Absolution Gap (102 page)

Only for a moment, though.

He threw the knife away, grateful for the weighty heft of the slug-gun. It had taken nerve to come aboard the ship with only knives and a few concealed gadgets, but he had always known that if he made it this far—to the point where he had a real gun in his hand—he would make it all the way through.

It was like the end of a bad dream.

“Going somewhere?”

The voice had come from behind him. But that simply wasn’t possible: he had been checking his rearguard constantly, and there had been no one coming along the corridor behind him when he knelt down to recover the slug-gun. Seyfarth was a good soldier: he never left his back uncovered for more than a few seconds.

But the voice sounded very near. Very familiar, too.

The safety catch was still off. He turned around slowly, holding the slug-gun at waist level. “I thought I took care of you,” he said.

“I need a lot of taking care of,” the pig replied. He stood there, unarmed, not even a slug-gun to his name. Looming behind him, like an adult above an infant, stood the hollow shell of a spacesuit. Seyfarth’s lip twisted in a sneer of incomprehension. The pig, just possibly, could have hidden in the darkness, or even pretended to be a body. But the hulking spacesuit? There was no conceivable way he had walked past that without noticing it. And it didn’t seem very likely that the suit could have sprinted from the far end of the corridor in the few seconds during which he’d had his back turned.

“This is a trick,” Seyfarth said, “isn’t it?”

“I’d put down that gun if I were you,” the pig said.

Seyfarth’s finger squeezed the trigger. Part of him wanted to blow the snout-faced abortion away. Another part wanted to know why the pig thought he had the
right
to speak to him in that kind of tone.

Didn’t the pig know his place?

“I hung you out to dry,” Seyfarth said. He wasn’t mistaken: this
was
the same pig. He could even see the wounds from where he had pinned him to the wall.

“Listen to me,” the pig said. “Put down the gun and we’ll talk. There are things I want you to tell me. Like what the hell Quaiche wants with my ship.”

Seyfarth touched one finger to his helmeted head, as if scratching an itch. “Which one of us is holding the gun, pig?”

“You are.”

“Right. Just felt that needed clearing up. Now step away from the suit and kneel in the shit, where you belong.”

The pig looked at him, the sly white of an eye catching the light. “Or what?”

“Or we’ll be looking at pork.”

The pig made a move towards him. It was only a flinch, but it was enough for Seyfarth. There were questions he’d have liked answered, but they would all have to wait for now. Once they had taken the ship, there would be all the time in the world for a few forensic investigations. It would actually give him something to do.

He made to squeeze the trigger. Nothing happened. Furious, imagining that the slug-gun had jammed after all, Seyfarth glanced down at the weapon.

It wasn’t the weapon that was the problem. The problem was his arm. Two spikes had appeared through it: they had shot out from one wall, speared his forearm and emerged on the other side, their sharp tips a damp ruby-red.

Seyfarth felt the pain arrive, felt the spikes grinding against bone and tendon. He bit down on the agony, sneering at the pig. “Nice . . .” he tried to say.

The spikes slid out of his arm, making a slick, slithery sound as they retracted. Seyfarth watched, fascinated and appalled, as they vanished back into the smooth wall.

“Drop the gun,” the pig said.

Seyfarth’s arm quivered. He raised the barrel towards the pig and the suit, made one last effort to squeeze the trigger. But there was something badly amiss with the anatomy of his arm. His forefinger merely spasmed, tapping pathetically against the trigger like a worm wriggling on a hook.

“I did warn you,” the pig said.

All around Seyfarth, walls, floor and ceiling erupted spikes. He felt them slide into him, freezing him in place. The gun fell from his hand, clattering to the ground through the labyrinth of interlaced metal rods.

“That’s for Orca,” the pig said.

 

It went quickly after that. The Captain’s control over his own local transformations seemed to grow in confidence and dexterity with each kill. It was, at times, quite sickening to watch. How much more terrible it must have been for the Adventists, to suddenly have the ship itself come alive and turn against them. How shocking, when the supposedly fixed surfaces of walls and floors and ceilings became mobile, crushing and pinning, maiming and suffocating. How distressing, when the fluids that ran throughout the ship—the fluids that the bilge pumps strove to contain—suddenly became the liquid instruments of murder, gushing out at high pressure, drowning hapless Adventists caught in the Captain’s hastily arranged traps. Growing up on Hela, drowning probably hadn’t been amongst the ways they expected to die. But that, Scorpio reflected, was life: full of nasty little surprises.

The tide had been turning against the Adventists, but now it was in full ebb. Scorpio felt his strength redouble, tapping into some last, unexpected reserve. He knew he was going to pay for it later, but for now it felt good to be pushing the enemy back, doing—as the Captain had promised—some actual damage. The slug-gun wasn’t designed for a pig, but that didn’t stop him finding a way to fire it. Sooner or later he was able to trade up for a shipboard boser pistol, pig-issue. Then, as he had always liked to say in Chasm City, he was really cooking.

“Do what you have to do,” the Captain told him. “I can take a little pain, for now.”

Pushing through the ship, following the Captain’s lead, he soon met up with surviving members of the Security Arm. They were shell-shocked, confused and disorganised, but on seeing him they rallied, realising that the ship had not yet fallen to the Adventists. And when word began to spread that the Captain was assisting in the effort, they fought like devils. The nature of the battle changed from minute to minute. Now it was no longer a question of securing control of their ship, but of mopping up the few outstanding pockets of Adventist resistance holed-up in volumes of the ship where the Captain had only limited control.

“I could kill them now,” he told Scorpio. “I can’t reshape those parts of me, but I can depressurise them, or flood them. It will just take a little longer than usual. I could even turn the hypometric weapon against them.”

“Inside yourself?” Scorpio asked, remembering the last time that had happened, during the calibration exercise.

“I wouldn’t do it lightly.”

Scorpio tightened his grip on the boser pistol. His heart was hammering in his chest, his eyesight and hearing no better than when he had been revived.

None of that mattered.

“I’ll deal with them,” he said. “You’ve done your bit for the day, Captain.”

“I’ll leave things to you, then,” the suit said, stepping back into a perfectly formed aperture that had just appeared in the wall. The wall resealed itself. It was as if the Captain had never been with him.

 

Beyond the
Nostalgia for Infinity,
the Captain’s manifold attention was at least partly occupied by the progress of the cache weapon. Even as the battle raged within him, even as the ship was brought slowly back under orthodox control, he was mindful of the weapon, anxious that it should not be wasted. For years he had carried the forty hell-class weapons within him, treasuring them against the predations of theft and damage. His degree of transformation had been much less than it was now, but he still felt an intense bond of care towards the weapons that had played such a central role in his recent history. Besides, the weapons themselves had been the beloved playthings of the old Triumvir, Ilia Volyova. He still had fond thoughts for the Triumvir, despite what she had done to him. As long as he remembered Ilia—who had always found time to speak to the Captain, even when he had been at his least communicative—he was not going to let her down by misusing the last of those dark toys.

Telemetry from the cache weapon reached him through multiply secure channels. The Captain had already sown tiny spysat cameras around himself during the fiercest phase of the Cathedral Guard assault. Now that same swarm of eyes permitted continuous communication with the weapon, even as the
Nostalgia for Infinity
swung around the far side of Hela.

Haldora, from the cache weapon’s perspective, now swallowed half the sky. The gas giant was a striped behemoth of primal cold oozing exotic chemistries, its bands of colour so wide that you could drown a rocky world in them. It looked very real: every sensor on the cache weapon’s harness reported exactly what would have been expected this close to a gas giant. It sniffed the cruel strength of its magnetic field, felt the hard sleet of charged particles entrained by that field. Even at extreme magnification, the whorls and flurries of the atmosphere looked absolutely convincing.

The Captain had listened to the conversations of the humans in his care, to their speculations concerning the nature of the Haldora enigma. He knew what they expected to find behind this mask of a world: a mechanism for signalling between adjacent realities, entire universes fluttering there like ribbons, adjacent braneworlds in the higher dimensional reality of the bulk: a kind of radio, capable of tuning into the whisper of gravitons. The details, as yet, didn’t matter. What they needed, now, was to make contact with the entities on the other side as quickly as possible. The suit in the Lady Morwenna was one possible means—perhaps the easiest, since it was already
open
—but it couldn’t be relied upon. If Quaiche destroyed it, then they would need to find another way to contact the shadows. Quaiche had waited until a vanishing occurred before sending his probe into the planet. They didn’t have time for that.

They needed to provoke a vanishing, to expose the machinery for themselves.

The weapon began to slow, taking up its firing posture. Within it, grave preparations were being made. Arcane physical processes began to occur: sequences of reactions, tiny at first, but growing towards an irreversible cascade. The commanding sentience of the device had settled into a state of calm acceptance. After so many years of inaction, it was now going to do the thing for which it had been created. The fact that it would die in the process did not alarm it in the slightest. It felt only a microscopic glimmer of regret that it was the last of its kind, and that no other cache weapons would be around to witness its furious proclamation.

That was the one thing their human masters had never grasped: cache weapons were intensely vain.

 

Scorpio sat at the conference table, scowling. He was alone except for a handful of seniors. Valensin was tending to his wounds: there was a small museum’s worth of antiquated medical equipment spread out on a bloodstained sheet before the pig, including bandages, scalpels, scissors, needles and various bottled ointments and sterilising agents. The doctor had already cut away part of his tunic, exposing the twin wounds where the Adventist’s throwing knives had pinned him to the wall.

“You’re lucky,” Valensin said, when he had cleaned away most of the blood and began sealing the entrance and exit wounds with an adhesive salve. “He knew what he was doing. You probably weren’t meant to die.”

“And that makes me lucky? It wasn’t remotely
unlucky
to end up impaled on a wall in the first place? Just a thought.”

“All I’m saying is, it could have been worse. It looks to me as if they were under orders to minimalise casualties, as far as possible.”

“Tell that to Orca.”

“Yes, the nerve gas was unfortunate. At some point, obviously, they were prepared to kill, but in general it appears that they considered themselves to be on holy business, like crusaders. The sword was to be used only as an instrument of last resort. But they must have known some blood would be shed.”

Urton leant across the table. Her arm was in a sling and there was a vivid purple bruise across her right cheek, but she was otherwise unhurt. “The question is, what now? We can’t just sit here and not react, Scorp. We have to take this back to Quaiche.”

The pig winced as Valensin tugged two folds of skin together, drawing a slug of adhesive across them. “That thought’s crossed my mind, believe me.”

“And?” Jaccottet asked.

“I’d like nothing more than to target all our hull defences on that cathedral and turn the fucker into a smouldering pile of rubble. But that isn’t an option, not while we’ve got people aboard it.”

“If we could get a message to Vasko and Khouri,” Urton said, “they could start doing some damage themselves. At the very least, they could find their way to safety.”

Scorpio sighed. Of all of them, why did it fall to him—the one who had the least-developed capacity for forward thinking—to point out the problems?

“This isn’t about revenge,” he said. “Believe me, I’m big on revenge. I wrote the book on retribution.” He paused, catching his breath while Valensin started fussing around with another wound, snipping away at leather and scabbed blood. “But we came here for a reason. I don’t know what Quaiche wanted with our ship, and it doesn’t look as if any of the surviving Adventists have much of an idea either. My guess is we just got caught up in some local power game, something that probably has damn all to do with the shadows. As tempting as it might be to take revenge now, it’d be the worst thing we could do in terms of our mission objective. We still have to make contact with the shadows, and our quickest route to them is inside a metal spacesuit inside the Lady Morwenna. That, people, is what we need to focus on, not on giving Quaiche the kicking he so richly deserves because he betrayed us. We can do that later, once we’ve established contact with the shadows. Believe me, I’ll be the first in line. And I won’t be operating on a minimum-casualties basis, either.”