Revelation Space (54 page)

Sylveste had rehearsed the meeting in his head many times.

He had done his best to consider every possible eventuality; even those that—based on his understanding of the situation—seemed fantastically unlikely to actually occur. But he had considered nothing like this, and with good reason. Even as it happened around him, he could not begin to make sense of what was going on; let alone why it deviated so far from the path of sanity.

“If it’s any consolation,” Sajaki said, his voice booming above the wind, amplified from the head of his monstrous suit, “I don’t understand much of this either.”

“That consoles me no end,” Sylveste said, speaking on the same radio frequency channel he had used for all his negotiations with the crew, even though their representatives—or what remained of them—were now standing within shouting distance. In the unrelenting howl of the razorstorm, shouting was not much of an option. “Call me naïve but at this point I was hoping you’d have taken things over with your usual ruthless efficiency, Sajaki. All I can say is that you appear to be slacking.”

“I don’t like it any more than you do,” the Ultra said. “But you’d better believe me—for your sakes—that things are now very much in control. Now, I’m about to divert my attention to my wounded colleague. At this point I strongly recommend that you resist the temptation to do anything foolhardy. Not that the thought ever crossed your mind, eh, Dan?”

“You know me better than that.”

“The problem, Dan, is that I know you only too well. But let’s not dwell on the past.”

“Let’s not.”

Sajaki moved over to the wounded one. Sylveste had known he was dealing with Triumvir Yuuji Sajaki even before the man had spoken. As soon as his suit hove into view, emerging from the storm, his faceplate had been rendered transparent, the man’s over-familiar features peering intently at the damage he surveyed. Although it was hard to tell, Sajaki looked largely unchanged from their last meeting. For him, only a few years of subjective time would have elapsed. Sylveste by contrast had squeezed the equivalent of two or three old-style human lives into that space. It was a dizzying moment.

But Sylveste could not establish the identities of the other two crew. There had been a third, of course . . . but he or she was now past the point at which he could ever hope to make acquaintance. And of the two who were not obviously dead, one was perhaps perilously close—this was the one now receiving Sajaki’s ministrations—and one was standing in what looked like shocked silence off to one side. Oddly, the uninjured one was keeping some suit weapons trained on Sylveste, even though he was unarmed and had no intention—no intention whatsoever—of resisting capture.

“She’ll live,” Sajaki said, after a moment in which his suit must have communed with the suit of the fallen one. “But we need to get her back to the ship fast. Then we can find out what actually happened down here.”

“It was Sudjic,” said a voice Sylveste didn’t know; female. “Sudjic tried to kill Ilia.”

Then the wounded one was the bitch herself: Triumvir Ilia Volyova.

“Sudjic?” Sajaki said. For a moment the word hung between them, and it seemed as if Sajaki could not-or would not—accept what the other, nameless woman was saying. But then, after the wind had torn at them for several more seconds, he said the name again, only this time on a falling note of acceptance. “Sudjic. Yes, it would make sense.”

“I think she planned—”

“You can tell me later, Khouri,” Sajaki said. “There’ll be plenty of time—and your role in the incident of course will have to be explained to my total satisfaction. But for now we should deal with priorities.” He nodded down at the injured Volyova. “Her suit will keep her alive for a few more hours, but it isn’t capable of reaching the ship.”

“I take it,” Sylveste said, “that you envisaged a way of getting us off the planet?”

“A word of advice,” Sajaki said. “Don’t irritate me too much, Dan. I’ve expended a considerable amount of trouble in getting you. But don’t imagine I wouldn’t stretch to killing you just to see how it feels.”

Sylveste had expected something like that from Sajaki—he would have been more worried if the man had said something dissimilar, downplaying the act of finding him. But if Sajaki believed a word of what he said—which was doubtful—then he was a fool. He had come from at least as far away as the Yellowstone system, perhaps even further, in his quest for Sylveste. No guessing what the human costs of it had actually been; quite aside from the sheer number of years which had been consumed.

“Good for you,” Sylveste said, injecting as much insincerity into his voice as he could muster. “But as a scientific man you must respect my impulse to experiment; to determine the limits of your tolerance.” He whipped his arm out from under his windcloak, holding something tightly between two fingers of his gloved hand. He had almost expected the one with the guns to fire at him at that point, thinking that he was drawing a weapon. It was, he considered, a reasonable risk to take. But he had not produced a gun. What he held was a smallish sliver of quantum-state memory.

“You see this?” he said. “This is what you asked me to bring. Calvin’s beta-level simulation. You need it, don’t you? You need it very badly.”

Sajaki watched him without a word.

“Well, fuck you,” Sylveste said, crushing the simulation, until its dust was blown away into the storm.

They lifted from Resurgam, quickly lancing into the clear skies above the storm. Eventually there was something above Sylveste, small at first and really only visible because it occasionally occluded the stars behind it. It looked no larger than a sliver of coal, but it kept on growing, until its roughly conical shape became obvious, and what had at first seemed like a silhouette of total blackness began to show faint details within its own shape, gloomily underlit by the world around which it was orbiting. The lighthugger grew until it seemed impossibly large, blocking half the sky, and then kept on growing. The ship had not changed greatly since his last trip aboard. Sylveste knew—without being much impressed by the fact—that ships like this were always redesigning themselves, although the changes would usually be subtle modifications of the interior, rather than radical overhauls of the exterior layout (although that did happen as well, perhaps once every century or two). For a moment he worried that it might now lack the capability he wished—but then he remembered what the ship had done to Phoenix. It was hard to forget, in truth, since the evidence of that attack was still glaringly visible below him; a lotus-bloom of grey destruction set into the face of Resurgam.

A door had opened in the dark hull of the ship. The door looked far too small to accept even one of the suited, let alone all of them, but as they neared it became obvious that the door was tens of metres wide and would admit them all with ease. Sylveste, his wife and the other two Ultras from the ship, one of whom held the wounded Volyova, vanished inside, and the door closed on them.

Sajaki brought them to a holding area where they sloughed the suits and breathed normally. There was a taste to the air which slammed him back to his last visit aboard. He had forgotten how the ship smelled.

“You wait here,” Sajaki said, while their suits tidied themselves up and moved to one wall. “I have to attend to my colleague.”

He knelt down and busied himself with Volyova’s armour. Sylveste toyed with the idea of telling Sajaki not to expend too much effort in helping the other Triumvir, then decided that was possibly not the best course of action. He might have already pushed Sajaki to the edge of his patience when he crushed the Cal sim. “What exactly happened down there?”

“I don’t know.” That was typical Sajaki; like all the genuinely clever people Sylveste had met he knew better than to feign understanding where none existed. “I don’t know and for the moment—for the moment—it doesn’t matter.” He studied a readout in Volyova’s suit. “Her injuries, while serious, don’t seem to be fatal. Given time, she can be healed. Also, I now have you. Everything else is detail.” Then he cocked his head towards the other woman, who had slipped out of her suit. “Still, something troubles me, Khouri . . . ”

“What?” she said.

“It doesn’t matter . . . for the moment.” He looked back at Sylveste. “Incidentally, that little trick you did with the sim—don’t imagine for one instant that I was impressed by that.”

“You should be. How are you going to get me to fix the Captain now?”

“With Calvin’s help, of course. Don’t you remember that I kept a back-up the last time you brought Cal aboard? Granted, it’s slightly out-of-date, but the surgical expertise is all there.”

It was a good bluff, Sylveste thought, but that was all it was. Still, there was a back-up, of sorts . . . or else he would never have destroyed the sim.

“Talking of which . . . is the Captain so grievously unwell that he can’t meet me in person?”

“You’ll meet him,” Sajaki said. “All in good time.”

The other woman and Sajaki were removing scabs of damaged hide from Volyova’s suit, a process which resembled the shelling of a crab. Eventually Sajaki murmured something to the woman and they halted their work, evidently deciding that it was too delicate to be continued here. Presently a trio of servitors glided into the room. Two of the machines lofted Volyova between them and then left with her, accompanied by Sajaki and the woman. Sylveste had not seen her during his last visit aboard, but she seemed to have assumed a fairly elevated role in the ship’s hierarchy. The third servitor squatted down and observed Sylveste and Pascale with one sullen camera eye.

“He didn’t even ask me to take off my mask and goggles,” Sylveste said. “It’s like he hardly cares that he has me.”

Pascale nodded. She was fingering her clothes, seemingly convinced that the suit’s gel-air should have left some sticky residue behind on them. “Whatever happened down there must have thrown his plans completely. Maybe he’d be more triumphant if things had gone according to plan.”

“Not Sajaki; triumphant just isn’t his style. But I’d at least have expected him to spend a few minutes gloating.”

“Maybe the fact that you destroyed the sim . . . ”

“Yes; that’ll have thrown him.” As he spoke, he did so in the knowledge that his words were almost certainly being recorded. “There may still be some residual functionality in the copy he made of Cal, even allowing for the self-destruct routines, though probably not enough for any kind of channelling, even with one-to-one neural congruency between sim and recipient.” Sylveste found a pair of storage crates and moved them over to use for chairs. “I’m sure he already tried to run the sim in some poor fool’s body, though.”

“And it must have failed.”

“Messily, probably. He’s probably hoping now that I can work with the damaged copy without channelling; just relying on my knowledge of Cal’s instincts and methodologies.”

Pascale nodded. She was shrewd enough not to ask the obvious question: what kind of plan would Sajaki have if his own copy was-too damaged even for that? Instead, she said, “Do you have any idea what happened down there?”

“No—and I think Sajaki was telling the truth when he said the same thing. Whatever it was, it wasn’t to plan. Maybe some kind of power-struggle within the crew, acted out on the surface because whoever was involved never got a chance aboard.” But while the idea sounded halfway plausible to him, that was as far as his thinking took him. Too much time had gone by, even within Sajaki’s reference frame, for Sylveste to trust his usually infallible processes of insight.

He would have to play things very carefully indeed until he understood the dynamics of the current crew. Assuming they gave him the luxury of time . . .

Pascale knelt down next to her husband. They had both removed their masks now, but only Pascale had removed her dust-goggles. “We’re in a lot of danger, aren’t we? If Sajaki decides he can’t use you . . . ”

“He’ll return us to the surface unharmed.” Sylveste took Pascale’s hands. Ranks of empty suits towered around them, as if the two of them were unwanted despoilers in an Egyptian tomb and the suits were mummies. “Sajaki can’t ever rule out my being useful to him again, in the future.”

“I hope you’re right . . . because that was quite a risk you took.” She looked at him now with an expression he had rarely seen before. It was one of quiet, calm warning. “With my life as well.”

“Sajaki isn’t my master. I just had to remind him of that; to let him know no matter how clever he gets, I’ll always be ahead of him.”

“But he is your master now, don’t you understand? He may not have the sim, but he’s got you. That still puts him ahead in my book.”

Sylveste smiled and reached for an answer that was both true and exactly what Sajaki would expect of him. “But not as far as he thinks.”