Absolution Gap (30 page)

Clavain stood, pushing himself up. “I don’t intend to say very much. All the evidence I’ve seen points to Scorpio having done an excellent job of running this place in my absence. I have no intention of replacing his leadership, but I will offer what guidance I can during the present crisis. I trust you’ve all had time to read the summaries Scorp and I put together, based on Khouri’s testimony?”

“We’ve read them,” said one of the former colonists—a bearded, corpulent man named Hallatt. “Whether we take any of it seriously is another thing entirely.”

“She certainly makes some unusual claims,” Clavain said, “but that in itself shouldn’t surprise us, especially given the things that happened to us after we left Yellowstone. These are unusual times. The circumstances of her arrival were bound to be a little surprising.”

“It’s not just the claims,” Hallatt said. “It’s Khouri herself. She was Ilia Volyova’s second-in-command. That’s hardly the best recommendation, as far as I’m concerned.”

Clavain raised a hand. “Volyova may well have wronged your planet, but in my view she also atoned for her sins with her last act.”

“
She
may believe she did,” Hallatt said, “but the gift of redemption lies with the sinned-against, rather than the sinner. In
my
view she was still a war criminal, and Ana Khouri was her accomplice.”

“That’s your opinion,” Clavain allowed, “but according to the laws that we all agreed to live under during the evacuation, neither Volyova nor Khouri were to be held accountable for any crimes. My only concern now is Khouri’s testimony, and whether we act upon it.”

“Just a moment,” Khouri said as Clavain sat down. “Maybe I missed something, but shouldn’t someone else be taking part in this little set-up?”

“Who did you have in mind?” Scorpio asked.

“The ship, of course. The one we happen to be sitting in.”

Scorpio scratched the fold of skin between his forehead and the upturned snout of his nose. “I don’t quite follow.”

“Captain Brannigan brought you all here, didn’t he?” Khouri asked. “Doesn’t that entitle him to a seat at this table?”

“Maybe you weren’t paying attention,” Pauline Sukhoi said. “This isn’t a ship any more. It’s a landmark.”

“You’re right to ask about the Captain,” Antoinette Bax said, her deep voice commanding immediate attention. “We’ve been trying to establish a dialogue with him almost since the
Infinity
landed.” Her many-ringed fingers were knitted together on the table, her nails painted a bright chemical green. “No joy,” she said. “He doesn’t want to talk.”

“Then the Captain’s dead?” Khouri said.

“No . . .” Bax said, looking around warily. “He still shows his face now and then.”

Pauline Sukhoi addressed Khouri again. “Might I ask something else? In your testimony you claim that Remontoire and his allies—
our
allies—have achieved significant breakthroughs in a range of areas. Drives that can’t be detected, ships that can’t be seen, weapons that cut through space-time . . . that’s quite a list.” Sukhoi’s frail, frightened voice always sounded on the verge of laughter. “All the more so given the very limited time that you’ve had to make these discoveries.”

“They weren’t discoveries,” Khouri said. “Read the summary. Aura gave us the clues to make those things, that’s all. We didn’t
discover
anything.”

“Let’s talk about Aura,” Scorpio said. “In fact, let’s go right back to the beginning, from the moment our two forces separated around Delta Pavonis.
Zodiacal Light
was badly damaged, we know that much. But it shouldn’t have taken more than two or three years for the self-repair systems to patch it up again, provided you fed them with enough raw material. Yet we’ve been waiting here for twenty-three years. What took you so long?”

“The repairs took longer than we anticipated,” Khouri replied. “We had problems obtaining the raw materials now that the Inhibitors had so much of the system under their control.”

“But not twenty years, surely,” said Scorpio.

“No, but once we’d been there a few years it became clear we were in no immediate danger of persecution by the Inhibitors provided we stayed near the Hades object, the re-engineered neutron star. That meant we had more time to study the thing. We were scared at first, but the Inhibitors always kept clear of it, as if there was something about it they didn’t like. Actually, Thorn and I had already guessed as much.”

“Tell us a bit more about Thorn,” Clavain said gently.

They all heard the crack in her voice. “Thorn was the resistance leader, the man who made life difficult for the regime until the Inhibitors showed up.”

“Volyova and you struck up some kind of relationship with him, didn’t you?” Clavain asked.

“He was our way of getting the people to accept our help to evacuate. Because of that I had a lot of involvement with Thorn. We got to know each other quite well.” She faltered into silence.

“Take your time,” Clavain said, with a kindness Scorpio had not heard in his voice lately.

“One time, stupid curiosity drew Thorn and I too close to the Inhibitors. They had us surrounded, and they’d even started pushing their probes into our heads, drinking our memories. But then something—some entity—intervened and saved us. Whatever it was, it appeared to originate around Hades. Maybe it was even an extension of Hades itself, another kind of probe.”

Scorpio tapped the summary before him. “You reported contact with a human mind.”

“It was Dan Sylveste,” she said, “the same self-obsessed bastard who started all this in the first place. We know he found a way into the Hades matrix all those years ago, using the same route that the Amarantin took to escape the Inhibitors.”

“And you think Sylveste—or whatever he had become by then—intervened to save you and Thorn?” Clavain asked.

“I know he did. When his mind touched mine, I got a blast of . . . call it remorse. As if the penny had finally dropped about how big a screw-up he’d been, and the damage he’d done in the name of curiosity. It was as if he was ready, in a small way, to start making amends.”

Clavain smiled. “Better late than never.”

“He couldn’t work miracles, though,” Khouri said. “The envoy that Hades sent to Roc to help us was enough to intimidate the Inhibitor machines, but it didn’t do more than hamper them, allowing us to make it back to Ilia. But it was a sign, at least, that if we stood a hope of doing something about the Inhibitors, the place to look for help was in Hades. Some of us had to go back inside.”

“You were one of them?” Clavain said.

“Yes,” she said. “I did it the same way I’d done it before, because I knew that would work. Not via the front door inside the thing orbiting Hades, the way Sylveste did it, but by falling towards the star. By dying, in other words; letting myself get ripped apart by the gravitational field of Hades and then reassembled inside it. I don’t remember any of that. I guess I’m grateful.”

It was clear to Scorpio that even Khouri had little idea of what had really happened to her during her entry into the Hades object. Her earlier account of things had made it clear that she believed herself to have been physically reconstituted within the star, preserved in a tiny, quivering bubble of flat space-time, so that she was immune to the awesome crush of Hades’ gravitational field. Perhaps that had indeed been the case. Equally, it might have been some fanciful fiction created for her by her once-human hosts. All that mattered, ultimately, was that there was a way to communicate with entities running inside the Hades matrix—and, perhaps more importantly, a way to get back out into the real universe.

Scorpio was contemplating that when his communicator buzzed discreetly. As he stood up from the table, Khouri halted her monologue.

Irritated at the interruption, Scorpio lifted the communicator to his face and unspooled the privacy earpiece. “This had better be good.”

The voice that came was thready and distant. He recognised it as belonging to the Security Arm guard that had met them at the landing stage. “Thought you needed to know this, sir.”

“Make it quick.”

“Class-three apparition reported on five eighty-seven. That’s the highest in nearly six months.”

As if he needed to be told. “Who saw it?”

“Palfrey, a worker in bilge management.”

Scorpio lowered his voice and pressed the earpiece in more tightly. He was conscious that he had the full attention of everyone in the room. “What did Palfrey see?”

“The usual, sir: not very much, but enough that we’ll have a hard time persuading him to go that deep again.”

“Interview him, get it on record, make it clear that he speaks of this to no one. Understood?”

“Understood, sir.”

“Then find him another line of work.” Scorpio paused, frowning as he thought through all the implications. “On second thoughts, I’d like a word with him as well. Don’t let him leave the ship.”

Without waiting for a reply, Scorpio broke the link, spooled the earpiece back into the communicator and returned to the table. He sat down, gesturing at Khouri for her to continue.

“What was all that about?” she asked.

“Nothing that need worry you.”

“I’m worried.”

He felt a splinter of pain between his eyes. He had been getting a lot of headaches lately, and this kind of day didn’t help. “Someone reported an apparition,” he said, “one of the Captain’s little manifestations that Antoinette mentioned. Doesn’t mean anything.”

“No? I show up,
he
shows up, and you think that doesn’t mean something?” Khouri shook her head. “I know what it means, even if you don’t. The Captain understands there’s some heavy stuff going down.”

The splinter of pain had become a little broken arrowhead. He pinched the bridge of skin between snout and forehead. “Tell us about Sylveste,” he said with exaggerated patience.

Khouri sighed, but did as she was asked. “There was a kind of welcoming committee inside the star, Sylveste and his wife, just as I’d last met them. It even looked like the same room—a scientific study full of old bones and equipment. But it didn’t
feel
the same. It was as if I was taking part in some kind of parlour game, but I was the only one not in on it. I wasn’t talking to Sylveste any more, if I ever had been.”

“An impostor?” Clavain asked.

“No, not that. I was talking with the genuine article . . . I’m sure of that . . . but at the same time it wasn’t Sylveste, either. It was as if . . . he was condescending to me, putting on a mask so that I’d have something familiar to talk to. I knew I wasn’t getting the whole story. I was getting the comforting version, with the creepy stuff taken out. I don’t think Sylveste thought I was
capable
of dealing with what he’d really become, after all that time.” She smiled. “I think he thought he’d blow my mind.”

“After sixty years in the Hades matrix, he might have,” Clavain said.

“All the same,” Khouri said, “I don’t think there was any actual deception. Nothing that wasn’t absolutely essential for the sake of my sanity, anyhow.”

“Tell us about your later visits,” Clavain said.

“I went in alone the first few times. Then it was always with someone else—Remontoire sometimes, Thorn, a few other volunteers.”

“But always you?” Clavain asked.

“The matrix accepted me. No one was willing to take the risk of going in without me.”

“I don’t blame them.” Clavain paused, but it was apparent to all present that he had something more to say. “But Thorn died, didn’t he?”

“We were falling towards the neutron star,” she said, “just the way we always did, and then something hit us. Maybe an energy burst from a stray weapon, we’ll never know for sure; it might have been orbiting Hades for a million years, or it could have been something from the Inhibitors, something they risked placing that close to the star. It wasn’t enough to destroy the capsule, but it was enough to kill Thorn.”

She stopped speaking, allowing an uncomfortable silence to invade the room. Scorpio looked around, observing that everyone had their eyes downcast; that no one dared look at Khouri, not even Hallatt.

Khouri resumed speaking. “The star captured me alive, but Thorn was dead. It couldn’t reassemble what was left of him into a living being.”

“I’m sorry,” Clavain said, his voice barely audible.

“There’s something else,” Khouri said, her voice nearly as quiet.

“Go on.”

“Part of Thorn did survive. We’d made love on the long fall to Hades, and so when I went into the star, I took a part of him with me. I was pregnant.”

Clavain waited a decent while before answering, allowing her words to settle in, giving them the dignified space they warranted. “And Thorn’s child?”

“She’s Aura,” Khouri said. “The baby Skade stole from me. The child I came here to get back.”

The room in which Palfrey had been told to wait for Scorpio was a small annexe off one of the larger storage areas used by bilge management, the branch of the administration tasked with keeping the lower levels of the ship as dry as possible. The curved walls of the little chamber were layered with a glossy grey-green plaque that had hardened into stringy, waxy formations. The smooth floor was sheet metal. Anchored to it with thick bolts was a small, battered desk from Central Amenities, upon which lay an ashtray, a half-empty beaker of something tarlike and the parts of several dismantled bilge pump assemblies. Bookended by the pump parts was what Scorpio took to be a vacuum helmet of antique design, silver paint peeling from its metal shell. Behind the desk, Palfrey sat chain-smoking, his eyes red with fatigue, his sparse black hair messed across the sunburned pink of his scalp. He wore khaki overalls with many pockets, and some kind of breathing apparatus hung around his neck on frayed cords.

“I understand you saw something,” Scorpio said, pulling up another chair, the legs squealing horribly against the metal, and sitting in it the wrong way around, facing the man with his legs splayed either side of the backrest.