The Revelation Space Collection

now that’s changing. The Captain’s applying thrust, so we’ve got a new source acting along the axis. It’s only a fifth of a gee at the moment, but you can bet it’s going to get worse. We can turn off the spin, but that won’t change things. The walls are becoming floors.’

‘This is a lighthugger, Khouri. This is a normal transition to starflight mode.’

‘You don’t understand, Ilia. We’ve got two thousand people crammed into one chamber, and they can’t stay there. They’re already freaking out because the floor is sloping so much. They feel as if they’re on the deck of a sinking ship, and no one is telling them anything’s wrong.’ She paused; she was a little out of breath. ‘Ilia, here’s the deal. You were right about the bottleneck. I told Thorn to get things moving faster at the Resurgam end. That means we’re going to be getting thousands of people arriving very soon indeed. We always knew we’d have to start emptying the holding bay. Now we’ll just have to start doing it a bit sooner.’

‘But that would mean…’ Volyova appeared unable to complete the thought.

‘Yes, Ilia. They’re going to have to get the tour of the ship. Whether they like it or not.’

‘This could turn out very badly, Khouri. Very badly indeed.’

Khouri looked down at her old mentor. ‘You know what I like about you, Ilia? You’re such a frigging optimist.’

‘Shut up and take a look at the battle display, Khouri. We are under attack — or we will be very shortly.’

‘Clavain?’

The merest hint of a nod. ‘Zodiacal Light has released squadrons of attack craft, around a hundred in total. They’re headed here, most of them at three gees. They won’t take more than four hours to reach us, no matter what we do.’

‘Clavain can’t have those weapons, Ilia.’

The Triumvir, who now looked far older and frailer than Khouri ever remembered, shook her head by the barest degree. ‘He isn’t going to get them. Not without a fight.’

They exchanged ultimatums. Clavain gave Ilia Volyova one last chance to surrender the hell-class weapons; if she complied he would recall his attack fleet. Volyova told Clavain that if he did not recall his fleet immediately, she would turn the thirteen remaining weapons against him.

Clavain readied his response. ‘Sorry. Unacceptable. I need those weapons very badly.’

He transmitted it and was only slightly startled when the Triumvir’s answer came back three seconds later. It was identical to his own. There had not been enough time for her to see his response.

THIRTY-FIVE

Volyova watched five of the thirteen remaining cache weapons assume attack positions beyond Nostalgia for Infinity. Their coloured icons floated above her bed like the kinds of bauble that were used to amuse infants in cots. Volyova raised a hand and poked it through the ghostly representation, pushing against the icons, adjusting the positions of the weapons relative to her ship, using its hull for camouflage wherever possible. The icons moved stubbornly, reflecting the sluggish real-time movements of the weapons themselves.

‘Are you going to use them immediately?’ Khouri asked.

Volyova glanced at the woman. ‘No. Not yet. Not until he forces my hand. I don’t want the Inhibitors to know that there are more cache weapons than the twenty they already know about.’

‘You’ll have to use them eventually.’

‘Unless Clavain sees sense and realises he can’t possibly win. Maybe he will. It isn’t too late.’

‘But we don’t know anything about the kinds of weapons he has,’ Khouri said. ‘What if he has something equally powerful?’

‘It won’t make a blind bit of difference if he has, Khouri. He wants something from me, understand? I want nothing from him. That gives me a distinct advantage over Clavain.’

‘I don’t…’

Volyova sighed, disappointed that it was necessary to spell this out. ‘His strike against us has to be surgical. He can’t risk damaging the weapons he so badly wants. In crude terms, you don’t rob someone by dropping a crustbuster on them. But I’m bound by no such constraint. Clavain has nothing that I want.’

Well, Volyova admitted to herself, almost nothing. She had a vague curiosity concerning whatever it was that had allowed him to decelerate so savagely. Even if it was nothing as exotic as inertia-suppression technology… but no. It was nothing she needed desperately. That meant she could use all the force in her arsenal against him. She could wipe him out of existence, and her only loss would be something she was not even sure had ever existed.

But something still troubled her. Clavain, surely, could see all that for himself? Especially if she was dealing with the Clavain, the real Butcher of Tharsis. He had not lived through four hundred or more dangerous years of human history by making tragically simple errors.

What if Clavain knew something she didn’t?

She moved her fingers through the projection, nervously reconfiguring her pieces, wondering which of them she should use first, thinking also that, given Clavain’s limitations, it would be more interesting to let the battle escalate rather than taking his main ship out instantly.

‘Any news from Thorn?’ she asked.

‘He’s en route from Resurgam with another two thousand passengers. ’

‘And does he know about our little difficulty with Clavain?’

‘I told him we were moving closer to Resurgam. I didn’t see any sense in giving him anything more to worry about.’

‘No,’ Volyova said, agreeing with her for once. ‘The people are at least as safe in space as they’d be on Resurgam. At least once they’re off the planet they’ve got a hope of survival. Not much of one, but…’

‘Are you certain you won’t use the cache weapons?’

‘I will use them Khouri, but not a moment sooner than I have to. Haven’t you ever heard of the expression “whites of their eyes”? Perhaps not; it’s the sort of thing only a soldier would be likely to know.’

‘I’ve forgotten more about soldiering than you’ll ever know, Ilia.’

‘Just trust me. Is it so much to ask?’

Twenty-two minutes later the battle began. Clavain’s opening salvo was almost insultingly inadequate. She had detected the signatures of railgun launchers, ripples of electromagnetic energy designed to slam a small dense slug up to one or two thousand kilometres per second. The slugs took an hour to reach her from their launch points near Zodiacal Light. At the very limit of her resolution she could make out the skeletal cruciform shapes of the launchers themselves, and then watch the pulse of sequenced matter-antimatter explosions that drove the slugs up to their terminal velocities, gobbling up the railguns in the process. Clavain did not have enough railguns to saturate the immediate volume of space around her ship, so she could avoid being hit simply by making sure she — or rather the Captain — kept Nostalgia for Infinity in a constant random-walk pattern, never entering the volume of space where it had been an hour earlier, which was where any arriving railgun slug would have been aimed.

At first, that was exactly what happened. She did not even have to ask it of the Captain. He was privy to the same tactical information as Volyova, and appeared capable of arriving at the same conclusions. She felt the faint yawing and pitching, as if her bed was adrift on a raft on a mildly choppy sea, as Nostalgia for Infinity moved, shifting with short, thunderous bursts of the many station-keeping thrusters which dotted the hull.

But she could do better than that.

With the long-range grabs of the railguns and the electromagnetic launch signatures, she could determine the precise direction in which a particular slug had been aimed. There was a margin of error, but it was not large, and it amused Volyova to remain exactly where she was until the last possible moment, only then moving her ship.