Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space

“Of course not,” Sajaki said, tearing a hunk of bread in half. He fixed Sudjic with his close-set ellipsoidal eyes, like someone staring down a rabid dog. The tattoos which he had applied during his infiltration of the Bloater Skyjacks were gone now, but there were fine whitish trails where they had been, despite the patient ministrations which had been visited upon him in reefersleep. Perhaps, Volyova thought, Sajaki had instructed his medichines to retain some trace of his exploits among the Bloaterians; a trophy of the economic gains he had wrested from them. “I’m sure we all absolve Ilia of any responsibility for Nagorny’s death—don’t we, Sudjic?”

“Why should I blame her for an accident?” Sudjic said.

“Precisely. And there’s an end to the matter.”

“Not quite,” Volyova said. “Now may not be the best time to raise the matter, but…” She trailed off. “I was going to say that I wanted to extract the implants from his head. But even if I was allowed to do so, they’d probably be damaged.”

“Can you make new ones?” Sajaki said.

“Given time, yes.” She said it with a sigh of resignation. “I’ll need a new candidate, too.”

“When we lay over around Yellowstone,” Hegazi said, “you can search for someone there, can’t you?”

The knights were still clashing across the glade, but no one was paying them very much attention now, even though one of them seemed to be having difficulties with an arrow inserted through his faceplate.

“I’m sure someone suitable will turn up,” Volyova said.

The cold air in the Mademoiselle’s house was the cleanest Khouri had tasted since arriving on Yellowstone. Which was really saying very little. Clean, but not fragrant. More like the smells she remembered from the hospital tent on Sky’s Edge, redolent of iodine and cabbage and chlorine, the last time she had seen Fazil.

Manoukhian’s cable-car had carried them across the city, through a partially flooded subsurface aqueduct. They had arrived in an underground cavern. From there, Manoukhian had ushered Khouri into a lift which ascended with ear-popping speed. The lift had brought them to this dark, echoey hallway. More than likely it was just a trick of acoustics, but Khouri felt as if she had just stepped into a huge unlit mausoleum. Filigreed windows floated overhead, but the light which leaked through them was midnight pale. Given that it was still day outside, the effect was subtly disturbing.

“The Mademoiselle has no passion for daylight,” Manoukhian said, leading her on.

“You don’t say.” Khouri’s eyes were starting to adjust to the gloom. She began to pick out big hulking things standing in the hall. “You’re not from around here, are you, Manoukhian?”

“I guess that makes two of us.”

“Was it a clerical error that brought you to Yellowstone as well?”

“Not quite.” She could tell that Manoukhian was deciding how much he could get away with telling. That was his one weakness, Khouri thought. For a hit-man, or whatever he was, the man liked to talk too much. The trip over had been one long series of brags and boasts about his exploits in Chasm City—stuff, which, if it had been coming from anyone other than this cool customer with the foreign accent and trick gun, she would have dismissed out of hand. But with Manoukhian, the worrying thing was that a lot of it might have been true. “No,” he said, his urge to spin a story obviously triumphing over his professional instincts towards surliness. “No; it wasn’t a clerical error. But it was a kind of mistake—or an accident, at any rate.”

There were lots of the hulking things. It was difficult to make out their overall shapes, but they all rested on slim poles jutting from black plinths. Some were like sections of smashed eggshell, while others more resembled delicate husks of brain coral. Everything had a metallic sheen, rendered colourless in the sallow light of the hallway.

“You had an accident?”

“No… not me. She did. The Mademoiselle. That’s how we met each other. She was… I shouldn’t be telling you any of this, Khouri. She finds out, I’m dead meat. Pretty easy to dispose of bodies in the Mulch. Hey, you know what I found there the other day? You’re not going to believe any of this, but I found a whole fucking…”

Manoukhian went off on a boast. Khouri brushed her fingers against one of the sculptures, feeling its cool metal texture. The edges were very sharp. It was as if she and Manoukhian were two furtive art lovers who had broken into a museum in the middle of the night. The sculptures seemed to be biding their time. They were waiting for something—but not with infinite reserves of patience.

She was perplexingly glad of the gunman’s company.

“Did she make these?” Khouri asked, interrupting Manoukhian’s flow.

“Perhaps,” Manoukhian said. “In which case you could say she suffered for her art.” He stopped, touching her on the shoulder. “All right. You see those stairs?”

“I guess you want me to use them.”

“You’re learning.”

Gently, he stuck the gun in her back—just to remind her it was still there. Through a porthole in the wall next to the dead man’s quarters Volyova could see a tangerine-coloured gas giant planet, its shadowed southern pole flickering with auroral storms. They were deep inside the Epsilon Eridani system now; coming in at a shallow angle to the ecliptic. Yellowstone was only a few days away; already they were within light-minutes of local traffic, threading through the web of line-of-sight communications which linked every significant habitat or spacecraft in the system. Their own ship had changed, too. Through the same window Volyova could just see the front of one of the Conjoiner engines. The engines had automatically hauled in their scoop fields as the ship dropped below ramming speed, subtly altering their shapes to in-system mode, the intake maw closing like a flower at dusk. Somehow the engines were still producing thrust, but the source of the reaction mass or the energy to accelerate it was just another mystery of Conjoiner technology. Presumably there was a limit on how long the drives could function like this, or else they would never have needed to trawl space for fuel during interstellar cruise mode…

Her mind was wandering, trying to focus on anything but the issue at hand.

“I think she’s going to be trouble,” Volyova said. “Serious trouble.”

“Not if I read her correctly.” Triumvir Sajaki dispensed a smile. “Sudjic knows me too well. She knows I wouldn’t take the trouble of actually reprimanding her if she made a move against a member of the Triumvirate. I wouldn’t even give her the luxury of leaving the ship when we get to Yellowstone. I’d simply kill her.”

“That might be a little harsh.”

She sounded weak and despised herself for it, but it was how she felt. “It’s not as if I don’t sympathise with her. After all Sudjic had nothing personal against me until I… until Nagorny died. If she does anything, couldn’t you just discipline her?”

“It’s not worth it,” Sajaki said. “If she has the mind to do something to you, she won’t stop at petty aggravation. If I lust discipline her she’ll find a way to hurt you permanently. Killing her would be the only reasonable option. Anyway—I’m surprised that you see her side of things. Hasn’t it occurred to you that some of Nagorny’s problems might have rubbed off on her?”

“You’re asking me whether I think she’s completely sane?”

“It doesn’t matter. She won’t move against you—you have my word on that.” Sajaki paused. “Now, can we get this over with? I’ve had enough of Nagorny for one life.”

“I know exactly how you feel.”