Absolution Gap rs-4

by Alastair Reynolds

  It accelerated smoothly, leaving physics squirming in its wake. When Inhibitor machinery moved, it did so without any hint of Newtonian reaction. The recent modifications to the Conjoiner drives had approximated something of the same effect by making the exhaust particles undergo rapid decay into a non-observable quantum state. But the wolves used a different principle. Even up close, there was no hint of any thrusting medium. The best guess—and guess it was—was that the Inhibitor drives employed a form of the quantum Casimir effect, using the unbalanced vacuum pressure on two parallel plates to skip themselves through space-time. The fact that the machines accelerated several trillion times faster than theory allowed was deemed slightly less embarrassing than having no theory at all.

  He ran a simulation, predicting the flight path of the aggregate. It might fracture into smaller elements, or combine with another, but if it continued on its present course, it was destined to skim the planet’s immediate airspace.

  This troubled Remontoire. So far the alien machines had avoided coming that close. It was as if, scripted deep into their controlling routines, was an edict, a fundamental command to avoid unnecessary contact with Pattern Juggler worlds.

  But humans had taken the battle to the waterlogged planet. How deep did that edict run? Perhaps the visible downing of Skade’s corvette had tripped some switch, the damage already done. Perhaps Inhibitor machinery had already entered the biosphere. In which case even this Juggler planet might not be safe for very much longer.

  The aggregate had been underway for nearly a second, from Remontoire’s point of view. Assuming the usual acceleration curves, it would reach the planet’s airspace in under forty minutes. In his present state of consciousness, that would seem like an eternity. But Remontoire knew better than to believe that.

  Remontoire’s trident-shaped ship departed from the parking bay in the side of the Zodiacal Light. Almost immediately he felt the spinal compression as the main drive came on, as hard and unforgiving as a fall on to concrete. The hull creaked and protested as the acceleration ramped up through five, six, seven gees. The single outrigger-mounted engine was a microminiature Conjoiner drive, engineered with watchmaker precision, every component squeezed down to neurotic tolerances. It would have made Remontoire nervous, had he permitted himself to feel nervousness.

  He was the only living thing aboard the recently manufactured ship. Even he seemed something of an afterthought, crammed into a tiny eyelike hollow in the long carbon-black needle of the hull. There were no windows, and only the bare minimum of sensor apertures, but through his implants Remontoire barely perceived the little craft, sensing it only as a glassy extension of his personal space. Beyond the hard boundaries of the ship was a less tangible sphere of sensor coverage: passive and active contacts tickling the part of his brain associated with the proprioceptive knowledge of his own body image.

  The thrust levelled out at eight gees. There was no inertial protection against that acceleration, even though bulk control of inertia had been within the reach of Conjoiner technology for more than half a century. It couldn’t be allowed. The other technology that the ship carried—the glittering, tinsel-like ma-chinery of the hypometric weapon—was highly intolerant of alterations to the local metric. The hypometric weapons were difficult enough to use in nearly flat, unmolested space-time. But within the influence of inertial technology they became malevolently unpredictable, like spiteful imps. Remontoire would have liked to have accelerated even harder, but above eight gees there was a real danger of shifting the weapon’s tiny components out of alignment.

  The weapon itself wasn’t much to look at from the outside. Shrouded in a cigar-shaped nacelle flung out as an extension from the same outrigger that held the drive, there was no muzzle, no exhaust, no surface detailing of any kind. The only design constraint had been to arrange for the weapon to be as far from the human occupant as possible. It was, Remontoire thought, a measure of the device’s threatening glamour that he actually felt safer with the dangerous, unstable miniature Con-joiner drive between him and the quixotic weapon.

  He checked the progress of the Inhibitor aggregate, neither gratified nor disappointed to see that it was exactly where he had predicted it would be. Something had changed, though: his departure from the Zodiacal Light had drawn the attention of the other protagonists. One of Skade’s former allies was moving on an intercept trajectory with his ship at a higher acceleration than he could sustain. The other Conjoiner craft would engage him within fifteen minutes. Five or six minutes after that, a second aggregate would have reached him.

  Remontoire allowed himself a flicker of disquiet, just enough to pump some adrenalin into his blood. Then he blocked it, the way one slammed the door on a boisterous party.

  He knew, rationally, that the logical thing would have been to remain on the Zodiacal Light, where his co-ordination and insight were most valued. He could have programmed a beta-level simulation of himself to fly this ship, or asked for a volunteer. There would have been dozens of willing candidates, some of whom had been equipped with Conjoiner implants of their own. But he had insisted on taking the ship himself. It wasn’t just because he had spent more time than most of them learning the ways of the hypometric weapon. There was also a sense of obligation: it was something he had to do.

  It was, he knew, because of Ana Khouri. He had made a mistake in letting her travel down to the planet on her own. From a military perspective it had been exactly the right thing to do: no point committing already overstretched resources when there was every likelihood that Aura was already dead. More than that, he thought, when there was every chance that Aura had already been as useful to them as she was ever going to be. Also, nothing much larger than an escape capsule had stood a chance of reaching the surface anyway, with the Inhibitor blockade in maximum effect.

  But Clavain wouldn’t have seen it that way. Nine times out of ten he had based his decisions upon the strict application of military sense. He wouldn’t have lived through five hundred years otherwise. But one time out often he would disregard the rules entirely and do something that made no sense except on a humane level.

  Remontoire thought it likely that this would have been one of those occasions. No matter that Skade and Aura were probably both dead: Clavain would have gone down with Khouri even if the rescue attempt itself was almost guaranteed to end in their deaths.

  Time and again over the years Remontoire had examined the minutiae of Clavain’s life, the critical points, trying to work out if those irrational acts had helped or hindered his old friend. He reviewed Clavain’s decisions once more while he waited for the Conjoiner ship to meet him. As always he arrived at no satisfactory answer. But he had decided that this was a time when he needed to live by Clavain’s rules rather than the rigid gamesmanship of tactical analysis.

  A clock rang in his brain. His fifteen minutes were up.

  There had been no point thinking about the approaching Conjoiner ship before it arrived: a quick review of the options had shown him that nothing would be gained by deviating from his present course.

  The other ship pushed through his concentric sensor boundaries like a fish nosing through sharply defined sea currents. In his mind’s eye it became a tangible thing rather than a vague hint in the sensor data.

  It was a moray-class corvette like Skade’s craft, just as light-suckingly black as Remontoire’s ship, but shaped more like a weirdly barbed fish-hook than the trident form of his own machine. Even at close range, the spectral whisper of its highly stealthed drives was barely detectable. On average, its hull radiated at a chill 2.7 kelvin above absolute zero. Up close, in the microwave spectrum, it was a quilt of hot and cold spots. He mapped the emplacement of cryo-arithmetic engines; observed those that were functioning less efficiently than their neighbours; observed also those that were running worryingly cold, teetering on the edge of algorithmic-cycle runaway. The occasional blue flicker sparked as one of the nodes dropped below I kelvin, before being dragged back into
lockstep with its cohorts.

  Ships could be made arbitrarily cold, and could therefore be made to blend in with the background radiation of the early universe, which was still shining after fifteen billion years. But the background map was not smooth: cosmic inflation had magnified tiny flaws in the expanding universe to produce subtle variations in the background, depending on which way one looked. They were deviations from true anisotropy: wrinkles in the face of creation. Unless they could adjust their hull temperatures to match those fluctuations, ships could only achieve an imperfect match with the background spectrum. Under some circumstances, hunting for those tiny signs of mismatch was the only way to detect enemy ships at all.

  But the Conjoiner ship was maintaining the coldness of its hull purely as camouflage against Inhibitor forces in the vicinity. It was making no real effort to hide itself from Remontoire. In fact, it was even trying to speak to him.

  There was one thing about Conjoiners that even the non-augmented had to admire: they didn’t give up. Twenty-eight thousand unanswered requests for negotiation wouldn’t deter a twenty-eight thousand and first.

  Remontoire allowed the narrow line of the message laser to scribe against his hull until it found one of the few sensor patches.

  He examined the transmission through copious layers of mental fire-walling. Eventually, after many seconds of cogitation, he decided that it was safe to unpack the transmission into the most sensitive parts of his own mind. The message format was in natural language rather than any of the high-level Con-joiner protocols. Nicely insulting touch, he thought: from the perspective of Skade’s allies, it was the Conjoiner equivalent of baby talk.

  [Remontoire? It’s you, isn’t it? Why won’t you talk to us?]

  He composed a thought in the same format. Why are you so certain I’m Remontoire?

  [You were always more fond of wild gestures than you’d ever admit. This is straight out of Clavain’s book of daring escapades.]

  Someone has to do it.

  [It’s a brave effort, Remontoire, but it’s pointless worrying about those people on the planet. Nothing we can do can help them now. They’re not even relevant to the future outcome of the war.]

  We’d best let them hang, then. That’d be Skade’s way, wouldn’t it?

  [Skade would do what she could for them if she thought they were going to make a difference. But you’re only making things worse. Don’t take the battle down there. Don’t stretch things up here when we most need to consolidate our forces.]

  Another plea for co-operation? Skade must be turning in her grave.

  [She was a pragmatist, Remontoire, much like yourself. She would have seen that now is the time to amalgamate our parties, to pool our knowledge-base and inflict real damage on the enemy machines.]

  What you mean is that you’ve achieved all you can through deception and theft. You know I’ll never trust you that way again. Now you have nothing to lose by negotiating.

  [With regret, we acknowledge that tactical errors were made. But now that Skade is—as you have alluded—very probably dead… ]

  The ducklings are waddling around looking for a new mother duck.

  [Adopt the analogy of your choice, Remontoire. We only offer the outstretched hand of friendship. The situation here is more complex than we’ve hitherto realised. You must have seen this for yourself: the teasing hints in the data, the scraps—too small and insignificant on their own—but which add up to a clear conclusion. We’re not just dealing with wolves, Remontoire. There is something else.]

  I’ve seen nothing I couldn’t explain.

  [Then you haven’t been looking hard enough. Here, Remontoire: examine our data, if you doubt us. See if that changes your opinion. See if that makes it any clearer to you.]

  The data nugget was scripted into his head. An instinct told him to delete it still compressed, still unread. But he decided to leave it there for the time being.

  You’re suggesting a partnership?

  [Disunited, we’ll never beat them. Together, we could make a difference.]

  Perhaps. But it’s not me you really want, is it?

  [Of course not, Remontoire.]

  He smiled: Skade’s Conjoiners might have been leaderless, might even have been driven towards him by some instinctive imperative to fill that void, but mainly it was the hypometric weapon. It was the one technology they hadn’t managed to steal or reverse-engineer, despite Skade’s theft of Aura. All that they needed was one prototype; it didn’t even have to be intact, so long as they could reconstruct its working configuration.

  Thanks for the offer, but I’m actually a tiny bit preoccupied at the moment. Why don’t we chat about this later? Say, in a few months?

  [Remontoire… don’t make us do this.]

  He applied lateral thrust, veering rudely away from the other ship. He mapped areas of brain function dropping in and out as the blood sloshed through his skull. A moment later the corvette shadowed him, mimicking his vicious moves with a finesse verging on the sarcastic.

  [We need that weapon, Remontoire.]

  So I guessed. Why didn’t you just come out and say it at the beginning?

  [We wanted to give you the chance to see things our way.]

  I suppose I should be grateful, in that case.

  He felt his ship judder. His head lit up with damage reports, bright and geometric as a migraine. They had hit him with multiple hull-penetrating slugs targeted for ship-critical functions. It was very surgical: they wanted to leave him drifting, ripe for theft, rather than to blow his ship apart. Whether they cared about his survival was another matter entirely.

  [Surrender the weapon now, Rem, and we’ll leave you with enough flight-capability to escape that wolf aggregate closing in on us.]

  Sorry, but that’s not really in my plans for today.

  His vessel rattled again: more vital functions faltered or dropped out of service. The ship was already trying to find work-arounds, doing its best to keep flying, but there was a limit to the damage it could soak up. He considered retaliating, but he was keen to save his conventional ordnance for the aggregates. That left the hypometric weapon itself, barely tested since its laborious calibration.

  He issued the mental command that caused it to spin up to activation energy, compensating for the drift in the ship’s vector as angular momentum transferred to the shining innards of the weapon. Externally, there was no evidence of any change in the device at all. He wondered what kind of sensors the corvette had trained on him, and whether they were good enough to pick up the subtle signatures of activation.

  It was a small weapon with a correspondingly limited precision and radial volume of effect (conventional terminology—things like “range” and “accuracy‘—were only vaguely applicable to hypometric weapons). But it also spun up very quickly. He tuned its scale of effect, found the solution in the complex topography of weapon parameters that corresponded to a specific point in the three-dimensional volume of surrounding space.

  He re-established a communications channel to the corvette. Pull back.

  [Again, don’t make us do this, Remontoire.]

  The weapon discharged. In the microwave-frequency map of the corvette’s cold spots, a wound had suddenly appeared: a perfectly hemispherical bite in the side of the hull. The cryogenic temperature gradients flowed like water around a sinkhole, gyring and wheeling as they tried to find a new equilibrium. Pairs of cooling nodes locked into unstable oscillation modes.

  The weapon spun up again. He put another hole in the corvette’s hull, deeper this time, so that the wound was concave.

  The corvette responded. Reluctantly, he parried the ship-to-ship munitions with a spread of countermeasures while still holding some back for the Inhibitor machines.

  The weapon spun up a third time. He concentrated, forcing himself to examine the solution from every angle. An error now could be fatal for all involved.

  Discharge. His third attack was not visible at all. If he had done his sums correct
ly he had just put a spherical hole inside the ship without touching the hull. It would not have touched any vital internal systems. And—his coup de grace—the centre of the final hole would be exactly in line with the centres of the last two, to micron accuracy.

  He waited a moment for the precision—and essential restraint—of his attack to sink in before contacting them again. The next one takes out your life-system. Got the message?

  The corvette hesitated. Seconds oozed by, time for Skade’s acolytes to examine thousands of possible response scenarios, toying with them the way children toyed with building blocks, constructing huge, wobbling edifices of event and counter-event. Almost certainly they had not expected him to turn the weapon against them. Their best intelligence would never have suggested he had that degree of control over the weapon’s effects. Even if it had—and even if they had considered the possibility of an attack—they must have assumed he would strike at their ship’s drive core, taking it out in an instant of blinding light.

  Instead, he had let them off with a warning. This wasn’t, Remontoire had thought to himself, a time to be making new enemies.

  There was no further transmission. He watched, fascinated, as the cryo-arithmetic engines smoothed out the temperature gradients around the two exterior wounds, doing their best to camouflage the damage. Then the corvette flipped over, pushed its thrust to the limit and made itself scarce.

  Remontoire allowed himself a miserly instant of self-congratulation. He had played that one well. His ship was still spaceworthy despite the damage it had sustained. And all he had to worry about now was the approaching aggregate of Inhibitor machines. The machines would arrive in three minutes.

  * * *

  Two thousand kilometres, then a thousand, then five hundred. Closer, his sensors struggled to deal with the clump of Inhibitor machines as a single entity, throwing back wildly conflicting estimates for distance, scale and geometric disposition. The best he could do was to focus his efforts on the larger nodes, refining his hull-camouflaging to provide a better line-of-sight match with the cosmic background. He adjusted his thrust vectoring, losing some acceleration but steering his ship’s exhaust beams away from the shifting concentrations of enemy machines. The exhausts were invisible, all but undetectable via the methods available to Remontoire. He hoped the same disadvantage applied to the aliens, but it paid not to take chances.