Absolution Gap rs-4

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Any apparitions?”

  “Nothing reported above level four hundred in the last three weeks. Plenty of activity in the lower levels, but we should have the high ship to ourselves.” The guard turned to Vasko. “If you’d care to follow me.”

  Vasko looked at Scorpio. “Are you coming down, sir?”

  “I’ll follow in a moment. You go ahead and introduce yourself. Say only that you are Vasko Malinin, an SA operative, and that you participated in the mission to recover Clavain—and then don’t say another word until I get there.”

  “Yes, sir.” Vasko hesitated. “Sir, one other thing?”

  “What?”

  “What did he mean about apparitions?”

  “You don’t need to know,”

  Scorpio said. Scorpio watched them troop off into the bowels of the ship, waiting until their footsteps had died away and he was certain that he had the landing bay to himself. Then he made his way to the edge of the bay’s entrance, standing with the tips of his blunt, childlike shoes perilously close to the edge.

  The wind scrubbed hard against his face, although today it was not especially strong. He always felt in danger of being blown out, but experience had taught him that the wind usually blew into the chamber. All the same, he remained ready to grab the left-hand edge of the door for support should an eddy threaten to tip him over the lip. Blinking against the wind, his eyes watering, he watched the claw-shaped aircraft bank and recede. Then he looked down, surveying the colony that, despite Clavain’s return, was still very much his responsibility.

  Kilometres away, First Camp sparkled in the curve of the bay. It was too distant to make out any detail save for the largest structures, such as the High Conch. Even those build-ings were flattened into near-insignificance by Scorpio’s elevation. The happy, bustling squalor and grime of the shanty streets were invisible. Everything appeared eerily neat and ordered, like something laid out according to strict civic rules. It could have been almost any city, on any world, at any point in history. There were even thin quills of smoke rising up from kitchens and factories. Yet other than the smoke there was nothing obviously moving, nothing that he could point to. But at the same time the entire settlement trembled with a frenzy of subliminal motion, as if seen through a heat haze.

  For a long time, Scorpio had thought that he would never adjust to life beyond Chasm City. He had revelled in the constant roaring intricacy of that place. He had loved the dangers almost as much as the challenges and opportunities. On any given day he had known that there might be six or seven serious attempts on his life, orchestrated by as many rival groups. There would be another dozen or so that were too inept to be worth bringing to his attention. And on any given day Scorpio might himself give the order to have one of his enemies put to sleep. It was never business with Scorpio, always personal.

  The stress of dealing with life as a major criminal element in Chasm City might have appeared crippling. Many did crack—they either burned out and retreated back to the limited spheres of petty crime that had bred them, or they made the kind of mistake it wasn’t possible to learn from.

  But Scorpio had never cracked, and if he had ever screwed up it was one time only—and even then it had not exactly been his fault. It had been wartime by then, after all. The rules were changing so fast that now and then Scorpio had even found himself acting legally. Now that had been frightening.

  But the one mistake he had made had been nearly terminal. Getting caught by the zombies, and then the spiders… and because of that he had fallen under Clavain’s influence. And at the end of it a question remained: if the city had defined him so totally, what did it mean to him no longer to have the city?

  It had taken him a while to find out—in a way, he had only really found the answer when Clavain had left and the colony was entirely in Scorpio’s control.

  He had simply woken up one morning and the longing for Chasm City was gone. His ambition no longer focused on anything as absurdly self-centred as personal wealth, or power, or status. Once, he had worshipped weapons and violence. He still had to keep a lid on his anger, but he struggled to remember the last time he had held a gun or a knife. Instead of feuds and scores, scams and hits, the things that crammed his days now were quotas, budgets, supply lines, the bewildering mire of interpersonal politics. First Camp was a smaller city—barely a city at all, really—but the complexity of running it and the wider colony was more than enough to keep him occupied. He would never have believed it back in his Chasm City days, but here he was, standing like a king surveying his empire. It had been a long journey, fraught with reversals and setbacks, but somewhere along the way—perhaps that first morning when he awoke without longing for his old turf—he had become something like a statesman. For someone who had started life as an indentured slave, without even the dignity of a name, it was hardly the most predictable of outcomes.

  But now he worried that it was all about to slip away. He had always known that their stay on this world was only ever intended to be temporary, a port of call where this particular band of refugees would wait until Remontoire and the others were able to regroup. But as time went on, and the twenty-year mark had approached and then passed without incident, the seductive idea had formed in his mind that perhaps things might be more permanent. That perhaps Remontoire had been more than delayed. That perhaps the wider conflict between humanity and the Inhibitors was going to leave the settlement alone.

  It had never been a realistic hope, and now he sensed that he was paying the price for such thinking. Remontoire had not merely arrived, but had brought the arena of battle with him. If Khouri’s account of things was accurate, then the situation truly was grave.

  The distant town glimmered. It looked hopelessly transient, like a patina of dust on the landscape. Scorpio felt a sudden visceral sense that someone dear to him was in mortal danger.

  He turned abruptly from the open door of the landing deck and made his way to the meeting room.

  THIRTEEN

  Ararat, 2675

  The meeting room lay deep inside the ship, in the spherical chamber that had once been the huge vessel’s main command centre. The process of reaching it now resembled the exploration of a large cave system: there were cold, snaking warrens of corridor, spiralling tunnels, junctions and dizzying shafts. There were echoing sub-chambers and claustrophobic squeeze-points. Weird, unsettling growths clotted the walls: here a leprous froth, there a brachial mass horribly suggestive of petrified lung tissue. Unguents dripped constantly from ceiling to floor. Scorpio dodged the obstacles and oozing fluids with practised ease. He knew that there was nothing really hazardous about the ship’s exudations—chemically they were quite uninteresting—but even for someone who had lived in the Mulch, the sense of revulsion was overpowering. If the ship had only ever been a mechanical thing, he could have taken it. But there was no escaping the fact that much of what he saw stemmed in some arcane sense from the memory of the Captain’s biological body. It was a matter of semantics as to whether he walked through a ship that had taken on certain biological attributes or a body that had swollen to the size and form of a ship.

  He didn’t care which was more accurate: both possibilities revolted him.

  Scorpio reached the meeting room. After the gloom of the approach corridors it was overwhelmingly bright and clean. They had equipped the ship’s original spherical command chamber with a false floor and suitably generous wooden conference table. A refurbished projector hung above the table like an oversized chandelier, shuffling through schematic views of the planet and its immediate airspace.

  Clavain was already waiting, garbed in the kind of stiff black dress uniform that would not have looked outrageously unfashionable at any point in the last eight hundred years. He had allowed someone to further tidy his appearance: the fines and shadows remained on his face, but with the benefit of a few hours’ sleep he was at least recognisable as the Clavain of old. He stroked the neat trim of his beard, one elbow propped on the ta
ble’s reflective black surface. His other hand drummed a tattoo against the wood.

  “Something kept you, Scorp?” he asked mildly.

  “I needed a moment of reflection.”

  Clavain looked at him and then inclined his head. “I understand.”

  Scorpio sat down. A seat had been reserved for him next to Vasko, amid a larger group of colony officials.

  Clavain was at the head of the table. To his left sat Blood, his powerful frame occupying the width of two normal spaces. Blood, as usual, managed to look like a thug who had gatecrashed a private function. He had a knife in one trotter and was digging into the nails of the other with the tip of the blade, flicking excavated dirt on to the floor.

  In stark contrast was Antoinette Bax, sitting on Clavain’s right side. She was a human woman Scorpio had known since his last days in Chasm City. She had been young then, barely out of her teens. Now she was in her early forties—still attractive, he judged, but certainly heavier around the face, and with the beginnings of crow’s-feet around the corners of her eyes. The one constant—and the thing that she would probably take to her grave—was the stripe of freckles that ran across the bridge of her nose. It always looked as if it had just been painted on, a precisely stippled band. Her hair was longer now, pinned back from her forehead in an asymmetrical parting. She wore complex locally made jewellery. Bax had been a superb pilot in her day, but lately there had been few opportunities for her to fly. She complained about this with good humour, but at the same time knuckled down to solid colony work. She had turned out to be a very good mediator.

  Antoinette Bax was married. Her husband, Xavier Liu, was a little older than her, his black hair now veined with silver, tied back in a modest tail. He had a small, neat goatee beard and he was missing two fingers on his right hand from an industrial accident down at the docks fifteen or so years ago. Liu was a genius with anything mechanical, especially cybernetic systems. Scorpio had always got on well with him. He was one of the few humans who genuinely didn’t seem to see a pig when he talked to him, just another mechanically minded soul, someone he could really talk to. Xavier was now in charge of the central machine pool, controlling the colony’s finite and dwindling reserve of functioning servitors, vehicles, aircraft, pumps, weapons and shuttles: technically it was a desk job, but whenever Scorpio called on him, Liu was usually up to his elbows in something. Nine times out of ten, Scorpio would find himself helping out, too.

  Next to Blood was Pauline Sukhoi, a pale, spectral figure seemingly either haunted by something just out of sight, or else a ghost herself. Her hands and voice trembled constantly, and her episodes of what might be termed transient insanity were well known. Years ago, in the patronage of one of Chasm City’s most shadowy individuals, she had worked on an experiment concerning local alteration of the quantum vacuum. There had been an accident, and in the whiplash of severing possibilities that was a quantum vacuum transition, Sukhoi had seen something dreadful, something that had pushed her to the edge of madness. Even now she could barely speak of it. It was said that she passed her time sewing patterns into carpets.

  Then there was Orca Cruz, one of Scorpio’s old associates from his Mulch days, one-eyed but still as sharp as a monofilament scythe. She was the toughest human he knew, Clavain included. Two of Scorpio’s old rivals had once made the mistake of underestimating Orca Cruz. The first Scorpio knew of it was when he heard about their funerals. Cruz wore much black leather and had her favourite firearm out on the table in front of her, scarlet fingernails clicking against the ornamented Japan-work of its carved muzzle. Scorpio thought the gesture rather gauche, but he had never picked his associates for their sense of decorum.

  There were a dozen other senior colony members in the room, three of them swimmers from the Juggler contact section. Of necessity they were all young baseline humans. Their bodies were sleek and purposeful as otters‘, their flesh mottled by faint green indications of biological takeover. They all wore sleeveless tunics that showed off the broadness of their shoulders and the impressive development of their arm muscles. They had tattoos worked into the paisley complexity of their markings, signifying some inscrutable hierarchy of rank meaningful only to other swimmers. Scorpio, on balance, did not much like the swimmers. It was not simply that they had access to a luminous world that he, as a pig, would never know. They seemed aloof and scornful of everyone, including the other baseline humans. But it could not be denied that they had their uses and that in some sense they were right to be scornful. They had seen things and places no one else ever would. As colonial assets, they had to be tolerated and tapped.

  The nine other seniors were all somewhat older than the swimmers. They were people who had been adults on Resurgam before the evacuation. As with the swimmers, the faces changed when new representatives were cycled in and out of duty. Scorpio, nonetheless, made it his duty to know them all, with the intimate fondness for personal details he reserved only for close friends and blood enemies. He knew that this curatorial grasp of personal data was one of his strengths, a compensation for his lack of forward-thinking ability.

  It therefore troubled him profoundly that there was one person in the room that he hardly knew at all. Khouri sat nearly opposite him, attended by Dr. Valensin. Scorpio had no hold on her, no insights into her weaknesses. That absence in his knowledge troubled him like a missing tooth.

  He was contemplating this, wondering if anyone else felt the same way, when the murmur of conversation came to an abrupt end. Everyone, including Khouri, turned towards Clavain, expecting him to lead the meeting.

  Clavain stood, pushing himself up. “I don’t intend to say very much. All the evidence I’ve seen points to Scorpio having done an excellent job of running this place in my absence. I have no intention of replacing his leadership, but I will offer what guidance I can during the present crisis. I trust you’ve all had time to read the summaries Scorp and I put together, based onKhouri’s testimony?”

  “We’ve read them,” said one of the former colonists—a bearded, corpulent man named Hallatt. “Whether we take any of it seriously is another thing entirely.”

  “She certainly makes some unusual claims,” Clavain said, “but that in itself shouldn’t surprise us, especially given the things that happened to us after we left Yellowstone. These are unusual times. The circumstances of her arrival were bound to be a little surprising.”

  “It’s not just the claims,” Hallatt said. “It’s Khouri herself. She was Ilia Volyova’s second-in-command. That’s hardly the best recommendation, as far as I’m concerned.”

  Clavain raised a hand. “Volyova may well have wronged your planet, but in my view she also atoned for her sins with her last act.”

  “She may believe she did,” Hallatt said, “but the gift of redemption lies with the sinned-against, rather than the sinner. In my view she was still a war criminal, and Ana Khouri was her accomplice.”

  “That’s your opinion,” Clavain allowed, “but according to the laws that we all agreed to live under during the evacuation, neither Volyova nor Khouri were to be held accountable for any crimes. My only concern now is Khouri’s testimony, and whether we act upon it.”

  “Just a moment,” Khouri said as Clavain sat down. “Maybe I missed something, but shouldn’t someone else be taking part in this little set-up?”

  “Who did you have in mind?” Scorpio asked.

  “The ship, of course. The one we happen to be sitting in.”

  Scorpio scratched the fold of skin between his forehead and the upturned snout of his nose. “I don’t quite follow.”

  “Captain Brannigan brought you all here, didn’t he?” Khouri asked. “Doesn’t that entitle him to a seat at this table?”

  “Maybe you weren’t paying attention,” Pauline Sukhoi said. “This isn’t a ship any more. It’s a landmark.”

  “You’re right to ask about the Captain,” Antoinette Bax said, her deep voice commanding immediate attention. “We’ve been trying to estab
lish a dialogue with him almost since the Infinity landed.” Her many-ringed fingers were knitted together on the table, her nails painted a bright chemical green. “No joy,” she said. “He doesn’t want to talk.”

  “Then the Captain’s dead?” Khouri said.

  “No…” Bax said, looking around warily. “He still shows his face now and then.”

  Pauline Sukhoi addressed Khouri again. “Might I ask something else? In your testimony you claim that Remontoire and his allies—our allies—have achieved significant breakthroughs in a range of areas. Drives that can’t be detected, ships that can’t be seen, weapons that cut through space-time… that’s quite a Jist.” Sukhoi’s frail, frightened voice always sounded on the verge of laughter. “All the more so given the very limited time that you’ve had to make these discoveries.”

  “They weren’t discoveries,” Khouri said. “Read the summary. Aura gave us the clues to make those things, that’s all. We didn’t discover anything.”

  “Let’s talk about Aura,” Scorpio said. “In fact, let’s go right back to the beginning, from the moment our two forces separated around Delta Pavonis. Zodiacal Light was badly damaged, we know that much. But it shouldn’t have taken more than two or three years for the self-repair systems to patch it up again, provided you fed them with enough raw material. Yet we’ve been waiting here for twenty-three years. What took you so long?”

  “The repairs took longer than we anticipated,” Khouri replied. “We had problems obtaining the raw materials now that the Inhibitors had so much of the system under their control.”

  “But not twenty years, surely,” said Scorpio.

  “No, but once we’d been there a few years it became clear we were in no immediate danger of persecution by the Inhibitors provided we stayed near the Hades object, the re-engineered neutron star. That meant we had more time to study the thing. We were scared at first, but the Inhibitors always kept clear of it, as if there was something about it they didn’t like. Actually, Thorn and I had already guessed as much.”