Reynolds, Alastair - Redemption Ark

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRTY-NINE

FORTY

EPILOGUE

MORE PRAISE FOR REDEMPTION ARK

Best SF Novel of the Year, Chronicle

One of the Best SF Novels of the Year, Locus

—The Denver Post

—Locus

—The San Diego Union-Tribune

—The Olympia (WA) Olympian

—SFRA Review

PRAISE FOR

CHASM CITY

Winner of The British Science Fiction Association’s Award

for Best Novel of the Year

One of the Best SF Novels of the Year,

Locus and Science Fiction Chronicle

—The Denver Post

PRAISE FOR

REVELATION SPACE

Best Science Fiction Novel of the Year, Chronicle

One of the Best First Novels of the Year, Locus

— Stephen Baxter, coauthor of The Light of Other Days

Science Fiction Chronicle

Ace Books by Alastair Reynolds

REVELATION SPACE

CHASM CITY

REDEMPTION ARK

ABSOLUTION GAP

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either

are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and

any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business

establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

REDEMPTION ARK

An Ace Book / published by arrangement with

Orion Publishing Group

Copyright © 2002 by Alastair Reynolds.

eISBN : 978-1-436-27768-6

ACE®

Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

ACE and the “A” design

are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

http://us.penguingroup.com

PROLOGUE

The dead ship was a thing of obscene beauty.

Skade looped around it in a helical pseudo-orbit, her corvette’s thrusters drumming a rapid tattoo of corrective bursts. The starscape wheeled behind the ship, the system’s sun eclipsed and revealed with each loop of the helix. Skade’s attention had lingered on the sun for a moment too long. She felt an ominous tightening in her throat, the onset of motion sickness.

It was not what she needed.

Irritated, Skade visualised her own brain in glassy three-dimensional complexity. As if peeling a fruit, she stripped away layers of neocortex and cortex, flinging aside the parts of her own mind that did not immediately interest her. The silvery loom of her implant web, topologically identical with her native synaptic network, shimmered with neural traffic, packets of information racing from neuron to neuron at a kilometre per second, ten times faster than the crawl of biological nerve signals. She could not actually perceive those signals moving—that would have required an accelerated rate of consciousness, which would have required even faster neural traffic—but the abstraction nonetheless revealed which parts of her augmented brain were the most active.

Skade zoomed in on a specific locus of brain function called the Area Postrema, an ancient tangle of neural circuitry that handled conflicts between vision and balance. Her inner ear felt only the steady pressure of her shuttle’s acceleration, but her eyes saw a cyclically changing view as the background wheeled behind the ship. The ancient part of her brain could only reconcile that mismatch by assuming that Skade was hallucinating. It therefore sent a signal to another part of her brain that had evolved to protect the body from ingesting poisons.

Skade knew there was no point blaming her brain for making her feel nauseous. The hallucination/poison connection had worked very well for millions of years, allowing her ancestors to experiment with a wider diet than would otherwise have been possible. It just had no place here and now, on the chill, dangerous edge of another solar system. She supposed it would have made sense to erase such features by deftly rewiring the basic topology, but that was a lot easier said than done. The brain was holographic and messy, like a hopelessly overcomplicated computer program. Skade knew, therefore, that by “switching off” the part of her brain that was making her feel nauseous, she was almost certainly affecting other areas of brain function that shared some of the same neural circuitry. But she could live with that; she had done something similar a thousand times before, and she had seldom experienced any cognitive side effects.

There. The culprit region pulsed pink and dropped off the network. The nausea vanished; she felt a great deal better.

What remained was anger at her own carelessness. When she had been a field operative, making frequent incursions into enemy territory, she would never have left it until now to make such a modest neural adjustment. She had become sloppy, and that was unforgivable. Especially now that the ship had returned: an event that might prove to be as significant to the Mother Nest as any of the war’s recent campaigns.

She felt sharper now. The old Skade was still there; she just needed to be dusted off and honed now and then.

[Skade, you will be careful, won’t you? It’s clear that something very peculiar has happened to this ship.]

The voice she heard was quiet, feminine and confined entirely to her own skull. She answered it subvocally.

I know .

[Have you identified it? Do you know which of the two it is, or was?]

It’s Galiana’s .

Now that she had swept around it, a three-dimensional image of the ship formed in her visual cortex, bracketed in a loom of shifting eidetic annotation as more information was teased out of the hulk.

[Galiana’s? The Galiana’s? You’re sure of that?]

Yes. There were some small design differences between the three that left together, and in as much as this matches either of the two that haven’t come back yet, it matches hers .

The presence took a moment to respond, as it sometimes did. [That was our conclusion as well. But something has clearly happened to this ship since it left the Mother Nest, wouldn’t you say?]

A lot of somethings, if you ask me .

[Let’s begin at the front and work backwards. There is evidence of damage—considerable damage: lacerations and gouges, whole portions of the hull that appear to have been removed and discarded, like diseased tissue. Plague, do you think?]

Skade shook her head, remembering her recent trip to Chasm City. I’ve seen the effects of the Melding Plague up close. This doesn’t look like quite the same thing .