Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds

Author:Alastair Reynolds [Reynolds, Alastair]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Tachyon Publications
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

“Orvin?”

“Who else?” Yesli smiled, and I tried to find the energy to respond. This was how it was going to be from now on, I thought. We would have to take our pleasure in small, petty things, like the capture of a fugitive. The measure of our lives now would not be in how things improved, but in how quickly or slowly they worsened.

“I’m glad.”

Yesli added: “He’s pretty weak, after all this time on his own, with no food or water. You should see him—make sure he really is the man you say he is.”

“There’s no doubt.”

“All the same, you should be involved in this. We’ll have to set an example, of course—do things properly. You’ve reason to hate him, and so do the rest of us after what happened to Crowl. But we’ve got to rise above our need for revenge. We’ll have to do things with due process, give him a chance to state his side of things . . .” Yesli trailed off, as if she recognised how ridiculous this all sounded.

“It’s all right. You can search me for knives.”

I ought to have felt jubilant, that we had Orvin back in our care. But so much had changed since he slipped away into the ship. We had learned too much from Murash, and I had been unkind to Prad. All I felt was a kind of empty satisfaction that one task was now completed, and that we could move on to the next.

I washed myself and met Yesli, Spry and Sacer with their new prisoner. It was the same room where we had spoken to Murash, and I had wondered if they might have allowed Murash to be present as well, to offer her outsider’s viewpoint. But it was just the four of us, and Orvin. They had tied him to a chair, doubling the restraints. He looked tired, and there were heavy bruises on his face. His eyes were red and puffy, the lids swollen. He seemed to have difficulty focussing.

“There was some resistance,” Sacer said.

“I can see.”

“Is it definitely Orvin?” Spry asked. “I know he mentioned you by name, before he got away from us. But there could always have been some mistake.”

“No,” I said, with joyless certainty. “It’s him. It’s not another man with the same name and it’s not someone pretending to be Orvin. This is the man who put a slow bullet into me, set to work its way to my heart, and then left me to die.”

“Are you going to argue with her story?” Yesli asked.

Orvin had some trouble answering. He moved to open his lips and spat out a wad of blood and shattered tooth.

“What would be the point?”

“Now would not be the time to test our patience,” Spry said.

“Fine then.” Orvin gave a sort of defeated sigh. “I met this woman during the war. Whether or not the ceasefire had been declared was an irrelevance. We were in the field of battle, cut off from central authority. She strayed into my sector.

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