The Revelation Space Collection

worked, of course. But there were too many things you didn’t explain to my satisfaction. Take the cache-weapon, for instance. When it malfunctioned, why did it point itself at Resurgam?’

‘It was the closest target.’

‘Sorry; too glib. It was something about Resurgam, wasn’t it? And the fact that you infiltrated this ship only when you knew our destination… yes; an out-of-the-way place would have made a good venue for staging an attempted take-over of the cache — but that was never on the cards anyway. You may have been resourceful, Khouri, but there was no way you were ever going to wrest control of those weapons from either myself or the rest of the Triumvirate.’ She put her hand beneath her chin now. ‘So — the obvious question. If your initial story was untrue, what exactly are you doing aboard this ship?’ She looked at Khouri, awaiting an answer. ‘You may as well tell me now, because I swear the next person to ask you will be Sajaki. It can’t have escaped your notice that Sajaki has his suspicions, Khouri — especially since Kjarval and Sudjic died.’

‘I didn’t have anything to do with…’ Then her voice lost conviction. ‘Sudjic had her own vendetta against you; that was none of my doing.’

‘But I had already disabled your suit’s weapons. Only I could have undone that order, and I was too busy being killed to do so. How did you manage to override the lock in order to kill Sudjic?’

‘Someone else did it.’ Khouri paused before continuing. ‘Something else, I should say. It was the same something that got into Kjarval’s suit and made her turn against me in the training session.’

‘That wasn’t Kjarval’s doing?’

‘No… not really. I don’t think I was her favourite person in the universe… but I’m fairly sure that she wasn’t planning to kill me in the training chamber.’

This was a lot to take in, even if it did finally feel like the truth. ‘So what happened, exactly?’

‘The thing inside my suit had to arrange matters so I’d be on the team to recover Sylveste. Getting Kjarval out of the picture was the only option.’

Yes; she could almost see the logic in that. She had never once questioned the manner in which Kjarval had died. It had seemed so predictable that one of the crew would turn against Khouri — especially Kjarval or Sudjic. Equally, one or other would surely have turned against Volyova before too long. Both things had happened, but now she saw them as part of something else… ripples of something she did not pretend to understand, but which moved with sharklike stealth beneath the surface of events.

‘What was so important about being in on the Sylveste recovery? ’

‘I…’ Khouri had been on the verge of saying something, but now she faltered. ‘I’m not sure this is the best time, Ilia — not when we’re so close to whatever destroyed the Lorean.’

‘I didn’t bring you here just to admire the view, in case you thought otherwise. Remember what I said about Sajaki? It’s either me, now — the closest thing on this ship you have to either an ally or a friend — or it’s Sajaki, later, with some hardware you probably don’t want to even think about.’ That was no great exaggeration, either. Sajaki’s trawl techniques were not exactly state-of-the-art in their subtlety.

‘I’ll start at the beginning, then.’ What Volyova had just said seemed to have done the trick. That was good — or else she would have to think about dusting off her own coercion methods. ‘The part about being a soldier… all that was true. How I got to Yellowstone is… complicated. Even now I’m not sure how much of it was an accident; how much of it was her doing. All I know is, she singled me out early on for this mission.’

‘Who was she?’

‘I don’t really know. Someone with a lot of power in Chasm City; maybe the whole planet. She called herself the Mademoiselle. She was careful never to use a real name.’

‘Describe her. She may be someone we know; someone we’ve had dealings with in the past.’

‘I doubt it. She wasn’t…’ Khouri paused. ‘She wasn’t one of you. Maybe once, but not now. I got the impression she’d been in Chasm City for a long time. But it wasn’t until after the Melding Plague that she came to power.’

‘She came to power and I haven’t heard of her?’

‘That was the whole point of her power. It wasn’t blatant, and she didn’t have to make her presence known to get something done. She just made shit happen. She wasn’t even rich — but she controlled more resources than anyone else on the planet, by sleight of hand. Not enough to conjure up a ship, though — which is why she needed you.’

Volyova nodded. ‘You said she might have been one of us, once. What did you mean by that?’

Khouri hesitated. ‘It wasn’t anything obvious. But the man working for her — Manoukhian, he called himself — definitely used to be an Ultra. He dropped enough clues to suggest that he’d found her in space.’

‘Found — as in rescued?’

‘That was how it sounded to me. She had these jagged metal sculptures, too — at least I thought they were sculptures to start with. Later, they began to look like parts of a wrecked spaceship. Like she was keeping them around her as a reminder of something. ’

Something tugged at Volyova’s memory, but for the moment she allowed the thought process to remain below the level of consciousness. ‘Did you get a good look at her?’

‘No. I saw a projection, but it needn’t have been accurate. She lived inside a palanquin, like the other hermetics.’

Volyova knew a little about the hermetics. ‘She needn’t have been one at all. A palanquin could simply have been a way of masking her identity. If we knew more about her origin… Did this Manoukhian tell you anything else?’

‘No; he wanted to — I could tell that much — but he managed not to give anything useful anyway.’

Volyova leaned closer. ‘Why do you say he wanted to tell you?’

‘Because that was his style. The guy never stopped mouthing off. The whole time I was being driven around by him, he never stopped telling me stories about all the things he’d done; all the famous people he’d known. Except for anything to do with the Mademoiselle. That was a closed subject; maybe because he was still working for her. But you could tell he was just itching to tell me stuff.’

Volyova drummed her fingers on the fascia. ‘Maybe he found a way.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘No; I wouldn’t expect you to. It was nothing he told you, either… but I think he did find a way to tell you the truth.’ The memory process she had suppressed a moment earlier had indeed dredged something. She thought back to the time of Khouri’s recruitment; to the examination she had given the woman after she had been brought aboard. ‘I can’t be sure yet, of course…’

Khouri looked at her. ‘You found something on me, didn’t you? Something Manoukhian planted?’

‘Yes. It seemed quite innocent, at first. Fortunately, I have an odd character defect, common amongst those of us who indulge in the sciences… I never, ever throw anything away.’ It was true; disposing of the thing she had found would have demanded a greater expenditure of effort than simply leaving it in her lab. It had seemed pointless at the time — the thing was just a shard, after all — but now she could run a compositional analysis on the metal splinter she had pulled from Khouri. ‘If I’m right, and this was Manoukhian’s doing, it may tell us something about the Mademoiselle. Perhaps even her identity. But you still need to tell me what exactly she wanted you to do for her. We already know it involves Sylveste in some way or another.’

Khouri nodded. ‘It does. And I’m afraid this is the part you’re really not going to like.’

‘We’ve completed a more detailed inspection of the surface of Cerberus from our present orbit,’ Alicia’s projection said. ‘And there’s still no evidence of the cometary impact point. Plenty of cratering, yes — but none of it recent. Which just doesn’t make any sense.’ She elaborated the one plausible theory they had, which was that the comet had been destroyed just before impact. Even that explanation implied the use of some form of defensive technology, but at least it avoided the paradox of the unchanged surface features. ‘But we saw no sign of anything like that, and there’s certainly no evidence of any technological structures on the surface. We’ve decided to launch a squadron of probes down to the surface. They’ll be able to hunt for anything we might have missed — machines buried in caves, or sunk in canyons below our viewing angle — and they might provoke some kind of response, if there are automated systems down there.’

Yes, Sylveste thought acidly. They had indeed provoked some kind of response. But it was almost certainly