The Revelation Space Collection

‘Only the man comes in person. But there are other visitors.’

‘You’re confusing me.’

‘That is because they confuse me. I know when the man comes because I sense the electromagnetic noise from the opening and closing of airlocks. I sense his suit, although I can never get close enough to paralyse him. But the others don’t arrive like that. Suddenly they are simply here, like a change in the wind. One in particular makes her presence very clear to me. She likes to walk in our heads, as if she is taking a stroll through an ornamental garden. She toys with us. She takes pleasure in our confinement, in our distress.’

‘You’re talking about an artificial intelligence, then. A beta-level simulation, something like that. A simulacrum that looks and acts like a real person, but has no interior life.’

‘No,’ the Conjoiner said carefully. ‘I am talking about something vastly more than that. A mind like a thundercloud, brimming with terrible lightning, terrible darkness. It was never a beta-level simulation. It has the structure of human consciousness, but warped, magnified, perverted. Like a mansion gone wrong, a great house turned evil.’

‘Does she have a name?’

‘One,’ the Conjoiner affirmed. ‘She professes to hide her true identity from us, but I have seen through her concealments. She is too vain to hide herself perfectly. She desires to be known, I think.’

Dreyfus hardly dared ask. ‘Tell me the name.’

‘She calls herself Aurora.’

‘I made no mistake,’ Thalia said. ‘I swear I did everything by the book.’

Thory’s eyes had shrunk to nasty little dots. ‘Then maybe the book is wrong. Every second that we don’t have abstraction will cost our standing with the lobbyists. You have no idea of the financial hurt I’m talking about. Each and every one of us is a stakeholder in Aubusson society. Damage the habitat’s finances and you damage us. That means me, personally.’

Thalia’s voice had become absurdly timid and small. She felt like a schoolgirl being required to explain late homework. ‘I don’t know what the problem is.’

‘Then perhaps you should start investigating!’ Thory glared at her with venomous intent. ‘You broke this, Prefect. It’s your responsibility to fix it. Why don’t you start, instead of just standing there like a petrified tree?’

‘I… don’t have access,’ Thalia said. Under her tunic she could feel a cold line of sweat trickling down her back. ‘They gave me a six-hundred-second window. I used it. There’s no way back in again.’

‘Then you’d better think of something else,’ Caillebot said. ‘And be fast about it.’

‘There’s nothing else to do. I can run some superficial tests on the pillar… but without core access, I can’t see into its guts. And this has to be a fundamental problem, something really deep-rooted. ’

It was Parnasse’s turn to speak. His voice was a low rumble, yet everyone listened to him. ‘They only gave you a single one-time pad, did they, girl?’

‘Just the one,’ Thalia said.

‘Then she’s right,’ he said, turning to the others. ‘I may not be a prefect, but I know a thing or two about the way these things work. She won’t get in again without a new pad.’

‘Then call home and get one,’ Thory said, hissing out the words.

‘Nice trick, without abstraction access,’ Parnasse replied. He looked at Thalia. ‘True, isn’t it? Your own comms piggyback abstraction services. You’d need it to be up and running before you can call Panoply.’

Thalia swallowed hard as the truth sank home. ‘That’s right. We depend on abstraction protocols as well. I’m out of contact with home.’

‘Try it, just to be sure,’ said Parnasse.

Thalia tried it. She attempted to return the call from Muang, the one she had ignored during the upgrade.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, when the bracelet failed to connect. ‘I can’t see Panoply. I can’t even see my ship.’

‘Oh, that’s clever!’ Thory said. ‘You gut us open and then you can’t even call for help! Whose clever bloody idea was that?’

‘It’s never caused us a problem before. If we take abstraction down, it’s on our terms.’

‘Until today,’ Thory said.

The mood of the gathering was swerving somewhere unpleasant. They’d been all smiles until she took their sweets away.

‘Look,’ Thalia said, trying to strike the right conciliatory note, ‘this is unacceptable, and you have my sincere apology for any inconvenience I may have caused. But I promise you it won’t last long. If the abstraction blackout is as wide as it looks, then that means an entire habitat has just dropped off the network. Not just any old hermit colony, either, but House Aubusson. You’ve already told me that the lobbyists are in almost constant contact with you. How long do you think it will take before they notice your absence? Probably not more than a few minutes. Maybe a few minutes more before they act on that absence and start calling Panoply, to find out what’s gone wrong.’ She took a deep breath. ‘My bosses will take this very, very seriously, even given the current crisis. At high-burn, a Heavy Technical Squad could be knocking on the door inside forty-five minutes. They’ll have new pads, maybe even an emergency field core, everything necessary to get abstraction back up and running. Honestly, you could be back on-line inside an hour, ninety minutes at the max.’

‘You talk as if ninety minutes is nothing,’ Thory said. ‘Maybe it isn’t for you. I know how it is for prefects. You’ve never experienced true abstraction. You have no idea what losing it means to us. Perhaps if your bosses had sent someone more experienced, someone who at least looked as if they knew what they were doing—’

Thalia felt something inside her snap, like a wishbone tearing in two. ‘Maybe I don’t know what losing abstraction means to you. But I’ll tell you this. A few days ago I was part of a lockdown party. It turned nasty. We had to euthanise. So don’t you dare talk to me as if I’m some wet-behind-the-ears apprentice who’s never got her hands dirty.’

‘If you think—’ Paula Thory began.

‘Wait,’ Thalia said. ‘I’m not done. I’m not remotely done. Since we got back from that lockdown — which was regarded as a successful operation, incidentally, despite the casualties — my boss has had to deal with the murder of more than nine hundred innocent people, not including the crew of a ship who were butchered and burnt for their perceived part in that crime, but who were in all likelihood innocent. My boss is still on that case. His boss is doing her best just to keep her head in one piece. The rest of Panoply’s trying to stop the whole Glitter Band sliding into war against the Ultras, while bracing itself for the civil war that’s probably going to follow when we find out who really torched Ruskin-Sartorious.’ Thalia stiffened the set of her jaw, making sure she looked at each member of the party in turn. ‘Maybe that isn’t a typical week in the life of Panoply, people, but it happens to be the week we’re dealing with right now. Perhaps you think the loss of ninety minutes of abstraction measures up to what’s already on our table. Fine if you do, that’s your call. But I’m here to tell you that, as far as I’m concerned, you are a bunch of self-pitying sonsofbitches who at this point in time are doing pretty fucking well just to be breathing.’

No one said anything. They were just looking at her, mouths open, as if she had frozen them all into silence.

Thalia smiled tightly. ‘Nothing personal, though. I guess I’d be pretty upset if someone had taken my toys from the pram as well. I’m just saying that right now we could all use a degree of perspective. Because this is not the end of the world.’

She relaxed her stance just enough to let them know that the dressing down was over, for the moment.

‘You,’ she said, pointing at the woman in the flame-red dress. ‘That train you saw earlier. Is it still stopped?’

‘Yes,’ the woman said, stammering out her answer. ‘I can still see it. It’s not going anywhere.’

‘I was hoping we could take the train back to the endcap. As I said, help’ll be on its way soon enough regardless, but if it would make any of you happier, I could use the transmitter on my ship to call Panoply.’

‘Would that work?’ asked a chastened Caillebot.

‘Absolutely. Since it’s outside Aubusson, it won’t have been affected by the abstraction outage. Looks like we’re stuck here for the duration, though, unless any of you knows another way to get to the docking hub.’