Absolution Gap (99 page)

He snapped his helmet on, gathered his belongings and cycled through the airlock. Outside, standing on the pad, he had to admit that the view was awesome. He could see the point where the land just ended, that vast cliff edge towards which they were sliding. Unstoppable now, he thought. Under any circumstances even slowing the progress of the Lady Morwenna was a matter of labyrinthine bureaucratic procedure. It could take many hours for the paperwork to filter down to the Motive Power technicians who actually had their hands on the motor controls. More often than not, conditioned to believe that the cathedral should never slow, they queried their orders, sending the paperwork echoing back up through the chain of command, resulting in more hours of delay. And what the cathedral needed now was not to slow down but to come to a complete standstill. Grelier shuddered: he didn’t want to think about how long it would take for
that
to happen.

Something caught his eye. He looked up, seeing countless sparks zip across the sky. Dozens—no, hundreds—of ships. What was going on?

Then he looked towards the horizon and saw the much larger bulk of the lighthugger, a small but visibly elongated sliver of twinkling iron-grey. The other ships were obviously heading towards it.

Something was up.

Grelier turned from the shuttle, anxious to make his way indoors and find out what was happening. Then he noticed the smudge of red on the end of his cane. He thought he had cleaned it thoroughly before leaving the settlement in the Vigrid region, but evidently he had been remiss.

Tutting to himself, he wiped the end of the cane against the frost-covered surface of the landing pad, leaving smears of pink.

Then he set off to find the dean, for he had interesting news to deliver.

 

Orca Cruz saw the two Adventists before the rest of her party. They were at the end of a wide, low-ceilinged corridor, one against each wall, moving towards her with the measured pace of sleepwalkers.

Cruz turned to the three Security Arm officers behind her. “Minimum necessary force,” she said quietly. “Bayonets and stun-prods only. This lot don’t have a flame-gun, and I’d really like to do some questioning.”

The Arm unit nodded in unison. They all knew what Cruz meant by that.

She started towards the Adventists, pushing the sharp blade of her weapon before her. The Adventists had little armour now. Garbled reports from the other elements of the Security Arm—the same messages that had warned her about the flame-throwers—had suggested that they had removed their vacuum suits, but she had not been prepared to believe it until she saw it with her own eye. But they hadn’t discarded the armour entirely: they carried jagged bits of it in their hands, and had lashed large curved parts to their chests. They still wore their metal gloves and pink-plumed helmets.

She admired the thinking behind their strategy. Once a boarding party had reached this far inside a lighthugger, armour was largely superfluous. Ultras would be very unwilling to deploy energy weapons against boarders even if they knew themselves to be safely distant from vacuum or ship-critical systems. The instinct not to harm their own ship was just too deeply ingrained, even when the ship was under threat of takeover. And aboard a ship like the
Nostalgia for Infinity
—with every inch of the ship’s fabric wired into the Captain’s nervous system—that instinct was all the stronger. They had all seen what happened when some accident inflicted a wound in the ship; they had all felt the Captain’s pain.

Cruz advanced down the corridor. “Put down your weapons,” she called. “You know you can’t succeed.”

“Put down
your
weapons,” one of the Adventists replied, chidingly. “We only want your ship. No one will be harmed, and the ship will be returned to you.”

“You could have asked nicely,” Cruz said.

“Would you have been likely to agree?”

“Not very,” she said, after a moment’s reflection.

“Then I think we have nothing else to say to each other.”

Cruz’s party moved forwards to within ten metres of the Adventists. She noticed that one of them was not in fact wearing a gauntlet at all; his hand was artificial. She remembered him: Scorpio had gone to extra pains to make sure the hand did not contain an anti-matter bomb.

“Final warning,” she said.

The other Adventist flung a bladed weapon towards her. It gyred through the air; Cruz threw herself back against the wall and felt the sharp, brief breeze as the weapon whisked past her throat and buried itself in the wall. Another weapon spun through the air; she heard glance against body armour without finding a weak spot.

“All right, game over,” Cruz said. She gestured to her people. “Pacification strength. Take ’em down.”

They pushed ahead of her, bayonets and snub-nosed stun-prods at the ready. The Adventist with the artificial hand pointed it in Cruz’s direction, like an admonition. It didn’t worry her: Scorpio’s examination had been thorough; the hand couldn’t possibly contain a concealed projectile or beam weapon.

The tip of the index finger came off. It detached from the rest of the finger, but instead of dropping to the ground it just floated there, slowly drifting away from the hand like a spacecraft on a lazy departure.

Cruz watched it, stupidly transfixed. The tip accelerated, travelled ten, twenty centimetres. It approached her party, bobbing slightly, and then yawed to the right as the hand moved, as if still connected to it by an invisible thread.

Which, she realised, it was.

“Monofilament scythe,” she shouted. “Fall back.
Fall the fuck back!
”

Her party got the message. They retreated from the Adventists even as the tip of the finger began to move in a vertical circle, seemingly of its own volition. The man’s hand was making tiny, effortless movements. The circle widened, the tip of the finger becoming a blurred grey ring a metre wide. In Chasm City, Orca Cruz had seen the grotesque results of scythe weapons. She had seen what happened when people blundered into static scythe defence lines, or moving scythes like the one being demonstrated here. It was never pretty. But what she remembered, more than the screams, more than the hideously sculpted and segregated corpses left behind, was the expression she always saw on the faces of the victims an instant after they’d realised their mistake. It was less fright, less shock, more acute embarrassment: the realisation that they were about to make a terrible, sickening spectacle of themselves.

“Fall back,” she repeated.

“Permission to fire,” one of her party said.

Cruz shook her head. “Not yet,” she said. “Not until we’re cornered.”

The whisking blur of the scythe advanced further down the corridor, emitting a high-pitched quavering note that was almost musical.

 

Scorpio tried again, shifting his weight as much as he was able, to prise himself away from the wall. He had given up calling for help and had long since stopped paying attention to his own yelps and squeals. The Adventist delegates had not returned, but they were still out there: intermittently, the muffled sounds of battle reached him through the echoing labyrinth of corridors, ducts and elevator shafts. He heard shouts and screams, and very occasionally he heard the basso groan of the ship itself, responding to some niggling internal injury. Nothing that the delegates did—either with their cutting tools or their flame-throwers—could possibly inflict any real harm upon the Captain. The
Nostalgia for Infinity
had survived a direct attack by one of its own cache weapons, after all. But even a tiny splinter could become an irritation out of all proportion to its physical size.

He thrashed again, feeling savage fire in both shoulders. There: something was beginning to give, wasn’t it? Was it him or the throwing weapons?

He tried again, and blacked out. He came around seconds or possibly minutes later, still pinned to the wall, an unpleasant metallic taste in his mouth. He was still alive, and—pain aside—he didn’t feel much worse than when Seyfarth had stuck him here. He supposed there must have been something in Seyfarth’s boast about not damaging any of his internal organs. But there was no guarantee that Scorpio wouldn’t start bleeding all over the place as soon as the weapons were removed. Why were the Security Arm taking so long to find him?

Twenty soldiers, he thought. That was enough to make trouble, no doubt about it, but they couldn’t possibly hope to take the entire ship. They had known all along that they could not smuggle serious firepower aboard the
Nostalgia for Infinity,
not in these hair-trigger times. But Seyfarth had struck him as a man who knew what he was doing, very unlikely to have volunteered for a futile suicide mission.

Scorpio groaned: not with pain, this time, but with the realisation that he had made a dreadful mistake. He couldn’t be blamed for letting the delegates aboard: he had been overruled on that one, and if he had missed the true nature of their armour, it was only because he had never heard of anyone using that particular trick before. Anyway, he
had
scanned the armour—even if he’d been looking through, rather than at it—and he’d seen nothing suspicious. The armour would have to have been removed and examined in a lab before the microscopic flaws and weak points would have revealed themselves. No: that wasn’t his mistake either. But he really shouldn’t have turned on the engines. Why had the Adventists needed to see them? They’d already observed the ship making its approach to the system, if that was what they were interested in.

What they were really interested in, if he read them rightly, was something else entirely: they had been using the engines to send a signal to Hela. The burst of thrust meant they were in place—that they had passed through his security arrangements and were ready to begin the take-over operation.

It was a signal to send in reinforcements.

Even as that thought crystallised in his head, he heard the ship groan again. But it was a different kind of groan this time. It was more like the sonorous off-key tolling of a very large, very cracked bell.

Scorpio closed his eyes: he knew exactly what that sound was. It was the hull defences: the
Nostalgia for Infinity
was under attack from outside as well as from within.
Great,
he thought. This was really shaping up to be one of those days when he should have stayed inside the reefersleep casket. Or, better still, should never have survived thawing in the first place.

A moment later, the entire fabric of the ship trembled. He felt it through the sharp-edged things pinning him to the wall. He screamed and blacked out again.

What woke him was pain—more than he had felt so far. It was hard and strangely rhythmic, as if he had been convulsing in his sleep. But he was making no conscious movements at all. Instead, the wall against which he was pinned was bellowing in and out, like a huge breathing lung.

Suddenly, anticlimactically, he popped loose. He hit the deck, sprawling, his lower jaw in the filthy, stinking overflow of ship effluent. The two bladed weapons clattered to the ground beside him. He experimented with pushing himself to his knees, and—to his surprise—found he was able to exert pressure on his arms without the pain becoming more than two or three times as intense. Nothing was broken, then—or at least nothing that had much to do with either arm.

Scorpio struggled to his feet. He touched the first wound, then the second. There was a lot of blood, but it wasn’t jetting out under arterial pressure. Presumably it was the same story with the two exit wounds. No telling about internal bleeding, but he’d cross that bridge when it became a problem.

Still unsure exactly what had happened to him, he knelt down again and picked up one of the bladed things. It was the first one: the boomerang weapon. He could see the curve of the original armour, the larger form implied by the fragment. He threw it away, kicked the other one aside. Then he reached down to his belt, through waves of pain, and found the haft of Clavain’s knife. He removed it from its sheath and flicked on the piezoelectric effect, feeling the hum transmitted to his palm.

In the gloom of the corridor ahead of him, something moved.

“Scorpio.”

He squinted, half-expecting it to be another Adventist, hoping it was someone from the Security Arm. “Took your time,” he said, which seemed to cover either possibility.

“We’ve got trouble, Scorp.
Big
trouble.”

The figure stepped out of the gloom. Scorpio flinched: it was no one he had been expecting. “Captain,” he breathed.

“I thought you needed some help to get free of that wall. Sorry it took me so long.”

“Better late than never,” Scorpio said.

It was a class-three apparition. No, Scorpio thought, strike that: this apparition demanded a new category all of its own. It was more than just a local alteration of the ship’s fabric, a remodelling of a wall or the temporary reassignment of some servitor parts. This thing was real and distinct from the ship itself. It was a physical artefact: a spacesuit, a huge, lumbering golemlike servo-powered affair. And it was empty. The faceplate was cranked up: there was only darkness within the helmet. The voice he heard came through the speaker grille beneath the helmet’s chin that was normally used for audio communications in a pressurised environment.

“Are you all right, Scorp?”

He dabbed at the blood again. “I’m not down yet. Doesn’t look as if you are, either.”

“It was a mistake to let them aboard.”

“I know,” Scorpio said, looking down at his shoes. “I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” the Captain said. “It was mine.”

Scorpio looked up at the apparition again. Something forced him to direct his attention into the darkness within the helmet: it seemed impolite not to. “So what now? They’re bringing reinforcements, aren’t they?”

“That’s their plan. Ships have begun to attack. I’ve parried most of them, but a handful have slipped through my hull defences. They’ve begun to drill into the hull. They’re hurting me, Scorp.”