Absolution Gap (40 page)

“And then what?”

“All bets would be off. We’d have to accept that the Captain’s woken up.”

In Blood’s view this was already a given. “It can’t be down to Khouri, can it? If the Captain had started behaving differently today, then I could believe it. But if this is real, it started weeks ago. She wasn’t here then.”

“But they’d arrived in-system by then,” Antoinette pointed out. “The battle was already here. How do we know the Captain wasn’t sensitive to that? He’s a
ship
. His senses reach out for light-hours in all directions. Being anchored to a planet doesn’t change that.”

“We don’t know that Khouri was telling the truth,” Blood said.

Antoinette used her red marker to add another star, one that corresponded to Palfrey’s report. “I’d say we do now,” she said.

“All right. One other thing. If the Cap’s woken up . . .”

She looked at him, waiting for him to finish the sentence. “Yes?”

“Do you think it means he wants something?”

Antoinette picked up the helmet, causing the map to roll back on itself with a snapping sound. “Guess one of us is going to have to ask him,” she replied.

 

Two hours before dawn something twinkled on the horizon.

“I see it, sir,” Vasko said. “It’s the iceberg, like we saw on the map.”

“I don’t see anything,” Urton said, after peering into the distance for half a minute.

“I do,” Jaccottet said, from the other boat. “Malinin’s right, I think. There’s something there.” He reached for binoculars and held them to his eyes. The wide cowl of the lenses stayed rigidly fixed on target even as the rest of the binoculars wavered in Jaccottet’s hands.

“What do you see?” Clavain asked.

“A mound of ice. At this range, that’s about all I can make out. Still no sign of a ship, though.”

“Good work,” Clavain said to Vasko. “We’ll call you Hawkeye, shall we?”

On Scorpio’s order the boats slowed to half their previous speed, then veered gradually to port. They commenced a long encirclement of the object, viewing it from all sides in the slowly changing dawn light.

Within an hour, as the boats spiralled nearer, the iceberg had become a small round-backed hummock. There was, in Vasko’s opinion, something deeply odd about it. It sat on the sea and yet seemed a part of it as well, surrounded as it was by a fringe of white that extended in every direction for perhaps twice the diameter of the central core. It made Vasko think of an island, the kind that consisted of a single volcanic mountain, with gently sloping beaches reaching the sea on all sides. He had seen a few icebergs, when they drifted down to the latitude of First Camp, and this was unlike any iceberg in his experience.

The boats circled closer. Now and then, Vasko heard Scorpio speaking to Blood via his wrist radio. The western sky was a bruised purple, with only a scattering of bright stars showing. In the east it was a bleak shade of rose. Against either backdrop the pale mound of the iceberg threw back subtly distorted variations of the same hues.

“We’ve circled it twice,” Urton reported.

“Keep it up,” Clavain instructed. “Reduce our distance by half, but slow to half our present speed. She may not be alert, and I don’t want to startle her.”

“Something’s not right about that iceberg, sir,” Vasko said.

“We’ll see.” Clavain turned to Khouri. “Can you sense her yet?”

“Skade?” she asked.

“I was thinking more of your daughter. I wondered if there might be some remote cross-talk between your mutual sets of implants.”

“We’re still a long way out.”

“Agreed, but let me know the instant you feel anything. My own implants may not pick up Aura’s emissions at all, or not until we’re much nearer. And in any case you
are
her mother. I am certain you’ll recognise her first, even if there is nothing unusual about the protocols.”

“I don’t need reminding that I’m her mother,” Khouri said.

“Of course. I just meant . . .”

“I’m listening for her, Clavain. I’ve been listening for her from the moment you pulled me out of that capsule. You’ll be the first to hear if I pick up Aura.”

Half an hour later they were close enough to make out more detail. It was clear to all of them now that this was no ordinary iceberg, even if one discounted the way it infiltrated the water around it. Indeed, it appeared increasingly unlikely that the thing was any kind of iceberg at all.

Yet it
was
made of ice.

The sides of the floating mass were weird and crystalline. Rather than facets or sheets, they consisted of a thickening tangle of white spars, a briar formed from interleaved spikes of ice. Stalagmites and stalactites daggered up and down like icy incisors. Vertical spikes bristled like rapiers. At the root of each spike was a flourish of smaller growths thrusting out in all directions, intersecting and threading through their neighbours. In all directions, the spikes varied in size. Some—the major trunks and branches of the structure—were as wide across as the boat. Others were so thin, so fine, that they formed only an iridescent haze in the air, as if the merest breeze would shatter them into a billion twinkling parts. From a distance, the berg had appeared to be a solid block. Now the mound seemed to be formed from a huge haphazardly tossed pile of glass needles. Unthinkable numbers of glass needles. It was a glistening cavity-filled thicket, as much hollow space as ice.

It was easily the most unsettling thing Vasko had ever seen in his life.

They circled closer.

Of all of them, only Clavain seemed unimpressed by the utter strangeness of what lay before them. “The smart maps were accurate,” he said. “The size of this thing . . . by my reckoning, you could easily hide a moray-class corvette inside it.”

Vasko raised his voice. “You still think there might be a ship inside that thing, sir?”

“Ask yourself a question, son. Do you really think Mother Nature had anything to do with this?”

“But why would Skade surround her ship with all this strange ice?” Vasko persisted. “I wouldn’t have thought it was much use as armour, and all it’s done so far is make her ship more visible on the maps.”

“What makes you so sure she had any choice, son?”

“I don’t follow, sir.”

Scorpio said, “He’s suggesting that all this might mean there’s something wrong with Skade’s ship. Isn’t that right?”

“That’s my working hypothesis,” Clavain said.

“But what . . .” Vasko abandoned his question before he got himself into even deeper water.

“Whatever’s inside,” Clavain said, “we still have to reach it. We don’t have tunnelling equipment or anything that can blast through thick ice. But if we’re careful, we won’t have to. We just have to locate a route through to the middle.”

“What if Skade spots us, sir?” Vasko asked.

“I’m hoping she does. The last thing I want is to have to knock on her front door. Now take us closer. Nice and slowly does it.”

 

Bright Sun rose. In the early minutes of dawn, the iceberg took on an entirely different character. Against the soft violet of the sky the whole structure seemed magical, as delicate as some aristocrat’s confection. The briar spikes and icy spars were shot through with gold and azure, the colours refracted with the untainted dazzle of cut diamond. There were glorious halos, shards and jangles of chromatic purity, colours Vasko had never seen in his life. Instead of shadows, the interior shone turquoise and opal with a radiance that groped and fingered its way to the surface through twisting corridors and canyons of ice. And yet within that shining interior there was a shadowy kernel, a hint of something cocooned.

The two boats had come within fifty metres of the outer edge of the island’s fringe. The water had been calm for much of their journey, but here in the immediate vicinity of the iceberg it moved with the languor of some huge sedated animal, as if every ripple cost the sea great effort. Closer to the edge of the fringe, the sea was already beginning to freeze. It had the slick blue-grey texture of animal hide. Vasko touched his fingers just beneath the surface of the water by the boat and then pulled them back out immediately. Even here, this far from the fringe, the water was much colder than it had been when they had left the shuttle.

“Look at this,” Scorpio said. He had one of the smart maps rolled out before him. Khouri was studying it, too, obviously agreeing with something Scorpio was saying to her as he pointed out features with the blunt-trottered stub of one hand.

Clavain opened his own map. “What is it, Scorp?”

“An update just came through from Blood. Take a look at the iceberg: it’s larger.”

Clavain made his map display the same coordinates. The iceberg leapt into view. Vasko peered over the old man’s shoulder, searching for the pair of boats. There was no sign of them. He assumed that the update had taken place before sunset the previous evening.

“You’re right,” Clavain said. “What would you say . . . thirty, forty per cent larger, by volume?”

“Easily,” Scorpio said. “And this
isn’t
real-time. If it’s growing this rapidly, it could be ten or twenty per cent larger again by now.”

Clavain folded his map: he had seen enough. “It certainly seems to be refrigerating the surrounding water. Before very long, where we’re sitting will be frozen as well. We’re lucky we arrived when we did. If we’d left it a few more days, we’d never have stood a chance. We’d be looking at a mountain.”

“Sir,” Vasko said, “I don’t understand how it can be getting larger. Surely it should be shrinking. Icebergs don’t last at these latitudes.”

“I thought you said you didn’t know much about them,” Clavain replied.

“I said we don’t see many in the bay, sir.”

Clavain looked at him shrewdly. “It’s not an iceberg. It never was. It’s a shell of ice around Skade’s ship. And it’s growing because the ship is making it grow by cooling the sea around it. Remember what Khouri said? They have ways of making their hulls as cold as the cosmic microwave background.”

“But you also said you didn’t think Skade had any control over this.”

“I’m not sure she has.”

“Sir . . .”

Clavain cut him off. “I think something may have gone wrong with the cryo-arithmetic engines that keep the hull cold. What, I don’t know. Perhaps Skade will tell us, when we find her.”

Until a day ago Vasko had never heard of cryo-arithmetic engines. But the phrase had cropped up in Khouri’s testimony—it was one of the technologies that Aura had helped Remontoire and his allies to perfect as they raced away from the ruins of the Delta Pavonis system.

In the hours that followed, Vasko had done his best to ask as many questions as possible, trying to fill in the most embarrassing voids in his knowledge. Not all of his questions had met with ready answers, even from Khouri. But Clavain had told him that the cryo-arithmetic engines were not completely new, that the basic technology had already been developed by the Conjoiners towards the end of their war against the Demarchists. At that time, a single cryo-arithmetic engine had been a clumsy thing the size of a mansion, too large to be carried on anything but a major spacecraft. All efforts to produce a miniaturised version had ended in disaster. Aura, however, had shown them how to make engines as small as apples.

But they were still dangerous.

The cryo-arithmetic principle was based on a controlled violation of thermodynamic law. It was an outgrowth from quantum computation, exploiting a class of algorithms discovered by a Conjoiner theorist named Qafzeh in the early years of the Demarchist war. Qafzeh’s algorithms—if implemented properly on a particular architecture of quantum computer—led to a net heat loss from the local universe. A cryo-arithmetic engine was in essence just a computer, running computational cycles. Unlike ordinary computers, however, it got colder the faster it ran. The trick—the really difficult part—was to prevent the computer from running even faster as it chilled, spiralling into a runaway process. The smaller the engine, the more susceptible it was to that kind of instability.

Perhaps that was what had happened to Skade’s ship. In space, the engines had worked to suck heat away from the corvette’s hull, making the ship vanish into the near-zero background of cosmic radiation. But the ship had sustained damage, perhaps severing the delicate web of control systems monitoring the cryo-arithmetic engines. By the time it hit Ararat’s ocean it had become a howling mouth of interstellar cold. The water had begun to freeze around it, the odd patterns and structures betraying the obscene violation of physical law taking place.

Could anyone still be alive inside it?

Vasko noticed something then. It was possible that he was the first. It was a keening sound at the very limit of his hearing, a sensation so close to ultrasound that he barely registered it as noise at all. It was more like a kind of data arriving by a sensory channel he had never known he possessed.

It was like singing. It was like a million fingers circling the wet rims of a million wine glasses.

He could barely hear it, and yet it threatened to split his skull open.

“Sir,” Vasko said, “I can hear something. The iceberg, sir, or whatever it is—it’s making a noise.”

“It’s the sun,” Clavain said, after a moment. “It must be warming the ice, stressing it in different ways, making it creak and shiver.”

“Can you hear it, sir?”

Clavain looked at him with an odd expression on his face. “No, son, I can’t. These days, there are a lot of things I can’t hear. But I’m taking your word for it.”

“Closer,” Scorpio said.

 

Through dark, dank corridors of the great drowned ship, Antoinette Bax walked alone. She held a torch in one hand and the old silver helmet in the other, her fingers tucked through the neck ring. Lolloping ahead of her with the eagerness of a hunting dog, the wandering golden circle of torchlight defined the unsettling sculptural formations that lined the walls: here an archway that appeared to be made from spinal vertebrae, there a mass of curled and knotted intestinal tubes. The crawling shadows made the tubes writhe and contort like copulating snakes.