Absolution Gap rs-4 Page 4

  “The queen’s insane. Everyone knows that. But she’s also pragmatic enough to know a valuable resource when she sees one.” Morwenna spoke openly because she knew that the queen had no working listening devices in the revival chamber. “Look at Grelier, for pity’s sake. Do you think she’d tolerate that freak for one minute if he wasn’t useful to her?”

  “That’s precisely my point,” Quaiche said, sinking into an even deeper pit of dejection and hopelessness. “The moment either of us stops being useful…” Had he felt like moving, he would have mimed drawing a knife across his throat. Instead he just made a choking sound.

  “You’ve an advantage over Grelier,” Morwenna said. “You have me, an ally amongst the crew. Who does he have?”

  “You’re right,” Quaiche said, “as ever.” With a tremendous effort he reached out and closed one hand around Morwenna’s steel gauntlet.

  He didn’t have the heart to remind her that she was very nearly as isolated aboard the ship as he was. The one thing guaranteed to get an Ultra ostracised was having any kind of interpersonal relationship with a baseline human. Morwenna put a brave face on it, but, Quaiche knew, if he had to rely on her for help when the queen and the rest of the crew turned against him, he was already crucified.

  “Can you sit up now?” she asked.

  “I’ll try.”

  The discomfort was abating slightly, as he had known it must do, and at last he was able to move major muscle groups without crying. He sat on the couch, his knees tucked against the hairless skin of his chest, while Morwenna gently removed the urinary catheter from his penis. He looked into her face while she worked, hearing only the whisk of metal sliding over metal. He remembered how fearful he had been when she first touched him there, her hands gleaming like shears. Making love to her was like making love to a threshing machine. Yet Morwenna had never hurt him, even when she inadvertently cut her own living parts.

  “All right?” she asked.

  “I’ll make it. Takes more than a quick revival to put a dent in Horris Quaiche’s day.”

  “That’s the spirit,” she said, sounding less than fully convinced. She leant over and kissed him. She smelt of perfume and ozone.

  “I’m glad you’re around,” Quaiche said.

  “Wait here. I’ll get you something to drink.”

  Morwenna moved off the revival couch, telescoping to her full height. Still unable to focus properly, he watched her slink across the room towards the hatch where various recuperative broths were dispensed. Her iron-grey dreadlocks swayed with the motion of her high-hipped piston-driven legs.

  Morwenna was on her way back with a snifter of recuperative broth—chocolate laced with medichines—when the door to the chamber slid open. Two more Ultras strode into the room: a man and a woman. After them, hands tucked demurely behind his back, loomed the smaller, unaugmented figure of the surgeon-general. He wore a soiled white medical smock.

  “Is he fit?” the man asked.

  “You’re lucky he’s not dead,” Morwenna snapped.

  “Don’t be so melodramatic,” the woman said. “He was never going to die just because we thawed him a bit faster than usual.”

  “Are you going to tell us what Jasmina wants with him?”

  “That’s between him and the queen,” she replied.

  The man threw a quilted silver gown in Quaiche’s general direction. Morwenna’s arm whipped out in a blur of motion and caught it. She walked over to Quaiche and handed it to him.

  “I’d like to know what’s going on,” Quaiche said.

  “Get dressed,” the woman said. “You’re coming with us.”

  He pivoted around on the couch and lowered his feet to the coldness of the floor. Now that the discomfort was wearing off he was starting to feel scared instead. His cock had shrivelled in on itself, retreating into his belly as if already making its own furtive escape plans. Quaiche put on the gown, cinching it around his waist. To the surgeon-general he said, “You had something to do with this, didn’t you?”

  Grelier blinked. “My dear fellow, it was all I could do to stop them warming you even more rapidly.”

  “Your time will come,” Quaiche said. “Mark my words.”

  “I don’t know why you insist on that tone. You and I have a great deal in common, Horris. Two human men, alone aboard an Ultra ship? We shouldn’t be bickering, competing for prestige and status. We should be supporting each other, cementing a friendship.” Grelier wiped the back of his glove on his tunic, leaving a nasty ochre smear. “We should be allies, you and I. We could go a long way together.”

  “When hell freezes over,” Quaiche replied.

  The queen stroked the mottled cranium of the human skull resting on her lap. She had very long finger and toenails, painted jet-black. She wore a leather jerkin, laced across her cleavage, and a short skirt of the same dark fabric. Her black hair was combed back from her brow, save for a single neatly formed cowlick. Standing before her, Quaiche initially thought she was wearing makeup, vertical streaks of rouge as thick as candlewax running from her eyes to the curve of her upper lip. Then, joltingly, he realised that she had gouged out her eyes.

  Despite this, her face still possessed a certain severe beauty.

  It was the first time he had seen her in the flesh, in any of her manifestations. Until this meeting, all his dealings with her had been at a certain remove, either via alpha-compliant proxies or living intermediaries like Grelier.

  He had hoped to keep things that way.

  Quaiche waited several seconds, listening to his own breathing. Finally he managed, “Have I let you down, ma’am?”

  “What kind of ship do you think I run, Quaiche? One where I can afford to carry baggage?”

  “I can feel my luck changing.”

  “A bit late for that. How many stopovers have we made since you joined the crew, Quaiche? Five, isn’t it? And what have we got to show for ourselves, after those five stopovers?”

  He opened his mouth to answer her when he saw the scrimshaw suit lurking, almost lost, in the shadows behind her throne. Its presence could not be accidental.

  It resembled a mummy, worked from wrought iron or some other industrialage metal. There were various heavy-duty input plugs and attachment points, and a dark grilled-over rectangle where the visor should have been. There were scabs and fillets of solder where parts had been rewelded or braised. There was the occasional smooth patch of obviously new metal.

  Covering every other part of the suit, however, was an intricate, crawling complexity of carvings. Every available square centimetre had been crammed with obsessive, eye-wrenching detail. There was far too much to take in at one glance, but as the suit gyrated above him Quaiche made out fanciful serpent-necked space monsters, outrageously phallic spacecraft, screaming faces and demons, depictions of graphic sex and violence. There were spiralling narratives, cautionary tales, boastful trade episodes writ large/There were clock faces and psalms. Lines of text in languages he didn’t recognise, musical stanzas, even swathes of lovingly carved numerals. Sequences of digital code or DNA base pairs. Angels and cherubim. Snakes. A lot of snakes.

  It made his head hurt just to look at it.

  It was pocked and gouged by the impact spots of microme-teorites and cosmic rays, its iron-grey tainted here and there with emerald-green or bronze discoloration. There were scratchlike striations where ultra-heavy particles had gouged out their own impact furrows as they sliced by at oblique angles. And there was a fine dark seam around the whole thing where the two armoured halves could be popped open and then welded shut again.

  The suit was a punishment device, its existence no more than a cruel rumour. Until this moment.

  The queen put people in the suit. It kept them alive and fed them sensory information. It protected them from the sleeting radiation of interstellar flight when they were entombed, for years at a time, in the ice of the ship’s ablative shield.

  The lucky ones were dead when they pulled them out of the
suit.

  Quaiche tried to stop the tremble in his voice. “If you look at things one way, we didn’t really… we didn’t really do too badly… all things considered. There was no material damage to the ship. No crew fatalities or major injuries. No contamination incidents. No unforeseen expenditures…” He fell silent, looking hopefully at Jasmina.

  “That’s the best you can come up with? You were supposed to make us rich, Quaiche. You were supposed to turn our fortunes around in these difficult times, greasing the wheels of trade with your innate charm and grasp of planetary psychologies and landscapes. You were supposed to be our golden goose.”

  He shifted uneasily.

  “Yet in five systems all you found was junk.”

  “You chose the systems, not me. It isn’t my fault if there wasn’t anything worth finding.”

  Slowly and worryingly the queen shook her head. “No, Quaiche. Not that easy, I’m afraid. You see, a month ago we intercepted something. It was a transmission, a two-way trade dialogue between a human colony on Chaloupek and the lighthugger Faint Memory of Hokusai. Ring any bells?”

  “Not really…”

  But it did.

  “The Hokusai was entering Gliese 664 just as we departed that system. It was the second system you swept for us. Your report was…” The queen hoisted the skull to the side of her head, listening to its chattering jaw. “Let’s see… ‘nothing of value found on Opincus or the other three terrestrial worlds; only minor items of discarded technology recovered on moons five to eight of the Haurient giant… nothing in the inner asteroid fields, D-type swarms, Trojan points or major K-belt concentrations.’”

  Quaiche could see where this was heading. “And the Faint Memory of Hokusai?”

  “The trade dialogue was absolutely fascinating. By all accounts, the Hokusai located a cache of buried trade items around one century old. Pre-war, pre-plague. Very valuable stuff: not merely technological artefacts, but also art and culture, much of it unique. I hear they made enough on that to buy themselves an entirely new layer of ablative hull cladding.” She looked at him expectantly. “Any comments, thoughts, on that?”

  “My report was honest,” Quaiche said. “They must have got lucky, that’s all. Look, just give me another chance. Are we approaching another system?”

  The queen smiled. “We’re always approaching another system. This time it’s a place called 107 Piscium, but frankly from this distance it doesn’t look much more promising than the last five. What’s to say you’re going to be any use this time?”

  “Let me take the Dominatrix,” he said, knitting his hands together involuntarily. “Let me take her down into that system.”

  The queen was silent for many seconds. Quaiche heard only his own breathing, punctuated now and then by the abrupt, attenuated sizzle of a dying insect or rat. Something moved languidly beyond the green glass of a hemispherical dome set into one of the chamber’s twelve walls. He sensed that he was being observed by something other than the eyeless figure in the chair. Without having been told, he understood then that the thing beyond the glass was the real queen, and that the ruined body in the seat was only a puppet that she currently inhabited. They were all true, then, all the rumours he had ever heard: the queen’s solipsism; her addiction to extreme pain as a reality-anchoring device; the vast reserve of cloned bodies she was said to keep for just that purpose.

  “Have you finished, Quaiche? Have you made your case?”

  He sighed. “I suppose I have.”

  “Very well, then.”

  She must have issued some secret command, because at that moment the door to the chamber opened again. Quaiche spun around as the blast of cold fresh air touched the nape of his neck. The surgeon-general and the two Ultras who had helped him during Quaiche’s revival entered the room.

  “I’m done with him,” the queen said.

  “And your intention?” Grelier asked.

  Jasmina sucked at a fingernail. “I haven’t changed my mind. Put him in the scrimshaw suit.”

  FOUR

  Ararat, 2675

  Scorpio knew better than to interrupt Clavain when the old man was thinking something over. How long had it been since he had told him about the object falling from space, if that was indeed where it had come from? Five minutes, easily. In all that time, Clavain had sat there as gravely as a statue, his expression fixed, his eyes locked on the horizon.

  Finally, just when Scorpio was beginning to doubt his old friend’s sanity, Clavain spoke. “When did it happen?” he asked. “When did this ‘thing’—whatever it is—arrive?”

  “Probably in the last week,” Scorpio said. “We only found it a couple of days ago.”

  There was another troubling pause, though it was only a minute or so long this time. Water slapped against rock and gurgled in little eddies in and out of shallow pools by the shoreline.

  “And what exactly is it?”

  “We can’t be absolutely certain. It’s a capsule of some kind. A human artefact. Our best guess is that it’s an escape pod, something with re-entry capabilities. We think it splashed down in the ocean and bobbed to the surface.”

  Clavain nodded, as if the news was of only minor interest. “And you’re certain it wasn’t left behind by Galiana?”

  He said the woman’s name with ease, but Scorpio could only guess at the pain it caused him. Especially now, looking out to sea.

  Scorpio had some inkling of what the ocean meant to Clavain: both loss and the cruellest kind of hope. In an unguarded moment, not long before his voluntary exile from island affairs, Clavain had said, “They’re all gone now. There’s nothing more the sea can do to me.”

  “They’re still there,” Scorpio had replied. “They aren’t lost. If anything, they’re safer than they ever were.”

  As if Clavain could not have seen that for himself.

  “No,” Scorpio said, snapping his attention back to the present, “I don’t think Galiana left it.”

  “I thought it might hold a message from her,” Clavain said. “But I’m wrong, aren’t I? There won’t be any messages. Not that way. Not from Galiana, not from Felka.”

  “I’m sorry,” Scorpio said.

  “There’s no need to be. It’s the way of things.”

  What Scorpio knew of Clavain’s past was drawn as much from hearsay as from things the old man had told him directly. Memories had always been fickle, but in the present era they were as mutable as clay. There were aspects of his own past even Clavain could not now be sure of.

  Yet there were some things that were certain. Clavain had once loved a woman named Galiana; their relationship had begun many centuries ago and had spanned many of those same centuries. It was clear that they had birthed—or created—a kind of daughter, Felka; that she had been both terribly damaged and terribly powerful; and that she had been loved and feared in equal measure.

  Whenever Clavain spoke of those times, it was with a happiness tempered by the knowledge of what was to follow.

  Galiana had been a scientist, fascinated by the augmentation of the human mind. But her curiosity had not stopped there. What she ultimately wanted was an intimate connection with reality, at its root level. Her neural experiments had only ever been a necessary part of this process. To Galiana, it had been natural that the next step should be physical exploration, pushing out into the cosmos. She wanted to go deeper, far beyond the ragged edge of mapped space, to see what was actually out there. So far the only indications of alien intelligence anyone had found had been ruins and fossils, but who was to say what might be found further into the galaxy? Human settlements at that time spanned a bubble two dozen light-years across, but Galiana intended to travel more than a hundred light-years before returning.

  And she had. The Conjoiners had launched three ships, moving slightly slower than the speed of light, on an expedition into deep interstellar space. The expedition would take at least a century and a half; equally eager for new experience, Clavain and Felka had journeyed with h
er. All had progressed according to plan: Galiana and her allies visited many solar systems, and while they never found any unambiguous signs of active intelligence, they nonetheless catalogued many remarkable phenomena, as well as uncovering further ruins. Then came reports, already outdated, of a crisis back home: growing tensions between the Conjoiners and their moderate allies, the Demarchists. Clavain needed to return home to lend his tactical support to the remaining Conjoiners.

  Galiana had considered it more important to continue with the expedition; their amicable separation in deep space left one of the ships returning home, carrying Clavain and Felka, while the two other craft continued to loop further into the plane of the galaxy.

  They had intended to be reunited, but when Galiana’s ship finally returned to the Conjoiner Mother Nest, it did so on automatic pilot, damaged and dead. Somewhere out in space a parasitic entity had attacked both of the ships, destroying one. Immediately afterwards, black machines had clawed into the hull of Galiana’s ship, systematically anatomising her crew. One by one, they had all been killed, until only Galiana remained. The black machines had infiltrated her skull, squeezing into the interstices of her brain. Horribly, she was still alive, but utterly incapable of independent action. She had become the parasite’s living puppet.

  With Clavain’s permission the Conjoiners had frozen her against the day when they might be able to remove the parasite safely. One day they might even have succeeded, but then a rift had opened in Conjoiner affairs: the beginning of the same crisis that had eventually brought Clavain to the Resurgam system and, latterly, to Ararat. In the conflict Galiana’s frozen body had been destroyed.

  Clavain’s grief had been a vast, soul-sucking thing. It would have killed him, Scorpio thought, had not his people been in such desperate need of leadership. Saving the colony on Resurgam had given him something to focus on besides the loss he had suffered. It had kept him somewhere this side of sanity.

  And, later, there had been a kind of consolation.

  Galiana had not led them to Ararat, yet it turned out that Ararat was one of the worlds she had visited after her separation from Clavain and Felka. The planet had attracted her because of the alien organisms filling its ocean. It was a Juggler world, and that was vitally important, for few things that visited Juggler worlds were ever truly forgotten.