Absolution Gap (82 page)

Which leaves me,
he thought.

“I can foresee at least one dispute in the very near future,” Vasko said.

“Enlighten me.”

“We’re going to have to agree about where we go—whether it’s out, to Hela, or back to Yellowstone. We all know what you think about it.”

“It’s ‘we’ now, is it?”

“You’re in the minority, Scorp. It’s just a statement of fact.”

“There won’t necessarily be a confrontation,” Khouri said. Her voice was low and soothing. “All Vasko means to say is that the majority of seniors believe Aura has privileged information, and that what she tells us ought to be taken seriously.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re right. It doesn’t mean we’ll find anything useful when we get to Hela,” Scorpio argued.

“There must be something about that system,” Vasko said. “The vanishings . . . they must mean
something
.”

“It means mass psychosis,” Scorpio said. “It means people see things when they’re desperate. You think there’s something useful on that planet? Fine. Go there and find out. And explain to me why it didn’t make one damned bit of difference to the natives.”

“They’re called scuttlers,” Vasko said.

“I don’t care what they’re called. They’re fucking
extinct
. Doesn’t that tell you something even slightly significant? Don’t you think that if there was something useful in that system they’d have used it already and still be alive?”

“Maybe it isn’t something you use lightly,” Vasko said.

“Great. And you want to go there and see what it was they were too scared to use even though the alternative was extinction? Be my guest. Send me a postcard. I’ll be about twenty light-years away.”

“Frightened, Scorpio?” Vasko asked.

“No, I’m not frightened,” he said, with a calm that even he found surprising. “Just prudent. There’s a difference. You’ll understand it one day.”

“Vasko only meant to say that we can’t take a guess at what really happened there unless we visit the place,” Khouri said. “Right now we know almost nothing about Hela or the scuttlers. The churches won’t allow orthodox scientific teams anywhere near the place. The Ultras don’t poke their noses in too deeply because they make a nice profit exporting useless scuttler relics. But we need to know more.”

“More,” Aura said, and then laughed.

“If she knows we need to go there, why doesn’t she tell us why?” Scorpio said. He nodded towards the vague milky-grey shape of the child. “All this stuff has to be in there somewhere, doesn’t it?”

“She doesn’t know,” Khouri said.

“Do you mean she won’t tell us yet, or that she’ll never know?”

“Neither, Scorp. I mean it hasn’t been unlocked for her yet.”

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“I told you what Valensin said: every day he looks at Aura, and every day he comes up with a different guess as to her developmental state. If she were a normal child she wouldn’t be born yet. She wouldn’t be talking. She wouldn’t even be breathing. Some days it’s as if she has the language skills of a three-year-old. Other days, she’s barely past one. He sees brain structures come and go like clouds, Scorp. She’s changing even while we’re sitting here. Her head’s like a furnace. Given all that, are you really surprised that she can’t tell you exactly why we need to go to Hela? It’s like asking a child why they need food. They can tell you they’re hungry. That’s all.”

“What did you mean about it being locked?”

“I mean it’s all in there,” she said, “all the answers, or at least everything we’ll need to know to work them out. But it’s encoded, packed too tightly to be unwound by the brain of a child, even a two- or three-year-old. She won’t begin to make sense of those memories until she’s older.”

“You’re older,” he said. “You can see into her head. You unwind them.”

“It doesn’t work like that. I only see what she understands. What I get from her—most of the time, anyway—is a child’s view of things. Simple, crystalline, bright. All primary colours.” In the gloom Scorpio saw the flash of her smile. “You should see how bright colours are to a child.”

“I don’t see colours that well to begin with.”

“Can you put aside being a pig for five minutes?” Khouri asked. “It would really help if everything didn’t keep coming back to that.”

“It keeps coming back to that for me. Sorry if it offends you.”

He heard her sigh. “All I’m saying, Scorp, is that we can’t begin to guess how significant Hela is unless we go there. And we’ll have to go there carefully, not barging in with all guns blazing. We’ll have to find out what we need before we ask for it. And we’ll have to be ready to take it if necessary, and to make sure we do it right the first time. But first of all we have to
go
there.”

“And what if going there is the worst thing we could do? What if all of this is a setup, to make the job easier for the Inhibitors?”

“She’s working for us, Scorp, not them.”

“That’s an assumption,” he said.

“She’s my daughter. Don’t you think I have some idea about her intentions?”

Vasko interrupted them, touching Scorpio’s shoulder. “I think you need to see this,” he said.

Scorpio looked at the battle, seeing immediately what Vasko had noticed. It was not good. The beam of the cache weapon was being bent away from its original trajectory, like a ray of light hitting water. There was no sign of anything at the point where the beam changed direction, but it did not take very much imagination to conclude that it was some hidden focus of Inhibitor energy that was throwing the beam off course. There was no weapon left to reaim and refire; all that could be done now was to sit back and watch what happened to the deviated beam.

Somehow Scorpio knew that it wasn’t just going to sail off into interstellar space, fading harmlessly as it fell into the night.

That was not how the enemy did things.

They did not have long to wait. Seen in magnification, the beam grazed the edge of Ararat’s nearest moon, cleaving its way through hundreds of kilometres of crust and then out the other side. The moon began to come apart like a broken puzzle. Red-hot rocky gore oozed from the wound with dreamlike slowness. It was like the time-lapse opening of some red-hearted flower at dawn.

“That’s not good,” Khouri said.

“You still think this is going according to plan?” Vasko asked.

The stricken moon was extending a cooling tentacle of cherry-red slurry along the path of its orbit. Scorpio looked at it in dismay, wondering what it would mean for the people on Ararat’s surface. Even a few million tonnes of rubble hitting the ocean would have dreadful consequences for the people left behind, but the amount of debris from the moon would be far, far worse than that.

“I don’t know,” Scorpio said.

A little while later, there was a different chime from the console.

“Encrypted burst from Remontoire,” Vasko said. “Shall I put him on?”

Scorpio told him to do it, watching as a fuzzy, pixellated image of Remontoire appeared on the console. The transmission was highly compressed, subject to jolting gaps and periods when the image froze while Remontoire continued speaking.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but it hasn’t worked quite as well as I’d hoped.”

“How bad?” Scorpio mouthed.

It was as if Remontoire had heard him. “A small aggregate of Inhibitor machines appears to be pursuing you,” he said. “Not as large as the pack that followed us from Delta Pavonis, but not something you can ignore, either. Have you completed testing the hypometric weaponry? That should be a priority now. And it might not be a bad idea to get the rest of the machinery working as well.” Remontoire paused, his image breaking up and reassembling. “There’s something you need to know,” he continued. “The failure was mine. It had nothing to do with the number of cache weapons in our arsenal. Even if you had given all of them to me, the outcome would have been the same. As a matter of fact, it was good that you didn’t. Your instincts served you well, Mr. Pink. I’m glad of that little conversation we had just before I left. You still have a chance.” He smiled: the expression looked as forced as ever, but Scorpio welcomed it. “You may be tempted to respond to this transmission. I recommend that you do nothing of the sort. The wolves will be trying to refine their positional fix on you, and a clear signal like that would do you no favours at all. Goodbye and good luck.”

That was it: the transmission was over.

“Mr. Pink?” Vasko said. “Who’s Mr. Pink?”

“We go back a way,” Scorpio said.

“He didn’t say anything about himself,” Khouri said. “Nothing about what he’s going to do.”

“I don’t think he considered it relevant,” Scorpio said. “There’s nothing we can do to help them, after all. They’ve done what they could for us.”

“But it wasn’t good enough,” Malinin said.

“Maybe it wasn’t,” Scorpio said, “but it was still a lot better than nothing, you ask me.”

“The conversation he mentioned,” Khouri said. “What was that about?”

“That was between me and Mr. Clock,” Scorpio replied.

 

Hela, 2727

 

After the surgeon-general had taken her blood, he showed her to her quarters. It was a small room about a third of the way up the Clocktower. It had one stained-glass window, a small, austere-looking bed and a bedside table. There was an annexe containing a washbasin and a toilet. There was some Quaicheist literature on the bedside table.

“I hope you weren’t expecting the height of luxury,” Grelier said.

“I wasn’t expecting anything,” she said. “Until a few hours ago I expected to be working in a clearance gang for the Catherine of Iron.”

“Then you can’t complain, can you?”

“I wasn’t intending to.”

“Play your cards right and we’ll sort out something a little larger,” he said.

“This is all I need,” Rashmika said.

Grelier smiled and left her alone. She said nothing as he left. She had not liked him taking her blood, but had felt powerless to resist. It was not simply the fact that the whole business of the churches and blood made her feel queasy—she knew too much about the indoctrinal viruses that were part and parcel of the Adventist faith—but something else, something that related to her own blood and the fact that she felt violated when he sampled it. The syringe had been empty before he drew the sample, which meant—assuming that the needle was sterile—that he had not tried to put the indoctrinal virus into her. That would have been a violation of a different order, but not necessarily worse. The thought that he had taken her blood was equally distressing.

But why, she wondered, did it bother her so much? It was a reasonable thing to do, at least within the confines of the Lady Morwenna. Everything here ran on blood, so it was hardly objectionable that she had been made to supply a sample. By rights, she should have been grateful that it had stopped there.

But she was not grateful. She was frightened, and she did not exactly know why.

She sat by herself. In the quiet of the room, bathed in the sepulchral light from the stained-glass window, she felt desperately alone. Had all this been a mistake? she wondered. Now that she had reached its roaring heart, the church did not seem like such a distant, abstract entity. It felt more like a machine, something capable of inflicting harm on those who strayed too close to its moving parts. Though she had never specifically set out to see Quaiche, it had seemed evident to her that only someone very high up in the Adventist hierarchy would be able to reveal the truth about Harbin. But she had also envisaged that the path there would be treacherous and time-consuming. She had been resigned to a long, slow, will-sapping investigation, a slow progress through layers of administration. She would have begun in a clearance gang, about as low as it was possible to get.

Instead, here she was: in Quaiche’s direct service. She should have felt elated at her good fortune. Instead she felt unwittingly manipulated, as if she had set out to play a game fairly and someone had turned a blind eye, letting her win by fiat. On one level she wanted to blame Grelier, but she knew that the surgeon-general was not the whole story. There was something else, too. Had she come all this way to find Harbin, or to meet Quaiche?

For the first time, she was not completely certain.

She began to flick through the Quaicheist literature, looking for some clue that would unlock the mystery. But the literature was the usual rubbish she had disdained since the moment she could read: the Haldora vanishings as a message from God, a countdown to some vaguely defined event, the nature of which depended on the function of the text in which it was mentioned.

Her hand hesitated on the cover of one of the brochures. Here was the Adventist symbol: the strange spacesuit radiating light as if seen in silhouette against a sunrise, with the rays of light ramming through openings in the fabric of the suit itself. The suit had a curious welded-together look, lacking any visible joints or seams. There was no doubt in her mind now that it was the same suit that she had seen in the dean’s garret.

Then she thought about the name of the cathedral: the Lady Morwenna.

Of course.
It all snapped into her head with blinding clarity. Morwenna had been Quaiche’s lover, before he came to Hela. Everyone who read their scripture knew that. Everyone also knew that something awful had happened to her, and that she had been imprisoned inside a strange welded-up suit when it happened. A suit that was itself a kind of punishment device, fashioned by the Ultras Quaiche and Morwenna had worked for.

The same suit she had seen in the garret; the same one that had made her feel so ill at ease.

She had rationalised away that fear at the time, but now, sitting all alone, the mere thought of being in the same building as the suit frightened her. She wanted to be as far away from it as possible.