The Revelation Space Collection

no other cache weapons would be around to witness its furious proclamation.

That was the one thing their human masters had never grasped: cache weapons were intensely vain.

Scorpio sat at the conference table, scowling. He was alone except for a handful of seniors. Valensin was tending to his wounds: there was a small museum’s worth of antiquated medical equipment spread out on a bloodstained sheet before the pig, including bandages, scalpels, scissors, needles and various bottled ointments and sterilising agents. The doctor had already cut away part of his tunic, exposing the twin wounds where the Adventist’s throwing knives had pinned him to the wall.

‘You’re lucky,’ Valensin said, when he had cleaned away most of the blood and began sealing the entrance and exit wounds with an adhesive salve. ‘He knew what he was doing. You probably weren’t meant to die.’

‘And that makes me lucky? It wasn’t remotely unlucky to end up impaled on a wall in the first place? Just a thought.’

‘All I’m saying is, it could have been worse. It looks to me as if they were under orders to minimise casualties, as far as possible.’

‘Tell that to Orca.’

‘Yes, the nerve gas was unfortunate. At some point, obviously, they were prepared to kill, but in general it appears that they considered themselves to be on holy business, like Crusaders. The sword was to be used only as an instrument of last resort. But they must have known some blood would be shed.’

Urton leant across the table. Her arm was in a sling and there was a vivid purple bruise across her right cheek, but she was otherwise unhurt. ‘The question is, what now? We can’t just sit here and not react, Scorp. We have to take this back to Quaiche.’

The pig winced as Valensin tugged two folds of skin together, drawing a slug of adhesive across them. ‘That thought’s crossed my mind, believe me.’

‘And?’ Jaccottet asked.

‘I’d like nothing more than to target all our hull defences on that cathedral and turn the fucker into a smouldering pile of rubble. But that isn’t an option, not while we’ve got people aboard it.’

‘If we could get a message to Vasko and Khouri,’ Urton said, ‘they could start doing some damage themselves. At the very least, they could find their way to safety.’

Scorpio sighed. Of all of them, why did it fall to him — the one who had the least-developed capacity for forward thinking — to point out the problems?

‘This isn’t about revenge,’ he said. ‘Believe me, I’m big on revenge. I wrote the book on retribution.’ He paused, catching his breath while Valensin started fussing around with another wound, snipping away at leather and scabbed blood. ‘But we came here for a reason. I don’t know what Quaiche wanted with our ship, and it doesn’t look as if any of the surviving Adventists have much of an idea either. My guess is we just got caught up in some local power game, something that probably has damn all to do with the shadows. As tempting as it might be to take revenge now, it’d be the worst thing we could do in terms of our mission objective. We still have to make contact with the shadows, and our quickest route to them is inside a metal spacesuit inside the Lady Morwenna. That, people, is what we need to focus on, not on giving Quaiche the kicking he so richly deserves because he betrayed us. We can do that later, once we’ve established contact with the shadows. Believe me, I’ll be the first in line. And I won’t be operating on a minimum-casualties basis, either.’

No one said anything for a moment. There was a hiatus, a stillness in the room. It reminded him of something, but it took a while to remember what it was. When he did, he almost flinched away from the memory: Clavain. There had been a similar pause whenever the old man had finished one of his rabble-rousing monologues.

‘We could still storm the cathedral,’ Urton said, her voice low. ‘There’s time. We’ve taken losses, but we have operational shuttles. How about it, Scorp: a precision raid on the Lady Morwenna, in and out, snatch the suit and our people?’

‘It’d be dangerous,’ said another of the Security Arm people. ‘We don’t just have Khouri and Malinin to worry about. There’s Aura. What if Quaiche suspects she’s one of us?’

‘He won’t,’ Urton said. ‘There’s no reason for him to do that.’

Scorpio wrestled away from Valensin long enough to lift up his sleeve and inspect the plastic and metal ruin of his communicator. He did not remember when he had damaged it, just as he did not recall where all the additional bruises and cuts had come from.

‘Someone get me a line to the cathedral,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to the man in charge.’

‘You never used to think much of negotiation,’ Urton said. ‘You said all it ever got you was a world of pain.’

‘Trouble is,’ Scorpio acknowledged ruefully, ‘sometimes that’s the best you can hope for.’

‘You’re wrong about this,’ Urton said. ‘This isn’t the way to handle things.’

‘Like I was wrong about letting those twenty Adventists aboard the ship? That wasn’t my bright idea, the last time I checked.’

‘They slipped past your security checks,’ Urton said.

‘You wouldn’t let me examine them as thoroughly as I’d have liked.’

Urton glanced at her fellows. ‘Look, we’re grateful for your help in regaining control. Deeply grateful. But now that the situation is stable again, wouldn’t it be better if—’

The ship moaned. Someone else slid a communicator across the polished gloss of the table. Scorpio reached for it, snapped it around his wrist, and called Vasko.

Hela Surface, 2727

Grelier stepped into the garret and took a moment to adjust to the scene that met his eyes. Superficially, the room was much as he had left it. But now it had extra guests — a man and an older woman — detained by a small detachment of the Cathedral Guard. The guests — they were from the Ultra ship, he realised — looked at him as if expecting an explanation. Grelier merely brushed a hand through the white shock of his hair and placed his cane by the door. There was a lot he wanted to get off his chest, but the one thing he couldn’t do was explain what was happening here.

‘I go away for a few hours and all hell breaks loose,’ he commented.

‘Have a seat,’ the dean said.

Grelier ignored the suggestion. He did what he usually did upon his arrival in the garret, which was to attend to the dean’s eyes. He opened the wall cabinet and took out his usual paraphernalia of swabs and ointments.

‘Not now, Grelier.’

‘Now is as good a time as any,’ he said. ‘Infection won’t stop spreading merely because it is inconvenient to treat it.’

‘Where have you been, Grelier?’

‘First things first.’ The surgeon-general leant over the dean, inspecting the points where the barbs of the eye-opener hooked into the delicate skin of Quaiche’s eyelids. ‘Might be my imagination, but there seemed to be a wee bit of an atmosphere when I came in here.’

‘They’re not too thrilled about my taking the cathedral over the rift.’

‘Neither am I,’ Grelier said, ‘but you’re not holding me at gun-point. ’

‘It’s rather more complicated than that.’

‘I’ll bet it is.’ More than ever, he was glad that he had left his shuttle in a state of immediate flight- readiness. ‘Well, is someone going to explain? Or is this a new parlour game, where I have twenty guesses?’

‘He’s taken over our ship,’ the man said.

Grelier glanced back at him, continuing to dab at the dean’s eyes. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘The Adventist delegates were a trick,’ the man elaborated. ‘They were sent up there to seize control of the Nostalgia for Infinity.’

‘Nostalgia for Infinity,’ Grelier said. ‘Now there’s a name that keeps coming up.’

Now it was the man’s turn to be puzzled. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘Been here before, haven’t you? About nine years ago.’

The two prisoners exchanged glances. They did their best to hide it, but Grelier had been expecting some response.