Revelation Space (58 page)

“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 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 tauneutrino 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.”

“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.

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.”