The Revelation Space Collection

the corvette’s interior. There was barely room for the suits, but there was even less room to put them on.

Skade?

[Yes, Clavain?]

I think it’s safe to tell me where we’re headed now, isn’t it?

[Just follow the flight plan and we’ll arrive there in good time. The Master of Works will be expecting us.]

Master of Works? Anyone I’ve met? He caught the sly curve of Skade’s smile, reflected in the corvette’s window.

[You’ll soon have the pleasure, Clavain.]

He didn’t need to be told that wherever they were going was still in the same part of the cometary halo that contained the Mother Nest. There was nothing out here but vacuum and comets, and even the comets were scarce. The Conjoiners had turned some comets into decoys to lure in the enemy, and had placed sensors, booby-traps and jamming systems on others, but he was not aware of any such activities taking place so close to home.

He tapped into systemwide newsfeeds as they flew. Only the most partisan enemy agencies pretended that there was any chance of a Demarchist victory now. Most of them were talking openly of defeat, though it was always worded in more ambiguous terms: cessation of hostilities; concession to some enemy demands; reopening of negotiations with the Conjoiners… the litany went on and on, but it was not difficult to read between the lines.

Attacks against Conjoiner assets had grown less and less frequent, with a commensurately dwindling success rate. Now the enemy was concentrating on protecting its own bases and strongholds, and even there they were failing. Most of the bases needed to be resupplied with provisions and armaments from the main production centres, which meant convoys of robot craft strung out on long, lonely trajectories across the system. The Conjoiners picked them off with ease; it was not even worth capturing their cargoes. The Demarchists had launched crash programmes to recover some of the expertise in nano-fabrication they had enjoyed before the Melding Plague, but the rumours coming out of their war labs hinted at grisly failures; of whole research teams turned into grey slurry by runaway replicators. It was like the twenty-first century all over again.

And the more desperate they got, the worse the failures became.

Conjoiner occupation forces had successfully seized a number of outlying settlements and quickly established puppet regimes, enabling day-to-day life to continue much as it had before. They had not so far embarked on mass neural conversion programmes, but their critics said it would only be a matter of time before the populaces were subjugated by Conjoiner implants, enslaved into their crushingly uniform hive mind. Resistance groups had made several damaging strikes against Conjoiner power in those puppet states, with loose alliances of Skyjacks, pigs, banshees and other systemwide ne’er-do-wells banding together against the new authority. All they were doing, Clavain thought, was hastening the likelihood that some form of neural conscription would have to take place, if only for the public good.

But so far Yellowstone and its immediate environs — the Rust Belt, the high-orbit habitats and carousels and the starship parking swarms — had not been contested. The Ferrisville Convention, though it had its own problems, was still maintaining a facade of control. It had long suited both sides to have a neutral zone, a place where spies could exchange information and where covert agents from both sides could mingle with third parties and sweet-talk possible collaborators, sympathisers or defectors. Some said that even this was only a temporary state of affairs; that the Conjoiners would not stop at occupying most of the system; they had held Yellowstone for a few short decades and would not throw away a chance to claim her for good. Their earlier occupation had been a pragmatic intervention at the invitation of the Demarchists, but the second would be an exercise in totalitarian control like nothing history had seen for centuries.

So it was said. But what if even that was a hopelessly optimistic forecast?

Skade had told him that the signals from the lost weapons had been detected more than thirty years earlier. The memories he had been given and the data he now had access to confirmed her story. But there was no explanation for why the recovery of the weapons had suddenly become a matter of vital urgency to the Mother Nest. Skade had said that the war had made it difficult to stage an attempt any sooner than now, but that was surely only part of the truth. There had to be something else: a crisis, or the threat of a crisis, which made the recovery of the weapons vastly more important than it had been before. Something had scared the Inner Sanctum.

Clavain wondered if Skade — and by implication the Inner Sanctum — knew something about the wolves that he had yet to be told. Since Galiana’s return, the wolves had been classified as a disturbing but distant threat, something to worry about only when humankind began to push deeper into interstellar space. But what if some new intelligence had been received? What if the wolves were closer?

He wanted to dismiss the idea, but found himself unable to do so. For the remainder of the trip his thoughts circled like vultures, examining the idea from every angle, mentally stripping it to the bone. It was only when Skade again pushed her thoughts into his head that he forced himself to bury his internal enquiries beneath conscious thought.

[We’re nearly there, Clavain. You appreciate that none of what you see here can be shared with the rest of the Mother Nest?]

Of course. I hope you were discreet about whatever you were doing out here. If you’d drawn the enemy’s attention you could have compromised everything.

[But we didn’t, Clavain.]

That’s not the point. There weren’t supposed to be any operations within ten light-hours of—

[Listen, Clavain.] She leaned forwards from the tight confines of her seat, the restraint webbing taut against the black curves of her spacesuit. [There’s something you need to grasp: the war isn’t our main concern any more. We’re going to win it.]

Don’t underestimate the Demarchists.

[Oh, I won’t. But we must keep them in perspective. The only serious issue now is the recovery of the hell- class weapons.]

Does it have to be recovery? Or would you settle for destruction? Clavain watched her reaction carefully. Even after his admittance to the Closed Council Skade’s mind was closed to him.

[Destruction, Clavain? Why on Earth would we want to destroy them?]

You told me that your main objective was to stop them from falling into the wrong hands.

[That remains the case, yes.]

So you’d allow them to be destroyed? That would achieve the same end, wouldn’t it? And I imagine it’d be very much easier from a logistical point of view.

[Recovery is our preferred outcome.]

Preferred?

[Very much preferred, Clavain.]

* * *

Presently, the corvette’s motors burned harder. Barely visible, a dark cometary husk hoved out of the darkness. The ship’s forward floods glanced across its surface, hunting and questing. The comet spun slowly, more rapidly than the Mother Nest but still within reasonable limits. Clavain judged the size of the filthy snowball to be perhaps seven or eight kilometers across — an order of magnitude smaller than home. It could easily have been hidden within the Mother Nest’s hollowed-out core.

The corvette hovered close to the frothy black surface of the comet, arresting its drift with stuttering spikes of violet-flamed thrust before firing anchoring grapples. They slammed into the ground, piercing the nearly invisible epoxy skein that had been thrown around the comet for structural reinforcement.

You’ve been busy little beavers. How many people have you got here, Skade, doing whatever it is they do?

[No one. Only a handful of us have ever visited here, and no one ever stays permanently. All activities have been totally automated. Periodically a Closed Council operative arrives to check on things, but for the most part the servitors have worked unsupervised.]

Servitors aren’t that clever.