The Revelation Space Collection by Alastair Reynolds Read Free Book Online Page A

like a prisoner who had until dawn to tunnel from his cell. Only a few moments passed before Pascale and the student joined him in the work, while the storm howled above.
     
    ‘I don’t remember much,’ the Captain said. ‘Are we still around Bloater?’
    ‘No,’ Volyova said, trying not to make it seem as if she had already explained this to him a dozen times, each time she had warmed his mind. ‘We left Kruger 60A some years ago, once Hegazi negotiated us the shield ice we needed.’
    ‘Oh. Then where are we?’
    ‘Heading towards Yellowstone.’
    ‘Why?’ The Captain’s basso voice rumbled out of speakers arranged some distance from his corpse. Complex algorithms scanned his brain patterns and translated the results into speech, fleshing out the responses when required. He had no real right to be conscious at all, really - all neural activity should have ended when his core temperature had dropped below freezing. But his brain was webbed by tiny machines, and in a way it was the machines which were thinking now, even though they were doing so at less than half a kelvin above absolute zero.
    ‘That’s a good question,’ she said. Something was bothering her now and it was more than just this conversation. ‘The reason we’re going to Yellowstone is . . .’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Sajaki thinks there’s a man there who can help you.’
    The Captain pondered this. On her bracelet she had a map of his brain: she could see colours squirming across it like armies merging on a battlefield. ‘That man must be Calvin Sylveste,’ the Captain said.
    ‘Calvin Sylveste is dead.’
    ‘The other one, then. Dan Sylveste. Is that the man Sajaki seeks?’
    ‘I can’t imagine it’s anyone else.’
    ‘He won’t come willingly. He didn’t last time.’ There was a moment of silence; quantum temperature fluctuations pushing the Captain back below consciousness. ‘Sajaki must be aware of that,’ he said, returning.
    ‘I’m sure Sajaki has considered all the possibilities,’ Volyova said, in a manner which made it clear she was sure of anything but that. But she would be careful of speaking against the other Triumvir. Sajaki had always been the Captain’s closest adjutant - the two of them went back a long way; times long before Volyova had joined the crew. To the best of her knowledge, no one else - including Sajaki - ever spoke to the Captain, or even knew that there was a way to do so. But there was no point taking stupid risks - even given the Captain’s erratic memory.
    ‘Something’s troubling you, Ilia. You’ve always been able to confide in me. Is it Sylveste?’
    ‘It’s more local than that.’
    ‘Something aboard the ship, then?’
    It was not something to which she was ever going to become totally accustomed, Volyova knew, but in recent weeks visiting the Captain had begun to take on definite tones of normality. As if visiting a cryogenically cooled corpse infected with a retarded but potentially all-consuming plague was merely one of life’s unpleasant but necessary elements; something that, now and again, everyone had to do. Now, though, she was taking their relationship a step further - about to ignore the same risk which had stopped her expressing her misgivings about Sajaki.
    ‘It’s about the gunnery,’ she said. ‘You remember that, don’t you? The room from which the cache-weapons can be controlled?’
    ‘I think so, yes. What about it?’
    ‘I’ve been training a recruit to become Gunnery Officer; to assume the gunnery seat and interface with the cache-weapons through neural implants.’
    ‘Who was this recruit?’
    ‘Someone called Boris Nagorny. No; you never met him - he came aboard only recently, and I tended to keep him away from the others when I could help it. I would never have brought him down here, for obvious reasons.’ Namely that the Captain’s contagion might have reached Nagorny’s implants if she had allowed the two of them to get too close. Volyova sighed. She