Absolution Gap

by Alastair Reynolds

  What they were really interested in, if he read them rightly, was something else entirely: they had been using the engines to send a signal to Hela. The burst of thrust meant they were in place—that they had passed through his security arrangements and were ready to begin the take-over operation.

  It was a signal to send in reinforcements.

  Even as that thought crystallised in his head, he heard the ship groan again. But it was a different kind of groan this time. It was more like the sonorous off-key tolling of a very large, very cracked bell.

  Scorpio closed his eyes: he knew exactly what that sound was. It was the hull defences: the Nostalgia for Infinity was under attack from outside as well as from within. Great, he thought. This was really shaping up to be one of those days when he should have stayed inside the reefersleep casket. Or, better still, should never have survived thawing in the first place.

  A moment later, the entire fabric of the ship trembled. He felt it through the sharp-edged things pinning him to the wall. He screamed and blacked out again.

  What woke him was pain—more than he had felt so far. It was hard and strangely rhythmic, as if he had been convulsing in his sleep. But he was making no conscious movements at all. Instead, the wall against which he was pinned was bellowing in and out, like a huge breathing lung.

  Suddenly, anticlimactically, he popped loose. He hit the deck, sprawling, his lower jaw in the filthy, stinking overflow of ship effluent. The two bladed weapons clattered to the ground beside him. He experimented with pushing himself to his knees, and—to his surprise—found he was able to exert pressure on his arms without the pain becoming more than two or three times as intense. Nothing was broken, then—or at least nothing that had much to do with either arm.

  Scorpio struggled to his feet. He touched the first wound, then the second. There was a lot of blood, but it wasn’t jetting out under arterial pressure. Presumably it was the same story with the two exit wounds. No telling about internal bleeding, but he’d cross that bridge when it became a problem.

  Still unsure exactly what had happened to him, he knelt down again and picked up one of the bladed things. It was the first one: the boomerang weapon. He could see the curve of the original armour, the larger form implied by the fragment. He threw it away, kicked the other one aside. Then he reached down to his belt, through waves of pain, and found the haft of Clavain’s knife. He removed it from its sheath and flicked on the piezoelectric effect, feeling the hum transmitted to his palm.

  In the gloom of the corridor ahead of him, something moved.

  “Scorpio.”

  He squinted, half-expecting it to be another Adventist, hoping it was someone from the Security Arm. “Took your time,” he said, which seemed to cover either possibility.

  “We’ve got trouble, Scorp. Big trouble.”

  The figure stepped out of the gloom. Scorpio flinched: it was no one he had been expecting. “Captain,” he breathed.

  “I thought you needed some help to get free of that wall. Sorry it took me so long.”

  “Better late than never,” Scorpio said.

  It was a class-three apparition. No, Scorpio thought, strike that: this apparition demanded a new category all of its own. It was more than just a local alteration of the ship’s fabric, a remodelling of a wall or the temporary reassignment of some servitor parts. This thing was real and distinct from the ship itself. It was a physical artefact: a spacesuit, a huge, lumbering golemlike servo-powered affair. And it was empty. The faceplate was cranked up: there was only darkness within the helmet. The voice he heard came through the speaker grille beneath the helmet’s chin that was normally used for audio communications in a pressurised environment.

  “Are you all right, Scorp?”

  He dabbed at the blood again.“I’m not down yet. Doesn’t look as if you are, either.”

  “It was a mistake to let them aboard.”

  “I know,” Scorpio said, looking down at his shoes. “I’m sorry.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” the Captain said. “It was mine.”

  Scorpio looked up at the apparition again. Something forced him to direct his attention into the darkness within the helmet: it seemed impolite not to. “So what now? They’re bringing reinforcements, aren’t they?”

  “That’s their plan. Ships have begun to attack. I’ve parried most of them, but a handful have slipped through my hull defences. They’ve begun to drill into the hull. They’re hurting me, Scorp.”

  He echoed the Captain’s earlier question: “Are you all right?”

  “Oh, I’m all right, it’s just that I’m beginning to get a little pissed off. I think they’ve had enough fun for one day, don’t you?”

  Though it hurt him, Scorpio nodded vigorously. “They picked the wrong pig to fuck with.”

  The vast suit bowed towards him, then turned, its huge boots sending sluggish wakes through the effluent. “They did more than pick the wrong pig. They picked the wrong ship. Now, shall we go and do some damage?”

  “Yes,” Scorpio said,smiling wickedly. “Let’s do some damage.”

  ORCA CRUZ AND her party had retreated as far as they could go. The two Adventists had pushed her group to a major nexus of corridors and shafts, something like a heart valve in the Captain’s anatomy, from which point it would be possible to reach any other part of the Nostalgia for Infinity with comparative ease. Cruz knew that she could not allow the Adventists such access. There were only twenty of them, maybe fewer now—it was unthinkable that they could ever gain more than a transient, faltering control over very small districts of the ship—but it was still her duty to limit their nuisance value. If that meant inflicting some small, local hurt on John Brannigan, then that was what she had to do.

  “All right,” she said. “Disarm them. Short, controlled bursts. I want something at the end to interrogate.”

  Her last few words were drowned out by the sudden, enraged roar of her soldiers’ slug-firing automatic weapons. Tracers sliced bright convergent lines down the corridor. The Adventist with the false hand fell down, his right leg peppered with bullet holes. The whirling demon of the scythe bit an arc into the floor, then fell silent. Some retraction mechanism inched the fingertip back to the rest of the hand as the line spooled itself in.

  The other Adventist lay on his side, his chest bloody despite the protection of the armour pieces.

  The ship groaned.

  “I did warn you,” Cruz said. Her own weapon lay cold in her hand. She hadn’t fired a shot.

  The second Adventist moved, clawing at his face with his hand, like a man trying to remove a bee.

  “Don’t move,” Cruz said, approaching him cautiously. “Don’t move and you might make it through the day.”

  He kept clawing at his face, concentrating his efforts around his eye. He dug his fingers into the socket, popping something loose. He held it between thumb and forefinger for a moment: a perfect human eye, glassily solid, bloodied like some horrid raw delicacy.

  “I said—” Orca Cruz began. .

  He crunched his fingers down on the eye, shattering it. Something chrome-yellow emerged in smoky wisps. A moment later Cruz felt the nerve agent infiltrate her lungs.

  No one had to tell her it would be fatal.

  FROM THE SAFE vantage point of his garret, the dean studied the progress of his takeover effort. Cameras around Hela offered him continuous real-time imagery of the Ultras’ ship, no mat-ter where its orbit took it. He had seen the telling flicker of drive flame: Seyfarth’s message that the first phase of the acquisition operation had been successful. He had seen—indeed, felt—the departure of the massed ships of the Cathedral Guard, and he had also seen the gathering and co-ordination of the squadrons above Hela. Tiny, flimsy ships, to be sure, but many of them. Crows could mob a man to death.

  He had no data about the ensuing activities within the ship. If Seyfarth had followed his own plan, then the twenty members of the spearhead unit would have begun their attack shortly afte
r the signal was returned to Hela. Seyfarth was a brave man: he must have known that his chances of surviving until the arrival of reinforcements were not excellent. He was also, it had to be remembered, a career survivor. More than likely Seyfarth had lost some of his squad by now, but Quaiche very much doubted that Seyfarth himself was amongst the casualties. Somewhere on that ship he was still fighting, still surviving.

  The dean craved, desperately, some means of divining what was happening in the ship at this moment. After all the planning, all the years of dreaming and scheming this mad folly into existence, it struck him as the height of unfairness not to be able to see whether events were unfolding as planned. He had always skipped over this hiatus in his imagination: it was either successful or it wasn’t, and there had been little point dwelling on the agony of uncertainty it represented.

  But now he had doubts. The squadrons were meeting unexpected resistance from the ship’s hull defences. The imagery showed the ship to be surrounded by a spangling halo of explosions, like a dark and foreboding castle throwing a fireworks display. Most Ultra craft had defences of some kind, so Quaiche had not been greatly surprised to see them deployed here. His cover story had even demanded that the ship have the means to defend itself. But the scale of the defences and the speed and efficiency with which they had reacted: that had taken him aback. What if the forces within the ship were encountering the same unexpected resistance? What if Seyfarth was dead? What if everything was going slowly, catastrophi-cally wrong?

  His couch chimed: an incoming message. Shaking, his hand worked the control. “Quaiche,” he said.

  “Report from Cathedral Guard,” said a muffled voice, lashed by static. “Report successful incursion of relief units three and eight. Hull has been breached; no significant airloss. Reinforcement squads are now aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity. Attempting to rendezvous with elements of spearhead.”

  Quaiche sighed, disappointed in himself. Of course it was going according to plan, and of course it was turning out to be a little more difficult than anticipated. That was the nature of worthy tasks. But he should never have doubted its ultimate success.

  “Keep me posted,” he said.

  THE TWO MISMATCHED figures—the Captain’s hulking, vacant suit and the childlike form of the pig—sloshed their way towards the scene of battle. They moved through corridors and passages that had never been fully reclaimed for human habitation: rat-ridden, rank with effluent and other toxins, crypt-dark save for the occasional weak and stuttering light source. When the Adventists had turned on him, Scorpio had known exactly where he was. But since then he had been following the Captain, allowing himself to be led into areas of the ship that were completely unfamiliar. As the tour progressed, and as the Captain ushered him through obscure hatchways and hidden apertures, he was struck by the increasing absence of the usual markers of ship wide authority: the jury-rigged electrical and hydraulic systems, the painted, luminescent direction arrows. There was only anatomy. They were navigating parts of the ship known only to the Captain, he realised: private corridors he must have haunted alone. It was his flesh and blood, Scorpio thought: up to him what he did with it.

  The pig was under no illusion that he was actually in the Captain’s physical presence. The suit was just a focus for his attention; in every other respect the Captain was as omnipresent as ever, surrounding him in every sinew of the architecture. But for all that Scorpio would have preferred something with a face to talk to rather than the empty suit, it was a lot better than being on his own. He knew that he had been hurt badly by the Adventist leader, and that sooner or later he was going to feel the delayed shock of those injuries. How hard it would hit him, he couldn’t say. He’d have shrugged off the wounds twenty years ago. Now, shrugging off anything seemed unlikely. Yet while he had some form of companion, he felt he could keep delaying that moment of accounting. Just give me a few hours, he thought, just long enough to sort out this mess.

  A few hours were all he needed; all he wanted.

  “There’s something we need to discuss, Scorp. You and me. Before it’s too late.”

  “Captain?”

  “I need to do something before it becomes impractical. We came here on Aura’s instructions, in the hope that we’d find something that might make a difference against the Inhibitors. Quaiche and the scuttlers were always the key, which is why we sent Aura into Hela society nine years ago. She was to gather information, to infiltrate the cathedrals through the back door, without anyone ever suspecting her connection to us. That was a good plan, Scorp. It was the best we had at the time. But we mustn’t neglect Haldora itself.”

  “No one’s neglecting it,” Scorpio said. “Aura already thinks she’s made contact with the shadows, via that suit. Isn’t that good enough for now?”

  “It might have been if the Adventists hadn’t betrayed us. But we don’t control that suit: Quaiche does, and he’s no longer a man we can trust. It’s time to up the ante, Scorp. We can’t put all our faith in that one line of negotiation.”

  “So we launch the instrument packages, just like we always planned.”

  “The packages were only ever intended as a precursor. More than likely, they’d have told us nothing we haven’t already learned from Aura. Sooner or later we’d have had to bring in the big guns.”

  For a moment Scorpio had forgotten his pain. “So what have you got in mind?”

  “We need to know what’s inside Haldora,” the Captain said. “We need to break through the camouflage, and we can’t afford to sit around waiting for a vanishing.”

  “The cache weapon,” Scorpio said, guessing his companion’s intentions. “You want to use it, don’t you? Fire it into the face of that planet, and see what happens?”

  “Like I said, it’s time to bring out the big guns.”

  “It’s the last one we’ve got. Make it count, Captain.”

  The suit studied him with the blank aperture of its faceplate. “I’ll do my best,” it said.

  PRESENTLY, THE SUIT slowed its pace. The pig halted, using the wide bulk of the suit for cover.

  “There’s something ahead, Scorp.”

  Scorpio looked into darkness. “I don’t see anything.”

  “I sense it, but I need the suit to take a closer look. I don’t have cameras here.”

  They rounded a slight bend, easing their way through a knuckle of interconnected corridors. Suddenly they were back in a part of the ship Scorpio thought he recognised—one of the corridors he had taken the Adventists down earlier that day. Dull sepia light dribbled from sconces in the wall.

  “There are bodies here, Scorp. It doesn’t look good.”

  The suit strode ahead, sloshing through unspeakable fluids. The bodies were shadowed lumps, half-submerged in the muck. The suit’s head-light flicked on, playing over the forms. Feral janitor rats fled from the glare.

  “They’re not Adventists,” Scorpio said.

  The suit knelt down next to the closest of the bodies. “Do you recognise them?”

  Scorpio squatted on his haunches, grimacing at the twin spikes of pain on either side of his chest. He touched the body nearest to the Captain, turning it over so that he could see the face. He fingered the rough leather of an eyepatch.

  “It’s Orca Cruz,” he said.

  His own voice sounded detached, matter-of-fact. She’s dead, he thought. This woman who was loyal to you for more than thirty years of your life is dead; this woman who aided you, protected you, fought for you and made you laugh with her stories, is dead, and she died because of your mistake, your stupidity in not seeing through the Adventists’ plans. And all you feel now is that something you own has been stepped on.

  There was a hiss of pistons and servo-mechanisms. The monstrous gauntlet of the Captain’s suit touched him gently on the back. “It’s all right, Scorp. I know how you feel.”

  “I don’t feel anything.”

  “That’s what I mean. It’s too soon, too sudden.”

  Scorpio
looked at the other bodies, knowing that they were all members of the Security Arm. Their weapons were gone, but there was no obvious indication of injury on any of them. But he wouldn’t forget the expression on Cruz’s face in a hurry.

  “She was good,” he said. “She stuck by me when she could have carved out a little empire of her own in Chasm City. She didn’t deserve this. None of them deserved this.”

  He forced himself to his full height, steadying himself against the wall. First Lasher, on the trip to Resurgam. Then he’d had to say goodbye to Blood, probably for ever. Now Cruz was gone: his last, precious link to that half-remembered life in Chasm City.

  “I don’t know about you, Captain,” he said, “but I’m about ready to start taking things personally.”

  “I’ve already started,” the empty suit said.

  BATTLE CONTINUED TO rage within the Nostalgia for Infinity. Slowly, however, the tide was turning against the Adventist boarders. Around the ship, the last elements of the Cathedral Guard had either tunnelled through to the interior or were being picked off by the hull-mounted defences. Damage had been sustained: fresh craters and scars gouged into the already treacherous landscape of the starship’s hull. The tiny ships that had reached the hull and anchored themselves in place—with projectile barbs, epoxy-pads, rocket grapples and drilling equipment—resembled mechanical ticks half-embedded in the flesh of some monstrous animal. Elsewhere, the mashed corpses of other ships lay entangled in the crevices and folds of the Nostalgia for Infinity’s architecture, quills of escaping air and fluid bleeding into space. Other ships had been ripped apart before they got close to the lighthugger, their hot, mangled wreckage trailing the larger vessel as it orbited Hela. No additional reinforcements had been launched from the moon: the assault had been designed to be total and overwhelming, and only a handful of Cathedral Guard units had not been mobilised during the first wave.