The Revelation Space Collection (44 page)

It was the size of a very small spacecraft, its central mass no more than ten metres from end to end. It resembled a fat, ribbed torpedo, sprouting eight articulated legs. It was walking along the hull of the ship. Most miraculously, it was not being shot at by the same defences which had destroyed the shuttle.

‘Ilia . . .’ Khouri breathed. ‘Ilia, you aren’t seriously thinking—’ And then, a moment later, ‘Oh shit. You were, weren’t you?’

‘What foolishness,’ the Madmemoiselle said.

The spider-room had detached itself from the hull, each of its eight legs releasing its grip simultaneously. Since the ship was still decelerating, the spider-room seemed to fall forwards with increasing speed. Ordinarily, so Volyova had said, the room would have fired its grapples at that point, to reestablish contact with the ship. Volyova must have disabled them, because the room kept falling, until its thrusters kicked in. Although Khouri was perceiving the scene via many different routes, and in some modes which would not have been assimilable to someone lacking the gunspace implants, a small aspect of that sensory stream was devoted to the optical, relayed from the external cameras on the ship. Via that channel she saw the thrusters burn violet-hot, jetting from pinprick-apertures around the midsection of the spider-room, where the torpedo-shaped body was attached to the turret from which sprouted the now purchaseless legs. The glare underlit the legs, picking them out in rapid strobing flashes as the room adjusted its fall, negated it and began to heave-to alongside the ship once more. But Volyova did not use the thrusters to bring the room within grasping range. After loitering for a few seconds, the room fell laterally away, accelerating towards the weapon.

‘Ilia . . . I really don’t think—’

‘Trust me,’ the Triumvir’s voice replied, cutting into gunspace as if she were speaking from halfway across the universe, not merely a few kilometres from Khouri’s position. ‘I’ve got what you might charitably refer to as a plan. Or at the very least an option on going out fighting.’

‘I’m not sure I liked the last bit.’

‘Me neither, in case you were wondering.’ Volyova paused. ‘Incidentally, Khouri, when all this is over - assuming we both survive all of this, which I admit isn’t exactly guaranteed at this juncture . . . I rather think we ought to set aside time for a little chat.’

Maybe she was talking to blank out the fear she must be feeling. ‘A little chat?’

‘About all of this. The whole problem with the gunnery. It might also be a chance for you to ease yourself of any . . . niggling little burdens you might have been well advised to share with me much earlier.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like who you are, for a start.’

The spider-room covered the distance to the weapon rapidly, using its thrusters to slow down, but still holding station relative to the ship, maintaining a standard one-gee aft burn. Even with its legs splayed, the spider-room was less than a third the size of the cache-weapon. It looked less like a spider now, and more like a hapless squid, about to vanish into the maw of a slowly cruising whale.

‘That’s going to take more than a little chat,’ Khouri said, feeling - with, she suspected, no little justification - that there was really no point holding much back from Volyova any more.

‘Good. Now excuse me for a moment; what I’m about to try is somewhat on the tricky side of downright impossible.’

‘She means suicidal,’ the Mademoiselle said.

‘You’re enjoying all this, aren’t you?’

‘Immensely - more so given that I have no control over anything that transpires.’

Volyova had positioned the spider-room near the projecting spike of the cache-weapon, although she was too far from it for the wriggling mechanical legs to gain a scramblehold on the pitted surface. In any case, the weapon was moving around now, oscillating slowly and randomly from side to side with fierce bursts of its own thrusters, seemingly trying to evade Volyova’s approach, but restricted in its movements by its own inertia - just as if the mighty hell-class weapon was scared of a tiny little spider. Khouri heard four rapid pops, almost too closely spaced to discriminate, as if a projectile weapon had emptied its chamber.

She watched as four grapple lines whipped out from the body of the spider-room, impacting silently with the cache-weapon’s spike. The grapples were penetrators; designed to burrow a few tens of centimetres into their target before widening, so once they had bitten home there was no possibility of their breaking loose. The guy lines were illuminated by the arcing thrusters, taut now, and the spider-room was already hauling itself in, even though the weapon had kept up its ponderous evasions.

‘Great,’ Khouri said. ‘I was all ready to shoot the bastard - now what do I do?’

‘You get a chance, you shoot,’ Volyova said. ‘If you can focus the blast away from me, I’ll take my chances - this room’s better armoured than you’d think.’ A moment’s silence, then: ‘Ah, good. Got you, you vicious piece of junk.’

She had the legs of the spider-room wrapped around the spike now. The weapon appeared to have given up all hope of dislodging her, and perhaps with good reason: it struck Khouri that Volyova had not achieved much, despite her valiant attempt. In all probability, the cache-weapon was not going to be greatly hindered by the arrival of the spider-room.

The struggle for control of the hull weapons had, meanwhile, resumed in earnest. Occasionally Khouri felt them budge slightly, the Mademoiselle’s systems momentarily losing the battle, but these tiny slippages were never enough to allow Khouri to target and deploy. And if Sun Stealer was assisting her, she did not feel it, although possibly that absence of presence was simply an artefact of his extreme cunning. Perhaps if Sun Stealer had not been there, she would have lost the battle completely, and - freed of this diversion - the Mademoiselle would already have unleashed whatever it was that the weapon held. Right now the distinction felt rather irrelevant. She had just noticed what it was that Volyova was doing. The spider-room’s thrusters were firing in concert now, resisting the thrust that the larger but clumsier weapon was applying.

Volyova was dragging the weapon downship, towards the spewing blue-white radiance that was the lighthugger’s nearest thrust-beam. She was going to kill the damned thing by taking it into the searing exhaust of the Conjoiner drive.

‘Ilia,’ Khouri said. ‘Are you sure this is . . . considered?’

‘Considered?’ This time there was no mistaking the woman’s clucking laughter, even though it sounded institutional. ‘It’s the most ill-considered thing I’ve ever done, Khouri. But right now I don’t see many alternatives. Not unless you get those guns online damn quickly.’

‘I’m . . . working on it.’

‘Well work on it some more and stop bothering me. In case it hadn’t occurred to you, I’ve got rather a lot on my mind right now.’

‘Her whole life flashing before her eyes, I should imagine.’

‘Oh, you again.’ Khouri ignored the Mademoiselle, realising by now that her interjections served the sly purpose of distracting her; that by doing so she was indeed interfering in the course of the battle; not nearly so ineffective a bystander as she maintained.

Volyova had now less than five hundred metres to go before she dragged the cache-weapon into the flames. It was putting up a fight, thrusters going haywire, but its overall thrust capacity was less than that of the spider-room. Understandable, Khouri thought. When its designers had conceived the ancillary systems which would be required to move and position the device, the idea that it would also have to fend for itself in a wrestling match had probably not been uppermost in their minds.

‘Khouri,’ Volyova said, ‘in about thirty seconds I’m going to release the
svinoi
. Assuming my sums are right, no amount of corrective thrust will be able to stop it drifting into the beam.’

‘That’s good, isn’t it?’

‘Well, sort of. But I feel I ought to warn you . . .’ Volyova’s voice faded in and out of clarity, reception compromised by the broiling energies of the propulsion beam, which she was now approaching at distances not usually considered wise for the organic. ‘It’s occurred to me that even if I succeed in destroying the cache-weapon . . . some part of the blast - something exotic, perhaps - might get sent back up the drive beam, into the propulsion core.’ A pause that was definitely intentional. ‘If that happens, the results might not be . . . optimal.’

‘Well, thanks,’ Khouri said. ‘I appreciate the morale-building.’

‘Damn,’ Volyova said, quietly and calmly. ‘There’s a slight flaw in my plan. The weapon must have hit the spider-room with some kind of defensive EM-pulse; either that or the radiation from the drive is interfering with the hardware.’ There was the sound - possibly - of someone making repeated attempts to throw antique metal switches on a console. ‘What I mean,’ Volyova said, ‘is that I don’t seem to be able to break free. I’m stuck to the bastard.’

‘Then shut off the damned drive - you can do that, can’t you?’

‘Of course; how do you think I killed Nagorny?’ But she didn’t sound optimistic. ‘
Nyet
- I’m locked out of the drive; must have blocked my intercession pathways when I ran Palsy . . .’ She was practically gabbling now. ‘Khouri, this is getting a tiny bit desperate . . . if you have those weapons . . .’

The Mademoiselle spoke now, sounding appropriately smug. ‘She’s dead, Khouri. And at the angle you’d now have to fire, half those weapons would be disabled to prevent them inflicting damage on the ship. You’ll be lucky to scorch the cache-weapon’s hull with what remains.’

She was right - almost without Khouri noticing, whole blocks of potentially available armament had safed themselves, since she was now requesting them to point dangerously close to critical ship components. What remained were the lightest armaments, almost by definition incapable of doing any serious damage.

Perhaps sensing this, something relented.

The weapons were suddenly more under Khouri’s control than not, and - she realised - the fact that the remaining systems were limited in their firepower was actually to her advantage. Her plan had changed. What she needed now was surgical precision, not brute force.

In the hiatus, before the weapons were regained by the Mademoiselle, Khouri ditched the prior target pattern and issued re-aiming orders. Her instructions were specific in the extreme. Now, oozing into position as if immersed in toffee, the weapons aligned themselves on the impact points she had selected. Not the cache-weapon now, but something else entirely . . .

‘Khouri,’ the Mademoiselle began, ‘I really think you should consider this . . .’

But by then Khouri had already fired.

Gouts of plasma streamed out towards the cache-weapon connecting - not with the weapon itself, but with the spider-room, neatly severing all eight of its legs, and then all four of its grapple-lines. The room flung itself away from the lancing spear of the drive, its legs truncated abruptly at the knees.

The cache-weapon drifted into the beam, like a moth brushing into an incandescent lamp.

What happened thereafter took place in an inhumanly brief series of instants; almost too rapid for Khouri to comprehend until afterwards. The physical exterior of the cache-weapon evaporated in a millisecond, boiling away in a gasp of predominantly metallic vapour. It was impossible to tell whether it was the touching of the beam which led to what followed, or whether, at the instant of its destruction, the cache-weapon was already committed to the act of turning itself inside out.

Either way, things did not proceed quite as its builders had intended.

Simultaneously - or as near as mattered - what was left of the cache-weapon beneath its eviscerated hide emitted a prolonged gravitational eruction, a burp of shearing spacetime. Something very horrible was happening to the fabric of reality in the immediate vicinity of the weapon, but not in the way which had been planned. A rainbow of bent starlight flickered around the curdling mass of plasma-energy. For a millisecond the rainbow was approximately spherical and stable, but then it began to wobble, oscillating unevenly like a soap-bubble on the point of bursting. A fraction of a millisecond later, it collapsed inwards, and accelerating exponentially, vanished.

For another moment there was nothing left, not even debris, just the normal star-speckled backdrop of space.

Then a glint of light appeared, shading to ultraviolet. The glint magnified and swelled, bloating into an intense, malignant sphere. The wave of expanding plasma hit the ship, juddering it so violently that Khouri felt the impact even with the cushioning gimbals of the gunnery. Data rushed in, telling her - not that she was particularly keen on knowing - that the blast had not seriously compromised any hull-based systems, and that the brief spike of background radiation from the flash was within tolerable norms. Gravimetric scans had abruptly returned to normal.

Spacetime had been punctured, penetrated at the quantum level, releasing a minuscule glint of Planck energy. Minuscule, that is, compared with the normally seething energies present in the spacetime foam. But beyond normal confinement that negligible release had been like a nuke going off next door. Spacetime had instantly healed itself, knitting back together before any real damage was done, leaving only a few surplus monopoles, low-mass quantum black holes and other anomalous/exotic particles as evidence that anything untoward had happened.