The Revelation Space Collection

‘Yes?’

‘Sajaki thinks there’s a man there who can help you.’

The Captain pondered this. On her bracelet she had a map of his brain: she could see colours squirming across it like armies merging on a battlefield. ‘That man must be Calvin Sylveste,’ the Captain said.

‘Calvin Sylveste is dead.’

‘The other one, then. Dan Sylveste. Is that the man Sajaki seeks?’

‘I can’t imagine it’s anyone else.’

‘He won’t come willingly. He didn’t last time.’ There was a moment of silence; quantum temperature fluctuations pushing the Captain back below consciousness. ‘Sajaki must be aware of that,’ he said, returning.

‘I’m sure Sajaki has considered all the possibilities,’ Volyova said, in a manner which made it clear she was sure of anything but that. But she would be careful of speaking against the other Triumvir. Sajaki had always been the Captain’s closest adjutant — the two of them went back a long way; times long before Volyova had joined the crew. To the best of her knowledge, no one else — including Sajaki — ever spoke to the Captain, or even knew that there was a way to do so. But there was no point taking stupid risks — even given the Captain’s erratic memory.

‘Something’s troubling you, Ilia. You’ve always been able to confide in me. Is it Sylveste?’

‘It’s more local than that.’

‘Something aboard the ship, then?’

It was not something to which she was ever going to become totally accustomed, Volyova knew, but in recent weeks visiting the Captain had begun to take on definite tones of normality. As if visiting a cryogenically cooled corpse infected with a retarded but potentially all-consuming plague was merely one of life’s unpleasant but necessary elements; something that, now and again, everyone had to do. Now, though, she was taking their relationship a step further — about to ignore the same risk which had stopped her expressing her misgivings about Sajaki.

‘It’s about the gunnery,’ she said. ‘You remember that, don’t you? The room from which the cache-weapons can be controlled?’

‘I think so, yes. What about it?’

‘I’ve been training a recruit to become Gunnery Officer; to assume the gunnery seat and interface with the cache-weapons through neural implants.’

‘Who was this recruit?’

‘Someone called Boris Nagorny. No; you never met him — he came aboard only recently, and I tended to keep him away from the others when I could help it. I would never have brought him down here, for obvious reasons.’ Namely that the Captain’s contagion might have reached Nagorny’s implants if she had allowed the two of them to get too close. Volyova sighed. She was getting to the crux of her confession now. ‘Nagorny was always slightly unstable, Captain. In many ways, a borderline psychopath was more useful to me than someone wholly sane — at least, I thought so at the time. But I underestimated the degree of Nagorny’s psychosis.’

‘He got worse?’

‘It started not long after I put the implants in and allowed him to tap into the gunnery. He began to complain of nightmares. Very bad ones.’

‘How unfortunate for the poor fellow.’

Volyova understood. What the Captain had undergone — what the Captain was still in the process of undergoing — would make most people’s nightmares seem very tame phantasms indeed. Whether or not he experienced pain was a debatable point, but what was pain anyway, compared to the knowledge that one was being eaten alive — and transformed at the same time — by something inexpressibly alien?

‘I can’t guess what those nightmares were really like,’ Volyova said. ‘All I know is that for Nagorny — a man who already had enough horrors loose in his head for most of us — they were too much.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I changed everything — the whole gunnery interface system, even the implants in his head. None of it worked. The nightmares continued.’

‘You’re certain they had something to do with the gunnery?’

‘I wanted to deny it at first, but there was a clear correlation with the sessions when I had him in the seat.’ She lit herself another cigarette, the orange tip the only remotely warm thing anywhere near the Captain. Finding a fresh packet of cigarettes had been one of the few joyful moments of recent weeks. ‘So I changed the system again, and still it didn’t work. If anything, he just got worse.’ She paused. ‘That was when I told Sajaki of my problems.’

‘And Sajaki’s response was?’

‘That I should discontinue the experiments, at least until we’d arrived around Yellowstone. Let Nagorny spend a few years in reefersleep, and see if that cured his psychosis. I was welcome to continue tinkering with the gunnery, but I wasn’t to put Nagorny in the seat again.’

‘Sounds like very reasonable advice to me. Which of course you disregarded.’

She nodded, paradoxically relieved that the Captain had guessed her crime, without her having to spell it out.

‘I woke a year ahead of the others,’ Volyova said. ‘To give me time to oversee the system and keep an eye on how you were doing. That was what I did for a few months, too. Until I decided to wake Nagorny as well.’

‘More experiments?’

‘Yes. Until a day ago.’ She sucked hard on the cigarette.

‘This is like drawing teeth, Ilia. What happened yesterday?’

‘Nagorny disappeared.’ There; she’d said it now. ‘He had a particularly bad episode and tried to attack me. I defended myself, but he escaped. He’s elsewhere in the ship. I have no idea where.’

The Captain pondered this for long moments. She could tell what he must be thinking. It was a big ship and there were whole regions of it through which nothing could be tracked, where sensors had stopped working. It would be even harder trying to find someone who was actively hiding.

‘You’re going to have to find him,’ the Captain said. ‘You can’t have him still at large when Sajaki and the others awaken.’

‘And then what?’

‘You’ll probably have to kill him. Do it cleanly, and you can put his body back in the reefersleep unit and then arrange for the unit to fail.’

‘Make it look like an accident, you mean?’

‘Yes.’ There was, as usual, absolutely no expression on the part of the Captain’s face she could see through the casket window. He was no more capable of altering his expression than a statue.

It was a good solution — one that, in her preoccupation with the nature of the problem, she had failed to devise herself. Until then, she had feared any confrontation with Nagorny because it might put her in the position of having to kill him. Such an outcome had seemed unacceptable — but as always, no outcome was unacceptable if you looked at it the right way.

‘Thank you, Captain,’ Volyova said. ‘You’ve been very helpful. Now — with your permission — I’m going to cool you again.’

‘You’ll be back again, won’t you? I do so enjoy our little conversations, Ilia.’

‘I wouldn’t miss them for the world,’ she said, and then told her bracelet to drop his brain temperature by fifty millikelvin; all it would take to send him to dreamless, thoughtless oblivion. Or so she hoped.

Volyova finished her cigarette in silence and then looked away from the Captain, along the dark curve of the corridor. Somewhere out there — somewhere else in the ship — Nagorny was waiting, bearing her what she knew to be the deepest of grudges. He was ill himself now; sick in the head.

Like a dog that had to be put down.

‘I think I know what it is,’ Sylveste said, when the last obstructing block of stone had been removed from the obelisk’s cladding, revealing the upper two metres of the object.

‘Well?’

‘It’s a map of the Pavonis system.’

‘Something tells me you’d already guessed that,’ Pascale said, squinting through her goggles at the complex