Quaiche screamed now, grasping precisely what had happened to him and where he was. His screams were muffled and soft, uncomfortably childlike. He was ashamed to hear such sounds coming out of his mouth. He could move no part of himself, but he was not exactly paralysed—rather there was no room to move any part of his body by more than a fraction of a centimetre.
The confinement felt oddly familiar.
Gradually Quaiche’s screams became wheezes, and then merely very hard rasping breaths. This continued for several minutes, and then Quaiche started humming, reiterating six or seven notes with the studied air of a madman or a monk. He must already be under the ice, he decided. There had been no entombment ceremony, no final chastising meeting with Jasmina. They had simply welded him into the suit and buried him within the shield of ice that Gnostic Ascension pushed ahead of itself. He could not guess how much time had passed, whether it was hours or larger fractions of a day. He dared not believe it was any longer than that.
As the horror hit him, so did something else: a nagging feeling that some detail was amiss. Perhaps it was the sense of familiarity he felt in the confined space, or perhaps it was the utter absence of anything to look at.
A voice said, “Attention, Quaiche. Attention, Quaiche. Deceleration phase is complete. Awaiting orders for system insertion.”
It was the calm, avuncular voice of the Dominatrix’s, cybernetic subpersona.
He realised, joltingly, that he was not in the iron suit at all, but rather inside the slowdown coffin of the Dominatrix, packed into a form-fitting matrix designed to shield him during the high-gee deceleration phase. Quaiche stopped humming, simultaneously affronted and disorientated. He was relieved, no doubt about that. But the transition from the prospect of years of torment to the relatively benign environment of the Dominatrix had been so abrupt that he had not had time to de-pressurise emotionally. All he could do was gasp in shock and wonderment.
He felt a vague need to crawl back into the nightmare and emerge from it mote gradually.
“Attention, Quaiche. Awaiting orders for system insertion.”
“Wait,” he said. His throat was raw, his voice gummy. He must have been in the slowdown coffin for quite some time. “Wait. Get me out of here. I’m…”
“Is everything satisfactory, Quaiche?”
“I’m a bit confused.”
“In what way, Quaiche? Do you need medical attention?”
“No, I’m…” He paused and squirmed. “Just get me out of here. I’ll be all right in a moment.”
“Very well, Quaiche.”
The restraints budged apart. Light rammed in through widening cracks in the coffin’s walls. The familiar onboard smell of the Dominatrix hit his olfactory system. The ship was nearly silent, save for the occasional tick of a cooling manifold. It was always like that after slowdown, when they were in coast phase.
Quaiche stretched, his body creaking like an old wooden chair. He felt bad, but not nearly as bad as he had felt after his last hasty revival from reefersleep on board the Gnostic Ascension. In the slowdown coffin he had been drugged into a state of unconsciousness, but most bodily processes had continued normally. He only spent a few weeks in the coffin during each system survey, and the medical risks associated with being frozen outweighed the benefits to the queen of arresting his ageing.
He looked around, still not quite daring to believe he had been spared the nightmare of the scrimshaw suit. He considered the possibility that he might be hallucinating, that he had perhaps gone mad after spending several months under the ice. But the ship had a hyper-reality about it that did not feel like any kind of hallucination. He had no recollection of ever dreaming in slowdown before—at least, not the kind of dreams that resulted in him waking screaming. But the more time that passed, and the more the ship’s reality began to solidify around him, the more that seemed to be the most likely explanation.
He had dreamed every moment of it.
“Dear God,” Quaiche said. With that came a jolt of pain, the indoctrinal virus’s usual punishment for blasphemy, but the feeling of it was so joyously real, so unlike the horror of being entombed, that he said it again. “Dear God, I’d never have believed I had that in me.”
“Had what in you, Quaiche?” Sometimes the ship felt obliged to engage in conversation, as if secretly bored.
“Never mind,” he said, distracted by something. Normally when he emerged from the coffin he had plenty of room to twist around and align himself with the long, thin axis of the little ship’s main companionway. But now something chafed his elbow, something that was not usually there. He turned to look at it, half-knowing as he did so exactly what it would be.
Corroded and scorched metal skin the colour of pewter. A festering surface of manic detail. The vague half-formed shape of a person with a dark grilled slot where the eyes would have been.
“Bitch,” he said.
“I am to inform you that the presence of the scrimshaw suit is a spur to success in your current mission,” the ship said.
“You were actually programmed to say that?”
“Yes.”
Quaiche observed that the suit was plumbed into the life-support matrix of the ship. Thick lines ran from the wall sockets to their counterparts in the skin of the suit. He reached out again and touched the surface, running his fingers from one rough welded patch to another, tracing the sinuous back of a snake. The metal was mildly warm to the touch, quivering with a vague sense of subcutaneous activity.
“Be careful,” the ship said.
“Why—is there something alive inside that thing?” Quaiche said. Then a sickening realisation dawned. “Dear God. Someone’s inside it. Who?”
“I am to inform you that the suit contains Morwenna.”
Of course. Of course. It made delicious sense.
“You said I should be careful. Why?”
“I am to inform you that the suit is rigged to euthanise its occupant should any attempt be made to tamper with the cladding, seams or life-support couplings. I am to inform you that only Surgeon-General Grelier has the means to remove the suit without euthanising the occupant.”
Quaiche pulled away from the suit. “You mean I can’t even touch it?”
“Touching it would not be your wisest course of action, given the circumstances.”
He almost laughed. Jasmina and Grelier had excelled themselves. First the audience with the queen to make him think that she had at last run out of patience with him. Then the charade of being shown the suit and made to think that punishment was finally upon him. Made to believe that he was about to be buried in ice, forced into consciousness for what might be the better part of a decade. And then this: the final, mocking reprieve. His last chance to redeem himself. And make no bones about it: this would be his last chance. That was clear to him now. Jasmina had shown him exactly what would happen if he failed her one more time. Idle threats were not in Jasmina’s repertoire.
But her cleverness ran deeper than that, for with Morwenna imprisoned in the suit he had no hope of doing what had sometimes occurred to him, which was to hide in a particular system until the Gnostic Ascension had passed out of range. No—he had no practical choice but to return to the queen. And then hope for two things: firstly, that he would not have disappointed her; and secondly, that she would free Morwenna from the suit.
A thought occurred to him. “Is she awake?”
“She is now approaching consciousness,” the ship replied.
With her Ultra physiology, Morwenna would have been much better equipped to tolerate slowdown than Quaiche, but it still seemed likely that the scrimshaw suit had been modified to protect her in some fashion.
“Can we communicate?”
“You can speak to her when you wish. I will handle ship-to-suit protocols.”
“All right, put me through now.” He waited a second, then said, “Morwenna?”
“Horris.” Her voice was stupidly weak and distant. He had trouble believing she was only
separated from him by mere centimetres of metal: it might as well have been fifty light-years of lead. “Horris, where am I? What’s happened?”
Nothing in his experience gave him any clue about how you broke news like this to someone. How did you gently wend the topic of a conversation around to being imprisoned alive in welded metal suit? Well, funny you should mention incarceration …
“Morwenna, something’s up, but I don’t want you to panic. Everything will be all right in the end, but you mustn’t, mustn’t panic. Will you promise me that?”
“What’s wrong?” There was now a distinctly anxious edge to Morwenna’s voice.
Memo to himself: the one way to make people panic was to warn them not to.
“Morwenna, tell me what you remember. Calmly and slowly.”
He heard the catch in her voice, the approaching onset of hysteria. “Where do you want me to begin?”
“Do you remember me being taken to see the queen?”
“Yes.”
“And do you remember me being taken away from her chamber?”
“Yes… yes, I do.”
“Do you remember trying to stop them?”
“No, I… ” She stopped and said nothing. He thought he had lost her—when she wasn’t speaking, the connection was silent. “Wait. Yes, I do remember.”
“And after that?”
“Nothing.”
“They took me to Grelier’s operating theatre, Morwenna. The one where he did all those other things to me.”
“No…” she began, misunderstanding, thinking that the dreadful thing had happened to Quaiche rather than herself.
“They showed me the scrimshaw suit,” he said. “But they put you in it instead. You’re in it now, and that’s why you mustn’t panic.”
She took it well, better than “he had been expecting. Poor, brave Morwenna. She had always been the more courageous half of their partnership. If she’d been given the chance to take the punishment upon herself, he knew she would have done so. Equally, he knew that he lacked that strength. He was weak and cowardly and selfish. Not a bad man, but not exactly one to be admired either. It was the flaw that had shaped his life. Knowing this did not make it any easier.
“You mean I’m under the ice?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “No, it’s not that bad.” He realised as he spoke how absurdly little difference it made whether she was buried under ice or not. “You’re in the suit now, but you’re not under the ice. And it isn’t because of anything you did. It’s because of me. It’s to force me to act in a certain way.”
“Where am I?”
“You’re with me, aboard the Dominatrix. I think we just completed slowdown into the new system.”
“I can’t see or move.”
He had been looking at the suit while he spoke, holding an image of her in his mind. Although she was clearly doing her best to hide it, he knew Morwenna well enough to understand that she was terribly frightened. Ashamed, he looked sharply away. “Ship, can you let her see something?”
“That channel is not enabled.”
“Then fucking well enable it.”
“No actions are possible. I am to inform you that the occupant can only communicate with the outside world via the cur-rent audio channel. Any attempt to instate further channels will be viewed as…”
He waved a hand. “All right. Look, I’m sorry, Morwenna. The bastards won’t let you see anything. I’m guessing that was Grelier’s little idea.”
“He’s not my only enemy, you know.”
“Maybe not, but I’m willing to bet he had more than a little say in the matter.” Quaiche’s brow was dripping with condensed beads of zero-gravity sweat. He mopped himself with the back of his hand. “All of this is my fault.”
“Where are you?”
The question surprised him. “I’m floating next to you. I thought you might be able to hear my voice through the armour.”
“All I can hear is your voice in my head. You sound a long way away. I’m scared, Horris. I don’t know if I can handle this.”
“You’re not alone,” he said. “I’m right by you. You’re probably safer in the suit than out of it. All you have to do is sit tight. We’ll be home and dry in a few weeks.”
Her voice had a desperate edge to it now. “A few weeks? You make it sound as if it’s nothing at all.”
“I meant it’s better than years and years. Oh, Christ, Morwenna, I’m so sorry. I promise I’ll get you out of this.” Quaiche screwed up his eyes in pain.
“Horris?”
“Yes?” he asked, through tears.
“Don’t leave me to die in this thing. Please.”
“Morwenna,” he said, a little while later, “listen carefully. I have to leave you now. I’m going up to the command deck. I have to check on our status.”
“I don’t want you to go.”
“You’ll still be able to hear my voice. I must do this, Morwenna. I absolutely must. If I don’t, neither of us will have any kind of a future to look forward to.”
“Horris.”
But he was already moving. He drifted away from the slowdown coffin and the-scrimshaw suit, crossing the compartment space to reach a set of padded wall grips. He began to make his way down the narrow companionway towards the command deck, pulling himself along hand over hand. Quaiche had never developed a taste for weightlessness, but the needle-hulled survey craft was far too small for centrifugal gravity. It would be better once they were underway again, for then he would have the illusion of gravity provided by the Dominatrix’s engines.
Under pleasanter circumstances, he would have been enjoying the sudden isolation of being away from the rest of the crew. Morwenna had not accompanied him on most of his previous excursions, but, while he missed her, he had generally revelled in the enforced solitude of his periods away from the Gnostic Ascension. It was not strictly the case that he was antisocial; admittedly, during his time in mainstream human culture, Quaiche had never been the most gregarious of souls, but he had always ornamented himself with a handful of strong friendships. There had always been lovers, some tending towards the rare, exotic, or—in Morwenna’s case—the downright hazardous. But the environment of Jasmina’s ship was so overwhelmingly claustrophobic, so cloyingly saturated with the pheromonal haze of paranoia and intrigue, that he found himself longing for the hard simplicity of a ship and a mission.
Consequently the Dominatrix and the tiny survey craft it contained had become his private empire within the greater dominion of the Ascension. The ship nurtured him, anticipating his desires with the eagerness of a courtesan. The more time he spent in it, the more it learned his whimsies and foibles. It played music that not only suited his moods, but was precisely calibrated to steer him from the dangerous extremes of morbid self-reflection or careless euphoria. It fed him the kinds of meals that he could never persuade the food synthesisers on the Ascension to produce, and seemed able to delight and surprise him whenever he suspected he had exhausted its libraries. It knew when he needed sleep and when he needed bouts of feverish activity. It amused him with fancies when he was bored, and simulated minor crises when he showed indications of complacency. Now and then it occurred to Quaiche that because the ship knew him so well he had in a sense extended himself into it, permeating its machine systems. The merging had even taken place on a biological level. The Ultras did their best to sterilise it every time it returned to its storage bay in the belly of the Ascension, but Quaiche knew that the ship now smelt different from the first time he had boarded it. It smelt of places he had lived in.
But any sense that the ship was a haven, a place of sanctuary, was now gone. Every glimpse of the scrimshaw suit was a reminder that Jasmina had pushed her influence into his fief dom. There would be no second chances. Everything that mattered to him now depended on the system ahead.
“Bitch,” he said again.
Quaiche reached the command deck and squeezed into the pilot’s seat. The deck was necessarily tin
y, for the Dominatrix was mostly fuel and engine. The space he sat in was little more than a bulbous widening of the narrow companionway, like the reservoir in a mercury thermometer. Ahead was an oval viewport showing nothing but interstellar space.
“Avionics,” he said.
Instrument panels closed around him like pincers. They flickered and then lit up with animated diagrams and input fields, flowing to meet the focus of his gaze as his eyes moved.
“Orders, Quaiche?”
“Just give me a moment,” he said. He appraised the critical systems first, checking that there was nothing wrong that the subpersona might have missed. They had eaten slightly further into the fuel budget than Quaiche would ordinarily have expected at this point in a mission, but given the additional mass of the scrimshaw suit it was only to be expected. There was enough in reserve for it not to worry him. Other than that all was well: the slowdown had happened without incident; all ship functions were nominal, from sensors and life support to the health of the tiny excursion craft that sat in the Dominatrix’s belly like an embryonic dolphin, anxious to be born.
“Ship, were there any special requirements for this survey?”
“None that were revealed to me.”
“Well, that’s splendidly reassuring. And the status of the mother ship?”
“I am receiving continuous telemetry from Gnostic Ascension. You will be expected to rendezvous after the usual six- to seven-week survey period. Fuel reserves are sufficient for the catch-up manoeuvre.”
“Affirmative.” It would never have made much sense for Jasmina to have stranded him without enough fuel, but it was gratifying to know, on this occasion at least, that she had acted sensibly.
Absolution Gap rs-4 Page 7