Absolution Gap (13 page)

And everyone knew what happened to lone voices.

It returned to the problem in hand. The world had returned after vanishing. The anomaly had not, thus far, repeated itself. Closer examination of the data showed that the moons—including Hela, the one Quaiche was interested in—had remained in orbit even when the gas giant had ceased to exist. This, clearly, made no sense. Nor did the apparition that had materialised, for a fleeting instant, in its place.

What was it to do?

It made a decision: it would wipe the specific facts of the vanishing from its own memories, just as the
Gnostic Ascension
might have done, and it, too, would populate the empty fields with made-up numbers. But it would continue to keep an observant eye on the planet. If it did something strange again, the ship would pay due attention, and then—perhaps—it would inform Quaiche of what had happened.

But not before then, and not without a great deal of trepidation.

While Vasko helped Clavain with his packing, Scorpio stepped outside the tent and, tugging aside his sleeve to reveal his communicator, opened a channel to Blood. He kept his voice low as he spoke to the other pig.

“I’ve got him. Needed a bit of persuading, but he’s agreed to come back with us.”

“You don’t sound overjoyed.”

“Clavain still has one or two issues he needs to work through.”

Blood snorted. “Sounds a bit ominous. Hasn’t gone and flipped his lid, has he?”

“I don’t know. Once or twice he mentioned seeing things.”

“Seeing things?”

“Figures in the sky, that worried me a bit—but it’s not as if he was ever the easiest man to read. I’m hoping he’ll thaw out a bit when he gets back to civilisation.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“I don’t know.” Scorpio spoke with exaggerated patience. “I’m just working on the assumption that we’re better off with him than without him.”

“Good,” Blood said doubtfully. “In which case you can skip the boat. We’re sending a shuttle.”

Scorpio frowned, pleased and confused at the same time. “Why the VIP treatment? I thought the idea was to keep this whole exercise low-profile.”

“It was, but there’s been a development.”

“The capsule?”

“Spot on,” Blood said. “It’s only gone and started warming up. Fucking thing’s sparked into automatic revival mode. Bio-indicators changed status about an hour ago. It’s started waking whoever or whatever’s inside it.”

“Right. Great. Excellent. And there’s nothing you can do about it?”

“We can just about repair a sewage pump, Scorp. Anything cleverer than that is a bit outside of our remit right now. Clavain might have a shot at slowing it down, of course . . .”

With his head full of Conjoiner implants, Clavain could talk to machines in a way that no one else on Ararat could.

“How long have we got?”

“About eleven hours.”

“Eleven hours. And you waited until now to tell me this?”

“I wanted to see if you were bringing Clavain back with you.”

Scorpio wrinkled his nose. “And if I’d told you I wasn’t?”

Blood laughed. “Then we’d be getting our boat back, wouldn’t we?”

“You’re a funny pig, Blood, but don’t make a career out of it.”

Scorpio killed the link and returned to the tent, where he revealed the change of plan. Vasko, with barely concealed excitement, asked why it had been altered. Scorpio, anxious not to introduce any factor that might upset Clavain’s decision, avoided the question.

“You can take back as much stuff as you like,” Scorpio told Clavain, looking at the miserable bundle of personal effects Clavain had assembled. “We don’t have to worry about capsizing now.”

Clavain gathered the bundle and passed it to Vasko. “I already have all I need.”

“Fine,” Scorpio said. “I’ll make sure the rest of your things are looked after when we send someone out to dismantle the tent.”

“The tent stays here,” Clavain said. Coughing, he pulled on a heavy full-length black coat. He used his long-nailed fingers to brush his hair away from his eyes, sweeping it back over his crown; it fell in white and silver waves over the high stiff collar of the coat. When he had stopped coughing he added, “And my things stay in the tent as well. You really weren’t listening, were you?”

“I heard you,” Scorpio said. “I just didn’t
want
to hear you.”

“Start listening, friend. That’s all I ask of you.” Clavain patted him on the back. He reached for the cloak he had been wearing earlier, fingered the fabric and then put it aside. Instead he opened the desk and removed an object sheathed in a black leather holster.

“A gun?” Scorpio asked.

“Something more reliable,” Clavain said. “A knife.”

 

107 Piscium, 2615

 

Quaiche worked his way along the absurdly narrow companionway that threaded the
Dominatrix
from nose to tail. The ship ticked and purred around him, like a room full of well-oiled clocks.

“It’s a bridge. That’s all I can tell at the moment.”

“What type of bridge?” Morwenna asked.

“A long, thin one, like a whisker of glass. Very gently curved, stretching across a kind of ravine or fissure.”

“I think you’re getting overexcited. If it’s a bridge, wouldn’t someone else have seen it already? Leaving aside whoever put it there in the first place.”

“Not necessarily,” Quaiche said. He had thought of this already, and had what he considered to be a fairly plausible explanation. He tried not to make it sound too well rehearsed as he recounted it. “For a start, it isn’t at all obvious. It’s big, but if you weren’t looking carefully, you might easily miss it. A quick sweep through the system wouldn’t necessarily have picked it up. The moon might have had the wrong face turned to the observer, or the shadows might have hidden it, or the scanning resolution might not have been good enough to pick up such a delicate feature . . . it’d be like looking for a cobweb with a radar. No matter how careful you are, you’re not going to see it unless you use the right tools.” Quaiche bumped his head as he wormed around the tight right angle that permitted entry into the excursion bay. “Anyway, there’s no evidence that anyone ever came here before us. The system’s a blank in the nomenclature database—that’s why we got first dibs on the name. If someone ever did come through before, they couldn’t even be bothered tossing a few classical references around, the lazy sods.”

“But someone must have been here before,” Morwenna said, “or there wouldn’t be a bridge.”

Quaiche smiled. This was the part he had been looking forward to. “That’s just the point. I don’t think anyone did build this bridge.” He wriggled free into the cramped volume of the excursion bay, lights coming on as the chamber sensed his body heat. “No one human, at any rate.”

Morwenna, to her credit, took this last revelation in her stride. Perhaps he was easier to read than he imagined.

“You think you’ve stumbled on an alien artefact, is that it?”

“No,” Quaiche said. “I don’t think I’ve stumbled on
an
alien artefact. I think I’ve stumbled on
the
fucking alien artefact to end them all. I think I’ve found the most amazing, beautiful object in the known universe.”

“What if it’s something natural?”

“If I could show you the images, rest assured that you would immediately dismiss such trifling concerns.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be so hasty, all the same. I’ve seen what nature can do, given time and space. Things you wouldn’t believe could be anything other than the work of intelligent minds.”

“Me, too,” he said. “But this is something different. Trust me, all right?”

“Of course I’ll trust you. It’s not as if I have a lot of choice in the matter.”

“Not quite the answer I was hoping for,” Quaiche said, “but I suppose it’ll have to do for now.”

He turned around in the tight confines of the bay. The entire space was about the size of a small washroom, with something of the same antiseptic lustre. A tight squeeze at the best of times, but even more so now that the bay was occupied by Quaiche’s tiny personal spacecraft, clamped on to its berthing cradle, poised above the elongated trap door that allowed access to space.

With his usual furtive admiration, Quaiche stroked the smooth armour of the
Scavenger’s Daughter
. The ship purred at his touch, shivering in her harness.

“Easy, girl,” Quaiche whispered.

The little craft looked more like a luxury toy than the robust exploration vessel it actually was. Barely larger than Quaiche himself, the sleek vessel was the product of the last wave of high Demarchist science. Her faintly translucent aerodynamic hull resembled something that had been carved and polished with great artistry from a single hunk of amber. Mechanical viscera of bronze and silver glimmered beneath the surface. Flexible wings curled tightly against her flanks, various sensors and probes tucked back into sealed recesses within the hull.

“Open,” Quaiche whispered.

The ship did something that always made his head hurt. With a flourish, various parts of the hull hitherto apparently seamlessly joined to their neighbours slid or contracted, curled or twisted aside, revealing in an eyeblink the tight cavity inside. The space—lined with padding, life-support apparatus, controls and read-outs—was just large enough for a prone human being. There was something both obscene and faintly seductive about the way the machine seemed to invite him into herself.

By rights, he ought to have been filled with claustrophobic anxiety at the thought of climbing into her. But instead he looked forward to it, prickling with eagerness. Rather than feeling trapped within the amber translucence of the hull, he felt connected through it to the rich immensity of the universe. The tiny jewel-like ship had enabled him to skim deep into the atmospheres of worlds, even beneath the surfaces of oceans. The ship’s transducers relayed ambient data to him through all his senses, including touch. He had felt the chill of alien seas, the radiance of alien sunsets. In his five previous survey operations for the queen he had seen miracles and wonders, drunk in the giddy ecstasy of it all. It was merely unfortunate that none of those miracles and wonders had been the kind you could take away and sell at a profit.

Quaiche lowered himself into the
Daughter
. The ship oozed and shifted around him, adjusting to match his shape.

“Horris?”

“Yes, love?”

“Horris, where are you?”

“I’m in the excursion bay, inside the
Daughter
.”

“No, Horris.”

“I have to. I have to go down to see what that thing really is.”

“I don’t want you to leave me.”

“I know. I don’t want to leave either. But I’ll still be in contact. The timelag won’t be bad; it’ll be just as if I’m right next to you.”

“No, it won’t.”

He sighed. He had always known this would be the difficult part. More than once it had crossed his mind that perhaps the kindest thing would be to leave without telling her, and just hope that the relayed communications gave nothing away. Knowing Morwenna, however, she would have seen through this gambit very quickly.

“I’ll be quick, I promise. I’ll be in and out in a few hours.” A day, more likely, but that was still a “few” hours, wasn’t it? Morwenna would understand.

“Why can’t you just take the
Dominatrix
closer?”

“Because I can’t risk it,” Quaiche said. “You know how I like to work. The
Dominatrix
is big and heavy. It has armour and range, but it lacks agility and intelligence. If we—I—run into anything nasty, the
Daughter
can get me out of harm’s way a lot faster. This little ship is cleverer than me. And we can’t risk damaging or losing the
Dominatrix
. The
Daughter
doesn’t have the range to catch up with the
Gnostic Ascension
. Face it, love, the
Dominatrix
is our ticket out of here. We can’t place it in harm’s way.” Hastily he added, “Or you, for that matter.”

“I don’t care about getting back to the
Ascension
. I’ve burned my bridges with that power-crazed slut and her toadying crew.”

“It’s not as if I’m in a big hurry to get back there myself, but the fact is we need Grelier to get you out of that suit.”

“If we stay here, there’ll be other Ultras along eventually.”

“Yeah,” Quaiche said, “and they’re all such nice people, aren’t they? Sorry, love, but this is definitely a case of working with the devil you know. Look, I’ll be quick. I’ll stay in constant voice contact. I’ll give you a guided tour of that bridge so good you’ll be seeing it in your mind’s eye, just as if you were there. I’ll sing to you. I’ll tell you jokes. How does that sound?”

“I’m scared. I know you have to do this, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m still scared.”

“I’m scared as well,” he told her. “I’d be mad not be scared. And I really don’t want to leave you. But I have no choice.”

She was quiet for a moment. Quaiche busied himself checking the systems of the little ship; as each element came on line, he felt a growing anticipatory thrill.

Morwenna spoke again. “If it is a bridge, what are you going to do with it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, how big is it?”

“Big. Thirty, forty kilometres across.”

“In which case you can’t very well bring it back with you.”

“Mm. You’re right. Got me there. What was I thinking?”

“What I mean, Horris, is that you’ll have to find a way to make it valuable to Jasmina, even though it has to stay on the planet.”

“I’ll think of something,” Quaiche said, with a brio he did not feel. “At the very least Jasmina can cordon off the planet and sell tickets to anyone who wants to take a closer look. Anyway, if they built a bridge, they might have built something else. Whoever
they
were.”