The Revelation Space Collection

Chasm City ‘night’.

‘We wouldn’t have had any trouble getting into Lyle’s,’ she told him.

‘I don’t really like that place.’

‘Ah.’

‘Too many damned animals. When you work with monkeys all day… or not, as the case may be… being served by machines begins to seem like a bloody good idea.’

She nodded at him over the top of her menu. ‘Fair enough.’

The gimmick at Robotnik’s was that the staff were all servitors. It was one of the few places in the carousel, barring the heavy-industrial repair shops, where you saw any kind of machines doing manual labour. Even then the machines were ancient and clapped-out, the kind of cheap, rugged servitors that had always been immune to the plague, and which could still be manufactured despite the system’s much reduced industrial capability in the wake of the plague and the war. There was a certain antique charm to them, Antoinette supposed, but by the time she had watched one limping machine drop their beers four times between the bar and their table, the charm had begun to wear a little thin.

‘You don’t actually like this place, do you?’ she asked later. ‘It’s just that you like Lyle’s even less.’

‘You ask me, there’s something a tiny bit sick about that place, turning a major civic catastrophe into a bloody tourist attraction.’

‘Dad would probably have agreed with you.’

Xavier grunted something unintelligible. ‘So what happened with the spiders, anyway?’

Antoinette began picking the label off her beer bottle, just the way she had all those years ago when her father had first mentioned his preferred mode of burial. ‘I don’t really know.’

Xavier wiped foam from his lip. ‘Have a wild stab in the dark.’

‘I got into trouble. It was all going nicely — I was making a slow, controlled approach to Tangerine Dream — and then wham.’ She picked up a beer mat and stabbed a finger at it by way of explanation.

‘I’ve got a zombie ship dead ahead of me, about to hit the atmosphere itself. I painted it with my radar by mistake and got a bunch of attitude from the zombie pilot.’

‘But she didn’t chuck a missile at you by way of thanks?’

‘No. She must have been all out, or she didn’t want to make things worse by revealing her position with a tube launch. See, the reason she was doing the big dive — the same as me — was that she had a spider ship chasing her.’

‘That wasn’t good,’ Xavier said.

‘No, not good at all. That’s why I had to get into the atmosphere so quickly. Fuck the safeguards, let’s get down there. Beast obliged, but there was a lot of damage on the way in.’

‘If it was that or get captured by the spiders, I’d say you did the right thing. I take it you waited down there until the spiders had passed on?’

‘Not exactly, no.’

‘Antoinette…’ Xavier chided.

‘Hey, listen. Once I’d buried my father, that was the last place I wanted to hang around. And Beast wasn’t enjoying it one bit. The ship wanted out as much as I did. Problem is, we got tokamak failure on the up and out.’

‘You were dead meat.’

‘We should have been,’ Antoinette said, nodding. ‘Especially as the spiders were still nearby.’

Xavier leant back in his chair and swigged an inch of beer. Now that he had her safe, now that he knew how things had turned out, he was obviously enjoying hearing the story. ‘So what happened — did you get the tokamak to reboot?’

‘Later, yes, when we were back in empty space. It lasted long enough to get me back to Yellowstone, but I needed the tugs for the slow-down.’

‘So you managed to reach escape velocity, or were you still able to insert into orbit?’

‘Neither, Xave. We were falling back to the planet. So I did the only thing I could, which was ask for help.’ She finished her own beer, watching his reaction.

‘Help?’

‘From the spiders.’

‘No shit? You had the nerve — the balls — to do that?’

‘I’m not sure about the balls, Xave. But yes, I guess I had the nerve.’ She grinned. ‘Hell, what else was I going to do? Sit there and die? From my point of view, with a fuck of a lot of cloud coming up real fast, being conscripted into a hive mind suddenly didn’t seem like the worst thing in the world.’

‘I still can’t believe… even after that dream you’ve been replaying?’

‘I figured that had to be propaganda. The truth couldn’t be quite that bad.’

‘But maybe nearly as bad.’

‘When you’re about to die, Xave, you take what you can get.’

He pointed the open neck of the beer bottle at her. ‘But…’

She read his mind. ‘I’m still here, yeah. I’m glad you noticed.’

‘What happened?’

‘They saved me.’ She said it again, almost having to reassure herself that it had really happened. ‘The spiders saved me. Sent down some kind of drone missile, or tug, or whatever it was. The thing clamped on to the hull and gave me a shove — a big shove — all the way out of Tangerine Dream’s gravity well. Next thing I knew I was falling back to Yellowstone. Had to get the tokamak up and running, but at least now I had more than a few minutes to do it in.’

‘And the spiders… they left?’

She nodded vigorously. ‘Their main guy, this old geezer, he spoke to me just before they sent the drone. Gave me one hell of a warning, I admit. Said if we ever crossed paths again — like, ever — he’d kill me. I think he meant it, too.’

‘I suppose you have to count yourself lucky. I mean, not everyone gets let off with a warning where the spiders are concerned.’

‘I guess so, Xave.’

‘This old man — the spider — anyone we’d have heard of?’

She shook her head. ‘Said his name was Clavain, that’s all. Didn’t mean shit to me.’

‘Not the Clavain, obviously?’

She stopped fiddling with the beer mat and looked at him. ‘And who would the Clavain be, Xave?’

He looked at her as if she was faintly stupid, or at the very least worryingly forgetful. ‘History, Antoinette, that boring stuff about the past. You know — before the Melding Plague, all that jazz?’

‘I wasn’t born then, Xave. It’s not even of academic interest to me.’ She held her bottle up to the light. ‘I need another one. What are the chances of getting it in the next hour, do you think?’

Xavier clicked a finger at the nearest servitor. The machine spun around, stiffened itself, took a step in their direction and fell over.

But when she was back at their place, Antoinette began to wonder. In the evening, when she had blasted away the worst effects of the beer, leaving her head clear but ringingly delicate, she squirrelled herself into Xavier’s office, powered up the museum-piece terminal and set about querying the carousel’s data hub for information on Clavain. She had to admit that she was curious now, but even if she had been curious during the journey home from the gas giant she would have had to wait until now to access any extensive systemwide archives. It would have been too risky to send a query from Storm Bird, and the ship’s own memories were not the most compendious.

Antoinette had never known anything except a post-plague environment, so she had no expectations of actually finding any useful information, even if the data she was looking for might once have existed. The system’s data networks had been rebuilt almost from scratch during the post-plague years, and much that had been archived before then had been corrupted or erased during the crisis.