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.
Still, he was alive. And he had been blind before. The state was not unfamiliar to him; he knew it was something he could survive.
“Where are we going?” he asked. They had bound him with tight, circulation-inhibiting restraints. “Back to Cuvier?”
“What if we were?” asked the voice. “I’m surprised you’d be in much of a hurry to get there.”
The aircraft tilted and “banked sickeningly, plummeting and jerking aloft like a toy yacht in a squall. Sylveste tried to relate the turns to his mental map of the canyon systems around Cuvier, but it was hopeless. He was probably much closer to the buried Amarantin city than home, but he could also be anywhere on the planet by now.
“Are you…” Sylveste hesitated. He wondered if he ought to fake some ignorance about his situation, then crushed the idea. There was little he needed to fake. “Are you Inundationists?”
“What do you think?”
“I think you’re True Path.”
“Give the man a round of applause.”
“Are you running things now?”
“The whole show.” The guard tried to put some swagger into his answer, but Sylveste caught the momentary hesitation. Uncertainty, Sylveste thought. Probably they had no real idea how well their takeover was going. What he said could have been true, but, given that communications across the planet might have been damaged, there was no way of knowing; no way of confirming the thoroughness of their control. It could easily be that Girardieau-loyal forces retained the capital, or another faction entirely. These people must be acting out of faith, hoping that their allies had also succeeded.
They could, of course, be completely right.
Fingers placed the mask over his face, its hard edges knifing into his skin. The discomfort was tolerable, though: against the permanent pain from his damaged eyes it hardly registered at all.
Breathing with the mask in place took some effort. He had to work hard to draw air through the dust-collector built into the mask’s snout. Two-thirds of the oxygen which entered his lungs would now come from Resurgam’s atmosphere, while the remaining third came from a pressurised canister slung beneath the proboscis. It was doped with enough carbon dioxide to trigger the body’s breathing response.
He had barely felt the aircraft touch down—had not even been certain that they had arrived somewhere until the door was opened. Now the guard undid his restraints and shoved him peremptorily towards the coldness and the wind of the exit.
Was it dark or daytime out there?
He had no idea; no way of telling.
“Where are we?” he called. The mask muffled his voice and made him sound moronic.
“You imagine it makes any difference?” The guard’s voice was not distorted. He was breathing the air directly, Sylveste realised. “Even if the city was within walking distance—which it isn’t—you wouldn’t get beyond spitting distance of where you are now without killing yourself.”
“I want to speak to my wife.”
The guard grabbed his arm and pivoted it back to the point where Sylveste felt it was going to be dislocated. He stumbled, but the guard refused to let him fall. “You’ll speak to her when we’re good and ready. Told you she was fine, didn’t I? You don’t trust me or something?”
“I just watched you kill my new father-in-law. What do you think?”