The Revelation Space Collection

two suited figures slipped ahead of him, buckling into massive antique-looking acceleration couches. While he searched for somewhere to anchor himself, Clavain appraised the flight deck, or bridge, or whatever Antoinette called it. Though it was about as far from a corvette or Nightshade as a space vessel could be in terms of capability, function and technological elegance, he had no difficulty orientating himself. It was easy when you had lived through so many centuries of ship design, seen so many cycles of technological boom- and-bust. It was simply a question of dusting off the right set of memories.

‘There,’ Antoinette said, jabbing a finger at a radar sphere. ‘Two of the fuckers, just like before.’ Her voice was low, evidently intended for Xavier’s ears alone.

‘Twenty-eight thousand klicks,’ he replied, in the same near-whisper, looking over her shoulder at the tumbling digits of the distance indicator. ‘Closing at… fifteen klicks a second, on a near-perfect intercept trajectory. They’ll start slowing soon, ready for final approach and forced hard docking.’

‘So they’ll be here in… what?’ Clavain ran some numbers through his head. ‘Thirty, forty minutes?’

Xavier stared back at him with a strange look on his face. ‘Who asked you?’

‘I thought you might value my thoughts on the matter.’

‘Have you dealt with banshees before, Clavain?’ Xavier asked.

‘Until a few hours ago I don’t think I’d ever heard of them.’

‘Then I don’t think you’re going to be a fuck of a lot of use, are you?’

Antoinette spoke softly again. ‘Xave… how long do you think we’ve got before they’re on us?’

‘Assuming the usual approach pattern and deceleration tolerances… thirty… thirty-five minutes.’

‘So Clavain wasn’t far off.’

‘A lucky guess,’ Xavier said.

‘Actually, it wasn’t a lucky guess at all,’ Clavain said, folding down a flap from the wall and strapping himself to it. ‘I may not have dealt with banshees before, but I’ve certainly dealt with hostile approach-and-boarding scenarios.’ He decided they could stand not knowing that he had often been the one doing the hostile boarding.

‘Beast,’ Antoinette said, raising her voice, ‘you ready with those evasion patterns we ran through before?’

‘The relevant routines are uploaded and ready for immediate execution, Little Miss. There is, however, a not inconsiderable problem.’

Antoinette sighed. ‘Lay it on me, Beast.’

‘Our fuel-consumption margins are already slender, Little Miss. Evasive patterns eat heavily into our reserve supplies.’

‘Do we have enough left to throw another pattern and still make it back to the Belt before hell freezes over?’

‘Yes, Little Miss, but with very little…’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Antoinette’s gauntleted hands were already on the controls, ready to execute the ferocious manoeuvres that would convince the banshees not to bother with this particular freighter.

‘Don’t do it,’ Clavain said.

Xavier looked at him with an expression of pure contempt. ‘What?’ ‘I said don’t do it. You can assume these are the same banshees as before. They’ve already seen your evasive patterns, so they know exactly what you’re capable of doing. It may have given them pause for thought once, but you can be certain they’ve already decided that the risk is worth it.’

‘Don’t listen…’ Xavier said.

‘All you’ll do is burn fuel you might need later. It won’t make a blind bit of difference. Trust me. I’ve been here a thousand times, in about as many wars.’

Antoinette looked at him questioningly. ‘So what the fuck do you want me to do, Clavain? Just sit here and lap it up?’

He shook his head. ‘You mentioned additional deterrents earlier on. I had a feeling I knew what you meant.’

‘Oh no.’

‘You must have weapons, Antoinette. In these times you’d be foolish not to.’

NINETEEN

Clavain did not know whether to laugh or cry when he saw the weapons and realised how antiquated and ineffective they were compared with the oldest, lowest-lethality weapons of a Conjoiner corvette or Demarchist raider. They had obviously been cobbled together from several centuries’ worth of black market jumble sales, more on the basis of how sleek and nasty they looked than on how much damage they could really do. Apart from the handful of firearms stored inside the ship to be used to repel boarders, the bulk of the weapons were stowed in concealed hull hatches or packed into dorsal or ventral pods that Clavain had earlier assumed held communications equipment or sensor arrays. Not all of the weapons were even functional. About a third of them had either never worked or had broken down, or had run out of whatever ammunition or fuel-source they needed to work.

To access the weapons, Antoinette had pulled back a hidden panel in the floor. A thick metal column had risen slowly from the well, unfolding control arms and display devices as it ascended. A schematic of Storm Bird rotated in one sphere, with the active weapons pulsing red. They were linked back into the main avionics web by snaking red data pathways. Other spheres and read-outs on the main panel showed the immediate volume of space around the ship at various magnifications. At the lowest magnification, the banshee ships were visible as indistinct radar-echo smudges creeping closer to the freighter.

‘Fifteen thousand klicks,’ Antoinette said.

‘I still say we should pull the evasive pattern,’ Xavier murmured.

‘Burn that fuel when you need it,’ Clavain said. ‘Not until then. Antoinette, are all those weapons deployed?’

‘Everything we’ve got.’

‘Good. Do you mind if I ask why you were unwilling to deploy them earlier?’

She tapped controls, finessing the weapons’ deployment, reallocating data flows through less congested parts of the web.

‘Two reasons, Clavain. One: it’s a hanging offence to even think of installing weps on a civilian ship. Two: all those juicy guns might just be the final incentive the banshees need to come in and rob us.’

‘It won’t come to that. Not if you trust me.’

‘Trust you, Clavain?’

‘Let me sit there and operate those weapons.’

She looked at Xavier. ‘Not a hope in hell.’

Clavain leaned back and folded his arms. ‘You know where I am if you need me, in that case.’

‘Pull the evasive…’ Xavier began.

‘No.’ Antoinette tapped something.

Clavain felt the entire ship rumble. ‘What was that?’

‘A warning shot,’ she said.

‘Good. I’d have done the same.’

The warning shot had probably been a slug, a cylinder of foam-phase hydrogen accelerated up to a few dozen klicks per second in a stubby railgun barrel. Clavain knew all about foam-phase hydrogen; it was one of the main weapons left in the Demarchist arsenal now that they could no longer manipulate antimatter in militarily useful quantities.

The Demarchists mined hydrogen from the oceanic hearts of gas giants. Under conditions of shocking pressure, hydrogen underwent a transition to a metallic state a little like mercury but thousands of times denser. Usually that metallic state was unstable: release the confining pressure and it would revert to a low-density gas. The foam phase, by contrast, was only quasi-unstable; with the right manipulation it could remain in the metallic