Absolution Gap

THIRTEEN

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 table’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 establish 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.”

‘Tell us a bit more about Thorn,“ Clavain said gently.

They all heard the crack in her voice. “Thorn was the resis-tance leader, the man who made life difficult for the regime until the Inhibitors showed up.”

“Volyova and you struck up some kind of relationship with him, didn’t you?” Clavain asked.

“He was our way of getting the people to accept our help to evacuate. Because of that I had a lot of involvement with Thorn. We got to know each other quite well.” She faltered into silence.

“Take your time,” Clavain said, with a kindness Scorpio had not heard in his voice lately.

“One time, stupid curiosity drew Thorn and I too close to the Inhibitors. They had us surrounded, and they’d even started pushing their probes into our heads, drinking our memories. But then something—some entity—intervened and saved us. Whatever it was, it appeared to originate around Hades. Maybe it was even an extension of Hades itself, another kind of probe.”

Scorpio tapped the summary before him. “You reported contact with a human mind.”

“It was Dan Sylveste,” she said, “the same self-obsessed bastard who started all this in the first place. We know he found a way into the Hades matrix all those years ago, using the same route that the Amarantin took to escape the Inhibitors.”

“And you think Sylveste—or whatever he had become by then—intervened to save you and Thorn?” Clavain asked.

“I know he did. When his mind touched mine, I got a blast of… call it remorse. As if the penny had finally dropped about how big a screw-up he’d been, and the damage he’d done in the name of curiosity. It was as if he was ready, in a small way, to start making amends.”

Clavain smiled. “Better late than never.”

“He couldn’t work miracles, though,” Khouri said. “The envoy that Hades sent to Roc to help us was enough to intimidate the Inhibitor machines, but it didn’t do more than hamper them, allowing us to make it back to Ilia. But it was a sign, at least, that if we stood a hope of doing something about the Inhibitors, the place to look for help was in Hades. Some of us had to go back inside.”

“You were one of them?” Clavain said.

“Yes,” she said. “I did it the same way I’d done it before, because I knew that would work. Not via the front door inside the thing orbiting Hades, the way Sylveste did it, but by falling towards the star. By dying, in other words; letting myself get ripped apart by the gravitational field of Hades and then reassembled inside it. I don’t remember any of that. I guess I’m grateful.”

It was clear to Scorpio that even Khouri had little idea of what had really happened to her during her entry into the Hades object. Her earlier account of things had made it clear that she believed herself to have been physically reconstituted within the star, preserved in a tiny, quivering bubble of flat space-time, so that she was immune to the awesome crush of Hades’ gravitational field. Perhaps that had indeed been the case. Equally, it might have been some fanciful fiction created for her by her once-human hosts. All that mattered, ultimately, was that there was a way to communicate with entities running inside the Hades matrix—and, perhaps more importantly, a way to get back out into the real universe.

Scorpio was contemplating that when his communicator buzzed discreetly. As he stood up from the table, Khouri halted her monologue.

Irritated at the interruption, Scorpio lifted the communicator to his face and unspooled the privacy earpiece. “This had better be good.”

The voice that came was thready and distant. He recognised it as belonging to the Security Arm guard that had met them at the landing stage. “Thought you needed to know this, sir.”

“Make it quick.”

“Class-three apparition reported on five eighty-seven. That’s the highest in nearly six months.”

As if he needed to be told. “Who saw it?”

“Palfrey, a worker in bilge management.”

Scorpio lowered his voice and pressed the earpiece in more tightly. He was conscious that he had the full attention of everyone in the room. “What did Palfrey see?”

“The usual, sir: not very much, but enough that we’ll have a hard time persuading him to go that deep again.”

“Interview him, get it on record, make it clear that he speaks of this to no one. Understood?”

“Understood, sir.”

“Then find him another line of work.” Scorpio paused, frowning as he thought through all the implications. “On second thoughts, I’d like a word with him as well. Don’t let him leave the ship.”

Without waiting for a reply, Scorpio broke the link, spooled the earpiece back into the communicator and returned to the table. He sat down, gesturing at Khouri for her to continue.

“What was all that about?” she asked.

“Nothing that need worry you.”

“I’m worried.”

He felt a splinter of pain between his eyes. He had been getting a lot of headaches lately, and this kind of day didn’t help. “Someone reported an apparition,” he said, “one of the Captain’s little manifestations that Antoinette mentioned. Doesn’t mean anything.”

“No? I show up, he shows up, and you think that doesn’t mean something?” Khouri shook her head. “I know what it means, even if you don’t. The Captain understands there’s some heavy stuff going down.”

The splinter of pain had become a little broken arrowhead. He pinched the bridge of skin between snout and forehead. “Tell us about Sylveste,” he said with exaggerated patience.

Khouri sighed, but did as she was asked. “There was a kind of welcoming committee inside the star, Sylveste and his wife, just as I’d last met them. It even looked like the same room—a scientific study full of old bones and equipment. But it didn’t feel the same. It was as if I was taking part in some kind of parlour game, but I was the only one not in on it. I wasn’t talking to Sylveste any more, if I ever had been.”

“An impostor?” Clavain asked.

“No, not that. I was talking with the genuine article… I’m sure of that… but at the same time it wasn’t Sylveste, either. It was as if… he was condescending to me, putting on a mask so that I’d have something familiar to talk to. I knew I wasn’t getting the whole story. I was getting the comforting version, with the creepy stuff taken out. I don’t think Sylveste thought I was capable of dealing with what he’d really become, after all that time.” She smiled. “I think he thought he’d blow my mind.”

“After sixty years in the Hades matrix, he might have,” Clavain said.

“All the same,” Khouri said, “I don’t think there was any actual deception. Nothing that wasn’t absolutely essential for the sake of my sanity, anyhow.”

“Tell us about your later visits,” Clavain said.

“I went in alone the first few times. Then it was always with someone else—Remontoire sometimes, Thorn, a few other volunteers.”

“But always you?” Clavain asked.

“The matrix accepted me. No one was willing to take the risk of going in without me.”

“I don’t blame them.” Clavain paused, but it was apparent to all present that he had something more to say. “But Thorn died, didn’t he?”

“We were falling towards the neutron star,” she said, “just the way we always did, and then something hit us. Maybe an energy burst from a stray weapon, we’ll never know for sure; it might have been orbiting Hades for a million years, or it could have been something from the Inhibitors, something they risked placing that close to the star. It wasn’t enough to destroy the capsule, but it was enough to kill Thorn.”

She stopped speaking, allowing an uncomfortable silence to invade the room. Scorpio looked around, observing that everyone had their eyes downcast; that no one dared look at Khouri, not even Hallatt.

Khouri resumed speaking. “The star captured me alive, but Thorn was dead. It couldn’t reassemble what was left of him into a living being.”

“I’m sorry,” Clavain said, his voice barely audible.

“There’s something else,” Khouri said, her voice nearly as quiet.

“Go on.”

“Part of Thorn did survive. We’d made love on the long fall to Hades, and so when I went into the star, I took a part of him with me. I was pregnant.”

Clavain waited a decent while before answering, allowing her words to settle in, giving them the dignified space they warranted. “And Thorn’s child?”

“She’s Aura,” Khouri said. “The baby Skade stole from me. The child I came here to get back.”