The Revelation Space Collection (51 page)

He pushed to the front, aware that the watchers deferred to him with more respect than he’d felt for several decades. But was it possibly only pity being afforded to a condemned man?

Pascale joined him at his side. ‘Do you recognise that woman?’ she asked.

‘What woman?’

‘On the screen. The one you’re standing in front of.’

What Sylveste saw was only an oblong of pointillist silver-grey pixels.

‘My eyes don’t read video too well,’ he said, addressing Sluka as much as Pascale. ‘And I can’t hear a damned thing. Maybe you’d better tell me what I’m missing.’

Falkender had appeared out of the crowd. ‘I’ll patch you in neurally, if you wish. It’ll only take a moment.’ He shunted Sylveste away from the watchers, towards a private alcove in one corner of the commons, Pascale and Sluka following. There, he opened his toolkit and removed a few glistening instruments.

‘Now you’re going to tell me this won’t hurt at all,’ Sylveste said.

‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ Falkender said. ‘After all, it wouldn’t be the complete truth, would it?’ Then he clicked his fingers, either at an aide or Pascale; Sylveste was unsure, and his visual field was now too restricted to discriminate. ‘Get the man a mug of coffee; that’ll take his mind off it. In any case, when he’s able to read that screen, I think he’ll need something stronger.’

‘That bad?’

‘I’m afraid Falkender isn’t joking,’ Sluka said.

‘My, aren’t you all enjoying yourselves.’ Sylveste bit his lip at the first cascade of pain from Falkender’s probings, although, as the minor operation proceeded, the pain never worsened. ‘Are you going to put me out of my misery? After all, it seemed important enough to wake me.’

‘The Ultras have announced themselves,’ Sluka said.

‘That much I extrapolated for myself. What have they done? Landed a shuttle in the middle of Cuvier?’

‘Nothing so obtrusive. Yet. There may be worse to come.’

Someone pushed a mug of coffee into his hands; Falkender relented in his ministrations long enough for Sylveste to sip a mouthful. It was acrid and not entirely warm, but sufficed to propel him fractionally closer towards alertness. He heard Sluka say, ‘What we’re showing on the screen is a repeating audiovisual message, one that’s been transmitting continuously now for about thirty minutes.’

‘Transmitted from the ship?’

‘No, seems they’ve managed to tap straight into our comsat girdle, piggybacking their message on our routine transmissions.’

Sylveste nodded, then regretted the movement. ‘Then they’re still edgy about being detected.’ Or else, he thought, they merely want to reaffirm their absolute technological superiority over us; their ability to tap into and manipulate our existing data systems. That seemed more likely: it smacked not only of the arrogant Ultra way of doing things, but of one Ultra crew in particular. Why announce your presence in a mundane way, when you can do a full burning bush and impress the natives? But he hardly needed confirmation that he knew these people. He had known ever since the ship had entered the system.

‘Next question,’ he said. ‘Who was the message directed to? Do they still think there’s some kind of planetary authority with whom they can deal?’

‘No,’ Sluka said. ‘The message was addressed to the citizens of Resurgam, irrespective of political or cultural affiliation.’

‘Very democratic,’ Pascale said.

‘Actually,’ Sylveste said, ‘I rather doubt that democracy comes into it. Not if I know who we’re dealing with.’

‘Regarding that,’ Sluka said, ‘you never did quite explain to my total satisfaction why these people might . . .’

Sylveste cut her off. ‘Before we go into any detailed analysis, do you think I could see the message for myself? Particularly as I seem to hold something of a personal stake in the matter.’

‘There.’ Falkender retreated and closed his toolkit with a decisive snap. ‘I told you it wouldn’t take a moment. Now you can jack straight into the screen.’ The surgeon smiled. ‘Now, do me a favour and be sure not to kill the messenger, won’t you?’

‘Let me see the message,’ Sylveste said. ‘Then I’ll decide.’

It was far worse than he had feared.

He pushed to the front again, though by now the watchers had thinned out, dispersed reluctantly to duties elsewhere in Mantell. It was much easier to hear the speaker now, and he recognised cadences in the woman’s speech as she repeated phrases which had cycled around a few minutes earlier. The message was not a long one, then. Which was ominous in itself. Who crossed light-years of interstellar space, only to announce their arrival around a colony in terms which were, frankly, curt? Only those who had no interest whatsoever in ingratiating themselves, and whose demands were supremely clear. And again that suspicion accorded well with what he already knew of the crew he believed had come for him. They had never been talkative.

He could not yet see the face, although the voice was already whispering across the years to him. When vision came - when Falkender completed the neural interface - he remembered.

‘Who is she?’ Sluka asked.

‘Her name - when last we met - was Ilia Volyova.’ Sylveste shrugged. ‘It may or may not have been real. All I do know is that whatever threats she goes on to make, she’s fully capable of backing them up.’

‘And she’s - what? The Captain?’

‘No,’ Sylveste said, distracted. ‘No, she’s not.’

The woman’s face was unremarkable. Almost monochromatically pale of complexion, short dark hair, and a facial structure somewhere between elfin and skeletal, framing deepset, narrow, slanted eyes which dispensed little compassion. She had hardly changed at all. But then, that was the point of Ultras. If subjective decades had passed for Sylveste since their last meeting, then for Volyova it might only have been a handful of years; a tenth or a twentieth of the time. For her, their last meeting would be a thing of the relatively recent past, whereas for Sylveste it felt like an event consigned to the dusty annals of history. It placed him at a disadvantage, of course. For Volyova, his mannerisms - the more predictable aspects of his behaviour - would still be fresh in her mind; he would be an adversary not long met. But Sylveste had barely recognised Volyova’s voice until now, and when he tried to recall whether she had been more or less sympathetic to him on their previous meeting, his memory failed him. Of course, it would all come back, but it was that very slowness of recall which gave Volyova her undoubted edge.

Odd, really. He had assumed - stupidly, perhaps - that it would be Sajaki who was making this announcement. Not the true Captain, of course, or else why would they have come for him? The Captain had to be ill again.

But then where was Sajaki?

He forced his mind to disregard these questions and concentrate on what Volyova had to say.

After two or three repetitions, he had the whole of her monologue assembled in his head, and was almost certain he could have regurgitated it word for word. It was indeed curt. They knew what they wanted, these Ultras. And they knew what it would take to get it. ‘I am Triumvir Ilia Volyova of the lighthugger
Nostalgia for Infinity
’ was how she introduced herself. No helloes; not even a perfunctory admission of gratitude for the fates having allowed them to cross space to Resurgam.

Such niceties, Sylveste knew, were not exactly Ilia Volyova’s style. He had always thought of her as the quiet one; more concerned with housekeeping her hideous weapons than condescending to engage in anything resembling normal social intercourse. More than once he had heard the other crewmembers joke - and they hardly ever joked - about how Volyova preferred the company of the vessel’s indigenous rats over her human crewmates.

Perhaps they had not really been joking.

‘I am addressing you from orbit,’ was how she continued. ‘We have studied your state of technological advancement and concluded that you pose us no military threat.’ And then she paused, before continuing in what to Sylveste sounded like the tones of a schoolteacher warning pupils against committing an act of minor disobedience, like gazing out the window, or not keeping their compads well organised. ‘However, should any act be construed as a deliberate attempt at inflicting damage on us, we will retaliate in a massively disproportionate sense.’ She almost smiled at that point. ‘Not so much an eye for an eye, so to speak, as a city for an eye. We are fully capable of destroying any or all of your settlements from orbit.’

Volyova leant forwards, her leonine grey eyes seeming to fill the screen. ‘More importantly, we also have the resolve to do it, should the need arise.’ Volyova again allowed herself an over-dramatic pause, doubtless aware that she had a captive audience at this point. ‘If I chose, it could happen in a matter of minutes. Don’t imagine I’d lose much sleep over it.’

Sylveste could see where all this was heading.

‘But let us put aside such vulgarities, at least for the moment.’ She really smiled at that point, though as smiles went, it was near-cryogenic in its frostiness. ‘You’re doubtless wondering why we’re here.’

‘Not me,’ Sylveste said, loud enough that Pascale heard him.

‘There is a man amongst you we seek. Our desire to find him is so absolute, so pressing, that we have decided to bypass the usual . . .’ Volyova’s smile reappeared; an even colder phantom of itself. ‘. . . diplomatic channels. The man’s name is Sylveste; no further explanation should be necessary, if his reputation hasn’t waned since our last meeting.’

‘Tarnished, perhaps,’ Sluka commented. Then, to Sylveste, ‘You’re really going to have to tell me more about this prior meeting, you know. It can hardly do you any harm.’

‘And knowing the facts won’t do you a blind bit of good,’ Sylveste said, immediately returning his attention to the broadcast.

‘Ordinarily,’ Volyova said, ‘we’d establish lines of dialogue with the proper authorities and negotiate for Sylveste’s handover. Possibly that was our original intention. But a cursory scan of your planet’s main settlement from orbit - Cuvier - convinced us that such an approach would be doomed to failure. We surmised that there was no longer any power worth dealing with. And I’m afraid we don’t have the patience to bargain with squabbling planetary factions.’

Sylveste shook his head. ‘She’s lying. They never intended to negotiate, no matter what state we were in. I know these people; they’re vicious scum.’

‘So you keep telling us,’ Sluka said.

‘Our options are therefore rather limited,’ Volyova continued. ‘We want Sylveste, and our intelligence has confirmed that he is not . . . how shall I put it - at large?’

‘All that from orbit?’ Pascale asked. ‘That’s what I call good intelligence.’

‘Too good,’ Sylveste said.

‘This then,’ Volyova added, ‘is how things will proceed. Within twenty-four hours Sylveste will make his presence and location known to us via a radio-frequency broadcast. Either he emerges from hiding or those who are holding him set him free. We leave the details to you. If Sylveste is dead, then irrefutable evidence of his death must be offered in place of the man himself. Whether we accept it will be entirely at our discretion, of course.’

‘Good job I’m not dead, in that case. I doubt there’s anything you could do to convince Volyova.’

‘She’s that intransigent?’

‘Not just her; the whole crew.’

But Volyova was still speaking: ‘Twenty-four hours, then. We will be listening. And if we hear nothing, or suspect deception in any form, we will enact a punishment. Our ship has certain capabilities - ask Sylveste, if you doubt us. If we have not heard from him within the next day, we will use that capability against one of your planet’s smaller surface communities. We have already selected the target in question, and the nature of the attack will be such that no one in the community will survive. Is that clear? No one. Twenty-four hours after that, if we have still heard nothing of the elusive Dr Sylveste, we will escalate to a larger target. Twenty-four hours after that, we will destroy Cuvier.’ And Volyova proffered another brief smile at that point. ‘Though you seem to be doing an admirable job there yourselves.’

The message ended, then recommenced from the beginning, with Volyova’s blunt introduction. Sylveste listened to it in its entirety twice more before anyone dared interrupt his concentration.

‘They wouldn’t do it,’ Sluka said. ‘Surely not.’

‘It’s barbaric,’ Pascale added, eliciting a nod from their captor. ‘No matter how much they need you - they couldn’t possibly intend to do what she said. I mean, destroy a whole settlement?’

‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ Sylveste said. ‘They’ve done it before. And I don’t doubt that they’ll do it again.’

There had been never been any real certainty in Volyova’s mind that Sylveste was alive - but on the other hand, the fact that he might not be present was something she had carefully avoided dwelling on, because the consequences of failure were too unpleasant to bring to mind. It mattered not that this was Sajaki’s quest, rather than her own. If it failed, he would punish her just as severely as if she had contrived the whole thing herself; as if it were Volyova who had brought them to this dispiriting place.

She had not really expected anything to happen in the first few hours. That was too optimistic; it presumed that Sylveste’s captors were awake and immediately aware of her warning. Realistically, it might be a fraction of a day before the news was passed along the chain of command to the right people; yet more time while it was verified. But as the hours became tens of hours, and then most of a day, she was forced to the conclusion that her threat would have to be enacted.