The Revelation Space Collection

[Because then he’ll find out that you aren’t who you say you are. And you wouldn’t want that.]

Her hand hesitated above the intercom. Why not press it, and summon the surgeon-general? She didn’t like the bastard, but she liked voices in her head even less.

But what the voice had said reminded her of her blood. She visualised him taking the sample, drawing the red core from her arm.

[Yes, Rashmika, that’s part of it. You don’t see it yet, but when he analyses that sample he’ll be in for a shock. But he may leave it at that. What you don’t want is him crawling over your head with a scanner. Then he’d really find something interesting.]

Her hand still hovered above the intercom, but she knew she was not going to press the connecting button. The voice was right: the one thing she did not want was Grelier taking an even deeper interest in her, beyond her blood. She did not know why, but it was enough to know it.

‘I’m scared,’ she said, moving her hand away.

[You don’t have to be. We’re here to help you, Rashmika.]

‘Me?’ she said.

[All of you,] the voice said. She sensed it pulling away, leaving her alone. [All we ask of you is a little favour in return.]

Afterwards, she tried to sleep.

Interstellar space, 2675

Scorpio looked over the technician’s shoulder. Glued to one wall was a large flexible screen, newly grown by the manufactories. It showed a cross-section through the ship, duplicated from the latest version of the hand-drawn map that had been used to track the Captain’s apparitions. Rather than the schematic of a spacecraft, it resembled a blow-up of some medieval anatomy illustration. The technician was marking a cross next to a confluence of tunnels, near to one of the acoustic listening posts.

‘Any joy?’ Scorpio asked.

The other pig made a noncommittal noise. ‘Probably not. False positives from this area all day. There’s a hot bilge pump near this sector. Keeps clanging, setting off our ’phones.’

‘Better check it out all the same, just to be on the safe side,’ Scorpio advised.

‘There’s a team already on their way down there. They’ve never been far away.’

Scorpio knew that the team would be going down in full vacuum-gear, warned that they might encounter a breach at any point, even deep within the ship. ‘Tell them to be careful,’ he said.

‘I have, Scorp, but they could be even more careful if they knew what they needed to be careful about.’

‘They don’t need to know.’

The pig technician shrugged and went back to his task, waiting for another acoustic or barometric signal to appear on his read-out.

Scorpio’s thoughts drifted to the hypometric weapon moving in its shaft, a corkscrewing, meshing, interleaving gyre of myriad silver blades. Even immobile, the weapon had felt subtly wrong, a discordant presence in the ship. It was like a picture of an impossible solid, one of those warped triangles or ever-rising staircases; a thing that looked plausible enough at first glance but which on closer inspection produced the effect of a knife twisting in a particular part of the brain — an area responsible for handling representations of the external universe, an area that handled the mechanics of what did and didn’t work. Moving, it was worse. Scorpio could barely look at the threshing, squirming complexity of the operational weapon. Somewhere within that locus of shining motion, there was a point or region where something sordid was being done to the basic fabric of space-time. It was being abused.

That the technology was alien had come as no surprise to Scorpio. The weapon — and the two others like it — had been assembled according to instructions passed to the Conjoiners by Aura, before Skade had stolen her from Khouri’s womb. The instructions had been precise and comprehensive, a series of unambiguous mathematical prescriptions, but utterly lacking any context — no hint of how the weapon actually functioned, or which particular model of reality had to apply for it to work. The instructions simply said: just build it, calibrate it in this fashion, and it will work. But do not ask how or why, because even if you were capable of understanding the answers, you would find them upsetting.

The only other hint of context was this: the hypometric weapon represented a general class of weakly acausal technologies usually developed by pre-Inhibitor-phase Galactic cultures within the second or third million years of their starfaring history. There were layers of technology beyond this, Aura’s information had implied, but they could certainly not be assembled using human tools. The weapons in that theoretical arsenal bore the same abstract relationship to the hypometric device as a sophisticated computer virus did to a stone axe. Simply grasping how such weapons were in some way disadvantageous to something loosely analogous to an enemy would have required such a comprehensive remapping of the human mind that it would be pointless calling it human any more.

The message was: make the most of what you have.

‘Teams are there,’ the other pig said, pressing a microphone into the little pastrylike twist of his ear.

‘Found anything?’

‘Just that pump playing up again.’

‘Shut it down,’ Scorpio said. ‘We can deal with the bilge later.’

‘Shut it down, sir? That’s a schedule-one pump.’

‘I know. You’re probably going to tell me it hasn’t been turned off in twenty-three years.’

‘It’s been turned off, sir, but always with a replacement unit standing by to take over. We don’t have a replacement available now, and won’t be able to get one down there for days. All service teams are tied up following other acoustic leads.’

‘How bad would it be?’

‘About as bad as it gets. Unless we install a replacement unit, we’ll lose three or four decks within a few hours.’

‘Then I guess we’ll have to lose them. Is your equipment sophisticated enough to filter out the sounds of those decks being flooded?’

The technician hesitated for a moment, but Scorpio knew that professional pride would win out in the end. ‘That shouldn’t be a problem, no.’

‘Then look on the bright side. Those fluids have to come from somewhere. We’ll be taking the load off some other pumps, more than likely.’

‘Yes, sir,’ the pig said, more resigned than convinced. He gave the order to his team, telling them to sacrifice those levels. He had to repeat the instruction several times before the message got through that he was serious and that he had Scorpio’s authorisation.

Scorpio understood his reservations. Bilge management was a serious business aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity, and the turning off of pumps was not something that was ever done lightly. Once a deck had been flooded with the Captain’s chemical humours and exudations, it could be very difficult to reclaim it for human use. But what mattered more now was the calibration of the weapon. Turning off the pump made more sense than turning off the listening devices in that area. If losing three or four decks meant having a realistic hope of defeating the pursuing wolves, it was a small price to pay.

The lights dimmed; even the constant background churn of bilge pumps became muted. The weapon was being discharged.

As the weapon rotated up to speed, it became a silent columnar blur of moving parts, a glittering whirlwind. In vacuum, it moved with frightening speed. Calculations had shown that it would only take the failure of one tiny part of the hypometric weapon to rip the Nostalgia for Infinity to pieces. Scorpio remembered the Conjoiners putting the thing together, taking such care, and now he understood why.

They followed the calibration instructions to the letter. Because their effects depended critically on atomic- scale tolerances, Remontoire had said, no two versions of the weapon could ever be exactly alike. Like handmade rifles, each would have its own distinct pull, an unavoidable effect of manufacture that had to be gauged and then compensated for. With a hypometric weapon it was not just a case of aiming-off to compensate — it was more a case of finding an arbitrary relationship between cause and effect within a locus of expectations. Once this pattern was determined, the weapon could in theory produce its effect almost anywhere, like a rifle able to fire in any direction.