Absolution Gap

FIFTEEN

Blood bustled into the conference room, a huge number of rolled-up maps tucked beneath his arms. He placed the maps on the table and then spread one of them wide, the map flattening itself obediently. It was a single sheet of thick creamy paper as wide as the table, with the slightly mottled texture of leather. At a command from Blood, topographic features popped into exaggerated relief, then shaded themselves according to the current pattern of daylight and darkness on that part of Ararat. Latitude and longitude appeared as thin glowing lines, labelled with tiny numerals.

Khouri leant across, studying the map for a moment. She turned it slightly, then pointed to one small chain of islands. “Near here,” she said, “about thirty kilometres west of that strait, eight hundred kilometres north of here.”

“Is this thing updated in real-time?” Clavain asked.

“Refresh time is about every two days on average,” Scorpio said. “It can take a bit longer. Depends on the vagaries of satellite positions, high-altitude balloons and cloud cover. Why?”

“Because it looks as if there’s something more or less where she said there would be.”

“He’s right,” Khouri said. “It has to be Skade’s ship, doesn’t it?”

Scorpio leant in to inspect the tiny white dot. “That’s no ship,” he said. “It’s just a speck of ice, like a small iceberg.”

“You’re sure about that?” Clavain asked.

Blood jabbed his trotter at the point Khouri had indicated. “Let’s be certain. Map: magnify, tenfold.”

The surface features of the map crawled away to the edges. The speck of ice swelled until it was the size of a fingernail. Blood told the map to apply an enhancement filter, but there was no obvious increase in detail save for a vague suggestion that the iceberg was bleeding into the surrounding sea, extending fine tendrils of whiteness in all directions.

“No ship,” Scorpio said.

Clavain sounded less certain. “Ana, the craft Skade came down in—you said in your report that it was a heavy corvette, correct?”

“I’m no expert on ships, but that’s what I was told.”

“You said it was fifty metres long. That would be about right for a moray-class corvette. The funny thing is, that iceberg looks about the same size. The proportions are consistent—maybe a bit larger, but not much.”

“Could be coincidence,” Blood said. “You know there are always bits of iceberg drifting down into those latitudes. Sometimes they even make it as far south as here.”

“But there are no other icebergs in the surrounding area,” Clavain pointed out.

“All the same,” Scorpio said, “there can’t be a ship in that thing, can there? Why would it have ended up covered in ice? If anything, ships come in hot, not cold. And why wouldn’t the ice have melted by now?”

“We’ll find out when we get there,” Clavain said slowly. “In the meantime, let’s stick to practicalities. We won’t want to alarm Skade into doing something rash, so we’ll make sure our approach is slow and obvious.” He indicated a spot on the map, to the south of the iceberg. “I suggest we take a shuttle out to about here; Antoinette can fly us. Then we’ll drop two or three boats and make the rest of the crossing by sea. We’ll carry surgical equipment and close-quarters arms, but nothing excessive. If we need to destroy the ship we can always call in an air-strike from the mainland.” He looked up, his finger still pressing down on the map. “If we leave this afternoon, we can time our arrival at the iceberg for dawn, which will give us a whole day in which to complete negotiations with Skade.”

“Wait a moment,” said Dr. Valensin, smiling slightly. “Before we get too carried away—are you telling me that you’re actually taking any of this seriously?”

“You mean you’re not?” Clavain asked.

“She’s my patient,” Valensin said, looking sympathetically at Khouri. “I’ll vouch for the fact that she’s isn’t obviously insane. She has Conjoiner implants, and if her child had them as well they could have communicated with each other while the child was still in her womb. It would have been unorthodox, but Remontoire could have put those implants in her unborn child using microsurgical remotes. Given Conjoiner medicine, too, it’s not inconceivable that Skade could have removed Khouri’s child without evidence of surgery. But the rest of it? This whole business about a space war taking place on our doorstep? It’s a bit of a stretch, wouldn’t you say?”

“I’m not so sure,” Clavain said.

“Please explain,” Valensin said, looking to his colleagues for support.

Clavain tapped the side of his skull. “Remember, I’m a Conjoiner as well. The last time I was able to check, all the machinery in my head was still working properly.”

“I could have told you as much,” Valensin said.

“What you forget is how sensitive it is. It’s designed to detect and amplify ambient fields, signals produced by machines or other Conjoiners. Two Conjoiners can share thoughts across tens of metres of open space even if there aren’t any amplifying systems in the environment. The hardware translates those fields into patterns that the organic part of the brain can interpret, harnessing the basic visual grammar of the perceptual centre.”

“This isn’t news to me,” Valensin said.

“So consider the implications. What if there really was a war going on out there—a major circumsolar engagement, with all sorts of weapons and countermeasures being deployed? There’d be a great deal of stray electromagnetic noise, much more powerful than normal Conjoiner signals. My implants might be picking up signals they can’t interpret properly. They’re feeding semi-intelligible patterns into my meat brain. The meat does its best to sort out the mess and ends up throwing shapes and faces into the sky.”

“He told me he’d been seeing things,” Scorpio said.

“Figures, signs and portents,” Clavain said. “It only began in the last two or three months. Khouri said the fleet arrived nine weeks ago. That’s too much of a coincidence for me. I thought that perhaps I was going mad, but it looks as if I was just picking up rumours of war.”

“Like the good old soldier you always were,” Scorpio said.

“It just means I’m inclined to take Khouri seriously,” Clavain said, “no matter how strange her story.”

“Even the part about Skade?” Valensin asked.

Clavain scratched his beard. His eyes were slit-lidded, almost closed, as if viewing a vast mental landscape of possibilities. “Especially the part about Skade,” he replied.

Rashmika looked straight ahead. She had nearly reached the other machine. In the distance she could see suited figures moving about on errands, clambering from one catwalk to another. Cranes swung out, burdened by pallets of heavy equipment. Servitors moved with the eerie, lubricated glide of clockwork automata. The vast single machine, the sum of many parts that was the caravan, needed constant care. It was, Rashmika suspected, a little like a cathedral in microcosm.

She stood again on the relatively firm ground of another vehicle. The motion of this one depended on legs rather than wheels, so instead of rumbling steadily, the metal surface beneath her feet drummed a slow rhythm, a series of timed thuds as each piston-driven mechanical foot hit ice. The gap she had crossed looked trivial now, a matter of metres, but she did not doubt that it would be just as unnerving on the way back.

Now she looked around. There was something very different about the layout of this roof: it was more ordered, lacking any of the obvious mechanical clutter of the last one. The few equipment boxes had been neatly stowed around the edges of the roof, with the conduits and power lines routed likewise.

Occupying much of the central area was a tilted surface, angled up from the roof on a set of pistons; she’d seen it during the approach in Crozet’s icejammer, and she’d also seen something like it in her village: an array of solar collectors forming part of the reserve power supply in case the main generators failed. The array had been a precise mosaic of small, square photovoltaic cells that spangled emerald and blue as they caught the light. But here there were no cells; instead the surface was covered by ranks of dark cruciform objects. Rash-mika counted them: there were thirty-six cruciform shapes, arranged six across and six high, and every one of the objects was about the same size as a human being.

She walked closer, but with trepidation. There really were people shackled to the tilted surface, held in place by clasps around their wrists, their heels supported by small platforms. As near as she could tell they were dressed identically. Each one wore a hooded, foot-length gown of chocolate-brown material, cinched around the waist by a braided white rope. The cowl of each hood framed the curved mirror of a vacuum suit visor. She saw no faces, just the warped reflection of the slowly crawling landscape, herself an insignificant part of it.

They were looking at Haldora. It was obvious now: the tilt of the platform was just right for observation of the rising planet. As the caravan approached the Way and the cathedrals that ran on it, the platform would approach the horizontal, until the thirty-six watchers were all flat on their backs, staring at the zenith.

They were pilgrims, she realised. They had been picked up by the caravan during its deviation away from the equatorial settlements. She had been stupid not to realise that there were bound to be some along for the ride. There was an excellent chance that some of them had even come down from the badlands, perhaps even from her village.

She looked up at them, wondering if they were somehow aware of her presence. She hoped that their attentions were too thoroughly fixed on Haldora for them to take any notice of her. That was the point of them being up there, after all: half-crucified, lashed to an iron raft, forced to stare into the face of the world they considered miraculous.

The thing that she found most disturbing was the speed with which these pilgrims had taken their faith to this limit. It was likely that they had only left their homes in the last few weeks. Until then, they would have had very little choice but to act like normal members of a secular community. They were welcome to their beliefs, but the necessary duties of functioning in the badlands precluded taking religious observations as seriously as this. They would have had to fit into families and work units, and to smile at the jokes of their colleagues. But here, now, they were free. Very likely there was already Quaicheist blood in their veins.

Rashmika looked back along the winding line of the caravan. There were other tilted surfaces. Assuming that they each held about the same number of pilgrims, there could easily have been two hundred just on this one caravan. And at any one time there were many other caravans on Hela. It amounted to thousands of pilgrims being transported to the shining Way, with thousands more making the journey on foot, step by agonising step.

The futility of it, the sheer miserable waste of finite human life, made her indignant and filled with self-righteous anger. She wanted to climb on to the rack herself to wrench one of the pilgrims away from the sight that transfixed then, to rip back the cowl from their helmet, to press her own face against that blank mirror and try to make contact—before it was too late—with whatever fading glimmer of human individuality remained. She wanted to drive a rock into the faceplate, shattering faith in an instant of annihilating decompression.

And yet she knew that her anger was horribly misdirected. She knew that she only loathed and despised these pilgrims because of what she feared had happened to Harbin. She could not smash the churches, so she desired instead to smash the gentle innocents who were drawn towards them. At this realisation she felt a secondary sort of revulsion directed towards herself. She could not recall ever feeling a hatred of this intensity. It was like a compass needle turning inside her, looking for a direction in which to settle. It both awed and frightened her that she had the capacity for such animus.

Rashmika forced a kind of calm upon herself. In all the time that she had been watching them, the figures had never stirred. Their dark-brown cloaks hung about their suited figures in reverential stillness, as if the various folds and twists in the fabric had been chiselled from the hardest granite by expert masons. Their mirrored faces continued to reflect the slow ooze of the landscape. Perhaps it was a kindness that she could not see the individuals behind the glass.

Rashmika turned from them, and then began to make her way back towards the bridge.