Absolution Gap (73 page)

Vasko recognised the smooth, melted, muscular lines of spacecraft much like their shuttle. They moved like projections rather than solid objects, slowing down in an eyeblink.

“Remontoire,” Khouri breathed.

Beyond the ragged shell of Inhibitor machines, Vasko glimpsed a much wider battle, one that must have been encompassing many light-seconds of space around Ararat. He saw awesome eruptions of light, flashes that grew and faded in slow motion. He saw purple-black spheres simply appear, visible only when they formed against some brighter background, lingering for a few seconds, their wrinkled surfaces undulating, before popping out of existence.

Vasko faded out. When he came to, Valensin was inspecting his wound. “It’s clean and not too deep, but it will need treating,” he said.

“But it isn’t serious, is it?”

“No. I don’t think Aura really wanted to hurt you.”

Vasko felt some of the tension drain from his body. Then he realised that Scorpio had said very little since their scuffle over the knife. “Scorp,” he began, “we couldn’t just kill her like that.”

“It’s easy to say that now. It’s what she wanted of us that matters.”

Valensin dabbed at his wound with something that stung. Vasko drew in a sharp breath. “What did she mean when she spoke? She said something about shadows.”

Scorpio’s expression gave nothing away. As calm as he now appeared, Vasko did not think it likely that the pig had forgiven him for the struggle.

“I don’t know,” Scorpio said, “except I didn’t like the sound of it very much.”

“What matters is Hela,” Khouri said. She sighed, rubbed at the fatigue-darkened skin under her eyes. Vasko thought it safe to assume that they were dealing with Ana rather than Aura now.

“And the other thing—the business with shadows?”

“We’ll find out when we get there.”

There was a call from the flight deck. “Incoming transmission from the
Nostalgia for Infinity
,” said the pilot. “We’re being invited aboard.”

“By whom?” Scorpio asked.

“Antoinette Bax,” the pilot said, his voice trailing off hesitantly. “With—um—the compliments of Captain John Brannigan.”

“Good enough for me,” Scorpio said.

Vasko felt the shuttle turn, arrowing towards the much larger vessel. At the same time, one of the small, sleek human-controlled ships detached from its neighbours and accompanied them, making an almost painful effort not to outpace them there.

Hela, 2727

 

One further incident stuck in Rashmika’s mind before the caravan arrived at the Permanent Way. It was a day after the crossing of the bridge, and the caravan had finally climbed out of the Rift on to the bone-white level plateau of the Jarnsaxa Flats. To the north, the southern limits of the Western Hyrrokkin Uplands were visible as a roughness on the horizon, while to the east, Rashmika knew, lay the complex volcano fields of the Glistenheath and Ragnarok complexes, all currently dormant. By contrast, the Jarnsaxa Flats were mirror smooth and geologically stable. There were no scuttler digs in this area—whatever geological process had created the Flats had also erased or subducted any scuttler relics in this part of Hela—but there were still many small communities that made a direct living from their proximity to the Way. Now and then the caravan passed one of these dour little hamlets of surface bubbletents, or barrelled past a roadside shrine commemorating some recent but unspecified tragedy. Occasionally they saw pilgrims hauling their penitential life-support systems across the ice. To Rashmika they looked like returning hunters in some brown-hued painting by Brueghel, sledges topheavy with winter foodstock.

The buildings, shrines and figures slipped from horizon to horizon with indecent speed. With a broad, straight road ahead of it, the caravan had been able to move at maximum velocity for several hours, and now it seemed to have settled into a rhythm, an unstoppable stampede of machinery. Wheels rolled, tracks whirled around, traction limbs disappeared in a blur of pistoning motion. Visibly, Haldora moved closer to the zenith, until—by Rashmika’s estimation—they could not be more than a few tens of kilometres from the Way.

Very soon the cathedrals would be visible, their spires clawing above the horizon.

But before she saw the cathedrals she saw other machines. They began as dots in the distance, throwing up pure white ballistic plumes from their rumbling wheels and treads. For many minutes they did not appear to move at all. Rashmika wondered if the caravan was simply catching up with similar processions arriving at the Way from elsewhere on Hela. This seemed reasonable, for many roads had joined up with the one they were on since they had climbed out of the Rift.

But then she realised that the vehicles were actually racing towards them. Even this did not strike her as particularly noteworthy, but then she felt the caravan slow and begin to oscillate from one side of the road to the other, as if uncertain which side it ought to be on. The swerves made her feel nauseous. She had the viewing area largely to herself, but the few caravan personnel that she saw also appeared ill at ease with developments.

The other machines continued to sweep towards them. In a few moments they had swelled to enormous size. They were much larger than any of the caravan’s components. Rashmika saw a blur of treads and wide meshwork road wheels, with a superstructure of vicious ice-and-rock-moving machinery. The machines were painted a dusty yellow, with bee-stripes and rotating warning beacons. Many of the components were half-familiar to her: massively scaled-up counterparts of the heavy excavation equipment her fellow villagers used in the scuttler digs.

She recognised the function, even if the size was daunting. There were toothed claws and gaping lantern-jawed dragline buckets. There were grader blades and mighty percussive hammers. There were angled conveyor belts like the ridged spines of dinosaurs. There were rotating shield drills: huge toothed discs as wide as any one of the caravan’s vehicles. There were fusion torches, lasers, bosers, high-pressure water cutters, steam-borers. There were tiny cabins jacked high on articulated gantries. There were vast ore hoppers and grilled, chimneyed machines she couldn’t even begin to identify. There were generators, equipment carriers and accommodation cabins painted the same dusty yellow.

All of it rolled by, machine after machine, hogging the road while the caravan bounced along in a rut on one side of it.

She sensed grinding humiliation.

Later, when the caravan was on the move again, she tried to find out what had happened. She thought Pietr might know, but he was nowhere to be found. Quaestor Jones, when she tracked him down, dismissed the matter as one of trifling importance. But he still did not tell her what she wanted to know.

“That wasn’t a caravan like ours,” she said.

“Your powers of observation do you credit.”

“So might I ask where it was going?”

“I would have thought that was obvious, especially given your chosen intention to work on the Permanent Way. Very evidently, those machines were part of a major Way taskforce. Doubtless they were on their way to clear a blockage, or to make good a defect in the infrastructure.” Quaestor Rutland Jones folded his arms, as if the matter was settled.

“Then they’d be affiliated to a church, wouldn’t they? I may not know much, but I know that all the gangs are tied to specific churches.”

“Most certainly.” He drummed his fingers on the desk before him.

“In which case, what church was it? I watched every one of those machines go past and I didn’t see a single clerical symbol on any of them.”

The quaestor shrugged, a little too emphatically for Rashmika’s tastes. “It’s dirty work—as you will soon discover. When the clock is against a team, I doubt that touching-up painted insignia is very high on the list of priorities.”

She recalled that the excavation machines had been dusty and faded. What the quaestor said was undoubtedly true in a general sense, but in Rashmika’s opinion, not one of those machines had ever carried a clerical symbol—not since they were last painted, at least.

“One other thing, Quaestor.”

“Yes,” he said, tiredly.

“We’re heading down towards the Way because we took a short cut across Absolution Gap. We’d come from the north. It seems to me that if those machines really were on their way to clear a blockage, they’d hardly be taking the same route we did, even in reverse.”

“What are you suggesting, Miss Els?”

“It strikes me as much more likely that they were headed somewhere else entirely. Somewhere that has nothing to do with the Way.”

“And that’s your considered opinion, is it? Based on all your many years of experience with matters of the Way and the operational complexities of its maintenance?”

“There’s no call for sarcasm, Quaestor.”

He shook his head and reached for a compad, making an exaggerated show of finding his place in whatever work he had been engaged in before her interruption. “Based on my own limited experience, you will do one of two things, Miss Els. You will either go very far, or you will shortly meet a very unfortunate end in what on the face of it might resemble a regrettable accident out on the ice. One thing I am certain about, however: in the process of reaching either outcome, you will still manage to irritate a great many people.”

“Then at least I’ll have made a difference,” she said, with vastly more bravado than she felt. She turned to go.

“Miss Els.”

“Quaestor?”

“Should you at any point decide to return to the badlands . . . would you do me a singular favour?”

“What?” she asked.

“Find some other mode of transport to take you back,” the quaestor said, before returning to his duties.

Scorpio cycled through the airlock as soon as the shuttle had engaged with its docking cradle, latching itself securely into place in the reception bay. The other ship that had accompanied them—it was much smaller and sleeker—was a wedge of darkness parked alongside. All he could see was its silhouette, a flint-shaped splash of ink like one of the random blots sometimes used in a psychological examination. It just sat there, hissing, its smell sharp and antiseptic, like a medicine cabinet. It looked completely two-dimensional, as if stamped from a sheet of thin black metal.

It looked like something you could cut yourself on.

Security Arm militia had already cordoned off both craft. They recognised the shuttle, but they were wary of the other arrival. Scorpio assumed it had received the same invitation, but the guards were still taking no chances. He stood most of them down, keeping only a couple handy just in case the ship really did contain an unpleasant surprise.

He raised his sleeve and spoke into his communicator. “Antoinette? You around?”

“I’m on my way up, Scorp. Be there in a minute or so. Do you have our guest?”

“I’m not sure,” he said.

He moved over to the black ship. It was not much larger than the capsule Khouri had come down in. Room in it for one or two people at the very most, he estimated. He rapped a knuckle against the black surface. It was cold to the touch. The hairs on his knuckle tingled with shock.

A dogleg of pink light split the black machine down the middle and a section of the hull slid aside, revealing a dim interior. A man was already extricating himself from the prison of an acceleration couch and fold-around controls. It was Remontoire, just as Scorpio had suspected. He was a little older than Scorpio remembered, but still fundamentally the same: a very thin, very tall, very bald man, dressed entirely in tight black clothes that served only to emphasise his arachnoid qualities. His skull was a peculiar shape: elongated, like a teardrop.

Scorpio leaned into the cavity to help him out.

“Mr. Pink, I presume,” Remontoire said.

Scorpio hesitated a moment. The name meant something, but the association was buried decades in the past. He tugged at the strands of his memory until one came loose. He recalled the time when Remontoire and he had travelled incognito through the Rust Belt and Chasm City, pursuing Clavain when he had first defected from the Conjoiners. Mr. Pink had been the name Scorpio had travelled under. What had Remontoire called himself? Scorpio tried to remember.

“Mr. Clock,” he said at last, just at the point when the pause would have become uncomfortable.

They had hated each other’s guts back then. It had been inevitable, really. Remontoire did not like pigs (there had been something unpleasant in his past, some incident in which he had been tortured by one of them) but had been forced to employ Scorpio because of his useful local knowledge. Scorpio did not like Conjoiners (no one did, unless they were already Conjoiners) and he particularly did not like Remontoire. But he had been blackmailed into assisting them, promised his freedom if he did. To refuse meant being handed over to the authorities, who had a nice little pre-scripted show trial planned for him.

No; they hadn’t exactly started out as friends, but the hatred had gradually evaporated, aided by their mutual respect for Clavain. Now Scorpio was actually glad to see the man, a reaction that would have stunned and appalled his younger self.

“We’re quite a pair of relics, you and I,” Remontoire said. He stood up, stretching his limbs, turning them this way and that as if ascertaining that none of them had become dislocated.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news,” Scorpio said.

“Clavain?”

“I’m sorry.”

“I guessed, of course. The moment I saw you, I knew he must be dead. When did it happen?”

“A couple of days ago.”

“And how did he die?”

“Very badly. But he died for Ararat. He was a hero to the end, Rem.”

For a moment Remontoire was somewhere else, wandering through a landscape of mental reflection accessible only to Conjoiners. He closed his eyes, remained that way for perhaps ten seconds and then opened them again. They were now gleaming with bright alertness, no trace of sorrow visible.