Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds Page A

escaped. He’s elsewhere in the ship. I have no idea where.”
    The Captain pondered this for long moments. She could tell what he must be thinking. It was a big ship and there were whole regions of it through which nothing could be tracked, where sensors had stopped working. It would be even harder trying to find someone who was actively hiding.
    “You’re going to have to find him,” the Captain said. “You can’t have him still at large when Sajaki and the others awaken.”
    “And then what?”
    “You’ll probably have to kill him. Do it cleanly, and you can put his body back in the reefersleep unit and then arrange for the unit to fail.”
    “Make it look like an accident, you mean?”
    “Yes.” There was, as usual, absolutely no expression on the part of the Captain’s face she could see through the casket window. He was no more capable of altering his expression than a statue.
    It was a good solution—one that, in her preoccupation with the nature of the problem, she had failed to devise herself. Until then, she had feared any confrontation with Nagomy because it might put her in the position of having to kill him. Such an outcome had seemed unacceptable—but as always, no outcome was unacceptable if you looked at it the right way.
    “Thank you, Captain,” Volyova said. “You’ve been very helpful. Now—with your permission—I’m going to cool you again.”
    “You’ll be back again, won’t you? I do so enjoy our little conversations, Ilia.”
    “I wouldn’t miss them for the world,” she said, and then told her bracelet to drop his brain temperature by fifty millikelvin; all it would take to send him to dreamless, thoughtless oblivion. Or so she hoped.
    Volyova finished her cigarette in silence and then looked away from the Captain, along the dark curve of the corridor. Somewhere out there—somewhere else in the ship—Nagomy was waiting, bearing her what she knew to be the deepest of grudges. He was ill himself now; sick in the head.
    Like a dog that had to be put down.
     
     
    “I think I know what it is,” Sylveste said, when the last obstructing block of stone had been removed from the obelisk’s cladding, revealing the upper two metres of the object.
    “Well?”
    “It’s a map of the Pavonis system.”
    “Something tells me you’d already guessed that,” Pascale said, squinting through her goggles at the complex motif, which resembled two slightly offset groups of concentric circles. Stereoscopically merged, they fell into one group which seemed to hang some distance above the obsidian. And they were planetary orbits; no doubt of that. The sun Delta Pavonis lay at the centre, marked with the appropriate Amarantin glyph—a very human-looking five-pointed star. Then came correctly sized orbits for all the major bodies in the system, with Resurgam marked with the Amarantin symbol for world. Any doubts that this was just a coincidental arrangement of circles was banished by the carefully marked moons of the major planets.
    “I had my suspicions,” Sylveste said. He was fatigued, but the night’s work—and the risk—had surely been worthwhile. It had taken them much longer to unearth the second metre of the obelisk than the first, and at times the storm had seemed like a squadron of banshees, only ever a moment. away from inflicting shrieking death. But—as had happened before, and would certainly happen again—the storm had never quite reached the fury that Cuvier had predicted. Now the worst of it was done, and though streaks of dust were still rippling in the sky like dark banners, pink dawnlight was beginning to chase away the night. It seemed they had survived after all.
    “But it doesn’t change anything,” Pascale said. “We always knew they had astronomy; this just shows that at some point they discovered the heliocentric universe.”
    “It means more than that,” Sylveste said, carefully. “Not all of these planets are visible to the naked eye, even allowing