Absolution Gap

FORTY-FOUR

Scorpio struggled to hear the whispery, paper-thin voice of Dean Quaiche. He held up a hand to silence his companions, screwing his eyes closed against the tight, nagging discomfort of his sealed wounds. His work finished, Valensin began wrapping up the soiled blood-red bundle of surgical tools and ointments.

“I don’t know about any girl,” Scorpio said.

The dean’s answer was like a scratch of nails against tin. “Her name is Rashmika Els. Her real name, I neither know nor care. What I do know is that she arrived on Hela from your ship nine years ago. We’ve established the connection beyond any doubt. And so much else suddenly tumbles into place.”

“It does?”

The voice changed: it was the other man again, the surgeon-general. “I don’t know exactly how you did it,” he said, “but I’m impressed. Buried memories, autosuggestion… what was it?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about?‘

“The business with the Vigrid constabulary.”

Again, “I’m sorry?”

“The girl had to be primed to emerge from her shell. There must have been a trigger. Perhaps after eight or nine years she knew, on a subconscious level, that she had spent enough time amongst the badland villagers to begin the next phase of her infiltration: penetrating the highest level of our very order. Why, I don’t yet know, although I’m a wee bit inclined to think you do.”

Scorpio said nothing. He let the man continue speaking.

“She had to wait until a means arrived to reach the Permanent Way. Then she had to signal to you that she was on her way, so that you would know to bring your ship in from the cold. It was a question of timing: your successful dealings with the dean obviously depended on internal intelligence fed to you by the girl. There are machines in her head—they rather resemble Conjoiner implants—but I doubt that you could read them from orbit. So you needed another sign, something you couldn’t possibly miss. The girl sabotaged a store of demolition charges, didn’t she? She blew it up, drawing down the attention of the constabulary. I doubt that she even knew she had done it herself: it was probably more like sleepwalking, acting out buried commands. Then she felt an inexplicable need to leave home and journey to the cathedrals. She concocted a motive for herself: a search for her long-lost brother, even though every rational bone in her body must have told her he was already dead. You, meanwhile, had your signal. The sabotage was reported on all the local news networks; doubtless you had the means to intercept them even far beyond Hela. I imagine there was something unambiguous about it—the time of day, perhaps—that made it absolutely clear that it was the work of your spy.”

Scorpio saw that there was no further point in bluffing. “You’ve done your homework,” he said.

“Bloodwork, really, but I take your point.”

“Touch her, and I’ll turn you to dust.”

He heard the smile in the surgeon-general’s voice. “I think touching her is the last thing any of us have in mind. I don’t think we intend to harm a hair on her head. On that note, why don’t I put you back on to the dean? I think he has an interesting proposition.”

The whispery voice again, like someone blowing through driftwood: “A proposition, yes,” the dean said. “I was prepared to take your ship by force because I never imagined I’d have any leverage over you. Force, it seems, has failed. I’m surprised: Seyfarth assured me he had every confidence in his own abilities. Frankly, it doesn’t matter now that I have the girl. Obviously she means something to you. That means you’re going to do what I want, without a single one of my agents lifting a finger.”

“Let’s hear your proposition,” Scorpio said.

“I told you I wanted the loan of your ship. As a gesture of my good faith—and my extremely forgiving nature—that arrangement still stands. I will take your ship, use it as I see fit, and then I shall return it to you, its occupants and infrastructure largely intact.”

“Largely intact,” Scorpio said. “I like that.”

“Don’t play games with me, pig. I’m older and uglier, and that’s really saying something.”

Scorpio heard his own voice, as if from a distance. “What do you want?”

“Take a look at Hela,” Quaiche said. “I know you have cameras spotted all around your orbit. Examine these coordinates; tell me what you see.”

It took a few seconds to acquire an image of the surface. When the picture on the compad stabilised, Scorpio found himself looking at a neatly excavated rectangular hole in the ground, like a freshly prepared grave. The coordinates referred to a part of Hela that was in daylight, but even so the sunken depths of the hole were in shadow, relieved by strings of intense industrial floodlights. The overlaid scale said that the trench was five kilometres long and nearly three wide. Three of the sides were corrugated grey revetments, sloping steeply, slightly outwards from their bases, carved with ledges and sloping access ramps. Windows shone in the two-kilometre-high walls, peering through plaques of industrial machinery and pressurised cabins. Around the upper edges of the trench, Scorpio saw retracted sheets, serrated to lock together. In the shadowed depths, sketchy, floodlit suggestions of enormous mechanisms were barely visible, things like grasping lobster claws and flattened molars: the movable components of a harness as large as the Nostalgia for Infinity. He could see the tracks and piston-driven hinges that would enable the harness to lock itself around almost any kind of lighthugger hull, within limits.

Only three walls of the trench were sheer. The fourth—one of the two short sides—provided a much shallower transition to the level of the surrounding plain. From the fall of surface shadows it was obvious that the trench was aligned parallel to Hela’s equator.

“Got the message?” Quaiche asked.

“I’m getting it,” Scorpio said.

“The structure is a holdfast: a facility for supporting the mass of your ship and preventing her escape, even while she is under thrust.”

Scorpio noted how the rear parts of the cradle could be raised or lowered to enable adjustment of the angle of the hull by precise increments. In his mind’s eye he already saw the Nostalgia for Infinity down in that trench, pinned there as he had been pinned to the wall.

“What is it for, Dean?”

“Haven’t you grasped it yet?”

“I’m a little slow on the uptake. It comes with my genes.”

“Then I’ll explain. You’re going to slow Hela for me. I’m going to use your ship as a brake, to bring this world into perfect synchronisation with Haldora.”

“You’re a madman.”

Scorpio heard a dry rattle of laughter, like old twigs being shaken in a bag. “I’m a madman with something you want very badly. Shall we do business? You have sixty minutes from now. In exactly one hour, I want your ship locked down in that holdfast. I have an approach trajectory already plotted, one that will minimise lateral hull stresses. If you follow it, the damage and discomfort will be minimalised. Would you like to see it?”

“Of course I’d like to…”

But even before he had finished the sentence he felt a lurch, the impulse as the ship broke from orbit. The other seniors reached instinctively for the table, clawing at it for support. Valensin’s bundle of medical tools slid to the floor. Groans and bellows of protest from the ship’s fabric were like the creaking of vast old trees in a thunderstorm.

They were going down. It was what the Captain wanted.

Scorpio snarled into the communicator, “Quaiche: listen to me. We can work this out. You can have your ship—we’re already on our way—but you have to do something for me in return.”

“You can have the girl when the ship has finished its business.”

“I’m not expecting you to hand her over right now. But do one thing: stop the cathedral. Don’t take it over the bridge.”

The whisper of a voice said, “I’d love to, I really would, but I’m afraid we’re already committed.”

In the core of the cache weapon, the cascade of reactions passed an irreversible threshold. Exotic physical processes simmered, rising like boiling water. No conceivable intervention could now prevent the device from firing, short of the violent destruction of the weapon itself. Final systems checks were made, targeting and yield cross-checked countless times. The spiralling processes continued: something like a glint became a spark, which in turn became a little marble-sized sphere of naked, swelling energy. The fireball grew larger still, swallowing layer after layer of containment mechanisms. Microscopic sensors, packed around the expanding sphere, recorded squalls of particle events. Space-time itself began to curl and crisp, like the edge of a sheet of parchment held too close to a candle flame. The sphere engulfed the last bastion of containment and kept growing. The weapon sensed parts of it-self being eaten from within: glorious and chilling at the same time. In its last moments it reassigned functions from the volume around the expanding sphere, cramming more and more of its control sentience into its outer layers. Still the sphere kept growing, but now it was beginning to deform, elongating in one direction in exact accordance with prediction. A spike of annihilating force rammed forwards, blasting through a marrow of abandoned machine layers. The weapon felt it as a cold steel impalement. The tip of the spike reached beyond its armour, beyond the harness, towards the face of Haldora.

The expanding sphere had now consumed eighty per cent of the cache weapon’s volume. Shockwaves were racing towards the gas giant’s surface: in a matter of nanoseconds, the weapon would cease to exist except as a glowing cloud at one end of its beam.

It had nearly run out of viable processing room. It began to discard higher sentience functions, throwing away parts of itself. It did so with a curious discrimination, intent on preserving a tiny nugget of intelligence until the last possible moment. There were no more decisions to be made; nothing to do except await destruction. But it had to know: it had to cling to sentience long enough to know that it had done some damage.

Ninety-five per cent of the cache weapon was now a roiling ball of photo-leptonic hellfire. Its thinking systems were smeared in a thin, attenuated crust on the inside of the weapon’s skin: a crust that was itself beginning to break up, sundered and riven by the racing Shockwave of the explosion. The machine’s intelligence slid down the cognitive ladder until all that remained was a stubborn, bacterial sense of its own existence and the fact that it was there to do something.

The light rammed through the last millimetre of armour. By then, the first visual returns were arriving from Haldora. The cameras on the cache weapon’s skin relayed the news to the shrinking puddle of mind that was all that remained of the once-sly intelligence.

The beam had touched the planet. And something was happening to it, spreading away from the impact point in a ripple of optical distortion.

The mind shrivelled out of existence. The last thing it allowed itself was a dwindling thrill of consummation.

In the depths of the Lady Morwenna—in the great hall of Motive Power—several things happened almost at once. An intense flash of light flooded the hall through the narrow colourless slits of the utilitarian windows above the coupling sleeves. Glaur, the shift boss, was just blinking away the afterimages of the flash—the propulsion systems etched into his retinae in looming pink-and-green negative forms—when he saw the machinery lose its usual keen synchronisation: the scissoring aerial intricacy of rods and valves and compensators appearing, for a heart-stopping moment, to be about to work loose, threshing itself and anyone nearby into a bloody amalgam of metal and flesh.

But the instant passed: the governors and dampers worked as they were meant to, forcing the motion back into its usual syncopated rhythm. There were groans and squeals of mechanical protestation—deafening, painful—as hundreds of tonnes of moving metal struggled against the constraints of hinge-point and valve sleeve, but nothing actually worked loose, or came flying through the air towards him. Glaur noticed, then, that the emergency lights were flashing on the reactor, as well as on the servo-control boxes of the main propulsion assembly.

The wave of uncoordinated motion had been damped and controlled within the Motive Power hall, but these mechanisms were only part of the chain: the wave itself was still travelling. In half a second it passed through the airtight seals in the wall and out into vacuum. An observer, watching“ the Lady Morwenna from a distance, would have seen the usual smooth movements of the flying buttresses slip out of co-ordination. Glaur didn’t need to be outside: he knew exactly what was about to happen, saw it in his imagination with the clarity of an engineering blueprint. He even reached for a handhold before he had made a conscious decision to do so.

The Lady Morwenna stumbled. Huge reciprocating masses of moving machinery—normally counterweighted so that the walking motion of the cathedral was experienced as only the tiniest of sways even at the top of the Clocktower—were now appallingly unbalanced. The cathedral lurched first to one side, then to the other. The effect was catastrophic and predictable: the lurch sent a fresh shudder through the propulsion mechanisms, and the entire process began again even before the first lurch had been damped out.

Glaur gritted his teeth and hung on. He watched the floor tilt by entire, horrifying degrees. Klaxons tripped automatically; red emergency lights flashed from the chamber’s vaulted heights.

A voice sounded on the pneumatic speaker system. He reached for the mouthpiece, raising his own voice above the racket.

“This is the surgeon-general. What, exactly, is happening?”

“Glaur, sir. I don’t know. There was a flash… systems went berserk. If I didn’t know better I’d say someone just let off a very powerful demolition charge, hit our ”tronics boxes.“

“It wasn’t a nuke. I meant, what is happening with your control of the cathedral?”

“She’s on her own now, sir.”

“Will she topple?”

Glaur looked around. “No, sir. No.”

“Will she leave the Way?”

“No sir, not that either.”

“Very well. I just wanted to be certain.” Grelier paused: in the gap between his words Glaur heard something odd, like a kettle whistling. “Glaur… what did you mean by ‘she’s on her own’?”

“I mean, sir, that we’re on automatic control, like we’re supposed to be during times of emergency. Manual control is locked out on the twenty-six-hour timer. Captain Seyfarth made me do it, sir: said it was on Clocktower authority. So we don’t stop, sir. So we can’t stop.”

“Thank you,” Grelier said quietly.

Above them all, something was very wrong with Haldora. Where the beam from the weapon had struck the planet, some-thing like a ripple had raced out, expanding concentrically. The weapon itself was gone now; even the beam had vanished into Haldora, and only a dispersing silvery-white cloud remained at the point where the device had been activated.

But the effects continued. Within the circular interior of the expanding ripple, the usual swirls and bands of gas-giant chemistry were absent. Instead there was just a ruby-red bruise, smooth and undifferentiated. In seconds it grew to encompass the entire planet. What had been Haldora was now something like a bloodshot eye.

It stayed like that for a few seconds, staring balefully down at Hela. Then hints of patterning began to appear in the ruby-red sphere: not the commas and horsetails of random chemical boundaries, not the bands of differentiated rotation belts, not the cyclopean eyes of major storm foci. These patterns were regular and precise, like designs worked into carpets. They sharpened, as if being worked and neatened by an invisible hand. Then they shifted: now a tidily manicured ornamental labyrinth, now a suggestion of cerebral folds. The colour flicked from ruby-red to bronze to a dark silver. The planet erupted forth a thousand spikes. The spikes lingered, then collapsed back into a sea of featureless mercury. The mercury became a chequerboard; the chequerboard became a spherical city scape of fantastic complexity; the city scape became a crawling Armageddon.

The planet returned. But it wasn’t the same planet. In a blink, Haldora became another gas giant, then another—the colouring and banding different each time. Rings appeared in the sky. A garland of moons, orbiting in impossible procession. Two sets of rings, intersecting at an angle, passing through each other. A dozen perfectly square moons.

A planet with a neat chunk taken out of it, like a half-eaten wedding cake.

A planet that was a reflected mirror of stars.

A dodecahedral planet.

Nothing.

For a few seconds there was only a black sphere up there. Then the sphere began to wobble, like a balloon full of water.

At last the great concealment mechanism was breaking down.