Absolution Gap

by Alastair Reynolds

  He saw now that the water was bellying up around the ship, the surface rising many hundreds of metres. Frightful energies were being released underwater, creating swelling bubbles of superdense, superhot plasma.

  The wall of elevated water surged away from the Nostalgia for Infinity in two concentric waves.

  “Did they get far enough beyond the headland?” he asked.

  “We’re about to find out,” Scorpio said.

  The surface of the water was crusted with a scum of stiff green biomass. They watched it crack into disjointed plates, unable to flex fast enough to match the distortion as the wave passed. It was moving at hundreds of metres per second. In only a few moments it would hit the bay’s low rock shields.

  Vasko looked back towards the source of the tidal wave. The ship was beginning to climb now, its nose emerging from the steam layer. The movement was awesomely smooth, almost as if he was seeing a fixed landmark—an ancient storm-weathered spire on a high promontory, perhaps—being revealed by the retreat of morning fog.

  He watched the top kilometre of the Nostalgia for Infinity push clear of the steam, holding up a hand to shade his eyes from the brightness. The ship was almost clean of Juggler biomass: he saw only a few green strands still attached to the hull. Now the next kilometre came out. Ropy strands of biomass—thicker than houses—were slithering free, losing traction against the accelerating spacecraft.

  The glare became intolerable. The hull of the shuttle darkened, protecting its occupants. The entire ship was now free of the ocean. Through the almost opaque shuttle fuselage, Vasko saw only two hard points of radiance, rising slowly.

  “No going back now,” he observed.

  Scorpio turned to Khouri. “I’m going to follow it, unless you disagree.”

  Khouri eyed her daughter. “I’m not getting anything from Aura, Scorp, but I’m certain Remontoire’s behind this. He always said there’d be a message. I don’t think we have any choice but to trust him.”

  “Let’s just hope it is Remontoire,” Scorpio said.

  But it was clear that his mind was already made up. He told them all to make seats for themselves and prepare for whatever they might find in Ararat orbit. Vasko went back to arrange his seat, but before he settled in he noticed that the floor of the fuselage was now transparent again. Down below, lit by the rising flare of the ship, he saw First Camp laid out in hallucinatory detail, the grid of streets and buildings picked out in monochrome clarity. He saw the small moving shadows of people running between buildings. Then he looked out towards the bay. The ramp of water had dashed against the barrier of the headland, dissipating much of its strength, but it had not been completely blocked. With an agonising sense of detachment he watched the remnant of the tidal wave cross the bay, slowing and gaining height as it hit the rising slope of the shallows. Then it was swallowing the shoreline, redefining it in an instant, overrunning streets and buildings. The flood lingered and then retreated, pulling debris with it. In its wake it left rubble and rectangular absences where entire buildings had simply vanished. Large conch structures, inadequately ballasted or anchored, were being carried along on the surface, claimed back by the sea.

  Within the bay the tidal wave echoed back on itself, creating several smaller surges, but none did as much damage as the first. After a minute or so, all was quite still again. But Vasko judged that a quarter of First Camp had simply ceased to exist. He just hoped that most of the citizens from those vul-nerable shoreline properties had been prioritised in the evacuation effort.

  The glare was fading. The ship was already far above them now, picking up speed, clawing towards rarefied atmosphere and, ultimately, space. The bay, robbed of that single landmark, looked unfamiliar. Vasko had lived here all his life, but now it was foreign territory, a place he barely recognised. He was certain it could never feel like home again. But it was easy for him to feel that way, wasn’t it? He was in the privileged position of not having to go back and rebuild his life amongst the ruins. He was already leaving, already saying goodbye* to Ararat, farewell to the world that had made him what he was.

  He nestled into his newly formed seat, allowing the hull to squirm intimately tighter around him, conforming to his precise shape. Almost as soon as he was settled he felt the shuttle commence its own steep climb.

  It did not take long for them to catch up with the Nostalgia for Infinity. He remembered what Antoinette Bax had told him, when he had asked her if the Captain was really capable of leaving Ararat. She had said that it could be done, but it would not be a fast departure. Like most ships of its kind, the great lighthugger was designed to sustain one gravity of thrust, all the way up to the bleeding edge of the speed of light. But at sea level Ararat’s own gravity was already close to one standard gee. At normal cruise thrust, the ship was just capable of balancing itself against that force, hovering at a fixed altitude. Landing had not been a problem, therefore: it had simply been a question of letting gravity win, albeit in a slow, controlled fashion. Taking off was different: now the ship had to beat both gravity and air resistance. There was some power in reserve for emergency manoeuvres—up to ten gees or more—but that reserve capacity was designed only for seconds of use, not the many minutes that would be needed to reach orbit or interplanetary escape velocity. To leave Ararat, therefore, the engines had to be pushed just beyond the normal one-gee limit, giving a slight excess thrust, but not enough to overload them. The excess equalled about one-tenth of a gee of acceleration.

  It would be a slower departure than the most primitive chemical rocket, Antoinette had said, slower even than the glorified firework that had carried the first astronaut (she had said that his name was Neal Gagarin and Vasko had believed her) into orbit. But the Nostalgia for Infinity weighed several thousand times more than the heaviest chemical rocket. And the old chemical rockets had to reach escape velocity very quickly, because they only had enough fuel for a few minutes of thrust. The Nostalgia for Infinity could sustain thrust for years and years.

  Air resistance lessened as the ship climbed. It began to accelerate a little harder, but still the shuttle had no difficulty keeping up. The escape felt leisurely and dreamlike. This, Vasko knew, was probably a dangerous misconception.

  When he had satisfied himself that the ride was likely to be smooth and predictable, at least for the next few minutes, he left his niche and went forward. Scorpio and the pilot were in the control couches.

  “Any transmissions from the Infinity!” Vasko asked.

  “Nothing,” the pilot replied.

  “I hope Antoinette’s all right,” he said. Then he remembered the other people—fourteen thousand by the last count—who had already been loaded into the ship.

  “She’ll cope,” Scorpio said.

  “I guess in a few minutes we’ll find out if that message really was from Remontoire. Are you worried?”

  “No,” Scorpio said. “And you know why? Because there isn’t anything you or I or anyone else can do about it. We couldn’t stop that ship going up and we can’t do anything about what’s up there waiting for it.”

  “We have a choice about whether we follow it or not,” Vasko said.

  The pig looked at him, eyes narrowed either in fatigue or disdain. “No, you’re wrong,” he said. “We have a choice, yes—that’s me and Khouri. But you don’t. You’re just along for the ride.”

  Vasko thought about going back to his seat, but decided to stick it out. Although it was night, he could clearly see the curve of Ararat’s horizon now. He was going into space. This was what he had always wanted, for much of his life. But he had never imagined it would be like this, or that the destination itself would contain such danger and uncertainty. Instead of the thrill of escape he felt a knot of tension in his stomach.

  “I’ve earned the right to be here,” he said, quietly, but loud enough for the pig to hear. “I have a stake in Aura’s future.”

  “You’re keen, Malinin, but you’re way out of your depth.”

 
“I’m also involved.”

  “You were embroiled. It isn’t the same thing.”

  Vasko started to say something, but there was a flicker of static across all the display read-outs hovering around the pilot. He felt the shuttle lurch.

  “Picking up interference on all comms frequencies,” the pilot reported. “We’ve lost all surface transponder contacts and all links to First Camp. There’s a lot of EM noise out here—more than we’re used to. There’s stuff the sensors can’t even interpret. Avionics are responding sluggishly. I think we’re entering some kind of jamming zone.”

  “Can you keep us close to the Infinity!” Scorpio asked.

  “I’m more or less flying this thing manually. I guess if I still have the ship as a reference, we’re not going to get lost. But I’m not making any promises.”

  “Altitude?”

  “One hundred and twenty klicks. We must be entering the lower sphere of battle about now.”

  Above, the view had not changed dramatically since the departure of the ship. The scratches of light had faded, perhaps because Remontoire was aware that the message had been received and acted upon. There were still flashes of light, ex-panding spheres and arcs, and the occasional searing passage of an atmosphere-skimming object, but other than the darkness becoming a more intense, deeper shade of black, there was no real difference compared to the surface view.

  Khouri came through to join them. “I’m hearing Aura,” she said. “She’s awake now.”

  “Good,” Scorpio began.

  “There’s more. I’m seeing things. So’s Aura. I think it must be the same kind of thing Clavain and I saw before things got really serious—leakage from the war. It’s getting through again.”

  “We must be close,” Vasko said. “I guess the wolves blocked those signals when they could, to stop Remontoire sending a message through that easily. Now that we’re getting so close they can’t stop all of them.”

  From somewhere, Vasko heard a noise he didn’t recognise. It was shrill, ragged, pained. It was muffled by plastic. He realised it was Aura, crying.

  “She doesn’t like it,” Khouri said. “It’s painful.”

  “Contacts,” the pilot announced. “Radar returns, incoming. Fifty klicks and closing. They weren’t there a moment ago.”

  The shuttle lurched violently, throwing Vasko and Khouri to one side. The walls deformed to soften the impact, but Vasko still felt the wind knocked out of him. “What’s happening?” he asked, breathless.

  “The Infinity is making evasive manoeuvres. She’s seen the same radar echoes. I’m just trying to keep up.” The pilot glanced at a read-out again. “Thirty klicks. Twenty and slowing. Jamming is getting worse. This isn’t good, folks.”

  “Do your best,” Scorpio said. “Everyone else—secure yourselves. It’s going to get rough.”

  Vasko and Khouri went back to where Valensin and his machines were continuing their vigil over Aura. She was still moving, but had at least stopped crying. Vasko wished that there was something he could do to help her, some way to temper the voices screaming into her head. He could not imagine what it must be like for her. By rights she should not even have been born yet; should barely have had any sense of her own individuality or the wider world in which she existed. Aura was not an ordinary baby, that much was clear—she already had the language skills of a two- or three-year-old child, in Vasko’s estimation—but it was also unlikely that all parts of her mind were developing at the same accelerated rate. There was only room in that tiny wrinkled head for a certain amount of complexity; she must still have had an infant’s view of many things. When he had been two years older than Aura, Vasko’s own grasp of the world had barely reached further than the handful of rooms that made up his home. Everything else had been hazy, unimportant, subject to comic misapprehension.

  The Nostalgia for Infinity was now further away from the shuttle than it had been: tens of kilometres distant, easily. The shuttle’s hull had still not turned fully transparent again, but in the light from its engines he caught the reflections of things moving closer. Not just moving, but fluttering, swirling, splin-tering and reforming, retreating and advancing in pulsing waves.

  They came closer. Now the glare of the engines revealed hints of stepped structures: tiers, contours, zigzag edges. It was the same machinery they had found in Skade’s ship, the same stuff that had reached down from the clouds and ripped the corvette apart, but this time the scale was immeasurably larger—these cubes were almost as large as houses, forming structures hundreds of metres across. The wolf cubes were in constant, sliding motion: slithering across each other, swelling and contracting, larger structures organising and dissipating with hypnotic fluidity. Filaments of cubes spanned the larger structures; clusters of them fluttered from point to point like messengers. The scale was still difficult to judge, but the cubes were converging from nearly all sides and it seemed to Vasko that they had already formed a loose shell around both the shuttle and the Nostalgia for Infinity. What was certain was that the shell was tightening, the gaps becoming smaller.

  “Ana?” Vasko asked. “You’ve seen these things before, haven’t you? They attacked your ship. Is this how it begins?”

  “We’re in trouble,” she confirmed.

  “What happens next, if we can’t escape?”

  “They come inside.” Her voice was hollow, like a cracked bell. “They invade your ship and then they invade your head. You don’t want that to happen, Vasko. Trust me on this one.”

  “How long will we have, if they reach the ship?”

  “Seconds, if we’re lucky. Maybe not even that.” Then she convulsed, a whiplash movement that had her body slamming against the restraining surface that the ship had fashioned around her. Her eyes closed and then reopened, her pupils raised to the ceiling, the whites bright and frightened. “Kill me. Now.”

  “Ana?”

  “Aura,” she said. “Kill me. Kill us both. Now.”

  “No,” he said. He looked at Valensin, hoping for some explanation.

  The doctor simply shook his head. “I won’t do it,” he said. “No matter what she wants. I won’t take a life.”

  “Listen to me,” she insisted. “What I know—too important. They can’t find out. Will read our minds. Cannot allow that to happen. Kill us now.“

  “No, Aura. I won’t do it. Not now. Not ever,” Vasko said.

  Valensin’s servitors moved nearer to the incubator. Their jointed limbs twitched, clicking against their drab bodies. One of the machines extended a manipulator towards the incubator, grasping it. The servitor then backed away, trying to tug the incubator away from the niche.

  Vasko leapt forwards and wrestled the machine away from the baby. The machine was lighter than it looked, but much stronger than he had anticipated. The many limbs thrashed against him, hard articulated metal pressing into his skin.

  “Valensin!” he shouted. “Do something!”

  “They’re beyond my control,” Valensin said, calmly, as if all that followed was out of his hands.

  Vasko sucked in his chest, making a cavity between his body and the machine in an attempt to avoid the swiping pass of a sharp-bladed manipulator. He wasn’t fast enough. He felt a nick through his clothing, the instant cold that told him he had been wounded. He fell back, hitting the wall, and tried to kick out at the wide base of the servitor. The machine toppled, clattering against its companion. The thrashing limbs entwined, knives sparking against knives.

  He touched his chest, fingering through the gashed fabric. His hand came back lathered in blood. “Get Scorpio,” he said to Valensin.

  But Scorpio was already on his way. Something gleamed in his right hand: a humming blur of metal, a knife-shaped smear of silver. He saw the machines, saw Vasko with blood on his fingers. The servitors had disentangled themselves and the one still standing had begun to pick at the base of the incubator, trying to claw it open. Scorpio snarled and slid the knife into the machine’s armour. The knife sail
ed through the drab green carapace as if it wasn’t there at all. There was a fizzle of shorting circuitry, a thrashing whirr of damaged mechanisms. The knife howled and twisted out of Scorpio’s grip, hitting the floor, where it continued to buzz and whirr.

  The servitor had broken down. It remained frozen in place, limbs still extended but now immobile.

  Scorpio knelt down and retrieved the piezo-knife, stilled the blade and returned it to its sheath.

  Outside the shuttle, the wall of Inhibitor machinery looked close enough to touch. Jags of blue-pink lightning flickered and danced between different portions of it.

  “Someone mind telling me what just happened?” Scorpio snapped.

  “Aura,” said Vasko. He wiped his bloody hand against his trouser leg. “Aura tried to turn the servitors against herself.” He was breathing hard, forcing out each word between ragged gulps of air. “Trying to kill herself. She doesn’t want the cubes to reach her while she’s still alive.”

  Khouri coughed. Her eyes were like a trapped animal’s. “Kill me, Scorp. Not too late. You have to do it.”

  “After all we’ve been through?” he said.

  “You have to go to Hela,” she said. “Find Quaiche. Negotiate with shadows. They will know.”

  “Fuck,” Scorpio said.

  Vasko watched as the pig pulled the knife from its sheath once more. Scorpio stared at the now-still blade, his lips curled in disgust. Did he really mean to use it, or was he simply thinking about throwing it away, before circumstances once again forced him to wield it against someone or something he cared for?

  Despite himself, despite the fact that he felt his own strength draining away, Vasko reached out and took hold of the pig’s sleeve. “No,” he said. “Don’t do it. Don’t kill them.”