Absolution Gap

by Alastair Reynolds

  “They say they want to bring you back for questioning,” Linxe said.

  “For running away from home? Haven’t they got anything better to do with their time?”

  “It’s not for running away from home,” Linxe said. Again she glanced at Crozet. “It’s about that sabotage last week. You know the one I mean, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Rashmika said, remembering the crater where the demolition store had been.

  “They’re saying you did it,” Crozet said.

  Hela, 2615

  OUT OF ORBIT now, Quaiche felt his weight increasing as the Daughter slowed down to only a few thousand kilometres per hour. Hela swelled, its hectic terrain rising up to meet him. The radar echo—the metallic signature—was still there. So was the bridge.

  Quaiche had decided to spiral closer rather than making a concerted dash for the structure. Even on the first loop in, still thousands of kilometres above Hela’s surface, what he had seen had been tantalising, like a puzzle he needed to assemble. From deep space the rift had been visible only as a change in albedo, a dark scar slicing across the world. Now it had palpable depth, especially when he examined it with the magnifying cameras. The gouge was irregular: there were places where there was a relatively shallow slope all the way down to the valley floor, but elsewhere the walls were vertical sheets of ice-covered rock towering kilometres high, as smooth and foreboding as granite. They had the grey sheen of wet slate. The floor of the rift varied between the flatness of a dry salt lake to a crazed, fractured quilt of tilted and interlocking ice panels separated by hair-thin avenues of pure sable blackness. The closer he came the more it indeed resembled an unfinished puzzle, tossed aside by a god in a tantrum.

  Once every minute or so he checked the radar. The echo was still there, and the Daughter had detected no signs of imminent attack. Perhaps it was just junk after all. The thought troubled him, for it meant someone else must have come this close to the bridge without finding it remarkable enough to report to anyone else. Or perhaps they had meant to report it, but some subsequent misfortune had befallen them. He wasn’t sure that was any less worrying, on balance.

  By the time he had completed the first loop he had reduced his speed to five hundred metres a second. He was close enough to the surface now to appreciate the texturing of the ground as it changed from jagged uplands to smooth plains. It was not all ice; most of the moon’s interior was rocky, and a great deal of fractured rocky material was embedded in the ice, or lying upon it. Ash plumes radiated away from dormant volcanoes. There were slopes of fine talus and up-rearing sharp-sided boulders as big as major space habitats; some poked through the ice, tipped at absurd angles like the sterns of sinking ships; others sat on the surface, poised on one side in the manner of vast sculptural installations.

  The Daughter’s thrusters burned continuously to support it against Hela’s gravity. Quaiche fell lower, edging closer to the lip of the rift. Overhead, Haldora was a brooding dark sphere illuminated only along one limb. Amused and distracted for a moment, Quaiche saw lightning storms play across the gas giant’s darkened face. The electrical arcs coiled and writhed with mesmerising slowness, like eels.

  Hela was still catching starlight from the system’s sun, but shortly its orbit around Haldora would take it into the largdr world’s shadow. It was fortuitous, Quaiche thought, that the source of the echo had been on this face of Hela, or else he would have been denied the impressive spectacle of the gas giant looming over everything. If he had arrived later in the world’s rotation cycle, of course, the rift would have been pointing away from Haldora. A difference of one hundred and sixty days and he would have missed this amazing sight.

  Another lightning flash. Reluctantly, Quaiche turned his attention back to Hela.

  He was over the edge of Ginnungagap Rift. The ground tumbled away with unseemly haste. Even though the pull of gravity was only a quarter of a standard gee, Quaiche felt as much vertigo as he would have on a heavier world. It made perfect sense, for the drop was still fatally deep. Worse, there was no atmosphere to slow the descent of a falling object, no terminal velocity to create at least an outside chance of a survivable accident.

  Never mind. The Daughter had never failed him, and he did not expect her to start now. He focused on the thing he had come to examine, and allowed the Daughter to sink lower, dropping below the zero-altitude surface datum.

  He turned, vectoring along the length of the rift. He had drifted one or two kilometres out from the nearest wall, but the more distant one looked no closer than it had before he crossed the threshold. The spacing of the walls was irregular, but here at the equator the sides of the rift were never closer than thirty-five kilometres apart. The rift was a minimum of five or six kilometres deep, pitching down to ten or eleven in the deepest, most convoluted parts of the valley floor. The feature was hellishly vast, and Quaiche came to the gradual conclusion that he did not actually like being in it very much. It was too much like hanging between the sprung jaws of a trap.

  He checked the clock: four hours before the Dominatrix was due to emerge from the far side of Haldora. Four hours was a long time; he expected to be on his way back well before then.

  “Hang on, Mor,” he said. “Not long now.”

  But of course she did not hear him.

  He had entered the rift south of the equator and was now moving towards the northern hemisphere. The fractured mosaic of the floor oozed beneath him. Measured against the far wall, the motion of his ship was hardly apparent at all, but the nearer wall slid past quickly enough to give him some indication of his speed. Occasionally he lost his grasp of scale, and for a moment the rift would become much smaller. These were the dangerous moments, for it was usually when an alien landscape became familiar, homely and containable that it would reach out and kill you.

  Suddenly he saw the bridge coming over the horizon between the pinning walls. His heart hammered in his chest. No doubt at all now, if ever there had been any: the bridge was a made thing, a confection of glistening thin threads. He wished Morwenna were here to see it as well.

  He was recording all the while as the bridge came closer, looming kilometres above him: a curving arc connected to the walls of the rift at either end by a bewildering filigree of supporting scrollwork. There was no need to linger. Just one sweep under the span would be enough to convince Jasmina. They could come back later with heavy-duty equipment, if that was what she wished.

  Quaiche looked up in wonder as he passed under the bridge. The roadbed—what else was he meant to call it?—bisected the face of Haldora, glowing slightly against the darkness of the gas giant. It was perilously thin, a ribbon of milky white. He wondered what it would be like to cross it on foot.

  The Daughter swerved violently, the gee-force pushing red curtains into his vision.

  “What…” Quaiche began.

  But there was no need to ask: the Daughter was taking evasive action, doing exactly what she was meant to. Something was trying to attack him. Quaiche blacked out, hit consciousness again, blacked out once more. The landscape hurtled around him, pulsing bright light back at him, reflected from the Daughter’s steering thrusters. Blackout again. Fleeting consciousness. There was a roaring in his ears. He saw the bridge from a series of abrupt, disconnected angles, like jumbled snapshots. Below it. Above it. Below it again. The Daughter was trying to find shelter.

  This wasn’t right. He should have been up and out, no questions asked. The Daughter was supposed to get him away from any possible threat as quickly as possible. This veering—this indecision—was not characteristic at all.

  Unless she was cornered. Unless she couldn’t find an escape route.

  In a window of lucidity he saw the situational display on the console. Three hostile objects were firing at him. They had emerged from niches in the ice, three metallic echoes that had nothing to do with the first one he had seen.

  The Scavenger’s Daughter shook herself like a wet dog. Quaiche saw the exhaust plumes of h
is own miniature missiles whipping away, corkscrewing and zigzagging to avoid being shot down by the buried sentries. Blackout again. This time when he came around he saw a small avalanche oozing down one side of the cliff. One of the attacking objects was now offline: at least one of his missiles had found its mark.

  The console flickered. The hull’s opacity switched to absolute black. When the hull cleared and the console recovered he was looking at emergency warnings across the board, scribbled in fiery red Latinate script. It had been a bad hit.

  Another shiver, another pack of missiles streaking away. They were tiny things, thumb-sized antimatter rockets with kilotonne yields.

  Black-out again. A sensation of falling when he came round.

  Another little avalanche; one fewer attacker on the display. One of the sentries was still out there, and he had no more ordnance to throw at it. But it wasn’t firing. Perhaps it was damaged—or maybe just reloading.

  The Daughter dithered, caught in a maelstrom of possibilities.

  “Executive override,” Quaiche said. “Get me out of here.”

  The gee-force came hard and immediately. Again, curtains of red closed on his vision. But he did not black out this time. The ship was keeping the blood in his head, drying to preserve his consciousness for as long as possible.

  He saw the landscape drop away below, saw the bridge from above.

  Then something else hit him. The little ship stalled, thrust interrupted for a jaw-snapping instant. She struggled to regain power, but something—some vital propulsion subsystem—must have taken a serious hit.

  The landscape hung motionless below him. Then it began to approach again.

  He was going down.

  Fade to black.

  QUAICHE FELL OBLIQUELY towards the vertical wall of the rift, slipping in and out of consciousness. He assumed he was going to die, smeared across that sheer cliff face in an instant of glittering destruction, but at the last moment before impact, the Scavenger’s Daughter used some final hoarded gasp of thrust to soften the crash.

  It was still bad, even as the hull deformed to soften the blow. The wall wheeled around: now a cliff, now a horizon, now a flat plane pressing down from the sky. Quaiche blacked out, came to consciousness, blacked out again. He saw the bridge wheel around in the distance. Clouds of ice and rubble were still belching from the avalanche points in the sides of the cliff where his missiles had taken out the attacking sentries.

  All the while, Quaiche and his tiny jewel of a ship tumbled towards the floor of the rift.

  Ararat, 2675

  VASKO FOLLOWED CLAVAIN and Scorpio into the administration compound, Blood escorting them through a maze of underpopulated rooms and corridors. Vasko expected to be turned back at any moment: his Security Arm clearance definitely did not extend to this kind of business. But although each security check was more stringent than the last, his presence was ac-cepted. Vasko supposed it unlikely that anyone was going to argue with Scorpio and Clavain about their choice of guest.

  Presently they arrived at a quarantine point deep within the compound, a medical centre housing several freshly made beds. Waiting for them in the quarantine centre was a sallow-faced human physician named Valensin. He wore enormous rhomboid-lensed spectacles; his thin black hair was glued back from his scalp in brilliant waves, and he carried a small scuffed bag of medical tools. Vasko had never met Valensin before, but as the highest-ranking physician on the planet, his name was familiar.

  “How do you feel, Nevil?” Valensin asked.

  “I feel like a man overstaying his welcome in history,” Clavain said.

  “Never one for a straight answer, were you?” But even as he was speaking Valensin had whipped some silvery apparatus from his bag and was now shining it into Clavain’s eyes, squinting through a little eyepiece of his own.

  “We ran a medical on him during the shuttle flight,” Scorpio said. “He’s fit enough. You don’t have to worry about him doing anything embarrassing like dropping dead on us.”

  Valensin flicked the light off. “And you, Scorpio? Any immediate plans of your own to drop dead?”

  “Make your life a lot easier, wouldn’t it?”

  “Migraines?”

  “Just getting one, as it happens.”

  “I’ll look you over later. I want to see if that peripheral vision of yours has deteriorated any faster than I was anticipating. All this running around really isn’t good for a pig of your age.”

  “Nice of you to remind me, particularly when I have no choice in the matter.”

  “Always happy to oblige.” Valensin beamed, popping his equipment away. “Now, let me make a couple of things clear. When that capsule opens, no one so much as breathes on the occupant until I’ve given them an extremely thorough examination. And by thorough, of course, I mean to the limited degree possible under the present conditions. I’ll be looking for infectious agents. If I do find anything, and if I decide that it has even a remote chance of being unpleasant, then anyone who came into contact with the capsule can forget returning to First Camp, or wherever else they call home. And by unpleasant I’m not talking about genetically engineered viral weapons. I mean something as commonplace as influenza. Our antiviral programmes are already stretched to breaking point.”

  “We understand,” Scorpio said.

  Valensin led them into a huge room with a high domed ceiling of skeletal metal. The room smelt aggressively sterile. It was almost completely empty, save for an intimate gathering of people and machines near the middle. Half a dozen white-clad workers were fussing over ramshackle towers of monitoring equipment.

  The capsule itself was suspended from the ceiling, hanging on a thin metal line like a plumb bob. The scorched-black egg-shaped thing was much smaller than Vasko had been expecting: it almost looked too small to hold a person. Though there were no windows, several panels had been folded back to reveal luminous displays. Vasko saw numbers, wobbling traces and trembling histograms.

  “Let me see it,” Clavain said, pushing through the workers to get closer to the capsule.

  At this intrusion, one of the workers surrounding the capsule made the mistake of frowning in Scorpio’s direction. Scorpio glared back at him, flashing the fierce curved incisors that marked his ancestry. At the same moment Blood signalled to the workers with a quick lateral stab of his trotter. Obediently they filed away, vanishing back into the depths of the compound.

  Clavain gave no sign that he had even noticed the commotion. Still hooded and anonymous, he slipped between the obstructions and moved to one side of the capsule. Very gently he placed a hand near one of the illuminated panels, caressing the scorched matt hide of the capsule.

  Vasko guessed it was safe to stare now.

  Scorpio looked sceptical. “Getting anything?”

  “Yes,” Clavain said. “It’s talking to me. The protocols are Conjoiner.”

  “Certain of that?” asked Blood.

  Clavain turned away from the machine, only the fine beard hairs on his jaw catching the light. “Yes,” he said.

  Now he placed his other hand on the opposite side of the panel, bracing himself, and lowered his head until it lay against the capsule. Vasko imagined that the old man’s eyes would be shut, blocking off outward distraction, concentration clawing grooves into his forehead. No one was saying anything, and Vasko realised that he was even making an effort not to breathe loudly.

  Clavain tilted his head this way and that, slowly and deliberately, in the manner of someone trying to find the optimum orientation for a radio antenna. He locked at one angle, his frame tensing through the fabric of the coat.

  “Definitely Conjoiner protocols,” Clavain said. He remained silent and perfectly still for at least another minute, before adding, “I think it recognises me as another Conjoiner. It’s not allowing me complete system access—not yet, anyway—but it’s letting me query certain low-level diagnostic functions. It certainly doesn’t look like a bomb.”

  “Be very, very caref
ul,” Scorpio said. “We don’t want you being taken over, or something worse.”

  “I’m doing my best,” Clavain said.

  “How soon can you tell who’s in it?” Blood asked.

  “I won’t know for sure until it cracks open,” Clavain said, his voice low but cutting through everything else with quiet authority. “I’ll tell you this now, though: I don’t think it’s Skade.”

  “You’re absolutely sure it’s Conjoiner?” Blood insisted.

  “It is. And I’m fairly certain some of the signals I’m picking up are coming from the occupant’s implants, not just from the capsule itself. But it can’t be Skade: she’d be ashamed to have anything to do with protocols this old.” He pulled his head away from the capsule and looked back at the company. “It’s Remontoire. It has to be.”

  “Can you make any sense of his thoughts?” Scorpio asked.

  “No, but the neural signals I’m getting are at a very low level, just routine housekeeping stuff. Whoever’s inside this is probably still unconscious.”

  “Or not a Conjoiner,” Blood said.

  “We’ll know in a few hours,” Scorpio said. “But whoever it is, there’s still the problem of a missing ship.”

  “Why is that a problem?” Vasko asked.

  “Because whoever it is didn’t travel twenty light-years in that capsule,” Blood said.

  “But couldn’t he have come into the system quietly, parked his ship somewhere we wouldn’t see it and then crossed the remaining distance in the capsule?” Vasko suggested.

  Blood shook his head. “He’d still have needed an in-system ship to make the final crossing to our planet.”

  “But we could have missed a small ship,” Vasko said. “Couldn’t we?”

  “I don’t think so,” Clavain said. “Not unless there have been some very unwelcome developments.”

  Chapter Nine

  Hela Surface, 2615

  QUAICHE CAME AROUND, upside down. He was still. Everything, in fact, was immensely still: the ship, the landscape, the sky. It was as if he had been planted here centuries ago and had only just opened his eyes.