Author: Alastair Reynolds
Category: Science
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/alastair-reynolds/page,4,52358-the_revelation_space_collection.html
The chamber was enormous; the best part of half a kilometre from end to end, but it was dark now and Volyova had to imagine for herself the forty things which it contained. That was never hard. While there were many unanswered questions relating to the functions and origins of the things, Volyova knew their shapes and relative positions perfectly, as if they were the carefully positioned furnishings of a blind person’s bedroom. Even in the elevator she felt she could reach out and stroke the alloy husk of the nearest of them, just to reassure herself that it was still there. She had been learning what she could of the things for most of the time since she had joined the Triumvirate, but she would not have claimed to have been at ease with any of them. She approached them with the nervousness of a new lover, knowing that the knowledge she had gleaned to date was entirely skin-deep, and that what lay below might shatter every illusion she had.
She was never entirely sorry to exit the cache.
At 450 she shot through another armature, spacing the utility section from the ship’s tapering conic tail, which extended below for another kilometre. Again a surge as the elevator rode through a rad-zone, then the beginning of prolonged deceleration which would eventually bring it to a halt. It was passing through the second set of cryogenic storage decks, two hundred and fifty levels capable of holding one hundred and twenty thousand, though of course there was currently only one sleeper, if one was so generously inclined as to describe the Captain’s state as sleep. The elevator was slowing now. Midway through the cryo levels it stopped, cordially announcing that it had reached her destination.
‘Passenger cryogenic sleep level concierge,’ said the elevator. ‘For your in-flight reefersleep requirements. Thank you for using this service.’
The door opened and she stepped across the threshold, glancing down at the converging, illuminated walls of the shaft framed by the gap. She had travelled almost the entire length of the ship (or height - it was difficult not to think of the ship as a tremendously tall building) and yet the shaft seemed to drop down to infinite depths below. The ship was so large - so stupidly large - that even its extremities beggared the mind.
‘Yes, yes. Now kindly piss off.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Go away.’
Not that the elevator would, of course - at least not for any real purpose other than placating her. It had nothing else to do but wait for her. Being the sole person awake, Volyova was the only one who had any cause to use the elevators at all.
It was a long hike from the spinal shaft to the place where they kept the Captain. She could not take the most direct route either, since whole sections of the ship were inaccessible, riddled with viruses which were causing widespread malfunction. Some districts were flooded with coolant, while others were infested with rogue janitor-rats. Others were patrolled by defence drogues which had gone berserk and so were best avoided, unless Volyova felt in the mood for sport. Others were filled with toxic gas, or vacuum, or too much high-rad, or were rumoured to be haunted.
Volyova did not believe in hauntings, (though of course she had her own ghosts, accessed via the spider-room), but the rest she took very seriously indeed. Some parts of the ship she would not enter unless armed. But she knew the Captain’s surroundings well enough not to take excessive precautions. It was cold, though, and she hiked up the collar of her jacket, tugged the bill of her cap tighter down, its mesh fabric crunching against her scalp stubble. She lit another cigarette, hard sucks perishing the vacuum in her head, replacing it with a frosty military alertness. Being alone suited her. She looked forward to human company, but not with any great fervour. And certainly not if that company also entailed dealing with the Nagorny situation. Perhaps when they reached the Yellowstone system she would consider locating a new Gunnery Officer.
Now, how had that worry escaped from her mental partitioning?
It was not Nagorny that concerned her now, but the Captain. And here he was, or at least the outermost extent of what he had now become. Volyova composed herself. That composure was necessary. What she had to examine always made her sick. It was worse for her than for the others; her repulsion stronger. She was brezgati; squeamish.
The miracle was that the reefersleep unit which cased Brannigan was still functional. It was a very old model, Volyova knew - sturdily built. It was still striving to hold the cells of his body in stasis, even though the shell of the reefer had ruptured in great Palaeolithic cracks, fibrous metallic growth spilling out. The growth came from within the reefer, like a fungal invasion. Whatever remained of Brannigan remained at its heart.
It was bitterly cold near the reefer, and Volyova soon found herself shivering. But there was work to do. She fished a curette from her jacket and used it to burn off slivers of the growth for analysis. Back in her lab she would attack them with various viral weapons, hoping to find one which had an edge on the growth. She knew from experience that the routine was largely futile - the growth had a fantastic capacity for corrupting the molecular tools with which she probed it. Not that there was any pressing hurry: the reefer kept Brannigan at only a few hundred millikelvin above absolute zero, and that cold did appear to offer some hindrance to the spread. On the negative side, Volyova knew that no human being had ever survived revival from such a cold, but that seemed oddly irrelevant against the Captain’s condition.
She spoke into her bracelet, voice hushed. ‘Open my log file on the Captain and append this entry.’
The bracelet chirped to indicate readiness.
‘Third check on Captain Brannigan since my revival. Extent of spread of the . . .’
She hesitated, aware that an ill-judged phrase might anger Triumvir Hegazi; not that she particularly cared. Dared she call it the Melding Plague, now that the Yellowstoners had given it a name? Perhaps that would be unwise.
‘. . . of the illness, seems unchanged since last entry. No more than a few millimetres of encroachment. Cryogenic functions are still green, miraculously. But I think we should resign ourselves to the inevitability of the unit’s failure at some point in the future . . .’ Thinking to herself, that when it did fail, if they were not speedy in transferring the Captain to a new reefer (exactly how was an unanswered question), then he would certainly be one less problem for them to worry about. His own problems would be over as well - she sincerely hoped.
She told the bracelet: ‘Close log file.’ And then added, wishing devoutly that she had spared herself one smoke for this moment: ‘Warm Captain’s brain core by fifty millikelvins.’
Experience had told her that this was the minimum necessary temperature increase. Short of it, his brain would remain locked in glacial stasis. Above, the plague would begin to transform him too rapidly for her tastes.
‘Captain?’ she said. ‘Can you hear me? It’s Ilia.’
Sylveste stepped down from the crawler and walked back towards the grid. During his meeting with Calvin the wind had increased appreciably; he could feel it stinging his cheeks, the scouring dust a witch’s caress.
‘I hope that little conversation was beneficial,’ Pascale said, snatching away her mask to bellow into the wind. She knew all about Calvin, even though she had never spoken to him directly. ‘Have you agreed to see sense now?’
‘Get Sluka for me.’
Ordinarily she might have rejected an order like that; now she just accepted his mood and returned to the other crawler, emerging shortly afterwards with Sluka and a handful of other workers.
‘You’re ready to listen to us, I take it?’ Sluka stood before him, the wind whipping a loose strand of hair across her goggles. She took periodic inhalations from her mask, cupped in one hand, while the other hand rested on her hip. ‘If so, I think you’ll find we can be reasonable. We all have your reputation in mind. None of us will speak of this matter once we return to Mantell. We’ll say you gave the order to withdraw once the advisory came in. The credit will be yours.’
‘And you think any of that matters in the long term?’
Sluka snarled: ‘What’s so damned important about one obelisk? For that matter, what’s so damned important about the Amarantin? ’
‘You never really saw the big picture, did you?’
Discreetly - but not so discreetly that he missed her doing it - Pascale had begun taping the exchange, standing to one side with her compad’s detachable camera in one hand. ‘Some people might say there never was one to see,’ Sluka said. ‘That you inflated the significance of the Amarantin just to keep the archaeologists in business.’
‘You’d say that, wouldn’t you, Sluka? But then again, you were never exactly one of us to begin with.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Meaning that if Girardieau had wanted to plant a dissenter in our midst, you’d have made an excellent candidate.’
Sluka turned back to what Sylveste was increasingly thinking of as her mob. ‘Listen to the poor bastard - sinking into conspiracy theories already. Now we’re getting a taste of what the rest of the colony has seen for years.’ Then her attention snapped back to him. ‘There’s no point talking to you. We’re leaving as soon as we have the equipment packed - sooner, if the storm intensifies. You can come with us.’ She caught her breath from the mask, colour returning to her cheeks. ‘Or you can take your chances out here. The choice is entirely yours.’
He looked beyond her, to the mob. ‘Go on, then. Leave. Don’t allow anything as trivial as loyalty to get in your way. Unless one of you has the guts to stay here and finish the job they came to do.’ He looked from face to face, meeting only awkwardly averted gazes. He barely knew any of their names. He recognised them, but only from recent experience; certainly none of them had come on the ship from Yellowstone; certainly none had known anything other than Resurgam, with its handful of human settlements strewn like a few rubies across otherwise total desolation. To them he must have seemed monstrously atavistic.
‘Sir,’ one of them said - possibly the one who had first alerted him to the storm. ‘Sir; it’s not that we don’t respect you. But we have to think of ourselves as well. Can’t you understand that? Whatever’s buried here, it isn’t worth this risk.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ Sylveste said. ‘It’s worth more risk than you can possibly imagine. Don’t you understand? The Event didn’t happen to the Amarantin. They caused it. They made it happen.’
Sluka shook her head slowly. ‘They made their sun flare up? Is that what you actually believe?’
‘In a word, yes.’
‘Then you’re a lot further gone than I feared.’ Sluka turned her back to him to address her mob. ‘Power up the crawlers. We’re leaving now.’
‘What about the equipment?’ Sylveste said.
‘It can stay here and rust for all I care.’ The mob began to disperse towards the two hulking machines.
‘Wait!’ Sylveste shouted. ‘Listen to me! You only need to take one crawler - there’s enough room for all of you in one, if you leave the equipment behind.’
Sluka faced him again. ‘And you?’
‘I’ll stay here - finish the work myself, along with anyone else who wants to stay.’
She shook her head, snatching off her mask to spit on the ground in disgust. But when she left, she caught up with the rest of her brigade and directed them towards the nearest crawler, leaving the other - the one containing his stateroom - for him alone. Sluka’s mob entered the machine, some of them carrying small items of equipment or boxed artefacts and bones recovered from the dig: scholarly instincts prevailing even in rebellion. He watched the crawler’s ramps and hatches fold shut, then the machine rose on its legs, shuffled around and moved away from the dig. In less than a minute it had passed out of view completely, and the noise of its engines was no longer audible above the roar of the wind.
He looked around to see who was still with him.
There was Pascale - but that was almost inevitable; he suspected she would dog him to his grave if there was a good story in it. A handful of students who had resisted Sluka; ashamedly he could not place their names. Perhaps half a dozen more still down in the Wheeler grid, if he was lucky.
Composing himself, he snapped his fingers towards two of those who had stayed. ‘Start dismantling the imaging gravitometers; we won’t need them again.’ He addressed another pair. ‘Begin at the back of the grid and start collecting all the tools left behind by Sluka’s deserters, together with field notes and any boxed artefacts. When you’re done, you can meet me at the base of the large pit.’
‘What are you planning now?’ Pascale said, turning off her camera and allowing it to whisk back into her compad.
‘I would have thought it was obvious,’ Sylveste said. ‘I’m going to see what it says on that obelisk.’
Chasm City, Yellowstone, Epsilon Eridani system, 2524
The suite console chimed as Ana Khouri was brushing her teeth. She came out of the bathroom, foam on her lips.
‘Morning, Case.’
The hermetic glided into the apartment, his travelling palanquin decorated in ornate scrollwork, with a tiny, dark window in the front side. When the light was right she could just make out K. C. Ng’s deathly pale face bobbing behind an inch of green glass.
‘Hey, you look great,’ he said, voice rasping through the box’s speaker grille. ‘Where can I get hold of whatever perks you up?’
‘It’s coffee, Case. Too much of the damned stuff.’
‘I was joking,’ Ng said. ‘You look like shit warmed over.’
She drew her palm across her mouth, removing the foam. ‘I’ve only just woken up, you bastard.’
‘Excuses.’ Ng managed to sound as if the act of waking up was an outmoded physical affectation he had long since discarded, like owning an appendix. Which was entirely possible: Khouri had never got a good look at the man inside the box. Hermetics were one of the more peculiar post-plague castes to emerge in the last few years. Reluctant to discard the implants which the plague might have corrupted, and convinced that traces of it still lingered even in the relative cleanliness of the Canopy, they never left their boxes unless the environment itself was hermetically sealed; limiting their mobility to a few orbital carousels.
The voice rasped again, ‘Pardon me, but we do have a kill scheduled for this morning, if I’m not very much mistaken. You remember this fellow Taraschi we’ve been trying to take out for the last two months? Ring any bells in there? It’s rather crucial that you do, because you happen to be the individual assigned to put him out of misery.’
‘Off my back, Case.’
‘Anatomically problematic even if I desired to locate myself thus, dear Khouri. But seriously, we have a probable kill location pegged, and an estimated time of demise. Are you sharpness personified?’
Khouri poured herself a final few sips of coffee and then left the rest of it on the stove for when she got back. Coffee was her only vice, one acquired in her soldiering days on the Edge. The trick was to reach a knife-edge of alertness, but not be so buzzing that she could not point the weapon without shaking.
‘I think I’ve reduced the amount of blood in my caffeine system to an acceptable level, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Then let us discuss matters of a terminal nature, at least where Taraschi is concerned.’
Ng began to hit her with the final details for the kill. Most of it was already in the plan, or stuff that she had guessed for herself, based on her experience of previous kills. Taraschi was to be her fifth consecutive assassination, so she was beginning to grasp the wider scope of the game. Though they were not always obvious, the game had its own rules, subtly reiterated in the grand movements of each kill. The media attention was even picking up, her name being bandied around Shadowplay circles with increasing frequency, and Case was apparently setting up some juicy, high-profile targets for her next few hunts. She was, she felt, on the way to becoming one of the top hundred or so assassins on the planet; élite company indeed.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Under the Monument, plaza le
vel eight, west annexe, one hour. Couldn’t be easier.’
‘Aren’t you forgetting one thing?’
‘Right. Where’s the kill weapon, Case?’
Ng’s form nodded behind her. ‘Where the tooth fairy left it, dear girl.’
And then he turned his box and retreated from the room, leaving only a faint whiff of lubricant. Khouri, frowning, reached a hand slowly beneath the pillow on her bed. There was something, just as Case had said. There had been nothing there when she went to sleep, but this sort of thing hardly bothered her these days. The company always had moved in mysterious ways.
Soon, she was ready.
She called a cable-car from the roof, the kill weapon snuggling under her coat. The car detected the weapon and the presence of implants in her head, and would have refused to carry her had she not shown it her Omega Point ident, grafted beneath the nail of her right index finger, making a tiny holographic target symbol seem to dance beneath the keratin. ‘Monument to the Eighty,’ Khouri said.
Sylveste stepped off the ladder and walked across the stepped base of the pit until he reached the pool of light around the obelisk’s exposed tip. Sluka and one of the other archaeologists had deserted him, but the one remaining worker - assisted by the servitor - had managed to uncover nearly a metre of the object, peeling away the nested layers of the stone sarcophagi to reach the massive block of obsidian, skilfully carved, on which Amarantin graphicforms had been engraved in precise lines. Most of it was textual: rows of ideopicts. The archaeologists understood the basics of Amarantin language, though there had been no Rosetta Stone to aid them. The Amarantin were the eighth dead alien culture discovered by humanity within fifty light-years of Earth, but there was no evidence that any of those eight species had come into contact with each other. Nor could the Pattern Jugglers or the Shrouders offer assistance: neither had revealed anything remotely resembling a written language. Sylveste, who had come into contact with both the Jugglers and the Shrouders - or at least the latter’s technology - appreciated that as well as anyone.