Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space 2 - Redemption Ark

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REDEMPTION ARK

Alastair Reynolds

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Ace Books by Alastair Reynolds

REVELATION SPACE

CHASM CITY

REDEMPTION ARK

Alastair Reynolds

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 The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

First American edition: June

Previously published in Great Britain in 2002 by Gollancz.

ISBN 0-441-01058-X

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Table of Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

EPILOGUE

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.

[We agree. This is something different. Nonetheless, full plague quarantine precautions

should be enforced; we might still be dealing with an infectious agent. Focus your attention

towards the rear, will you?]

The voice, which was never quite like any of the other voices she heard from other

Conjoiners, took on a needling, tutorial quality, as if it already knew the answers to the

questions it posed. [What do you make of the regular structures embedded in the hull, Skade?]

Here and there, situated randomly, were clusters of black cubes of varying size and

orientation. They appeared to have been pressed into the hull as if into wet clay, so that their

faces were half-concealed by the hulk’s hull material. They radiated curving tails of smaller

cubes, whipping out in elegant fractal arcs.

I’d say those are what they were trying to cut out elsewhere. Obviously they weren’t fast enough

to get them all.

[We concur. Whatever they are, they should certainly be treated with the utmost caution,

although they may very well be inactive now. Perhaps Galiana was able to stop them

spreading. Her ship was able to make it this far, even if it returned home on autopilot. You are

sure that no one is alive aboard it, Skade?]

No, and I won’t be until we open her up. But it doesn’t look promising. No movement inside, no

obvious hotspots. The hull’s too cold for any life-support processes to be operational unless they’re

carrying a cryo-arithmetic engine.

Skade hesitated, running a few more simulations in her head as background processes.

[Skade…?]

There could be a small number of survivors, I admit—but the bulk of the crew can’t be anything

other than frozen corpses. We might be able to trawl a few memories, but even that’s probably being

optimistic.

[We’re really only interested in one corpse, Skade.]

I don’t even know if Galiana’s aboard it. And even if she is… even if we directed all our efforts

into bringing her back to the living…we might not succeed.

[We understand. These are difficult times, after all. While it would be glorious to succeed,

failure would be worse than never having attempted it. At least in the eyes of the Mother Nest.]

Is that the Night Council’s considered opinion?

[All our opinions are considered, Skade. Visible failure cannot be tolerated. But that doesn’t

mean we won’t do our best. If Galiana is aboard, we will do what we can to bring her back to

us. But it must be done in absolute secrecy.]

How absolute, precisely?

[Knowledge of the ship’s return will be impossible to conceal from the rest of the Mother

Nest. But we can spare them the torment of hope, Skade. It will be reported that she is dead,

beyond hope of revival. Let our compatriots’ grief be quick and bright, like a nova. It will only

make their efforts against the enemy more strenuous. But in the meantime we will work on her

with diligence and love. If we bring her back to the living, her return will be a miracle. We will

be forgiven our bending of the truth here and now.]

Skade caught herself before she laughed aloud. Bending of the truth? It sounds like an

outright lie to me. And how are you going to ensure that Clavain sticks to your story?

[Why do you imagine Clavain will be a problem, Skade?]

She answered the question with a question of her own. Don’t tell me you’re planning on not

telling him either?

[This is war, Skade. There is an old aphorism concerning truth and casualty with which we

will not presently detain you, but we’re certain you grasp the point. Clavain is a major asset in

our tactical armoury. His thinking is unlike any other Conjoiner’s, and for that reason he gives

us a constant edge against the enemy. He will grieve and grieve quickly, like the others, and it

will be painful. But then he will be his old self again, just when we need him the most. Better

that, don’t you think, than to inflict upon him some protracted period of hope

and—likely—crushing disappointment?]

The voice shifted its tone, perhaps sensing that it still needed to make its point

convincingly. [Clavain is an emotional man, Skade—more so than the rest of us. He was old

when he came to us, older in neurological terms than any other recruit we have ever gained.

His mind is still mired in old ways of thinking. We mustn’t ever forget that. He is fragile and

needs our care, like a delicate hothouse flower.]

But lying to him about Galiana…

[It may never come to that. We’re getting ahead of ourselves. First we have to examine the

ship—Galiana may not be aboard after all.]

Skade nodded. That would be the best thing, wouldn’t it? Then we’d know that she’s still out

there, somewhere.

[Yes. But then we’d have to address the small matter of whatever happened to the third

ship.]

In the ninety-five years since the onset of the Melding Plague, the Conjoiners had learned a

great deal about contamination management. As one of the last human factions to retain an

appreciable pre-plague technology, they took quarantine very seriously indeed. In peacetime

the safest and easiest option would have been to examine the ship in situ, as it drifted through

space on the system’s edge. But there was too much risk of the Demarchists noticing such

activity, so the investigations had to be conducted under cover of camouflage. The Mother Nest

was already equipped to take contaminated craft, so it was the perfect destination.

But precautions still had to be taken, and that entailed a certain amount of work out in

open space. First, servitors removed the engines, lasering through the spars that braced them

on either side of the lighthugger’s tapering conic hull. An engine malfunction could have

destroyed the Mother Nest, and while such a thing was nearly unthinkable, Skade was

determined to take no chances while the nature of what had happened to the ship remained

mysterious. While that was going on, she ordered tractor rockets to haul slugs of black

unsublimated cometary ice out to the drifter, which servitors then slathered on to the hull in a

metre-thick caulk. The servitors completed their work quickly, without ever coming into direct

contact with the hull. The ship had been dark to begin with; now it became impossibly black.

Once that was done, Skade fired grapples into the ice, anchoring tractor rockets all around

the hulk. Since the ice would be bearing all the structural stress of moving the ship, she had to

attach a thousand tractors to avoid fracturing any one part of the caulk. It was exquisitely

beautiful when they all ignited: a thousand pinpricks of cold blue flame stabbing out from the

black spirelike core of the drifter. She kept the acceleration slow, and her calculations had been

so accurate that she needed only one small corrective burst before the final approach to the

Mother Nest. Such bursts were timed to coincide with blind spots in the Demarchist’s sensor

coverage, blind spots which the Demarchists thought the Conjoiners knew nothing about.

Inside the Mother Nest, the hulk was hauled into a five-kilometre-wide ceramic-lined

docking bay. The bay had been designed specifically for handling plague ships and was just

large enough to accommodate a lighthugger with its engines removed. The ceramic walls were

thirty metres thick and every item of machinery inside the bay was hardened against known

plague strains. The chamber was sealed once the ship was inside it, along with Skade’s

hand-picked examination team. Because the bay had only the most meagre data connections

with the rest of the Mother Nest, the team had to be primed to deal with isolation from the

million other Conjoiners in the Nest. That requirement made for operatives who were not

always the most stable—but Skade could hardly complain. She was the rarest of all: a

Conjoiner who could operate entirely alone, deep in enemy territory.

Once the ship was secured, the chamber was pressurised with argon at two atmospheres.

All but a fine layer of ice was removed from the ship by delicate ablation, with the final layer

melted away over a period of six days. A flock of sensors hovered around the ship like gulls,

sniffing the argon for any traces of foreign matter. But apart from chips of hull material

nothing unusual was detected.

Skade bided her time, taking every possible precaution. She did not touch the ship until it

was absolutely necessary. A hoop-shaped imaging gravitometer whirred along the ship,

probing its internal structure, hinting at fuzzy interior details. Much of what Skade saw

matched what she expected to see from the blueprints, but there were strange things that

should not have been there: elongated black masses which corkscrewed and bifurcated

through the ship’s interior. They reminded her of bullet trails in forensic images, or the

patterns sub-atomic particles made when they passed through cloud chambers. Where the

black masses reached the outer hull, Skade always found one of the half-buried cubic

structures.

But there was still room in the ship for humans to have survived, even though all the

indications were that none still lived. Neutrino radar and gamma-ray scans elucidated more of

the structure, but still Skade could not see the crucial details. Reluctantly, she moved to the

next phase of her investigation: physical contact. She attached dozens of mechanical

jackhammers around the hull, along with hundreds of paste-on microphones. The hammers

started up, thudding against the hull. She heard the din in her spacesuit, transmitted through

the argon. It sounded like an army of metalsmiths working overtime in a distant foundry. The

microphones listened for the metallic echoes as the acoustic waves propagated through the

ship. One of Skade’s older neural routines unravelled the information buried in the arrival

times of the echoes, assembling a tomographic density profile of the ship.

Skade saw it all in ghostly grey-greens. It did not contradict anything that she had already

learned, and improved her knowledge in several areas. But she could glean nothing further

without going inside, and that would not be easy. All the airlocks had been sealed from inside

with plugs of molten metal. She cut through them, slowly and nervously, with lasers and

hyperdiamond-tipped drills, feeling the crew’s fear and desperation. When she had the first

lock open she sent in an exploratory detachment of hardened servitors, ceramic-shelled crabs

equipped with just enough intelligence to get the job done. They fed images back into her

skull.

What they found horrified Skade.

The crew had been butchered. Some had been ripped apart, squashed, dismembered,

pulped, sliced, fragmented. Others had been burned or suffocated or frozen. The carnage had

evidently not happened quickly. As Skade absorbed the details, she began to picture how it

must have happened: a series of pitched battles and last stands in various parts of the ship, with

the crew raising makeshift barricades against the invaders. The ship itself had done its

desperate best to protect its human charges, rearranging interior partitions to keep the enemy

at bay. It had tried to flood certain areas with coolant or high-pressure atmosphere, and in

those cells Skade found the corpses of strange, ungainly machines—conglomerations of

thousands of black geometric shapes.

She formed a hypothesis. It was not difficult. The cubes had glued themselves on to the

outside of Galiana’s ship. They had multiplied, growing as they absorbed and reprocessed the

ship’s integument. In that respect it was indeed a little plaguelike. But the plague was

microscopic; one never saw the individual elements of the spore with the naked eye. This was

more brutal and mechanistic, almost fascistic, in the way it replicated. The plague at least

imbued transformed matter with something of its earlier characteristics, yielding chimeric

phantasms of machine and flesh.

No, Skade told herself. She was certainly not dealing with the Melding Plague, as

comforting as that might now have been.

The cubes had wormed into the ship and then formed attacking units—soldier

conglomerations. These soldiers had done the killing, advancing slowly away from each

infection point. Judging by the remains they were lumpy and asymmetric, more like dense

swarms of hornets than individual entities. They must have been able to squirm through the

tiniest opening, reassembling on the other side. Nonetheless, the battle had taken time. By

Skade’s estimate, it might have taken many days for the whole ship to fall. Many weeks, even.

She shivered at the thought of it.

A day after they had first entered, her servitors found some human bodies that were nearly

intact, except that their heads had been swallowed by black helmets of surrounding cubes. The

alien machinery appeared inert. The servitors removed parts of the helmets and found that

prongs of machine-growth reached into the corpses’ skulls, through the eye sockets or the ears

or the nasal cavity. Further study showed that the prongs had bifurcated many times, until

they reached microscopic scale. They extended deep into the brains of the dead, establishing

connections with their native Conjoiner implants.

But the machines, and their hosts, were now very much dead.

Skade tried to work out what had happened; the ship’s records were thoroughly

scrambled. It was obvious that Galiana had encountered something hostile, but why hadn’t the

cubes simply destroyed her ship in one go? The infiltration had been slow and painstaking, and

it only made sense if the cubes wanted to keep the ship intact for as long as possible.

There had been another ship: two had gone on—what had happened to that one?

[Ideas, Skade?]

Yes. But nothing I like.

[You think the cubes wanted to learn as much as possible, don’t you?]

I can’t think of any other reason. They put taps into their minds, reading their neural machinery.

They were intelligence-gathering.

[Yes. We agree. The cubes must have learned a great deal about us. We have to consider

them a threat, even if we don’t yet know where Galiana was when they found her. But there is

a glimmer of hope, wouldn’t you say?]

Skade failed to see what that glimmer could possibly be. Humanity had been searching for

an unambiguous alien intelligence for centuries. All they had found so far had been tantalising

leads—the Pattern Jugglers, the Shrouders, the archaeological remains of another eight or nine

dead cultures. They had never encountered another extant machine-using intelligence, nothing

to measure themselves against.

Until now.

And what this machine-using intelligence did, so it seemed, was stalk, infiltrate and

slaughter, and then invade skulls.

It was not, Skade conceded, the most fruitful of first encounters.

Hope? Are you serious?

[Yes, Skade, because we don’t know that the cubes were ever able to transmit that

knowledge back to whatever it was that sent them. Galiana’s ship made it back home, after all.

She must have steered it here, and she would not have done that if she thought there was any

danger of leading the enemy back to us. Clavain would be proud, I think. She was still

thinking of us; still thinking of the Mother Nest.]

But she ran the risk…

The voice of the Night Council cut her off sharply. [The ship is a warning, Skade. That is

what Galiana intended and that is how we must read it.]

A warning?

[That we must be ready. They are still out there, and one way or another we will meet them

again.]

You almost sound as if you were expecting them to arrive.

But the Night Council said nothing.

It was another week before they found Galiana, for the ship was vast and there had been

many changes to its interior that prohibited a rapid search. Skade had gone inside it herself,

along with other sweep teams. They wore heavy ceramic armour over their pressure suits, oiled

carapacial plaques that made movement awkward unless one exercised great care and

forethought. After several minutes of fumbling and locking herself into postures that could

only be got out of by laborious back-tracking, Skade wrote a hasty body-image/motion patch

and assigned it to run on a clump of idle neural circuits. Things became easier then, though she

had the unpleasant feeling that a shadowy counterpart of herself was driving her. Skade made

a mental note to revise the script later, so that the movement routines would feel totally

voluntary no matter how illusory that might be.

By then the servitors had done about all they were able. They had secured large volumes of

the ship, spraying diamond-fibred epoxy over the ruins of the alien machines, and they had

DNA-sampled most of the corpses in the explored zones. Every individual sample of genetic

material had been identified against the crew manifests in the Mother Nest, preserved since the

departure of the exploratory fleet, but there were many names on the list that had yet to be

Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space 2 - Redemption Ark

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