Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days

Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days collects two novellas by Alastair Reynolds, both of them set in the universe of his Revelation Space novels but almost entirely independent of the plots of those books. The volume was published by Gollancz in 2003.

The first of the two, Diamond Dogs, belongs to the late twenty-fifth century. Richard runs into Roland Childe in Chasm City, at the Monument to the Eighty, a friend he had thought dead for more than a century and a half, and Childe takes him home to explain that he is putting a team together.

The object of that team is an alien structure his family's probes found long before, and the story is Reynolds's own version of the classic deadly-maze plot. The party he assembles is a mixed one: Richard himself, his ex-wife Celestine, a hacker called Hirz, a doctor with a reputation for experiments on unwilling subjects, the captain of a lighthugger, and Childe. They travel out from Chasm City to the artifact, which they name Blood Spire.