still more - secluded deep within the ship, far from any other focus of activity - were assembling the inertia-suppression devices that had been tested during the
Zodiacal Light’
s chase from Yellowstone to Resurgam. This was alien technology, Scorpio knew, machinery that humans had appropriated without Aura’s assistance. But they had never been able to get it to work reliably. By all accounts, Aura had shown them how to modify it for relatively safe operation. Skade, in desperation, had attempted to use the same technology for faster-than-light travel. Her effort had failed catastrophically, and Aura had refused to reveal any secrets that might make another attempt possible. Amongst the gifts she was giving them, there was to be no superluminal technology.

He watched the servitors slip another blade into place. The device had looked finished a day ago, but since then they had added about three times more machinery. Yet, strangely, the structure looked even more lacy and fragile than it had before. He wondered when it would be done - and what exactly it would
do
when it was done - and then began to turn from the window, apprehension lying heavy in his heart.

‘Scorp.’

He had not been expecting company, so was surprised to hear his own name. He was even more surprised to see Vasko Malinin standing there.

‘Vasko,’ he said, offering a noncommittal smile. ‘What brings you down here?’

‘I wanted to find you,’ he said. Vasko was wearing a stiff, fresh-looking Security Arm uniform. Even his boots were clean, a miracle aboard the
Nostalgia for Infinity
.

‘You managed.’

‘I was told you’d probably be down here somewhere.’ Vasko’s face was lit from the side by the red glow spilling from the hypometric weapon shaft. It made him look young and feral by turns. Vasko glanced through the window. ‘Quite something, isn’t it?’

‘I’ll believe it works when I see it do something other than sit there looking pretty.’

‘Still sceptical?’

‘Someone should be.’

Scorpio realised now that Vasko was not alone. There was a figure looming behind him. He would have been able to see the person clearly years ago; now he had difficulty making out detail when the light was gloomy.

He squinted. ‘Ana?’

Khouri stepped into the pool of red light. She was dressed in a heavy coat and gloves, enormous boots covering her legs up to her knees - they were much dirtier than Vasko’s - and she was carrying something, tucked into the crook of her arm. It was a bundle, a form wrapped in quilted silver blanketing. At the top end of the bundle, near the crook of her arm, was a tiny opening.

‘Aura?’ he said, startled.

‘She doesn’t need the incubator now,’ Khouri said.

‘She might not
need
it, but ...’

‘Dr Valensin said it was holding her back, Scorp. She’s too strong for it. It was doing more harm than good.’ Khouri angled her face down towards the open end of the bundle, her eyes meeting the hidden eyes of her daughter. ‘She told me she wanted to be out of it as well.’

‘I hope Valensin knows what he’s doing,’ Scorpio said.

‘He does, Scorp. More importantly, so does Aura.’

‘She’s just a child,’ he said, keeping his voice low. ‘Barely that.’

Khouri stepped forwards. ‘Hold her.’

She was already offering the bundle to him. He wanted to say no. It wasn’t just that he did not quite trust himself with something as precious and fragile as a child. There was something else: a voice that warned him not to make this physical connection with her. Another voice - quieter - reminded him that he was already bound to her in blood. What more harm could be done now?

He took Aura. He held her against his chest, just tight enough to feel that he had her safely. She was astonishingly light. It stunned him that this girl - this asset they had lost their leader to recover - could feel so insubstantial.

‘Scorpio.’

The voice was not Khouri’s. It was not an adult voice; barely a child’s. It was more a gurgling croak that half-approximated the sound of his name.

He looked down at the bundle, into the opening. Aura’s face turned towards his. Her eyes were still tightly closed gummy slits. There was a bubble emerging from her mouth.

‘She didn’t just say my name,’ he said incredulously.

‘I did,’ Aura said.

He felt, for a heartbeat, as if he wanted to drop the bundle. There was something
wrong
lying there in his arms, something that had no right to exist in this universe. Then the shameful reflex passed, as quickly as it had come. He looked away from the tiny pink-red face, towards her mother.

‘She can’t even see me,’ he said.

‘No, Scorp,’ Khouri confirmed, ‘she can’t. Her eyes don’t work yet. But mine do. And that’s all that matters.’

Throughout the ship, Scorpio’s technicians worked day and night laying listening devices. They glued newly manufactured microphones and barometers to walls and ceilings, then unspooled kilometres of cables, running them through the natural ducts and tunnels of the Captain’s anatomy, splicing them at nodes, braiding them into thickly entwined trunk lines that ran back to central processing points. They tested their devices, tapping stanchions and bulkheads, opening and closing pressure doors to create sudden draughts of air from one part of the ship to another. The Captain tolerated them, even, it seemed, did his best to make their efforts easier. But he was not always in complete control of his reshaping processes. Fibre-optic lines were repeatedly severed; microphones and barometers were absorbed and had to be remade. The technicians accepted this stoically, going back down into the bowels of the ship to re-lay a kilometre of line that they had just put in place; even, sometimes, repeating the process three or four times until they found a better, less vulnerable routing.

What they did not do, at any point, was ask why they were doing this. Scorpio had told them not to, that they did not want to know, and that if they were to ask, he would not tell them the truth. Not until the reason for their work was over, and things were again as safe as they could be.

But he knew why, and when he thought about what was going to happen, he envied them their ignorance.

Hela, 2727

The interviews with the Ultras continued. Rashmika sat and made her observations. She sipped tea and watched her own shattered reflection swim in the mirrors. She thought about each hour bringing her more than a kilometre closer to Absolution Gap. But there were no clocks in the garret, hence no obvious means of judging their progress.

After each interview, she told Quaiche what she thought she had seen, taking care neither to embroider nor omit anything that might have been crucial. By the end of the third interview, she had formed an impression of what was happening. Quaiche wanted the Ultras to bring one of their ships into close orbit around Hela, to act as bodyguard.

Exactly what he feared, she could not guess. He told the Ultras that he desired protection from other spacefaring elements, that he had lately thwarted a number of schemes to seize control of Hela and wrest the supply of scuttler relics from the Adventist authorities. With a fully armed lighthugger in orbit around Hela, he said, his enemies would think twice about meddling in Hela’s affairs. The Ultras, in return, would enjoy favoured trader status, a necessary compensation for the risk entailed in bringing their valuable ship so close to the world that had destroyed the
Gnostic Ascension
. She could smell their nervousness: even though they only ever came down to Hela in shuttles, leaving their main spacecraft parked safely on the system’s edge, they did not want to spend a minute longer than necessary in the Lady Morwenna.

But there was, Rashmika suspected, something more to Quaiche’s plan than mere protection. She was certain that Quaiche was hiding something. It was a hunch this time, not something she saw in his face. He was, to all intents and purposes, unreadable. It was not just the mechanical eye-opener, hiding all those nuances of expression she counted on. There was also a torpid, masklike quality to his face, as if the nerves that operated his muscles had been severed or poisoned. When she stole glances at him she saw a vacuity of expression. The faces he made were stiff and exaggerated, like the expressions of a glove puppet. It was ironic, she thought, that she had been brought in to read people’s faces by a man whose own face was essentially closed. Almost deliberately so, in fact.

Finally the interviews for the day were over. She had reported her findings to Quaiche and he had listened appreciatively to what she had to say. There was no guessing where his own intuitions lay, but at no point did he question or contradict any of her observations. He merely nodded keenly, and told her she had been very helpful.

There would be more Ultras to interview, she was assured, but that was it for the day.

‘You can go now, Miss Els. Even if you leave the cathedral now, you will still have been very useful to me and I will see to it that your efforts are rewarded. Did I mention a good position in the Catherine of Iron?’

‘You did, Dean.’

‘That is one possibility. Another is for you to return to the Vigrid region. You have family there, I take it?’

‘Yes,’ she said, but even as the word left her mouth, her own family suddenly felt distant and abstract to her, like something she had only been told about. She could remember the rooms of her house, the faces and voices of her parents, but the memories felt thin and translucent, like the facets in the stained-glass windows.

‘You could return with a nice bonus - say, five thousand ecus. How does that sound?’

‘That would be very generous,’ she replied.

‘The other possibility - the preferred one from my point of view - is that you remain in the Lady Morwenna and continue to assist me in the interviewing of Ultras. For that I will pay you two thousand ecus for every day of work. By the time we reach the bridge, you will have made double what you could have taken back to your home if you’d left today. And it doesn’t have to stop there. For as long as you are willing, there will always be work. In a year’s service, think what you could earn.’

‘I’m not worth that much to anyone,’ she said.

‘But you are, Miss Els. Didn’t you hear what Grelier said? One in a thousand. One in a million, perhaps, with your degree of receptivity. I’d say that makes you worth two thousand ecus per day of anyone’s money.’

‘What if my advice isn’t right?’ she asked. ‘I’m only human. I make mistakes.’

‘You won’t get it wrong,’ he said, with more certainty than she liked. ‘I have faith in few things, Rashmika, beyond God Himself. But you are one of them. Fate has brought you to my cathedral. A gift from God, almost. I’d be foolish to turn it away, wouldn’t I?’

‘I don’t feel like a gift from anything,’ she said.

‘What do you feel like, then?’

She wanted to say, like an avenging angel. But instead she said, ‘I feel tired and a long way from home, and I’m not sure what I should do.’

‘Work with me. See how it goes. If you don’t like it, you can always leave.’

‘Is that a promise, Dean?’

‘As God is my witness.’

But she couldn’t tell if he was lying or not. Behind Quaiche, Grelier stood up with a click of his knee-joints. He ran a hand through the electric-white bristles of his hair. ‘I’ll show you to your quarters, then,’ he said. ‘I take it you’ve agreed to stay?’

‘For now,’ Rashmika said.

‘Good. Right choice. You’ll like it here, I’m sure. The dean is right: you are truly privileged to have arrived at such an auspicious time.’ He reached out a hand. ‘Welcome aboard.’

‘That’s it?’ she said, shaking his hand. ‘No formalities? No initiation rituals?’

‘Not for you,’ Grelier said. ‘You’re a secular specialist, Miss Els, just like myself. We wouldn’t want to go clouding your brain with all that religious claptrap, would we?’

She looked at Quaiche. His metal-goggled face was as unreadable as ever. ‘I suppose not.’

‘There is just one thing,’ Grelier said. ‘I’m going to have to take a bit of blood, if you don’t mind.’