Absolution Gap (111 page)

Her heart quickened. The cathedral was already deserted. The Cathedral Guard must have left already, during the commotion on the landing stage. If that was the case, all she had to do was find her mother and Vasko and hope that the scrimshaw suit was still in a communicative frame of mind.

She orientated herself using the designs in the stained-glass windows as a reference, and set off towards the Clocktower. But she had barely taken a step when two officers of the Cathedral Guard emerged from an annexe, pointing weapons at her. They had their helmets on, visors down, pink plumes hanging from their crests.

“Please,” Rashmika said, “let me through. All I want is to reach my friends.”

“Stay where you are,” said one of the guards, training his gun on the flickering indices of her life-support tabard. He nodded to his partner. “Secure her.”

His companion shouldered his gun and reached for something on his belt.

“The dean is dead,” Rashmika said. “The cathedral is about to be smashed to pieces. You should leave, now, while you still can.”

“We have orders,” the guard said, while his partner pushed her against a slab of stonework.

“Don’t you understand?” she asked. “It’s all over now. Everything has changed. It doesn’t matter.”

“Bind her. And if you can shut her up, do that as well.”

The guard moved to slide her visor down. Rashmika started to protest, wanting to fight but knowing she didn’t have the strength. But even as she struggled, she saw something lurch from the shadows behind the guard holding the gun.

A flicker of a moving blade flashed through her peripheral vision. The guard made a guttural sound, his gun dropping to the floor.

The other one started to react, springing away from Rashmika and making an effort to bring his own weapon around. Rashmika kicked him, her boot catching him in the knee. He stumbled back into the masonry, still fumbling for the gun. The vacuum-suited pig crossed the distance to him, slid the silver gleam of his knife into the man’s abdomen and then dragged it upwards through his sternum in one smooth arc.

Scorpio killed the knife, slipped it back into its sheath. Firmly but gently, he pushed Rashmika into the shadows, where the two of them crouched together.

She pushed her visor up again, surprised at the harshness of her own breathing.

“Thanks, Scorp.”

“You know who I am? After all this time?”

“You left your mark,” she said, between breaths. She reached and touched his hand with hers. “Thanks for coming.”

“Had to drop in, didn’t I?”

She waited until her breathing had settled down. “Scorp—was that you, with the bridge?”

“Had my trademark on it, did it?” He pushed his own visor up and smiled. “Yes. How else was I going to get them to stop this thing?”

“I understand,” she said. “It was a good idea, too. Shame about the bridge, but—”

“But?”

“The cathedral can’t stop, Scorp. It’s going over.”

He seemed to take this as only a minor adjustment to his world view. “Then we’d better get off it as soon as we can. Where are the others?”

“Up the Clocktower, in the dean’s garret. They’re under guard.”

“We’ll get them out,” he said. “Trust me.”

“And the suit, Scorp? The thing I came all this way to find?”

“We need to have a word about that,” he said.

They rode the elevator up to the garret, the low sun sliding colours across their faces.

Scorpio reached into his suit pocket. “Remontoire gave me this,” he said.

Rashmika took the piece of conch material, examined it with the cautious, critical eye of someone who has lived amongst fossils and bones and who knows that the slightest scratch can speak volumes—both truthful and false.

“I don’t recognise it,” she said.

He told her everything that he had learned from Remontoire, everything that Remontoire had guessed or conjectured.

“We’re not alone in this,” Scorpio said. “There’s someone else out there. We don’t even have a name for them. We only know them from the wreckage they leave behind.”

“They left this behind on Ararat?”

“And around Ararat,” he said. “And elsewhere, you can bet. Whoever they are, they must have been out there a long time. They’re clever, Aura.” He used her real name deliberately. “They’d have to be, to have lived with the Inhibitors for so long.”

“I don’t understand what they have to do with us.”

“Maybe nothing,” he said. “Maybe everything. It depends on what happened to the scuttlers. That’s where you come in, I think.”

Her voice was flat as she said, “Everyone knows what happened to the scuttlers.”

“Which is?”

“They were destroyed by the Inhibitors.”

He watched the colours paint her face. She looked radiant and dangerous, like an avenging angel in an illuminated heretical gospel. “And what do you think?”

“I don’t think the Inhibitors had anything to do with the extinction of the scuttlers. I never have: not since I started paying attention, at least. It didn’t look like an Inhibitor cull to me. Too much was left behind. It was thorough, don’t get me wrong, but not thorough enough.” She paused, cast her face down as if embarrassed. “That was what my book was about: the one I was working on when I lived in the badlands. It was a thesis, proving my hypothesis through the accumulation of data.”

“No one would have listened to you,” he said. “But if it’s any consolation, I think you’re right. The question is: what did the shadows have to do with any of this?”

“I don’t know.”

“When we came here, we thought it was simple. The evidence pointed to one conclusion: that the scuttlers had been wiped out by the Inhibitors.”

“That’s what the scrimshaw suit told me,” Rashmika said. “The scuttlers built the mechanism to receive the signals from the shadows. But they didn’t take the final step: they didn’t allow the shadows to cross over to help them.”

“But now we have the chance not to make the same mistake,” Scorpio said.

“Yes,” Rashmika said, sounding wary of a trap. “But you don’t think we should do it, do you?”

“I think the mistake the scuttlers made was to contact the shadows,” Scorpio said.

Rashmika shook her head. “The shadows didn’t wipe out the scuttlers. That doesn’t make any sense, either. We know that they’re at least as powerful as the Inhibitors. They wouldn’t have left a trace behind here. And if they had crossed over, why would they still be pleading for the chance to do so?”

“Exactly,” Scorpio said.

Rashmika echoed him. “Exactly?”

“It wasn’t the Inhibitors that annihilated the scuttlers,” he said. “And it wasn’t the shadows, either. It was whoever—or whatever—made that shard of conch material.”

She gave it back to him, as if the thing were in some way tainted. “Do you have any proof of this, Scorp?”

“None whatsoever. But if we were to dig around on Hela—really dig—I wouldn’t be surprised if we eventually turned up something like this. Just a shard would do. Of course, there’s another way to test my theory.”

She shook her head, as if trying to clear it. “But what did the scuttlers do that meant they had to be wiped out of existence?”

“They made the wrong decision,” he said.

“Which was?”

“They negotiated with the shadows. That was the test, Aura, that was what the conch-makers were waiting for. They knew that the one thing the scuttlers shouldn’t do was open the door to the shadows. You can’t beat one enemy by doing a deal with something worse. We’d better ensure that we don’t make the same mistake.”

“The conch-makers don’t sound much better than the shadows—or the Inhibitors—in that case.”

“I’m not saying we have to climb into bed with them, just that we might want to take them into consideration. They’re here, Aura, in this system. Just because we can’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t watching our every move.”

The elevator ascended in silence for several more seconds. Eventually Rashmika said, “You haven’t actually come for the scrimshaw suit at all, have you?”

“I had an open mind,” Scorpio said.

“And now?”

“You’ve helped me make it up. It isn’t leaving the Lady Morwenna.”

“Then Dean Quaiche was right,” Rashmika said. “He always said the suit was full of demons.”

The elevator slowed. Scorpio placed the shard of conch material back in his belt pouch, then retrieved Clavain’s knife. “Stay here,” he said. “If I don’t come back out of that room in two minutes, take the elevator down to the surface. And then get the hell out of the cathedral.”

 

The four of them stood on the ice: Rashmika and her mother, Vasko and the pig. They had walked with the Lady Morwenna since leaving it, following the immense thing as it continued its journey towards the attenuated stump of the bridge thrusting out from the edge of the cliff. They were actually standing on that last part of the bridge, a good kilometre out from the cliff wall.

It seemed very unlikely that there was anyone left alive aboard the cathedral now, but Scorpio had resigned himself to never knowing that for certain. He had swept the main spaces looking for survivors, but there were almost certainly dozens of pressurised hiding places he would never have found. It was, he thought, enough that he had tried. In his present weakened state, even that had been more than anyone could have expected.

In other respects, nothing very much about the Lady Morwenna had changed. The lower levels had been depressurised, as he had discovered when he climbed aboard using the line that the technician had dropped down from the propulsion chamber. But the great machines evidently worked as well in vacuum as in air: there had been no hesitation in the cathedral’s onward march, and the subsystems of electrical generation had not been affected. High up in the garret of the Clocktower, lights still burned. But no one moved up there, nor in any of the other windows that shone in the moving edifice.

“How far now?” Scorpio asked.

“Two hundred metres to the edge,” Vasko said, “near as I can judge.”

“Fifteen minutes,” Rashmika said. “Then the front half of her will be over thin air—assuming that the remaining part of the bridge holds her that far.”

“I think it’ll hold,” Scorpio said. “I think it would have held all the way over, to be honest.”

“That would have been something to see,” Khouri said.

“I guess we’ll never know what made the bridge,” Vasko said. Next to him, one of the huge feet was hoisted into the air by the complex machinery of the flying buttress. The foot moved forwards, then descended silently on to the ice.

Scorpio thought of the message he had intercepted via his suit. “One of life’s mysteries,” he said. “It wasn’t the scuttlers, though. We can be sure of that.”

“Not them,” Rashmika agreed. “Not in a million years. They’d never have left behind anything that marvellous.”

“It’s not too late,” Vasko said.

Scorpio turned to him, catching the distorted reflection of his own face in the man’s helmet. “Not too late for what, son?”

“To go back inside. Fifteen minutes. Say, thirteen or fourteen, to be on the safe side. I could get to the garret in time.”

“And haul that suit down the stairs?” Khouri asked. “It won’t fit in the elevator.”

“I could smash the window of the garret. With two of us, we ought to be able to push the suit over the side.”

“I thought the idea was to save it,” Scorpio said.

“It’s a lot less of a drop from the garret to the ice than from the bridge to the bottom of the Gap,” Rashmika said. “It would probably survive, with some damage.”

“Twelve minutes, if you want to play safe,” Khouri said.

“I could still do it,” Vasko said. “What about you, Scorp? Could you make it, if we had to?”

“I probably could, if I didn’t have anything planned for the rest of my life.”

“I’ll take that as a no, then.”

“We made a decision, Vasko. Where I come from, we tend to stick with them.”

Vasko craned his neck to take in the highest extremities of the Lady Morwenna. Scorpio found himself doing the same thing, even though it made him dizzy to look up. Against the fixed stars over Hela, the cathedral hardly seemed to be moving at all. But it was not the fixed stars that were the problem: it was the twenty bright new ones strung in a ragged necklace around the planet. They couldn’t stay up there for ever, Scorpio thought. The Captain had done the right thing by protecting his sleepers from the uncertainties of the holdfast, even if it had been a kind of suicide. But sooner or later someone was going to have to do something about those eighteen thousand sleeping souls.

Not my problem,
Scorpio thought. Someone else could take care of that one. “I didn’t think I’d make it this far,” he said under his breath.

“Scorp?” Khouri asked.

“Nothing,” he said, shaking his head. “Just wondering what the hell a fifty-year-old pig is doing this far from home.”

“Making a difference,” Khouri said. “Like we always knew you would.”

“She’s right,” Rashmika agreed. “Thank you, Scorpio. You didn’t have to do what you did. I’ll never forget it.”

And I’ll never forget the screams of my friend as I dug into him with that scalpel,
Scorpio thought. But what choice had he had? Clavain had never blamed him; had, in fact, done everything in his power to absolve him of any feelings of guilt. The man was about to die horribly, and the only thing that really mattered to him was sparing his friend any emotional distress. Why couldn’t Scorpio honour Clavain’s memory by letting go of the hatred? He had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It wasn’t the pig’s fault. It hadn’t been Clavain’s, either. And the one person whose fault it definitely hadn’t been was Aura.

“Scorp?” she asked.

“I’m glad you’re safe,” he said.