Absolution Gap (85 page)

Could she take that?

Rashmika swallowed. She felt very young, very alone. “I wanted to ask if you had ever heard of the shadows,” she said.

But the dean said nothing. He had never, she realised, promised her an answer.

 

Interstellar space, 2675

 

Three days later, the Inhibitor aggregate had moved within range of the weapon. The technicians still felt they had more calibration to do, more parameter space to explore. Every now and then the weapon did something weird and frightening, taking a nibble out of something local when it was supposed to be tuned for a target several AU distant. Sometimes, most frighteningly of all, its effects seemed only loosely coupled to any input. It was weakly acausal, after all: a weapon that undercut both time and space, and did so according to rules of Byzantine and shifting complexity. It was no wonder that the wolves had nothing analogous to it in their own arsenal. Perhaps they had decided that, all told, it was more trouble than it was worth. The same logic probably applied to Skade’s faster-than-light drive. A great many things were possible in the universe, far more than appeared so at first glance. But many of them were unhealthy, on both the individual and the species/galactic culture level.

But the lights kept dimming, and the weapon kept operating, and Scorpio’s private sense of self continued, unperturbed. The weapon might be doing grotesque things to the very foundations of reality, but all he cared about was what it did to the wolves. Slowly, it was taking chunks out of the pursuing swarm.

He wasn’t winning. He was surviving. That was good enough, for now.

 

Aura was wrapped in her customary quilted silver blanket, supported on her mother’s lap. Scorpio still found her frighteningly small, like a doll designed to sit inside a cabinet rather than be subjected to the damaging rough-and-tumble of the outside world. But there was something else, too: a quiet sense of invulnerability that made the back of his neck tingle. He only felt it now that her eyes were fully open. Focused and bright, like the eyes of some hunting bird, she absorbed everything that took place around her. Her eyes were golden-brown, flecked with glints of gold and bronze and some colour closer to electric blue. They didn’t simply look around. They probed and extracted. They
surveilled
.

Scorpio and the other seniors had gathered in the usual meeting room, facing each other around the dark mirror of the table. He studied his companions, mentally listing his allies and adversaries and those who had probably still to make up their minds. He could have counted on Antoinette, but she was back on Ararat now. He was sure that Blood would also have seen things his way, not because Blood would necessarily have thought things through, but because it took imagination to think of disloyalty, and imagination had never been Blood’s strong point. Scorpio missed him already. He had to keep reminding himself that his old deputy was not in fact dead, just out of reach.

It was two weeks since they had left Ararat. The
Nostalgia for Infinity
had pushed its way out of Ararat’s system at a steady one-gee acceleration, slipping between the meshing gear-teeth of the battle. In the first week, the
Infinity
had put twelve AU between itself and Ararat, reaching a fiftieth of the speed of light. By the end of the second week it had reached a twenty-fifth of light speed and was now nearly fifty AU from Ararat. Scorpio felt that distance now: looking back, Ararat’s Bright Sun, p Eridani A—the one that had warmed them for the last twenty-three years—was now only a very bright star, one hundred thousand times fainter than when seen from the the planet’s surface. It looked no brighter now than its binary companion, Faint Sun or p Eridani B; they were two amber eyes falling behind the lighthugger, pulling together as the ship headed further and further out into interstellar space. He couldn’t see the wolves—only the sensors could even begin to pick them out of the background, and then with only limited confidence—but they were there. The hypometric weapons—there were three of them online now—had been chewing holes in the pursuing elements, but not all of the wolves had been destroyed.

There was no going back. But until this moment their course had been dictated solely by Remontoire’s plan, his trajectory designed merely to get them away from the wolves with the lowest probability of interception. It was only now, after two weeks, that they had the option to steer on a new heading. The pursuing wolves had no bearing on that decision: Scorpio had to assume that they would eventually be destroyed, long before the ship reached its final destination.

He stood up and waited for everyone to fall silent. Saying nothing himself, he pulled Clavain’s knife from its sheath. Without turning it on, he leant across the table and made two marks, one on either side of the centre line, each requiring only three scratches of the blade. One was a “Y,” the other an “H.” In the dark lacquer of the wood the scratches were the colour of pigskin.

They all watched him, expecting him to say something. Instead he returned the knife to its sheath and sat back down in his seat. Then he meshed his hands behind his neck and nodded at Orca Cruz.

Cruz was his only remaining ally from his Chasm City days. She looked at them all in turn, fixing everyone with her one good eye, black fingernails rasping against the table as she made her points.

“The last few weeks haven’t been easy,” she began. “We’ve all made sacrifices, all seen plans upturned. Some of us have lost loved ones or seen our families ripped apart. Every certainty that we had a month ago has been pulverised. We are deep into unfamiliar territory, and we don’t have a map. Worse, the man we had come to trust, the man who would have seen the right way forward, isn’t with us any more.” She fixed her gaze on Scorpio, waiting until everyone else was looking at him as well. “But we still have a leader,” she continued. “We still have a damned
good
leader, someone Clavain trusted to run things on Ararat when he wasn’t around. Someone we should trust to lead us, more now than ever. Clavain had faith in his judgement. I think it’s about time we took a leaf from the old man’s book.”

Urton, the Security Arm woman, shook her head. “This is all well and good, Orca. None of us has a problem with Scorpio’s leadership.” She gave the last word a heavy emphasis, leaving everyone to draw their own conclusions about just what problems they might have with the pig. “But what we want to hear now is where
you
think we should go.”

“It’s very simple,” Orca Cruz replied. “We have to go to Hela.”

Urton tried unsuccessfully to hide her surprise. “Then we’re in agreement.”

“But only after we’ve been to Yellowstone,” Cruz said. “Hela is . . . speculative, at best. We don’t really know what we’ll find there, if anything. But we know that we can do some good around Yellowstone. We have the capacity to take tens of thousands more sleepers. Another hundred and fifty thousand, easily. Those are human lives, Urton. They’re people we can save. Fate gave us this ship. We have to do something with it.”

“We’ve already evacuated the Resurgam system,” Urton said. “Not to mention seventeen thousand people from this one. I’d say that wipes the slate clean.”

“This slate is never wiped clean,” Cruz said.

Urton waved her hand across the table. “You’re forgetting something. The core systems are crawling with Ultras. There are dozens, hundreds of ships with the sleeper capacity of
Infinity,
in any system you care to name.”

“You’d trust lives to Ultras? You’re dumber than you look,” Orca said.

“Of course I’d trust them,” Urton said.

Aura laughed.

“Why did she do that?” Urton asked.

“Because you lied,” Khouri told her. “She can tell. She can
always
tell.”

One of the refugee representatives—a man named Rintzen—coughed tactically. He smiled, doing his best to seem conciliatory. “What Urton means is that it simply isn’t our job. The motives and methods of the Ultras may be questionable—we all know that—but it is a simple fact that they have ships and a desire for customers. If the situation in the core systems does indeed reach a crisis point, then—might I venture to suggest—all we’d have is a classic case of demand being met by supply.”

Cruz shook her head. She looked disgusted. If Scorpio had walked in at that moment and only had her face to go by, he would have concluded that someone had just deposited a bowel movement on the table.

“Remind me,” she said. “When you came aboard this ship from Resurgam—how much did it cost you?”

The man examined his fingernails. “Nothing, of course . . . but that’s not the point. The situation was totally different.”

The lights dimmed. It was happening every few minutes now, as the weapons were spun up and discharged; often enough that everyone had stopped remarking on it, but that didn’t mean that the dimming went unnoticed. Everyone knew that it meant the wolves were still out there, still creeping closer to the
Nostalgia for Infinity
.

“All right,” Cruz said when the light flicked back up to full strength. “Then what about this time, when you were evacuated from Ararat? How much did you cough up for the privilege?”

“Again, nothing,” Rintzen conceded. “And again, the two things can’t be compared . . .”

“You revolt me,” Cruz said. “I dealt with some slime down in the Mulch, but you’d have been in a league of your own, Rintzen.”

“Look,” said Kashian, another of the refugee representatives, “no one’s saying it’s right for the Ultras to make a profit out of the wolf emergency, but we have to be pragmatic. Their ships will always be better suited than this one to the task of mass evacuation.” She looked around, inviting the others to do likewise. “This room may seem normal enough, but it’s hardly representative of the rest of the ship. It’s more like a hard, dry pearl in the slime of an oyster. There are still vast swathes of this ship that are not even mapped, let alone habitable. And let’s not forget that things are significantly worse than they were during the Resurgam evacuation. Most of the seventeen thousand who came aboard two weeks ago still haven’t been processed properly. They are living in unspeakable conditions.” She shivered, as if experiencing some of that squalor by osmosis.

“You want to talk about unspeakable conditions,” Cruz said, “try death for a few weeks, see how it suits you.”

Kashian shook her head, looking in exasperation at the other seniors. “You can’t negotiate with this woman. She reduces everything to insult or absurdity.”

“Might I say something?” asked Vasko Malinin.

Scorpio shrugged in his direction.

Vasko stood up, leaning forwards across the table, his fingers splayed for support. “I won’t debate the logistics of helping the evacuation effort from Yellowstone,” he said. “I don’t believe it makes any difference. Irrespective of the needs of those refugees, we have been given a clear direction not to go there. We have to listen to Aura.”

“She didn’t say we shouldn’t go to Yellowstone,” Cruz interjected. “She just said we should go to Hela.”

Vasko’s expression was severe. “You think there’s a difference?”

“Yellowstone could be our first priority, as I said. It doesn’t preclude a visit to Hela once the evacuation is complete.”

“It will take decades to do that,” Vasko said.

“It’ll take decades whatever we do,” Cruz said, smiling slightly. “That’s the nature of the game, kid. Get used to it.”

“I know the nature of the game,” Vasko told her, his voice low, letting her know that she had made a mistake in addressing him that way. “I’m also aware that we’ve been given a clear instruction about reaching Hela. If Yellowstone formed part of Aura’s plans, don’t you think she’d have told us?”

They all looked at the child. Sometimes Aura spoke: by now they had all become accustomed to her small, half-formed, liquid croak. Yet there were still days when she said nothing at all, or made only childlike noises. Then, as now, she appeared to have switched into some mode of extreme receptivity, taking in rather than giving out. Her development was accelerated, but it was not progressing smoothly: there were leaps and bounds, but there were also plateaux and unaccountable reversals.

“She means for us to go to Hela,” Khouri said. “That’s all I know.”

“What about the other part?” Scorpio asked. “The bit about negotiating with shadows?”

“It was something that came through. Maybe a memory that came loose, but which she couldn’t interpret.”

“What else came through at the same time?”

She looked at him, hesitating on the edge of answering. It was a lucky guess, but his question had worked. “I sensed something that frightened me,” she said.

“Something about these shadows?”

“Yes. It was like the chill from an open door, like a draught of terror.” Khouri looked down at the hair on her baby’s head. “She felt it as well.”

“And that’s all you can tell me?” Scorpio asked. “We have to go to Hela and negotiate with something that frightens both of you to death?”

“It was just that the message carried a warning,” Khouri said. “It said proceed with caution. But it also said it’s what we have to do.”

“You’re sure of that?” Scorpio persisted.

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

“Maybe you interpreted the message wrongly. Maybe the ‘draught of terror’ was there for a different reason. Maybe it was there to indicate that on no account should we have anything to do with . . . whatever these shadows are.”

“Maybe, Scorp,” Khouri said, “but in that case, why mention the shadows at all?”

“Or Hela, for that matter,” Vasko added.

Scorpio looked at him, drawing out the moment. “You done?” he asked.

“I guess so,” Vasko said.

“Then I think the decision needs to be taken,” the pig said. “We’ve heard all the arguments, either way. We can go to Hela on the off chance that there might be something there worth our effort. Or we can take this ship to Yellowstone and save some lives, guaranteed. I think you all know my feelings on the matter.” He nodded at the letters he had gouged into the table using Clavain’s old knife. “I think you also know what Clavain would have done, under the same circumstances.”