The Revelation Space Collection

Her hands fumbled for the box. ‘I’ll take this,’ she said. ‘It’s mine, after all.’

‘The letters are yours. But you may keep the box.’

‘Is it over, now?’

He seemed surprised. ‘Over, Miss Els?’

‘The agreement. My period of employment.’

‘I don’t see why it should be,’ he said. ‘As you pointed out, you were never obliged to mention your interest in the scuttlers. No crimes have been committed; no trust betrayed.’

Her hands left sweaty imprints on the box. She had not expected him to let her keep it. All that lost correspondence: sad, earnest little messages from her past self to her present. ‘I thought you’d be displeased,’ she said.

‘You still have your uses. I’m expecting more Ultras very shortly, as a matter of fact. I’ll want your opinions on them, your peculiar insights and observations, Miss Els. You can still do that for me, can’t you?’

She stood up, clutching the box. From the tone of his voice it was clear that her audience with the dean was at an end. ‘Might I ask one thing?’ she enquired, nearly stammering over her words.

‘I’ve asked you enough questions. I don’t see why not.’

She hesitated. Even as she made her request, she had meant to ask him about Harbin. The dean must have known what had happened to him: it wouldn’t have cost him anything to uncover the truth from cathedral records, even if he’d never set eyes on her brother. But now that the moment was here, now that it had arrived and the dean had granted her permission to ask her question, she knew that she did not have the strength of mind to go through with it. It was not simply that she was frightened of hearing the truth. She already suspected the truth. What frightened her was finding out how she would react when that truth was revealed. What if she turned out not to care about Harbin as much as she claimed? What if everything the dean had said was true, about Harbin just being the excuse she gave for her quest?

Could she take that?

Rashmika swallowed. She felt very young, very alone. ‘I wanted to ask if you had ever heard of the shadows,’ she said.

But the dean said nothing. He had never, she realised, promised her an answer.

Interstellar space, 2675

Three days later, the Inhibitor aggregate had moved within range of the weapon. The technicians still felt they had more calibration to do, more parameter space to explore. Every now and then the weapon did something weird and frightening, taking a nibble out of something local when it was supposed to be tuned for a target several AU distant. Sometimes, most frighteningly of all, its effects seemed only loosely coupled to any input. It was weakly acausal, after all: a weapon that undercut both time and space, and did so according to rules of Byzantine and shifting complexity. It was no wonder that the wolves had nothing analogous to it in their own arsenal. Perhaps they had decided that, all told, it was more trouble than it was worth. The same logic probably applied to Skade’s faster-than-light drive. A great many things were possible in the universe, far more than appeared so at first glance. But many of them were unhealthy, on both the individual and the species/galactic culture level.

But the lights kept dimming, and the weapon kept operating, and Scorpio’s private sense of self continued, unperturbed. The weapon might be doing grotesque things to the very foundations of reality, but all he cared about was what it did to the wolves. Slowly, it was taking chunks out of the pursuing swarm.

He wasn’t winning. He was surviving. That was good enough, for now.

Aura was wrapped in her customary quilted silver blanket, supported on her mother’s lap. Scorpio still found her frighteningly small, like a doll designed to sit inside a cabinet rather than be subjected to the damaging rough- and-tumble of the outside world. But there was something else, too: a quiet sense of invulnerability that made the back of his neck tingle. He only felt it now that her eyes were fully open. Focused and bright, like the eyes of some hunting bird, she absorbed everything that took place around her. Her eyes were golden-brown, flecked with glints of gold and bronze and some colour closer to electric blue. They didn’t simply look around. They probed and extracted. They surveilled.

Scorpio and the other seniors had gathered in the usual meeting room, facing each other around the dark mirror of the table. He studied his companions, mentally listing his allies and adversaries and those who had probably still to make up their minds. He could have counted on Antoinette, but she was back on Ararat now. He was sure that Blood would also have seen things his way, not because Blood would necessarily have thought things through, but because it took imagination to think of disloyalty, and imagination had never been Blood’s strong point. Scorpio missed him already. He had to keep reminding himself that his old deputy was not in fact dead, just out of reach.

It was two weeks since they had left Ararat. The Nostalgia for Infinity had pushed its way out of Ararat’s system at a steady one-gee acceleration, slipping between the meshing gear-teeth of the battle. In the first week, the Infinity had put twelve AU between itself and Ararat, reaching a fiftieth of the speed of light. By the end of the second week it had reached a twenty-fifth of light speed and was now nearly fifty AU from Ararat. Scorpio felt that distance now: looking back, Ararat’s Bright Sun, p Eridani A — the one that had warmed them for the last twenty-three years — was now only a very bright star, one hundred thousand times fainter than when seen from the planet’s surface. It looked no brighter now than its binary companion, Faint Sun or p Eridani B; they were two amber eyes falling behind the lighthugger, pulling together as the ship headed further and further out into interstellar space. He couldn’t see the wolves — only the sensors could even begin to pick them out of the background, and then with only limited confidence — but they were there. The hypometric weapons — there were three of them online now — had been chewing holes in the pursuing elements, but not all of the wolves had been destroyed.

There was no going back. But until this moment their course had been dictated solely by Remontoire’s plan, his trajectory designed merely to get them away from the wolves with the lowest probability of interception. It was only now, after two weeks, that they had the option to steer on a new heading. The pursuing wolves had no bearing on that decision: Scorpio had to assume that they would eventually be destroyed, long before the ship reached its final destination.

He stood up and waited for everyone to fall silent. Saying nothing himself, he pulled Clavain’s knife from its sheath. Without turning it on, he leant across the table and made two marks, one on either side of the centre line, each requiring only three scratches of the blade. One was a ‘Y’, the other an ‘H’. In the dark lacquer of the wood the scratches were the colour of pigskin.

They all watched him, expecting him to say something. Instead he returned the knife to its sheath and sat back down in his seat. Then he meshed his hands behind his neck and nodded at Orca Cruz.

Cruz was his only remaining ally from his Chasm City days. She looked at them all in turn, fixing everyone with her one good eye, black fingernails rasping against the table as she made her points.

‘The last few weeks haven’t been easy,’ she began. ‘We’ve all made sacrifices, all seen plans upturned. Some of us have lost loved ones or seen our families ripped apart. Every certainty that we had a month ago has been pulverised. We are deep into unfamiliar territory, and we don’t have a map. Worse, the man we had come to trust, the man who would have seen the right way forward, isn’t with us any more.’ She fixed her gaze on Scorpio, waiting until everyone else was looking at him as well. ‘But we still have a leader,’ she continued. ‘We still have a damned good leader, someone Clavain trusted to run things on Ararat when he wasn’t around. Someone we should trust to lead us, more now than ever. Clavain had faith in his judgement. I think it’s about time we took a leaf from the old man’s book.’

Urton, the Security Arm woman, shook her head. ‘This is all well and good, Orca. None of us has a problem with Scorpio’s leadership.’ She gave the last word a heavy emphasis, leaving everyone to draw their own conclusions about just what problems they might have with the pig. ‘But what we want to hear now is where you think we should go.’

‘It’s very simple,’ Orca Cruz replied. ‘We have to go to Hela.’

Urton tried unsuccessfully to hide her surprise. ‘Then we’re in agreement.’

‘But only after we’ve been to Yellowstone,’ Cruz said. ‘Hela is… speculative, at best. We don’t really know what we’ll find there, if anything. But we know that we can do some good around Yellowstone. We have the capacity to take tens of thousands more sleepers. Another hundred and fifty thousand, easily. Those are human lives, Urton. They’re people we can save. Fate gave us this ship. We have to do something with it.’