Inhibitor Sequence 1 - Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds

Author:Alastair Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2010-12-16T23:00:00+00:00

Chamber Two was an empty twin of the chamber where the cache-weapons were kept.

Unlike the weapon-filled chamber, it had been pressurised up to one standard atmosphere. This was no mere extravagance; it constituted the largest single pocket of breathable air aboard the lighthugger, and was therefore used as a reservoir for supplying normally vacuum-filled regions of the ship with air when they needed to be entered by unsuited humans.

Usually the drive would have supplied an illusory one-gee of gravity, acting along the long axis of the ship, which was also the long axis of the roughly cylindrical chamber. But now that the drive had been quenched—now that the ship was in orbit around Resurgam—the illusion of gravity came from rotating the whole chamber, which meant that gravity acted at ninety degrees to the long axis, pushing radially outwards from the chamber’s middle. Near the middle, there was almost no gravity at all; objects could free-float there for minutes before their inevitable small initial drift slowly pushed them away from the middle. Thereafter, the increasing wind-pressure of the co-rotating air would tug them faster and lower. But nothing “fell” in straight lines in the chamber, at least not from the point of view of someone standing on the rotating wall.

They entered at one end of the cylinder, via an armoured clamshell door whose inner face was pitted with blast-marks and projectile impact-craters. Every visible surface of the chamber was similarly weathered; as far as Khouri could see (and the suit’s vision-augmentation routines meant she could see as far as she wished) there was no square metre of the chamber’s skin which had not been harried, scarred, gouged, buckled, assaulted, melted or corroded by some kind of weapon. It might once have been silver; now it was purple, like an all-enveloping metallic bruise. Illumination was supplied not from a stationary light source, but from dozens of free-noating drones, each of which picked out a spot on the chamber’s wall with a floodlight of actinic brilliance. The drones were constantly moving around, like a swarm of agitated glow-worms. The result was that no shadow in the chamber stayed still for more than a second or so, and it was impossible to look in any direction for more than a second before a blinding light-source entered it, washing everything else out.

“You sure you can handle this?” Sudjic said, as the door locked shut behind them. “You wouldn’t want to damage that suit. You break it, you bought it, you know?”

“Concentrate on not damaging your own,” Khouri said. Then she switched to the private channel, addressing Sudjic alone. “Maybe it’s just my imagination, but do I get the impression you don’t like me very much?”

“Now why would you think that?”

“I think it might have something to do with Nagorny.” Khouri paused. It had occured to her that the private channels might not be private at all, but then again, nothing she was about to say would not already be completely obvious to anyone listening in; most especially not to Volyova.

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