The Revelation Space Collection (63 page)

‘Can you identify the ship?’ Sajaki said.

‘It isn’t necessary,’ Sylveste said, the deep calm in his voice surprising them all. ‘I know which ship it is.’

On the display, the final wave of detail shimmered across the ship, and the view enlarged until the craft filled almost the entire sphere. It was obvious now, even if it had not been completely so before. The ship was damaged; gutted: pocked by great spherical indentations, acres of the hull flensed open to reveal an intricate and queasy complexity of sub-layers which ought never to have been exposed to vacuum.

‘Well?’ Sajaki said.

‘It’s the wreck of the
Lorean
,’ Sylveste said.

TWENTY

Approaching Cerberus/Hades, 2566

Calvin assumed existence in the lighthugger’s medical suite, still incongruously posed in his enormous hooded chair.

‘Where are we?’ he asked, rummaging in the corner of one eye with his finger, as if he had just awoken from a satisfactorily deep sleep. ‘Still around that shithole of a planet?’

‘We’ve left Resurgam,’ said Pascale, who sat in the seat next to Sylveste, who in turn was reclining on the operation couch, fully clothed and conscious. ‘We’re on the edge of Delta Pavonis’s heliosphere, near the Cerberus/Hades system. They’ve found the
Lorean
.’

‘Sorry; I think I misheard you.’

‘No; you heard me perfectly well. Volyova showed it to us - it’s definitely the same ship.’

Calvin frowned. Like Pascale - like Sylveste - he had assumed that the
Lorean
was no longer anywhere near the Resurgam system. Not since Alicia and the other mutineers had stolen it to return to Yellowstone back in the early days of the Resurgam colony. ‘How can it be the
Lorean
?’

‘We don’t know,’ Sylveste said. ‘All we know is what we’ve told you. You’re as much in the dark as the rest of us.’ At such a point in their conversation, he normally inserted a barb against Calvin, but for once something made him hold his tongue.

‘Is it intact?’

‘Something must have attacked it.’

‘Survivors?’

‘I doubt it. The ship was heavily damaged . . . whatever it was came suddenly, or they would have tried moving out of range.’

Calvin was silent for a few moments before answering. ‘Alicia must have died, then. I’m sorry.’

‘We don’t know what it was, or how the attack came about,’ Sylveste said. ‘But we may learn something shortly.’

‘Volyova’s launched a probe,’ Pascale said. ‘A robot - capable of crossing over to the
Lorean
very quickly. It should have arrived by now. She said it will enter the ship and find whatever electronic records have survived.’

‘And then?’

‘We’ll know what killed them.’

‘But that won’t be enough, will it? No matter what you learn from the
Lorean
, it won’t be enough to make you turn back, Dan. I know you better than that.’

‘You only think you do,’ Sylveste said.

Pascale stood up, coughing. ‘Can we save this for later? If you can’t work together, Sajaki’s not going to have much use for either of you two.’

‘Irrelevant what he thinks about me,’ Sylveste said. ‘Sajaki still has to do whatever I say.’

‘He has a point,’ Calvin said.

Pascale asked the room to extrude an escritoire, with controls and readouts in the Resurgam style. She made a seat and sat herself beneath the escritoire’s curved ivory fascia. Then she called up a map of the data connections in the suite, and set about establishing the necessary links between Calvin’s module and the suite’s medical systems. She looked like she was spinning an elaborate cat’s cradle in thin air. As the connections were created, Calvin acknowledged them, and told her whether to increase or decrease bandwidth along certain pathways, or whether additional topologies were needed. The procedure lasted only a few minutes, and when it was complete Calvin was able to operate the medical suite’s servo-mechanical equipment, causing a mass of tipped alloy arms to descend from the ceiling, like the sculpture of a medusa.

‘You have no idea how this feels,’ Calvin said. ‘It’s the first time in years I’ve been able to act on a part of the physical universe - not since I first repaired your eyes.’ And as he spoke, the multi-jointed arms executed a shimmering dance, blades, lasers, claws, molecular-manipulators and sensors scything the air in a whirl of vicious silver.

‘Very impressive,’ Sylveste said, feeling the breeze on his face. ‘Just be careful.’

‘I could rebuild your eyes in a day,’ Calvin said. ‘I could make them better than they ever were. I could make them look human - hell; with the technology here I could implant biological eyes just as easily.’

‘I don’t want you to rebuild them,’ Sylveste said. ‘Right now they’re all I have on Sajaki. Just repair Falkender’s work.’

‘Ah, yes - I’d forgotten about that.’ Calvin, who remained essentially immobile, raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you sure this procedure is wise?’

‘Just be careful what you poke.’

Alicia Keller Sylveste had been his last wife before Pascale. They had married on Yellowstone, during the long years when the Resurgam expedition had been planned in excruciating detail. They had been together at the founding of Cuvier and had worked in harmony during the earliest years of the digs. She had been brilliant; too much so, perhaps, to stay comfortably within his orbit. Independently minded, she had begun to draw away from him - both personally and professionally - as their time on Resurgam entered its third decade. Alicia was not alone in her conviction that enough had been learned of the Amarantin; that it was time for the expedition - never meant to be permanent - to return to Epsilon Eridani. After all, if they had not learned anything shattering in thirty years, there was no promise that the next thirty years, or the next century, would bring anything more overwhelming. Alicia and her sympathisers believed that the Amarantin did not merit further detailed study; that the Event had only been an unfortunate accident of no actual cosmic significance. It was not hard to see the sense in this. The Amarantin, after all, were not the only dead species known to humankind. Out in the ever-expanding bubble of explored space, it was entirely possible that other cultures were about to be discovered, potent with archaeological treasures waiting to be unearthed. Alicia’s faction felt that Resurgam should be abandoned; that the colony’s finest minds should return to Yellowstone and select new targets of study.

Sylveste’s faction, of course, disagreed in the strongest terms. By then Alicia and Sylveste were estranged, but even in the depths of their enmity they preserved a cool respect of each other’s abilities. If love had withered, detached admiration remained.

Then came the mutiny. Alicia’s faction had done just what they always threatened to do: abandoned Resurgam. Unable to convince the rest of the colony to travel with them, they had stolen the
Lorean
from its parking orbit. The mutiny had been quite bloodless, but in their theft of the ship, Alicia’s faction had inflicted a much more insidious harm upon the colony. The
Lorean
had contained all the intra-system vessels and shuttles, meaning that the colonists were confined to Resurgam’s surface. They had no means to repair or upgrade the comsat girdle until Remilliod’s arrival, decades later. Servitors, replicating technology and implants had all been in excruciatingly short supply after Alicia’s departure.

But, in fact, Sylveste’s faction had been the fortunate ones.

‘Log entry,’ said Alicia’s ghost, floating disembodied in the bridge. ‘Twenty-five days out from Resurgam. We’ve decided - against my better judgement - to approach the neutron star on our way out. The alignment’s propitious; it doesn’t take us very far from our planned heading for Eridani, and the net delay to our journey will be tiny compared with the years of flight that are ahead of us in any case.’

She was not quite what Sylveste remembered. It had been a long time, in any case. She no longer seemed hateful to him; merely errant. She wore dark green clothes of a kind no one had worn in Cuvier since the mutiny itself, and her hairstyle seemed almost theatrical in its antiquity.

‘Dan was convinced there was something important out here, but the evidence was always lacking.’

That surprised him. She was speaking from a time long before the unearthing of the obelisk with its curious orrery-like inscriptions. Had his obsession been that strong, even then? It was entirely possible, but the realisation was not a comfortable one. Alicia was right in what she said. The evidence had been lacking.

‘We saw something strange,’ Alicia said. ‘A cometary impact on Cerberus, the planet orbiting the neutron star. Such impacts must be quite rare, this far out from the main Kuiper swarm. It naturally drew our attention. But when we were close enough to examine the surface of Cerberus, there was no sign of a new impact crater.’

Sylveste felt the hairs on the back of his neck tingle. ‘And?’ he found himself mouthing, almost silently, as if Alicia were standing before them in the bridge, and not a projection dredged from the memory banks of the wrecked ship.

‘It was not something we could ignore,’ she said. ‘Even if it seemed to lend tacit support to Dan’s theory that there was something strange about the Hades/Cerberus system. So we altered our course to come in closer.’ She paused. ‘If we find something significant . . . something we can’t explain . . . I don’t think we’ll have any ethical choice but to inform Cuvier. Otherwise we could never again hold our heads high as scientists. We will know better tomorrow, anyway. We’ll be within probe range by then.’

‘How much more of this is there?’ Sylveste asked Volyova. ‘How much longer did she continue with log entries?’

‘About a day,’ Volyova said.

Now they were in the spider-room, safe - or so Volyova wished to believe - from the prying eyes of Sajaki and the others. They had still not listened to everything Alicia had to say, for the very act of sifting through the spoken records was time-consuming and emotionally draining. Yet the basic shape of the truth was emerging, and it was far from encouraging. Alicia’s crew had been attacked by something near Cerberus, suddenly and decisively. Shortly Volyova and her crewmates would know a great deal more about the danger they were being impelled towards.

‘You realise,’ Volyova said, ‘that if we encounter trouble, you may have to enter the gunnery.’

‘I don’t think that would necessarily be for the best,’ Khouri said. Justifying herself, she added, ‘We both know there have been some worrying events related to the gunnery recently.’

‘Yes. As a matter of fact . . . during my convalescence, I convinced myself that you know more than you admit.’ Volyova relaxed back into the maroon plush of her seat, toying with the brass controls in front of her. ‘I think you told me the truth when you said you were an infiltrator. But I think that was as far as it went. The rest was a lie, designed to satisfy my curiosity and yet stop me taking the matter to the rest of the Triumvirate . . . which worked, of course. But there were too many things you didn’t explain to my satisfaction. Take the cache-weapon, for instance. When it malfunctioned, why did it point itself at Resurgam?’

‘It was the closest target.’

‘Sorry; too glib. It was something
about
Resurgam, wasn’t it? And the fact that you infiltrated this ship only when you knew our destination . . . yes; an out-of-the-way place would have made a good venue for staging an attempted take-over of the cache - but that was never on the cards anyway. You may have been resourceful, Khouri, but there was no way you were ever going to wrest control of those weapons from either myself or the rest of the Triumvirate.’ She put her hand beneath her chin now. ‘So - the obvious question. If your initial story was untrue, what exactly are you doing aboard this ship?’ She looked at Khouri, awaiting an answer. ‘You may as well tell me now, because I swear the next person to ask you will be Sajaki. It can’t have escaped your notice that Sajaki has his suspicions, Khouri - especially since Kjarval and Sudjic died.’

‘I didn’t have anything to do with . . .’ Then her voice lost conviction. ‘Sudjic had her own vendetta against you; that was none of my doing.’

‘But I had already disabled your suit’s weapons. Only I could have undone that order, and I was too busy being killed to do so. How did you manage to override the lock in order to kill Sudjic?’

‘Someone else did it.’ Khouri paused before continuing. ‘Some
thing
else, I should say. It was the same something that got into Kjarval’s suit and made her turn against me in the training session.’

‘That wasn’t Kjarval’s doing?’

‘No . . . not really. I don’t think I was her favourite person in the universe . . . but I’m fairly sure that she wasn’t planning to kill me in the training chamber.’

This was a lot to take in, even if it did finally feel like the truth. ‘So what happened, exactly?’

‘The thing inside my suit had to arrange matters so I’d be on the team to recover Sylveste. Getting Kjarval out of the picture was the only option.’