Absolution Gap (71 page)

“It was a bit more than a punch.”

“Is the guy going to pull through?”

“Yes,” he said, grudgingly.

Khouri shrugged. “Then chill out. What these people need now is a leader. What they don’t need is someone moping around with a guilty conscience.”

He stood up. “Thank you, Ana. Thank you.”

“Did I help, or did I just screw things up even more?”

“You helped.”

The seat melted back into the wall.

“Good. Because, you know, I’m not the most eloquent of people. I’m just a grunt at heart, Scorp. A long way from home, with some weird stuff in my head, and a daughter I’m not sure I’ll ever understand. But really, I’m still just a grunt.”

“It’s never been my policy to underestimate grunts,” he said. Now, inevitably, it was his turn to feel ineloquent. “I’m sorry about what happened to you. I hope one day . . .” He looked around, noticing that Vasko was moving down the opaque line of the floor towards Aura’s niche. “Well, I don’t know. Just that you find something to make that rage a little smaller and brighter. Maybe when it gets small and bright enough it will just pop away.”

“Would that be a good thing?”

“I don’t know.”

She smiled. “Me neither. But I guess you and I are the ones who’ll find out.”

“Scorpio?” Vasko said.

“Yes?”

“You should see this. You, too, Ana.”

They woke Valensin. Vasko ushered them to a different part of the shuttle, then made some modifications to the hull to increase the visibility of the night sky, calling bulkheads into existence and enhancing the brightness of the transmitted light to compensate for the reflected glare from the shuttle’s wings. He did so with an ease that suggested he had been working with such systems for half his life, rather than the few days that was actually the case.

Above, Scorpio saw only the same appearing and fading scratches of light that he had noticed earlier. The nagging feeling that they meant something still troubled him, but the scratches made no more sense to him now than they had before.

“I’m not seeing it, Vasko.”

“I’ll have the hull add a latency, so that the marks take longer to fade out.”

Scorpio frowned. “Can you do that?”

“It’s easy.” Vasko patted the cold, smooth surface of the inner fuselage. “There’s almost nothing these old machines won’t do, if you know the right way to ask.”

“So do it,” Scorpio said.

All four of them looked up. Even Valensin was fully awake now, his eyes slits behind his spectacles.

Above, the scratches of light took longer to fade. Before, only two or three had ever been visible at the same time. Now dozens lingered, bright as the images scorched on to the retina by the setting sun.

And now they most definitely meant something.

“My God,” Khouri said.

In the glade, everything changed. The sky above had turned midnight-black; no birds moved from tree to tree now, and the trees themselves formed only a darker frame to the night sky, looming in on all sides like encroaching thunder clouds. The animals had fallen silent, and Antoinette could no longer hear the simmering hiss of the waterfall. Perhaps it had never been real.

When she turned her attention back to the Captain, he was sitting alone at the table. Again he had slipped forward some years, reiterating another slice from his history. The last time she had seen him, in the silver armoured suit, one of his arms had been mechanical. Now the process of mechanisation had marched on even more. It was difficult to judge how much of him had been replaced by prosthetic components because of the suit, but she could at least see his head since the helmet was resting in front of him on the table. His scalp was completely bald, his face hairless save for a moustache that drooped on either side of his mouth. It was the same mouth she remembered from the first apparition: compact, straight, probably not much given to small talk. But that was about the only point of reference she recognised. She couldn’t see his eyes at all. They were lost under a complicated-looking band of some sort that reached from one side of his face to the other. Optics twinkled beneath the band’s pearly coating. The skin across his scalp was quilted with fine white lines. Glued tight to his skull, it revealed irregular raised plates just under the skin.

“Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” Antoinette asked.

“Look up.”

She complied, and saw immediately that something had changed in the few scant minutes during which she had been studying the Captain’s latest manifestation. Scratches of light cut across the sky. She thought of someone making quick, neat, butcherlike gashes in soft skin. The scratches looked random at first, but then she began to discern the emergence of a pattern.

“John . . .”

“Keep looking.”

The scratches increased in frequency. They became a flicker, then a frenzy, then something that almost appeared permanent.

The scratches formed letters.

The letters formed words.

The words said: LEAVE NOW.

“I just wanted you to know,” John Brannigan said.

That was when she felt the entire floor of the glade rumble. She had barely had time to register this when she felt her own weight increasing. She was being pressed into the roughly formed wooden seat. It was a gentle pressure, but that was no surprise. A ship with a mass of several million metric tonnes didn’t just leap into space. Especially not when it had been sitting in a kilometre of water for twenty-three years.

 

Across the bay, lighting up the sea and land all the way to the horizon, a temporary day had come to Ararat. At first, all that Vasko could see was a mountain of steam, a scalding eruption of superheated water engulfing first the lower flanks of the ship and then the entire green-clad structure. A blue-white light shone out through the steam, like a lantern in a mound of tissue paper. It was painfully bright even through the darkening filter of the shuttle’s fuselage. It shaded to violet and left jagged pink shadows on his retinae. Even far away from the edge of the steam column, the water shone a luminous turquoise. It was beautiful and strange, like nothing he had seen in his twenty years of existence.

He saw now that the water was bellying up around the ship, the surface rising many hundreds of metres. Frightful energies were being released underwater, creating swelling bubbles of superdense, superhot plasma.

The wall of elevated water surged away from the
Nostalgia for Infinity
in two concentric waves.

“Did they get far enough beyond the headland?” he asked.

“We’re about to find out,” Scorpio said.

The surface of the water was crusted with a scum of stiff green biomass. They watched it crack into disjointed plates, unable to flex fast enough to match the distortion as the wave passed. It was moving at hundreds of metres per second. In only a few moments it would hit the bay’s low rock shields.

Vasko looked back towards the source of the tidal wave. The ship was beginning to climb now, its nose emerging from the steam layer. The movement was awesomely smooth, almost as if he was seeing a fixed landmark—an ancient storm-weathered spire on a high promontory, perhaps—being revealed by the retreat of morning fog.

He watched the top kilometre of the
Nostalgia for Infinity
push clear of the steam, holding up a hand to shade his eyes from the brightness. The ship was almost clean of Juggler biomass: he saw only a few green strands still attached to the hull. Now the next kilometre came out. Ropy strands of biomass— thicker than houses—were slithering free, losing traction against the accelerating spacecraft.

The glare became intolerable. The hull of the shuttle darkened, protecting its occupants. The entire ship was now free of the ocean. Through the almost opaque shuttle fuselage, Vasko saw only two hard points of radiance, rising slowly.

“No going back now,” he observed.

Scorpio turned to Khouri. “I’m going to follow it, unless you disagree.”

Khouri eyed her daughter. “I’m not getting anything from Aura, Scorp, but I’m certain Remontoire’s behind this. He always said there’d be a message. I don’t think we have any choice but to trust him.”

“Let’s just hope it is Remontoire,” Scorpio said.

But it was clear that his mind was already made up. He told them all to make seats for themselves and prepare for whatever they might find in Ararat orbit. Vasko went back to arrange his seat, but before he settled in he noticed that the floor of the fuselage was now transparent again. Down below, lit by the rising flare of the ship, he saw First Camp laid out in hallucinatory detail, the grid of streets and buildings picked out in monochrome clarity. He saw the small moving shadows of people running between buildings. Then he looked out towards the bay. The ramp of water had dashed against the barrier of the headland, dissipating much of its strength, but it had not been completely blocked. With an agonising sense of detachment he watched the remnant of the tidal wave cross the bay, slowing and gaining height as it hit the rising slope of the shallows. Then it was swallowing the shoreline, redefining it in an instant, overrunning streets and buildings. The flood lingered and then retreated, pulling debris with it. In its wake it left rubble and rectangular absences where entire buildings had simply vanished. Large conch structures, inadequately ballasted or anchored, were being carried along on the surface, claimed back by the sea.

Within the bay the tidal wave echoed back on itself, creating several smaller surges, but none did as much damage as the first. After a minute or so, all was quite still again. But Vasko judged that a quarter of First Camp had simply ceased to exist. He just hoped that most of the citizens from those vulnerable shoreline properties had been prioritised in the evacuation effort.

The glare was fading. The ship was already far above them now, picking up speed, clawing towards rarefied atmosphere and, ultimately, space. The bay, robbed of that single landmark, looked unfamiliar. Vasko had lived here all his life, but now it was foreign territory, a place he barely recognised. He was certain it could never feel like home again. But it was easy for him to feel that way, wasn’t it? He was in the privileged position of not having to go back and rebuild his life amongst the ruins. He was already leaving, already saying goodbye to Ararat, farewell to the world that had made him what he was.

He nestled into his newly formed seat, allowing the hull to squirm intimately tighter around him, conforming to his precise shape. Almost as soon as he was settled he felt the shuttle commence its own steep climb.

It did not take long for them to catch up with the
Nostalgia for Infinity
. He remembered what Antoinette Bax had told him, when he had asked her if the Captain was really capable of leaving Ararat. She had said that it could be done, but it would not be a fast departure. Like most ships of its kind, the great lighthugger was designed to sustain one gravity of thrust, all the way up to the bleeding edge of the speed of light. But at sea level Ararat’s own gravity was already close to one standard gee. At normal cruise thrust, the ship was just capable of balancing itself against that force, hovering at a fixed altitude. Landing had not been a problem, therefore: it had simply been a question of letting gravity win, albeit in a slow, controlled fashion. Taking off was different: now the ship had to beat both gravity and air resistance. There was some power in reserve for emergency manoeuvres—up to ten gees or more—but that reserve capacity was designed only for seconds of use, not the many minutes that would be needed to reach orbit or interplanetary escape velocity. To leave Ararat, therefore, the engines had to be pushed just beyond the normal one-gee limit, giving a slight excess thrust, but not enough to overload them. The excess equalled about one-tenth of a gee of acceleration.

It would be a slower departure than the most primitive chemical rocket, Antoinette had said, slower even than the glorified firework that had carried the first astronaut (she had said that his name was Neal Gagarin and Vasko had believed her) into orbit. But the
Nostalgia for Infinity
weighed several thousand times more than the heaviest chemical rocket. And the old chemical rockets had to reach escape velocity very quickly, because they only had enough fuel for a few minutes of thrust. The
Nostalgia for Infinity
could sustain thrust for years and years.

Air resistance lessened as the ship climbed. It began to accelerate a little harder, but still the shuttle had no difficulty keeping up. The escape felt leisurely and dreamlike. This, Vasko knew, was probably a dangerous misconception.

When he had satisfied himself that the ride was likely to be smooth and predictable, at least for the next few minutes, he left his niche and went forward. Scorpio and the pilot were in the control couches.

“Any transmissions from the
Infinity
?” Vasko asked.

“Nothing,” the pilot replied.

“I hope Antoinette’s all right,” he said. Then he remembered the other people—fourteen thousand by the last count—who had already been loaded into the ship.

“She’ll cope,” Scorpio said.

“I guess in a few minutes we’ll find out if that message really was from Remontoire. Are you worried?”

“No,” Scorpio said. “And you know why? Because there isn’t anything you or I or anyone else can do about it. We couldn’t stop that ship going up and we can’t do anything about what’s up there waiting for it.”

“We have a choice about whether we follow it or not,” Vasko said.

The pig looked at him, eyes narrowed either in fatigue or disdain. “No, you’re wrong,” he said. “
We
have a choice, yes—that’s me and Khouri. But you don’t. You’re just along for the ride.”

Vasko thought about going back to his seat, but decided to stick it out. Although it was night, he could clearly see the curve of Ararat’s horizon now. He was going into space. This was what he had always wanted, for much of his life. But he had never imagined it would be like this, or that the destination itself would contain such danger and uncertainty. Instead of the thrill of escape he felt a knot of tension in his stomach.