Absolution Gap (43 page)

Clavain moved, his knife humming in his hand. “We’ll have to trust that the stuff remains dormant,” he said.

“It’s stayed dormant this long,” Jaccottet said. “Why would it wake up now?”

“We’re heat sources,” Clavain said. “That
might
make a tiny bit of difference.”

Khouri pushed through into the belly of the ruined ship. Her torchlight bounced back through the gash, picking out the stepped edges of the froth. Under a fine patina of ice the machinery gleamed like freshly hewn coal. Where Jaccottet had rubbed his fingers across it, however, the stuff was pure black, lacking any highlights or lustre.

“There’s more of the shit in here,” she said. “It’s spread over everything, like black vomit.” The torchlight played around again, their shadows wheeling over the walls like stalking ogres. “But it doesn’t seem to be any more active than the stuff outside.”

“All the same,” Clavain said, “don’t touch it, just to be on the safe side.”

“It wasn’t on my to-do list,” Khouri replied.

“Good. Anything else?”

“The music’s louder. It comes in blasts, speeded up. It’s as if I almost recognise it.”

“I do recognise it,” Clavain said. “It’s Bach—Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, if I’m not mistaken.”

Scorpio turned to his Security Arm man. “I want you to stay out here. I can’t afford to leave this exit uncovered.”

Jaccottet knew better than to argue.

Scorpio and Clavain climbed in after Khouri. Clavain played his torch around the mangled interior of this part of the corvette, pausing now and then as the beam alighted on some recognisable but damaged structure. The black invasion resembled a prolific fungal growth that had all but consumed the fabric of the spacecraft.

The hull, Scorpio realised, was a shattered ruin, barely holding itself together. He watched where he put his feet.

“It subsumes,” Clavain said quietly, as if wary—despite the intermittent pulses of music—of alerting the machinery. “It only takes one element to invade a whole ship. Then it eats its way through the entire thing, converting as it goes.”

“What are those little black cubes made of?” asked Scorpio.

“Almost nothing,” Clavain told him. “Just pure force maintained by a tiny mechanism deep inside, like the nucleus of an atom. Except we never got a look at the mechanism.”

“I take it you had a go?”

“We removed some cubic elements from Galiana’s crew by mechanical force, breaking the inter-cube bonds. They just shrank away to nothing, leaving a tiny pile of grey dust. We presumed that was the machinery, but by then there wasn’t a lot it could tell us. Reverse engineering wasn’t really an option.”

“We’re in a lot of trouble, aren’t we?” Scorpio said.

“Yes, we’re in trouble,” Khouri said. “You’re right about that part. Matter of fact, we probably don’t know how much trouble we really are in. But understand one thing: we’re not dead, not yet, and not while we have Aura.”

“You think she’ll make that much of a difference?” Clavain asked.

“She made a difference already, guy. We wouldn’t have made it to this system if she hadn’t.”

“Do you still think she’s here?” Scorpio asked her.

“She’s here. Just can’t say where.”

“I’m picking up signals as well,” Clavain said, “but they’re fractured and confused. Too many echoes from all the half-functioning systems in this ship. I can’t say if it’s one source or several.”

“So what do we do?” Scorpio asked.

Clavain angled his torch into the gloom. The beam knifed against fabulous crenellations and castellations of frozen black cubes. “Back there should be the propulsion systems compartment,” he said. “Not a very likely place to look for survivors.” He swung around, hunting with the beam, squinting at the unfamiliarity of it all. “Through here, I think. It seems to be the source of the music, as well. Careful, it’ll be a tight squeeze.”

“Where will that take us?” Scorpio said.

“Habitat and flight deck. Assuming we recognise any of it when we get there.”

“It’s colder that way,” Khouri observed.

They stepped towards the part of the ship Clavain had indicated. There was a gap ahead, the remains of a bulkhead. The air felt as if it was only a breath away from freezing solid altogether. Scorpio glanced back, his mind playing tricks on him, conjuring languid ripples and waves of motion in the black tar of the wolf machinery.

Instead, something moved ahead. A section of shadow detached itself from the wall, black against black.

Khouri’s gun tipped towards it.

“No!” Clavain shouted.

Scorpio heard the click of the Breitenbach cannon’s trigger. He flinched, steeling himself for the energy discharge. It was not really the weapon of choice for close-quarters combat.

Nothing happened. Khouri lowered the weapon’s muzzle an inch. She had pulled back on the trigger, but not enough to fire.

Clavain’s knife trembled in his hand like an elver.

The black presence became a person in black vacuum armour. The armour moved stiffly, as if rusted into seizure. It clutched a dark shape in one hand. The figure took another step and then keeled towards them. It hit the ground with a crack of metal against ice. Black cubes splintered away in all directions, frosted with ice. The weapon—or whatever it was—skidded away and knocked against the wall.

Scorpio knelt down to pick it up.

“Careful,” Clavain said again.

Scorpio’s trotters closed on the rounded contours of the Conjoiner side arm. He tried to close his hand around the grip in such a way that he could still depress the trigger. It wasn’t possible. The grip had never been engineered for use by pigs.

In fury he tossed it to Clavain. “Maybe you can get this thing to work.”

“Easy, Scorp.” Clavain pocketed the weapon. “It won’t work for me, either, not unless Skade was very careless with her defences. But we can keep it out of harm’s way, at least.”

Khouri shouldered the cannon and lowered herself down next to the crashed armour of the figure. “It ain’t Skade,” she said. “Too big, and the helmet crest isn’t the right shape. You picking up anything, Clavain?”

“Nothing intelligible,” he said. He stilled the shivering blade of his knife and slipped it back into one of his pockets. “But let’s get that helmet off and see where we are, shall we?”

“We don’t have time to waste,” Scorpio said.

Clavain started working the helmet seals. “This will only take a moment.”

The extremities of Scorpio’s hands were numb, his co-ordination beginning to show signs of impairment. He did not doubt that Clavain was suffering much the same thing; it must have taken real strength and precision to unlock the intricate mechanism of the helmet seal.

There was a latching sound, then a scrape of metal against metal and a gasp of equalising air pressure. The helmet popped off, trapped between Clavain’s trembling fingertips. He placed it gently on to the ice, rim down.

The face of a young female Conjoiner looked back at them. She had something of the same sleekly sculpted look as her mentor, but she was clearly not Skade. Her face was wide and flat-featured, her bloodless skin the colour of static on a monitor. Her neural crest—the heat-dissipating ridge of bone and cartilage running from the very top of her forehead to the nape of her neck—was less extravagant than the one Scorpio remembered seeing on Skade, and was almost certainly a much less useful indicator of her state of mind. It probably incorporated a more advanced set of neural mechanisms, with lower heat-dissipation burdens.

Her lips were grey and her eyebrows pure chrome white. She opened her eyes. In the torchlight her irises were a metallic blue-grey.

“Talk to me,” Clavain said.

She coughed and laughed at the same time. The appearance of a human expression on that stiff mask shocked them all.

Khouri leaned closer. “I’m only picking up mush,” she said.

“There’s something wrong with her,” Clavain replied quietly. Then he held the woman’s head from behind, supporting it off the ice. “Listen to me carefully. We don’t want to hurt you. You’ve been injured, but if you help us we will take care of you. Can you understand me?”

The woman laughed again, a spasm of delight creasing her face. “You . . .” she began.

Clavain leaned closer. “Yes?”

“Clavain.”

Clavain nodded. “Yes, that’s me.” He looked back at the others. “Damage can’t be too severe if she remembers me. I’m sure we’ll be able . . .”

She spoke again. “Clavain. Butcher of Tharsis.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Clavain. Defector.
Traitor
.” She smiled again, coughed, and then hacked a mouthload of saliva into his face. “Betrayed the Mother Nest.”

Clavain wiped the spit from his face with the back of his glove. “I didn’t betray the Mother Nest,” he said, with an alarming lack of anger. “It was actually Skade who betrayed it.” He corrected her with avuncular patience, as if putting right some minor misapprehension about geography.

She laughed and spat at him again. The power of it surprised Scorpio. It caught Clavain in the eye and made him hiss in pain.

Clavain leant closer to the woman, keeping a hand over her mouth this time. “We have some work to do, I think. A little bit of re-education. A little bit of attitude adjustment. But that’s all right, I’ve got plenty of time.”

The woman coughed again. Her titanium-grey eyes were bright and joyful, even as she struggled for breath. There was something idiotic about her, Scorpio realised.

The armoured body started convulsing. Clavain kept hold of her head, his other hand still across her mouth.

“Let her breathe,” Khouri said.

He released the pressure across her mouth for an instant. The woman kept smiling, her eyes wide, unblinking. Something black squeezed between Clavain’s fingers, forcing its way through the gaps like some manifestation of demonic foul-ness. Clavain flinched back, letting go of the woman, dropping her head against the floor. The black stuff pulsed out of her mouth, out of her nostrils, the flows merging into a horrible black beard which began to engulf her face.

“Live machinery,” Clavain said, falling back. His own left hand was covered in ropes of the black stuff. He swatted it against the ice, but the black ooze refused to dislodge. The ropes combined into a coherent mass, a plaque covering his fingers to the knuckle. It was composed of hundreds of smaller versions of the same cubes they had seen elsewhere. They were swelling perceptibly, enlarging as they consolidated their hold on his hand. The black growth progressed towards his wrist in a series of convulsive waves, cubes sliding over each other.

From behind, something lit up the entire cavity of the wrecked ship. Scorpio risked a glance back, just long enough to see the barrel of Khouri’s cannon glowing cherry-red from a minimum-yield discharge. Jaccottet was aiming his own weapon at the corpse of the Conjoiner, but it was obvious that nothing more remained of the organic part of the Inhibitor victim. The emerging machines appeared totally unaffected: the blast had dispersed some of them from the main mass, but there was no sign that the energy had harmed them in any way whatsoever.

Scorpio had only glanced away for a second, but when he returned his attention to Clavain, he was horrified to see Clavain slumped back against the wall, grimacing.

“They’ve got me, Scorp. It hurts.”

Clavain closed his eyes. The black plaque had now taken his hand to the wrist. At the finger end it had formed a rounded stump which was creeping slowly back as the wrist end advanced.

“I’ll try to lever it off,” Scorpio said, fumbling in his belt for something thin and strong, but not so sharp that it would damage Clavain’s hand.

Clavain opened his eyes. “It won’t work.”

With his good hand he reached into the pocket where he had put the knife. A moment earlier his face had been a grey testament to pain, but now there was an easing there, as if the agony had abated.

It hadn’t, Scorpio knew. Clavain had merely dulled off the part of his brain that registered it.

Clavain had the knife out. He held it by the haft, trying to make the blade come alive. It wasn’t happening. Either the control could never be activated single-handedly, or Clavain’s other hand was too numb from the cold to do the job. In error or frustration, the knife tumbled from his grip. He groped towards it, then abandoned the effort.

“Scorp, pick it up.”

He took the knife. It felt odd in his trotter, like something precious he had stolen, something he had never been meant to handle. He moved to give it back to Clavain.

“No. You have to do it. Activate the blade with that stud. Be careful: she kicks when the piezo-blade starts up. You don’t want to drop it. She’ll cut through hyperdiamond like a laser through smoke.”

“I can’t do this, Nevil.”

“You have to. It’s killing me.”

The black caul of Inhibitor machinery was eating back into his hand. There was no room in that thing for his fingertips, Scorpio realised. It had devoured them already.

He pressed the activation stud. The knife twisted in his hand, alive and eager. He felt the high-frequency buzz through the hilt. The blade had become a blur of silver, like the flicker of a hummingbird’s wing.

“Take it off, Scorp. Now. Quickly and cleanly. A good inch above the machinery.”

“I’ll kill you.”

“No, you won’t. I’ll make it through this.” Clavain paused. “I’ve shut down pain reception. Bloodstream implants will handle clotting. You’ve nothing to worry about. Just do it.
Now
. Before I change my mind, or that stuff finds a short cut to my head.”

Scorpio nodded, horrified by what he was about to do but knowing that he had no choice.

Making sure that none of the machinery touched his own flesh, Scorpio supported Clavain’s damaged arm at the elbow. The knife buzzed and squirmed. He held the locus of the blur close to fabric of the sleeve.