Absolution Gap rs-4

by Alastair Reynolds

  Other Conjoiners were crawling through the ship’s original engines, tinkering with the hallowed reactions at their core. More were out on the hull, tethered to the encrusted architecture of the Captain’s growth patterns. They were installing additional weapons and armouring devices. Still more—secluded deep within the ship, far from any other focus of activity—were assembling the inertia-suppression devices that had been tested during the Zodiacal Light’s chase from Yellowstone to Resurgam. This was alien technology, Scorpio knew, machinery that humans had appropriated without Aura’s assistance. But they had never been able to get it to work reliably. By all accounts, Aura had shown them how to modify it for relatively safe operation. Skade, in desperation, had attempted to use the same technology for faster-than-light travel. Her effort had failed catastrophically, and Aura had refused to reveal any secrets that might make another attempt possible. Amongst the gifts she was giving them, there was to be no superluminal technology.

  He watched the servitors slip another blade into place. The device had looked finished a day ago, but since then they had added about three times more machinery. Yet, strangely, the structure looked even more lacy and fragile than it had before. He wondered when it would be done—and what exactly it would do when it was done—and then began to turn from the window, apprehension lying heavy in his heart.

  “Scorp.”

  He had not been expecting company, so was surprised to hear his own name. He was even more surprised to see Vasko Malinin standing there.

  “Vasko,” he said, offering a noncommittal smile. “What brings you down here?”

  “I wanted to find you,” he said. Vasko was wearing a stiff, fresh-looking Security Arm uniform. Even his boots were clean, a miracle aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity.

  “You managed.”

  “I was told you’d probably be down here somewhere.” Vasko’s face was lit from the side by the red glow spilling from the hypometric weapon shaft. It made him look young and feral by turns. Vasko glanced through the window. “Quite something, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll believe it works when I see it do something other than sit there looking pretty.”

  “Still sceptical?”

  “Someone should be.”

  Scorpio realised now that Vasko was not alone. There was a figure looming behind him. He would have been able to see the person clearly years ago; now he had difficulty making out detail when the light was gloomy.

  He squinted. “Ana?”

  Khouri stepped into the pool of red light. She was dressed in a heavy coat and gloves, enormous boots covering her legs up to her knees—they were much dirtier than Vasko’s—and she was carrying something, tucked into the crook of her arm. It was a bundle, a form wrapped in quilted silver blanketing. At the top end of the bundle, near the crook of her arm, was a tiny opening.

  “Aura?” he said, startled.

  “She doesn’t need the incubator now,” Khouri said.

  “She might not need it, but…”

  “Dr. Valensin said it was holding her back, Scorp. She’s too strong for it. It was doing more harm than good.” Khouri angled her face down towards the open end of the bundle, her eyes meeting the hidden eyes of her daughter. “She told me she wanted to be out of it as well.”

  “I hope Valensin knows what he’s doing,” Scorpio said.

  “He does, Scorp. More importantly, so does Aura.”

  “She’s just a child,” he said, keeping his voice low. “Barely that.”

  Khouri stepped forwards. “Hold her.”

  She was already offering the bundle to him. He wanted to say no. It wasn’t just that he did not quite trust himself with something as precious and fragile as a child. There was something else: a voice that warned him not to make this physical connection with her. Another voice—quieter—reminded him that he was already bound to her in blood. What more harm could be done now?

  He took Aura. He held her against his chest, just tight enough to feel that he had her safely. She was astonishingly light. It stunned him that this girl—this asset they had lost their leader to recover—could feel so insubstantial.

  “Scorpio.”

  The voice was not Khouri’s. It was not an adult voice; barely a child’s. It was more a gurgling croak that half-approximated the sound of his name.

  He looked down at the bundle, into the opening. Aura’s face turned towards his. Her eyes were still tightly closed gummy slits. There was a hubble emerging from her mouth.

  “She didn’t just say my name,” he said incredulously.

  “I did,” Aura said.

  He felt, for a heartbeat, as if he wanted to drop the bundle. There was something wrong lying there in his arms, something that had no right to exist in this universe. Then the shameful reflex passed, as quickly as it had come. He looked away from the tiny pink-red face, towards her mother.

  “She can’t even see me,” he said.

  “No, Scorp,” Khouri confirmed, “she can’t. Her eyes don’t work yet. But mine do. And that’s all that matters.”

  Throughout the ship, Scorpio’s technicians worked day and night laying listening devices. They glued newly manufactured microphones and barometers to walls and ceilings, then un-spooled kilometres of cables, running them through the natural ducts and tunnels of the Captain’s anatomy, splicing them at nodes, braiding them into thickly entwined trunk lines that ran back to central processing points. They tested their devices, tapping stanchions and bulkheads, opening and closing pressure doors to create sudden draughts of air from one part of the ship to another. The Captain tolerated them, even, it seemed, did his best to make their efforts easier. But he was not always in complete control of his reshaping processes. Fibre-optic lines were repeatedly severed; microphones and barometers were absorbed and had to be remade. The technicians accepted this stoically, going back down into the bowels of the ship to re-lay a kilometre of line that they had just put in place; even, sometimes, repeating the process three or four times until they found a better, less-vulnerable routing.

  What they did not do, at any point, was ask why they were doing this. Scorpio had told them not to, that they did not want to know, and that if they were to ask, he would not tell them the truth. Not until the reason for their work was over, and things were again as safe as they could be.

  But he knew why, and when he thought about what was going to happen, he envied them their ignorance.

  Hela, 2727

  The interviews with the Ultras continued. Rashmika sat and made her observations. She sipped tea and watched her own shattered reflection swim in the mirrors. She thought about each hour bringing her more than a kilometre closer to Absolution Gap. But there were no clocks in the garret, hence no obvious means of judging their progress.

  After each interview, she told Quaiche what she thought she had seen, taking care neither to embroider nor omit anything that might have been crucial. By the end of the third interview, she had formed an impression of what was happening. Quaiche wanted the Ultras to bring one of their ships into close orbil around Hela, to act as bodyguard.

  Exactly what he feared, she could not guess. He told the Ultras that he desired protection from other spacefaring elements, that he had lately thwarted a number of schemes to seize control of Hela and wrest the supply of scuttler relics from the Adventist authorities. With a fully armed lighthugger in orbit around Hela, he said, his enemies would think twice about meddling in Hela’s affairs. The Ultras, in return, would enjoy favoured trader status, a necessary compensation for the risk entailed in bringing their valuable ship so close to the world that had destroyed the Gnostic Ascension. She could smell their nervousness: even though they only ever came down to Hela in shuttles, leaving their main spacecraft parked safely on the system’s edge, they did not want to spend a minute longer than necessary in the Lady Morwenna.

  But there was, Rashmika suspected, something more to Quaiche’s plan than mere protection. She was certain that Quaiche was hiding something. It was a
hunch this time, not something she saw in his face. He was, to all intents and purposes, unreadable. It was not just the mechanical eye-opener, hiding all those nuances of expression she counted on. There was also a torpid, masklike quality to his face, as if the nerves that operated his muscles had been severed or poisoned. When she stole glances at him she saw a vacuity of expression. The faces he made were stiff and exaggerated, like the expressions of a glove puppet. It was ironic, she thought, that she had been brought in to read people’s faces by a man whose own face was essentially closed. Almost deliberately so, in fact.

  Finally the interviews for the day were over. She had reported her findings to Quaiche and he had listened appreciatively to what she had to say. There was no guessing where his own intuitions lay, but at no point did he question or contradict any of her observations. He merely nodded keenly, and told her she had been very helpful.

  There would be more Ultras to interview, she was assured, but that was it for the day.

  “You can go now, Miss Els. Even if you leave the cathedral now, you will still have been very useful to me and I will see to it that your efforts are rewarded. Did I mention a good position in the Catherine of Iron?”

  “You did, Dean.”

  “That is one possibility. Another is for you to return to the Vigrid region. You have family there, I take it?”

  “Yes,” she said, but even as the word left her mouth, her own family suddenly felt distant and abstract to her, like something she had only been told about. She could remember the rooms of her house, the faces and voices of her parents, but the memories felt thin and translucent, like the facets in the stained-glass windows.

  “You could return with a nice bonus—say, five thousand ecus. How does that sound?”

  “That would be very generous,” she replied.

  “The other possibility—the preferred one from my point of view—is that you remain in the Lady Morwenna and continue to assist me in the interviewing of Ultras. For that I will pay you two thousand ecus for every day of work. By the time we reach the bridge, you will have made double what you could have taken back to your home if you’d left today. And it doesn’t have to stop there. For as long as you are willing, there will always be work. In a year’s service, think what you could earn.”

  “I’m not worth that much to anyone,” she said.

  “But you are, Miss Els. Didn’t you hear what Grelier said? One in a thousand. One in a million, perhaps, with your degree of receptivity. I’d say that makes you worth two thousand ecus per day of anyone’s money.”

  “What if my advice isn’t right?” she asked. “I’m only human. I make mistakes.”

  “You won’t get it wrong,” he said, with more certainty than she liked. “I have faith in few things, Rashmika, beyond God Himself. But you are one of them. Fate has brought you to my cathedral. A gift from God, almost. I’d be foolish to turn it away, wouldn’t I?”

  “I don’t feel like a gift from anything,” she said.

  “What do you feel like, then?”

  She wanted to say, like an avenging angel. But instead she said, “I feel tired and a long way from home, and I’m not sure what I should do.”

  “Work with me. See how it goes. If you don’t like it, you can always leave.”

  “Is that a promise, Dean?”

  “As God is my witness.”

  But she couldn’t tell if he was lying or not. Behind Quaiche, Grelier stood up with a click of his knee-joints. He ran a hand through the electric-white bristles of his hair. “I’ll show you to your quarters, then,” he said. “I take it you’ve agreed to stay?”

  “For now,” Rashmika said.

  “Good. Right choice. You’ll like it here, I’m sure. The dean is right: you are truly privileged to have arrived at such an auspicious time.” He reached out a hand. “Welcome aboard.”

  “That’s it?” she said, shaking his hand. “No formalities? No initiation rituals?”

  “Not for you,” Grelier said. “You’re a secular specialist, Miss Els, just like myself. We wouldn’t want to go clouding your brain with all that religious claptrap, would we?“

  She looked at Quaiche. His metal-goggled face was as unreadable as ever. “I suppose not.”

  “There is just one thing,” Grelier said. “I’m going to have a take a bit of blood, if you don’t mind.”

  “Blood?” she asked, suddenly nervous.

  Grelier nodded. “Strictly for medical purposes. There are a lot of nasty bugs going around these days, especially in the Vi-grid and Hyrrokkin regions. But don’t worry.” He moved towards the wall-mounted medical cabinet. “I’ll only need a wee bit.”

  Interstellar Space, Near p Eridani 40,2675

  Energies pocked the space around Ararat. Scorpio watched the distant, receding battle from the spider-shaped observation capsule, secure in the warm, padded plush of its upholstery.

  Carnations of light bloomed and faded over many seconds, slow and lingering as violin chords. The lights were concentrated into a tight, roughly spherical volume, centred on the planet. Around them was a vaster darkness. The slow brightening “and fading, the pleasing randomness of it, stirred some memory—probably second hand—of sea creatures communicating in benthic depths, throwing patterns of bioluminescence towards each other. Not a battle at all but a rare, intimate gathering, a celebration of the tenacity of life in the cold lightless-ness of the deep ocean.

  In the early phases of the space war in the p Eridani A system, the battle had been fought under a ruling paradigm of maximum stealth. All parties, Inhibitor and human, had cloaked their activities by using drives, instruments and weapons that radiated energies—if they radiated anything—only into the narrow, squeezed blind spots between orthodox sensor bands. The way Remontoire had described it, it had been like two men in a dark room, treading silently, slashing almost randomly into the darkness. When one man took a wound, he could not cry out for fear of revealing his location. Nor could he bleed, or offer tangible resistance to the passage of the blade. And when the other man struck, he had to withdraw the blade quickly, lest he signal his own position. A fine analogy, if the room had been light-hours wide, and the men had been human-controlled spacecraft and wolf machines, and the weapons had kept escalating in size and reach with every feint and parry. Ships had darkened their hulls to the background temperature of space; masked the emissions from their drives; used weapons that slid undetected through darkness and killed with the same discretion.

  Yet there had come a point, inevitably, when it had suited one or other of the combatants to discard the stealth stratagem. Once one abandoned it, the others had to follow suit. Now it was a war not of stealth but of maximum transparency. Weapons, machines and forces were being tossed about with abandon.

  Watching the battle from the observation capsule, Scorpio was reminded of something Clavain had said on more than one occasion, when viewing some distant engagement: war was beautiful, when you had the good fortune not to be engaged in it. It was sound and fury, colour and movement, a massed assault on the senses. It was bravura and theatrical, something that made you gasp. It was thrilling and romantic, when you were a spectator. But, Scorpio reminded himself, they were involved. Not in the sense that they were participants in the engagement around Ararat, but because their own fate depended critically on its outcome. And to a large extent he was responsible for that. Remontoire had wanted him to hand over all the cache weapons, and he had refused. Because of that, Remontoire could not guarantee that the covering action would be successful.

  The console chimed, signifying that a specific chirp of gravitational radiation had just swept past the Nostalgia for Infinity.

  “That’s it,” Vasko said, his voice hushed and businesslike. “The last cache weapon, assuming we haven’t lost count.”

  “He wasn’t meant to use them up this quickly,” Khouri said. She was sitting with him in the observation capsule, with Aura cradled in her arms. “I think something’s gone wrong.”
/>   “Wait and see,” Scorpio said. “Remontoire may just be changing the plan because he’s seen a better strategy.”

  They watched a beam of something—bleeding visible light sideways so that it was evident even in vacuum—reach out with elegant slowness across the theatre of battle. There was something obscene and tonguelike about the way it extended itself, pushing towards some invisible wolf target on the far side of the battle. Scorpio did not like to think about how bright that beam must have been close-up, for it was visible now even without optical magnification or intensity enhancement. He had turned down all the lights in the observation capsule, dimming the navigation controls so that they had the best view of the engagement. Shields had been carefully positioned to screen out the glare and radiation from the engines.

  The capsule lurched, something snapping free of the larger ship. Scorpio had learned not to flinch when such things happened. He waited while the capsule reoriented itself, picking its way to a new place of rest with the unhurried care of a tarantula, following the dictates of some ancient collision-avoidance algorithm.

  Khouri looked through one of the portholes, holding Aura up to the view even though the baby’s eyes were still closed.

  “It’s strange down here,” she said. “Like no other part of the ship. Who did this? The Captain or the sea?”

  “The sea, I think,” Scorpio replied, “though I don’t know whether the Jugglers had anything to do with it or not. There was a whole teeming marine ecology below the Jugglers, just as on any other aquatic planet.”

  “Why are you whispering?” Vasko asked. “Can he hear us in here?”

  “I’m whispering because it’s beautiful and strange,” Scorpio said. “Plus, I happen to have a headache. It’s a pig thing. It’s because our skulls are a bit too small for our brains. It gets worse as we get older. Our optic nerves get squeezed and we go blind, assuming macular degeneration doesn’t get us first.” He smiled into darkness. “Nice view, isn’t it?”