Better than nothing.
‘Wait,’ Pascale said. ‘There’s light behind us, Dan!’
And voices. He could hear their wordless, urgent babble now. The rattle of sterile metal. Chemosensor arrays were probably already tracking them; pheromonal sniffers were reading the airborne human effluent of panic, graphing data directly into the sensoria of the chasers.
‘Faster,’ Pascale said. He snatched a glance back, his eyes momentarily overloaded by the new light. It was a bluish radiance limning the shaft’s far reach, quivering, as if someone were holding a torch. He tried to increase speed, but the tunnel was steepening, making it harder to find traction on the glassily smooth sides: too much like trying to scramble up an ice chimney.
Panting sounds, metal scraping against the walls, barked commands.
Too steep now. It was now a constant battle just to hold balance, just to keep from slipping backwards. ‘Get behind me,’ he said, turning to face the blue light.
Pascale rushed past him.
‘What now?’
The light wavered, crept in intensity. ‘We have no choice,’ Sylveste said. ‘We can’t outrun them, Pascale. Have to turn and face them.’
‘That’s suicide.’
‘Maybe they won’t kill us if they see our faces.’
He thought to himself that four thousand years of human civilisation put the lie to that hope, but, given that it was the only one he had, it hardly mattered that it was forlorn. His wife locked her arms round his chest and pressed her head against his, looking the same way. Her breathing was pulsed and terrified. Sylveste had no doubt that his own sounded much the same.
The enemy could probably smell their fear, quite literally.
‘Pascale,’ Sylveste said. ‘I need to tell you something.’
‘Now?’
‘Yes, now.’ He could no longer separate his own rapid breathing from hers, each exhalation a quick hard beat against the skin. ‘In case I don’t get a chance to tell anyone else. Something I’ve kept a secret for too long.’
‘You mean in case we die?’
He avoided answering her question directly, one half of his mind trying to guess how many seconds or tens of seconds they had left. Perhaps not enough for what had to be said. ‘I lied,’ he said. ‘About what happened around Lascaille’s Shroud.’
She started to say something.
‘No, wait,’ Sylveste said. ‘Hear me out. I have to say this. Have to get it out.’
Her voice was barely audible. ‘Say it.’
‘Everything that I said happened out there was true.’ Her eyes were wide now; oval voids in the heat-map of her face. ‘It just happened in reverse. It wasn’t Carine Lefevre’s transform that began to break down when we were close to the Shroud.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘That it was mine. I was the one who nearly got both of us killed.’ He paused, waiting either for her to say something, or for the chasers to erupt from the blue light which was slowly creeping closer. When neither happened he continued, lost in the momentum of confession. ‘My Juggler transform started to decay. The gravity fields around the Shroud began to lash at us. Carine was going to die unless I separated my half of the contact module from hers.’
He could imagine the way she was trying to fit this over the existing template she carried in her mind, part of the consensus history with which she had been born. What he was saying was not, could not, should not be the truth. The way it was was very simple. Lefevre’s transform had begun to decay; Lefevre had made the supreme sacrifice, jettisoning her half of the contact module so that Sylveste stood a chance at surviving this bruising encounter with the totally alien. It could not be any other way. It was what she knew.
Except it was all untrue.
‘Which is what I should have done. Easy to say now, after the fact. But I couldn’t, not there and then.’ She could not read his expression, and he was unsure whether this pleased or displeased him at this moment. ‘I couldn’t blow the separation charges.’
‘Why not?’
And he thought: what she wants me to say is that it was not physically possible; that the quiet space had become too restricted for physical movement; that the gravity vortices were pinning him immobile, even as they worked to rip him flesh from bone. But that would have been a lie, and he was beyond that now.
‘I was scared,’ Sylveste said. ‘More scared than I’ve ever been in my life. Scared of what dying in an alien place would mean. Scared of what would happen to my soul, around that place. In what Lascaille called Revelation Space.’ He coughed, knowing there wasn’t much time left. ‘Irrational, but that was how I felt. The simulations hadn’t prepared us for the terror.’
‘Yet you made it.’
‘Gravity torsions ripped the craft apart; did the job the explosive charges were meant to do. I didn’t die… and that I don’t understand, because I should have.’
‘And Carine?’
Before he could answer — as if he even had an answer — a sickly-sweet smell hit them. Sleeping gas again, only this time in a much thicker dose. It flooded his lungs. He wanted to sneeze. He forgot about Lascaille’s Shroud, forgot Carine, forgot his own part in whatever had become of her. Sneezing was suddenly the most important thing in his universe.
That and clawing his skin off with his fingers.
A man stood against the blue. His expression was unreadable beneath his mask, but his stance conveyed nothing more than bored indifference. Languidly, he raised his left arm. At first it appeared that he was holding a trigger-grip megaphone, but the way he held the device was infinitely more purposeful. Calmly he sighted until the flared weapon was pointed straight at Sylveste’s eyes.
He did something — it was completely silent — and molten agony spiked into Sylveste’s brain.
NINE
‘Sorry about the eyes,’ the voice said, after an eternity of pain and motion.
For a moment Sylveste drifted in confused thought, trying to arrange the order of recent events. Somewhere in his recent past lay the wedding, the murders, their flight into the labyrinth, the tranquilliser gas, but nothing connected with anything else. He felt as if he were trying to reassemble a biography from a handful of unnumbered fragments, a biography whose events seemed tantalisingly familiar.
The unbelievable pain in his head when the man had pointed the weapon at him—
He was blind.
The world was gone, replaced by an unmoving grey mosaic; the emergency shutdown mode of his eyes. Severe damage had been wrought on Calvin’s handiwork. The eyes had not merely crashed; they had been assaulted.
‘It was better that you not see us,’ said the voice, very close now. ‘We could have blindfolded you, but we weren’t sure what those little beauties could do. Maybe they could see through any fabric we used. It was simpler this way. Focused mag pulse… probably hurt a bit. Blitzed a few circuits. Sorry for that.’
He managed not to sound sorry at all.
‘What about my wife?’
‘Girardieau’s kid? She’s okay. Nothing so drastic was required in her case.’
Perhaps because he was blind, Sylveste was more sensitive to the motion of his environment. They were in an aircraft, he guessed, steering through canyons and valleys to avoid dust storms. He wondered who owned the aircraft, who was now in charge. Were Girardieau government forces still holding Cuvier, or had the whole colony fallen to the True Path uprising? Neither was particularly appealing. He might have struck an alliance with Girardieau, but he was dead now and Sylveste had always had enemies in the Inundationist power structure; people who resented the way Girardieau had allowed Sylveste to live after the first coup.