The Revelation Space Collection

‘Maybe trade isn’t what they’ve come for.’

Possibly it was a sign of arrogance, but Volyova was not physically capable of letting someone else do her work, no matter how absurd the alternative. She was perfectly happy — if happy was the word — to let Khouri sit in the gunnery and do her best at shooting the cache-weapon out of the sky. She was also willing to admit that using Khouri was the only sensible option available. But that did not mean that she was prepared to sit calmly by and await the outcome. Volyova knew herself too well for that. What she needed — what she craved — was some way to attack the problem from another angle.

‘Svinoi,’ she said, because, no matter how hard she tried, an answer obdurately failed to pop into her mind. Every time she thought she had hit on an approach, a way to circumvent the weapon’s progress, another part of her mind had already jumped ahead and found some impasse further down the logical chain. It was, in a way, a testament to the fluidity of her thought that she was able to critique her own solutions as soon as they came to mind; in fact, almost before she became consciously aware of them. But it also felt — maddeningly — as if she was doing her level best to sabotage her own chances of success.

And now there was this aberration to deal with.

She called it that now, because the word served to contain the melange of incomprehension and disgust she felt whenever she forced her mind onto the topic. The topic was whatever was going on inside Khouri’s head. And, now that Khouri was immersed in the abstracted mental landscape of gunspace, the aberration necessarily included the gunnery itself, and by extension Volyova, since it was her handiwork. She was monitoring the situation closely, via neural readouts on her bracelet. There was quite a storm going on in that woman’s skull; no doubt about it. And the storm was extending troubled, flickering tendrils into gunspace.

Volyova knew that, somehow, all of this had to be related. The whole problem with the gunnery, from the beginning: Nagorny’s madness, the Sun Stealer business, and latterly the self-activation of the cache-weapon. Somehow, also, the storm in Khouri’s head — the aberration — also fitted in with things. But knowing that a solution existed, or at the very least an answer — a unifying picture which would explain everything — did not help at all.

Perhaps the most annoying aspect was that, even in a moment like this, part of her mind was dwelling on that problem, not giving itself over fully to the more pressing issue at hand. Volyova felt as if her brain consisted of a room full of precocious schoolchildren: individually bright, and — if only they would pool themselves — capable of shattering insights. But some of those schoolchildren were not paying attention; they were staring dreamily out of the window, ignoring her protestations to focus on the present, because they found their own obsessions more intellectually attractive than the dull curriculum she was intent on dispensing.

A thought budged to the front of her mind; a recollection. It concerned a series of firewall systems she had installed in the ship, upwards of four decades earlier by shiptime. She had intended that they be called into use as a final countermeasure against incursion by subversive viruses. It had not occurred to her that they would ever really be needed, and most certainly not under circumstances like this.

But all the same, she remembered them.

‘Volyova,’ she said, almost gasping, into her bracelet, straining to tug the requisite commands from her memory. ‘Access counterinsurgent protocols; lambda-plus severity, maximum battle-readiness concurrence and counter-check to be assumed, full autonomous denial-suppression, criticality-nine Armageddon defaults, red-one- alpha security-bypass, all Triumvirate privileges invoked at all levels; all non-Triumvirate privileges rescinded.’ She collected her breath; hoping that the string of incantations had opened enough doors for her into the heart of the ship’s operational matrix. ‘Now,’ she said. ‘Retrieve and run the executable coded Palsy.’ To herself she muttered, ‘And do it damned quickly!’

Palsy was the program which initiated the sealing of the firewalls she had installed. She had written Palsy herself — but it was so long ago that she barely remembered what Palsy did, or how much of the ship Palsy was liable to affect. It was a gamble — she wanted to immobilise enough to inconvenience the cache-weapon, but most certainly not enough to hamper her own attempts at stopping it.

‘Svinoi, svinoi, svinoi…’

Error-messages were scrolling across her bracelet. They were telling her, very helpfully, that the various systems which Palsy had attempted to access and disable were no longer within Palsy’s remit; they were out-of- bounds to the program’s interference. Most of them, anyway — especially the deeper ship systems. If Palsy had functioned correctly, it would have had the same general effect on the ship as a blow on the head had to a human being — massive shut-down of all nonessential systems, and a general collapse into a state of recuperative immobility. Real damage would have been done, but mostly on a superficial level, and of a sort that Volyova would have been able to fix, disguise or invent lies about before the other crewmembers were awakened. But Palsy had worked differently. If likened to a human affliction, what the ship had suffered was more akin to an episode of mild paralysis immobilising only the epidermal layers, and then only partially. That was not at all in accordance with Volyova’s plans.

But, she realised, it would have immobilised the autonomous hull weapons, those which were not directly slaved to the gunnery and which had already blown up the shuttle. Now at least she could try the same gambit again. Of course, the weapon would have advanced further now; there was no longer an option of simply obstructing it. But if she could at least get another shuttle out into space, certain possibilities presented themselves.

A second or so later, her optimism had been shattered into a few dismal crumbs of dejection. Maybe Palsy had been meant to work this way, or maybe in the intervening forty years various ship-systems had become tangled up and interconnected, so that Palsy killed certain parts Volyova had never meant it to touch… but, for whatever reason, the shuttles were inoperative, locked out by firewalls. She tried, perfunctorily, the usual Triumvirate-level bypass commands, but none of them worked. Hardly surprising: Palsy had set up physical breaks in the command network, chasms that no amount of software intervention could possibly bridge. To get the shuttles online, Volyova would have to physically reset all those breaks — and to do that, she would have to find the map she had made, four decades earlier, of the installations. That would entail, conservatively, several days’ work.

Instead, she had minutes in which to act.

She was sucked into — not so much a pit of despondency, as a bottomless, endlessly plummeting gravitational well. But, when she had dropped deep into its maw — and several of those precious minutes had elapsed — she remembered something; something so obvious she should have thought of it long before.

Volyova began running.

Khouri crashed back into the gunnery.

A quick check on the status-clocks confirmed what Fazil had promised her, which was that no real time had passed. That was some trick; she really felt as if she had spent the best part of an hour in the bubbletent, when in fact the whole experience had just been laid down a fraction of a second earlier. She had lived through none of it, but that was almost impossible to accept. Yet she could not now relax — events had been frantic enough even before the memories had been triggered. The situation had not lost any of its urgency.

The cache-weapon must be nearly ready to blow now: its gravitational emissions were no longer detectable by the ship, like a whistle which had passed into the ultrasonic. Maybe the weapon was already able to fire. Was the Mademoiselle actually holding back? Was it important to her that Khouri come over to her side? If the weapon failed, Khouri would again be her only means of acting.

‘Relinquish,’ the Mademoiselle said. ‘Relinquish, Khouri. You must realise by now that Sun Stealer is something alien! You’re assisting it!’

The mental effort involved in subvocalising was almost too much for her now.

‘Yeah, I’m quite prepared to believe that it’s alien. The trouble is, what does that make you?’

‘Khouri, we don’t have time for this.’

‘Sorry, but now seems as good a time as ever to get this into the open.’ While she communicated her thoughts, Khouri kept up her side in the struggle, though part of her — the part that had been swayed by what she had been shown in the memories — implored her to give up; to let the Mademoiselle assume total control of the cache-weapon. ‘You led me into thinking Sun Stealer was something Sylveste brought back from the Shrouders.’

‘No; you saw the facts and jumped to the only logical conclusion. ’