The Revelation Space Collection

Daughter would have told the servitor what needed to be done to keep her occupant alive. The air might even be supercharged with oxygen, to take the edge off his pain and anxiety.

He could not believe this was happening. After all the hallucinations, this really, genuinely felt like reality. It had the prickly texture of actual experience. And he did not think that servitors had featured in any of his hallucinations to date. He had never thought things through clearly enough to work out that a servitor would have to drag the ship to safety with him in it. Obvious in hindsight, but in his dreams it had always been people coming to his rescue. That one neglected detail had to make it real, didn’t it?

Quaiche looked at the console. How much time had passed? Had he really managed to make the air last for five hours? It had seemed doubtful before, but here he was, still breathing. Perhaps the indoctrinal virus had helped, putting his brain into some mysterious state of zenlike calm so that he used up the oxygen less quickly.

But there wouldn’t have been any air left, let alone oxygen, not by the third or fourth hour. Unless the ship had made a mistake. This was a dismaying thought, given all that he had been through, but it was the only possible explanation. The air leak must not have been as serious as the Daughter had thought it was. Perhaps it had started off badly, but had sealed itself to some extent. Perhaps the auto-repair systems had not been totally destroyed, and the Daughter had been able to fix the leak.

Yes, that had to be it. There was simply no other explanation.

But the console said that only three hours had passed since his crash.

That wasn’t possible. The Dominatrix was still supposed to be tucked away behind Haldora, out of communications range. It would be out of range for another sixty minutes! Many more minutes, even at maximum burn, before it could possibly reach him. And maximum burn was not an option either, was it? There was a person aboard the ship who had to be protected. At the very least, the Dominatrix would have been restricted to slowdown acceleration.

But it was sitting there, on the ice. It looked as real as anything else.

The time had to be wrong, he thought. The time had to be wrong, and the leak must have fixed itself. There was no other possibility. Well, there was, now that he thought about it, but it did not merit close examination. If the time was right, then the Dominatrix must have somehow received his distress signal before emerging from behind Haldora. The signal would have had to find its way around the obstruction of the planet. Could that have happened? He had assumed it was impossible, but with the evidence of the ship sitting before him, he was ready to consider anything. Had some quirk of atmospheric physics acted as a relay for his message, curving it around Haldora? He couldn’t swear that something like that was impossible. If the clock was correct, what was the alternative? That the entire planet had ceased to exist just long enough for his message to get through?

Now that would have been a miracle. He had asked for one, but he hadn’t really been expecting one.

Another servitor was waiting by the open dorsal lock. Cooperating, the two machines hoisted the Daughter into the Dominatrix . Once inside the bay, the machines nudged the Daughter until a series of clunking sounds resonated through the hull. Despite the damage it had sustained, the little ship was still more or less the right shape to be accommodated by the cradle. Quaiche looked down, watched the airlock sealing beneath him.

A minute later, another servitor — much smaller this time — was opening the Daughter, preparing to lift him out of it.

‘Morwenna,’ he said, finding the energy to talk despite the returning pain in his chest. ‘Morwenna, I’m back. Bruised but intact.’

But there was no reply.

Ararat, 2675

The capsule was preparing to open. Clavain sat before it, his fingers laced together beneath his chin, his head bowed as if in prayer, or the remorseful contemplation of some recent and dreadful sin.

He had thrown back his hood; white hair spilled over the collar of his coat and on to his shoulders. He looked like an old man, of obvious stature and respectability, but he did not look much like the Clavain everyone thought they knew. Scorpio had little doubt that the workers would go back to their husbands and wives, lovers and friends and, despite express orders to the contrary, they would talk abut the elderly apparition that had materialised out of the night. They would remark on his uncanny similarity to Clavain, but how much older and frailer he looked. Scorpio was equally certain they would prefer the old man to turn out to be someone else entirely, with their leader really halfway around the world. If they accepted this old man as Clavain, it meant that they had been lied to, and that Clavain was nothing more than a grey ghost of himself.

Scorpio sat down in the vacant seat next to him. ‘Picking something up?’

It was a while before Clavain answered, his voice a whisper. ‘Not much more than the housekeeping stuff I already reported. The capsule blocks most of his neural transmissions. They’re only coming through in shards, and sometimes the packets are scrambled.’

‘Then you’re certain it’s Remontoire?’

‘I’m certain that it isn’t Skade. Who else can it be?’

‘I’d say there are dozens of possibilities,’ Scorpio whispered back.

‘No, there aren’t. The person inside this capsule is a Conjoiner.’

‘One of Skade’s allies, then.’

‘No. Her friends were all cast from the same mould: new-model Conjoiners, fast and efficient and as cold as ice. Their minds feel different.’

‘You’re losing me, Nevil.’

‘You think we’re all alike, Scorp. We’re not. We never were. Every Conjoiner I ever linked minds with was different. Whenever I touched Remontoire’s thoughts it was like…’ Clavain hesitated for a moment, smiling slightly when the right analogy occurred to him. ‘Like touching the mechanism of a clock. An old clock, good and dependable. The kind they had in churches. Something made of iron, something ratcheted and geared. I think to him I was something even slower and more mechanical… a grindstone, perhaps. Whereas Galiana’s mind…’

He faltered.

‘Easy, Nevil.’

‘I’m all right. Her mind was like a room full of birds. Beautiful, clever songbirds. And they were singing — not in some mindless cacophony, not in unison, but to each other — a web of song, a shining, shimmering conversation, quicker than the mind could follow. And Felka…’ He hesitated again, but resumed his thread almost immediately. ‘Felka’s was like a turbine hall, that awful impression of simultaneous stillness and dreadful speed. She seldom let me see deep into it. I’m sure she thought I wouldn’t be able to take it.’

‘And Skade?’

‘She was like a shining silver abattoir, all whirling and whisking blades, designed to slice and chop reality and anyone foolish enough to peer too far into her skull. At least, that’s what I saw when she let me. It may not have had very much to do with her true mental state. Her head was like a hall of mirrors. What you saw in it was only what she wanted you to see.’

Scorpio nodded. He had met Skade on precisely one occasion, for a few minutes only. Clavain and the pig had infiltrated her ship, which was damaged and drifting after she had attempted, with the aid of dangerous alien machinery, to exceed the speed of light. She had been weakened then, and evidently disturbed by the things that she had seen after the accident. But even though he had not been able to see into her mind, he had come away from the meeting with a sure sense that Skade was not a woman to be trifled with.

Frankly, he did not very much mind that he would never be able to see into her skull. But he still had to assume the worst. If Skade was in the capsule, it was entirely possible that she would be disguising her neural packets, lulling Clavain into a false sense of security, waiting for the moment when she could claw her way into his skull.

‘The instant you feel anything odd…’ Scorpio began.

‘It’s Rem.’

‘You’re absolutely certain of that?’

‘I’m certain it isn’t Skade. Good enough for you?’

‘I suppose it’ll have to do, pal.’

‘It had better,’ Clavain said, ‘because…’ He fell silent and blinked. ‘Wait. Something’s happening.’