Absolution Gap

THIRTY-FOUR

Scorpio had been walking through the ship for hours. It was still chaotic in the high levels, where the latest arrivals were being processed. There were smaller pockets of chaos at a dozen other locations. But the Nostalgia/or Infinity was a truly enormous spacecraft, and it was remarkable how little evidence there was of the seventeen thousand newcomers once he moved away from the tightly policed processing zones. Throughout much of the ship’s volume, things were as empty and echoing as they had ever been, as if all the newcomers had been imagined spectres.

But the ship was not completely deserted, even away from the processing zones. He paused now at a window that faced on to a deep vertical shaft. Red light bathed the interior, throwing a roseate tint on the metallic structure taking form within it. The structure was utterly unfamiliar. And yet it reminded him, forcefully, of something—one of the trees he had seen in the glade. Only this was a tree made from countless bladelike parts, foil-thin leaves arranged in spiralling ranks around a narrow core that ran the length of the shaft. There was too much detail to take in; too much geometry; too much perspective. His head hurt to look at the treelike object, as if the whole sculptural form was a weapon designed to shatter perception.

Servitors scuttled amongst the leaves like black bugs, their movements methodical and cautious, while black-suited human figures hung from harnesses at a safe distance from the delicate convolutions of the forming structure. The servitors carried metal-foil parts on their backs, slotting them into precisely machined apertures. The humans—they were Conjoin-ers—appeared to do very little except hang in their harnesses and observe the machines. But they were undoubtedly directing the action at a fundamental level, their concentration intense, their minds multitasking with parallel thought threads.

These were just some of the Conjoiners aboard the ship. There were dozens more. Hundreds, even. He could barely tell them apart. Except for minor variations in skin tone, bone structure and sex, they all appeared to have stepped from the same production line. They were of the crested kind, advanced specimens from Skade’s own taskforce. They said nothing to each other and were uncomfortable when forced to talk to the non-Conjoined. They stuttered and made elementary errors of pronunciation, grammar and syntax: things that would have shamed a pig. They functioned and communicated on an entirely nonverbal level, Scorpio knew. To them, verbal communication—even when speeded up by mind-to-mind linkage—was as primitive as communication by smoke signal. They made Clavain and Remontoire look like grunting stone-age relics. Even Skade must have felt some itch of inadequacy around these sleek new creatures.

If the wolves lost, Scorpio thought, but the only people left to celebrate were these silent Conjoiners, would it have been worth it?

He had no easy answer.

Beyond their silent strangeness, their stiffly economical movements and utter absence of expression, the thing that most chilled him about the Conjoiner technicians was the blithe ease with which they had shifted loyalty to Remontoire. At no point had they acknowledged that their obedience to Skade had been in error. They had, they said, only ever been following the path of least resistance when it came to the greater good of the Mother Nest. For a time, that path had involved co-operation with Skade’s plans. Now, however, they were content to align themselves with Remontoire. Scorpio wondered how much of that had to do with the pure demands of the situation and how much with respect for the traditions and history of the Nest. With Galiana and Clavain now dead, Remontoire was probably the oldest living Conjoiner.

Scorpio had no choice but to accept the Conjoiners. They were not a permanent fixture in any case; in fewer than eight days they would have to leave if they wanted to return home to the Zodiacal Light and their other remaining ships. There were already fewer of them than there had been at first.

They had helped to reinstall nanotechnological manufactories, plague-hardened so that they would continue to function even in the contagious environment of the Infinity. Primed with blueprints and raw matter, the forges spewed out gleaming new technologies of mostly unfamiliar function. The same blueprints showed how the newly minted components were to be assembled into even larger—yet equally unfamiliar—new shapes. In evacuated shafts running the length of the Nostalgia for Infinity— just like the one he was looking into now—these contraptions grew and grew. The thing that looked like an elongated silver tree—or a dizzyingly complicated turbine, or some weird alien take on DNA—was a hypometric weapon. Perhaps sensing their value, the Captain tolerated the activity, although at any moment he could have remade his interior architecture, crushing the shafts out of existence.

Elsewhere, Conjoiners crawled through the skin of the ship, installing a network of cryo-arithmetic engines. Tiny as hearts, each limpetlike engine was a sucking wound in the corpus of classical thermodynamics. Scorpio recalled what had happened to Skade’s corvette when the cryo-arithmetic engines had gone wrong. The runaway cooling must have begun with a tiny splinter of ice, smaller than a snowflake. But it had been growing all the while, as the engines locked into manic, spiralling feedback loops, destroying more heat with every computational cycle, the cold feeding the cold. In space, the ship would simply have cooled down to within quantum spitting distance of absolute zero. On Ararat, however, with an ocean at hand, it had grown an iceberg around itself.

Other Conjoiners were crawling through the ship’s original engines, tinkering with the hallowed reactions at their core. More were out on the hull, tethered to the encrusted architecture of the Captain’s growth patterns. They were installing additional weapons and armouring devices. Still more—secluded deep within the ship, far from any other focus of activity—were assembling the inertia-suppression devices that had been tested during the Zodiacal Light’s chase from Yellowstone to Resurgam. This was alien technology, Scorpio knew, machinery that humans had appropriated without Aura’s assistance. But they had never been able to get it to work reliably. By all accounts, Aura had shown them how to modify it for relatively safe operation. Skade, in desperation, had attempted to use the same technology for faster-than-light travel. Her effort had failed catastrophically, and Aura had refused to reveal any secrets that might make another attempt possible. Amongst the gifts she was giving them, there was to be no superluminal technology.

He watched the servitors slip another blade into place. The device had looked finished a day ago, but since then they had added about three times more machinery. Yet, strangely, the structure looked even more lacy and fragile than it had before. He wondered when it would be done—and what exactly it would do when it was done—and then began to turn from the window, apprehension lying heavy in his heart.

“Scorp.”

He had not been expecting company, so was surprised to hear his own name. He was even more surprised to see Vasko Malinin standing there.

“Vasko,” he said, offering a noncommittal smile. “What brings you down here?”

“I wanted to find you,” he said. Vasko was wearing a stiff, fresh-looking Security Arm uniform. Even his boots were clean, a miracle aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity.

“You managed.”

“I was told you’d probably be down here somewhere.” Vasko’s face was lit from the side by the red glow spilling from the hypometric weapon shaft. It made him look young and feral by turns. Vasko glanced through the window. “Quite something, isn’t it?”

“I’ll believe it works when I see it do something other than sit there looking pretty.”

“Still sceptical?”

“Someone should be.”

Scorpio realised now that Vasko was not alone. There was a figure looming behind him. He would have been able to see the person clearly years ago; now he had difficulty making out detail when the light was gloomy.

He squinted. “Ana?”

Khouri stepped into the pool of red light. She was dressed in a heavy coat and gloves, enormous boots covering her legs up to her knees—they were much dirtier than Vasko’s—and she was carrying something, tucked into the crook of her arm. It was a bundle, a form wrapped in quilted silver blanketing. At the top end of the bundle, near the crook of her arm, was a tiny opening.

“Aura?” he said, startled.

“She doesn’t need the incubator now,” Khouri said.

“She might not need it, but…”

“Dr. Valensin said it was holding her back, Scorp. She’s too strong for it. It was doing more harm than good.” Khouri angled her face down towards the open end of the bundle, her eyes meeting the hidden eyes of her daughter. “She told me she wanted to be out of it as well.”

“I hope Valensin knows what he’s doing,” Scorpio said.

“He does, Scorp. More importantly, so does Aura.”

“She’s just a child,” he said, keeping his voice low. “Barely that.”

Khouri stepped forwards. “Hold her.”

She was already offering the bundle to him. He wanted to say no. It wasn’t just that he did not quite trust himself with something as precious and fragile as a child. There was something else: a voice that warned him not to make this physical connection with her. Another voice—quieter—reminded him that he was already bound to her in blood. What more harm could be done now?

He took Aura. He held her against his chest, just tight enough to feel that he had her safely. She was astonishingly light. It stunned him that this girl—this asset they had lost their leader to recover—could feel so insubstantial.

“Scorpio.”

The voice was not Khouri’s. It was not an adult voice; barely a child’s. It was more a gurgling croak that half-approximated the sound of his name.

He looked down at the bundle, into the opening. Aura’s face turned towards his. Her eyes were still tightly closed gummy slits. There was a hubble emerging from her mouth.

“She didn’t just say my name,” he said incredulously.

“I did,” Aura said.

He felt, for a heartbeat, as if he wanted to drop the bundle. There was something wrong lying there in his arms, something that had no right to exist in this universe. Then the shameful reflex passed, as quickly as it had come. He looked away from the tiny pink-red face, towards her mother.

“She can’t even see me,” he said.

“No, Scorp,” Khouri confirmed, “she can’t. Her eyes don’t work yet. But mine do. And that’s all that matters.”

Throughout the ship, Scorpio’s technicians worked day and night laying listening devices. They glued newly manufactured microphones and barometers to walls and ceilings, then un-spooled kilometres of cables, running them through the natural ducts and tunnels of the Captain’s anatomy, splicing them at nodes, braiding them into thickly entwined trunk lines that ran back to central processing points. They tested their devices, tapping stanchions and bulkheads, opening and closing pressure doors to create sudden draughts of air from one part of the ship to another. The Captain tolerated them, even, it seemed, did his best to make their efforts easier. But he was not always in complete control of his reshaping processes. Fibre-optic lines were repeatedly severed; microphones and barometers were absorbed and had to be remade. The technicians accepted this stoically, going back down into the bowels of the ship to re-lay a kilometre of line that they had just put in place; even, sometimes, repeating the process three or four times until they found a better, less-vulnerable routing.

What they did not do, at any point, was ask why they were doing this. Scorpio had told them not to, that they did not want to know, and that if they were to ask, he would not tell them the truth. Not until the reason for their work was over, and things were again as safe as they could be.

But he knew why, and when he thought about what was going to happen, he envied them their ignorance.

The interviews with the Ultras continued. Rashmika sat and made her observations. She sipped tea and watched her own shattered reflection swim in the mirrors. She thought about each hour bringing her more than a kilometre closer to Absolution Gap. But there were no clocks in the garret, hence no obvious means of judging their progress.

After each interview, she told Quaiche what she thought she had seen, taking care neither to embroider nor omit anything that might have been crucial. By the end of the third interview, she had formed an impression of what was happening. Quaiche wanted the Ultras to bring one of their ships into close orbil around Hela, to act as bodyguard.

Exactly what he feared, she could not guess. He told the Ultras that he desired protection from other spacefaring elements, that he had lately thwarted a number of schemes to seize control of Hela and wrest the supply of scuttler relics from the Adventist authorities. With a fully armed lighthugger in orbit around Hela, he said, his enemies would think twice about meddling in Hela’s affairs. The Ultras, in return, would enjoy favoured trader status, a necessary compensation for the risk entailed in bringing their valuable ship so close to the world that had destroyed the Gnostic Ascension. She could smell their nervousness: even though they only ever came down to Hela in shuttles, leaving their main spacecraft parked safely on the system’s edge, they did not want to spend a minute longer than necessary in the Lady Morwenna.

But there was, Rashmika suspected, something more to Quaiche’s plan than mere protection. She was certain that Quaiche was hiding something. It was a hunch this time, not something she saw in his face. He was, to all intents and purposes, unreadable. It was not just the mechanical eye-opener, hiding all those nuances of expression she counted on. There was also a torpid, masklike quality to his face, as if the nerves that operated his muscles had been severed or poisoned. When she stole glances at him she saw a vacuity of expression. The faces he made were stiff and exaggerated, like the expressions of a glove puppet. It was ironic, she thought, that she had been brought in to read people’s faces by a man whose own face was essentially closed. Almost deliberately so, in fact.

Finally the interviews for the day were over. She had reported her findings to Quaiche and he had listened appreciatively to what she had to say. There was no guessing where his own intuitions lay, but at no point did he question or contradict any of her observations. He merely nodded keenly, and told her she had been very helpful.

There would be more Ultras to interview, she was assured, but that was it for the day.

“You can go now, Miss Els. Even if you leave the cathedral now, you will still have been very useful to me and I will see to it that your efforts are rewarded. Did I mention a good position in the Catherine of Iron?”

“You did, Dean.”

“That is one possibility. Another is for you to return to the Vigrid region. You have family there, I take it?”

“Yes,” she said, but even as the word left her mouth, her own family suddenly felt distant and abstract to her, like something she had only been told about. She could remember the rooms of her house, the faces and voices of her parents, but the memories felt thin and translucent, like the facets in the stained-glass windows.

“You could return with a nice bonus—say, five thousand ecus. How does that sound?”

“That would be very generous,” she replied.

“The other possibility—the preferred one from my point of view—is that you remain in the Lady Morwenna and continue to assist me in the interviewing of Ultras. For that I will pay you two thousand ecus for every day of work. By the time we reach the bridge, you will have made double what you could have taken back to your home if you’d left today. And it doesn’t have to stop there. For as long as you are willing, there will always be work. In a year’s service, think what you could earn.”

“I’m not worth that much to anyone,” she said.

“But you are, Miss Els. Didn’t you hear what Grelier said? One in a thousand. One in a million, perhaps, with your degree of receptivity. I’d say that makes you worth two thousand ecus per day of anyone’s money.”

“What if my advice isn’t right?” she asked. “I’m only human. I make mistakes.”

“You won’t get it wrong,” he said, with more certainty than she liked. “I have faith in few things, Rashmika, beyond God Himself. But you are one of them. Fate has brought you to my cathedral. A gift from God, almost. I’d be foolish to turn it away, wouldn’t I?”

“I don’t feel like a gift from anything,” she said.

“What do you feel like, then?”

She wanted to say, like an avenging angel. But instead she said, “I feel tired and a long way from home, and I’m not sure what I should do.”

“Work with me. See how it goes. If you don’t like it, you can always leave.”

“Is that a promise, Dean?”

“As God is my witness.”

But she couldn’t tell if he was lying or not. Behind Quaiche, Grelier stood up with a click of his knee-joints. He ran a hand through the electric-white bristles of his hair. “I’ll show you to your quarters, then,” he said. “I take it you’ve agreed to stay?”

“For now,” Rashmika said.

“Good. Right choice. You’ll like it here, I’m sure. The dean is right: you are truly privileged to have arrived at such an auspicious time.” He reached out a hand. “Welcome aboard.”

“That’s it?” she said, shaking his hand. “No formalities? No initiation rituals?”

“Not for you,” Grelier said. “You’re a secular specialist, Miss Els, just like myself. We wouldn’t want to go clouding your brain with all that religious claptrap, would we?“

She looked at Quaiche. His metal-goggled face was as unreadable as ever. “I suppose not.”

“There is just one thing,” Grelier said. “I’m going to have a take a bit of blood, if you don’t mind.”

“Blood?” she asked, suddenly nervous.

Grelier nodded. “Strictly for medical purposes. There are a lot of nasty bugs going around these days, especially in the Vi-grid and Hyrrokkin regions. But don’t worry.” He moved towards the wall-mounted medical cabinet. “I’ll only need a wee bit.”

Energies pocked the space around Ararat. Scorpio watched the distant, receding battle from the spider-shaped observation capsule, secure in the warm, padded plush of its upholstery.

Carnations of light bloomed and faded over many seconds, slow and lingering as violin chords. The lights were concentrated into a tight, roughly spherical volume, centred on the planet. Around them was a vaster darkness. The slow brightening “and fading, the pleasing randomness of it, stirred some memory—probably second hand—of sea creatures communicating in benthic depths, throwing patterns of bioluminescence towards each other. Not a battle at all but a rare, intimate gathering, a celebration of the tenacity of life in the cold lightless-ness of the deep ocean.

In the early phases of the space war in the p Eridani A system, the battle had been fought under a ruling paradigm of maximum stealth. All parties, Inhibitor and human, had cloaked their activities by using drives, instruments and weapons that radiated energies—if they radiated anything—only into the narrow, squeezed blind spots between orthodox sensor bands. The way Remontoire had described it, it had been like two men in a dark room, treading silently, slashing almost randomly into the darkness. When one man took a wound, he could not cry out for fear of revealing his location. Nor could he bleed, or offer tangible resistance to the passage of the blade. And when the other man struck, he had to withdraw the blade quickly, lest he signal his own position. A fine analogy, if the room had been light-hours wide, and the men had been human-controlled spacecraft and wolf machines, and the weapons had kept escalating in size and reach with every feint and parry. Ships had darkened their hulls to the background temperature of space; masked the emissions from their drives; used weapons that slid undetected through darkness and killed with the same discretion.

Yet there had come a point, inevitably, when it had suited one or other of the combatants to discard the stealth stratagem. Once one abandoned it, the others had to follow suit. Now it was a war not of stealth but of maximum transparency. Weapons, machines and forces were being tossed about with abandon.

Watching the battle from the observation capsule, Scorpio was reminded of something Clavain had said on more than one occasion, when viewing some distant engagement: war was beautiful, when you had the good fortune not to be engaged in it. It was sound and fury, colour and movement, a massed assault on the senses. It was bravura and theatrical, something that made you gasp. It was thrilling and romantic, when you were a spectator. But, Scorpio reminded himself, they were involved. Not in the sense that they were participants in the engagement around Ararat, but because their own fate depended critically on its outcome. And to a large extent he was responsible for that. Remontoire had wanted him to hand over all the cache weapons, and he had refused. Because of that, Remontoire could not guarantee that the covering action would be successful.

The console chimed, signifying that a specific chirp of gravitational radiation had just swept past the Nostalgia for Infinity.

“That’s it,” Vasko said, his voice hushed and businesslike. “The last cache weapon, assuming we haven’t lost count.”

“He wasn’t meant to use them up this quickly,” Khouri said. She was sitting with him in the observation capsule, with Aura cradled in her arms. “I think something’s gone wrong.”

“Wait and see,” Scorpio said. “Remontoire may just be changing the plan because he’s seen a better strategy.”

They watched a beam of something—bleeding visible light sideways so that it was evident even in vacuum—reach out with elegant slowness across the theatre of battle. There was something obscene and tonguelike about the way it extended itself, pushing towards some invisible wolf target on the far side of the battle. Scorpio did not like to think about how bright that beam must have been close-up, for it was visible now even without optical magnification or intensity enhancement. He had turned down all the lights in the observation capsule, dimming the navigation controls so that they had the best view of the engagement. Shields had been carefully positioned to screen out the glare and radiation from the engines.

The capsule lurched, something snapping free of the larger ship. Scorpio had learned not to flinch when such things happened. He waited while the capsule reoriented itself, picking its way to a new place of rest with the unhurried care of a tarantula, following the dictates of some ancient collision-avoidance algorithm.

Khouri looked through one of the portholes, holding Aura up to the view even though the baby’s eyes were still closed.

“It’s strange down here,” she said. “Like no other part of the ship. Who did this? The Captain or the sea?”

“The sea, I think,” Scorpio replied, “though I don’t know whether the Jugglers had anything to do with it or not. There was a whole teeming marine ecology below the Jugglers, just as on any other aquatic planet.”

“Why are you whispering?” Vasko asked. “Can he hear us in here?”

“I’m whispering because it’s beautiful and strange,” Scorpio said. “Plus, I happen to have a headache. It’s a pig thing. It’s because our skulls are a bit too small for our brains. It gets worse as we get older. Our optic nerves get squeezed and we go blind, assuming macular degeneration doesn’t get us first.” He smiled into darkness. “Nice view, isn’t it?”

“I only asked.”

“You didn’t answer his question,” Khouri said. “Can he hear us in here?”

“John?” Scorpio shrugged. “Don’t know. Me, I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. Only polite, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t think you ‘did’ polite,” Khouri said.

“I’m working on it.”

Aura gurgled.

The capsule stiffened its legs, pushing itself closer to the hull with a delicate clang of contacting surfaces. It hung suspended beneath the flattened underside of the great ship, where the Nostalgia for Infinity had come to rest on Ararat’s seabed. All around it, seen in dim pastel shades, were weird coral-like formations. There were grey-green structures as large as ships, forests of gnarled, downward-pointing fingers, like stone chandeliers. The growths had all formed during the ship’s twenty-three years of immersion, forming a charming rock-garden counterpoint to the brutalist transformations inflicted on the hull by the captain’s own plague-driven reshaping processes. They had remained intact even as the Jugglers had moved the Infinity to deeper water, and they had survived both the departure from Ararat and the subsequent engagement with wolf forces. Doubtless John Brannigan could have removed them, just as he had redesigned the ship’s lower extremities to permit it to land on Ararat in the first place. The entire ship was an ex-ternalisation of his psyche, an edifice chiselled from guilt, horror and the craving for absolution.

But there was no sign of any further transformations taking place here. Perhaps, Scorpio mused, it suited the Captain to carry these warts and scabs of dead marine life, just as it suited Scorpio to carry the scar on his shoulder, where he had effaced the scorpion tattoo. Remove evidence of that scar, and he would have been removing part of what made him Scorpio. Ararat, in turn, had changed the Captain. Scorpio was certain of that, certain also that the Captain felt it. But how had it changed him, exactly? Shortly, he thought, it would be necessary to put the Captain to the test.

Scorpio had already made the appropriate arrangements. There was a fistful of bright-red dust in his pocket.

Vasko stirred, the upholstery creaking. “Yes, it might pay to be polite to him,” he said. “After all, nothing’s going to happen around here without his agreement. I think we all recognise that.”

“You talk as if you think there’s going to be a clash of wills,” Scorpio said. He kept one eye on the extending beam of the cache weapon, watching as it scribed a bright scratch across the volume of battle. The scratch was now of a finite length, inching its way across space. Where the cache weapon had been was only a fading smudge of dying matter. The weapon had been a one-shot job, a throwaway.

“You think there won’t be?” Vasko asked.

“I’m an optimist. I think we’ll all see sense.”

“You won the battle over the cache weapons,” Vasko said. “Remontoire went along with it, and so did the ship. I’m not surprised about that: the ship felt safer with the weapons than without them. But we still don’t know that it was the right thing to do. What about next time?”

“Next time? I don’t see any disputes on the horizon,” Scorpio said.

But he did, and he felt isolated now that Remontoire and Antoinette had gone. Remontoire and the last of the Conjoin-ers had departed a day ago, taking with them their servitors, machines and the last of the negotiated number of cache weapons. In their place they had left behind working manufactories and the vast shining things Scorpio had watched them assemble. Remontoire had explained that the weapons and mechanisms had only been tested in a very limited fashion. Before they could be used they would require painstaking calibration, following a set of instructions the Conjoiner technicians had left behind. The Conjoiner technicians could not stay aboard and complete the calibrations: if they waited any longer, their small ships would be unable to return to the main battle group around Ararat. Even with inertia-suppressing systems, they were still horribly constrained by the exigencies of fuel reserves and delta-vee margins. Physics still mattered. It was not their own survival they cared about, but their usefulness to the Mother Nest. And so they had left, taking with them the one man Scorpio felt would have had the will to oppose Aura, if the circumstances merited it.

Which leaves me, he thought.

“I can foresee at least one dispute in the very near future,” Vasko said.

“Enlighten me.”

“We’re going to have to agree about where we go—whether it’s out, to Hela, or back to Yellowstone. We all know what you think about it.”

“It’s ‘we’ now, is it?”

“You’re in the minority, Scorp. It’s just a statement of fact.”

“There won’t necessarily be a confrontation,” Khouri said. Her voice was low and soothing. “All Vasko means to say is that the majority of seniors believe Aura has privileged information, and that what she tells us ought to be taken seriously.”

‘That doesn’t mean they’re right. It doesn’t mean we’ll find anything useful when we get to Hela,“ Scorpio argued.

‘There must be something about that system,“ Vasko said. ”The vanishings… they must mean something.“

“It means mass psychosis,” Scorpio said. “It means people see things when they’re desperate. You think there’s something useful on that planet? Fine. Go there and find out. And explain to me why it didn’t make one damned bit of difference to the natives.”

“They’re called scuttlers,” Vasko said.

“I don’t care what they’re called. They’re fucking extinct. Doesn’t that tell you something even slightly significant? Don’t you think that if there was something useful in that system they’d have used it already and still be alive?”

“Maybe it isn’t something you use lightly,” Vasko said.

“Great. And you want to go there and see what it was they were too scared to use even though the alternative was extinction? Be my guest. Send me a postcard. I’ll be about twenty light-years away.”

“Frightened, Scorpio?” Vasko asked.

“No, I’m not frightened,” he said, with a calm that even he found surprising. “Just prudent. There’s a difference. You’ll understand it one day.”

“Vasko only meant to say that we can’t take a guess at what really happened there unless we visit the place,” Khouri said. “Right now we know almost nothing about Hela or the scuttlers. The churches won’t allow orthodox scientific teams anywhere near the place. The Ultras don’t poke their noses in too deeply because they make a nice profit exporting useless scuttler relics. But we need to know more.”

“More,” Aura said, and then laughed.

“If she knows we need to go there, why doesn’t she tell us why?” Scorpio said. He nodded towards the vague milky-grey shape of the child. “All this stuff has to be in there somewhere, doesn’t it?”

“She doesn’t know,” Khouri said.

“Do you mean she won’t tell us yet, or that she’ll never know?”

“Neither, Scorp. I mean it hasn’t been unlocked for her yet.”

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“I told you what Valensin said: every day he looks at Aura, and every day he comes up with a different guess as to her developmental state. If she were a normal child she wouldn’t be born yet. She wouldn’t be talking. She wouldn’t even be breathing. Some days it’s as if she has the language skills of a three-year-old. Other days, she’s barely past one. He sees brain structures come and go like clouds, Scorp. She’s changing even while we’re sitting here. Her head’s like a furnace. Given all that, are you really surprised that she can’t tell you exactly why we need to go to Hela? It’s like asking a child why they need food. They can tell you they’re hungry. That’s all.”

“What did you mean about it being locked?”

“I mean it’s all in there,” she said, “all the answers, or at least everything we’ll need to know to work them out. But it’s encoded, packed too tightly to be unwound by the brain of a child, even a two- or three-year-old. She won’t begin to make sense of those memories until she’s older.”

“You’re older,” he said. “You can see into her head. You unwind them.”

“It doesn’t work like that. I only see what she understands. What I get from her—most of the time, anyway—is a child’s view of things. Simple, crystalline, bright. All primary colours.” In the gloom Scorpio saw the flash of her smile. “You should see how bright colours are to a child.”

“I don’t see colours that well to begin with.”

“Can you put aside being a pig for five minutes?” Khouri asked. “It would really help if everything didn’t keep coming back to that.”

“It keeps coming back to that for me. Sorry if it offends you.”

He heard her sigh. “All I’m saying, Scorp, is that we can’t begin to guess how significant Hela is unless we go there. And we’ll have to go there carefully, not barging in with all guns blazing. We’ll have to find out what we need before we ask for it. And we’ll have to be ready to take it if necessary, and to make sure we do it right the first time. But first of all we have to go there.”

“And what if going there is the worst thing we could do? What if all of this is a setup, to make the job easier for the Inhibitors?”

“She’s working for us, Scorp, not them.”

“That’s an assumption,” he said.

“She’s my daughter. Don’t you think I have some idea about her intentions?”

Vasko interrupted them, touching Scorpio’s shoulder. “I think you need to see this,” he said.

Scorpio looked at the battle, seeing immediately what Vasko had noticed. It was not good. The beam of the cache weapon was being bent away from its original trajectory, like a ray of light hitting water. There was no sign of anything at the point where the beam changed direction, but it did not take very much imagination to conclude that it was some hidden focus of Inhibitor energy that was throwing the beam off course. There was no weapon left to reaim and refire; all that could be done now was to sit back and watch what happened to the deviated beam.

Somehow Scorpio knew that it wasn’t just going to sail off into interstellar space, fading harmlessly as it fell into the night.

That was not how the enemy did things.

They did not have long to wait. Seen in magnification, the beam grazed the edge of Ararat’s nearest moon, cleaving its way through hundreds of kilometres of crust and then out the other side. The moon began to come apart like a broken puzzle. Red-hot rocky gore oozed from the wound with dreamlike slowness. It was like the time-lapse opening of some red-hearted flower at dawn.

“That’s not good,” Khouri said.

“You still think this is going according to plan?” Vasko asked.

The stricken moon was extending a cooling tentacle of cherry-red slurry along the path of its orbit. Scorpio looked at it in dismay, wondering what it would mean for the people on Ararat’s surface. Even a few million tonnes of rubble hitting the ocean would have dreadful consequences for the people left behind, but the amount of debris from the moon would be far, far worse than that.

“I don’t know,” Scorpio said.

A little while later, there was a different chime from the console.

“Encrypted burst from Remontoire,” Vasko said. “Shall I put him on?”

Scorpio told him to do it, watching as a fuzzy, pixellated image of Remontoire appeared on the console. The transmission was highly compressed, subject to jolting gaps and periods when the image froze while Remontoire continued speaking.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but it hasn’t worked quite as well as I’d hoped.”

“How bad?” Scorpio mouthed.

It was as if Remontoire had heard him. “A small aggregate of Inhibitor machines appears to be pursuing you,” he said. “Not as large as the pack that followed us from Delta Pavonis, but not something you can ignore, either. Have you completed testing the hypometric weaponry? That should be a priority now. And it might not be a bad idea to get the rest of the machinery working as well.” Remontoire paused, his image breaking up and reassembling. ‘There’s something you need to know,“ he continued. ”The failure was mine. It had nothing to do with the number of cache weapons in our arsenal. Even if you had given all of them to me, the outcome would have been the same. As a matter of fact, it was good that you didn’t. Your instincts served you well, Mr. Pink. I’m glad of that little conversation we had just before I left. You still have a chance.“ He smiled: the expression looked as forced as ever, but Scorpio welcomed it. ”You may be tempted to respond to this transmission. I recommend that you do nothing of the sort. The wolves will be trying to refine their positional fix on you, and a clear signal like that would do you no favours at all. Goodbye and good luck.’^?

That was it: the transmission was over.

“Mr. Pink?” Vasko said. “Who’s Mr. Pink?”

“We go back a way,” Scorpio said.

“He didn’t say anything about himself,” Khouri said. “Nothing about what he’s going to do.”

“I don’t think he considered it relevant,” Scorpio said. “There’s nothing we can do to help them, after all. They’ve done what they could for us.”

“But it wasn’t good enough,” Malinin said.

“Maybe it wasn’t,” Scorpio said, “but it was still a lot better than nothing, you ask me.”

“The conversation he mentioned,” Khouri said. “What was that about?”

“That was between me and Mr. Clock,” Scorpio replied.

After the surgeon-general had taken her blood, he showed her to her quarters. It was a small room about a third of the way up the Clocktower. It had one stained-glass window, a small, austere-looking bed and a bedside table. There was an annexe containing a washbasin and a toilet. There was some Quaicheist literature on the bedside table.

“I hope you weren’t expecting the height of luxury,” Grelier said.

“I wasn’t expecting anything,” she said. “Until a few hours ago I expected to be working in a clearance gang for the Catherine of Iron.”

“Then you can’t complain, can you?”

“I wasn’t intending to.”

“Play your cards right and we’ll sort out something a little larger,” he said.

“This is all I need,” Rashmika said.

Grelier smiled and left her alone. She said nothing as he left. She had not liked him taking her blood, but had felt powerless to resist. It was not simply the fact that the whole business of the churches and blood made her feel queasy—she knew too much about the indoctrinal viruses that were part and parcel of the Adventist faith—but something else, something that related to her own blood and the fact that she felt violated when he sampled it. The syringe had been empty before he drew the sample, which meant—assuming that the needle was sterile—that he had not tried to put the indoctrinal virus into her. That would have been a violation of a different order, but not necessarily worse. The thought that he had taken her blood was equally distressing.

But why, she wondered, did it bother her so much? It was a reasonable thing to do, at least within the confines of the Lady Morwenna. Everything here ran on blood, so it was hardly objectionable that she had been made to supply a sample. By rights, she should have been grateful that it had stopped there.

But she was not grateful. She was frightened, and she did not exactly know why.

She sat by herself. In the quiet of the room, bathed in the sepulchral light from the stained-glass window, she felt desperately alone. Had all this been a mistake? she wondered. Now that she had reached its roaring heart, the church did not seem like such a distant, abstract entity. It felt more like a machine, something capable of inflicting harm on those who strayed too close to its moving parts. Though she had never specifically set out to see Quaiche, it had seemed evident to her that only someone very high up in the Adventist hierarchy would be able to reveal the truth about Harbin. But she had also envisaged that the path there would be treacherous and time-consuming. She had been resigned to a long, slow, will-sapping investigation, a slow progress through layers of administration. She would have begun in a clearance gang, about as low as it was possible to get.

Instead, here she was: in Quaiche’s direct service. She should have felt elated at her good fortune. Instead she felt unwittingly manipulated, as if she had set out to play a game fairly and someone had turned a blind eye, letting her win by fiat. On one level she wanted to blame Grelier, but she knew that the surgeon-general was not the whole story. There was something else, too. Had she come all this way to find Harbin, or to meet Quaiche?

For the first time, she was not completely certain.

She began to flick through the Quaicheist literature, looking for some clue that would unlock the mystery. But the literature was the usual rubbish she had disdained since the moment she could read: the Haldora vanishings as a message from God, a countdown to some vaguely defined event, the nature of which depended on the function of the text in which it was mentioned.

Her hand hesitated on the cover of one of the brochures. Here was the Adventist symbol: the strange spacesuit radiating light as if seen in silhouette against a sunrise, with the rays of light ramming through openings in the fabric of the suit itself. The suit had a curious welded-together look, lacking any visible joints or seams. There was no doubt in her mind now that it was the same suit that she had seen in the dean’s garret.

Then she thought about the name of the cathedral: the Lady Morwenna.

Of course. It all snapped into her head with blinding clarity. Morwenna had been Quaiche’s lover, before he came to Hela. Everyone who read their scripture knew that. Everyone also knew that something awful had happened to her, and that she had been imprisoned inside a strange welded-up suit when it happened. A suit that was itself a kind of punishment device, fashioned by the Ultras Quaiche and Morwenna had worked for.

The same suit she had seen in the garret; the same one that had made her feel so ill at ease.

She had rationalised away that fear at the time, but now, sitting all alone, the mere thought of being in the same building as the suit frightened her. She wanted to be as far away from it as possible.

There’s something in it, she thought. Something more than just a mechanism to put the jitters on rival negotiators.

A voice said, [Yes. Yes, Rashmika. We are inside the suit.]

She dropped the booklet, letting out a small gasp of horror. She had not imagined that voice. It had been faint, but very clear, very precise. And its lack of resonance told her that it had sounded inside her head, not in the room itself.

“I don’t need this,” she said. She spoke aloud, hoping to break the spell. “Grelier, you bastard, there was something on that needle, wasn’t there?”

[There was nothing on the needle. We are not a hallucination. We have nothing to do with Quaiche or his scripture.]

“Then who the hell are you?” she said.

[Who are we? You know who we are, Rashmika. We are the ones you came all this way to find. We are the shadows. You came to negotiate with us. Don’t you remember?]

She swore, then pummelled her head against the pillow at the end of the bed.

[That won’t do any good. Please stop, before you hurt yourself]

She snarled, smashing her fists against the sides of her skull.

[That won’t help either. Really, Rashmika, don’t you see it yet? You aren’t going mad. We’ve just found a way into your head. We speak to Quaiche as well, but he doesn’t have the benefit of all that machinery in his head. We have to be discreet, whispering aloud to him when he’s alone. But you’re different.]

“There’s no machinery in my head. And I don’t know anything about any shadows.”

The voice shifted its tone, adjusting its timbre and resonance until it sounded exactly as if there was a small, quiet friend whispering confidences into her ear.

[But you do know, Rashmika. You just haven’t remembered yet. We can see all the barricades in your head. They’re beginning to come down, but it will take a little while yet. But that’s all right. We’ve waited a long time to find a friend. We can wait a little longer.]

“I think I should call Grelier,” she said. Before he left, the surgeon-general had shown her how to access the cathedral’s pneumatic intercom system. She leant over the bed, towards the bedside table. There was a grilled panel above it.

[No, Rashmika,] the voice warned. [Don’t call him. He’ll only look at you more closely, and you don’t want that, do you?]

“Why not?” she demanded.

[Because then he’ll find out that you aren’t who you say you are. And you wouldn’t want that.]

Her hand hesitated above the intercom. Why not press it, and summon the surgeon-general? She didn’t like the bastard, but she liked voices in her head even less.

But what the voice had said reminded her of her blood. She visualised him taking the sample, drawing the red core from her arm.

[Yes, Rashmika, that’s part of it. You don’t see it yet, but when he analyses that sample he’ll be in for a shock. But he may leave it at that. What you don’t want is him crawling over your head with a scanner. Then he’d really find something interesting.]

Her hand still hovered above the intercom, but she knew she was not going to press the connecting button. The voice was right: the one thing she did not want was Grelier taking an even deeper interest in her, beyond her blood. She did not know why, but it was enough to know it.

“I’m scared,” she said, moving her hand away.

[You don’t have to be. We’re here to help you, Rashmika.]

“Me?” she said.

[All of you,] the voice said. She sensed it pulling away, leaving her alone. [All we ask of you is a little favour in return.]

Afterwards, she tried to sleep.

Scorpio looked over the technician’s shoulder. Glued to one wall was a large flexible screen, newly grown by the manufactories. It showed a cross section through the ship, duplicated from the latest version of the hand-drawn map that had been used to track the Captain’s apparitions. Rather than the schematic of a spacecraft, it resembled a blow-up of some medieval anatomy illustration. The technician was marking a cross next to a confluence of tunnels, near to one of the acoustic listening posts.

“Any joy?” Scorpio asked.

The other pig made a noncommittal noise. “Probably not. False positives from this area all day. There’s a hot bilge pump near this sector. Keeps clanging, setting off our phones”.

“Better check it out all the same, just to be on the safe side,” Scorpio advised.

“There’s a team already on their way down there. They’ve never been far away.”

Scorpio knew that the team would be going down in full vacuum-gear, warned that they might encounter a breach at any point, even deep within the ship. “Tell them to be careful,” he said.

“I have, Scorp, but they could be even more careful if they knew what they needed to be careful about.”

“They don’t need to know.”

The pig technician shrugged and went back to his task, waiting for another acoustic or barometric signal to appear on his read-out.

Scorpio’s thoughts drifted to the hypometric weapon mov-ing in its shaft, a corkscrewing, meshing, interweaving gyre of myriad silver blades. Even immobile, the weapon had felt subtly wrong, a discordant presence in the ship. It was like a picture of an impossible solid, one of those warped triangles or ever-rising staircases; a thing that looked plausible enough at first glance but which on closer inspection produced the effect of a knife twisting in a particular part of the brain—an area responsible for handling representations of the external universe, ah area that handled the mechanics of what did and didn’t work. Moving, it was worse. Scorpio could barely look at the threshing, squirming complexity of the operational weapon. Somewhere within that locus of shining motion, there was a point or region where something sordid was being done to the basic fabric of space-time. It was being abused.

That the technology was alien had come as no surprise to Scorpio. The weapon—and the two others like it—had been assembled according to instructions passed to the Conjoiners by Aura, before Skade had stolen her from Khouri’s womb. The instructions had been precise and comprehensive, a series of unambiguous mathematical prescriptions, but utterly lacking any context—no hint of how the weapon actually functioned, or which particular model of reality had to apply for it to work. The instructions simply said: just build it, calibrate it in this fashion, and it will work. But do not ask how or why, because even if you were capable of understanding the answers, you would find them upsetting.

The only other hint of context was this: the hypometric weapon represented a general class of weakly acausal technologies usually developed by pre-Inhibitor-phase Galactic cultures within the second or third million years of their star-faring history. There were layers of technology beyond this, Aura’s information had implied, but they could certainly not be assembled using human tools. The weapons in that theoretical arsenal bore the same abstract relationship to the hypometric device as a sophisticated computer virus did to a stone axe. Simply grasping how such weapons were in some way disadvantageous to something loosely analogous to an enemy would have required such a comprehensive remapping of the human mind that it would be pointless calling it human anymore.

The message was: make the most of what you have.

“Teams are there,” the other pig said, pressing a microphone into the little pastry like twist of his ear.

“Found anything?”

“Just that pump playing up again.”

“Shut it down,” Scorpio said. “We can deal with the bilge later.”

“Shut it down, sir? That’s a schedule-one pump.”

“I know. You’re probably going to tell me it hasn’t been turned off in twenty-three years.”.

“It’s been turned off, sir, but always with a replacement unit standing by to take over. We don’t have a replacement available now, and won’t be able to get one down there for days. All service teams are tied up following other acoustic leads.”

“How bad would it be?”

“About as bad as it gets. Unless we install a replacement unit, we’ll lose three or four decks within a few hours.”

“Then I guess we’ll have to lose them. Is your equipment sophisticated enough to filter out the sounds of those decks being flooded?”

The technician hesitated for a moment, but Scorpio knew that professional pride would win out in the end. “That shouldn’t be a problem, no.”

“Then look on the bright side. Those fluids have to come from somewhere. We’ll be taking the load off some other pumps, more than likely.”

“Yes, sir,” the pig said, more resigned than convinced. He gave the order to his team, telling them to sacrifice those levels. He had to repeat the instruction several times before the message got through that he was serious and that he had Scorpio’s authorisation.

Scorpio understood his reservations. Bilge management was a serious business aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity, and the turning off of pumps was not something that was ever taken lightly. Once a deck had been flooded with the Captain’s chemical humours and exudations, it could be very difficult to reclaim it for human use. But what mattered more now was the calibration of the weapon. Turning off the pump made more sense than turning off the listening devices in that area. If losing three or four decks meant having a realistic hope of defeat-ing the pursuing wolves, it was a small price to pay.

The lights dimmed; even the constant background churn of bilge pumps became muted. The weapon was being discharged.

As the weapon rotated up to speed, it became a silent columnar blur of moving parts, a glittering whirlwind. In vacuum, it moved with frightening speed. Calculations had shown that it would only take the failure of one tiny part of the hypo-metric weapon to rip the Nostalgia for Infinity to pieces. Scorpio remembered the Conjoiners putting the thing together, taking such care, and now he understood why.

They followed the calibration instructions to the letter. Because their effects depended critically on atomic-scale tolerances, Remontoire had said, no two versions of the weapon could ever be exactly alike. Like handmade rifles, each would have its own distinct pull, an unavoidable effect of manufacture that had to be gauged and then compensated for. With a hypometric weapon it was not just a case of aiming-off to compensate—it was more a case of finding an arbitrary relationship between cause and effect within a locus of expectations. Once this pattern was determined, the weapon could in theory produce its effect almost anywhere, like a rifle able to fire in any direction.

Scorpio had already seen the weapon in action. He didn’t have to understand how it worked, only what it did. He had heard the sonic booms as spherical volumes of Ararat’s atmosphere were deleted from existence (or, conceivably, shifted or redistributed somewhere else). He had seen a hemispherical chunk of water removed from the sea, the memory of those in-rushing walls of water—even now—making him shiver at the sheer wrongness of what he had witnessed.

The technology, Remontoire had told him, was spectacularly dangerous and unpredictable. Even when it was properly constructed and calibrated, a hypometric weapon could still turn against its maker. It was a little like grasping a cobra by the tail and using it to lash out against enemies while hoping that the snake didn’t coil around and bite the hand that held it.

The trouble was, they needed that snake.

Thankfully, not all aspects of the h-weapon’s function were totally unpredictable. The range was limited to within light-hours of the weapon itself, and there was a tolerably well-defined relationship between weapon spin-rate (as measured by some parameter Scorpio didn’t even want to think about) and radial reach in a given direction. What was more difficult to predict was the direction in which the extinction bubble would be launched, and the resulting physical size of the bubble’s effect.

The testing procedure required the detection of an effect caused by the weapon’s discharge. On a planet, this would have presented no real difficulties: the weapon’s builders would simply tune the spin-rate to allow the effect to show itself at a safe distance, and then make some guess as to the size of the effect and the direction in which it would occur. After the weapon had been fired, they would examine the predicted zone of effect for any indication that a spherical bubble of space-time—including all the matter within it—had simply winked out of existence.

But in space it was much more difficult to calibrate a hypometric weapon. No sensors in existence could detect the disappearance of a few atoms of interstellar gas from a few cubic metres of vacuum. The only practical solution, therefore, was to try to calibrate the weapon within the ship itself. Of course, this was scarily dangerous: had the bubble appeared within the core of one of the Conjoiner drives, the ship would have been destroyed instantly. But the mid-flight calibration procedure had been done before, Remontoire had said, and none of his ships had been destroyed in the process.

The one thing they didn’t do was immediately select a target within the ship. They were aiming for an effect on the skin of the vessel, safely distant from any critical systems. The procedure, therefore, was to set the weapon’s initial coordinates to generate a small, unobserved extinction bubble beyond the hull. The weapon would then be fired repeatedly, with the spin-rate adjusted by a tiny amount each time, decreasing the radial distance and therefore drawing the bubble closer and closer to the hull. They couldn’t see it out there; they could only imagine it approaching, and could never be sure whether it was about to nibble the ship’s hull or was still hundreds of metres distant. It was like summoning a malevolent spirit to a seance: the mo-ment of arrival was a thing of both dread and anticipation.

The test area around the weapon had been sealed off right out to the skin of the ship, save for automated control systems. Everyone not already frozen had been moved as far away from the weapon as possible. After each firing—each squirming, rebounding collapse of the threshing mechanisms—Scorpio’s technicians pored over their data to see if the weapon had generated an effect, scanning the network of microphones and barometers to see if there was any hint that a spherical chunk of the ship a metre in diameter had just ceased to exist. And so the calibration process continued, the technicians tuning the weapon time and again and listening for results.

The lights dimmed again.

“Getting something,” the technician said, after a moment. Scorpio saw a cluster of red indicators appear on his read-out. “Signals coming in from…”

But the technician did not complete his sentence. His words were drowned out by a rising howl, a noise unlike anything Scorpio had ever heard aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity. It was not the shriek of air escaping through a nearby breach, nor the groan of structural failure. It was much closer to a low, agonised vocalisation, to the sound of something huge and bestial being hurt.

The moan began to subside, like the dying after-rumble of a thunderclap.

“I think you have your effect,” Scorpio said.

He went down to see it for himself. It was much worse than he had feared: not a one-metre-wide nibble taken out of the ship, but a gaping fifteen-metre-wide wound, the edges where bulkheads and floors had been sheared gleaming a bright, untarnished silver. Greenish fluids were raining down through the cavity from severed feedlines; an electrical cable was thrashing back and forth in the void, gushing sparks each time it contacted a metallic surface.

It could have been worse, he told himself. The volume of the ship nipped out of the existence by the weapon had not coincided with any of the inhabited parts, nor had it intersected critical ship systems or the outer hull. There had been a slight local pressure loss as the air inside the volume ceased to exist, but, all told, the weapon had had a negligible effect on the ship. But it had unquestionably had an effect on the Captain. Some part of his vaguely mapped nervous system must have passed through this volume, and the weapon had evidently caused him pain. It was difficult to judge how severe that pain must have been, whether it had been transitory or Was even now continuing. Perhaps there was no exact analogue for it in human terms. If there was, Scorpio was not certain that he really wished to know, because for the first time a disturbing thought had occurred to him: if this was the pain the Captain felt when a tiny part, of the ship was harmed, what would it be like if something much worse happened?

Yes, it could have been worse.

He visited the technicians who were calibrating the weapon, taking in their nervous expressions and gestures. They were expecting a reprimand, at the very least.

“Looks like it was a bit larger than one metre,” he said.

“It was always going to be uncertain,” their leader flustered. “All we could do was take a lucky guess and hope—”

Scorpio cut her off. “I know. No one ever said this was going to be easy. But knowing what you know now, can you adjust the volume down to something more practical?”

The technician looked relieved and doubtful at the same time, as if she could not really believe that Scorpio had no intention of punishing her.

“I think so… given the effect we’ve just observed… of course, there’s still no guarantee…”

“I’m not expecting one. I’m just expecting the best you can do.”

She nodded quickly. “Of course. And the testing?”

“Keep it up. We’re still going to need that weapon, no matter how much of a bastard it is to use.”