Absolution Gap (27 page)

They sat down on opposite sides of her bed—Clavain in one chair, Scorpio in another, but reversed so that he sat with his arms folded across the top of the backrest.

“I’ve read Valensin’s report,” Scorpio began. “We were all hoping he’d tell us you were insane. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be the case.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “And that gives me a really bad headache.”

Khouri pushed herself up in the bed. “I’m sorry about your headache, but can we skip the formalities and get on with rescuing my daughter?”

“We’ll discuss it when you’re up on your feet,” Clavain said.

“Why not now?”

“Because we still need to know exactly what’s happened. We’ll also need an accurate tactical assessment of any scenario involving Skade and your daughter. Would you define it as a hostage situation?” Clavain asked.

“Yes,” Khouri replied, grudgingly.

“Then until we have concrete demands from Skade, Aura is in no immediate danger. Skade won’t risk hurting her one asset. She may be cold-hearted, but she’s not irrational.”

Guardedly, Scorpio observed the old man. He appeared as alert and quick-witted as ever, yet to the best of Scorpio’s knowledge Clavain had allowed himself no more than two hours of sleep since returning to the mainland. Scorpio had seen that kind of thing in other elderly human men: they needed little sleep and resented its imposition by those younger than themselves. It was not that they necessarily had more energy, but that the division between sleep and waking had become an indistinct, increasingly arbitrary thing. He wondered how that would feel, drifting through an endless succession of grey moments, rather than ordered intervals of day and night.

“How much time are we talking about?” Khouri said. “Hours or days, before you act?”

“I’ve convened a meeting of colony seniors for later this morning,” Clavain said. “If the situation merits it, a rescue operation could be underway before sunset.”

“Can’t you just take my word that we need to act
now
?”

Clavain scratched his beard. “If your story made more sense, I might.”

“I’m not lying.” She gestured in the direction of one of the servitors. “The doctor gave me the all-clear, didn’t he?”

Scorpio smiled, tapping the medical report against the back of his chair. “He said you weren’t obviously delusional, but his examination raised as many questions as it answered.”

“You talk about a baby,” Clavain said before Khouri had a chance to interrupt, “but according to this report you’ve never given birth. Nor is there any obvious sign of Caesarean surgery having been performed.”

“It wouldn’t be obvious—it was done by Conjoiner medics. They can sew you up so cleanly it’s as if it never happened.” She looked at each of them in turn, her anger and fear equally clear. “Are you saying you don’t believe me?”

Clavain shook his head. “I’m saying we can’t verify your story, that’s all. According to Valensin there
is
womb distension consistent with you having very recently been pregnant, and there are hormonal changes in your blood that support the same conclusion. But Valensin admits that there could be other explanations.”

“They don’t contradict my story, either.”

“But we’ll need more convincing before we organise a military action,” Clavain said.

“Again: why can’t you just trust me?”

“Because it’s not only the story about your baby that doesn’t make sense,” Clavain replied. “How did you
get
here, Ana? Where’s the ship that should have brought you? You didn’t come all the way from the Resurgam system in that capsule, and yet there’s no sign of any other spacecraft having entered our system.”

“And that makes me a liar?”

“It makes us suspicious,” Scorpio said. “It makes us wonder if you’re what you appear to be.”

“The ships are here,” she said, sighing, as if spoiling a carefully planned surprise. “All of them. They’re concentrated in the immediate volume of space around this planet. Remontoire, the
Zodiacal Light
, the two remaining starships from Skade’s taskforce—they’re all up there, within one AU of this planet. They’ve been in your system for nine weeks. That’s how I got here, Clavain.”

“You can’t hide ships that easily,” he said. “Not consistently, not all the time. Not when we’re actively looking for them.”

“We can now,” she said. “We have techniques you know nothing about. Things we’ve learned . . . things we’ve
had
to learn since the last time you saw us. Things you won’t believe.”

Clavain glanced at Scorpio. The pig tried to guess what was going through the old man’s mind and failed.

“Such as?” Clavain asked.

“New engines,” she said. “Dark drives. You can’t see them.
Nothing
sees them. The exhaust . . . slips away. Camouflaging screens. Free-force bubbles. Miniaturised cryo-arithmetic engines. Reliable control of inertia on bulk scales. Hypometric weapons.” She shivered. “I
really
don’t like the hypometric weapons. They scare me. I’ve seen what happens when they go wrong. They’re
not right
.”

“All that in twenty-odd years?” Clavain asked, incredulously.

“We had some help.”

“Sounds as if you had God on the end of the phone, taking down your wish list.”

“It wasn’t God, believe me. I should know. I was the one who did the asking.”

“And who exactly did you ask?”

“My daughter,” Khouri said. “She knows things, Clavain. That’s why she’s valuable. That’s why Skade wants her.”

Scorpio felt dizzy: it seemed that every time they scratched back one layer of Khouri’s story, there was something even less comprehensible behind it.

“I still don’t understand why you didn’t signal your arrival from orbit,” Clavain said.

“Partly because we didn’t want to draw attention to Ararat,” Khouri said. “Not until we had to. There’s a war going on up there, understand? A major space engagement, with heavily stealthed combatants. Any kind of signalling is a risk. There’s also a lot of jamming and disruption going on.”

“Between Skade’s forces and your own?”

“It’s more complicated than that. Until recently, Skade was fighting with us, rather than against us. Even now, aside from the personal business between Skade and myself, I’d say we’re in what you might call a state of uneasy truce.”

“Then who the hell are you fighting?” Clavain asked.

“The Inhibitors,” Khouri said. “The wolves, whatever you want to call them.”

“They’re here?” Scorpio asked. “Actually in this system?”

“Sorry to rain on your parade,” Khouri said.

“Well,” Clavain said, looking around, “I don’t know about the rest of you, but that certainly puts a dent in my day.”

“That was the idea,” Khouri said.

Clavain ran a finger down the straight line of his nose. “One other thing. Several times since you arrived here you’ve mentioned a word that sounds like ‘hella.’ You even said we had to get there. The name means nothing to me. What is its significance?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t even remember saying it.”

Quaestor Jones had been warned to expect a new guest aboard his caravan. The warning had come straight from the Permanent Way, with the official seals of the Clocktower. Shortly afterwards, a small spacecraft—a single-seat shuttle of Ultra manufacture shaped like a cockleshell—came sliding over the procession of caravan vehicles.

The ruby-hulled vehicle loitered on a spike of expertly balanced thrust, hovering unnervingly while the caravan continued on its way. Then it lowered, depositing itself on the main landing pad. The hull opened and a vacuum-suited figure stepped from the vehicle’s hatch. The figure hesitated, reaching back into the cockpit for a walking stick and a small white case. Cameras tracked him from different viewpoints as he made his way down into the caravan, opening normally impassable doors with Clocktower keys, shutting them neatly behind him. He walked very slowly, taking his time, giving the quaestor the opportunity to exercise his imagination. Now and then he tapped his cane against some component of the caravan, or paused to run a gloved hand along the top of a wall, inspecting his fingers as if for dust.

“I don’t like this, Peppermint,” the quaestor told the creature perched on his desk. “It’s never good when they send someone out, especially when they only give you an hour’s warning. It means they want to surprise you. It means they think you’re up to something.”

The creature busied itself with the small pile of seeds the quaestor had tipped on to the table. There was something engrossing about just watching it eat and then clean itself. Its faceted black eyes—in the right light they were actually a very dark, lustrous purple—shone like rare minerals.

“Who can it be, who can it be . . .” the quaestor said, drumming his fingers on the table. “Here, have some more seeds. A
stick
. Who do we know who walks with a stick?”

The creature looked up at him, as if on the verge of having an opinion. Then it went back to its nibbling, its tail coiled around a paperweight.

“This isn’t good, Peppermint. I can feel it.”

The quaestor prided himself on running a tight ship, as far as caravans went. He did what the church asked of him, but in every other respect he kept his nose out of cathedral business. His caravan always returned to the Way on time to meet its rendezvous, and he rarely came back without a respectable haul of pilgrims, migrant workers and scuttler artefacts. He took care of his passengers and clients without in any way seeking their friendship or gratitude. He needed neither: he had his responsibilities, and he had Peppermint, and that was all that mattered.

Things had not been as good lately as in the past, but that went for all the caravans, and if they were going to single anyone out for punishment, there were others who had far worse records than the quaestor. Besides, the church must have been largely satisfied with his work for them over the last few years, or else they would not have allowed his caravan to grow so large and to travel such important trade routes. He had a good relationship with the cathedral officials he dealt with, and—though none of them would ever have admitted it—a reputation for fairness when it came to dealing with traders like Crozet. So what was the purpose of this surprise visit?

He hoped it had nothing to do with blood. It was well known that the closer you got to cathedral business, the more likely you were to come into contact with the agents of the Office of Bloodwork, that clerical body which promulgated the literal blood of Quaiche. Bloodwork was an organ of the Clocktower, he knew that. But this far from the Way, Quaiche’s blood ran thin and diluted. It was hard to live in the country, beyond the iron sanctuary of the cathedrals. You needed to think about icefalls and geysers. You needed detachment and clarity of mind, not the chemical piety of an indoctrinal virus. But what if there had been a change of policy, a broadening of the reach of Bloodwork?

“It’s that Crozet,” he said, “always brings bad luck. Shouldn’t have let him aboard this late in the run. Should’ve sent him back with his tail between his legs. He’s a lazy good-for-nothing, that one.”

Peppermint looked up at him. The little mouthparts said, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

“Yes, thank you, Peppermint.” The quaestor opened his desk drawer. “Now why don’t you climb in there until we’ve seen our visitor? And keep your trap shut.”

He reached out for the creature, ready to fold it gently into a form that would fit within the drawer. But the door to his office was already opening, the stranger’s passkey working even here.

The suited figure walked in, stopped and closed the door behind him. He rested the cane against the side of the table and placed the white case on the ground. Then he reached up and unlatched his helmet seal. The helmet was a rococo affair, with bas-relief gargoyles worked around the visor. He slid it over his head and set it down on the end of the table.

Rather to his surprise, the quaestor did not recognise the man. He had been expecting one of the usual church officials he dealt with, but this was truly a stranger.

“Might I have a wee word, Quaestor?” the man asked, gesturing towards the seat on his side of the desk.

“Yes, yes,” Quaestor Jones said hastily. “Please sit down. How was your, um . . . ?”

“My journey from the Way?” The man blinked, as if momentarily narcotised by the utter dullness of the quaestor’s question. “Unremarkable.” Then he looked at the creature that the quaestor had not had time to hide. “Yours, is it?”

“My Pep . . . my Petnermint. My Peppermint. Pet. Mine.”

“A genetic toy, isn’t it? Let me have a guess: one part stick insect, one part chameleon, one part something mammalian?”

“There’s cat in him,” the quaestor said. “Definitely cat. Isn’t there, Peppermint?” He pushed some of the seeds towards the visitor. “Would you like to, um . . . ?”

Again to the quaestor’s surprise—and he wasn’t quite sure why he had asked in the first place—the stranger took a pinch of the seeds and offered his hand up to Peppermint’s head. He did it very gently. The creature’s mandibles began to eat the seeds, one by one.

“Charming,” the man said, leaving his hand where it was. “I’d get one for myself, but I hear they’re very hard to come by.”

“Devils to keep healthy,” the quaestor said.

“I’m sure they are. Well, to business.”

“Business,” the quaestor said, nodding.

The man had a long, thin face with a very flat nose and a strong jaw. He had a shock of white hair sticking straight up from his brow, stiff as a brush and mathematically planar on top, as if sliced off with a laser. Under the room’s lights it shone with a faint blue aura. He wore a high-collared side-buttoned tunic marked with the Clocktower insignia: that odd, mummylike spacesuit radiating light through cracks in its shell. But there was something about him that made the quaestor doubt that he was a cleric. He didn’t have the smell of someone with Quaiche blood in them. Some high-ranking technical official, then.