Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space

“You’re ready to listen to us, I take it?” Sluka stood before him, the wind whipping a loose strand of hair across her goggles. She took periodic inhalations from her mask, cupped in one hand, while the other hand rested on her hip. “If so, I think you’ll find we can be reasonable. We all have your reputation in mind. None of us will speak of this matter once we return to Mantell. We’ll say you gave the order to withdraw once the advisory came in. The credit will be yours.”

“And you think any of that matters in the long term?”

Sluka snarled: “What’s so damned important about one obelisk? For that matter, what’s so damned important about the Amarantin?”

“You never really saw the big picture, did you?”

Discreetly—but not so discreetly that he missed her doing it—Pascale had begun taping the exchange, standing to one side with her compad’s detachable camera in one hand. “Some people might say there never was one to see,” Sluka said. “That you inflated the significance of the Amarantin just to keep the archaeologists in business.”

“You’d say that, wouldn’t you, Sluka? But then again, you were never exactly one of us to begin with.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that if Girardieau had wanted to plant a dissenter in our midst, you’d have made an excellent candidate.”

Sluka turned back to what Sylveste was increasingly thinking of as her mob. “Listen to the poor bastard—sinking into conspiracy theories already. Now we’re getting a taste of what the rest of the colony has seen for years.” Then her attention snapped back to him. “There’s no point talking to you. We’re leaving as soon as we have the equipment packed—sooner, if the storm intensifies. You can come with us.” She caught her breath from the mask, colour returning to her cheeks. “Or you can take your chances out here. The choice is entirely yours.”

He looked beyond her, to the mob. “Go on, then. Leave. Don’t allow anything as trivial as loyalty to get in your way. Unless one of you has the guts to stay here and finish the job they came to do.” He looked from face to face, meeting only awkwardly averted gazes. He barely knew any of their names. He recognised them, but only from recent experience; certainly none of them had come on the ship from Yellowstone; certainly none had known anything other than Resurgam, with its handful of human settlements strewn like a few rubies across otherwise total desolation. To them he must have seemed monstrously atavistic.

“Sir,” one of them said—possibly the one who had first alerted him to the storm. “Sir; it’s not that we don’t respect you. But we have to think of ourselves as well. Can’t you understand that? Whatever’s buried here, it isn’t worth this risk.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Sylveste said. “It’s worth more risk than you can possibly imagine. Don’t you understand? The Event didn’t happen to the Amarantin. They caused it. They made it happen.”

Sluka shook her head slowly. “They made their sun flare up? Is that what you actually believe?”

“In a word, yes,”

“Then you’re a lot further gone than I feared.” Sluka turned her back to him to address her mob. “Power up the crawlers. We’re leaving now.”

“What about the equipment?” Sylveste said.

“It can stay here and rust for all I care.” The mob began to disperse towards the two hulking machines.

“Wait!” Sylveste shouted. “Listen to me! You only need to take one crawler—there’s enough room for all of you in one, if you leave the equipment behind.”

Sluka faced him again. “And you?”

“I’ll stay here—finish the work myself, along with anyone else who wants to stay.”

She shook her head, snatching off her mask to spit on the ground in disgust. But when she left, she caught up with the rest of her brigade and directed them towards the nearest crawler, leaving the other—the one containing his stateroom—for him alone. Sluka’s mob entered the machine, some of them carrying small items of equipment or boxed artefacts and bones recovered from the dig: scholarly instincts prevailing even in rebellion. He watched the crawler’s ramps and hatches fold shut, then the machine rose on its legs, shuffled around and moved away from the dig. In less than a minute it had passed out of view completely, and the noise of its engines was no longer audible above the roar of the wind.

He looked around to see who was still with him.

There was Pascale—but that was almost inevitable; he suspected she would dog him to his grave if there was a good story in it. A handful of students who had resisted Sluka; ashamedly he could not place their names. Perhaps half a dozen more still down in the Wheeler grid, if he was lucky.

Composing himself, he snapped his fingers towards two of those who had stayed. “Start dismantling the imaging gravitometers; we won’t need them again.” He addressed another pair. “Begin at the back of the grid and start collecting all the tools left behind by Sluka’s deserters, together with field notes and any boxed artefacts. When you’re done, you can meet me at the base of the large pit.”

“What are you planning now?” Pascale said, turning off her camera and allowing it to whisk back into her compad.

“I would have thought it was obvious,” Sylveste said. “I’m going to see what it says on that obelisk.”

The suite console chimed as Ana Khouri was brushing her teeth. She came out of the bathroom, foam on her lips.

“Morning, Case.”

The hermetic glided into the apartment, his travelling palanquin decorated in ornate scrollwork, with a tiny, dark window in the front side. When the light was right she could just make out K. C. Ng’s deathly pale face bobbing behind an inch of green glass.

“Hey, you look great,” he said, voice rasping through the box’s speaker grille. “Where can I get hold of whatever perks you up?”

“It’s coffee, Case. Too much of the damned stuff.”

“I was joking,” Ng said. “You look like shit warmed over.”

She drew her palm across her mouth, removing the foam. “I’ve only just woken up, you bastard.”

“Excuses.” Ng managed to sound as if the act of waking up was an outmoded physical affectation he had long since discarded, like owning an appendix. Which was entirely possible: Khouri had never got a good look at the man inside the box. Hermetics were one of the more peculiar post-plague castes to emerge in the last few years. Reluctant to discard the implants which the plague might have corrupted, and convinced that traces of it still lingered even in the relative cleanliness of the Canopy, they never left their boxes unless the environment itself was hermetically sealed; limiting their mobility to a few orbital carousels.

The voice rasped again, “Pardon me, but we do have a kill scheduled for this morning, if I’m not very much mistaken. You remember this fellow Taraschi we’ve been trying to take out for the last two months? Ring any bells in there? It’s rather crucial that you do, because you happen to be the individual assigned to put him out of misery.”

“Off my back, Case.”

“Anatomically problematic even if I desired to locate myself thus, dear Khouri. But seriously, we have a probable kill location pegged, and an estimated time of demise. Are you sharpness personified?”

Khouri poured herself a final few sips of coffee and then left the rest of it on the stove for when she got back. Coffee was her only vice, one acquired in her soldiering days on the Edge. The trick was to reach a knife-edge of alertness, but not be so buzzing that she could not point the weapon without shaking.