Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space

Volyova’s voice sounded slightly choked, as if she were in the process of slow strangulation.

“If I had any doubts about your story, they vanished the instant I looked into his face. There was never any question that I was confronting something alien. And I began to understand some of what Boris Nagorny must have gone through.”

“What drove him mad, you mean.”

“Believe me, I think I’d have suffered something similar if I’d had that in my head. What worries me, too, is that some of Boris might have corrupted Sun Stealer.”

“Then how do you think I feel?” Khouri asked. “I have got that thing in my head.”

“No, you haven’t.”

Volyova was shaking her head now, a gesture which verged on the reckless in the four-gee field. “You had him in your head for a while, Khouri—just long enough for him to crush what remained of the Mademoiselle. But then he got out.”

“Got out when?”

“When Sajaki trawled you. It was my fault, I suppose. I should not have allowed him even to switch on the trawl.” For someone admitting guilt she sounded remarkably devoid of repentance. Perhaps for Volyova the act of admission was enough in itself. “When your neural patterns were scanned, Sun Stealer embedded himself in them and reached the trawl, encoded in the data. From there it was only a short hop to every other system in the ship.”

They absorbed that in silence, until Khouri said, “Letting Sajaki do that wasn’t your smartest ever move, Ilia.”

“No,” she said, as if the thought had only just struck her. “I don’t think it was.”

When he came round—it might have been tens of seconds later, or tens of minutes—the visual shields had retracted and he was falling unimpeded down the shaft. He looked up, and though it was now kilometres overhead, he saw the residual glow of their skirmish, the shaft walls pocked and scarred by energy impacts. Some of the words were still circling, but parts of them had been chipped off so that they no longer made much sense. As if in recognition that their warning was now hopelessly corrupted, the words seemed to have given up being weapons. Even as he watched, they were returning to their hollows, like sullen rooks returning to the rookery.

But something was wrong.

Where was Sajaki?

“What the hell happened?” he asked, hoping that his suit would interpret the query successfully. “Where’s he gone?”

“There was an engagement against an autonomous defence system,” the suit informed him, as if commenting on the weather earlier that morning.

“Thank you, I realised that, but where’s Sajaki?”

“His suit sustained critical damage during the evasive action. Crypted telemetry squirts indicate extensive and possibly irreparable damage to both primary and secondary thrust units.”

“I said where is he?”

“His suit would not have been able to restrict his rate of fall or counteract Coriolis drift towards the wall. Telemetry bursts indicate he is fifteen kilometres below and still falling, with a blueshift relative to your position of one point one kilometres a second and climbing.”

“Still falling?”

“It is likely that, owing to the non-functionality of his thruster units, and the inability to deploy a monofilament braking line at his current speed, he will fall until further descent is inhibited by the termination of the shaft.”

“You mean he’s going to die?”

“At his predicted terminal velocity, survival is excluded in all models except as an extreme statistical outlier.”

“One chance in a million,” Calvin said.

Sylveste angled himself so that he was able to peer vertically down the shaft. Fifteen kilometres—-more than seven times the shaft’s echoless width. He looked and looked, all the while falling himself… and thought that perhaps he saw a flash, once or twice, at the extreme limit of his vision. He wondered if the flash had been the spark of friction, as Sajaki brushed against the walls in his unstoppable descent. If he had seen it at all, it was fainter each time, and soon he stopped seeing anything except the uninterrupted walls of the shaft.

“You learnt something,” Pascale said. “Sun Stealer told you something. That’s why you’ve been so desperate to stop him ever since.”

She was addressing Volyova, who had begun to feel slightly less vulnerable once the shuttle had passed turnover, midway between Cerberus and the point where she had increased the thrust to four gees. Now, with the drive flame pointing away from the pursuing lighthugger, they would make a far less conspicuous target. The downside of this, of course, was that the drive flame was now wafting towards Cerberus, and might be interpreted as a sign of hostility by the planet itself, if it had not already got the message that its recent human visitors did not necessarily have its best interests at heart.

But there was nothing any of them could do about that.

The lighthugger was sustaining a comfortable six gees now; enough to steadily whittle the distance down, bringing it within kill-range of the shuttle in five hours. Sun Stealer could have pushed the ship faster, which suggested to her that he was still cautiously exploring the limits of the drive. It was not, she thought, that he particularly cared about his own survival, but if the lighthugger was destroyed, the bridgehead would quickly follow. And although Sylveste was now inside, perhaps the alien needed to know that the objective had been achieved, which presumably required the prolonged opening of the crustal breach, so that some signal could return to outside space. She did not believe for one instant that Sylveste’s safe return had any place in Sun Stealer’s plans.

“Was it what the Mademoiselle showed me?” Khouri asked. After hours of sustained gee-load, her voice sounded like someone after a heavy drinking session. “The thing I could never get quite right in my head—was it that?”

“I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure,” Volyova said. “All I know is what he showed me. I believe it was the truth—but I doubt that we’ll ever know for sure.”

“You could start by telling me what it was,” Pascale said. “Seeing as I’m the one among us who definitely doesn’t know. Then you can fight over the details between yourselves.”

The console chimed, as it had done once or twice in the last few hours, signifying that a radar beam had just swept across them from aft, directed from the lighthugger. For the moment, it was not especially valuable data, since light-travel delay between the ship and the shuttle was still in the order of seconds, long enough for the shuttle to displace itself from its radar-tagged position with a burst of lateral thrust. But it was unnerving, since it confirmed that the lighthugger was indeed chasing them, and that it was indeed attempting to get a sufficiently accurate positional fix to justify opening fire. It would be hours before that situation came to pass, but the machine’s intent was grimly obvious.

“I’ll start with what I know,” Volyova said, drawing in a generous inhalation of breath. “Once, the galaxy was a lot more populous than it is now. Millions of cultures, though only a handful of big players. In fact, just the way all the predictive models say the galaxy ought to be today, based on the occurrence rates of G-type stars and terrestrial planets in the right orbits for liquid water.” She was digressing, but Pascale and Khouri decided not to fight it. “That’s always been a major paradox, you know. On paper, life looks a lot commoner than we find it to be. Theories for the developmental timescales for tool-using intelligence are a lot harder to quantify, but they suffer from much the same problem. They predict too many cultures.”