Revelation Space Read Free Page A

more than that.” He snapped a finger at the students. “Faster. Use the servitor if you must. I want to see the top of that obelisk by dawn.”
    Sluka, his senior research student, muttered a word under her breath.
    “Something to contribute?” Sylveste asked.
    Sluka stood for what must have been the first time in hours. He could see the tension in her eyes. The little spatula she had been using dropped on the ground, beside the mukluks she wore on her feet. She snatched the mask away from her face, breathing Resurgam air for a few seconds while she spoke. “We need to talk.”
    “About what, Sluka?”
    Sluka gulped down air from the mask before speaking again. “You’re pushing your luck, Dr. Sylveste.”
    “You’ve just pushed yours over the precipice.”
    She seemed not to have heard him. “We care about your work, you know. We share your beliefs. That’s why we’re here, breaking our backs for you. But you shouldn’t take us for granted.” Her eyes flashed white arcs, glancing towards Pascale. “Right now you need all the allies you can find, Dr. Sylveste.”
    “That’s a threat, is it?”
    “A statement of fact. If you paid more attention to what was going on elsewhere in the colony, you’d know that Girardieau’s planning to move against you. The word is that move’s a hell of a lot closer than you think.”
    The back of his neck prickled. “What are you talking about?”
    “What else? A coup.” Sluka pushed past him to ascend the ladder up the side of the pit. When she had a foot on the first rung, she turned back and addressed the other two students, both minding their own business, heads down in concentration as they worked to reveal the obelisk. “Work for as long as you want, but don’t say no one warned you. And if you’ve any doubts as to what being caught in a razorstorm is like, take a look at Sylveste.”
    One of the students looked up, timidly. “Where are you going, Sluka?”
    “To speak to the other dig teams. Not everyone may know about that advisory. When they hear, I don’t think many of them will be in any hurry to stay.”
    She started climbing, but Sylveste reached up and grabbed the heel of her mukluk. Sluka looked down at him. She was wearing the mask now, but Sylveste could still see the contempt in her expression. “You’re finished, Sluka.”
    “No,” she said climbing. “I’ve just begun. It’s you I’d worry about.”
    Sylveste examined his own state of mind and found—it was the last thing he had expected—total calm. But it was like the calm that existed on the metallic hydrogen oceans of the gas giant planets further out from Pavonis—only maintained by crushing pressures from above and below.
    “Well?” Pascale said.
    “There’s someone I need to talk to,” Sylveste said.
     
     
    Sylveste climbed the ramp into his crawler. The other was crammed with equipment racks and sample containers, with hammocks for his students pressed into the tiny niches of unoccupied space. They had to sleep aboard the machines because some of the digs in the sector—like this one—were over a day’s travel from Mantell itself. Sylveste’s crawler was considerably better appointed, with over a third of the interior dedicated to his own stateroom and quarters. The rest of the machine was taken up with additional payload space and a couple of more modest quarters for his senior workers or guests: in this case Sluka and Pascale. Now, however, he had the whole crawler to himself.
    The stateroom’s decor belied the fact that it was aboard a crawler. It was walled in red velvet, the shelves dotted with facsimile scientific instruments and relics. There were large, elegantly annotated Mercator maps of Resurgam dotted with the sites of major Amarantin finds; other areas of wall were covered in slowly updating texts: academic papers in preparation. His own beta-level was doing most of the scut-work on the papers now; Sylveste had trained the simulation to the point where