The Revelation Space Collection

happened to her, but it was enough to know that it had been Clavain’s doing. It did not matter that it might not have been intentional.

There were no accidents in treason.

Where is he?

[That’s the funny thing. No one seems to know. They had a fix on his exhaust. He was heading towards Eridani — towards what we assumed would be Yellowstone or the Rust Belt.]

The Demarchists would crucify him.

Remontoire nodded. [Clavain especially. But now it doesn’t look as if he was going there at all — not directly, anyway. He turned away from the sunward vector. We don’t know how far into his journey, since we lost his drive flame.]

We have optical monitors strewn through the halo. Surely he’ll have fallen into the line of sight of another one by now.

[The problem is that Clavain knows the positions of those monitors. He can make sure his beam doesn’t sweep across them. We have to keep reminding ourselves that he’s one of ours, Skade.]

Were missiles launched?

[Yes, but they never got close enough to establish their own fixes. They didn’t have enough fuel to make it back to the Nest, so we had to detonate them.]

She felt drool loosen itself and trail down her chin. We have to stop him, Remontoire. Grasp that.

[Even if we pick up Clavain’s signal again, he’d be out of effective missile range. And no other ships can catch a corvette.]

She bit down on her fury. We have the prototype.

[Even Nightshade isn’t that fast, not over solar-system-type distances.]

Skade said nothing for several seconds, calculating how much she could prudently reveal. This was Inner Sanctum business, after all, sensitive even by the clandestine standards of Closed Council. It is, Remontoire.

The door opened. One of the servitors ducked under and in, followed by Delmar. Remontoire stood and extended his hands, palms facing forwards.

[We just need another moment…]

Delmar stood by the door, arms folded. [I’m staying here, I’m afraid.]

Skade hissed at Remontoire. He moved closer, bending down so that their heads were only centimetres apart, permitting mind-to-mind contact without amplification by the room’s systems. It can be done. The prototype has a higher acceleration ceiling than you have assumed.

[How much higher?]

A lot. You’ll see. But all you need to know is that the prototype can get close enough to Clavain’s approximate position to pick up his trail again, and then close within weapons range. I’ll need you on the crew, of course. You’re a soldier, Remontoire. You know the weapons better than I do.

[Shouldn’t we be thinking of ways to bring him back alive?]

It’s a little bit late for that, wouldn’t you say?

Remontoire said nothing, but she knew she had made her point. And he would come around to her viewpoint soon enough. He was a Conjoiner to the core, and would therefore accept any course of action, no matter how ruthless, that benefited the Mother Nest. That was the difference between Remontoire and Clavain.

[Skade…]

Yes, Remontoire?

[If I should consent to your proposal…]

You’d have a demand of your own?

[Not a demand. A request. That Felka be allowed to join us.]

Skade narrowed her eyes. She was about to refuse when she realised that her grounds for doing so — that the operation had to remain entirely within the purview of the Closed Council — made no difference where Felka was concerned.

What possible good would Felka’s presence serve?

[That depends. If you intend to make this an execution squad she will be of no use to us at all. But if you have any intention of bringing Clavain back alive — and I think you must — then Felka’s usefulness cannot be under-estimated.]

Skade knew he was right, though it pained her to admit it. Clavain would have been an immensely valuable asset to the operation to recover the hell-class weapons, and his loss would make the operation very much more difficult. On one level, she could see the attraction of bringing him back into the fold, so that he could be pinned down and his hard-won expertise sucked out like so much bone marrow. But a live capture would be inordinately more difficult than a long-range kill, and until she succeeded there would remain the possibility of him reaching the other side. The Demarchists would be fascinated to hear about the new shipbuilding programme, the rumours of evacuation plans and savage new weapons.

Skade could not be certain, but she thought that the news might be enough to reinvigorate the enemy, gaining them allies who had thus far remained neutral. If the Demarchists rallied and managed to launch some kind of last-ditch attack on the Mother Nest, with the support of the Ultras and any number of previously neutral factions, all could be lost.

No. She had to kill Clavain; that was simply not open to debate. Equally, she had to give every impression that she was ready to act reasonably, just as she would have done under any other state of war. Which meant that she had to accept Felka’s presence.

This is blackmail, isn’t it?

[Not blackmail, Skade. Just negotiation. If any one of us can talk Clavain out of this, it has to be Felka.]

He won’t listen to her, even if…

[Even if he thinks she’s his daughter? Is that what you were going to say?]

He’s an old man, Remontoire. An old man with delusions. They’re not my responsibility.

The servitors moved aside to allow him to leave. She watched the seemingly detached ovoid of his face bob out of the room like a balloon. There had been instants in their conversation when she had almost sensed cracks in the neural blockade, pathways that Delmar had — through understandable oversight — not completely disabled. The cracks had been like strobe flashes, opening up brief frozen windows into Remontoire’s skull. Very probably he had not even been aware of her intrusions. Perhaps she had even imagined them.

But if she had imagined them, she had also imagined the horror that went with them. And the horror came from what Remontoire was seeing.

Delmar… I really would like to know the facts…

[Later, Skade, after you’ve been healed. Then you can know. Until then, I’d rather put you back into coma.]

Show me now, you bastard.

He came closer to her side. The first of the swan-necked servitors towered over him, the chrome segments of its neck gleaming. The machine angled its head back and forth, digesting what lay below it.

[All right. But don’t say you weren’t warned.]

The blockades came down like heavy metal shutters: clunk, clunk, clunk through her skull. A barrage of neural data crashed in. She saw herself through Delmar’s eyes. The thing down on the medical couch was her, recognisably so — her head was bizarrely unharmed — but she was not remotely the right shape. She felt a twisting spasm of revulsion, as if she had just accessed a photograph from some bleak pre-industrial archive of medical nightmares. She wanted desperately to turn the page, to move on to the next pitiful atrocity.

She had been bisected.

The tether must have fallen across her from her left shoulder to her right hip, a precise diagonal severance. It had taken her legs and her left arm. Carapacial machinery hugged the wounds: gloss-white humming scabs of medical armour, like huge pus-filled blisters. Fluid lines erupted from the machinery and trailed into white modules squatting by her side. She looked as if she was bursting out of a white steel chrysalis. Or being consumed by it,