Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds Page B

for Amarantin physiology.”
    “So they used telescopes.”
    “Not long ago you described them as stone-age aliens. Now you’re ready to accept that they knew how to make telescopes?”
    He thought she might have smiled, but it was hard to tell when she wore the breather mask. Instead, she looked skywards. Something had crossed between the baulks; a bright deltoid moving under the dust.
    “I think someone’s here,” she said.
    They climbed the ladder quickly, out of breath when they reached the top. Though the wind had lessened from its peak of several hours earlier, it was still an ordeal to move around topside. The dig was in disarray, with floods and gravitometers toppled and broken, equipment strewn around.
    The aircraft was hovering above them, veering to and fro as it scouted landing sites. Sylveste recognised it immediately as one of Cuvier’s; Mantell had nothing as large. Aircraft were in short supply on Resurgam: the only means of crossing distances more than a few hundred kilometres. All the aircraft in existence now had been manufactured during the early days of the colony by servitors working from local raw materials. But the constructional servitors had been destroyed or stolen during the mutiny, and consequently the artefacts they had left behind were of incalculable value to the colony. The aircraft regenerated themselves if they were involved in minor accidents, and never needed maintainance—but they could still be ruined by sabotage or recklessness. Over the years the colony had steadily depleted its supply of flying machines.
    The deltoid hurt his eyes. The underside of the plane’s wing was sewn with thousands of heat elements which glowed white-hot, generating lift thermally. The contrast was too much for Calvin’s algorithms.
    “Who are they?” one of his students asked.
    “I wish I knew,” Sylveste said. But the fact that this plane had originated in Cuvier entirely failed to cheer him. He watched it lower, casting actinic shadows across the ground before the heat elements slid down the spectrum and the plane settled onto skids. After a moment a ramp folded out and a cluster of figures trooped from the plane. His eyes snapped to infrared—he could see the figures clearly now, even as they moved away from the plane towards him. Clad in dark clothes, they wore breather masks, helmets and what looked like strap-on armour, flashed with the Administration insignia: the closest the colony came to a fully-fledged militia. And they were carrying things—long, evil-looking rifles held in double-grips, with a torch slung under each barrel.
    “This doesn’t look good,” Pascale said, accurately.
    The squad halted a few metres from them. “Doctor Sylveste?” called a voice, attenuated by the wind, which was still considerable. “I’ve got some bad news, I’m afraid, sir.”
    He had been expecting nothing else. “What is it?”
    “The other crawler, sir—the one that left earlier tonight?”
    “What about it?”
    “They never made it back to Mantell, sir. We found them. There’d been a landslide—dust had built up on the ridge. They didn’t have a chance, sir.”
    “Sluka?”
    “They’re all dead, sir.” The Administration man.’s heavy breather mask made him look like an elephantine god. “I’m sorry. It’s lucky not all of you tried to get back at the same time.”
    “It’s more than luck,” Sylveste said.
    “Sir? There’s one other thing.” The guard tightened his grip on his rifle, emphasising its presence rather than aiming it. “You’re under arrest, sir.”
     
     
    K. C. Ng’s rasp of a voice filled the cable-car’s cockpit like a trapped wasp. “You developing a taste for it yet? Our fair city, I mean.”
    “What would you know?” Khouri said. “I mean, when was the last time you set foot outside of that damned box, Case? It can’t have been in living memory.”
    He was not with her, of course—there was nowhere near enough for room for a palanquin