Absolution Gap (80 page)

Grelier looked up at his master, peering over the steeple of his fingers. “Doesn’t that rather defeat the purpose?”

“Perhaps.” Quaiche seemed irritated by his surgeon’s needling. “In any case, there are other candidates. I have two more waiting in the cathedral. I take it, Rashmika, that you’d be willing to sit through another couple of interviews?”

She poured herself some more tea. “Send them in,” she said. “It’s not as if I have anything else to do.”

Scorpio had been walking through the ship for hours. It was still chaotic in the high levels, where the latest arrivals were being processed. There were smaller pockets of chaos at a dozen other locations. But the
Nostalgia for Infinity
was a truly enormous spacecraft, and it was remarkable how little evidence there was of the seventeen thousand newcomers once he moved away from the tightly policed processing zones. Throughout much of the ship’s volume, things were as empty and echoing as they had ever been, as if all the newcomers had been imagined spectres.

But the ship was not completely deserted, even away from the processing zones. He paused now at a window that faced on to a deep vertical shaft. Red light bathed the interior, throwing a roseate tint on the metallic structure taking form within it. The structure was utterly unfamiliar. And yet it reminded him, forcefully, of something—one of the trees he had seen in the glade. Only this was a tree made from countless bladelike parts, foil-thin leaves arranged in spiralling ranks around a narrow core that ran the length of the shaft. There was too much detail to take in; too much geometry; too much perspective. His head hurt to look at the treelike object, as if the whole sculptural form was a weapon designed to shatter perception.

Servitors scuttled amongst the leaves like black bugs, their movements methodical and cautious, while black-suited human figures hung from harnesses at a safe distance from the delicate convolutions of the forming structure. The servitors carried metal-foil parts on their backs, slotting them into precisely machined apertures. The humans—they were Conjoiners—appeared to do very little except hang in their harnesses and observe the machines. But they were undoubtedly directing the action at a fundamental level, their concentration intense, their minds multitasking with parallel thought threads.

These were just some of the Conjoiners aboard the ship. There were dozens more. Hundreds, even. He could barely tell them apart. Except for minor variations in skin tone, bone structure and sex, they all appeared to have stepped from the same production line. They were of the crested kind, advanced specimens from Skade’s own taskforce. They said nothing to each other and were uncomfortable when forced to talk to the non-Conjoined. They stuttered and made elementary errors of pronunciation, grammar and syntax: things that would have shamed a pig. They functioned and communicated on an entirely non-verbal level, Scorpio knew. To them, verbal communication—even when speeded up by mind-to-mind linkage—was as primitive as communication by smoke signal. They made Clavain and Remontoire look like grunting stone-age relics. Even Skade must have felt some itch of inadequacy around these sleek new creatures.

If the wolves lost, Scorpio thought, but the only people left to celebrate were these silent Conjoiners, would it have been worth it?

He had no easy answer.

Beyond their silent strangeness, their stiffly economical movements and utter absence of expression, the thing that most chilled him about the Conjoiner technicians was the blithe ease with which they had shifted loyalty to Remontoire. At no point had they acknowledged that their obedience to Skade had been in error. They had, they said, only ever been following the path of least resistance when it came to the greater good of the Mother Nest. For a time, that path had involved co-operation with Skade’s plans. Now, however, they were content to align themselves with Remontoire. Scorpio wondered how much of that had to do with the pure demands of the situation and how much with respect for the traditions and history of the Nest. With Galiana and Clavain now dead, Remontoire was probably the oldest living Conjoiner.

Scorpio had no choice but to accept the Conjoiners. They were not a permanent fixture in any case; in fewer than eight days they would have to leave if they wanted to return home to the
Zodiacal Light
and their other remaining ships. There were already fewer of them than there had been at first.

They had helped to reinstall nanotechnological manufactories, plague-hardened so that they would continue to function even in the contagious environment of the
Infinity
. Primed with blueprints and raw matter, the forges spewed out gleaming new technologies of mostly unfamiliar function. The same blueprints showed how the newly minted components were to be assembled into even larger—yet equally unfamiliar—new shapes. In evacuated shafts running the length of the
Nostalgia for Infinity
—just like the one he was looking into now—these contraptions grew and grew. The thing that looked like an elongated silver tree—or a dizzyingly complicated turbine, or some weird alien take on DNA—was a hypometric weapon. Perhaps sensing their value, the Captain tolerated the activity, although at any moment he could have remade his interior architecture, crushing the shafts out of existence.

Elsewhere, Conjoiners crawled through the skin of the ship, installing a network of cryo-arithmetic engines. Tiny as hearts, each limpetlike engine was a sucking wound in the corpus of classical thermodynamics. Scorpio recalled what had happened to Skade’s corvette when the cryo-arithmetic engines had gone wrong. The runaway cooling must have begun with a tiny splinter of ice, smaller than a snowflake. But it had been growing all the while, as the engines locked into manic, spiralling feedback loops, destroying more heat with every computational cycle, the cold feeding the cold. In space, the ship would simply have cooled down to within quantum spitting distance of absolute zero. On Ararat, however, with an ocean at hand, it had grown an iceberg around itself.

Other Conjoiners were crawling through the ship’s original engines, tinkering with the hallowed reactions at their core. More were out on the hull, tethered to the encrusted architecture of the Captain’s growth patterns. They were installing additional weapons and armouring devices. Still more—secluded deep within the ship, far from any other focus of activity—were assembling the inertia-suppression devices that had been tested during the
Zodiacal Light
’s chase from Yellowstone to Resurgam. This was alien technology, Scorpio knew, machinery that humans had appropriated without Aura’s assistance. But they had never been able to get it to work reliably. By all accounts, Aura had shown them how to modify it for relatively safe operation. Skade, in desperation, had attempted to use the same technology for faster-than-light travel. Her effort had failed catastrophically, and Aura had refused to reveal any secrets that might make another attempt possible. Amongst the gifts she was giving them, there was to be no superluminal technology.

He watched the servitors slip another blade into place. The device had looked finished a day ago, but since then they had added about three times more machinery. Yet, strangely, the structure looked even more lacy and fragile than it had before. He wondered when it would be done—and what exactly it would
do
when it was done—and then began to turn from the window, apprehension lying heavy in his heart.

“Scorp.”

He had not been expecting company, so was surprised to hear his own name. He was even more surprised to see Vasko Malinin standing there.

“Vasko,” he said, offering a noncommittal smile. “What brings you down here?”

“I wanted to find you,” he said. Vasko was wearing a stiff, fresh-looking Security Arm uniform. Even his boots were clean, a miracle aboard the
Nostalgia for Infinity
.

“You managed.”

“I was told you’d probably be down here somewhere.” Vasko’s face was lit from the side by the red glow spilling from the hypometric weapon shaft. It made him look young and feral by turns. Vasko glanced through the window. “Quite something, isn’t it?”

“I’ll believe it works when I see it do something other than sit there looking pretty.”

“Still sceptical?”

“Someone should be.”

Scorpio realised now that Vasko was not alone. There was a figure looming behind him. He would have been able to see the person clearly years ago; now he had difficulty making out detail when the light was gloomy.

He squinted. “Ana?”

Khouri stepped into the pool of red light. She was dressed in a heavy coat and gloves, enormous boots covering her legs up to her knees—they were much dirtier than Vasko’s—and she was carrying something, tucked into the crook of her arm. It was a bundle, a form wrapped in quilted silver blanketing. At the top end of the bundle, near the crook of her arm, was a tiny opening.

“Aura?” he said, startled.

“She doesn’t need the incubator now,” Khouri said.

“She might not
need
it, but . . .”

“Dr. Valensin said it was holding her back, Scorp. She’s too strong for it. It was doing more harm than good.” Khouri angled her face down towards the open end of the bundle, her eyes meeting the hidden eyes of her daughter. “She told me she wanted to be out of it as well.”

“I hope Valensin knows what he’s doing,” Scorpio said.

“He does, Scorp. More importantly, so does Aura.”

“She’s just a child,” he said, keeping his voice low. “Barely that.”

Khouri stepped forwards. “Hold her.”

She was already offering the bundle to him. He wanted to say no. It wasn’t just that he did not quite trust himself with something as precious and fragile as a child. There was something else: a voice that warned him not to make this physical connection with her. Another voice—quieter—reminded him that he was already bound to her in blood. What more harm could be done now?

He took Aura. He held her against his chest, just tight enough to feel that he had her safely. She was astonishingly light. It stunned him that this girl—this asset they had lost their leader to recover—could feel so insubstantial.

“Scorpio.”

The voice was not Khouri’s. It was not an adult voice; barely a child’s. It was more a gurgling croak that half-approximated the sound of his name.

He looked down at the bundle, into the opening. Aura’s face turned towards his. Her eyes were still tightly closed gummy slits. There was a bubble emerging from her mouth.

“She didn’t just say my name,” he said incredulously.

“I did,” Aura said.

He felt, for a heartbeat, as if he wanted to drop the bundle. There was something
wrong
lying there in his arms, something that had no right to exist in this universe. Then the shameful reflex passed, as quickly as it had come. He looked away from the tiny pink-red face, towards her mother.

“She can’t even see me,” he said.

“No, Scorp,” Khouri confirmed, “she can’t. Her eyes don’t work yet. But mine do. And that’s all that matters.”

 

Throughout the ship, Scorpio’s technicians worked day and night laying listening devices. They glued newly manufactured microphones and barometers to walls and ceilings, then unspooled kilometres of cables, running them through the natural ducts and tunnels of the Captain’s anatomy, splicing them at nodes, braiding them into thickly entwined trunk lines that ran back to central processing points. They tested their devices, tapping stanchions and bulkheads, opening and closing pressure doors to create sudden draughts of air from one part of the ship to another. The Captain tolerated them, even, it seemed, did his best to make their efforts easier. But he was not always in complete control of his reshaping processes. Fibre-optic lines were repeatedly severed; microphones and barometers were absorbed and had to be remade. The technicians accepted this stoically, going back down into the bowels of the ship to re-lay a kilometre of line that they had just put in place; even, sometimes, repeating the process three or four times until they found a better, less-vulnerable routing.

What they did not do, at any point, was ask why they were doing this. Scorpio had told them not to, that they did not want to know, and that if they were to ask, he would not tell them the truth. Not until the reason for their work was over, and things were again as safe as they could be.

But he knew why, and when he thought about what was going to happen, he envied them their ignorance.

 

Hela, 2727

 

The interviews with the Ultras continued. Rashmika sat and made her observations. She sipped tea and watched her own shattered reflection swim in the mirrors. She thought about each hour bringing her more than a kilometre closer to Absolution Gap. But there were no clocks in the garret, hence no obvious means of judging their progress.

After each interview, she told Quaiche what she thought she had seen, taking care neither to embroider nor omit anything that might have been crucial. By the end of the third interview, she had formed an impression of what was happening. Quaiche wanted the Ultras to bring one of their ships into close orbit around Hela, to act as bodyguard.

Exactly what he feared, she could not guess. He told the Ultras that he desired protection from other spacefaring elements, that he had lately thwarted a number of schemes to seize control of Hela and wrest the supply of scuttler relics from the Adventist authorities. With a fully armed lighthugger in orbit around Hela, he said, his enemies would think twice about meddling in Hela’s affairs. The Ultras, in return, would enjoy favoured trader status, a necessary compensation for the risk entailed in bringing their valuable ship so close to the world that had destroyed the
Gnostic Ascension
. She could smell their nervousness: even though they only ever came down to Hela in shuttles, leaving their main spacecraft parked safely on the system’s edge, they did not want to spend a minute longer than necessary in the Lady Morwenna.