Absolution Gap (48 page)

“Worth a try,” Scorpio said. Often in Chasm City—for the purposes of deterrence—he had been called upon to kill people with maximum slowness. He thought now of all the swift ways he knew to end the life of a sentient being. Those methods had their uses, too: mercy executions, button jobs. Some of them were very swift indeed. The only drawback was that he had never knowingly tried any of his methods on a Conjoiner. He had certainly never killed a Conjoiner carrying a hostage in their womb.

“She won’t let it happen,” Clavain said soothingly. He touched Khouri’s arm. “She’d find a way to kill Aura before we got to her. But it’s all right, this is the way it has to be.”

“No, Clavain,” Khouri repeated.

He shushed her. “I came here to secure Aura’s release. That’s still my mission objective.”

“I don’t want you to die.”

Scorpio saw a smile crinkle the skin at the corners of Clavain’s eyes. “No, I doubt that you do. Frankly, I don’t want to, either. Funny how these things seem a lot less attractive when it’s someone else doing the deciding for you. But Skade’s made up her mind, and this is how it’s going to happen.”

“I suggest we get a move on,” Skade interrupted.

“Wait,” Scorpio said. The words had an unreality in his head as he marshalled what he was about to say. “If we give you Clavain . . . and you kill him . . . what’s to stop you reneging on your part of the deal?”

“She’s thought of that,” Clavain said.

“Of course I have,” Skade answered. “And I’ve also considered the opposite scenario: what’s to prevent you from taking Clavain away if I give you Aura first? Clearly our mutual trust is an insufficient guarantee of compliance. So I’ve devised a solution I believe both parties will find entirely satisfactory.”

“Tell them,” Clavain said.

Skade gestured at Jaccottet. “You—security man—will perform the Caesarean.” Then her attention flicked to Scorpio. “You—pig—will perform the execution of Clavain. I will direct both procedures, incision by incision. They will take place in parallel, step by step. One must last precisely as long as the other.”

“No,” Scorpio gasped, as the horror of her words slammed home.

“The message isn’t getting through, is it?” Skade asked. “Shall I kill her now, and be done with it?”

“No,” Clavain said. He turned to his friend. “Scorp, you have to do this. I know you have the strength to do it. You’ve already shown me that a thousand times. Do it, friend, and end this.”

“I can’t.”

“It’s the hardest thing anyone’s ever asked you to do, I know that. But I’m still asking.”

Scorpio could only say the same thing again. “I can’t.”

“You must.”

“No,” said another voice. “He doesn’t have to. I’ll do it.”

All of them, including Skade, followed the voice to its source. There, framed in the ruined bulkhead, was Vasko Malinin. He had a gun in his hand and looked as cold and bewildered as the rest of them.

“I’ll do it,” he repeated. He had obviously been standing there for some time, unnoticed by those present.

“You were given orders to stay outside,” Scorpio said.

“Blood countermanded them.”

“Blood?” Scorpio repeated.

“Urton and I heard gunfire. It sounded as if it was coming from inside here. I contacted Blood and he gave me permission to investigate.”

“Leaving Urton alone outside?”

“Not for long, sir. Blood’s sending a plane. It’ll be here in under an hour.”

“That isn’t the way it’s supposed to happen,” Scorpio said.

“Pardon, sir, but Blood’s view was that once shooting started, it was time to tear up the rules.”

“You can’t argue with that,” Clavain said.

Scorpio nodded, still burdened by the vast weight of what lay before him. He could not let Vasko do it, no matter how devoutly he wished to abdicate this particular responsibility. “Anything else to report?” he asked.

“The sea’s funny, sir. It’s greener, and there are mounds of biomass appearing all around the iceberg, as far as the eye can see.”

“Juggler activity,” Clavain said. “Blood already told us it was hotting up.”

“That’s not all, sir. More reports of things in the sky. Eye-witnesses even say they’ve seen things re-entering.”

“The battle’s coming closer,” Clavain said, with something close to anticipation. “Well, Skade, I don’t think any of us really want to delay things now, do we?”

“Wiser words were never spoken,” she said.

“You tell us how you want it done. I presume we’ll need to get that armour off you first?”

“I’ll deal with that,” she said. “In the meantime, make sure you have the incubator ready.”

Scorpio made a shooting gesture in Vasko’s direction. “Return to the boat. Inform Blood that we are in the process of delicate negotiations, then bring the incubator back through the iceberg.”

“I’ll do that, sir. But seriously, I know how hard it is for you to . . .” Vasko could not complete his sentence. “What I mean is, I’m willing to do it.”

“I know,” Scorpio said, “but I’m his friend. The one thing I know is that I wouldn’t want anyone else to have this on their conscience.”

“There’ll be nothing on your conscience, Scorp,” Clavain said.

No, Scorpio thought. There’d be nothing on his conscience. Nothing save the fact that he had tortured his best friend—his only genuine human friend—to death, slowly, in return for the life of a child he neither knew nor cared for. So what if he had no choice in the matter? So what if it was only what Clavain wanted him to do? None of that made it any easier to do, or would make it any easier to live with in times to come. Because he knew that what happened in the next half hour—he did not think the procedure could last much longer than that—would surely be burned into his memory as indelibly as the self-inflicted scar on his shoulder, the one that covered his original emerald-green tattoo of human ownership.

Perhaps it would be faster than that. And perhaps Clavain would really suffer very little. After all, he had managed to block most of the pain when he lost the hand. Presumably it was within his power to establish a more comprehensive set of neural barricades, nulling the agony Skade sought to inflict.

But she would know that, wouldn’t she?

“Go. Now,” he said to Vasko. “And don’t return immediately.”

“I’ll be back, sir.” Vasko hesitated at the bulkhead, studying the little tableau as if committing it to memory. Scorpio read his mind. Vasko knew that when he returned, Clavain would not be amongst the living.

“Son,” Clavain said, “do as the man says. I’ll be all right. I appreciate your concern.”

“I wish I could do something, sir.”

“You can’t. Not here, not now. That’s another of those difficult lessons. Sometimes you can’t do the right thing. You just have to walk away and fight another day. Tough medicine, son, but sooner or later we all have to swallow it.”

“I understand, sir.”

“I haven’t known you that long, but it’s been long enough for me to form a reasonable impression of your abilities. You’re a good man, Vasko. The colony needs you and it needs others like you. Respect that need and don’t let the colony down.”

“Sir,” Vasko said.

“When this is done, we’ll have Aura again. First and foremost, she’s her mother’s daughter. Don’t ever let anyone forget that.”

“I won’t, sir.”

“But she’s also ours. She’ll be fragile, Vasko. She’ll need protecting as she grows up. That’s the task I’m giving you and your generation. Take care of that girl, because she may be the last thing that matters.”

“I’ll take care of her, sir.” Vasko looked at Khouri, as if seeking permission. “We’ll all take care of her. That’s a promise.”

“You sound as if you mean it. I can trust you, can’t I?”

“I’ll do my best, sir.”

Clavain nodded, weary, resigned, facing an abyss the depth of which only he could comprehend. “That’s all I’ve ever done, too. Mostly, it’s been good enough. Now go, please, and give my regards to Blood.”

Vasko hesitated again, as if there was something more he wished to say. But whatever words he intended remained unsaid. He turned and was gone.

“Why did you want to get rid of him?” Scorpio asked, after a few seconds had passed.

“Because I don’t want him to see one moment of this.”

“I’ll make it as quick as she’ll let me,” Scorpio said. “If Jaccottet works fast, I can work fast as well. Isn’t that right, Skade?”

“You’ll work as fast as I dictate, and no faster.”

“Don’t make this any harder than it has to be,” Scorpio said.

“It won’t hurt him, will it?” Khouri asked. “He can turn off the pain, can’t he?”

“I was coming to that,” Skade said, with an obvious reptilian delight in her own cunning. “Clavain—explain to your friends what you will allow to happen, please.”

“I have no choice, do I?”

“Not if you want this to go ahead.”

Clavain scratched at his brow. It was pale with frost, his eyebrows pure ermine white. “Since I entered this room, Skade has been trying to override my neural barricades. She’s been launching attack algorithms against my standard security layers and firewalls, trying to hijack deeper control structures. Take my word for it, she’s very good. The only thing stopping her is the antiquated nature of my implants. For her, it’s like trying to hack into a clockwork calculator. Her methods are too advanced for the battleground.”

“So?” Khouri said, squinting as if she were missing something obvious.

“If she could penetrate those layers,” Clavain said, “she could override any pain-blocks I cared to install. She could open them all one by one, like water-release valves in a dam, letting the pain flow through.”

“But she can’t get at them, can she?” Scorpio asked.

“Not unless I let her. Not unless I invite her in and give her complete control.”

“But you’d never do that.”

“I wouldn’t,” he said, “unless, of course, she demanded it of me.”

“Skade, please,” Khouri said.

“Lower those blockades,” Skade said, ignoring the woman. “Lower them and let me in. If you don’t, the deal’s off. Aura dies now.”

Clavain closed his eyes for a moment fractionally longer than a blink. It was only an instant, but for Clavain it must have involved the issuing of many intricate, rarely used neural management commands, rescinding standard security states that had probably remained frozen for decades.

He opened his eyes. “It’s done,” he said. “You have control.”

“Let’s make sure, shall we?”

Clavain made a noise somewhere between a moan and a yelp. He clutched at the bandaged stump of his left hand, his jaw stiffening. Scorpio saw the tendons in his neck stand out like guylines.

“I think you have it,” Clavain said, teeth clenched.

“I’m locked in now,” Skade told her audience. “He can’t throw me out or block my commands.”

“Get this over with,” Clavain said. Again, there was an easing in his expression, like the change of light on a landscape. Scorpio understood. If Skade was going to torture him, she would not want to ruin her carefully orchestrated efforts with an extraneous pain source. Especially one that had never been part of her plan.

Skade reached down to her belly with both gauntleted hands. No seam had been visible in her armour before, but now the curved white plate that covered her abdomen detached itself from the rest of the suit. Skade placed it next to her, then returned her hands to her sides. Where the armour had been opened, a bulge of soft human flesh moved under the thin, crosshatched mesh of a vacuum suit inner layer.

“We’re ready,” she said.

Jaccottet moved towards her and knelt down, one knee resting on the mound of fused ice that covered Skade’s lower half. The black box of white surgical instruments sat splayed open at his side.

“Pig,” she said, “take a scalpel from the lower compartment. That will do for now.”

Scorpio’s trotter poked at the snugly embedded instrument. Khouri reached over and pulled it out for him. She placed it delicately in his grasp.

“For the last time,” Scorpio said, “don’t make me do this.”

Clavain sat down next to him, crossing his legs. “It’s all right, Scorp. Just do what she says. I’ve a few tricks up my sleeve she doesn’t know about. She won’t be able to block all my commands, even if she thinks she can.”

“Tell him that if you think it makes it easier for him,” Skade said.

“He’s never lied to me,” Scorpio said. “I don’t think he’d start now.”

The white instrument sat in his hand, absurdly light, an innocent little surgical tool. There was no evil in the thing itself, but at that moment it felt like the focus of all the inchoate badness in the universe, its pristine whiteness part of the same sense of malignity. Titanic possibilities were balanced in his palm. He could not hold the instrument the way its designers had intended. All the same, he could still manipulate it well enough to do harm. He supposed it did not really matter to Clavain how skilfully the work was done. A certain imprecision might even help him, dulling the white-hot edge of the pain Skade intended.

“How do you want me to sit?” Clavain asked.

“Lie down,” Skade said. “On your back. Hands at your sides.”

Clavain positioned himself. “Anything else?”

“That’s up to you. If you have anything you want to say, now would be a good time. In a little while, you might find it difficult.”

“Only one thing,” Clavain said.

Scorpio moved closer. The dreadful task was almost upon him. “What is it, Nevil?”

“When this is over, don’t waste any time. Get Aura to safety. That’s really all I care about.” He paused, licked his lips. Around them the fine growth of his beard glistened with a haze of beautiful white crystals. “But if there’s time, and if it doesn’t inconvenience you, I’d ask you to bury me at sea.”

“Where?” Scorpio asked.