Absolution Gap

THIRTY-SIX

In the instant of awakening he assumed there had been a mistake. He was still in the black cabinet. Only a moment earlier the technicians had been cutting him open, stuffing tubes into him, pulling pieces out, examining and replacing them like children looking for treats. Now they were here again, white-hooded forms shuffling around him in a gauzy haze of vapour. He found it difficult to focus on them, the white forms blurring and joining like clouds.

“What…” he started to say. But he couldn’t speak. There was something packed into his mouth, chafing his throat with sharp edges.

One of the technicians leant into his field of view. The blur of white relaxed into a face framed in a hood, the lower half concealed behind a surgical mask.

“Easy, Scorp, don’t try talking for a moment.”

He made a sound that was both furious and interrogative. The technician appeared to understand. He pushed back his hood and lowered the mask, revealing a face that Scorpio almost recognised. A man, like the older brother of someone he knew.

“You’re safe,” the man said. “Everything worked.”

He grunted another question. ‘The wolves?“

“We took care of them. In the end they evolved—or deployed—some defence against the hypometric weaponry. It just stopped working against them. But we still had the cache weapons we didn’t give to Remontoire.”

“How many?” he signalled.

“We used all but one finishing off the wolves.”

For a moment none of these things meant anything to Scorpio. Then the memories budged into some kind of order, some kind of sense. There was a feeling of dislocation, of standing on one side of a rift that was widening, gaping open to geological depths. The land that had seemed immediately in reach a second or two ago was racing away into the distance, forever inaccessible. The memory of the technicians pushing lines into him suddenly felt ancient, something from a second- or third-hand account, as if it had happened to someone else entirely.

They pulled the breather assembly from his throat. He took ragged breaths, each inhalation feeling as if finely ground glass had been stuffed into his pleural cavity. Was it ever this bad for humans, he wondered, or was reefersleep a special kind of hell for pigs? He guessed no one would ever know for sure.

It was enough to make him laugh. One weapon left. One fucking weapon, out of the nearly forty they had begun with.

“Let’s hope we saved the best until last,” he said, when he felt he could manage a sentence. “What about the hypometrics? Are you saying they’re just so much junk?”

“Not yet. Maybe in time, but the local wolves don’t seem to have evolved the defence that the others used. We still have a window of usefulness.”

“Oh, good. You said ‘local.’ Local to where?”

“We’ve reached Yellowstone,” the man said. “Or rather, we’ve reached the Epsilon Eridani system, but it isn’t good. We can’t slow down to system speeds, just enough to make the turn for Hela.”

“Why can’t we slow down? Is something wrong with the ship?”

“No,” the man replied. Scorpio had realised by then that he was talking to an older version of Vasko Malinin. Not a young man now, a man. “But there is something wrong with Yellowstone.”

He didn’t like the sound of that. “Show me,” Scorpio said.

Before they showed him, he met Aura. She walked into the reefersleep chamber with her mother. The shock of it nearly floored him. He didn’t want to believe it was her, but there was no mistaking those golden-brown eyes. Glints of embedded metal threw prismatic light back at him like oil in water.

“Hello,” she said. She held her mother’s hand, standing hip-high against Khouri’s side. “They said they were waking you, Scorpio. Are you all right?”

“I’m all right,” he replied, which was as much as he was prepared to commit. “It was always a risk, going in that thing.” Understatement of the century, he thought. “How are you, Aura?”

“I’m six,” she said.

Khouri gripped her daughter’s hand. “She’s having one of her child days, Scorp, when she acts more or less the way you’d expect a six-year-old to act. But she isn’t always like this. I just thought you should be prepared.”

He studied the two of them. Khouri looked a little older, but not dramatically so. The lines in her face had a little more definition, as if an artist had taken a soft-edged sketch of a woman and gone over it with a sharp pencil, lovingly delineating each crease and fold of skin. She had grown her hair to shoulder length, parted it to one side, clasping it there with a small slide the colour of ambergris. There were veins of white and silver running through her hair, but these served only to emphasise the blackness of the rest of it. Folds of skin he didn’t remember marked her neck, and her hands were somehow thinner and more anatomical. But she was still Khouri, and had he no knowledge that six years had passed he might not have noticed these changes.

The two of them wore white. Khouri was dressed in a floor-length ruffled skirt and a high-collared white jacket over a scoop-necked blouse. Her daughter wore a knee-length skirt over white leggings, with a simple long-sleeved top. Aura’s hair was a short, tomboyish black crop, the fringe cut straight above her eyes. Mother and daughter stood before him like angels, too clean to be a part of the ship he knew. But perhaps things had changed. It had been six years, after all.

“Have you remembered anything?” he asked Aura.

“I’m six,” she said. “Do you want to see the ship?”

He smiled, hoping it wouldn’t frighten the child. “That would be nice. But someone told me there was something else I had to deal with first.”

“What did they tell you?” Khouri asked.

“That it wasn’t good.”

“Understatement of the century,” she replied.

But Valensin would not let him out of the reefersleep chamber without a full medical examination. The doctor made him lie back on a couch and submit to the silent scrutiny of the green medical servitors. The machines fussed over his abdomen with scanners and probes while Valensin peeled back Scorpio’s eyelids and shone a migraine-inducing light into his head, tutting to himself as if he had found something slightly sordid hidden away inside.

“You had me asleep for six years,” Scorpio said. “Couldn’t you have made your examinations then?”

“It’s the waking that kills you,” Valensin said breezily. “That and the immediate period after revival. Given the antiquity of the casket you just came out of and the unavoidable idiosyncrasies of your anatomy, I’d say you have no more than a ninety-five per cent chance of making it through the next hour.”

“I feel fine.”

“If you do, that’s quite some achievement.” Valensin held up a hand, flicking his fingers around Scorpio’s face. “How many?”

“Three.”

“Now?”

“Two.”

“And now?”

“Three.”

“And now?”

“Three. Two. Is there a point to this?”

“I’ll need to run some more exhaustive tests, but it looks to me as if you’re exhibiting a ten or fifteen per cent degradation in your peripheral vision.” Valensin smiled, as if this was exactly the sort of news Scorpio needed: just the ticket for getting him off the couch and putting a spring in his step.

“I’ve just come out of reefersleep. What do you expect?”

“More or less what I’m seeing,” Valensin said. “There was some loss of peripheral vision before we put you under, but it has definitely worsened now. There may be some slight recovery over the next few hours, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you never get back to where you were.”

“But I haven’t aged. I was in the casket all the time.”

“It’s the transitions,” Valensin said, spreading his hands apologetically. “In some respects, they’re as hard on you as staying awake. I’m sorry, Scorp, but this technology just wasn’t made for pigs. The best I can say is that if you’d stayed awake, the loss in vision would have been five to ten per cent worse.”

“Well, that’s fine, then. I’ll bear it in mind next time. Nothing I like better than having to choose between two equally fucked-up options.”

“Oh, you made the right decision,” Valensin said. “From a hard-nosed statistical viewpoint, it was your best chance of surviving through the last six years. But I’d think very carefully about the ‘next time,’ Scorp. The same hard-nosed statistical viewpoint gives you about a fifty per cent chance of surviving another reefersleep immersion. After that, it drops to about ten per cent. Throughout your body, your cells will be putting their affairs in order, settling their debts and making sure their wills are up to date.”

“What does that mean? That I’ve got one more shot in that thing?”

“About that. You weren’t planning on going back in there in a hurry, were you?”

“What, with your bedside manner to cheer me up? I’d be mad to.”

“It’s the lowest form of wit,” Valensin said.

“It beats a kick in the teeth.”

Scorpio pushed himself off the couch, sending Valensin’s robots scurrying for cover. Check-out time for the pig, he thought.

Symbols floated in the sphere of a holographic display, resolving into suns, worlds, ships and ruins. Scorpio, Vasko, Khouri and Aura stood before it, their reflections looming spectrally in the sphere’s glass. With them were half a dozen other ship seniors, including Cruz and Urton.

“Scorp,” Khouri said, “take it easy, all right? Valensin’s a certified prick, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore what he said. We need you in one piece.”

“I’m still here,” he said. “Anyway, you woke me for a reason. Let’s get the bad news over with, shall we?”

It was worse than anything he could have anticipated.

Wolves had reached Epsilon Eridani, the Yellowstone system. The evidence from departing ships suggested that their depredations had begun only recently. Three light-months from Yellowstone, expanding outwards in all directions, was a ragged shell of lighthuggers: the leading edge of an evacuation wave. He saw them in the display when the scale was adjusted to include the entire volume of surrounding space to a light-year out from Epsilon Eridani. The ships each marked with its own colourfully annotated symbol—ship ID and vector—looked like startled fish racing in radial lines away from some central threat. Some had pulled slightly ahead of the rest, some were lagging, but the one-gee acceleration ceiling of their drives guaranteed that the shell was only now beginning to lose its symmetry.

On either side of the wave there were hardly any ships. Those few vessels further out must have left Yellowstone before the wolves arrived. They were on routine trade routes. Some of them were travelling so fast that it would be years before news of the crisis caught up with them. Further in, there were a handful of ships—the last to leave, or perhaps they had been unable to maintain their usual acceleration rate for some reason. Closer to Epsilon Eridani, within a light-week of the system, there was no outbound traffic at all. If there were any starships left down in the still-hot ruins, they were not going anywhere in a hurry. There was no indication of in-system traffic, and nor were there any signals being received from the system’s colonies or navigation beacons. Those few ships that had been on approach patterns when the crisis erupted were now engaged in wide, lazy turnarounds. They had heard the warnings and seen the evacuees streaming out in the other direction; now they were trying to head back into interstellar space.

It had taken the wolves a year to sterilise every world around Delta Pavonis. Here, Scorpio doubted that more than half a year had passed since the onset of the cull.

This, however, was a different kind of cull from that which had obliterated Resurgam and its fellow worlds. Around Delta Pavonis, an earlier cull—a million years previously—had already failed, so the Inhibitor elements tasked with the current clean-up operation had gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure the job was done properly this time. They had ripped worlds apart, mining them for raw materials to be assembled into an engine that murdered stars. They had turned it on Delta Pavonis, stabbing deep to the star’s heart and unleashing an arterial gush of core material at fusion temperatures and pressures. They had sprayed this hellfire across the face of Resurgam, incinerating every organism unfortunate enough not to be shielded beneath hundreds of kilometres of crust. If life was ever to arise again on Resurgam, it would have to start almost from scratch. Faced with the unambiguous evidence of two prior extinctions, even other starfaring cultures would want to give the place a wide berth.

But that was not the Inhibitors’ usual modus operandi. Felka had revealed to Clavain that the wolves were not programmed simply to wipe intelligent life out of existence. They were more cunning and purposeful than that, and their task was ultimately more difficult than wholesale extermination. They were designed to hold back the eruption of starfaring life, to keep the galaxy in a state of bucolic pastoralism for the next three billion years. Life, confined to individual worlds, would be shepherded through an unavoidable cosmic crisis in what the wolves viewed as only the moderately distant future. Then, and only then, could it be allowed to teem unchecked. But the preservation of life on the planetary scale was just as much a part of the wolves’ plan as its desire to control expansion on the interstellar scale. To this end, the sterilisation of fertile systems like Delta Pavonis was a tool of last resort. It was a marker of local incompetence. Wolf packs vied for prestige, competing with each other to demonstrate their subtle control over emergent life. Having to destroy first worlds and then a star was a sign of slippage, an unforgivable lapse in attention. It was the sort of thing that might result in a group of wolves being ostracised, denied the latest tips in extinction management.

Around Epsilon Eridani, events were taking place on a more subtle, surgical scale. The attacking efforts were concentrated around the infrastructure of human presence rather than on the worlds themselves. There was no need to sterilise Yellowstone: the planet had never been truly inhabitable in the first place, and the only native life was microscopic. The human colonies on its surface were tenuous, domed affairs. They drew minerals and warmth from the planet, but this was only an expediency: had those resources not existed, the colonies could have been as totally self-sufficient as space habitats. It was enough for the wolves to target them and leave the rest of Yellowstone intact. Where Ferrisville had been, and Loreanville and Chasm City, all that now remained were glaring, molten craters of radioactivity. They winked through the thick yellow smog of the planet’s atmosphere. No one could have survived. No thing could have survived.

It was the same around the planet. Before the Melding Plague, the Glitter Band had been the local name for the twinkling swarm of orbital habitats encircling the planet. Ten thousand jewelled city-states had swung around Yellowstone, nose-to-nose, many with populations in the millions. The Melding Plague had taken the shine off that glory, but Scorpio had only ever known the Glitter Band in its post-plague days, when they renamed it the Rust Belt. Many of the habitats had been airless shells by then, but there were still hundreds more that had managed to hold on to their ecologies, each a festering little microkingdom with its own laws and uniquely tasty opportunities for criminal adventuring. Scorpio hadn’t been greedy. The Rust Belt had been more than sufficient for his needs, especially when he had access to Chasm City as well. But now there was no Rust Belt. A glowing ring system now hung around Yellowstone, a bracelet of cherry-red ruins. There was nothing left larger than a boulder. Every single human artefact had been pulverised. It was horrifying and beautiful.

Not just the Rust Belt, either, but all the way out. The Inhibitor machines had smashed and sterilised all the other human habitats in near-Yellowstone space. Scorpio identified their ruins from their orbits. No Haven, now. No Idlewild. Even Marco’s Eye, the planet’s moon, had been pruned. There was no sign that any structure larger than an igloo had ever existed on its surface. No cities, no spaceports, just a local enhancement in radioactivity and a few interesting trace elements to puzzle over.

Elsewhere in the system, the same story: nothing remained. No habitats. No surface encampments. No ships. No transmitters.

Scorpio wept.

“How many got out?” he said, when he could face reality again. “Count the ships, tell me how many survivors they could have carried.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Vasko said.

“What the fuck do you mean, it doesn’t matter! It matters to me. That’s why I’m asking you the fucking question.”

Khouri frowned at him. “Scorpio… she’s only six.”

He looked at Aura. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t understand,” Vasko said softly. He nodded at the holographic sphere. “It’s not real-time, Scorp.”

“What?”

“It’s a snapshot. It’s the way things were two months ago.” Vasko looked at him with his too-adult eyes. “Things got worse, Scorp. Let me show you what I’m talking about, and then you’ll understand why it doesn’t make much difference how many got out.”

Vasko ran the holographic display forwards in time. Time-code numerals, logged to worldtime, tumbled in one corner. Scorpio saw the date and felt a lurch of disorientation: 04/07/2698. The numerals were meaningless, too far removed from his own days in Chasm City to have any emotional impact. I wasn’t made for these times, he thought. He had been yanked from the ordinary flow of time and now he was adrift, unmoored from history. He realised, with a shudder of comprehension, that it was precisely this sense of dislocation that shaped the psychologies of Ultras. How much worse must it have been for Clavain?

He watched the ragged shell of the migration wave increase in size, becoming a little less spherical as the distances between the ships increased. And then, one by one, the ships began to disappear. Their icons flashed red and vanished, leaving nothing behind.

Urton was speaking now, her hands folded across her chest. “The Inhibitors had already locked on to those escaping ships,” she said. “From the moment the attack began, they didn’t have a hope. The Inhibitors caught up, smothered them, stripped the ships down to make more Inhibitors.”

“We can even track them mathematically,” Vasko elaborated, “with models based on the mass of raw material in each ship. Each captured vessel becomes the seed for a new wolf expansion sphere.”

The shell was breaking up. There had been hundreds of ships to begin with; now there could not be more than three dozen left. Even some of these last remaining sparks were vanishing from the display.

“No,” he said.

“There was nothing we could do,” Vasko said. “It’s the end of the world, Scorp. That’s all it was ever going to be.”

“Run it forwards, to the end.”

Vasko complied. The numerals blurred, the scale of the display lurching wider. There were still some ships left: maybe twenty. Scorpio didn’t have the heart to count them. At least a third of them had been the ones that had been approaching Yellowstone when the crisis started. Of the ships in the evacuation wave, not many more than a dozen had made it out this far.

“I’m sorry,” Vasko said.

“You woke me for this?” Scorpio said. “Just to rub my snout in it? Just to show me the utter fucking futility of coming all this way?”

“Scorpio,” Aura said chidingly. “Please. I’m only six.”

“We woke you because you ordered us to wake you when we got here,” Vasko said.

“We never got anywhere,” Scorpio said. “You said it yourself. We’re turning around, just like those other fortunate sons of bitches. I’ll ask you again: why did you wake me, if it wasn’t to show me this?”

“Show him,” Khouri said.

“There was another reason,” Vasko said.

The image in the tank wobbled and stabilised. Something new appeared. It was fuzzy, even after the enhancement filters had been applied. The computers were guessing details into existence, constantly testing their assumptions against the faint signal rising above the crackle of background noise. The best that the high-magnification cameras could offer was a rectangular shape with vague suggestions of engine modules and comms blisters.

“It’s a ship,” Vasko said. “Not a lighthugger. Something smaller, like an in-system shuttle or freighter. It’s the only human spacecraft within two light-months of Epsilon Eridani.”

“What the hell is it doing out there?” Scorpio asked.

“What everyone else was doing,” Khouri said. “Trying to get away from there as quickly as possible. It’s sustaining five gees, but it won’t be able to keep that up for very long.” She added, “If it’s really what it looks like.”

“What do you mean?”

“She means that we backtracked its point of origin,” Vasko said. “Of course, there’s some guesswork, but we think this is more or less what happened.”

He cut back to the main display showing the shell of expanding lighthuggers. Now the numerals tumbled in reverse. The icon of the shuttle zoomed back into the heart of the expansion, coinciding with a lighthugger that had just popped into existence. Vasko ran the scenario back a little more, then let it run forwards in accelerated time. Now the lighthugger was moving away from Yellowstone, following its own escape trajectory. Scorpio read the ship’s name: Wild Pallas.

The icon winked out. At that same moment the separate emblem of the shuttle raced away from the point where the lighthugger had been.

“Someone got out,” Scorpio said, marvelling. “Used the shuttle as a lifeboat before the wolves got them.”

“Not many, if that lighthugger was carrying hundreds of thousands of sleepers,” Vasko said.

“If we save a dozen we’ve justified our visit. And that shuttle could easily be carrying thousands.”

“We don’t know that, Scorp,” Khouri said. “It isn’t transmitting, or at least not along a line of sight we can intercept No distress codes, nothing.”

“They wouldn’t be transmitting if they thought the space around them was swarming with wolves,” Scorpio said, “but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t save the poor bastards. That is why you woke me, isn’t it? To decide whether we rescue them or not?”

“Actually,” Vasko said, “the reason we woke you was to let you know that the ship’s within range of the hypometric weapons. We think it may be safer to destroy it.”