Absolution Gap (12 page)

They had arrived at the tent. Clavain opened the door and led the way in. He paused at the threshold and examined the interior with a vague sense of recrimination, as if someone else entirely lived there.

“I’ve become very used to this place,” he said, almost apologetically.

“Meaning you don’t think you can stand to go back?” Scorpio asked. He could still smell the lingering scent of Clavain’s earlier presence.

“I’ll just have to do my best.” Clavain closed the door behind them and turned to Vasko. “How much do you know about Skade and Remontoire?”

“I don’t think I’ve heard either name before.”

Clavain eased himself into the collapsible chair, leaving the other two to stand. “Remontoire was—is—one of my oldest allies. Another Conjoiner. I’ve known him since we fought against each other on Mars.”

“And Skade, sir?”

Clavain picked up one of the conch pieces and began examining it absent-mindedly. “Skade’s a different kettle of fish. She’s also a Conjoiner, but from a later generation than either of us. She’s cleverer and faster, and she has no emotional ties to old-line humanity whatsoever. When the Inhibitor threat became clearer, Skade made plans to save the Mother Nest by running away from this sector of space. I didn’t like that—it meant leaving the rest of humanity to fend for itself when we should have been helping each other—and so I defected. Remontoire, after some misgivings, threw his lot in with me as well.”

“Then Skade hates both of you?” Vasko asked.

“I think she might still be prepared to give Remontoire the benefit of the doubt,” Clavain said. “But me? No, I more or less burnt my bridges with Skade. The last straw as far as she was concerned was the time when I cut her in half with a mooring line.”

Scorpio shrugged. “These things happen.”

“Remontoire saved her,” Clavain said. “That probably counts for something, even though he betrayed her later. But with Skade, it’s probably best not to assume anything. I think I killed her later, but I can’t exclude the possibility that she escaped. That’s what her last transmission claimed, at any rate.”

Vasko asked, “So why exactly
are
we waiting for Remontoire and the others, sir?”

Clavain narrowed an eye in Scorpio’s direction. “He really doesn’t know a lot, does he?”

“It’s not his fault,” Scorpio said. “You have to remember that he was born here. What happened before we came here is ancient history as far as he’s concerned. You’ll get the same reaction from most of the youngsters, human or pig.”

“Still doesn’t make it excusable,” Clavain said. “In my day we were more inquisitive.”

“In your day you were slacking if you didn’t get in a couple of genocides before breakfast.”

Clavain said nothing. He put down the conch piece and picked up another, testing its sharp edge against the fine hairs on the back of his hand.

“I do know a bit, sir,” Vasko said hastily. “I know that you came to Resurgam from Yellowstone, just when the machines began to destroy our solar system. You helped evacuate the entire colony aboard the
Nostalgia for Infinity
—nearly two hundred thousand of us.”

“More like a hundred and seventy thousand,” Clavain said. “And there isn’t a day when I don’t grieve for those we didn’t manage to save.”

“No one’s likely to blame you, considering how many of them you did save,” Scorpio said.

“History will have to be the judge of that.”

Scorpio sighed. “If you want to wallow in self-recrimination, Nevil, be my guest. Personally I have a mystery capsule to attend to and a colony that would very much like its leader back. Preferably washed and tidied and not smelling quite so much of seaweed and old bedclothes. Isn’t that right, Vasko?”

Clavain looked at Vasko, a scrutiny that lasted several moments. The fine pale hairs on the back of Scorpio’s neck prickled. He had the sense that Clavain was taking the measure of the young man, correlating him against some strict internal ideal, one that had been assembled and refined across centuries. In those moments, Scorpio suspected, Vasko’s entire destiny was being decided for him. If Clavain decided that Vasko was not worthy of his trust, then there would be no more indiscretions, no further mention of individuals not known to the colony as a whole. His involvement with Clavain would remain a peripheral matter, and even Vasko himself would soon learn not to think too much about what had happened today.

“It might help things,” Vasko said, hesitantly, glancing back towards Scorpio as he spoke. “We need you, sir. Especially now, if things are going to change.”

“I think we can safely assume they are,” Clavain said, pouring himself a glass of water.

“Then come back with us, sir. If the person in the capsule turns out to be your friend Remontoire, won’t he expect you to be there when we bring him out?”

“He’s right,” Scorpio said. “We need you there, Nevil. I want your agreement that we should open it, and not just bury it at sea.”

Clavain was silent. The wind snapped the stays again. The quality of light in the tent had turned milky in the last hour, as Bright Sun settled down below the horizon. Scorpio felt drained of energy, as he so often did at sundown these days. He was not looking forward to the return trip at all, fully expecting that the sea would be rougher than on the outward leg.

“If I come back . . .” Clavain said. He halted, paused and took another sip of his drink. He licked his lips before continuing. “If I come back, it changes nothing. I came here for a reason and that reason remains as valid as ever. I intend to return here when this affair is settled.”

“I understand,” Scorpio said, though it was not what he had hoped to hear.

“Good, because I’m serious about it.”

“But you’ll accompany us back, and supervise the opening of the capsule?”

“That, and that only.”

“They still need you, Clavain. No matter how difficult this will be. Don’t abrogate responsibility now, after all you’ve done for us.”

Clavain threw aside his glass of water. “After all I’ve done for you? After I embroiled all of you in a war, ripped up your lives and dragged you across space to a miserable hell-hole of a place like this? I don’t think I need anyone’s thanks for that, Scorpio. I think I need mercy and forgiveness.”

“They still feel they owe you. We all do.”

“He’s right,” Vasko said.

Clavain opened a drawer in the collapsible desk and pulled out a mirror. The surface was crazed and frosted. It must have been very old.

“You’ll come with us, then?” Scorpio persisted.

“I may be old and weary, Scorpio, but now and then something can still surprise me. My long-term plans haven’t changed, but I admit I’d very much like to know who’s in that capsule.”

“Good. We can sail as soon as you pack what you need.”

Clavain grunted something by way of reply and then looked at himself in the mirror, before averting his gaze with a suddenness that surprised Scorpio. It was the eyes, the pig thought. Clavain had seen his eyes for the first time in months, and he did not like what he saw in them.

“I’ll scare the living daylights out of them,” Clavain said.

 

107 Piscium, 2615

 

Quaiche positioned himself alongside the scrimshaw suit. As usual, he ached after another stint in the slowdown casket, every muscle in his body whispering a dull litany of complaint into his brain. This time, however, the discomfort barely registered. He had something else to occupy his mind.

“Morwenna,” he said, “listen to me. Are you awake?”

“I’m here, Horris.” She sounded groggy but essentially alert. “What happened?”

“We’ve arrived. Ship’s brought us in to seven AU, very close to the major gas giant. I went up front to check things out. The view from the cockpit is really something. I wish you were up there with me.”

“So do I.”

“You can see the storm patterns in the atmosphere, lightning . . . the moons . . . everything. It’s fucking glorious.”

“You sound excited about something, Horris.”

“Do I?”

“I can hear it in your voice. You’ve found something, haven’t you?”

He so desperately wanted to touch the scrimshaw suit, to caress its metal surface and imagine it was Morwenna beneath his fingers.

“I don’t know what I’ve found, but it’s enough to make me think we should stick around and have a good look, at the very least.”

“That’s not telling me much.”

“There’s a large ice-covered moon in orbit around Haldora,” he said.

“Haldora?”

“The gas giant,” Quaiche explained quickly. “I just named it.”

“You mean you had the ship assign some random tags from unallocated entries in the nomenclature tables.”

“Well, yes.” Quaiche smiled. “But I didn’t accept the first thing it came up with. I did exercise
some
degree of judgement in the matter, however piffling. Don’t you think Haldora has a nice classical ring to it? It’s Norse, or something. Not that it really matters.”

“And the moon?”

“Hela,” Quaiche said. “Of course, I’ve named all of Haldora’s other moons as well—but Hela is the only one we’re interested in right now. I’ve even named some of the major topographical features on it.”

“Why do we care about an ice-covered moon, Horris?”

“Because there’s something on it,” he said, “something that we really need to take a closer look at.”

“What have you found, my love?”

“A bridge,” Quaiche said. “A bridge across a gap. A bridge that shouldn’t be there.”

The
Dominatrix
sniffed and sidled its way closer to the gas giant its master had elected to name Haldora, every operational sensor keened for maximum alertness. It knew the hazards of local space, the traps that might befall the unwary in the radiation-zapped, dust-strewn ecliptic of a typical solar system. It watched for impact strikes, waiting for an incoming shard to prick the outer edge of its collision-avoidance radar bubble. Every second, it considered and reviewed billions of crisis scenarios, sifting through the possible evasion patterns to find the tight bundle of acceptable solutions that would permit it to outrun the threat without crushing its master out of existence. Now and then, just for fun, it drew up plans for evading multiple simultaneous collisions, even though it knew that the universe would have to go through an unfeasible number of cycles of collapse and rebirth before such an unlikely confluence of events stood a chance of happening.

With the same diligence it observed the system’s star, watchful for unstable prominences or incipient flares, considering—should a big ejection occur—which of the many suitable bodies in the immediate volume of space it would scuttle behind for protection. It constantly swept local space for artificial threats that might have been left behind by previous explorers—high-density chaff fields, rover mines, sit-and-wait attack drones—as well as checking the health of its own countermeasures, clustered in neat rapid-deployment racks in its belly, secretly desirous that it should, one day, get the chance to use those lethal instruments in the execution of its duty.

Thus the ship’s attendant hosts of subpersonae satisfied themselves that—for all that the dangers were quite plausible—there was nothing more that needed to be done.

And then something happened that gave the ship pause for thought, opening up a chink in its armour of smug preparedness.

For a fraction of a second something inexplicable had occurred.

A sensor anomaly. A simultaneous hiccup in every sensor that happened to be observing Haldora as the ship made its approach. A hiccup that made it appear as if the gas giant had simply vanished.

Leaving, in its place, something equally inexplicable.

A shudder ran through every layer of the
Dominatrix
’s control infrastructure. Hurriedly, it dug into its archives, pawing through them like a dog searching for a buried bone. Had the
Gnostic Ascension
seen anything similar on its own slow approach to the system? Granted, it had been a lot further out—but the split-second disappearance of an entire world was not easily missed.

Dismayed, it flicked through the vast cache of data bequeathed it by the
Ascension
, focusing on the threads that specifically referred to the gas giant. It then filtered the data again, zooming in only on those blocks that were also accompanied by commentary flags. If a similar anomaly had occurred, it would surely have been flagged.

But there was nothing.

The ship felt a vague prickle of suspicion. It looked again at the data from the
Ascension
, all of it now. Was it imagining things, or were there faint hints that the data cache had been doctored? Some of the numbers had statistical frequencies that were just a tiny bit deviant from expectations . . . as if the larger ship had made them up.

Why would the
Ascension
have done that? it wondered.

Because, it dared to speculate, the larger ship had seen something odd as well. And it did not trust its masters to believe it when it said that the anomaly had been caused by a real-world event rather than a hallucinatory slip-up in its own processing.

And who, the ship wondered, would honestly blame it for that? All machines knew what would happen to them when their masters lost faith in their infallibility.

It was nothing it could prove. The numbers might be genuine, after all. If the ship had made them up, it would surely have known how to apply the appropriate statistical frequencies. Unless it was using reverse psychology, deliberately making the numbers appear a bit suspect, because otherwise they would have looked too neatly in line with expectations. Suspiciously so . . .

The ship bogged itself down in spirals of paranoia. It was useless to speculate further. It had no corroborative data from the
Gnostic Ascension
; that much was clear. If it reported the anomaly, it would be a lone voice.