Revelation Space

SEVENTEEN

Sylveste had rehearsed the meeting in his head many times.

He had done his best to consider every possible eventuality; even those that—based on his understanding of the situation—seemed fantastically unlikely to actually occur. But he had considered nothing like this, and with good reason. Even as it happened around him, he could not begin to make sense of what was going on; let alone why it deviated so far from the path of sanity.

“If it’s any consolation,” Sajaki said, his voice booming above the wind, amplified from the head of his monstrous suit, “I don’t understand much of this either.”

“That consoles me no end,” Sylveste said, speaking on the same radio frequency channel he had used for all his negotiations with the crew, even though their representatives—or what remained of them—were now standing within shouting distance. In the unrelenting howl of the razorstorm, shouting was not much of an option. “Call me naпve but at this point I was hoping you’d have taken things over with your usual ruthless efficiency, Sajaki. All I can say is that you appear to be slacking.”

“I don’t like it any more than you do,” the Ultra said. “But you’d better believe me—for your sakes—that things are now very much under control. Now, I’m about to divert my attention to my wounded colleague. At this point I strongly recommend that you resist the temptation to do anything foolhardy. Not that the thought ever crossed your mind, eh, Dan?”

“You know me better than that.”

“The problem, Dan, is that I know you only too well. But let’s not dwell on the past.”

“Let’s not.”

Sajaki moved over to the wounded one. Sylveste had known he was dealing with Triumvir Yuuji Sajaki even before the man had spoken. As soon as his suit hove into view, emerging from the storm, his faceplate had been rendered transparent, the man’s over-familiar features peering intently at the damage he surveyed. Although it was hard to tell, Sajaki looked largely unchanged from their last meeting. For him, only a few years of subjective time would have elapsed. Sylveste by contrast had squeezed the equivalent of two or three old-style human lives into that space. It was a dizzying moment.

But Sylveste could not establish the identities of the other two crew. There had been a third, of course… but he or she was now past the point at which he could ever hope to make acquaintance. And of the two who were not obviously dead, one was perhaps perilously close—this was the one now receiving Sajaki’s ministrations—and one was standing in what looked like shocked silence off to one side. Oddly, the uninjured one was keeping some suit weapons trained on Sylveste, even though he was unarmed and had no intention—no intention whatsoever—of resisting capture.

“She’ll live,” Sajaki said, after a moment in which his suit must have communed with the suit of the fallen one. “But we need to get her back to the ship fast. Then we can find out what actually happened down here.”

“It was Sudjic,” said a voice Sylveste didn’t know; female. “Sudjic tried to kill Ilia.”

Then the wounded one was the bitch herself: Triumvir Ilia Volyova.

“Sudjic?” Sajaki said. For a moment the word hung between them, and it seemed as if Sajaki could not—or would not—accept what the other, nameless woman was saying. But then, after the wind had torn at them for several more seconds, he said the name again, only this time on a falling note of acceptance. “Sudjic. Yes, it would make sense.”

“I think she planned—”

“You can tell me later, Khouri,” Sajaki said. “There’ll be plenty of time—and your role in the incident of course will have to be explained to my total satisfaction. But for now we should deal with priorities.” He nodded down at the injured Volyova. “Her suit will keep her alive for a few more hours, but it isn’t capable of reaching the ship.”

“I take it,” Sylveste said, “that you envisaged a way of getting us off the planet?”

“A word of advice,” Sajaki said. “Don’t irritate me too much, Dan. I’ve expended a considerable amount of trouble in getting you. But don’t imagine I wouldn’t stretch to killing you just to see how it feels.”

Sylveste had expected something like that from Sajaki—he would have been more worried if the man had said something dissimilar, downplaying the act of finding him. But if Sajaki believed a word of what he said—which was doubtful—then he was a fool. He had come from at least as far away as the Yellowstone system, perhaps even further, in his quest for Sylveste. No guessing what the human costs of it had actually been; quite aside from the sheer number of years which had been consumed.

“Good for you,” Sylveste said, injecting as much insincerity into his voice as he could muster. “But as a scientific man you must respect my impulse to experiment; to determine the limits of your tolerance.” He whipped his arm out from under his windcloak, holding something tightly between two fingers of his gloved hand. He had almost expected the one with the guns to fire at him at that point, thinking that he was drawing a weapon. It was, he considered, a reasonable risk to take. But he had not produced a gun. What he held was a smallish sliver of quantum-state memory.

“You see this?” he said. “This is what you asked me to bring. Calvin’s beta-level simulation. You need it, don’t you? You need it very badly.”

Sajaki watched him without a word.

“Well fuck you,” Sylveste said, crushing the simulation, until its dust was blown away into the storm.