The Revelation Space Collection (53 page)

She looked at him, long and hard.

‘We do still have - in principle - data links to Cuvier, via what remains of the comsat girdle. But they’ve barely been used since the domes were blown. It would be risky to open them - the data-trail could lead back to us.’

‘I’d say that’s the least of anyone’s worries right now.’

‘He’s right,’ Pascale said. ‘With all this going on, who’s going to care about a minor breach of security in Cuvier? I’d say it would be worthwhile just to get the maps updated.’

‘How long will it take?’

‘An hour; two hours. Why, were you planning on going somewhere?’

‘No,’ Sylveste said, conspicuously failing to smile. ‘But someone else might be deciding for me.’

They went surfaceside again while they were waiting for the maps to be revised. There were no stars visible in the low north-east; just a hump of sooty nothingness, as if a gargantuan crouched figure were looming over the horizon. It must have been an uplifted wall of dust, edging towards them. ‘It’ll blanket the world for months,’ Sluka said. ‘Just as if a massive volcano had gone off.’

‘The winds are getting stronger,’ Sylveste said.

Pascale nodded. ‘Could they have done that - changed the weather, this far from the attack? What if the weapon they used caused radioactive contamination?’

‘It needn’t have been,’ Sylveste said. ‘Some kind of kinetic-energy weapon would have sufficed. Knowing Volyova, she wouldn’t have done anything more than was absolutely necessary. But you’re right to worry about radiation. That weapon probably opened a hole right through the lithosphere. It’s anyone’s guess what was released from the crust.’

‘We shouldn’t spend too much time surfaceside.’

‘Agreed - but that probably goes for the colony as a whole.’

One of Sluka’s aides appeared in the exit door.

‘You’ve got the maps?’ she asked.

‘Give us another half-hour,’ he said. ‘We’ve got the data, but the encryption’s pretty heavy. There’s news from Cuvier, though. We just picked it up, publicly broadcast.’

‘Go on.’

‘It seems the ship took pictures of the - uh - aftermath. They transmitted them to the capital, and now they’ve been sent around the planet.’ The aide took a battered compad from his pocket, its flatscreen throwing his features into lilac relief. ‘I have the images.’

‘You’d better show us.’

The aide placed the compad on the mesa’s gritty, wind-smoothed surface. ‘They must have used infrared,’ he said.

The pictures were awesome and terrifying. Molten rock was still snaking from the crater and beyond, or spraying in fountainlike cascades from dozens of suddenly birthed baby volcanoes. All evidence of the settlement had been obliterated, completely swallowed by the wide cauldron of the crater, which must have been a kilometre or two across. There were vast patches of glassy smoothness near its centre, like solidified tar; black as night.

‘For a moment I hoped we were wrong,’ Sluka said. ‘I hoped that the flash, even the pressure-wave - I hoped that somehow they’d been faked, like a theatrical effect. But I can’t see how they could have faked this without actually blowing a hole in the planet.’

‘We’ll know in a while,’ the aide said. ‘I presume I can speak freely?’

‘This concerns Sylveste,’ Sluka said. ‘So he may as well hear it.’

‘Cuvier has a plane heading towards the site of the attack. They’ll be able to confirm that this imagery wasn’t fabricated.’

By the time they returned underground the maps had been cracked, replacing the outdated copies in Mantell’s archive. Once again they retired to Sluka’s stateroom to view the data. This time the map’s accompanying information showed that it had been updated only a few weeks earlier.

‘They’ve done pretty well,’ Sylveste said. ‘To have kept up with the business of cartography while the city was crumbling around them. I admire their dedication.’

‘Never mind their motives,’ Sluka said, brushing her fingers against one of the pedestal-mounted globes which flanked the room, seemingly to anchor herself to the planet which now seemed to be spinning irrevocably beyond her control. ‘As long as Phoenix - or whatever they called it - is there, that’s all I care.’

‘It’s there all right,’ Pascale said.

Her finger penetrated the projected terrain, arrowing a tiny, labelled dot in the otherwise unpopulated north-eastern ranges. ‘It’s the only thing so far north,’ she said. ‘And the only settlement in remotely the right direction. It’s called Phoenix, too.’

‘What else do you have on it?’

Sluka’s aide - he was a small man with a delicately oiled moustache and goatee - spoke softly into his sleeve-mounted compad, instructing the map to zoom in on the settlement. A series of demographic icons popped into existence above the table. ‘Not much,’ he said. ‘Just a few multi-family surface shacks linked by tubes. A few underground workings. No ground connections, although they did have a landing pad for aircraft.’

‘Population?’

‘I don’t think population’s quite the word for it,’ the man said. ‘Just a hundred or so; about eighteen family units. Most of them from Cuvier, by the look of this.’ He shrugged. ‘Actually, if this was her idea of a strike against the colony, I think we did remarkably well. A hundred or so people - well, it’s a tragedy. But I’m surprised she didn’t play her hand against a more populous target. The fact that none of us really knew this place existed - it almost nullifies the act, don’t you think?’

‘A splendidly inept thing,’ Sylveste said, nodding despite himself.

‘What?’

‘The human capacity for grief. It just isn’t capable of providing an adequate emotional response once the dead exceed a few dozen in number. And it doesn’t just level off - it just gives up, resets itself to zero. Admit it. None of us feels a damn about these people.’ Sylveste looked at the map, wondering what it must have been like for the inhabitants, given those few seconds of warning which Volyova had prescribed them. He wondered if any of them had taken the trouble to leave their dwellings and face the sky, in order to quicken - fractionally - the coming annihilation. ‘But I do know one thing. We have all the evidence we need that she’s a woman of her word. And that means you have to let me go to them.’

‘I’m reluctant to lose you,’ Sluka said. ‘But it isn’t like I have much choice in the matter. You’ll be wanting to contact them, of course.’

‘Naturally,’ Sylveste said. ‘And of course Pascale will be coming with me. But there’s one thing I’d like you to do for me first.’

‘A favour?’ Sluka sounded amused, as if this were the last thing in the world she would have expected from him. ‘Well, what can I do for you, now that we’ve become such firm friends?’

Sylveste smiled. ‘Actually it’s not so much what you can do for me as what Doctor Falkender can. It concerns my eyes, you see.’

From the vantage point of her floating, boom-suspended seat, the Triumvir observed the handiwork she had wrought on the planet below. It was all perfectly clear, imaged precisely on the bridge’s projection sphere. In the last ten hours she had observed the wound extend dark cyclonic tendrils away from its focus, evidence that the weather in that region - and, by implication, elsewhere on the planet - had been tipped towards a violent new equilibrium. According to the locally culled data, the colonists on Resurgam called such phenomena razorstorms, on account of the merciless flensing quality of the airborne dust. It was fascinating to watch, much like the dissection of some unfamiliar animal species. Although she had had more experience with planets than many of her crewmates, there were still things about them which she found surprising and not a little disturbing. It was disturbing that simply puncturing a hole in the planet’s integument could have this much effect - not just on the immediate locality of the place she had attacked, but thousands of kilometres beyond. Eventually, she knew, there would not be a spot on the planet which had not been in some measurable way affected by her action. The dust she had caused to be elevated would eventually settle; a fine blackened, faintly radioactive caul deposited fairly uniformly around the planet. In the temperate regions it would soon be washed away by the weather processes which the colonists had instigated, assuming of course that those processes still functioned. But in the arctic regions there was never any rain, so the fine fall of dust would remain unperturbed for centuries to come. Eventually other deposits would cover it, and it would become part of the irrevocable geological memory of the planet. Perhaps, the Triumvir mused, in a few million years other beings would arrive on Resurgam, sharing something of humanity’s curiosity. They would want to learn of the planet’s history, and in doing so they would take core samples, reaching far back into Resurgam’s past. Doubtless that deposited layer of dust would not be the only mystery they had to solve, but nonetheless they would mull on it, if only fleetingly. And she had no doubt that those hypothetical future investigators would come to a totally wrong conclusion regarding the layer’s origin. It would never occur to them that it had been put there by an act of conscious volition . . .

Volyova had slept only a few hours in the last thirty, but her nervous energy currently seemed limitless. She would, of course, pay a price for it at some point in the near future, but for now she felt like she was careering, imbued with unstoppable momentum. Even so, she did not immediately snap to alertness when Hegazi steered his chair next to hers.

‘What is it?’

‘I’m getting something which might very much be our boy.’

‘Sylveste?’

‘Or someone pretending to be him.’ Hegazi entered one of his intermittent phases of fugue, which to Volyova signified that he was in deep rapport with the ship. ‘Can’t trace the communication route he’s using. It’s coming from Cuvier, but you can bet Sylveste isn’t physically there.’

She did not raise her voice, even though the two of them were quite alone in the bridge.

‘What’s he saying?’

‘He’s just asking to speak to us. Over and over again.’

Khouri heard footsteps sloshing through the inch-thick sludge which flooded the entire Captain’s level.

She did not have a rational answer for why she had come down here. Perhaps that was the point, really: now that she no longer trusted Volyova - the one person she had thought she could place her faith in - and now that the Mademoiselle was absent, as she had been ever since the attack against the cache-weapon, Khouri had to turn to the irrational. The only person left on the ship who had not in some way betrayed her, or had not earned her hatred, was the one she could never expect an answer from.

She knew almost immediately that the footsteps did not belong to Volyova, but there was a purposefulness to them which suggested that the person knew exactly where they were going, and had not simply strolled into this area of the ship by accident.

Khouri got up out of the muck. The seat of her trousers was wet and cold with the stuff, but the darkness of the fabric concealed most of the damage.

‘Relax,’ said the person, strolling casually round the bend, her boots sloshing through the sludge. There was a glint of metal from the woman’s free-swinging arms and a multicoloured glow from the holographic designs worked into the arms’ metalwork.

‘Sudjic,’ Khouri identified. ‘How the hell did you—’

Sudjic shook her head with a tight-lipped smile. ‘How did I find my way down here? Simple, Khouri. I followed you. Once I saw which general direction you’d gone, it was obvious you must be headed here. So I came after you, because I reckon you and I could use a little chat.’

‘A chat?’

‘About the situation here.’ Sudjic gestured expansively. ‘On this ship. More specifically, the fucking Triumvirate. It can’t have escaped you that I have a grievance against one of them.’

‘Volyova.’

‘Yes, our mutual friend Ilia.’ Sudjic managed to make the woman’s name sound like a particularly unsavoury expletive. ‘She killed my lover, you know that.’

‘I understand there’d been . . . problems.’

‘Problems, ha. That’s a good one. Do you call turning someone psychotic a problem, Khouri?’ She paused, stepped a little closer, but still kept a respectful distance from the fused, angelic core of the Captain. ‘Or maybe I should call you Ana, now that we’re on - uh - closer terms.’

‘Call me what you want. It doesn’t alter anything. I may hate her guts right now, but that doesn’t mean I’m about to betray her. We shouldn’t even be having this conversation.’