Absolution Gap

by Alastair Reynolds

  The few elements still trying to make their boarding approach must have known that their chances were not excellent. The resistance had been greater than expected: for the first time, a group of Ultras had actually downplayed the effective-ness of their defences. But the regular soldiers of the Cathedral Guard were blood-loyal to the Adventist order, Quaicheist doctrine running thick and true in their veins, and for them retreat was literally unthinkable. They did not have to know the purpose of their mission to understand that it was of the utmost importance to the dean.

  Preoccupied with the matter of finding a safe route to the hull, none of them observed the opening of a space-door in the side of the Nostalgia for Infinity, a chink of golden-yellow light amidst the complexity of the Captain’s transformations. The door looked tiny, but that was only because of the dizzying scale of the ship itself.

  Something emerged, moving with the smooth, unhesitating autonomy of a machine. It did not look very much like a spacecraft, even the ungainly sort used for ship-to-ship operations. It resembled a strange abstract ornament: a surreal juxtaposition of flanged bronze-green shapes, windowless and seamless, as if carved from soap or marble, the whole thing encased in a skeletal black harness, a geodesic framework stubbed with docking latches, thrusters and navigation and aiming devices.

  It was a cache weapon: There had been forty of the hell-class devices once; now only this unit remained. The science that had made it, the engineering principles embodied in its construction, were almost certainly less advanced than those in the latest additions to the Infinity’s arsenal, like the bladder-mines or the hypometric weapons. No one would ever know for sure. But one thing was clear: the new weapons were instruments of surgical precision rather than brute force, so the cache weapon still had its uses.

  It cleared the space-door. Around the skeletal framework of the harness, thrusters sparked blue-white. The glare lit the Nostalgia for Infinity, throwing hard radiance across the black shapes of the last few ships of the Cathedral Guard.

  No one noticed.

  The cache weapon wheeled around, the harness aligning itself with the looming face of Haldora. Then it accelerated, climbing away from the Nostalgia for Infinity, away from the battle, away from the scratched face of Hela.

  * * *

  VASKO AND KHOURI stepped into the mirror-filled room of the garret. Vasko looked around, satisfying himself that the room was much as they had left it. The dean was still sitting in the same couch, in the same part of the chamber. Rashmika was seated at the table in the middle of the room, watching their arrival. She had a tea set before her: a neat china service. Vasko observed her reactions carefully, wondering how much of her memory she had recovered. Even if she had not recalled everything, he could not believe that the sight of her mother’s face would not elicit some reaction. There were certain things that cut through memory, he thought.

  But if there was a flicker of reaction from Rashmika, he missed it. She simply inclined her head towards them, the way she would have to greet any arriving visitors.

  “Just the two of you?” Dean Quaiche asked.

  “We’re the advance party,” Vasko said. “There didn’t seem to be any need to send down dozens of us, not until we’ve assessed the facilities.”

  “I told you there were many rooms available,” he said, “for as many delegates as you cared to send.”

  Rashmika spoke up. “They’re not mad, Dean. They know what’s going to happen in a few hours.”

  “The crossing concerns you?” he asked the Ultras, as if the very thought was ludicrous.

  “Let’s just say we’d rather observe it from a distance,” Vasko said. “That’s fair enough, isn’t it? There was nothing in our agreement that said we absolutely had to remain aboard the Lady Morwenna. The disadvantage is on our side if we choose not to have delegates present.”

  “I’m disappointed, all the same,” Quaiche said. “I’d hoped you would want to share it with me. The spectacle won’t be anywhere near as impressive from a distance.”

  “I don’t doubt that for a moment,” Vasko said. “All the same, we’ll leave you in peace to enjoy it first-hand.” He looked at Khouri, choosing his words carefully. “We wouldn’t want to interfere with a sacred event.”

  “You wouldn’t be interfering,” the dean said. “All the same, if that’s what you wish… I can hardly stop you. But we’re still twelve hours from the crossing. There’s no need to get nervous just yet.”

  “Are you nervous?” Khouri asked him.

  “Not in the slightest,” he said. “That bridge was put there for a reason. I’ve always believed that.”

  “There’s the wreckage of another cathedral at the bottom of the rift,” Vasko said. “Doesn’t that worry you at all?”

  “It tells me that the dean of that cathedral lacked faith,” Quaiche said.

  Vasko’s communicator chimed. He lifted the bracelet to his ear, listened carefully. He frowned, then turned and whispered something into Khouri’s ear.

  “Something the matter?” Quaiche asked.

  “There’s some trouble on the ship,” Vasko said. “I’m not sure exactly what it is, but it seems to have something to do with your delegates.”

  “My delegates? Why would they be causing trouble?”

  “It seems they’re trying to take over the ship,” Vasko said. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

  “Well, now that you mention it—” Quaiche made a very poor imitation of a smile “—I might have an inkling.”

  One of the doors to the garret swung open. Six red-uniformed Adventist guards walked in, carrying weapons and looking as if they knew what to do with them.

  “I’m sorry it’s come to this,” Quaiche said, as the guards motioned for Vasko and Khouri to sit down opposite Rash-mika. “But I really need your ship, and—let’s be honest—there was never much chance of you just giving it to me, was there?”

  “But we had an agreement,” Vasko said, one of the guards prodding him on the shoulder. “We offered you protection.”

  “The trouble was, it wasn’t protection I was after,” Quaiche said. The rim of his eye-opener flashed polished brass. “It was propulsion.”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  RASHMIKA HAD A premonitory sense that something was about to trespass into her head. In the moments before the shadows spoke to her, she had learned to identify a specific sensation: a faint tingle of neural intrusion, like the feeling that somewhere in a huge and rambling old house a door had just opened.

  She steeled herself: aware of the proximity of the scrimshaw suit, conscious of the ease with which the shadows were able to slip in and out of her skull.

  But the voice was different this time.

  [Rashmika. Listen to me. Don’t react. Don’t pay any more attention to me than you would to a stranger.]

  Rashmika shaped an answer, without speaking. It was as if she had been born to it, as if the skill had always been there. Who are you?

  [I’m the only other woman in this room.]

  Despite herself, Rashmika glanced towards Khouri. The woman’s face was impassive: not hostile, not even unkind, but utterly blank of any kind of expression. It was as if she were looking at a wall, rather than Rashmika.

  You?

  [Me, Rashmika. Yes.]

  Why are you here?

  [To help you. How much do you remember? All of it, or only some of it? Do you remember anything at all?]

  Aloud, Vasko said, “Propulsion, Dean? Are you saying you want our ship to take you somewhere?”

  “Not exactly, no,” Quaiche replied.

  Rashmika tried not to look at the woman, keeping her attention focused on the men instead. I don’t remember much, only that I don’t belong here. The shadows already found me out. Do you know about the shadows, Khouri?

  [A little. Not as much as you.]

  Can you answer any of my questions? Who sent me here? What was I supposed to do?

  [We sent you here.] In her per
ipheral vision Rashmika saw the woman’s head nod by the slightest of degrees: silent, discreet affirmation that it was really her voice Rashmika was hearing. [But it was your decision. Nine years ago, Rashmika, you told us we had to put you on Hela, in the care of another family.]

  Why?

  [To learn things, to find out as much as you could about Hela and the scuttlers, from the inside. To reach the dean.]

  Why?

  [Because the dean was the only way of reaching Haldora. We thought Haldora was the key: the only route to the shadows. We didn’t know he’d already used it. You told us that, Rashmika. You found the short cut.]

  The suit?

  [That’s what we came for. And you, of course.]

  Whatever your plan was, it’s going wrong. We’re in trouble, aren’t we?

  [You’re safe, Rashmika. He doesn’t know you have anything to do with us.]

  If he finds out?

  [We’ll protect you. I’ll protect you, no matter what happens. You have my word on that.]

  She looked into the woman’s face, daring Quaiche to notice. Why would you care about me?

  [Because I’m your mother.]

  Look into my eyes. Say it again.

  Khouri did. And though Rashmika watched her face intently for the slightest indication of a lie, there was none. She supposed that meant Khouri was telling the truth.

  There was shock, a stinging sense of denial, but it was not nearly as great as Rashmika might have expected. She had, by then, already begun to doubt much of what passed for her assumed history. The shadows—and, of course, Surgeon-General Grelier—had already convinced her that she had not been born on Hela, and that the people in the Vigrid badlands could not be her real parents. So what remained was a void waiting to be filled with facts, rather than one truth waiting to be displaced by another.

  So here it was. There was still much she needed to remember for herself, but the essence was this: she was an agent of Ultras—these Ultras, specifically—and she had been put on Hela on an intelligence-gathering mission. Her actual memories had been suppressed, and in their place she had a series of vague, generic snapshots of early life on Hela. They were like a theatrical backdrop: convincing enough to pass muster provided they were not the object of attention themselves. But when the shadows had told her about her false past, she had seen the early memories for what they were.

  The woman said she was Rashmika’s mother. She had no reason to doubt her—her face had conveyed no indication of a lie, and Rashmika already knew that her supposed mother in the badlands was only a foster parent. She felt sadness, a sense of loss, but no sense of betrayal.

  She shaped a thought. I think you must be my mother.

  [Do you remember me?]

  I don’t know. A little. I remember someone like you, I think.

  [What was I doing?]

  You were standing in a palace of ice. You were crying.

  Hela Orbit, 2727

  RIBBONS OF GREY-blue smoke twisted in the corridor, writhing with the shifts of air pressure. Fluid sluiced from weeping wounds in the walls and ceiling, raining down in muddy curtains. From some nearby part of the ship, Captain Seyfarth heard shouts and the rattle of automatic slug-guns, punctuated by the occasional bark of an energy weapon. He stepped through an obstacle course of bodies, his booted feet squashing limbs and heads into the ankle-deep muck that seemed to flood every level of the ship. One gauntleted hand gripped the rough handle of a throwing knife formed from the armour he had been wearing upon his arrival. The knife was already bloodied—by Seyfarth’s estimate he had killed three Ultras so far, and left another two with serious injuries—but he was still looking for something better. As he passed each body he kicked it over, checking the hands and belt for something promising. All he needed was a slug-gun.

  Seyfarth was alone, the rest of his group either dead or cut off, wandering some other part of the ship. He had anticipated nothing less. Of the twenty units of the first infiltration team, Seyfarth would have been surprised if more than half a dozen survived to see the taking of the ship. Of course, he counted himself amongst the likely survivors, but based on past experience that was only to be expected. It was not, never had been, a suicide mission: just an operation with a low survival probability for most of those involved. The infiltration squad wasn’t required to survive, just to signal the fitness of the ship for the full takeover effort, using the massed ships of the Cathedral Guard. If the infiltrators were able to disrupt the defensive activities aboard the ship, creating pockets of internal confusion, then all the better. But once that signal had been sent to the surface, the survival or otherwise of Seyfarth’s unit had no bearing on subsequent events.

  Given that, he thought, things were actually going tolerably well. There had been reports—fragmented, not entirely trustworthy—that the massed assault had met more resistance than expected. Certainly, the Cathedral Guard had appeared to suffer greater losses than Seyfarth had ever planned. But the massed assault had been overwhelming in scale for precisely the reason that it needed to be able to absorb huge losses and still succeed. It was shock and awe: no one needed to lecture Seyfarth on that particular doctrine. And the reports of weapons fire from elsewhere in the ship confirmed that elements of the second wave had indeed reached the Nostalgia for Infinity, together with the slug-guns they could never have smuggled past the pig.

  His foot touched something.

  Seyfarth knelt down, grimacing at the smell. He pushed the body over, bringing a sodden hip out of the brown muck in which it lay. He spied the tarnished gleam of a slug-gun.

  Seyfarth pulled the weapon from the belt of the dead Cathedral Guardsman, shaking loose most of the muck. He checked the clip: fully loaded. The slug-gun was crudely made, mass-produced from cheap metal, but there were no electronic components in it, nothing that would have suffered from being immersed in the shipboard filth. Seyfarth tested it anyway, releasing a single slug into the nearest wall. The ship groaned as the slug went in. Now that he paid attention to it, it occurred to Seyfarth that the ship had been groaning rather a lot lately—more than he would have expected if the groans were merely structural noises. For a moment this troubled him.

  Only for a moment, though.

  He threw the knife away, grateful for the weighty heft of the slug-gun. It had taken nerve to come aboard the ship with only knives and a few concealed gadgets, but he had always known that if he made it this far—to the point where he had a real gun in his hand—he would make it all the way through.

  It was like the end of a bad dream.

  “Going somewhere?”

  The voice had come from behind him. But that simply wasn’t possible: he had been checking his rearguard constantly, and there had been no one coming along the corridor behind him when he knelt down to recover the slug-gun. Seyfarth was a good soldier: he never left his back uncovered for more than a few seconds.

  But the voice sounded very near. Very familiar, too.

  The safety catch was still off. He turned around slowly, olding the slug-gun at waist level. “I thought I took care of ou,” he said.

  “I need a lot of taking care of,” the pig replied. He stood there, unarmed, not even a slug-gun to his name. Looming behind him, like an adult above an infant, stood the hollow shell of a spacesuit. Seyfarth’s lip twisted in a sneer of incomprehension. The pig, just possibly, could have hidden in the darkness, or even pretended to be a body. But the hulking spacesuit? There was no conceivable way he had walked past that without noticing it. And it didn’t seem very likely that the suit could have sprinted from the far end of the corridor in the few seconds during which he’d had his back turned.

  “This is a trick,” Seyfarth said, “isn’t it?”

  “I’d put down that gun if I were you,” the pig said.

  Seyfarth’s finger squeezed the trigger. Part of him wanted to blow the snout-faced abortion away. Another part wanted to know why the pig thought he had the right to speak to him in that kind of tone. />
  Didn’t the pig know his place?

  “I hung you out to dry,” Seyfarth said. He wasn’t mistaken: this was the same pig. He could even see the wounds from where he had pinned him to the wall.

  “Listen to me,” the pig said. “Put down the gun and we’ll talk. There are things I want you to tell me. Like what the hell Quaiche wants with my ship.”

  Seyfarth touched one finger to his helmeted head, as if scratching an itch. “Which one of lis is holding the gun, pig?”

  “You are”

  “Right. Just felt that needed clearing up. Now step away from the suit and kneel in the shit, where you belong.”

  The pig looked at him, the sly white of an eye catching the light. “Or what?”

  “Or we’ll be looking at pork.”

  The pig made a move towards him. It was only a flinch, but it was enough for Seyfarth. There were questions he’d have liked answered, but they would all have to wait for now. Once they had taken the ship, there would be all the time in the world for a few forensic investigations. It would actually give him something to do.

  He made to squeeze the trigger. Nothing happened. Furious, imagining that the slug-gun had jammed after all, Seyfarth glanced down at the weapon.

  It wasn’t the weapon that was the problem. The problem was his arm. Two spikes had appeared through it: they had shot out from one wall, speared his forearm and emerged on the other side, their sharp tips a damp ruby-red.

  Seyfarth felt the pain arrive, felt the spikes grinding against bone and tendon. He bit down on the agony, sneering at the pig. “Nice…” he tried to say.

  The spikes slid out of his arm, making a slick, slithery sound as they retracted. Seyfarth watched, fascinated and appalled, as they vanished back into the smooth wall.

  “Drop the gun,” the pig said.

  Seyfarth’s arm quivered. He raised the barrel towards the pig and the suit, made one last effort to squeeze the trigger. But there was something badly amiss with the anatomy of his arm. His forefinger merely spasmed, tapping pathetically against the trigger like a worm wriggling on a hook.