Absolution Gap

THREE

His lover helped him out of the casket. Quaiche lay shivering on the revival couch, racked with nausea, while Morwenna attended to the many jacks and lines that plunged into his bruised baseline flesh.

“Lie still,” she said.

“I don’t feel very well.”

“Of course you don’t. What do you expect when the bastards thaw you so quickly?”

It was like being kicked in the groin, except that his groin encompassed his entire body. He wanted to curl up inside a space smaller than himself, to fold himself into a tiny knot like some bravura trick of origami. He considered throwing up, but the effort involved was much too daunting.

“They shouldn’t have taken the risk,” he said. “She knows I’m too valuable for that.” He retched: a horrible sound like a dog that had been barking too long.

“I think her patience might be a bit strained,” Morwenna said, as she dabbed at him with stinging medicinal salves.

“She knows she needs me.”

“She managed without you before. Maybe it’s dawning on her that she can manage without you again.”

Quaiche brightened. “Maybe there’s an emergency.”

“For you, perhaps.”

“Christ, that’s all I need—sympathy.” He winced as a bolt of pain hit his skull, something far more precise and targeted than the dull unpleasantness of the revival trauma.

“You shouldn’t use the Lord’s name in vain,” Morwenna said, her tone scolding. “You know it only hurts you.”

He looked into her face, forcing his eyes open against the cruel glare of the revival area. “Are you on my side or not?”

“I’m trying to help you. Hold still, I’ve nearly got the last of these lines out.” There was a final little stab of pain in his thigh as the shunt popped out, leaving a neat eyelike wound. “There, all done.”

“Until next time,” Quaiche said. “Assuming there is a next time.”

Morwenna fell still, as if something had struck her for the first time. “You’re really frightened, aren’t you?”

“In my shoes, wouldn’t you be?”

“The queen’s insane. Everyone knows that. But she’s also pragmatic enough to know a valuable resource when she sees one.” Morwenna spoke openly because she knew that the queen had no working listening devices in the revival chamber. “Look at Grelier, for pity’s sake. Do you think she’d tolerate that freak for one minute if he wasn’t useful to her?”

“That’s precisely my point,” Quaiche said, sinking into an even deeper pit of dejection and hopelessness. “The moment either of us stops being useful…” Had he felt like moving, he would have mimed drawing a knife across his throat. Instead he just made a choking sound.

“You’ve an advantage over Grelier,” Morwenna said. “You have me, an ally amongst the crew. Who does he have?”

“You’re right,” Quaiche said, “as ever.” With a tremendous effort he reached out and closed one hand around Morwenna’s steel gauntlet.

He didn’t have the heart to remind her that she was very nearly as isolated aboard the ship as he was. The one thing guaranteed to get an Ultra ostracised was having any kind of interpersonal relationship with a baseline human. Morwenna put a brave face on it, but, Quaiche knew, if he had to rely on her for help when the queen and the rest of the crew turned against him, he was already crucified.

“Can you sit up now?” she asked.

“I’ll try.”

The discomfort was abating slightly, as he had known it must do, and at last he was able to move major muscle groups without crying. He sat on the couch, his knees tucked against the hairless skin of his chest, while Morwenna gently removed the urinary catheter from his penis. He looked into her face while she worked, hearing only the whisk of metal sliding over metal. He remembered how fearful he had been when she first touched him there, her hands gleaming like shears. Making love to her was like making love to a threshing machine. Yet Morwenna had never hurt him, even when she inadvertently cut her own living parts.

“All right?” she asked.

“I’ll make it. Takes more than a quick revival to put a dent in Horris Quaiche’s day.”

“That’s the spirit,” she said, sounding less than fully convinced. She leant over and kissed him. She smelt of perfume and ozone.

“I’m glad you’re around,” Quaiche said.

“Wait here. I’ll get you something to drink.”

Morwenna moved off the revival couch, telescoping to her full height. Still unable to focus properly, he watched her slink across the room towards the hatch where various recuperative broths were dispensed. Her iron-grey dreadlocks swayed with the motion of her high-hipped piston-driven legs.

Morwenna was on her way back with a snifter of recuperative broth—chocolate laced with medichines—when the door to the chamber slid open. Two more Ultras strode into the room: a man and a woman. After them, hands tucked demurely behind his back, loomed the smaller, unaugmented figure of the surgeon-general. He wore a soiled white medical smock.

“Is he fit?” the man asked.

“You’re lucky he’s not dead,” Morwenna snapped.

“Don’t be so melodramatic,” the woman said. “He was never going to die just because we thawed him a bit faster than usual.”

“Are you going to tell us what Jasmina wants with him?”

“That’s between him and the queen,” she replied.

The man threw a quilted silver gown in Quaiche’s general direction. Morwenna’s arm whipped out in a blur of motion and caught it. She walked over to Quaiche and handed it to him.

“I’d like to know what’s going on,” Quaiche said.

“Get dressed,” the woman said. “You’re coming with us.”

He pivoted around on the couch and lowered his feet to the coldness of the floor. Now that the discomfort was wearing off he was starting to feel scared instead. His cock had shrivelled in on itself, retreating into his belly as if already making its own furtive escape plans. Quaiche put on the gown, cinching it around his waist. To the surgeon-general he said, “You had something to do with this, didn’t you?”

Grelier blinked. “My dear fellow, it was all I could do to stop them warming you even more rapidly.”

“Your time will come,” Quaiche said. “Mark my words.”

“I don’t know why you insist on that tone. You and I have a great deal in common, Horris. Two human men, alone aboard an Ultra ship? We shouldn’t be bickering, competing for prestige and status. We should be supporting each other, cementing a friendship.” Grelier wiped the back of his glove on his tunic, leaving a nasty ochre smear. “We should be allies, you and I. We could go a long way together.”

“When hell freezes over,” Quaiche replied.

The queen stroked the mottled cranium of the human skull resting on her lap. She had very long finger and toenails, painted jet-black. She wore a leather jerkin, laced across her cleavage, and a short skirt of the same dark fabric. Her black hair was combed back from her brow, save for a single neatly formed cowlick. Standing before her, Quaiche initially thought she was wearing makeup, vertical streaks of rouge as thick as candlewax running from her eyes to the curve of her upper lip. Then, joltingly, he realised that she had gouged out her eyes.

Despite this, her face still possessed a certain severe beauty.

It was the first time he had seen her in the flesh, in any of her manifestations. Until this meeting, all his dealings with her had been at a certain remove, either via alpha-compliant proxies or living intermediaries like Grelier.

He had hoped to keep things that way.

Quaiche waited several seconds, listening to his own breathing. Finally he managed, “Have I let you down, ma’am?”

“What kind of ship do you think I run, Quaiche? One where I can afford to carry baggage?”

“I can feel my luck changing.”

“A bit late for that. How many stopovers have we made since you joined the crew, Quaiche? Five, isn’t it? And what have we got to show for ourselves, after those five stopovers?”

He opened his mouth to answer her when he saw the scrimshaw suit lurking, almost lost, in the shadows behind her throne. Its presence could not be accidental.

It resembled a mummy, worked from wrought iron or some other industrialage metal. There were various heavy-duty input plugs and attachment points, and a dark grilled-over rectangle where the visor should have been. There were scabs and fillets of solder where parts had been rewelded or braised. There was the occasional smooth patch of obviously new metal.

Covering every other part of the suit, however, was an intricate, crawling complexity of carvings. Every available square centimetre had been crammed with obsessive, eye-wrenching detail. There was far too much to take in at one glance, but as the suit gyrated above him Quaiche made out fanciful serpent-necked space monsters, outrageously phallic spacecraft, screaming faces and demons, depictions of graphic sex and violence. There were spiralling narratives, cautionary tales, boastful trade episodes writ large/There were clock faces and psalms. Lines of text in languages he didn’t recognise, musical stanzas, even swathes of lovingly carved numerals. Sequences of digital code or DNA base pairs. Angels and cherubim. Snakes. A lot of snakes.

It made his head hurt just to look at it.

It was pocked and gouged by the impact spots of microme-teorites and cosmic rays, its iron-grey tainted here and there with emerald-green or bronze discoloration. There were scratchlike striations where ultra-heavy particles had gouged out their own impact furrows as they sliced by at oblique angles. And there was a fine dark seam around the whole thing where the two armoured halves could be popped open and then welded shut again.

The suit was a punishment device, its existence no more than a cruel rumour. Until this moment.

The queen put people in the suit. It kept them alive and fed them sensory information. It protected them from the sleeting radiation of interstellar flight when they were entombed, for years at a time, in the ice of the ship’s ablative shield.

The lucky ones were dead when they pulled them out of the suit.

Quaiche tried to stop the tremble in his voice. “If you look at things one way, we didn’t really… we didn’t really do too badly… all things considered. There was no material damage to the ship. No crew fatalities or major injuries. No contamination incidents. No unforeseen expenditures…” He fell silent, looking hopefully at Jasmina.

“That’s the best you can come up with? You were supposed to make us rich, Quaiche. You were supposed to turn our fortunes around in these difficult times, greasing the wheels of trade with your innate charm and grasp of planetary psychologies and landscapes. You were supposed to be our golden goose.”

He shifted uneasily.

“Yet in five systems all you found was junk.”

“You chose the systems, not me. It isn’t my fault if there wasn’t anything worth finding.”

Slowly and worryingly the queen shook her head. “No, Quaiche. Not that easy, I’m afraid. You see, a month ago we intercepted something. It was a transmission, a two-way trade dialogue between a human colony on Chaloupek and the lighthugger Faint Memory of Hokusai. Ring any bells?”

“Not really…”

But it did.

“The Hokusai was entering Gliese 664 just as we departed that system. It was the second system you swept for us. Your report was…” The queen hoisted the skull to the side of her head, listening to its chattering jaw. “Let’s see… ‘nothing of value found on Opincus or the other three terrestrial worlds; only minor items of discarded technology recovered on moons five to eight of the Haurient giant… nothing in the inner asteroid fields, D-type swarms, Trojan points or major K-belt concentrations.’”

Quaiche could see where this was heading. “And the Faint Memory of Hokusai?”

“The trade dialogue was absolutely fascinating. By all accounts, the Hokusai located a cache of buried trade items around one century old. Pre-war, pre-plague. Very valuable stuff: not merely technological artefacts, but also art and culture, much of it unique. I hear they made enough on that to buy themselves an entirely new layer of ablative hull cladding.” She looked at him expectantly. “Any comments, thoughts, on that?”

“My report was honest,” Quaiche said. “They must have got lucky, that’s all. Look, just give me another chance. Are we approaching another system?”

The queen smiled. “We’re always approaching another system. This time it’s a place called 107 Piscium, but frankly from this distance it doesn’t look much more promising than the last five. What’s to say you’re going to be any use this time?”

“Let me take the Dominatrix,” he said, knitting his hands together involuntarily. “Let me take her down into that system.”

The queen was silent for many seconds. Quaiche heard only his own breathing, punctuated now and then by the abrupt, attenuated sizzle of a dying insect or rat. Something moved languidly beyond the green glass of a hemispherical dome set into one of the chamber’s twelve walls. He sensed that he was being observed by something other than the eyeless figure in the chair. Without having been told, he understood then that the thing beyond the glass was the real queen, and that the ruined body in the seat was only a puppet that she currently inhabited. They were all true, then, all the rumours he had ever heard: the queen’s solipsism; her addiction to extreme pain as a reality-anchoring device; the vast reserve of cloned bodies she was said to keep for just that purpose.

“Have you finished, Quaiche? Have you made your case?”

He sighed. “I suppose I have.”

“Very well, then.”

She must have issued some secret command, because at that moment the door to the chamber opened again. Quaiche spun around as the blast of cold fresh air touched the nape of his neck. The surgeon-general and the two Ultras who had helped him during Quaiche’s revival entered the room.

“I’m done with him,” the queen said.

“And your intention?” Grelier asked.

Jasmina sucked at a fingernail. “I haven’t changed my mind. Put him in the scrimshaw suit.”