Absolution Gap rs-4 Page 13

  Vasko had caught glimpses of the colony’s aircraft before, but only from a distance. This was the most impressive thing he had seen.

  The three of them had walked towards the boarding ramp. They had almost reached it when Clavain misjudged his footfall and began to tumble towards the rocks. Vasko and the pig had both lurched forward at the same time, but it was Vasko who had taken the brunt of Clavain’s weight. There had been a moment of relief and shock—Clavain had felt terribly light, like a sack of straw. Vasko’s intake of breath had been loud, distinct even above the kettlelike hissing of the transport.

  “Are you all right, sir?” he had asked.

  Clavain had looked at him sharply. “I’m an old man,” he had replied. “You mustn’t expect the world of me.”

  Reflecting now on his past few hours in Clavain’s presence, Vasko had no idea what to make of him. One minute the old man was showing him around the shuttle with a kind of avuncular hospitality, asking him about his family, complimenting him on the perspicacity of his questions, sharing jokes with him in the manner of a long-term confidant. The next minute he was as icy and distant as a comet.

  Though the mood swings came without warning, they were always accompanied by a perceptible shift of focus in Clavain’s eyes, as if what was taking place around him had suddenly ceased to be of significant interest.

  The first few times that this happened, Vasko had naturally assumed that he had done something to displease the old man. But it quickly became apparent that Scorpio was getting the same treatment, and that Clavain’s distant phases had less to do with anger than with the loss of a signal, like a radio losing its frequency lock. He was drifting, then snapping back to the present. Once that realisation had dawned, Vasko stopped worrying so much about what he said and did in Clavain’s presence. At the same time he found himself more and more concerned about the state of mind of the man they were bringing home. He wondered what kind of place Clavain was drifting to when he stopped being present. When the man was friendly and focused on the here and now, he was as sane as anyone Vasko had met. But sanity, Vasko decided, was like the pattern of lights he could see through his cabin window. In al-most any direction the only way to travel was into darkness, and there was a lot more darkness than light.

  Now he noticed a strange absence of illumination cutting through the lights of one of the larger settlements. He frowned, trying to think of somewhere he knew where there was an unlit thoroughfare, or perhaps a wide canal cutting back into one of the islands.

  The shuttle banked, changing his angle of view. The swathe of darkness tilted, swallowing more lights and revealing others. Vasko’s perceptions flipped and he realised that he was seeing an unlit structure interposed between the shuttle and the settlement. The structure’s immensely tall shape was only vaguely implied by the way it eclipsed and revealed the background lights, but once Vasko had identified it he had no trouble filling in the details for himself. It was the sea tower, of course. It rose from the sea several kilometres out from the oldest of the settlements, the place where he had been born.

  The sea tower. The ship.

  Nostalgia for Infinity.

  He had only ever seen it from a distance, for routine sea traffic was forbidden close to the ship. He knew that the leaders sailed out to it, and it was no secret that shuttles occasionally entered or left the ship, tiny as gnats against the gnarled and weathered spire of the visible hull. He supposed Scorpio would know all about that, but the ship was one of the many topics Vasko had decided it would be best not to raise during his first outing with the pig.

  From this vantage point, the Nostalgia for Infinity still looked large to Vasko, but no longer quite as distant and geologically huge as it had done for most of his life. He could see that the ship was at least a hundred times taller than the tallest conch structure anywhere in the archipelago, and it still gave him a bracing sense of vertigo. But the ship was much closer to the shore than he had realised, clearly an appendage of the colony rather than a distant looming guardian. If the ship did not exactly look fragile, he now understood that it was a human artefact all the same, as much at the mercy of the ocean as the settlements it overlooked.

  The ship had brought them to Ararat, before submerging its lower extremities in a kilometre of sea. There were a handful of shuttles capable of carrying people to and from interplanetary space, but the ship was the only thing that could take them beyond Ararat’s system, into interstellar space.

  Vasko had known this since he was small, but until this moment he had never quite grasped how terribly dependent they were on this one means of escape.

  As the shuttle fell lower, the lights resolved into windows, street lamps and the open fires of bazaars. There was an un-planned, shanty-town aspect to most of the districts of First Camp. The largest structures were made from conch material that had washed up on the shore or been recovered from the sea by foraging expeditions. The resulting buildings had the curved and chambered look of vast seashells. But it was very rare to find conch material in such sizes, and so most of the structures were made of more traditional materials. There were a handful of inflatable domes, some of which were almost as large as the conch structures, but the plastics used to make and repair the domes had always been in short supply. It was much easier to scavenge metal from the heart of the ship; that was why almost everything else was lashed together from sheet metal and scaffolding, forming a low urban sprawl of sagging rectangular structures seldom reaching more than three storeys high. The domes and conch structures erupted through the metal slums like blisters. Streets were webs of ragged shadow, unlit save for the occasional torch-bearing pedestrian.

  The shuttle slid over some intervening regions of darkness and then came to hover above a small outlying formation of structures that Vasko had never seen before. There was a dome and a surrounding accretion of metal structures, but the whole ensemble looked a good deal more formal than any other part of the town. Vasko realised that it was almost certainly one of the administration’s hidden encampments. The body of humans and pigs that ran the colony had offices in the city, but it was also a matter of public knowledge that they had secure meeting places not marked on any civilian map.

  Remembering Clavain’s instructions, Vasko made the window seal itself up again and then waited for the touchdown. He barely noticed it when it came, but suddenly his two companions were clambering down the length of the cabin, back to-wards the boarding ramp. Belatedly, Vasko realised that the shuttle had never had a pilot.

  They stepped down on to an apron of fused rock. Floodlights had snapped on at the last minute, bathing everything in icy blue. Clavain still wore his coat, but he had also donned a shapeless black hood tugged from the recesses of the collar. The hood’s low, wide cowl threw his face into shadow; he was barely recognisable as the man they had met on the island. During the flight, Scorpio had taken the opportunity to clean him up a little, trimming his beard and hair as neatly as circumstances allowed.

  “Son,” Clavain said, “try not to stare at me with quite that degree of messianic fervour, will you?”

  “I didn’t mean anything, sir.”

  Scorpio patted Vasko on the back. “Act normally. As far as you’re concerned, he’s just some stinking old hermit we found wandering around.”

  The compound was full of machines. Of obscure provenance, they squatted around the shuttle or loomed as vague suggestions in the dark interstices between the floodlights. There were wheeled vehicles, one or two hovercraft, a kind of skeletal helicopter. Vasko made out the sleek surfaces of two other aerial craft parked on the edge of the apron. He could not tell if they were the type that could reach orbit, as well as fly in the atmosphere.

  “How many operational shuttles?” Clavain asked.

  Scorpio answered after a moment’s hesitation, perhaps wondering how much he should say in Vasko’s presence. “Four,” he said.

  Clavain walked on for half a dozen paces before saying, “There were five or six when
I left. We can’t afford to lose shuttles, Scorp.”

  “We’re doing our best with very limited resources. Some of them may fly again, but I can’t promise anything.”

  Scorpio was leading them towards the nearest of the low metal structures around the dome’s perimeter. As they walked away from the shuttle, many of the shadowy machines began to trundle towards it, extending manipulators or dragging umbilical cables across the ground. The way they moved made Vasko imagine injured sea monsters hauling ruined tentacles across dry land.

  “If we need to leave quickly,” Clavain said, “could we do it? Could any of the other ships be used? Once the Zodiacal Light arrives, they only have to reach orbit. I’m not asking for full space-worthiness, just something that will make a few trips.”

  “Zodiacal Light will have its own shuttles,” Scorpio said. “And even if it doesn’t, we still have the only ship we need to reach orbit.”

  “You’d better hope and pray we neyer have to use it,” Clavain said.

  “By the time we need the shuttles,” Scorpio said, “we’ll have contingencies in place.”

  “The time we need them might be this evening. Has that occurred to you?”

  They had arrived at the entrance to the cordon of structures surrounding the dome. As they approached it, another pig stepped out into the night, moving with the exaggerated side-to-side swagger common to his kind. He was shorter and stockier than Scorpio, if such a thing were possible. His shoulders were so massive and yokelike that his arms hung some distance from the sides of his body, swinging like pendulums when he walked. He looked as if he could pull a man limb from limb.

  The pig glared at Vasko, deep frown lines notching his brow. “Looking at something, kid?”

  Vasko hurried out his answer. “No, sir.”

  “Relax, Blood,” Scorpio said. “Vasko’s had a busy day. He’s just a bit overwhelmed by it all. Right, son?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The pig called Blood nodded at Clavain. “Good to have you back, old guy.”

  Approaching Hela, 2615

  Quaiche was still close enough to Morwenna for real-time communication. “You won’t like what I’m going to do,” he said, “but this is for the good of both of us.”

  Her reply came after a crackle of static. “You promised you wouldn’t be long.”

  “I still intend to keep that promise. I’m not going to be gone one minute longer than I said. This is more about you than me, actually.”

  “How so?” she asked.

  “I’m worried that there might be something down on Hela apart from the bridge. I’ve been picking up a metallic echo and it hasn’t gone away. Could be nothing—probably is nothing—but I can’t take the chance that it might be a booby trap. I’ve encountered this kind of thing before and it makes me nervous.”

  “Then turn around,” Morwenna said.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t. I really need to check out this bridge. If I don’t come back with something good, Jasmina’s going to have me for breakfast.” He would leave it to Morwenna to figure out what that would mean for her, still buried in the scrimshaw suit with Grelier her only hope of escape.

  “But you can’t just walk into a trap,” Morwenna said.

  “I’m more worried about you, frankly. The Daughter will take care of me, but if I trigger something it might start taking pot shots at anything it sees, up to and including the Dominatrix.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I thought about having you pull away from the Haldora/Hela system, but that would waste too much time and fuel. I’ve got a better idea: we’ll use what we’ve been given. Haldora is a nice, fat shield. It’s just sitting there doing nothing. I’m going to put it between you and whatever’s on Hela, make some bloody use of the thing.”

  Morwenna considered the implications for a few seconds. There was a sudden urgency in her voice. “But that will mean…”

  “Yes, we’ll be out of line-of-sight contact, so we won’t be able to talk to each other. But it’ll only be for a few hours, six at the most.” He got that in before she could protest further. “I’ll program the Dominatrix to wait behind Haldora for six hours, then return to its present position relative to Hela. Not so bad, is it? Get some sleep and you’ll barely realise I’m gone.”

  “Don’t do this, Horris. I don’t want to be in a place where I can’t talk to you.”

  “It’s only for six hours.”

  When she responded she did not sound any calmer, but he could hear the shift in pitch in her voice that meant she had at least accepted the futility of argument. “But if something happens in that time—if you need me, or I need you—we won’t be able to talk.”

  “Only for six hours,” he said. “Three hundred minutes or so. Nothing. Be done in a flash.”

  “Can’t you drop some relays, so we can still keep in touch?”

  “Don’t think so. I could sew some passive reflectors around Haldora, but that’s exactly the kind of thing that might lead a smart missile back to you. Anyway, it would take a couple of hours to get them into position. I could be down under the bridge by then.”

  “I’m frightened, Horris. I really don’t want you to do this.”

  “I have to,” he said. “I just have to.”

  “Please don’t.”

  “I’m afraid the plan is already under way,” Quaiche replied gently. “I’ve sent the necessary commands to the Dominatrix. It’s moving, love. It’ll be inside Haldora’s shadow in about thirty minutes.”

  There was silence. He thought for a moment that the link might already have broken, that his calculations had been in error. But then she said, “So why did you bother to ask me if you’d already made up your mind?”

  EIGHT

  Hela, 2727

  For the first day they travelled hard, putting as much distance between themselves and the badlands communities as possible. For hours on end they sped along white-furrowed trails, slicing through slowly changing terrain beneath a sable sky. Occasionally they passed a transponder tower; an outpost or even another machine moving in the other direction.

  Rashmika gradually became used to the hypnotic, bouncing motion of the skis, and was able to walk around the icejammer without losing her balance. Now and then she sat in her personal compartment, her knees folded up to her chin, looking out of the window at the speeding landscape and imagining that every malformed rock or ice fragment contained a splinter of alien empire. She thought about the scuttlers a lot, picturing the blank pages of her book filling with neat handwriting and painstaking crosshatched drawings.

  She drank coffee or tea, consumed rations and occasionally spoke to Culver, though not as often he would have wished.

  When she had planned her escape—except “escape” wasn’t quite the right word, because it was not as if she was actually running from anything—but when she had planned it, anyway, she had seldom thought very far beyond the point when she left the village. The few times she had allowed her mind to wander past that point, she had always imagined herself feeling vastly more relaxed now that the difficult part:—actually leaving her home, and the village—was over.

  It wasn’t like that at all. She was not as tense as when she had climbed out of her home, but only because it would have been impossible to stay in that state for very long. Instead she had come down to a plateau of continual tension, a knot in her stomach that would not undo. Partly it was because she was now thinking ahead, into the territory she had left vague until now. Suddenly, dealing with the churches was a looming concrete event in the near future. But she was also concerned about what she had left behind. Three days, even six, had not seemed like such a long time when she had been planning the trip to the caravans, but now she counted every hour. She imagined the village mobilising behind her, realising what had happened and uniting to bring her back. She imagined constabulary officers following the icejammer in fast vehicles of their own. None of them liked Crozet or Linxe to begin with. They would assu
me that the couple had talked her into it, that in some way they were the real agents of her misfortune. If they caught up, she would be chastised, but Crozet and Linxe would be ripped apart by the mob.

  But there was no sign of pursuit. Admittedly Crozet’s machine was fast, but on the few occasions when they surmounted a rise, giving them a chance to look back fifteen or twenty kilometres along the trail, there was nothing behind them.

  Nonetheless, Rashmika remained anxious despite Crozet’s assurances that there were no faster routes by which they might be cut off further on down the trail. Now and then, to oblige her, Crozet tuned into the village radio band, but most of the time he found only static. Nothing unusual about that, for radio reception on Hela was largely at the whim of the magnetic storms roiling around Haldora. There were other modes of communication—tight-beam laser-communication between satellites and ground stations, fibreoptic land lines—but most of these channels were under church control and in any case Crozet subscribed to none of them. He had means of tapping into some of them when he needed to, but now, he said, was not the time to risk drawing someone’s attention. When Crozet did finally tune into a non-garbled transmission from Vigrid, however, and Rashmika was able to listen to the daily news service for major villages, it was not what she had been expecting. While there were reports of cave-ins, power outages and the usual ups and downs of village life, there was no mention at all of anyone going missing. At seventeen, Rashmika was still under the legal care of her parents, so they would have had every right to report her absence. Indeed, they would have been breaking the law by failing to report her missing.

  Rashmika was more troubled by this than she cared to admit. On one level she wanted to slip away unnoticed, the way she had always planned it. But at the same time the more childish part of her craved some sign that her absence had been noted. She wanted to feel missed.