The Revelation Space Collection (66 page)

The machines now extended booms tipped with sensors; magnetic resonance imagers to peer deep into the plague, differentiating between the machine, chimeric and organic strata which had once been a man. Sylveste had the drones pass what they saw to his eyes, appearing as a lilac-tinged overlay superimposed on the Captain. It was only with effort that he could make out the residual outline of the human instar which had become this; it was like a ghostly outline beneath the paint on a recycled canvas. But as the MRI sweep continued, the details grew progressively sharper, the man’s plague-distorted anatomy bleeding into clarity. That was when the horror of it could no longer be ignored. But Sylveste just stared.

‘Where are we - I mean you - going to begin?’ he asked, towards Calvin. ‘Are we healing a man or sterilising a machine?’

‘Neither,’ Calvin said drily. ‘We’re fixing the Captain, and I’m afraid he’s rather transcended both those categories.’

‘You understand magnificently,’ Sajaki said, standing back from the cold tableau to allow the Sylvestes an unimpeded view. ‘It’s no longer a matter of healing, or even repairing. I prefer to think of it as restoration.’

‘Warm him,’ Calvin said.

‘What?’

‘You heard. I want him warmed - just temporarily, I assure you. But long enough to take a few biopsies. I understand Volyova restricted her examinations to the plague periphery. That was diligent of her; she did well, and the samples she obtained are invaluable indices of the growth pattern, and of course she couldn’t have engineered her retrovirus without them. But now we need to reach into the core; to where there’s still living meat.’ He smiled, undoubtedly enjoying the revulsion which flickered across Sajaki’s face. So maybe there was some empathy there after all, Sylveste thought - or at least the atrophied stump of what it had once been. For an instant he felt kinship with the Triumvir.

‘What are you so interested in?’

‘His cells, of course.’ Calvin fingered the curlicued arm of his seat. ‘They say the Melding Plague corrupts our implants, blends them into the flesh, by subverting their replicating machinery. I think it goes beyond that. I think it tries to hybridise - tries to achieve some harmony between the living and the cybernetic. That’s what it’s doing here, after all - nothing more malign than trying to hybridise the Captain with his own cybernetics and the ship. It’s almost benign; almost artistic, almost purposeful.’

‘You wouldn’t be saying that if you were where he is now,’ Sajaki said.

‘Of course not. That’s why I want to help him. And why I need to see into his cells. I want to know if the plague has touched his DNA - whether it’s tried to hijack his own cellular machinery.’

Sajaki extended a hand towards the chill. ‘Go ahead, in that case. You’ve permission to warm him. But only for as long as it takes. Then I want him back under, until it’s time to operate. And I don’t want those samples leaving here.’

Sylveste noticed that the Triumvir’s outstretched hand was shaking.

‘All this has something to do with a war,’ Khouri said in the spider-room. ‘That much I’m clear about. The Dawn War, they called it. It was a long time ago. Millions of years back.’

‘How would you know?’

‘The Mademoiselle gave me a lesson in galactic history, just so I’d appreciate what was at stake. And it worked, too. Can’t you accept that going along with Sylveste is not a good idea?’

‘I was never remotely of the opinion it was.’

Pull the other one, Khouri thought. Volyova was still childishly curious about Cerberus/Hades, even now that she knew it contained something dangerous. More so, in fact. Before, the mystery had consisted of a single anomalous neutrino signature. Now she had seen the alien machinery for herself, via Alicia’s recording. No; in some respects Volyova was as fascinated by the place as Sylveste. The difference was, she could still be reasoned with. Volyova still had a residual core of sanity.

‘Do you think we’d stand a chance of persuading Sajaki of the risks?’

‘Not much. We’ve kept too much from him. He’d kill us just for that. I’m still worried about him trawling you. He mentioned it again just now, you know. I managed to deflect him, but . . .’ She sighed. ‘In any case, Sylveste is the one pulling the strings now. What Sajaki does or doesn’t want is almost irrelevant.’

‘Then we have to get to Sylveste.’

‘It won’t work, Khouri. No amount of rational argument is going to sway him now - and I’m afraid what you’ve told me doesn’t even qualify as that.’

‘But you believe it.’

Volyova raised a hand. ‘I believe some of it, Khouri - but that isn’t the same thing. I’ve witnessed some of the things you claim to understand, like the incident with the cache-weapon. And we know alien forces are involved on some level, which makes it difficult for me to dismiss your Dawn War story completely. But we still don’t have anything resembling the big picture.’ She paused. ‘Maybe when I’ve finished analysing that splinter . . .’

‘What splinter?’

‘The one Manoukhian planted on you.’ Volyova told her the rest; how she had found the splinter during the medical examination she had conducted after Khouri’s recruitment. ‘At the time I just assumed it was a piece of shrapnel from your soldiering days. Then I wondered why your own medics hadn’t removed it earlier. I suppose I should have realised there was something strange about it even then . . . but it clearly wasn’t any kind of functional implant, just a piece of jagged metal.’

‘And you haven’t worked out what it is yet?’

‘No, I . . .’ But that was the truth of it, as Khouri learned. There was a lot more to that little shard than met the eye. The blend of metals was fairly unusual, even for someone who had worked with some very strange alloys indeed. Also, Volyova said, it had what looked like odd manufacturing flaws, but which could just as easily have been stresses worked into the metal long afterwards; bizarre nanoscale fatigue patterns. ‘Still, I’m nearly there,’ she said.

‘Maybe it’ll tell us what we need. But one thing won’t change. I can’t do the one thing which would get us out of this mess, can I? I can’t kill Sylveste.’

‘No. But if the stakes become higher - if it becomes absolutely clear that he must be killed - then I think we have to begin thinking about what would be required.’

It took a moment for the true meaning of what Volyova was saying to sink in.

‘Suicide?’

Volyova nodded dourly. ‘Meanwhile I have to do the best possible job I can of granting Sylveste’s wish, or else I put us all in danger.’

‘That’s what you don’t understand,’ Khouri said. ‘I’m not saying that we’ll all die if the attack against Cerberus isn’t successful, which is what you seem to assume. I’m saying that something terrible is going to happen, even if the attack works. That’s exactly why the Mademoiselle wanted him dead.’

Volyova had sealed her lips and shaken her head slowly, for all the world like a parent admonishing a child.

‘I can’t start a mutiny on the basis of some vague premonition.’

‘Then maybe I’ll have to start it myself.’

‘Be careful, Khouri. Be very careful indeed. Sajaki’s a more dangerous man than you can even begin to imagine. He’s waiting for any excuse to crack your head open and see what’s inside. He might not even wait for one. Sylveste is . . . I don’t know. I’d think twice about crossing him as well. Especially now that he has the smell of it.’

‘Then we have to get to him indirectly. Through Pascale. Do you understand? I’ll tell her everything, if I think she can get him to see sense.’

‘She won’t believe you.’

‘She might if you back me up. You’ll do it, won’t you?’ Khouri looked at Volyova. The Triumvir stared back for a long moment, and might have been on the verge of answering when her bracelet began chirping. She pulled back the cuff of her sleeve and looked at the readout. She was wanted upship.

The bridge, as always, seemed too large for the few people in it, dispersed sparsely throughout the chamber’s enormous and redundant volume. Pathetic, Volyova thought - and for a moment considered calling up some of her beloved dead, to at least fill out the place a bit and add a sense of ceremony to the occasion. But that would be demeaning, and in any case - despite the amount of thought she had expended on this project - she was not feeling remotely elated. Her recent discussions with Khouri had killed any lingering positive feelings she might have had for this whole enterprise. Khouri was right, of course - they really were taking an unthinkable risk just by being near to Cerberus/Hades - but there was nothing she could do about that. It was not simply that they ran the risk of the ship being destroyed. According to Khouri, that might actually be preferable to having Sylveste succeed in getting inside Cerberus. The ship and its crew might just survive that . . . but their short-term good fortune would be only a prelude to something much, much worse. If what Khouri had told her about the Dawn War was halfway to being the truth, it would be very bad indeed, not just for Resurgam - not just for this system - but for humanity as a whole.

She was about to make what might be the worst mistake of her career, and it was not even properly a mistake, since she had no choice in the matter.

‘Well,’ Triumvir Hegazi said, lording over her from his seat, ‘I hope this is worth it, Ilia.’

So did she - but the last thing she was going to do was concede any of her feelings of unease to Hegazi. ‘Bear in mind,’ she said, addressing them all, ‘that as soon as this is done, there won’t be any going back. This is going to look like bad news in anyone’s book. We might elicit an immediate response from the planet.’

‘Or we might not,’ Sylveste said. ‘I’ve told you repeatedly, Cerberus won’t do anything to draw unwarranted attention to itself.’

‘Then we’d better hope your theories are right.’

‘I think we can trust the good doctor,’ Sajaki said from Sylveste’s flank. ‘He’s just as vulnerable as the rest of us.’

Volyova felt an urge to get things over with. She illuminated the previously dark holo, filling it with a realtime image of the
Lorean
. The wreck showed no sign of having changed in any way since they had first found it - the hull was still peppered with awful wounds, inflicted, as they now knew, immediately after Cerberus had attacked and destroyed the probes. But within the ship, Volyova’s machines had been busy. There had been only a tiny swarm of them at first, spawned by the robot she had sent to find Alicia’s log entries. But the swarm had grown swiftly, consuming metal in the ship to fuel expansion, interfacing with the ship’s own self-replicating repair and redesign systems, most of which had failed to reboot after the Cerberus attack. Other populations would have followed - and then, a day or so after the first impregnation, the work proper would commence: transformation of the ship’s interior and skin. To a casual observer, none of this activity would have been apparent, but any kind of industry produced heat, and the outer layer of the wrecked ship had grown slightly warmer over the last few days, betraying the furious activity inside.

Volyova stroked her bracelet, doublechecking that all the indications were nominal. In a moment it would begin; there was now nothing that she could do to arrest the process.

‘My God,’ Hegazi said.

The
Lorean
was changing: shedding its skin. Sections of the damaged outer hull were flaking away in great acres, the ship enveloping itself in a slowly expanding cocoon of shards. What was revealed underneath still had the same form as the wreck, but it was smoothly carapaced, like a snake’s new skin. The transformations had been really rather easy to impose - the
Lorean
, unlike the
Infinity
, did not fight back with replicating viruses of its own; did not resist her sculpting hand. If reshaping the
Infinity
was like trying to carve fire, the other ship had been clay in her hands.

The angle of the view shifted, as the sloughing debris caused the
Lorean
to turn about its long axis. The Conjoiner engines were still attached and working - and now she had control of them, delegated to her bracelet. They would probably never have reached sufficient functionality to push the ship to the edge of light, but that was not Volyova’s intention. The journey it had to make - the last journey it would ever make - was almost insultingly small for such a ship. And now the ship was mostly hollow, the interior volume compressed into the thickened walls of the conic hull. The cone was open at the base; the ship was like a huge pointed thimble.

‘Dan,’ she said. ‘My machines found Alicia’s body, and the other crew, of course. Most of the mutineers had been in reefersleep . . . but even they didn’t survive the attack.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I can have them returned here, if you wish. There’ll be a delay, of course - we’d have to send a shuttle over to retrieve them.’

Sylveste’s answer, when it came, was swifter than she had expected. She had assumed he would want to dwell on it for anything up to an hour or so. Instead, he said: ‘No. There can’t be any delay now. You’re right - Cerberus will have witnessed this activity.’

‘Then the bodies?’

When he spoke, it was as if his answer were the only reasonable course of action. ‘They’ll have to go down with it.’