Absolution Gap

by Alastair Reynolds

  Jaccottet knew better than to argue.

  Scorpio and Clavain climbed in after Khouri. Clavain played his torch around the mangled interior of this part of the corvette, pausing now and then as the beam alighted on some recognisable but damaged structure. The black invasion resembled a prolific fungal growth that had all but consumed the fabric of the spacecraft.

  The hull, Scorpio realised, was a shattered ruin, barely holding itself together. He watched where he put his feet.

  “It subsumes,” Clavain said quietly, as if wary—despite the intermittent pulses of music—of alerting the machinery. “It only takes one element to invade a whole ship. Then it eats its way through the entire thing, converting as it goes.”

  “What are those little black cubes made of?” asked Scorpio.

  “Almost nothing,” Clavain told him. “Just pure force maintained by a tiny mechanism deep inside, like the nucleus of an atom. Except we never got a look at the mechanism.”

  “I take it you had a go?”

  “We removed some cubic elements from Galiana’s crew by mechanical force, breaking the inter-cube bonds. They just shrank away to nothing, leaving a tiny pile of grey dust. We presumed that was the machinery, but by then there wasn’t a lot it could tell us. Reverse engineering wasn’t really an option.”

  “We’re in a lot of trouble, aren’t we?” Scorpio said.

  “Yes, we’re in trouble,” Khouri said. “You’re right about that part. Matter of fact, we probably don’t know how much trouble we really are in. But understand one thing: we’re not dead, not yet, and not while we have Aura.”

  “You think she’ll make that much of a difference?” Clavain asked.

  “She made a difference already, guy. We wouldn’t have made it to this system if she hadn’t.”

  “Do you still think she’s here?” Scorpio asked her.

  “She’s here. Just can’t say where.”

  “I’m picking up signals as well,” Clavain said, “but they’re fractured and confused. Too many echoes from all the half-functioning systems in this ship. I can’t say if it’s one source or several.”

  “So what do we do?” Scorpio asked.

  Clavain angled his torch into the gloom. The beam knifed against fabulous crenellations and castellations of frozen black cubes. “Back there should be the propulsion systems compartment,” he said. “Not a very likely place to look for survivors.” He swung around, hunting with the beam, squinting at the un-familiarity of it all. ‘Through here, I think. It seems to be the source of the music, as well. Careful, it’ll be a tight squeeze.“

  “Where will that take us?” Scorpio said.

  “Habitat and flight deck. Assuming we recognise any of it when we get there.”

  “It’s colder that way,” Khouri observed.

  They stepped towards the part of the ship Clavain had indicated. There was a gap ahead, the remains of a bulkhead. The air felt as if it was only a breath away from freezing solid altogether. Scorpio glanced back, his mind playing tricks on him, conjuring languid ripples and waves of motion in the black tar of the wolf machinery.

  Instead, something moved ahead. A section of shadow detached itself from the wall, black against black.

  Khouri’s gun tipped towards it.

  “No!” Clavain shouted.

  Scorpio heard the click of the Breitenbach cannon’s trigger. He flinched, steeling himself for the energy discharge. It was not really the weapon of choice for close-quarters combat.

  Nothing happened. Khouri lowered the weapon’s muzzle an inch. She had pulled back on the trigger, but not enough to fire.

  Clavain’s knife trembled in his hand like an elver.

  The black presence became a person in black vacuum armour. The armour moved stiffly, as if rusted into seizure. It clutched a dark shape in one hand. The figure took another step and then keeled towards them. It hit the ground with a crack of metal against ice. Black cubes splintered away in all directions, frosted with ice. The weapon—or whatever it was—skidded away and knocked against the wall.

  Scorpio knelt down to pick it up.

  “Careful,” Clavain said again.

  Scorpio’s trotters closed on the rounded contours of the Conjoiner side arm. He tried to close his hand around the grip in such a way that he could still depress the trigger. It wasn’t possible. The grip had never been engineered for use by pigs.

  In fury he tossed it to Clavain. “Maybe you can get this thing to work.”

  “Easy, Scorp.” Clavain pocketed the weapon. “It won’t work for me, either, not unless Skade was very careless with her defences. But we can keep it out of harm’s way, at least.”

  Khouri shouldered the cannon and lowered herself down next to the crashed armour of the figure. “It ain’t Skade,” she said. “Too big, and the helmet crest isn’t the right shape. You picking up anything, Clavain?”

  “Nothing intelligible,” he said. He stilled the shivering blade of his knife and slipped it back into one of his pockets. “But let’s get that helmet off and see where we are, shall we?”

  “We don’t have time to waste,” Scorpio said.

  Clavain started working the helmet seals. “This will only take a moment.”

  The extremities of Scorpio’s hands were numb, his coordination beginning to show signs of impairment. He did not doubt that Clavain was suffering much the same thing; it must have taken real strength and precision to unlock the intricate mechanism of the helmet seal.

  There was a latching sound, then a scrape of metal against metal and a gasp of equalising air pressure. The helmet popped off, trapped between Clavain’s trembling fingertips. He placed it gently on to the ice, rim down.

  The face of a young female Conjoiner looked back at them. She had something of the same sleekly sculpted look as her mentor, but she was clearly not Skade. Her face was wide and flat-featured, her bloodless skin the colour of static on a monitor. Her neural crest—the heat-dissipating ridge of bone and cartilage running from the very top of her forehead to the nape of her neck—was less extravagant than the one Scorpio remembered seeing on Skade, and was almost certainly a much less useful indicator of her state of mind. It probably incorporated a more advanced set of neural mechanisms, with lower heat-dissipation burdens.

  Her lips were grey and her eyebrows pure chrome white. She opened her eyes. In the torchlight her irises were a metallic blue-grey.

  “Talk to me,” Clavain said.

  She coughed and laughed at the same time. The appearance of a human expression on that stiff mask shocked them all.

  Khouri leaned closer. “I’m only picking up mush,” she said.

  “There’s something wrong with her,” Clavain replied quietly. Then he held the woman’s head from behind, supporting it off the ice. “Listen to me carefully. We don’t want to hurt you. You’ve been injured, but if you help us we will take care of you. Can you understand me?”

  The woman laughed again, a spasm of delight creasing her face. “You…” she began.

  Clavain leaned closer. “Yes?”

  “Clavain.”

  Clavain nodded. “Yes, that’s me.” He looked back at the others. “Damage can’t be too severe if she remembers me. I’m sure we’ll be able…”

  She spoke again. “Clavain. Butcher of Tharsis.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “Clavain. Defector. Traitor? She smiled again, coughed, and then hacked a mouthload of saliva into his face. ”Betrayed the Mother Nest.“

  Clavain wiped the spit from his face with the back of his glove. “I didn’t betray the Mother Nest,” he said, with an alarming lack of anger. “It was actually Skade who betrayed it.” He corrected her with avuncular patience, as if putting right some minor misapprehension about geography.

  She laughed and spat at him again. The power of it surprised Scorpio. It caught Clavain in the eye and made him hiss in pain.

  Clavain leant closer to the woman, keeping a hand over her mouth this time. “We
have some work to do, I think. A little bit of re-education. A little bit of attitude adjustment. But that’s all right, I’ve got plenty of time.”

  The woman coughed again. Her titanium-grey eyes were bright and joyful, even as she struggled for breath. There was something idiotic about her, Scorpio realised.

  The armoured body started convulsing. Clavain kept hold of her head, his other hand still across her mouth.

  “Let her breathe,” Khouri said.

  He released the pressure across her mouth for an instant. The woman kept smiling, her eyes wide, unblinking. Something black squeezed between Clavain’s fingers, forcing its way through the gaps like some manifestation of demonic foulness. Clavain flinched back, letting go of the woman, dropping her head against the floor. The black stuff pulsed out of her mouth, out of her nostrils, the flows merging into a horrible black beard which began to engulf her face.

  “Live machinery,” Clavain said, falling back. His own left hand was covered in ropes of the black stuff. He swatted it against the ice, but the black ooze refused to dislodge. The ropes combined into a coherent mass, a plaque covering his fingers to the knuckle. It was composed of hundreds of smaller versions of the same cubes they had seen elsewhere. They were swelling perceptibly, enlarging as they consolidated their hold on his hand. The black growth progressed towards his wrist in a series of convulsive waves, cubes sliding over each other.

  From behind, something lit up the entire cavity of the wrecked ship. Scorpio risked a glance back, just long enough to see the barrel of Khouri’s cannon glowing cherry-red from a minimum-yield discharge. Jaccottet was aiming his own weapon at the corpse of the Conjoiner, but it was obvious that nothing more remained of the organic part of the Inhibitor victim. The emerging machines appeared totally unaffected: the blast had dispersed some of them from the main mass, but there was no sign that the energy had harmed them in any way whatsoever.

  Scorpio had only glanced away for a second, but when he returned his attention to Clavain, he was horrified to see Clavain slumped back against the wall, grimacing.

  “They’ve got me, Scorp. It hurts.”

  Clavain closed his eyes. The black plaque had now taken his hand to the wrist. At the finger end it had formed a rounded stump which was creeping slowly back as the wrist end advanced.

  “I’ll try to lever it off,” Scorpio said, fumbling in his belt for something thin and strong, but not so sharp that it would damage Clavain’s hand.

  Clavain opened his eyes. “It won’t work.”

  With his good hand he reached into the pocket where he had put the knife. A moment earlier his face had been a grey testament to pain, but now there was an easing there, as if the agony had abated.

  It hadn’t, Scorpio knew. Clavain had merely dulled off the part of his brain that registered it.

  Clavain had the knife out. He held it by the haft, trying to make the blade Come alive. It wasn’t happening. Either the control could never be activated single-handedly, or Clavain’s other hand was too numb from the cold to do the job. In error or frustration, the knife tumbled from his grip. He groped towards it, then abandoned the effort.

  “Scorp, pick it up.”

  He took the knife. It felt odd in his trotter, like something precious he had stolen, something he had never been meant to handle. He moved to give it back to Clavain.

  “No. You have to do it. Activate the blade with that stud. Be careful: she kicks when the piezo-blade starts up. You don’t want to drop it. She’ll cut through hyperdiamond like a laser through smoke.”

  “I can’t do this, Nevil.”

  “You have to. It’s killing me.”

  The black caul of Inhibitor machinery was eating back into his hand. There was no room in that thing for his fingertips, Scorpio realised. It had devoured them already.

  He pressed the activation stud. The knife twisted in his hand, alive and eager. He felt the high-frequency buzz through the hilt. The blade had become a blur of silver, like the flicker of a hummingbird’s wing.

  “Take it off, Scorp. Now. Quickly and cleanly. A good inch above the machinery.”

  “I’ll kill you.”

  “No, you won’t. I’ll make it through this.” Clavain paused. “I’ve shut down pain reception. Bloodstream implants will handle clotting. You’ve nothing to worry about. Just do it. Now. Before I change my mind, or that stuff finds a short cut to my head.”

  Scorpio nodded, horrified by what he was about to do but knowing that he had no choice.

  Making sure that none of the machinery touched his own flesh, Scorpio supported Clavain’s damaged arm at the elbow. The knife buzzed and squirmed. He held the locus of the blur close to fabric of the sleeve.

  He looked into Clavain’s face. “Are you sure about this?”

  “Scorp. Now. As a friend. Do it.”

  Scorpio pushed the knife down. He felt no resistance as it ghosted through fabric, flesh and bone.

  HALF A SECOND later the work was done. The severed hand—Scorpio had cut it off just above the wrist—dropped to the ice with a solid whack. With a moan Clavain slumped back against the wall, losing whatever strength he had mustered until then. He’d told Scorpio that he had blocked all pain signals, but some residual message must have reached his brain: either that or what Scorpio heard was a moan of desperate relief.

  Jaccottet knelt down by Clavain, unhitching a medical kit from his belt. Clavain had been right: there was very little in the way of the blood loss from the wound. He held the truncated forearm against his belly, pressing it tight, while Jaccottet prepared a dressing.

  There was a rustle of movement from the hand. The black machines were detaching themselves, breaking free of the remaining flesh. They moved hesitantly, as if sapped of the energy they had drawn from the warmth of living bodies. The mass of cubes oozed away from the hand, slowed and then halted, becoming just another part of the dormant growth that filled the ship. The hand lay there, the flesh a contused landscape of recent bruises and older age spots, yet still largely intact save for the eroded stubs of the fingertips, which had been consumed down to the first joint.

  Scorpio made the knife stop shivering and put it on the ground. “I’m sorry, Nevil.”

  “I’ve lost it once already,” Clavain said. “It really doesn’t mean that much to me. I’m grateful that you did what you had to do.” Then he leant back against the wall and closed his eyes for another few seconds. His breathing was sharply audible and irregular. It sounded like someone making inexpert saw cuts.

  “Are you going to be all right?” Scorpio asked Clavain, eyeing the severed hand.

  Clavain did not respond.

  “I don’t know enough about Conjoiners to say how much shock he can take,” Jaccottet said, keeping his voice low, “but I know this man needs rest and a lot of it. He’s old, for a start, and no one’s been around to fine-tune all those machines in his blood. It might be hitting him a lot worse than we think.”

  “We have to move on,” Khouri said.

  “She’s right,” Clavain said, stirring again. “Here, someone help me to my feet. Losing a hand didn’t stop me last time; it won’t now.”

  “Wait a moment,” Jaccottet said, finishing off the emergency dressing.

  “You need to stay here, Nevil,” Scorpio said.

  “If I stay here, Scorp, I will die.” Clavain groaned with the effort of trying to stand up on his own. “Help me, God damn you. Help me!”

  Scorpio eased him to his feet. He stood unsteadily, still holding the bandaged stump against his belly.

  “I still think you’d be better off waiting here,” Scorpio said.

  “Scorp, we’re all staring hypothermia in the face. If I can feel it, so can you. Right now the only thing that’s holding it off is adrenalin and movement. So I suggest we keep moving.” Then Clavain reached down and picked up the knife from where Scorpio had put it down. He slipped it back into his pocket. “Glad I brought it with me now,” he said.

  Scorpio glanced
down at the ground. “What about the hand?”

  “Leave it. They can grow me a new one.”

  They followed the draught of cold towards the front portion of Skade’s wrecked ship.

  “Is it me,” Khouri said, “or has the music just changed?”

  “It’s changed,” Clavain said. “But it’s still Bach.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Hela, 2727

  RASHMIKA WATCHED THE icejammer being winched down to the rolling ribbon of road. There was a scuff of ice as the skis touched the surface. On the icejammer’s roof, the two suited men unhitched the hooks and rode them up to the top of the winches, before being swung back on to the top of the caravan vehicle. Crozet’s tiny-looking vehicle bobbed and yawed alongside the caravan for several hundred metres, then allowed itself to be slowly overtaken by the rumbling procession. Rashmika watched until it was lost to view behind the grinding wheels of one of the machines.

  She stepped back from the inclined viewing window. That was it, then: all her bridges burned. But her resolve to continue remained as strong as ever. She was going onwards, no matter what it took.

  “I see you’ve made your mind up, then.”

  Rashmika turned from the window. The sound of Quaestor Jones’s voice shocked her: she had imagined herself alone.

  The quaestor’s green pet cleaned its face with its one good forelimb, its tail wrapped tight as a tourniquet around his upper arm.

  “My mind didn’t need making up,” she said.

  “I had hoped that the letter from your brother would knock some sense into your head. But it didn’t, and here you are. At least now we have a small treat for you.”

  “I’m sorry?” Rashmika asked.

  “There’s been a slight change in our itinerary,” he said. “We’ll be taking a little longer to make our rendezvous with the cathedrals than planned.”

  “Nothing serious has happened, I hope.”

  “We’ve already incurred delays that we can’t make up by following our usual route south. We had intended to traverse the Ginnungagap Rift near Gudbrand Crossing, then move south down the Hyrrokkin Trail until we reached the Way, where we’d meet the cathedrals. But that simply isn’t possible now, and in any case, there’s been a major icefall somewhere along the Hyrrokkin Pass. We don’t have the gear to shift it, not quickly, and the nearest caravan with ice-clearing equipment is stuck at Glum Junction, pinned down by a flash glacier. So we’ll have to take a short cut, if we aren’t to be even later.”