Free The Revelation Space Collection by Alastair Reynolds Page B

of the shaft slow down rather violently.
    Nagorny, though, was not so well protected.
    It had not been easy - the rush of air had almost drowned out her voice as she screamed the appropriate instructions into the bracelet. Agonising moments had followed before the ship seemed to take any notice of her.
    Then - dutifully - it had moved to her whim.
    Later, she had found Nagorny. The ten gees of thrust, sustained for a second, would not ordinarily have been fatal. Volyova had, however, not whittled her speed down to zero in one go. She had achieved that through trial and error, and with each impulse Nagorny had been flung between ceiling and floor.
    She had been hurt herself; the impacts with the side of the shaft as she fell had broken one leg, but that was healed now and the pain no more than a foggy memory. She remembered using the laser-curette to remove Nagorny’s head, knowing that she would need to open it to get at the dedicated implants buried in his brain. They were delicate, those implants, and because they had come into being through laborious processes of mediated molecular growth, she would not be best pleased if they had to be duplicated.
    Now it was time to remove them.
    She took the head out of the helmet, immersing it in a bath of liquid nitrogen. Then she pushed her hands into two pairs of gauntlets suspended above the workbench within a scaffold of pistons. Tiny, glistening medical instruments whirred into life and descended on the skull, ready to slice it open in pieces which would later lock back together with fiendish precision. Before reassembling the head, Volyova would insert dummy implants so that - if the head were ever examined - it would not seem as if she had removed anything from it. It would have to be re-attached to the body, too - but there was no need to worry herself too much over that. By the time the others found out what had happened to Nagorny - what she was going to convince them had happened - they would not be in a hurry to examine him in any kind of detail. Sudjic might be a problem, of course - she and Nagorny had been lovers, until Nagorny went insane.
    Like many others that remained before her, Ilia Volyova would cross that bridge when she came to it.
    In the meantime, as she delved deep into Nagorny’s head for what was hers, she began to give the first thought to who was going to replace him.
    Certainly no one now aboard the ship.
    But perhaps around Yellowstone she would find a new recruit.
     
    ‘Case, are we getting warm?’
    The voice came back, blurred and trembly through the mass of the building above her. ‘So warm we’re incandescent, dear girl. Just hold on and make sure you don’t waste those toxin darts.’
    ‘Yes, about those, Case, I—’
    Khouri dived aside as three New Komuso trooped past, their heads enveloped in basketlike wicker helmets. Shakuhachi - bamboo flutes - cut the air ahead of them like majorettes’ staffs, dispersing a gang of capuchin monkeys into the shadows. ‘I mean,’ she continued, ‘what if we take out a collateral?’
    ‘It can’t happen,’ Ng said. ‘The toxin’s keyed directly to Taraschi’s biochemistry. Hit anyone else on the planet and what they’ll have to show for it is a nasty puncture wound.’
    ‘Even if I hit Taraschi’s clone?’
    ‘You think you might?’
    ‘Just a question.’ It struck her that Case was unusually jumpy.
    ‘Anyway, if Taraschi had a clone, and we killed him by mistake, that would be Taraschi’s problem, not ours. It’s all in the fine print. You should read it sometime.’
    ‘When I’m gripped by existential boredom,’ Khouri said, ‘I might try it.’
    She stiffened, then, because all of a sudden it was different. Ng was silent, and in place of his voice was a clear pulsing tone. It was soft and evil, like the echolocation pulse of a predator. She had heard that tone a dozen times in the last six months, each time signifying her proximity to the target. It meant that Taraschi was no