The Revelation Space Collection (278 page)

[I don’t...]

Skade cut her off, one of her fingers suddenly appearing beneath Molenka’s chin.
No. No words, Molenka. No words, no thoughts. Just go back into the machinery and make the necessary adjustments. Do that for me, will you? Do it for me, and for the Mother Nest?

Molenka trembled. She was, Skade judged, quite exquisitely terrified. It was the resigned, hopeless terror of a small mammal caught in something’s claws. [Yes, Skade.]

The name Jastrusiak stuck in Skade’s mind, tantalisingly familiar. She could not dislodge it. When the opportunity presented itself, she tapped into the Conjoiner collective memory and retrieved all references connected to the name, or anything close to it. She was determined to understand what had made Molenka’s subconscious malfunction in such a singularly creative fashion, weaving a nonexistent individual out of nothing in a moment of terror.

To her moderate surprise, Skade learned that Jastrusiak was a name known to the Mother Nest. There had been a Jastrusiak amongst the Conjoined. He had been recruited during the Chasm City occupation. He had quickly gained Inner Sanctum clearance, where he worked on advanced concepts such as breakthrough propulsion theory. He had been one of a team of Conjoiner theorists who had established their own research base on an asteroid. They had been working on methods to convert existing Conjoiner drives to the stealthed design.

It was tricky work, it turned out. Jastrusiak’s team had been amongst the first to learn exactly how tricky. Their entire base, along with a sizeable chunk of that hemisphere of the asteroid, had been wiped out in an accident.

So Jastrusiak was dead - had, in fact, been dead for many years.

But had he lived, Skade thought, he would have been exactly the kind of expert she would have recruited for her own team aboard
Nightshade
. Very probably he would have been of similar calibre to Molenka, and would have ended up working alongside her.

What did it mean? It was, she supposed, no more than uncomfortable coincidence.

Molenka called her back. [We’re ready, Skade. We can try the experiment again.]

Skade hesitated, almost about to tell her that she had discovered the truth about Jastrusiak. But then she thought better of it.
Make it so
, Skade told her.

She watched the machinery move, the curved black arms whisking back and forth and, it appeared, through each other, knitting and threshing time and space like some infernal weaving machine, coaxing and cradling the bacterium-sized speck of altered metric into the tachyonic phase. Within seconds the machinery had become a knitting blur behind
Nightshade
. The gravity wave and exotic particle sensors registered squalls of deep spatial stress as the quantum vacuum on the boundary of the bubble was curdled and sheared on microscopic scales. The pattern of those squalls, filtered and processed by computers, told Molenka how the bubble’s geometry was behaving. She transmitted this data to Skade, permitting her to visualise the bubble as a glowing globule of light, pulsing and quivering like a drop of mercury suspended in a magnetic cradle. Colours, not all of them within the normal human spectrum, shifted in prismatic waves across the skin of the bubble, signifying arcane nuances of quantum-vacuum interaction. None of that concerned Skade; all that mattered to her were the accompanying indices that told her that the bubble was behaving normally, or as normally as could be expected of something that had no real right to exist in this universe. There was a soft blue glow from the bubble as particles of Hawking radiation were snatched into the tachyonic state and whisked away from
Nightshade
at superluminal speed.

Molenka signalled that they were ready to expand the bubble, so that
Nightshade
itself would be trapped inside its own sphere of tachyonic-phase space-time. The process would happen in a flash, and the field, according to Molenka, would collapse back to its microscopic scale in subjective picoseconds, but that instant of stability would be sufficient to translate Skade’s ship across a light-nanosecond of space, about one-third of a metre. Disposable probes had already been deployed beyond the expected radius of the bubble, ready to capture the instant when the ship made its tachyonic shift. One-third of a metre was not enough to make a difference against Clavain, of course, but in principle the jump procedure could be extended in duration and repeated almost immediately. By far the hardest thing would be to do it once; thereafter it was only a question of refinements.

Skade gave Molenka permission to expand the bubble. At the same time Skade willed her implants into their maximum state of accelerated consciousness. The normal activity of the ship became a barely changing background; even the whisking black arms slowed so that she was able to appreciate their hypnotic dance more clearly. Skade examined her state of mind and found nervous anticipation, mingled with the visceral fear that she was about to commit a grave mistake. She recalled that the Wolf had told her that very few organic entities had ever moved faster than light. Under other circumstances, she might have chosen to heed the Wolf’s unspoken warning, but at the same time the Wolf had been goading her on, urging her to this point. Its technical assistance had been vital in decoding the Exordium instructions, and she assumed that it had some interest in preserving its own existence. But perhaps it simply enjoyed seeing her conflicted, caring nothing for its own survival.

Never mind. It was done now. The whisking arms were already altering the field conditions around the bubble, stroking the boundary with delicate quantum caresses, encouraging it to expand. The wobbling bubble enlarged, swelling in a series of lopsided expansions. The scale changed in a series of logarithmic jumps, but not nearly fast enough. Skade knew immediately that something was wrong. The expansion should have happened too rapidly to be sensed, even in accelerated consciousness. The bubble should have engulfed the ship by now, but instead it had only inflated to the size of a swollen grapefruit. It hovered within the grasp of the whisking arms, horribly, tauntingly wrong. Skade prayed for the bubble to shrink back down to bacterium size, but she knew from what Molenka had said that it was much more likely to expand in an uncontrolled fashion. Horrified and enraptured, she watched as the grapefruit-sized bubble flexed and undulated, becoming peanut-shaped one instant and then squirming into a torus, a topological transformation that Molenka had sworn was impossible. Then it was a bubble again, and then, as random bulges and dents pulsed in an out of the membrane’s surface, Skade swore she saw a gargoyle face leer at her. She knew that it was the fault of her subconscious, imprinting a pattern where none existed, but the impression of inchoate evil was inescapable.

Then the bubble expanded again, swelling up to the size of a small spacecraft. Some of the whisking arms did not swing out of the way in time, and their sharp extremities punched through the undulating membrane. The sensors flipped into overload, unable to process the howling torrent of gravitational and particle flux. Inexorably, matters were shifting out of control. Vital control systems in the rear of
Nightshade
were shutting down. The arms began to move spasmodically, lashing against each other like the limbs of ill-orchestrated dancers. Nodules and flanges sheered off. Scarves of glowing plasma ripped between the boundary and its encasing machinery. The boundary bloated again; its membrane swallowed cubic hectares of support machinery. The failing machinery could no longer hold it stable. Dim explosions pulsed within the bubble. A major control arm severed itself and swung back into the side of
Nightshade’
s hull. Skade sensed a chain of explosions surging along the side of her ship, pink blossoms cascading towards the bridge. Her beautiful machinery was ripping itself to pieces. The bubble squirmed larger, oozing through the failing constraints of the sheered and buckled arms. Emergency alarms sounded, internal barricades clanging down throughout the ship. Whiteness glared from the heart of the bubble as matter within it underwent a partial transition to the pure photonic state. A catastrophic reversion to the state-three quantum vacuum, in which all matter was massless ...

The photo-leptonic flash surged through the membrane. The few arms that were still functioning were snapped backwards like broken fingers. There was a brief, furious sizzle of plasma discharge and then the bubble swept larger, engulfing
Nightshade
and dissipating at the same time. Skade felt it slam through her, like a sudden cold front on a warm day. At the same time a shock wave shook the ship, throwing Skade against a wall. Ordinarily the wall would have deformed to absorb the energy of the collision, but this time the impact was hard and metallic.

Yet the ship remained around her. She was able to think. She could still hear klaxons and emergency messages, and the barricades were still closing. But the excursion event had passed. The bubble had shattered, but while it had damaged her ship - perhaps profoundly, perhaps beyond the point of repair - it had not destroyed it.

Skade willed her consciousness rate back down to her normal processing speed. Her crest throbbed with the excess blood heat it had to dissipate - she felt light-headed - but that would soon pass. She appeared to have suffered no injuries, even in the violent crash against the wall. Her armour moved at her will, undamaged by the impact. She took hold of a wall restraint and tugged herself into the middle of the corridor. She had no weight, for
Nightshade
was drifting and had never been equipped for spin-generated gravity.

Molenka?

There was no response. The entire shipboard network was down, preventing neural communication unless the subjects were extremely close to each other. But she knew where Molenka had been before the bubble had swelled out of control. She called aloud, but there was still no answer, and then set off in the direction of the machinery. The critical volume was still pressurised, though she had to persuade the internal doors to let her through.

The glossy, curved surfaces of the alien machinery, like black glass, had shifted since she was last within this part of the ship. She wondered how much of the change had happened during the failed attempt to expand the bubble. The air prickled with ozone and a dozen less familiar smells, and against the continuous background of klaxons and spoken alarms she heard sparking and shearing sounds.

‘Molenka?’ she called again.

[Skade.] The neural response was incredibly weak, but it was recognisably Molenka. She was close now, certainly.

Skade pushed forwards, hand over hand, the movements of her armour stiff. The machinery surrounded her on all sides, smooth black ledges and protrusions, like the water-carved rock in some ancient underground cavern. It widened out, admitting her to an occlusion five or six metres from side to side. The scalloped walls were studded with data-input sockets. A window set into the far side of the chamber offered a view of the smashed and buckled containment machinery jutting from the rear of her ship. Even now some of the arms were still moving, ticking lazily back and forth like the last twitching limbs of a dying creature. Seen with her eyes, the damage appeared much worse than she had been led to believe. Her ship had been gutted, its viscera ripped out for inspection.

But that was not what drew Skade’s attention. In the approximate centre of the occlusion floated an undulating sac, its skin a milky translucence behind which something shifted in and out of visibility. The sac was five-pointed, throwing out blunt pseudopodia that corresponded in proportion and arrangement to the head and limbs of a human. Indeed, Skade saw, the thing within it was human, a shape she glimpsed in shattered parts rather than any unified whole. There was a ripple of dark clothing and a ripple of paler flesh.

Molenka?

Though she was only metres away, the reply felt astonishingly distant.

[Yes. It’s me. I’m trapped, Skade. Trapped inside part of the bubble.]

Skade shivered, impressed by the woman’s calm. She was clearly going to die, and yet her reporting of her predicament had an admirable detachment. It was the attitude of a true Conjoiner, convinced that her essence would live on in the wider consciousness of the Mother Nest, and that physical death amounted only to the removal of an inessential peripheral element from a much more significant whole. But, Skade reminded herself, they were a long way from the Mother Nest now.
The bubble, Molenka?

[It fragmented as it passed through the ship. It glued itself to me, almost deliberately. Almost as if it was looking for someone to surround, someone to embed within itself.] The five-pointed thing wobbled revoltingly, hinting at some awful instability that was on the point of collapsing.

What state are you in, Molenka?

[It must be state one, Skade ... I don’t feel any different. Just trapped . . . and
distant
. I feel very, very distant.] The bubble fragment began to contract, exactly as Molenka had said it was likely to do. The body-shaped membrane shrunk down until its surface conformed closely with Molenka’s body. For a dreadful moment she looked quite normal, except that she was covered in a shifting glaze of pearly light. Skade dared to hope that the bubble would choose that instant to collapse, freeing Molenka. But at the same time she knew it was not about to happen.