Absolution Gap (81 page)

But there was, Rashmika suspected, something more to Quaiche’s plan than mere protection. She was certain that Quaiche was hiding something. It was a hunch this time, not something she saw in his face. He was, to all intents and purposes, unreadable. It was not just the mechanical eye-opener, hiding all those nuances of expression she counted on. There was also a torpid, masklike quality to his face, as if the nerves that operated his muscles had been severed or poisoned. When she stole glances at him she saw a vacuity of expression. The faces he made were stiff and exaggerated, like the expressions of a glove puppet. It was ironic, she thought, that she had been brought in to read people’s faces by a man whose own face was essentially closed. Almost deliberately so, in fact.

Finally the interviews for the day were over. She had reported her findings to Quaiche and he had listened appreciatively to what she had to say. There was no guessing where his own intuitions lay, but at no point did he question or contradict any of her observations. He merely nodded keenly, and told her she had been very helpful.

There would be more Ultras to interview, she was assured, but that was it for the day.

“You can go now, Miss Els. Even if you leave the cathedral now, you will still have been very useful to me and I will see to it that your efforts are rewarded. Did I mention a good position in the Catherine of Iron?”

“You did, Dean.”

“That is one possibility. Another is for you to return to the Vigrid region. You have family there, I take it?”

“Yes,” she said, but even as the word left her mouth, her own family suddenly felt distant and abstract to her, like something she had only been told about. She could remember the rooms of her house, the faces and voices of her parents, but the memories felt thin and translucent, like the facets in the stained-glass windows.

“You could return with a nice bonus—say, five thousand ecus. How does that sound?”

“That would be very generous,” she replied.

“The other possibility—the preferred one from my point of view—is that you remain in the Lady Morwenna and continue to assist me in the interviewing of Ultras. For that I will pay you two thousand ecus for every day of work. By the time we reach the bridge, you will have made double what you could have taken back to your home if you’d left today. And it doesn’t have to stop there. For as long as you are willing, there will always be work. In a year’s service, think what you could earn.”

“I’m not worth that much to anyone,” she said.

“But you are, Miss Els. Didn’t you hear what Grelier said? One in a thousand. One in a million, perhaps, with your degree of receptivity. I’d say that makes you worth two thousand ecus per day of anyone’s money.”

“What if my advice isn’t right?” she asked. “I’m only human. I make mistakes.”

“You won’t get it wrong,” he said, with more certainty than she liked. “I have faith in few things, Rashmika, beyond God Himself. But you are one of them. Fate has brought you to my cathedral. A gift from God, almost. I’d be foolish to turn it away, wouldn’t I?”

“I don’t feel like a gift from anything,” she said.

“What do you feel like, then?”

She wanted to say, like an avenging angel. But instead she said, “I feel tired and a long way from home, and I’m not sure what I should do.”

“Work with me. See how it goes. If you don’t like it, you can always leave.”

“Is that a promise, Dean?”

“As God is my witness.”

But she couldn’t tell if he was lying or not. Behind Quaiche, Grelier stood up with a click of his knee-joints. He ran a hand through the electric-white bristles of his hair. “I’ll show you to your quarters, then,” he said. “I take it you’ve agreed to stay?”

“For now,” Rashmika said.

“Good. Right choice. You’ll like it here, I’m sure. The dean is right: you are truly privileged to have arrived at such an auspicious time.” He reached out a hand. “Welcome aboard.”

“That’s it?” she said, shaking his hand. “No formalities? No initiation rituals?”

“Not for you,” Grelier said. “You’re a secular specialist, Miss Els, just like myself. We wouldn’t want to go clouding your brain with all that religious claptrap, would we?”

She looked at Quaiche. His metal-goggled face was as unreadable as ever. “I suppose not.”

“There is just one thing,” Grelier said. “I’m going to have a take a bit of blood, if you don’t mind.”

“Blood?” she asked, suddenly nervous.

Grelier nodded. “Strictly for medical purposes. There are a lot of nasty bugs going around these days, especially in the Vigrid and Hyrrokkin regions. But don’t worry.” He moved towards the wall-mounted medical cabinet. “I’ll only need a wee bit.”

 

Interstellar Space, Near p Eridani 40, 2675

 

Energies pocked the space around Ararat. Scorpio watched the distant, receding battle from the spider-shaped observation capsule, secure in the warm, padded plush of its upholstery.

Carnations of light bloomed and faded over many seconds, slow and lingering as violin chords. The lights were concentrated into a tight, roughly spherical volume, centred on the planet. Around them was a vaster darkness. The slow brightening and fading, the pleasing randomness of it, stirred some memory—probably second hand—of sea creatures communicating in benthic depths, throwing patterns of bioluminescence towards each other. Not a battle at all but a rare, intimate gathering, a celebration of the tenacity of life in the cold lightless-ness of the deep ocean.

In the early phases of the space war in the p Eridani A system, the battle had been fought under a ruling paradigm of maximum stealth. All parties, Inhibitor and human, had cloaked their activities by using drives, instruments and weapons that radiated energies—if they radiated
anything
—only into the narrow, squeezed blind spots between orthodox sensor bands. The way Remontoire had described it, it had been like two men in a dark room, treading silently, slashing almost randomly into the darkness. When one man took a wound, he could not cry out for fear of revealing his location. Nor could he bleed, or offer tangible resistance to the passage of the blade. And when the other man struck, he had to withdraw the blade quickly, lest he signal his own position. A fine analogy, if the room had been light-hours wide, and the men had been human-controlled spacecraft and wolf machines, and the weapons had kept escalating in size and reach with every feint and parry. Ships had darkened their hulls to the background temperature of space; masked the emissions from their drives; used weapons that slid undetected through darkness and killed with the same discretion.

Yet there had come a point, inevitably, when it had suited one or other of the combatants to discard the stealth stratagem. Once one abandoned it, the others had to follow suit. Now it was a war not of stealth but of maximum transparency. Weapons, machines and forces were being tossed about with abandon.

Watching the battle from the observation capsule, Scorpio was reminded of something Clavain had said on more than one occasion, when viewing some distant engagement: war was beautiful, when you had the good fortune not to be engaged in it. It was sound and fury, colour and movement, a massed assault on the senses. It was bravura and theatrical, something that made you gasp. It was thrilling and romantic, when you were a spectator. But, Scorpio reminded himself, they
were
involved. Not in the sense that they were participants in the engagement around Ararat, but because their own fate depended critically on its outcome. And to a large extent he was responsible for that. Remontoire had wanted him to hand over all the cache weapons, and he had refused. Because of that, Remontoire could not guarantee that the covering action would be successful.

The console chimed, signifying that a specific chirp of gravitational radiation had just swept past the
Nostalgia for Infinity
.

“That’s it,” Vasko said, his voice hushed and businesslike. “The last cache weapon, assuming we haven’t lost count.”

“He wasn’t meant to use them up this quickly,” Khouri said. She was sitting with him in the observation capsule, with Aura cradled in her arms. “I think something’s gone wrong.”

“Wait and see,” Scorpio said. “Remontoire may just be changing the plan because he’s seen a better strategy.”

They watched a beam of
something
—bleeding visible light sideways so that it was evident even in vacuum—reach out with elegant slowness across the theatre of battle. There was something obscene and tonguelike about the way it extended itself, pushing towards some invisible wolf target on the far side of the battle. Scorpio did not like to think about how bright that beam must have been close-up, for it was visible now even without optical magnification or intensity enhancement. He had turned down all the lights in the observation capsule, dimming the navigation controls so that they had the best view of the engagement. Shields had been carefully positioned to screen out the glare and radiation from the engines.

The capsule lurched, something snapping free of the larger ship. Scorpio had learned not to flinch when such things happened. He waited while the capsule reoriented itself, picking its way to a new place of rest with the unhurried care of a tarantula, following the dictates of some ancient collision-avoidance algorithm.

Khouri looked through one of the portholes, holding Aura up to the view even though the baby’s eyes were still closed.

“It’s strange down here,” she said. “Like no other part of the ship. Who did this? The Captain or the sea?”

“The sea, I think,” Scorpio replied, “though I don’t know whether the Jugglers had anything to do with it or not. There was a whole teeming marine ecology below the Jugglers, just as on any other aquatic planet.”

“Why are you whispering?” Vasko asked. “Can he hear us in here?”

“I’m whispering because it’s beautiful and strange,” Scorpio said. “Plus, I happen to have a headache. It’s a pig thing. It’s because our skulls are a bit too small for our brains. It gets worse as we get older. Our optic nerves get squeezed and we go blind, assuming macular degeneration doesn’t get us first.” He smiled into darkness. “Nice view, isn’t it?”

“I only asked.”

“You didn’t answer his question,” Khouri said. “Can he hear us in here?”

“John?” Scorpio shrugged. “Don’t know. Me, I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. Only polite, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t think you ‘did’ polite,” Khouri said.

“I’m working on it.”

Aura gurgled.

The capsule stiffened its legs, pushing itself closer to the hull with a delicate clang of contacting surfaces. It hung suspended beneath the flattened underside of the great ship, where the
Nostalgia for Infinity
had come to rest on Ararat’s seabed. All around it, seen in dim pastel shades, were weird coral-like formations. There were grey-green structures as large as ships, forests of gnarled, downward-pointing fingers, like stone chandeliers. The growths had all formed during the ship’s twenty-three years of immersion, forming a charming rock-garden counterpoint to the brutalist transformations inflicted on the hull by the captain’s own plague-driven reshaping processes. They had remained intact even as the Jugglers had moved the
Infinity
to deeper water, and they had survived both the departure from Ararat and the subsequent engagement with wolf forces. Doubtless John Brannigan could have removed them, just as he had redesigned the ship’s lower extremities to permit it to land on Ararat in the first place. The entire ship was an externalisation of his psyche, an edifice chiselled from guilt, horror and the craving for absolution.

But there was no sign of any further transformations taking place here. Perhaps, Scorpio mused, it suited the Captain to carry these warts and scabs of dead marine life, just as it suited Scorpio to carry the scar on his shoulder, where he had effaced the scorpion tattoo. Remove evidence of that scar, and he would have been removing part of what made him Scorpio. Ararat, in turn, had changed the Captain. Scorpio was certain of that, certain also that the Captain felt it. But how had it changed him, exactly? Shortly, he thought, it would be necessary to put the Captain to the test.

Scorpio had already made the appropriate arrangements. There was a fistful of bright-red dust in his pocket.

Vasko stirred, the upholstery creaking. “Yes, it might pay to be polite to him,” he said. “After all, nothing’s going to happen around here without his agreement. I think we all recognise that.”

“You talk as if you think there’s going to be a clash of wills,” Scorpio said. He kept one eye on the extending beam of the cache weapon, watching as it scribed a bright scratch across the volume of battle. The scratch was now of a finite length, inching its way across space. Where the cache weapon had been was only a fading smudge of dying matter. The weapon had been a one-shot job, a throwaway.

“You think there won’t be?” Vasko asked.

“I’m an optimist. I think we’ll all see sense.”

“You won the battle over the cache weapons,” Vasko said. “Remontoire went along with it, and so did the ship. I’m not surprised about that: the ship felt safer with the weapons than without them. But we still don’t know that it was the right thing to do. What about next time?”

“Next time? I don’t see any disputes on the horizon,” Scorpio said.

But he did, and he felt isolated now that Remontoire and Antoinette had gone. Remontoire and the last of the Conjoiners had departed a day ago, taking with them their servitors, machines and the last of the negotiated number of cache weapons. In their place they had left behind working manufactories and the vast shining things Scorpio had watched them assemble. Remontoire had explained that the weapons and mechanisms had only been tested in a very limited fashion. Before they could be used they would require painstaking calibration, following a set of instructions the Conjoiner technicians had left behind. The Conjoiner technicians could not stay aboard and complete the calibrations: if they waited any longer, their small ships would be unable to return to the main battle group around Ararat. Even with inertia-suppressing systems, they were still horribly constrained by the exigencies of fuel reserves and delta-vee margins. Physics still mattered. It was not their own survival they cared about, but their usefulness to the Mother Nest. And so they had left, taking with them the one man Scorpio felt would have had the will to oppose Aura, if the circumstances merited it.