Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space

Again there was a chime from the hull sensors, warning of a directed radar scan. Another chime followed soon after; evidence that the pursuing ship was narrowing its focus.

“The Inhibitor device around Hades must have alerted others, elsewhere,” Khouri said, trying to ignore the mechanised prophecies of imminent doom. “Transmitted the intelligence it had gathered, warning them to be on the lookout for the Banished.”

“It can’t have simply been a case of sitting around waiting for them to show up,” Volyova said. “The machines must have switched over from passivity to something more active—replicating hunting machines, for instance, programmed with the templates of the Banished. No matter which direction the Banished turned to flee, light would have outraced them, and Inhibitor systems would always be one step ahead, alert and waiting.”

“They wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

“But it can’t have been instantaneous extinction,” Pascale said. “The Banished had time to return to Resurgam; time to preserve what they could of the old culture. Even if they knew they were being hunted down, and that the sun was in the process of destroying their homeworld.”

“Maybe it took ten years; maybe a century.” The way Volyova spoke, it was obvious she didn’t think it made a great deal of difference. “All we know is that some managed to get further than others.”

“But none survived,” Pascale said. “Did they?”

“Some did,” Khouri said. “In a manner of speaking.”

Behind Volyova, the tactical display began to shriek.

The final shell was hollow.

It had taken him three days to reach it; a day since he had left Sajaki’s bodyless suit on the floor of the third shell, more than five hundred kilometres above him now. If he stopped to think about those distances, he knew, he would go quietly mad, so he carefully quarantined them from his thoughts. Simply being in an entirely alien environment was troubling enough; he did not wish to compound his fear with an additional dose of claustrophobia. Yet his quarantining was not complete, so that behind every thought there was a nagging background of crushing fright, the thought that at any instant some action he did would cause the delicate equilibria of this place to shift catastrophically, bringing down that vast, impossible ceiling.

With each inward layer he seemed to pass through a subtly different phase of Amarantin construction methodology. History, too, he supposed—but nothing was ever that simple. The levels did not seem to get systematically more or less advanced as he penetrated deeper, but rather evinced different philosophies; different approaches. It was as if the first Amarantin to arrive here had found something (what, he had not yet begun to guess) and had taken the decision to englobe it in an artificial shell armoured and capable of defending itself. Then another group must have arrived and elected to englobe that, perhaps because they believed their fortifications were more secure. The last of all had taken the process one logical step further, by camouflaging their fortifications so that they did not resemble anything artificial at all. It was impossible to guess over what timescales this layering had taken place, so he studiously avoided doing so. Maybe the different layers had been emplaced almost simultaneously—or perhaps the process had been drawn out over the thousands of years between Sun Stealer’s departure with the Banished Ones, and his godlike return.

Naturally, he had been less than comforted by what he found in Sajaki’s suit.

“He was never there,” Calvin said, filling in his thoughts. “All the while you thought he was in the suit, he wasn’t. The suit was empty. No wonder he never let you get too close.”

“Sneaky bastard.”

“I’ll say. But it wasn’t actually Sajaki being a sneaky bastard, was it?”

Sylveste was desperately trying to find another way to explain this paradox, but was failing at every attempt. “But if not Sajaki…” He trailed off, remembering how he had not actually seen the Triumvir in person before they departed the ship. Sajaki had called him from the clinic, but he had no reason to believe that had really been Sajaki.

“Listen, something was driving that suit until it crashed.” Calvin was doing his favourite trick of sounding absurdly calm, despite the situation. But he lacked the usual bravado. “I’d say there’s only one logical culprit.”

“Sun Stealer.” Sylveste said the words experimentally, testing the idea for its repulsiveness. It was no less bitter than he had imagined it would be. “It was him, wasn’t it? Khouri had it right all along.”

“I’d say that at this juncture we’d be staggeringly foolish to reject that hypothesis. Do you want me to continue?”

“No,” Sylveste said. “Not just yet. Give me a moment to think things through, then you can inflict all the pious wisdom on me you see fit.”

“What’s there to think through?”

“I’d have thought it was obvious. Whether we go on or not.”

The decision had not been one of the simpler ones in his life. Now he knew that, for all or part of this, he had been manipulated. How deep had that manipulation gone? Had it extended to his very powers of reason? Had his thought processes been subjugated towards this one end for most of his life in fact, since returning from Lascaille’s Shroud? Had he really died out there, and returned to Yellowstone as some kind of automaton, acting and feeling like his old self, but really directed towards one goal only, which was now on the point of being achieved? And did it honestly matter?

After all, no matter which way he cut it, no matter how false these feelings were, no matter how irrational the logic, this was the place he had always wanted to be.

He could not go back; not yet.

Not until he knew.

“ Svinoi pig-dog,” Volyova said.

The first graser burst had hit the nose of the shuttle thirty seconds after the tactical attack siren had begun to shriek; barely enough time to throw off a cloud of ablative chaff, designed to dissipate the initial energies of the incoming gamma-ray photons. Just before the flightdeck windows rendered themselves opaque, Volyova saw a silver flash, as sacrificial hull armour vanished in a gasp of excited metal ions. The structural shock rammed through the fuselage like a concussion charge. More sirens joined in the threnody, and a vast acreage of the tactical display switched over to offensive mode, graphing up weapons readiness data.

Useless; all of it useless. The Melancholia’s defences were simply too small-scale, too short-range, to have any chance against the pursuing megatonnage of the lighthugger. Hardly surprising; some of the Infinity ’s guns were larger than the shuttle, and those were probably the ones that it had not yet bothered deploying.

Cerberus was a grey immensity, filling a third of the sky from the shuttle’s perspective. By now they should be decelerating, yet they were busy wasting precious seconds being fried. Even if they fought off the attack, they would be moving uncomfortably fast…

More of the hull vaporised.

She let her fingers do the talking, typing in a programmed evasive pattern that would undoubtedly get them out of the immediate focus of the graser onslaught. The only trouble was, it depended on sustaining thrust at ten gees.

She executed the routine, and almost immediately blacked out.

The chamber was hollow, but not empty.

Three hundred kilometres wide, Sylveste guessed it to be, though that was sheer guesswork, because his suit radar stubbornly refused to come up with a consistent distance for the diameter of the chamber, no matter how many readings he asked it to make. No doubt what was in the middle of the chamber was causing his suit difficulty. He could understand that. The thing was causing him difficulty as well, though in perhaps not quite the same way. It was giving him a headache.