The Revelation Space Collection

any timescale shorter than a few million years. Most species did not endure that long, so they saw only grim continuity. The only way that the decline could be observed was in the much longer term, evidenced not in the records of individual cultures but in the subtle differences between them. The ruthlessness quotient of the Inhibitors remained as high as ever, but their methods were becoming less efficient, their response times slower. Some profound and subtle flaw in the machines’ design had worked its way to the surface. Now and then a culture slipped through the net, managing to spread into interstellar space before the Inhibitors could contain and cull it. The cull then became more difficult; less like surgery and more like butchery.

The Amarantin, the birdlike creatures who had lived on Resurgam a million years earlier, had been one such species. The effort to cleanse them had been protracted, allowing many of them to slip into various hidden sanctuaries. The last act of the culling machines had been to annihilate Resurgam’s biosphere by triggering a catastrophic stellar flare. Delta Pavonis had since settled down to normal sunlike activity, but it was only now that Resurgam was beginning to support life again.

Their work done, the Inhibitors had vanished back into the stellar cold. Nine hundred and ninety thousand years passed.

Then humans came, drawn to the enigma of the vanished Amarantin culture. Their leader had been Sylveste, the ambitious scion of a wealthy Yellowstone family. By the time Khouri, Volyova and Nostalgia for Infinity arrived in the system, Sylveste had put in place his plans for exploring the neutron star on the system’s edge, convinced that Hades had something to do with the Amarantin extinction. Sylveste had coerced the crew of the starship into helping him, using its cache of weapons to break through shells of defensive machinery and finally penetrating to the heart of a moon-sized artefact — they called it Cerberus — which orbited the neutron star.

Sylveste had been right all along about the Amarantin. But in verifying his theory he had also sprung a primed Inhibitor trap. At the heart of the Cerberus object, Sylveste had died in a massive matter-antimatter explosion.

And at the same time he had not died at all. Khouri knew; she had met and spoken to Sylveste after his ‘death’. So far as she was capable of understanding it, Sylveste and his wife had been stored as simulations in the crust of the neutron star itself. Hades, it turned out, was one of the sanctuaries that the Amarantin had used when they were being harried by the Inhibitors. It was an element of something much older than either the Amarantin or the Inhibitors, a transcendent information storage and processing system, a vast archive. The Amarantin had found a way inside it, and so, much later, had Sylveste. That was as much as Khouri knew, and as much as she wanted to know.

She had met the stored Sylveste only once. In the more than sixty years that had passed since then — the time that Volyova had spent carefully infiltrating the very society that feared and loathed her — Khouri had allowed herself to forget that Sylveste was still out there, was still in some sense alive in the Hades computational matrix. On those rare occasions when she did think about him, she found herself wondering if he ever gave a moment’s thought to the consequences of his actions all those years ago; if memories of the Inhibitors ever stirred him from vain dreams of his own brilliance. She doubted it, for Sylveste had not struck her as someone overly troubled by the results of his own deeds. And in any case, by Sylveste’s accelerated reckoning, for time passed very rapidly in the Hades matrix, the events must have been centuries of subjective time in his past, as inconsequential as childhood misdeeds. Very little could touch him in there, so what was the point of worrying about him?

But that hardly helped those who were still outside the matrix. Khouri and Volyova had spent only twenty of those sixty-plus years out of reefersleep, for their infiltration scheme had been necessarily slow and episodic. But of those twenty years, Khouri doubted that a single day had passed when she had not thought of — and worried about — the prospect of the Inhibitors.

Now at least her worry had transmuted into certainty. They were here; the thing that she had dreaded had finally started.

And yet it was not to be a quick, brutal culling. Something titanic was being brought into existence, something that required the raw material of three entire worlds. For the time being the activities of the Inhibitors could not be detected from Resurgam, even with the tracking systems put in place to spot approaching lighthuggers. But Khouri doubted that this could continue to be the case. Sooner or later the activities of the alien machines would exceed some threshold and the citizenry would begin to glimpse strange apparitions in the sky.

Very likely, all hell would break loose.

But by then it might not even matter.

TEN

Xavier saw one ship detach itself from the bright flow of other vessels on the main approach corridor to Carousel New Copenhagen, tugged down his helmet’s binoculars and swept space until he locked on to the ship itself. The image enlarged and stabilised, the spined pufferfish profile of Storm Bird rotating as the ship executed a slow turn. The Taurus IV salvage tug was still nosing against its hull, like a parasite looking for one last nibble.

Xavier blinked hard, requesting a higher magnification zoom. The image swelled, wobbled and then sharpened.

‘Dear God,’ he whispered. ‘What the hell have you done to my ship?’

Something awful had happened to his beloved Storm Bird since the last time he had seen it. Whole parts were gone, ripped clean away. The hull looked as if it had seen its last service some time during the Belle Epoque, not a couple of months ago. He wondered where Antoinette had taken it — straight into the heart of Lascaille’s Shroud, perhaps? Either that or she had had a serious run-in with well-armed banshees.

‘It’s not your ship, Xavier. I just pay you to look after it now and then. If I want to trash it, that’s entirely my business.’

‘Shit.’ He had forgotten that the suit-to-ship comm channel was still open. ‘I didn’t mean…’

‘It’s not as bad as it looks, Xave. Trust me on that.’

The salvage tug detached at the last minute, executed a needlessly complex pirouette and then was gone, curving away to its home on the other side of Carousel New Copenhagen. Xavier had already calculated how much the salvage tug was going to cost in the end. It didn’t matter who ultimately picked up that tab. It was going to be one hell of a sting, whether it was him or Antoinette, since their businesses were so intertwined. They were well into the red at the favour bank, and it was going to take about a year of retroactive favours before they groped their way back into the black…

But things could have been worse. Three days ago he had more or less given up hope of ever seeing Antoinette again. It was depressing how quickly the elation at finding her alive had degenerated into his usual nagging worries about insolvency. Dumping that hauler certainly hadn’t helped…

Xavier grinned. But hell, it had been worth it.

When she had announced her approach Xavier had suited up, gone out on to the carousel’s skin and hired a skeletal thruster trike. He gunned the trike across the fifteen kilometres to Storm Bird, then orbited it around the ship, satisfying himself that the damage looked every bit as bad up close as he had first thought it was. None of it would cripple the ship for good; it was all technically fixable — but it would cost money to put right.

He swung around, bringing the trike forwards so that he was ahead of Storm Bird. Against the dark hull he saw the two bright parallel slits of the cabin windows. Antoinette was a tiny silhouetted figure in the uppermost cabin, the small bridge that she only used during delicate docking/undocking procedures. She was reaching up to work controls above her head, a clipboard tucked under one arm. She looked so small and vulnerable that all his anger drained out of him in an instant. Instead of worrying about the damage, he should have been rejoicing that the ship had kept her alive all this time.

‘You’re right; it’s superficial,’ he said. ‘We’ll get it fixed easily enough. Do you have enough thruster control to do a hard docking?’