The Revelation Space Collection (62 page)

It must not come to that, she thought.

As soon as she was well enough, she would have to get Khouri to the spider-room where they could talk more freely. For now, it was senseless to dwell on things beyond her control.

‘What happened afterwards?’ she asked.

‘After Sudjic bought it? Everything continued according to plan, believe it or not. Sylveste still had to be escorted aboard the ship, and Sajaki and I hadn’t been injured.’

She thought of Sylveste, somewhere in the ship now. ‘Then Sajaki really did get what he wanted.’

‘No,’ Khouri said, guardedly. ‘That’s only what he thought he’d got. But the truth was a bit different.’

Over the next hour she told Volyova everything that had happened since Sylveste had been brought back aboard the lighthugger. It was all general ship-knowledge; nothing that Sajaki would not expect her to tell Volyova. But all the while, Volyova reminded herself that she was being told events as filtered by Khouri’s perception of things, which might not necessarily be complete, or even reliable. There were nuances of shipboard politics which would elude Khouri; would, indeed, elude anyone who had not been aboard for years. But at the end it seemed unlikely that any large portion of the truth had not been related, whether Khouri knew it or not. And what Volyova had been told was not good; not good at all.

‘You think he lied?’ Khouri asked.

‘About the hot-dust?’ Volyova approximated a shrug. ‘It’s certainly possible. Granted, Remilliod did sell hot-dust to the colony - we’ve seen the evidence of that already - but manipulating it isn’t child’s play. And they wouldn’t have had long to install it in his eyes, assuming they waited until the strike against Phoenix had already taken place, which seems likely. On the other hand . . . the risk’s just too great to assume he was lying. No remote-scan could detect hot-dust without risking a trigger . . . it puts Sajaki in a double-bind. He can’t not assume Sylveste was telling the truth. He has to take Sylveste at his word, or risk everything. At least this way the risk’s marginally quantifiable.’

‘You call Sylveste’s request a quantifiable risk?’

Volyova clucked, thinking of his demands. In all her life, she had never been near anything potentially alien; anything so potentially outside of her experience. There would surely be much there that could teach her . . . many lessons she could absorb. Sylveste need hardly have bothered with his threat . . .

‘He should have known better than to offer us such a tantalising lure,’ she said. ‘I’ve been intrigued by that neutron star ever since we entered the system, do you know? I found something near it on our approach - a weak neutrino source. It seems to be orbiting the planet, which itself orbits the neutron star.’

‘What could produce neutrinos?’

‘Many things - but of this energy? I can only think of machinery. Advanced machinery.’

‘Left there by the Amarantin?’

‘It’s a possibility, isn’t it?’ Volyova smiled, with effort. That was exactly what she was thinking, but there was no sense in stating her desires so blatantly. ‘I suppose we will find out when we get there.’

Neutrinos are fundamental particles; spin-half leptons. They come in three forms, or flavours: electron, mu- or tau-neutrinos, depending on the nuclear reactions which have birthed them. But because they have mass - because they move fractionally slower than the speed of light - neutrinos oscillate between flavours as they fly. By the time the ship’s sensors intercepted these neutrinos, they were a blend of the three possible flavour states, difficult to untangle. But as the distance to the neutron star decreased - and with it the time available for the neutrinos to oscillate away from their creation state - the blend of flavours became increasingly dominated by one type of neutrino. The energy spectrum became easier to read, too, and the time-dependent variations in the source strength were now much simpler to follow and interpret. By the time the distance between the ship and the neutron star had narrowed to one-fifth of one AU - about twenty million kilometres - Volyova had a much clearer idea about what was causing the steady flux of particles, dominated by the heaviest of the neutrino flavours, tau-neutrinos.

And what she learned disturbed her enormously.

But she decided to wait until they were closer before announcing her fears to the rest of the crew. Sylveste was, after all, still controlling them; it seemed unlikely that her worries would greatly dissuade him from his current course of action.

Khouri was getting used to dying.

One of the niggling aspects of Volyova’s simulations was the way they routinely carried on beyond the point where any real observer would have been killed, or at the very least so gravely injured as to be incapable of perceiving any subsequent events, let alone capable of having any influence over them. Like this time. Something had lanced out from Cerberus - an unspecified weapon of arbitrary destructiveness - and casually shredded the entire lighthugger. Nothing could have survived that attack, but Khouri’s disembodied consciousness was still stubbornly present, watching the riven shards drift lazily apart in a pinkish halo of their own ionised guts. It was, she supposed, Volyova’s way of rubbing it in.

‘Haven’t you ever heard of morale-building?’ Khouri had asked.

‘Heard of it,’ Volyova said. ‘Don’t happen to agree with it. Would you rather be happy and dead, or scared and alive?’

‘But I keep dying anyway. Why are you so convinced we’re going to run into trouble when we get there?’

‘I’m only assuming the worst,’ Volyova said, depressingly.

The next day Volyova felt strong enough to talk to Sylveste and his wife. She was sitting up in bed when they came into the medical bay, a compad propped on her lap, scrolling through a plethora of attack scenarios which she would later test against Khouri. She hastily closed the display and replaced it with something less ominous, though she doubted that the cryptic code of her simulations would have made much sense to Sylveste anyway; even to herself, her scribbles sometimes resembled a private language in which she had only passing fluency.

‘You’re healed now,’ Sylveste said, sitting next to her, flanked by Pascale. ‘That’s good.’

‘Because you care about my well-being, or because you need my expertise?’

‘The latter, obviously. There’s no love lost between us, Ilia, so why pretend otherwise?’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’ She put the compad aside. ‘Khouri and I had a discussion about you. I - or we - concluded that it was better to give you the benefit of the doubt. So for the time being, assume that I assume that everything you’ve told us,’ she touched a finger against her brow, ‘is completely true. Of course, I reserve the right to alter this judgement at any point in the future.’

‘I think it’s best for all of us if we adopt that line of thinking,’ Sylveste said. ‘And I assure you, scientist to scientist, it’s utterly true. Not just about my eyes, either.’

‘The planet.’

‘Cerberus. yes. I presume they briefed you?’

‘You expect to find something there which may relate to the Amarantin extinction. Yes; that much I gleaned.’

‘You know about the Amarantin?’

‘Orthodox thinking, yes.’ She lifted the compad again, quickly scrolling to a cache of documents uplinked from Cuvier. ‘Of course, very little of this is your work. But I have the biography, as well. It conveys a great deal of your speculation.’

‘Framed from the point of view of a sceptic,’ Sylveste said, glancing towards Pascale - a visible shift in the angle of his head, for it was impossible to judge the direction of his gaze from his eyes.

‘Naturally. But the essence of your thinking comes through. Within that paradigm . . . I concur that Cerberus/Hades is of some interest.’

Sylveste nodded, clearly impressed that she had remembered the proper nomenclature for the planet/neutron-star binary system they were now approaching. ‘Something drew the Amarantin there, in their end days. I want to know what it was.’

‘And does it concern you that this something might have been related to the Event?’

‘It concerns me, yes.’ His answer was not quite what she was expecting. ‘But it would concern me more if we were to ignore it entirely. After all, the threat to our own safety might be just as present. At least if we learn something we have a chance of avoiding the same fate.’

Volyova tapped a finger against her lower lip, thoughtfully. ‘The Amarantin may have thought similarly.’

‘Better, then, to approach the situation from a standpoint of power.’ Sylveste looked to his wife again. ‘It was providential that you arrived, in all honesty. There was no way for Cuvier to finance an expedition out here, even if I had been able to persuade the colony of its importance. And even if they had, nothing they could have prepared would have equalled the offensive capabilities of this ship.’

‘That little demonstration of our fire-power was really rather ill-judged, wasn’t it?’

‘Perhaps - but without it, I might never have been released.’

She sighed. ‘That, unfortunately, is precisely my point.’

The better part of a week later - when the ship had arrived within twelve million kilometres of Cerberus/Hades, and had assumed orbit around the neutron star - Volyova convened a meeting of the entire crew, and their guests, in the ship’s bridge. Now, she thought, was the time to reveal that her deepest fears had indeed been justified. It was hard enough for her, but how would Sylveste 367 take matters? What she was about to tell him not only confirmed that they were approaching something dangerous, but it also touched on something of deep personal significance for him. She was not an adept judge of character at the best of times - and Sylveste was entirely too complex a beast to submit to easy analysis - but she saw no way that her news could be anything other than painful.

‘I found something,’ she said, when she had everyone’s attention. ‘Quite some time ago, in fact: a source of neutrinos, near Cerberus.’

‘How long ago?’ Sajaki said.

‘Before we arrived around Resurgam.’ Watching his expression darken, she added: ‘There was nothing worth telling you, Triumvir. We did not even know we would be sent out here at that point. And the nature of the source was very unclear.’

‘And now?’ Sylveste said.

‘Now I have . . . a clearer idea. As we approached Hades, it became obvious that the emissions at source were pure tau-neutrinos of a particular energy spectrum; unique, in fact, amongst the signatures of any human technology.’

‘Then it’s something human that you’ve found out here?’ Pascale said.

‘That was my assumption.’

‘A Conjoiner drive,’ Hegazi said, and Volyova nodded slightly.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Only Conjoiner drives produce tau-neutrino signatures which match the source around Cerberus.’

‘Then there’s another ship out here?’ Pascale said.

‘That was my first thought,’ Volyova said, sounding uneasy. ‘And, in fact, it isn’t entirely wrong, either.’ Then she whispered commands into her bracelet, causing the central display sphere to warm to life and begin running through a pre-programmed routine she had set up just before the meeting. ‘But it was important to wait until we were close enough for visual identification of the source.’

The sphere showed Cerberus. The moon-sized world was like a less inviting version of Resurgam: monotonously grey, densely cratered. It was dark, too: Delta Pavonis was ten light-hours away, and the other nearby star - Hades - offered almost no light at all. Although it had been born furiously hot in a supernova explosion, the tiny neutron star had long since cooled into the infrared, and to the naked eye it was only visible when its gravitational field tricked background stars into arcs of lensed light. But even if Cerberus had been bathed in light, there was no suggestion of anything which might have lured the Amarantin. Even the best of Volyova’s scans, however, had only mapped the surface at a resolution of kilometres, so very little could be ruled out at this stage. But she had studied the object orbiting Cerberus in considerably greater detail.

She zoomed in on it now. At first it was just a slightly elongated whitish-grey smudge, backdropped by stars, with one edge of Cerberus visible to one side. That was how it had looked to her days ago, before the ship had deployed all its long-baseline eyes. But even then she had found it hard to ignore her suspicions. As more details appeared, it became harder still.

The smudge took on definite attributes of solidity and form now. It was a vaguely conic shape, like a splinter of glass. Volyova made a dimensional grid envelop the object, showing its approximate size. It was clearly several kilometres from end to end: three or four, easily.

‘At this resolution,’ Volyova said, ‘the neutrino emission resolved into two distinct sources.’ She showed them: grey-green blurs spaced either side of the thickened end of the conic shape. As more details phased in, the blurs could be seen to be attached to the body of the splinter by elegant, back-swept spars.

‘A lighthugger,’ Hegazi said. He was right; even at this relatively crude resolution, there was no doubt about it. What they were looking at was another ship, much like their own. The two individual sources of neutrino emission originated from the two Conjoiner engines mounted either side of the hull.

‘The engines are dormant,’ Volyova said. ‘But they still give off a stable flux of neutrinos even when the ship’s not under thrust.’