Absolution Gap (72 page)

“I’ve earned the right to be here,” he said, quietly, but loud enough for the pig to hear. “I have a stake in Aura’s future.”

“You’re keen, Malinin, but you’re way out of your depth.”

“I’m also involved.”

“You were embroiled. It isn’t the same thing.”

Vasko started to say something, but there was a flicker of static across all the display read-outs hovering around the pilot. He felt the shuttle lurch.

“Picking up interference on all comms frequencies,” the pilot reported. “We’ve lost all surface transponder contacts and all links to First Camp. There’s a lot of EM noise out here—more than we’re used to. There’s stuff the sensors can’t even interpret. Avionics are responding sluggishly. I think we’re entering some kind of jamming zone.”

“Can you keep us close to the
Infinity
?” Scorpio asked.

“I’m more or less flying this thing manually. I guess if I still have the ship as a reference, we’re not going to get lost. But I’m not making any promises.”

“Altitude?”

“One hundred and twenty klicks. We must be entering the lower sphere of battle about now.”

Above, the view had not changed dramatically since the departure of the ship. The scratches of light had faded, perhaps because Remontoire was aware that the message had been received and acted upon. There were still flashes of light, expanding spheres and arcs, and the occasional searing passage of an atmosphere-skimming object, but other than the darkness becoming a more intense, deeper shade of black, there was no real difference compared to the surface view.

Khouri came through to join them. “I’m hearing Aura,” she said. “She’s awake now.”

“Good,” Scorpio began.

“There’s more. I’m seeing things. So’s Aura. I think it must be the same kind of thing Clavain and I saw before things got really serious—leakage from the war. It’s getting through again.”

“We must be close,” Vasko said. “I guess the wolves blocked those signals when they could, to stop Remontoire sending a message through that easily. Now that we’re getting so close they can’t stop all of them.”

From somewhere, Vasko heard a noise he didn’t recognise. It was shrill, ragged, pained. It was muffled by plastic. He realised it was Aura, crying.

“She doesn’t like it,” Khouri said. “It’s painful.”

“Contacts,” the pilot announced. “Radar returns, incoming. Fifty klicks and closing. They weren’t there a moment ago.”

The shuttle lurched violently, throwing Vasko and Khouri to one side. The walls deformed to soften the impact, but Vasko still felt the wind knocked out of him. “What’s happening?” he asked, breathless.

“The
Infinity
is making evasive manoeuvres. She’s seen the same radar echoes. I’m just trying to keep up.” The pilot glanced at a read-out again. “Thirty klicks. Twenty and slowing. Jamming is getting worse. This isn’t good, folks.”

“Do your best,” Scorpio said. “Everyone else—secure yourselves. It’s going to get rough.”

Vasko and Khouri went back to where Valensin and his machines were continuing their vigil over Aura. She was still moving, but had at least stopped crying. Vasko wished that there was something he could do to help her, some way to temper the voices screaming into her head. He could not imagine what it must be like for her. By rights she should not even have been born yet; should barely have had any sense of her own individuality or the wider world in which she existed. Aura was not an ordinary baby, that much was clear—she already had the language skills of a two- or three-year-old child, in Vasko’s estimation—but it was also unlikely that all parts of her mind were developing at the same accelerated rate. There was only room in that tiny wrinkled head for a certain amount of complexity; she must still have had an infant’s view of many things. When he had been two years older than Aura, Vasko’s own grasp of the world had barely reached further than the handful of rooms that made up his home. Everything else had been hazy, unimportant, subject to comic misapprehension.

The
Nostalgia for Infinity
was now further away from the shuttle than it had been: tens of kilometres distant, easily. The shuttle’s hull had still not turned fully transparent again, but in the light from its engines he caught the reflections of
things
moving closer. Not just moving, but fluttering, swirling, splintering and reforming, retreating and advancing in pulsing waves.

They came closer. Now the glare of the engines revealed hints of stepped structures: tiers, contours, zigzag edges. It was the same machinery they had found in Skade’s ship, the same stuff that had reached down from the clouds and ripped the corvette apart, but this time the scale was immeasurably larger—these cubes were almost as large as houses, forming structures hundreds of metres across. The wolf cubes were in constant, sliding motion: slithering across each other, swelling and contracting, larger structures organising and dissipating with hypnotic fluidity. Filaments of cubes spanned the larger structures; clusters of them fluttered from point to point like messengers. The scale was still difficult to judge, but the cubes were converging from nearly all sides and it seemed to Vasko that they had already formed a loose shell around both the shuttle and the
Nostalgia for Infinity
. What
was
certain was that the shell was tightening, the gaps becoming smaller.

“Ana?” Vasko asked. “You’ve seen these things before, haven’t you? They attacked your ship. Is this how it begins?”

“We’re in trouble,” she confirmed.

“What happens next, if we can’t escape?”

“They come inside.” Her voice was hollow, like a cracked bell. “They invade your ship and then they invade your head. You don’t want that to happen, Vasko. Trust me on this one.”

“How long will we have, if they reach the ship?”

“Seconds, if we’re lucky. Maybe not even that.” Then she convulsed, a whiplash movement that had her body slamming against the restraining surface that the ship had fashioned around her. Her eyes closed and then reopened, her pupils raised to the ceiling, the whites bright and frightened. “Kill me. Now.”

“Ana?”

“Aura,” she said. “Kill me. Kill us
both
. Now.”

“No,” he said. He looked at Valensin, hoping for some explanation.

The doctor simply shook his head. “I won’t do it,” he said. “No matter what she wants. I won’t take a life.”

“Listen to me,” she insisted. “What I know—too important. They can’t find out. Will read our minds. Cannot allow that to happen. Kill us now.”

“No, Aura. I won’t do it. Not now. Not ever,” Vasko said.

Valensin’s servitors moved nearer to the incubator. Their jointed limbs twitched, clicking against their drab bodies. One of the machines extended a manipulator towards the incubator, grasping it. The servitor then backed away, trying to tug the incubator away from the niche.

Vasko leapt forwards and wrestled the machine away from the baby. The machine was lighter than it looked, but much stronger than he had anticipated. The many limbs thrashed against him, hard articulated metal pressing into his skin.

“Valensin!” he shouted. “Do something!”

“They’re beyond my control,” Valensin said, calmly, as if all that followed was out of his hands.

Vasko sucked in his chest, making a cavity between his body and the machine in an attempt to avoid the swiping pass of a sharp-bladed manipulator. He wasn’t fast enough. He felt a nick through his clothing, the instant cold that told him he had been wounded. He fell back, hitting the wall, and tried to kick out at the wide base of the servitor. The machine toppled, clattering against its companion. The thrashing limbs entwined, knives sparking against knives.

He touched his chest, fingering through the gashed fabric. His hand came back lathered in blood. “Get Scorpio,” he said to Valensin.

But Scorpio was already on his way. Something gleamed in his right hand: a humming blur of metal, a knife-shaped smear of silver. He saw the machines, saw Vasko with blood on his fingers. The servitors had disentangled themselves and the one still standing had begun to pick at the base of the incubator, trying to claw it open. Scorpio snarled and slid the knife into the machine’s armour. The knife sailed through the drab green carapace as if it wasn’t there at all. There was a fizzle of shorting circuitry, a thrashing whirr of damaged mechanisms. The knife howled and twisted out of Scorpio’s grip, hitting the floor, where it continued to buzz and whirr.

The servitor had broken down. It remained frozen in place, limbs still extended but now immobile.

Scorpio knelt down and retrieved the piezo-knife, stilled the blade and returned it to its sheath.

Outside the shuttle, the wall of Inhibitor machinery looked close enough to touch. Jags of blue-pink lightning flickered and danced between different portions of it.

“Someone mind telling me what just happened?” Scorpio snapped.

“Aura,” said Vasko. He wiped his bloody hand against his trouser leg. “Aura tried to turn the servitors against herself.” He was breathing hard, forcing out each word between ragged gulps of air. “Trying to kill herself. She doesn’t want the cubes to reach her while she’s still alive.”

Khouri coughed. Her eyes were like a trapped animal’s. “Kill me, Scorp. Not too late. You have to do it.”

“After all we’ve been through?” he said.

“You have to go to Hela,” she said. “Find Quaiche. Negotiate with shadows.
They
will know.”

“Fuck,” Scorpio said.

Vasko watched as the pig pulled the knife from its sheath once more. Scorpio stared at the now-still blade, his lips curled in disgust. Did he really mean to use it, or was he simply thinking about throwing it away, before circumstances once again forced him to wield it against someone or something he cared for?

Despite himself, despite the fact that he felt his own strength draining away, Vasko reached out and took hold of the pig’s sleeve. “No,” he said. “Don’t do it. Don’t kill them.”

The pig’s expression was something beyond fury. But Vasko had him. Scorpio couldn’t activate the knife one-handed; his anatomy wouldn’t allow it.

“Malinin. Let go now.”

“Scorp, listen to me. There has to be another way. The price we paid for her . . . we can’t just throw her away now, no matter how much
she
wants it.”

“You think I don’t know what she cost us?”

Vasko shook his head. He had no idea what else to say. His strength was very nearly gone. He did not think he had been seriously injured, but the wound was still deep, and he was already desperately tired.

Scorpio tried to fight him. They were eye to eye. The pig had the advantage in strength, Vasko was sure, but Vasko had leverage and dexterity.

“Drop the knife, Scorp.”

“I’ll kill you, Malinin.”

“Wait,” Valensin said mildly, taking off his spectacles and polishing them on the hem of his tunic. “Both of you, wait. You should look outside, I think.”

Still struggling over control of the knife, they did as he suggested.

Something was happening, something that in the heat of the struggle they had missed completely. The
Nostalgia for Infinity
was starting to fight back. Weapons had emerged from its hull, poking out through the intricate accretion of detail that marked the Captain’s transformations. These were not the cache weapons, Vasko realised, not the major Conjoiner ordnance that the ship carried deep inside it. Instead these were the conventional armaments that it had carried for much of its lifetime, designed primarily to intimidate trading customers and to warn off potential rivals or pirates. The same weapons that had been used against the colony on Resurgam, when the colony had been slow in handing over Dan Sylveste.

Scorpio relaxed his grip on Vasko, and slowly returned the knife to its sheath. “That won’t make much difference,” he said.

“It’s buying time,” Vasko said. He let go of the pig. The two of them glowered at each other. Vasko knew he had just crossed yet another line, one that could never be traversed in the opposite direction.

So be it. He had been serious in his promise to Clavain to protect Aura.

Lines of fire were stabbing out from the
Nostalgia for Infinity
, sweeping around and scything into the closing wall of wolf machinery. They were very high above Ararat now and there was little atmosphere left to make the beam weapons—or whatever they were—visible for more than few dozen metres along their course. Vasko guessed that the great ship, after so long in an atmosphere, was still bleeding trapped air and water from pockets in the folds and crevices of its hull. He watched the dark clots of wolf machinery squirm away from the impact points of the beams, like specks of iron being repelled by a magnet. The beams moved quickly, but the cubes moved faster, slipping from one point to another with dizzying rapidity. Vasko realised, dejectedly, that Scorpio was right. It was a gesture of defiance, nothing more. Everything they had learned about the wolves, in all the glancing contacts to date, had taught them that conventional human weapons had almost no effect on them whatsoever. They might slow the closing of the shell, but no more than that.

Perhaps Aura was right all along. Better for her to die now, before the machines drained every last scrap of knowledge from her head. She had told them that Hela was significant. Perhaps no one would survive to act on that knowledge. But if anyone did, they would at least be able to act without the wolves knowing their exact intentions.

He looked at the sheath where the pig kept his knife.

No. There had to be another way. If they started murdering children to gain a tactical advantage, the Inhibitors might as well win the war now.

“They’re backing off,” Valensin said. “Look. Something’s hurting them. I don’t think it’s the
Infinity
.”

The wall of machines was peppered with gaping, irregular holes. Carnations of colourless white light flashed from the cores of the cube structures. Chunks of cubic machinery veered into each other or dropped out of sight entirely. Tentacles of cubes thrashed purposelessly. The lightning pulsed in ugly, spavined shapes. And, suddenly, dashing through the gaps, machines appeared.