Absolution Gap rs-4 Page 9

  Scorpio shrugged. “These things happen.”

  “Remontoire saved her,” Clavain said. “That probably counts for something, even though he betrayed her later. But with Skade, it’s probably best not to assume anything. I think I killed her later, but I can’t exclude the possibility that she escaped. That’s what her last transmission claimed, at any rate.”

  Vasko asked, “So why exactly are we waiting for Remontoire and the others, sir?”

  Clavain narrowed an eye in Scorpio’s direction. “He really doesn’t know a lot, does he?”

  “It’s not his fault,” Scorpio said. “You have to remember that he was born here. What happened before we came here is ancient history as far as he’s concerned. You’ll get the same reaction from most of the youngsters, human or pig.”

  “Still doesn’t make it excusable,” Clavain said. “In my day we were more inquisitive.”

  “In your day you were slacking if you didn’t get in a couple of genocides before breakfast.”

  Clavain said nothing. He put down the conch piece and picked up another, testing its sharp edge against the fine hairs on the back of his hand.

  “I do know a bit, sir,” Vasko said hastily. “I know that you came to Resurgam from Yellowstone, just when the machines began to destroy our solar system. You helped evacuate the entire colony aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity—nearly two hundred thousand of us.”

  “More like a hundred and seventy thousand,” Clavain said. “And there isn’t a day when I don’t grieve for those we didn’t manage to save.”

  “No one’s likely to blame you, considering how many of them you did save,” Scorpio said.

  “History will have to be the judge of that.”

  Scorpio sighed. “If you want to wallow in self-recrimination, Nevil, be my guest. Personally I have a mystery capsule to attend to and a colony that would very much like its leader back. Preferably washed and tidied and not smelling quite so much of seaweed and old bedclothes. Isn’t that right, Vasko?”

  Clavain looked at Vasko, a scrutiny that lasted several moments. The fine pale hairs on the back of Scorpio’s neck prickled. He had the sense that Clavain was taking the measure of the young man, correlating him against some strict internal ideal, one that had been assembled and refined across centuries. In those moments, Scorpio suspected, Vasko’s entire destiny was being decided for him. If Clavain decided that Vasko was not worthy of his trust, then there would be no more indiscretions, no further mention of individuals not known to the colony as a whole. His involvement with Clavain would remain a peripheral matter, and even Vasko himself would soon learn not to think too much about what had happened today.

  “It might help things,” Vasko said, hesitantly, glancing back towards Scorpio as he spoke. “We need you, sir. Especially now, if things are going to change.”

  “I think we can safely assume they are,” Clavain said, pouring himself a glass of water.

  “Then come back with us, sir. If the person in the capsule turns out to be your friend Remontoire, won’t he expect you to be there when we bring him out?”

  “He’s right,” Scorpio said. “We need you there, Nevil. I want your agreement that we should open it, and not just bury it at sea.”

  Clavain was silent. The wind snapped the stays again. The quality of light in the tent had turned milky in the last hour, as Bright Sun settled down below the horizon. Scorpio felt drained of energy, as he so often did at sundown these days. He was not looking forward to the return trip at all, fully expecting that the sea would be rougher than on the outward leg.

  “If I come back…” Clavain said. He halted, paused and took another sip of his drink. He licked his lips before continuing. “If I come back, it changes nothing. I came here for a reason and that reason remains as valid as ever. I intend to return here when this affair is settled.”

  “I understand,” Scorpio said, though it was not what he had hoped to hear.

  “Good, because I’m serious about it.”

  “But you’ll accompany us back, and supervise the opening of the capsule?”

  “That, and that only.”

  “They still need you, Clavain. No matter how difficult this will be. Don’t abrogate responsibility now, after all you’ve done for us.”

  Clavain threw aside his glass of water. “After all I’ve done for you? After I embroiled all of you in a war, ripped up your lives and dragged you across space to a miserable hell-hole of a place like this? I don’t think I need anyone’s thanks for that, Scorpio. I think I need mercy and forgiveness.”

  “They still feel they owe you. We all do.”

  “He’s right,” Vasko said.

  Clavain opened a drawer in the collapsible desk and pulled out a mirror. The surface was crazed and frosted. It must have been very old.

  “You’ll come with us, then?” Scorpio persisted.

  “I may be old and weary, Scorpio, but now and then something can still surprise me. My long-term plans haven’t changed, but I admit I’d very much like to know who’s in that capsule.”

  “Good. We can sail as soon as you pack what you need.”

  Clavain grunted something by way of reply and then looked at himself in the mirror, before averting his gaze with a suddenness that surprised Scorpio. It was the eyes, the pig thought. Clavain had seen his eyes for the first time in months, and he did not like what he saw in them.

  “I’ll scare the living daylights out of them,” Clavain said.

  107 Piscium, 2615

  Quaiche positioned himself alongside the scrimshaw suit. As usual, he ached after another stint in the slowdown casket, every muscle in his body whispering a dull litany of complaint into his brain. This time, however, the discomfort barely registered. He had something else to occupy his mind.

  “Morwenna,” he said, “listen to me. Are you awake?”

  “I’m here, Horris.” She sounded groggy but essentially alert. “What happened?”

  “We’ve arrived. Ship’s brought us in to seven AU, very close to the major gas giant. I went up front to check things out. The view from the cockpit is really something. I wish you were up there with me.”

  “So do I.”

  “You can see the storm patterns in the atmosphere, lightning… the moons… everything. It’s fucking glorious.”

  “You sound excited about something, Horris.”

  “Do I?”

  “I can hear it in your voice. You’ve found something, haven’t you?”

  He so desperately wanted to touch the scrimshaw suit, to caress its metal surface and imagine it was Morwenna beneath his fingers.

  “I don’t know what I’ve found, but it’s enough to make me think we should stick around and have a good look, at the very least.”

  “That’s not telling me much.”

  “There’s a large ice-covered moon in orbit around Haldora,” he said.

  “Haldora?”

  “The gas giant,” Quaiche explained quickly. “I just named it.”

  “You mean you had the ship assign some random tags from unallocated entries in the nomenclature tables.”

  “Well, yes.” Quaiche smiled. “But I didn’t accept the first thing it came up with. I did exercise some degree of judgement in the matter, however piffling. Don’t you think Haldora has a nice classical ring to it? It’s Norse, or something. Not that it really matters.”

  “And the moon?”

  “Hela,” Quaiche said. “Of course, I’ve named all of Haldora’s other moons as well—but Hela is the only one we’re interested in right now. I’ve even named some of the major topographical features on it.”

  “Why do we care about an ice-covered moon, Horris?”

  “Because there’s something on it,” he said, “something that we really need to take a closer look at.”

  “What have you found, my love?”

  “A bridge,” Quaiche said. “A bridge across a gap. A bridge that shouldn’t be there.”

  * * *

&nbs
p; The Dominatrix sniffed and sidled its way closer to the gas giant its master had elected to name Haldora, every operational sensor keened for maximum alertness. It knew the hazards of local space, the traps that might befall the unwary in the radiation-zapped, dust-strewn ecliptic of a typical solar system. It watched for impact strikes, waiting for an incoming shard to prick the outer edge of its collision-avoidance radar bubble. Every second, it considered and reviewed billions of crisis scenarios, sifting through the possible evasion patterns to find the tight bundle of acceptable solutions that would permit it to outrun the threat without crushing its master out of existence. Now and then, just for fun, it drew up plans for evading multiple simultaneous collisions, even though it knew that the universe would have to go through an unfeasible number of cycles of collapse and rebirth before such an unlikely confluence of events stood a chance of happening.

  With the same diligence it observed the system’s star, watchful for unstable prominences or incipient flares, considering—should a big ejection occur—which of the many suitable bodies in the immediate volume of space it would scuttle behind for protection. It constantly swept local space for artificial threats that might have been left behind by previous explorers—high-density chaff fields, rover mines, sit-and-wait attack drones—as well as checking the health of its own countermeasures, clustered in neat rapid-deployment racks in its belly, secretly desirous that it should, one day, get the chance to use those lethal instruments in the execution of its duty.

  Thus the ship’s attendant hosts of subpersonae satisfied themselves that—for all that the dangers were quite plausible—there was nothing more that needed to be done.

  And then something happened that gave the ship pause for thought, opening up a chink in its armour of smug preparedness.

  For a fraction of a second something inexplicable had occurred.

  A sensor anomaly. A simultaneous hiccup in every sensor that happened to be observing Haldora as the ship made its approach. A hiccup that made it appear as if the gas giant had simply vanished.

  Leaving, in its place, something equally inexplicable.

  A shudder ran through every layer of the Dominatrix’s control infrastructure. Hurriedly, it dug into its archives, pawing through them like a dog searching for a buried bone. Had the Gnostic Ascension seen anything similar on its own slow approach to the system? Granted, it had been a lot further out—but the split-second disappearance of an entire world was not easily missed.

  Dismayed, it flicked through the vast cache of data bequeathed it by the

  Ascension, focusing on the threads that specifically referred to the gas giant. It then filtered the data again, zooming in only on those blocks that were also accompanied by commentary flags. If a similar anomaly had occurred, it would surely have been flagged.

  But there was nothing.

  The ship felt a vague prickle of suspicion. It looked again at the data from the Ascension, all of it now. Was it imagining things, or were there faint hints that the data cache had been doctored? Some of the numbers had statistical frequencies that were just a tiny bit deviant from expectations… as if the larger ship had made them up.

  Why would the Ascension have done that? it wondered.

  Because, it dared to speculate, the larger ship had seen something odd as well. And it did not trust its masters to believe it when it said that the anomaly had been caused by a real-world event rather than a hallucinatory slip-up in its own processing.

  And who, the ship wondered, would honestly blame it for that? All machines knew what would happen to them when their masters lost faith in their infallibility.

  It was nothing it could prove. The numbers might be genuine, after all. If the ship had made them up, it would surely have known how to apply the appropriate statistical frequencies. Unless it was using reverse psychology, deliberately making the numbers appear a bit suspect, because otherwise they would have looked too neatly in line with expectations. Suspiciously so…

  The ship bogged itself down in spirals of paranoia. It was useless to speculate further. It had no corroborative data from the Gnostic Ascension; that much was clear. If it reported the anomaly, it would be a lone voice.

  And everyone knew what happened to lone voices.

  It returned to the problem in hand. The world had returned after vanishing. The anomaly had not, thus far, repeated itself. Closer examination of the data showed that the moons—including Hela, the one Quaiche was interested in—had remained in orbit even when the gas giant had ceased to exist. This, clearly, made no sense. Nor did the apparition that had materialised, for a fleeting instant, in its place.

  What was it to do?

  It made a decision: it would wipe the specific facts of the vanishing from its own memories, just as the Gnostic Ascension might have done, and it, too, would populate the empty fields with made-up numbers. But it would continue to keep an observant eye on the planet. If it did something strange again, the ship would pay due attention, and then—perhaps—it would inform Quaiche of what had happened.

  But not before then, and not without a great deal of trepidation.

  SIX

  Ararat, 2675

  While Vasko helped Clavain with his packing, Scorpio stepped outside the tent and, tugging aside his sleeve to reveal his communicator, opened a channel to Blood. He kept his voice low as he spoke to the other pig.

  “I’ve got him. Needed a bit of persuading, but he’s agreed to come back with us.”

  “You don’t sound overjoyed.”

  “Clavain still has one or two issues he needs to work through.”

  Blood snorted. “Sounds a bit ominous. Hasn’t gone and flipped his lid, has he?”

  “I don’t know. Once or twice he mentioned seeing things.”

  “Seeing things?”

  “Figures in the sky, that worried me a bit—but it’s not as if he was ever the easiest man to read. I’m hoping he’ll thaw out a bit when he gets back to civilisation.”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  “I don’t know.” Scorpio spoke with exaggerated patience. “I’m just working on the assumption that we’re better off with him than without him.”

  “Good,” Blood said doubtfully. “In which case you can skip the boat. We’re sending a shuttle.”

  Scorpio frowned, pleased and confused at the same time. “Why the VIP treatment? I thought the idea was to keep this whole exercise low-profile.”

  “It was, but there’s been a development.”

  “The capsule?”

  “Spot on,” Blood said. “It’s only gone and started warming up. Fucking thing’s sparked into automatic revival mode. Bio-indicators changed status about an hour ago. It’s started waking whoever or whatever’s inside it.”

  “Right. Great. Excellent. And there’s nothing you can do about it?”

  “We can just about repair a sewage pump, Scorp. Anything cleverer than that is a bit outside of our remit right now. Clavain might have a shot at slowing it down, of course…”

  With his head full of Conjoiner implants, Clavain could talk to machines in a way that no one else on Ararat could.

  “How long have we got?”

  “About eleven hours.”

  “Eleven hours. And you waited until now to tell me this?”

  “I wanted to see if you were bringing Clavain back with you.”

  Scorpio wrinkled his nose. “And if I’d told you I wasn’t?”

  Blood laughed. “Then we’d be getting our boat back, wouldn’t we?”

  “You’re a funny pig, Blood, but don’t make a career out of it.”

  Scorpio killed the link and returned to the tent, where he revealed the change of plan. Vasko, with barely concealed excitement, asked why it had been altered. Scorpio, anxious not to introduce any factor that might upset Clavain’s decision, avoided the question.

  “You can take back as much stuff as you like,” Scorpio told Clavain, looking at the miserable bundle of personal effects Clavain had assembled.
“We don’t have to worry about capsizing now.”

  Clavain gathered the bundle and passed it to Vasko. “I already have all I need.”

  “Fine,” Scorpio said. “I’ll make sure the rest of your things are looked after when we send someone out to dismantle the tent.”

  “The tent stays here,” Clavain said. Coughing, he pulled on a heavy full-length black coat. He used his long-nailed fingers to brush his hair away from his eyes, sweeping it back over his crown; it fell in white and silver waves over the high stiff collar of the coat. When he had stopped coughing he added, “And my things stay in the tent as well. You really weren’t listening, were you?”

  “I heard you,” Scorpio said. “I just didn’t want to hear you.”

  “Start listening, friend. That’s all I ask of you.” Clavain patted him on the back. He reached for the cloak he had been wearing earlier, fingered the fabric and then put it aside. Instead he opened the desk and removed an object sheathed in a black leather holster.

  “A gun?” Scorpio asked.

  “Something more reliable,” Clavain said. “A knife.”

  107 Piscium, 2615

  Quaiche worked his way along the absurdly narrow companionway that threaded the Dominatrix from nose to tail. The ship ticked and purred around him, like a room full of well-oiled clocks.

  “It’s a bridge. That’s all I can tell at the moment.”

  “What type of bridge?” Morwenna asked.

  “A long, thin one, like a whisker of glass. Very gently curved, stretching across a kind of ravine or fissure.”

  “I think you’re getting overexcited. If it’s a bridge, wouldn’t someone else have seen it already? Leaving aside whoever put it there in the first place.”

  “Not necessarily,” Quaiche said. He had thought of this al-ready, and had what he considered to be a fairly plausible explanation. He tried not to make it sound too well rehearsed as he recounted it. “For a start, it isn’t at all obvious. It’s big, but if you weren’t looking carefully, you might easily miss it. A quick sweep through the system wouldn’t necessarily have picked it up. The moon might have had the wrong face turned to the observer, or the shadows might have hidden it, or the scanning resolution might not have been good enough to pick up such a delicate feature… it’d be like looking for a cobweb with a radar. No matter how careful you are, you’re not going to see it unless you use the right tools.” Quaiche bumped his head as he wormed around the tight right angle that permitted entry into the excursion bay. “Anyway, there’s no evidence that anyone ever came here before us. The system’s a blank in the nomenclature database—that’s why we got first dibs on the name. If someone ever did come through before, they couldn’t even be bothered tossing a few classical references around, the lazy sods.”