Absolution Gap rs-4 Page 12

  Could he really rule out human builders? Wherever they went, humans left junk. Their ships spewed out radioisotopes, leaving twinkling smears across the faces of moons and worlds. Their pressure suits and habitats leaked atoms, leaving ghost atmospheres around otherwise airless bodies. The partial pressures of the constituent gases were always a dead giveaway. They left navigation transponders, servitors, fuel cells and waste products. You found their frozen piss—little yellow snowballs—forming miniature ring systems around planets. You found corpses and, now and then—more often than Quaiche would have expected—they were murder victims.

  It was not always easy, but Quaiche had developed a nose for the signs: he knew the right places to look. And he wasn’t finding much evidence for prior human presence around 107 Piscium.

  But someone had built that bridge.

  It might have been put there hundreds of years ago, he thought; some of the usual signs of human presence would have been erased by now. But something would have remained, unless the bridge builders had been extraordinarily careful to clean up after themselves. He had never heard of anyone doing such a thing on this scale. And why bury it so far from the usual centres of commerce? Even if people did occasionally visit 107 Piscium system, it was definitely not on the usual trade routes. Didn’t these artists want anyone to see what they had created?

  Perhaps that had always been the intention: just to leave it here, twinkling under the starlight of 107 Piscium until someone found it by accident. Perhaps even now Quaiche was an unwilling participant in a century-spanning cosmic jest.

  But he didn’t think so.

  What he was certain of was that it would have been a dreadful mistake to tell Jasmina more than he had. He had, fortunately, resisted the huge temptation to prove his worth. Now, when he did report back with something remarkable, he would appear to have behaved with the utmost restraint. No; his final message had been exquisite in its brevity. He was quite proud of himself.

  The virus woke now, stirred perhaps by that fatal pride. He should have kept his emotions in check. But it was too late: it had simmered beyond the point where it would damp down naturally. However, it was too early to tell if this was going to be a major attack. Just to placate it, he mumbled a little Latin. Sometimes if he anticipated the virus’s demands the attack would be less serious.

  He forced his attention back to Haldora, like a drunkard trying to maintain a clear line of thought. It was strange to be falling towards a world he had named himself.

  Nomenclature was a difficult business in an interstellar culture limited by speed-of-light links. All major craft carried databases of the worlds and minor bodies orbiting different stars. In the core systems—those within a dozen or so light-years of Earth—it was easy enough to stick to the names assigned centuries earlier, during die first wave of interstellar exploration. But once you got further out into virgin territory the whole business became complicated and messy. The Dominatrix said the worlds around 107 Piscium had never been named, but all that meant was that there were no assigned names in the ship’s database. That database, however, might not have been seriously updated for decades; rather than relying on transmissions to and from some central authority, the anarchistic Ultras preferred direct ship-to-ship contact. When two or more of their lighthuggers met, they would compare and update their respective nomenclature tables. If the first ship had assigned names to a group of worlds and their associated geographical features, and the second ship had no current en-tries for those bodies, it was usual for the second ship to amend its database with the new names. They might be flagged as provisional, unless a third ship confirmed that they were still unallocated. If two ships had conflicting entries, their databases would be updated simultaneously, listing two equally likely names for each entry. If three or more ships had conflicting entries, the various entries would be compared in case two or more had precedence over a third. In that case, the deprecated entry would be erased or stored in a secondary field reserved for questionable or unofficial designations. If a system had truly been named for the first time, then the newly assigned names would gradually colonise the databases of most ships, though it might take decades for that to happen. Quaiche’s tables were only as accurate as the Gnostic Ascension’s; Jasmina was not a gregarious Ultra, so it was possible that this system had been named already. If that were the case, his own lovingly assigned names would be gradually weeded out of existence until they remained only as ghost entries at the lowest level of deprecation in ship databases—or were erased entirely.

  But for now, and perhaps for years to come, the system was his. Haldora was the name he had given this world, and until he learned otherwise, it was as official as any other—except that, as Morwenna had pointed out, all he had really done was grab unallocated names from the nomenclature tables and flung them at anything that looked vaguely appropriate. If the system did indeed turn out to be important, did it not behove him to take a little more care over the process?

  Who knew what pilgrimages might end here, if his bridge turned out to be real?

  Quaiche smiled. The names were good enough for now; if he decided he wanted to change them, he still had plenty of time.

  He checked his range to Hela: just over one hundred and fifty thousand kilometres. From a distance, the illuminated face of the moon had been a flat disc the colour of dirty ice, streaked here and there with pastel shades of pumice, ochre, pale blue and faint turquoise. Now that he was closer, the disc had taken on a distinct three-dimensionality, bulging out to meet him like a blind human eye.

  Hela was small only by the standards of terrestrial worlds. For a moon it was respectable enough: three thousand kilometres from pole to pole, with a mean density that put it at the upper range of the moons that Quaiche had encountered. It was spherical and largely devoid of impact craters. No atmosphere to speak of, but plenty of surface topology hinting at recent geological processes. At first glance it had appeared to be tidally locked to Haldora, always presenting the same face to its mother world, but the mapping software had quickly detected a tiny residual rotation. Had it been tidally locked, the moon’s rotation period would have been exactly the same as the time it took to make one orbit: forty hours. Earth’s moon was like that, and so were many of the moons Quaiche had spent time on: if you stood at a given spot on their surface, then the larger world around which they orbited—be it Earth or a gas giant like Haldora—always hung at about the same place in the sky.

  But Hela wasn’t like that. Even if you found a spot on Hela’s equator where Haldora was sitting directly overhead, swallowing twenty degrees of sky, Haldora would drift. In one forty-hour orbit it would move by nearly two degrees. In eighty standard days—just over two standard months—Haldora would be sinking below Hela’s horizon. One hundred and sixty days later it would begin to peep over the opposite horizon. After three hundred and twenty days it would be back at the beginning of the cycle, directly overhead.

  The error in Hela’s rotation—the deviation away from a true tidally locked period—was only one part in two hundred. Tidal locking was an inevitable result of frictional forces between two nearby orbiting bodies, but it was a grindingly slow process. It might be that Hela was still slowing down, not yet having reached its locked configuration. Or it might be that something had jolted it in the recent past—a glancing collision from another body, perhaps. Still another possibility was that the orbit had been perturbed by a gravitational interaction with a massive third body.

  All these possibilities were reasonable, given Quaiche’s ignorance of the system’s history. But at the same time the imperfection affronted him. It was as annoying as a clock that kept almost perfect time. It was the kind of thing he would have imagined pointing to if anyone had ever argued that the cosmos must be the result of divine conception. Would a Cre-ator have permitted such a thing, when all it would have taken was a tiny nudge to set the world to rights?

  The virus simmered, boiling higher in his blood. It didn’t like
that kind of thinking.

  He snapped his thoughts back to the safe subject of Hela’s topography, wondering if he might make some sense of the bridge from its context. The bridge was aligned more or less east-to-west, as defined by Hela’s rotation. It was situated very near the equator, spanning the gash that was the world’s most immediately obvious geographic feature. The gash began near the northern pole, cutting diagonally from north to south across the equator. It was at its widest and deepest near the equator, but it was still fearfully impressive many hundreds of kilometres north or south of that point.

  Ginnungagap Rift, he had named it.

  The rift sloped from north-east to south-west. To its west in the northern hemisphere was an upraised geologically complex region that he had named the Western Hyrrokkin Uplands. The Eastern Hyrrokkin Uplands curled around the pole to flank the rift on its other side. South of the western range, but still above the equator, was the zone that Quaiche had elected to call Glistenheath Ridge. South of the equator was another upraised area named the Gullveig Range. To the west, straddling the tropics, Quaiche identified Mount Gudbrand, the Kelda Flats, the Vigrid badlands, Mount Jord… to Quaiche, these names conveyed a dizzying sense of antiquity, a feeling that this world already had a richly textured past, a frontier history of epic expeditions and harrowing crossings, a history populated by the brave and the bold.

  Inevitably, however, his attention returned to Ginnungagap Rift and the bridge that spanned it. The details were still unclear, but the bridge was obviously too complicated, too artful and delicate, to be just a tongue of land left behind by some erosive process. It had been built there, and it did not appear as if humans had had much to do with it.

  It was not that it was beyond human ingenuity. Humans had achieved many things in the last thousand years, and throwing a bridge across a forty-kilometre-wide abyss—even a bridge as cleanly elegant as the one that spanned Ginnungagap Rift—would not be amongst the most audacious of those achievements. But just because humans could have done it did not mean that they had.

  This was Hela. This was as far out in the sticks as it was possible to be. No human had any business building bridges here.

  But aliens? Now that was a different matter.

  It was true that in six hundred years of space travel, nothing remotely resembling an intelligent, tool-using technological culture had ever been encountered by humankind. But they had been out there once. Their ruins dotted dozens of worlds. Not just one culture either, but eight or nine of them—and that was only the tally in the little huddle of systems within a few dozen light-years of the First System. There was no guessing how many hundreds or thousands of dead cultures had left their mark across the wider galaxy. What kind of culture might have lived on Hela? Had they evolved on this icy moon, or had it just been a stopover point in some ancient, forgotten diaspora?

  What were they like? Were they one of the known cultures?

  He was getting ahead of himself. These were questions for later, when he had surveyed the bridge and determined its composition and age. Closer in, he might well find other things that the sensors were missing at this range. There might be artefacts that unequivocally linked the Hela culture to one that had already been studied elsewhere. Or the artefacts might cinch the case the other way: an utterly new culture, never encountered before.

  It didn’t matter. Either way, the find was of incalculable value. Jasmina could control access to it for decades to come. It would give her back the prestige she had lost over the last few decades. For all that he had disappointed her, Quaiche was certain she would find a way to reward him for that.

  Something chimed on the console of the Scavenger’s Daughter. For the first time, the probing radar had picked up an echo. There was something metallic down there. It was small, tucked away in the depths of the rift, very near the bridge.

  Quaiche adjusted the radar, making sure that the echo was genuine. It did not vanish. He had not seen it before, but it would have been at the limit of his sensor range until now. The Dominatrix would have missed it entirely.

  He didn’t like it. He had convinced himself that there had never been a human presence out here and now he was getting exactly the sort of signature he would have expected from discarded junk.

  “Be careful,” he said to himself.

  On an earlier mission, he had been approaching a moon a little smaller than Hela. There had been something on it that enticed him, and he had advanced incautiously. Near the surface he had picked up a radar echo similar to this one, a glint of something down there. He had pushed on, ignoring his better instincts.

  The thing had turned out to be a booby trap. A particle cannon had popped out of the ice and locked on to his ship. Its beam had chewed holes in the ship’s armour, nearly frying Quaiche in the process. He had made it back to safety, but not before sustaining nearly fatal damage to both the ship and himself. He had recovered and the ship had been repaired, but for years afterwards he had been wary of similar traps. Things got left behind: automated sentries, plonked down on worlds centuries earlier to defend property claims or mining rights. Sometimes they kept on working long after their original owners were dust.

  Quaiche had been lucky: the sentry, or whatever it was, had been damaged, its beam less powerful than it had once been. He had got off with a warning, a reminder not to assume anything. And now he was in serious danger of making the same mistake again.

  He reviewed his options. The presence of a metallic echo was dispiriting, making him doubtful that the bridge was as ancient and alien as he had hoped. But he would not know until he was closer, and that would mean approaching the source of the echo. If it was indeed a waiting sentry, he would be placing himself in harm’s way. But, he reminded himself, the Scavenger’s Daughter was a good ship, nimble, smart and well armoured. She was crammed with intelligence and guile. Reflexes were not much use against a relativistic weapon like a particle beam, but the Daughter would be monitoring the source of the echo all the while, just in case there was some movement before firing. The instant the ship saw anything she found alarming, she would execute a high-gee random evasion pattern designed to prevent the beam-weapon from predicting its position. The ship knew the precise physiological tolerances of Quaiche’s body, and was prepared nearly to kill him in the interests of his ultimate survival. If she got really annoyed, she would deploy microde-fences of her own.

  “I’m all right,” Quaiche said aloud. “I can go deeper and still come out of this laughing. I’m sorted.”

  But he had to consider Morwenna as well. The Dominatrix was further away, granted, but it was slower and less responsive. It would be a stretch for a beam-weapon to take out the Dominatrix, but it was not impossible. And there were other weapons that a sentry might deploy, such as hunter-seeker missiles. There might even be a distributed network of the things, talking to each other.

  Hell, he thought. It might not even be a sentry. It might just be a metal-rich boulder or a discarded fuel tank. But he had to assume the very worst. He needed to keep Morwenna alive. Equally, he needed the Dominatrix to be able to get back to Jasmina. He could not risk losing either his lover or the ship that was now her extended prison. Somehow, he had either to protect both of them or give up now. He was not in the mood to give up. But how was he going to safeguard his ticket out of there and his lover without waiting hours for them to get a safe distance away from Hela?

  Of course. The answer was obvious. It was—almost—staring him in the face. It was beautifully simple and it made elegant use of local resources. Why had he not thought of it sooner?

  All he had to do was hide them behind Haldora.

  He made the necessary arrangements, then opened the communications channel back to Morwenna.

  Ararat, 2675

  Vasko observed the approach to the main island with great interest. They had been flying over black ocean for so long that it was a relief to see any evidence of human presence. Yet at the same time the lights of the outlying sett
lements, strung out in the filaments, arcs and loops that implied half-familiar bays, peninsulas and tiny islands, looked astonishingly fragile and evanescent. Even when the brighter outlying sprawls of First Camp came into view, they still looked as if they could be quenched at any moment, no more permanent or meaningful than a fading pattern of bonfire embers. Vasko had always known that the human presence on Ararat was insecure, something that could never be taken for granted. It had been drummed into him since he was tiny. But until now he had never felt it viscerally.

  He had-created a window for himself in the hull of the shuttle, using his fingertip to sketch out the area he wanted to become transparent. Clavain had shown him how to do that, demonstrating the trick with something close to pride. Vasko suspected that the hull still looked perfectly black from the outside and that he was really looking at a form of screen which exactly mimicked the optical properties of glass. But where old technology was concerned—and the shuttle was very definitely old technology—it never paid to take anything for granted. All he knew for certain was that he was flying, and that he knew of none amongst his peers who had ever done that before.

  The shuttle had homed in on the signal from Scorpio’s bracelet. Vasko had watched it descend out of the cloud layer attended by spirals and curlicues of disturbed air. Red and green lights had blinked on either side of a hull of polished obsidian that had the deltoid, concave look of a manta ray.

  At least a third of the surface area of the underside had been painfully bright: grids of actinically bright, fractally folded thermal elements hazed in a cocoon of flickering purple-indigo plasma. Elaborate clawed undercarriage had emerged from the cool spots on the underside, unfolding and elongating in a hypnotic ballet of pistons and hinges. Neon patterns had flicked on in the upper hull, delineating access hatches, hotspots and exhaust apertures. The shuttle had picked its landing zone, rotating and touching down with dainty precision, the undercarriage contracting to absorb the weight of the craft. For a moment the roar of the plasma heaters had remained, before stopping with unnerving suddenness. The plasma had dissipated, leaving only a nasty charred smell.