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REDEMPTION ARK Alastair Reynolds ACE BOOKS, NEW YORK MORE PRAISE FOR REDEMPTION ARK Best SF Novel of the Year, Chronicle One of the Best SF Novels of the Year, Locus “The best of the new breed of space opera. Wild action on a grand scale spans well-imagined and developed worlds— bold and new with sharply defined differences in both characters and the changed definitions of humanity.” —The Denver Post “Clearly one of the year’s major science fiction nov els... The book Reynolds’s readers have been waiting for.” —Locus “Political snarking worthy of Graham Greene.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune “Reynolds’ sequel...features intense personal drama and large-scale scenes of space warfare. Told with skill and an attention to detail.” —Library Journal “Alastair Reynolds’s work is hard science fiction at its best. Full of suspense, great characters, and science.” —The Olympia (WA) Olympian “A terrific story. Alastair Reynolds is one of the most inter esting writers of hard SF today, easily ranking with Greg Benford, Stephen Baxter, and Ken MacLeod.” —SFRA Review “A large, sprawling tale of war, politics, ideology, and alien invasion. Skilled narrative technique and well-developed characters make this a novel most readers will find absorb ing.” —Booklist continued . . . PRAISE FOR CHASM CITY Winner of The British Science Fiction Association’s Award for Best Novel of the Year One of the Best SF Novels of the Year, Locus and Science Fiction Chronicle “Deep, complex, and always more than [it] seems. Reynolds succeeds in the hardest task of good science fic tion, creating a new world full of wonder.” —The Denver Post “A tightly written story that spirals inevitably inwards to ward its powerful conclusion. [Chasm City] confirms Reynolds as the most exciting space opera writer working today.” —Locus “The best thing that Reynolds has ever done...int he end, it’s a joy.” —John Clute, author of Appleseed, coeditor of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction “A worthy follow-up to Revelation Space. Reynolds trans mutes space opera into a noirish, baroque, picaresque mys tery tale. Inventiveness and tone are Reynolds’ strong points... the novel’s details are consistently startling but convincing in context. Reynolds remains one of the hottest new SF writers around.” —Publishers Weekly “An impressive book. Another step toward what could be come a very significant twenty-first-century hard SF ca reer.” —SF Site PRAISE FOR REVELATION SPACE Best Science Fiction Novel of the Year, Chronicle One of the Best First Novels of the Year, Locus “A terrific treat. I was hooked from page one...Fero ciously intelligent and imbued with a chilling logic—it may really be like this Out There.” —Stephen Baxter, coauthor of The Light of Other Days “Intensely compelling; darkly intelligent; hugely ambi tious.” —Paul J. McAuley, author of Ancients of Days “This distant-past/far-future, hard sci-fi tour de force probes a galaxy-wide enigma: Why does spacefaring hu manity encounter so few remnants of intelligent life?...C learly intoxicated by cutting-edge scientific re search—in bioengineering, space physics, cybernetics— Reynolds spins a ravishingly inventive tale of intrigue...Reynolds’s vision of a future dominated by ar tificial intelligence trembles with the ultimate cold of the dark between the stars.” —Publishers Weekly “An inventive, wide-ranging, fascinating, and exciting space adventure... The best first novel I’ve ever read since A Canticle for Lebowitz.” —Don D’Ammassa, Science Fiction Chronicle “A striking first novel. Reynolds is the next writer to watch in the resurrection of the conceptually intelligent space opera.” —Gary Wolfe, Locus “Reynolds does not lack in big ideas...awe-inspiring . . . cutting-edge and convincingly rendered.” —SF Site “Top-notch.” —Maxim “Stirring stuff.” —Edge Ace Books by Alastair Reynolds revelation space chasm city redemption ark absolution gap REDEMPTION ARK Alastair Reynolds ACE BOOKS, NEW YORK This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. REDEMPTION ARK An Ace Book / published by arrangement with Orion Publishing Group Copyright © 2002 by Alastair Reynolds. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014. ISBN: 1-4362-7279-3 ACE® Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014. ACE and the “A” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc. PROLOGUE The dead ship was a thing of obscene beauty. Skade looped around it in a helical pseudo-orbit, her corvette’s thrusters drumming a rapid tattoo of corrective bursts. The starscape wheeled behind the ship, the system’s sun eclipsed and revealed with each loop of the helix. Skade’s at tention had lingered on the sun for a moment too long. She felt an ominous tightening in her throat, the onset of motion sick ness. It was not what she needed. Irritated, Skade visualised her own brain in glassy three- dimensional complexity. As if peeling a fruit, she stripped away layers of neocortex and cortex, flinging aside the parts of her own mind that did not immediately interest her. The silvery loom of her implant web, topologically identical with her native synaptic network, shimmered with neural traffic, packets of in formation racing from neuron to neuron at a kilometre per sec ond, ten times faster than the crawl of biological nerve signals. She could not actually perceive those signals moving—that would have required an accelerated rate of consciousness, which would have required even faster neural traffic—but the abstraction nonetheless revealed which parts of her augmented brain were the most active. Skade zoomed in on a specific locus of brain function called the Area Postrema, an ancient tangle of neural circuitry that handled conflicts between vision and balance. Her inner ear felt only the steady pressure of her shuttle’s acceleration, but her eyes saw a cyclically changing view as the background wheeled behind the ship. The ancient part of her brain could only recon cile that mismatch by assuming that Skade was hallucinating. It therefore sent a signal to another part of her brain that had evolved to protect the body from ingesting poisons. Skade knew there was no point blaming her brain for mak ing her feel nauseous. The hallucination/poison connection had 2 Alastair Reynolds worked very well for millions of years, allowing her ancestors to experiment with a wider diet than would otherwise have been possible. It just had no place here and now, on the chill, danger ous edge of another solar system. She supposed it would have made sense to erase such features by deftly rewiring the basic topology, but that was a lot easier said than done. The brain was holographic and messy, like a hopelessly overcomplicated com puter program. Skade knew, therefore, that by “switching off” the part of her brain that was making her feel nauseous, she was almost certainly affecting other areas of brain function that shared some of the same neural circuitry. But she could live with that; she had done something similar a thousand times be fore, and she had seldom experienced any cognitive side ef fects. There. The culprit region pulsed pink and dropped off the network. The nausea vanished; she felt a great deal better. What remained was anger at her own carelessness. When she had been a field operative, making frequent incursions into enemy territory, she would never have left it until now to make such a modest neural adjustment. She had become sloppy, and that was unforgivable. Especially now that the ship had re turned: an event that might prove to be as significant to the Mother Nest as any of the war’s recent campaigns. She felt sharper now. The old Skade was still there; she just needed to be dusted off and honed now and then. [Skade, you will be careful, won’t you? It’s clear that some thing very peculiar has happened to this ship.] The voice she heard was quiet, feminine and confined en tirely to her own skull. She answered it subvocally. I know. [Have you identified it? Do you know which of the two it is, or was?] It’s Galiana’s. Now that she had swept around it, a three-dimensional im age of the ship formed in her visual cortex, bracketed in a loom of shifting eidetic annotation as more information was teased out of the hulk. [Galiana’s? The Galiana’s? You’re sure of that?] Yes. There were some small design differences between the three that left together, and in as much as this matches either of the two that haven’t come back yet, it matches hers.
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