Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds

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 Nagomy. 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 was getting to the crux of her confession now. “Nagorny was always slightly unstable, Captain. In many ways, a borderline psychopath was more useful to me than someone wholly sane—at least, I thought so at the time. But I underestimated the degree of Nagorny’s psychosis.”
    “He got worse?”
    “It started not long after I put the implants in and allowed him to tap into the gunnery. He began to complain of nightmares. Very bad ones.”
    “How unfortunate for the poor fellow.”
    Volyova understood. What the Captain had undergone—what the Captain was still in the process of undergoing—would make most people’s nightmares seem very tame phantasms indeed. Whether or not he experienced pain was a debatable point, but what was pain anyway, compared to the knowledge that one was being eaten alive—and transformed at the same time—by something inexpressibly alien?
    “I can’t guess what those nightmares were really like,” Volyova said. “All I know is that for Nagomy—a man who already had enough horrors loose in his head for most of us—they were too much.”
    “So what did you do?”
    “I changed everything—the whole gunnery interface system, even the implants in his head. None of it worked. The nightmares continued.”
    “You’re certain they had something to do with the gunnery?”
    “I wanted to deny it at first, but there was a clear correlation with the sessions when I had him in the seat.” She lit herself another cigarette, the orange tip the only remotely warm thing anywhere near the Captain. Finding a fresh packet of cigarettes had been one of the few joyful moments of recent weeks. “So I changed the system again, and still it didn’t work. If anything, he just got worse.” She paused. “That was when I told Sajaki of my problems.”
    “And Sajaki’s response was?”
    “That I should discontinue the experiments, at least until we’d arrived around Yellowstone. Let Nagomy spend a few years in reefersleep, and see if that cured his psychosis. I was welcome to continue tinkering with the gunnery, but I wasn’t to put Nagorny in the seat again.”
    “Sounds like very reasonable advice to me. Which of course you disregarded.”
    She nodded, paradoxically relieved that the Captain had guessed her crime, without her having to spell it out.
    “I woke a year ahead of the others,” Volyova said. “To give me time to oversee the system and keep an eye on how you were doing. That was what I did for a few months, too. Until I decided to wake Nagorny as well.”
    “More experiments?”
    “Yes. Until a day ago.” She sucked hard on the cigarette.
    “This is like drawing teeth, Ilia. What happened yesterday?”
    “Nagorny disappeared.” There; she’d said it now. “He had a particularly bad episode and tried to attack me. I defended myself, but he