Absolution Gap (90 page)

Not just the Rust Belt, either, but all the way out. The Inhibitor machines had smashed and sterilised all the other human habitats in near-Yellowstone space. Scorpio identified their ruins from their orbits. No Haven, now. No Idlewild. Even Marco’s Eye, the planet’s moon, had been pruned. There was no sign that any structure larger than an igloo had ever existed on its surface. No cities, no spaceports, just a local enhancement in radioactivity and a few interesting trace elements to puzzle over.

Elsewhere in the system, the same story: nothing remained. No habitats. No surface encampments. No ships. No transmitters.

Scorpio wept.

“How many got out?” he said, when he could face reality again. “Count the ships, tell me how many survivors they could have carried.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Vasko said.

“What the fuck do you mean,
it doesn’t matter
? It matters to
me
. That’s why I’m asking you the fucking question.”

Khouri frowned at him. “Scorpio . . . she’s only six.”

He looked at Aura. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t understand,” Vasko said softly. He nodded at the holographic sphere. “It’s not real-time, Scorp.”

“What?”

“It’s a snapshot. It’s the way things were two months ago.” Vasko looked at him with his too-adult eyes. “Things got worse, Scorp. Let me show you what I’m talking about, and then you’ll understand why it doesn’t make much difference how many got out.”

Vasko ran the holographic display forwards in time. Time-code numerals, logged to worldtime, tumbled in one corner. Scorpio saw the date and felt a lurch of disorientation: 04/07/2698. The numerals were meaningless, too far removed from his own days in Chasm City to have any emotional impact.
I wasn’t made for these times,
he thought. He had been yanked from the ordinary flow of time and now he was adrift, unmoored from history. He realised, with a shudder of comprehension, that it was precisely this sense of dislocation that shaped the psychologies of Ultras. How much worse must it have been for Clavain?

He watched the ragged shell of the migration wave increase in size, becoming a little less spherical as the distances between the ships increased. And then, one by one, the ships began to disappear. Their icons flashed red and vanished, leaving nothing behind.

Urton was speaking now, her hands folded across her chest. “The Inhibitors had already locked on to those escaping ships,” she said. “From the moment the attack began, they didn’t have a hope. The Inhibitors caught up, smothered them, stripped the ships down to make more Inhibitors.”

“We can even track them mathematically,” Vasko elaborated, “with models based on the mass of raw material in each ship. Each captured vessel becomes the seed for a new wolf expansion sphere.”

The shell was breaking up. There had been hundreds of ships to begin with; now there could not be more than three dozen left. Even some of these last remaining sparks were vanishing from the display.

“No,” he said.

“There was nothing we could do,” Vasko said. “It’s the end of the world, Scorp. That’s all it was ever going to be.”

“Run it forwards, to the end.”

Vasko complied. The numerals blurred, the scale of the display lurching wider. There were still some ships left: maybe twenty. Scorpio didn’t have the heart to count them. At least a third of them had been the ones that had been approaching Yellowstone when the crisis started. Of the ships in the evacuation wave, not many more than a dozen had made it out this far.

“I’m sorry,” Vasko said.

“You woke me for this?” Scorpio said. “Just to rub my snout in it? Just to show me the utter fucking futility of coming all this way?”

“Scorpio,” Aura said chidingly. “Please. I’m only six.”

“We woke you because you ordered us to wake you when we got here,” Vasko said.

“We never got anywhere,” Scorpio said. “You said it yourself. We’re turning around, just like those other fortunate sons of bitches. I’ll ask you again: why did you wake me, if it wasn’t to show me this?”

“Show him,” Khouri said.

“There was another reason,” Vasko said.

The image in the tank wobbled and stabilised. Something new appeared. It was fuzzy, even after the enhancement filters had been applied. The computers were guessing details into existence, constantly testing their assumptions against the faint signal rising above the crackle of background noise. The best that the high-magnification cameras could offer was a rectangular shape with vague suggestions of engine modules and comms blisters.

“It’s a ship,” Vasko said. “Not a lighthugger. Something smaller, like an in-system shuttle or freighter. It’s the only human spacecraft within two light-months of Epsilon Eridani.”

“What the hell is it doing out there?” Scorpio asked.

“What everyone else was doing,” Khouri said. “Trying to get away from there as quickly as possible. It’s sustaining five gees, but it won’t be able to keep that up for very long.” She added, “If it’s really what it looks like.”

“What do you mean?”

“She means that we backtracked its point of origin,” Vasko said. “Of course, there’s some guesswork, but we think this is more or less what happened.”

He cut back to the main display showing the shell of expanding lighthuggers. Now the numerals tumbled in reverse. The icon of the shuttle zoomed back into the heart of the expansion, coinciding with a lighthugger that had just popped into existence. Vasko ran the scenario back a little more, then let it run forwards in accelerated time. Now the lighthugger was moving away from Yellowstone, following its own escape trajectory. Scorpio read the ship’s name:
Wild Pallas
.

The icon winked out. At that same moment the separate emblem of the shuttle raced away from the point where the lighthugger had been.

“Someone got out,” Scorpio said, marvelling. “Used the shuttle as a lifeboat before the wolves got them.”

“Not many, if that lighthugger was carrying hundreds of thousands of sleepers,” Vasko said.

“If we save a dozen we’ve justified our visit. And that shuttle could easily be carrying thousands.”

“We don’t know that, Scorp,” Khouri said. “It isn’t transmitting, or at least not along a line of sight we can intercept. No distress codes, nothing.”

“They wouldn’t be transmitting if they thought the space around them was swarming with wolves,” Scorpio said, “but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t save the poor bastards. That
is
why you woke me, isn’t it? To decide whether we rescue them or not?”

“Actually,” Vasko said, “the reason we woke you was to let you know that the ship’s within range of the hypometric weapons. We think it may be safer to destroy it.”

Scorpio toured the ship. It distracted his mind from dwelling on what had happened to Yellowstone. He kept hoping all this would turn out to be a bad dream, one of those plausible night-mares that sometimes happened during a slow revival from reefersleep. Any moment now this layer of reality was going to peel back and they would be pulling him out of the casket again. The news would be bad: the wolves would still be on their way, but they would not yet have reached Yellowstone. There would still be time to warn the planet—still time to make a difference. If the system had just one more month, millions might be saved. The wolves would still be out there, of course, but any prolongation of life was better than immediate extinction. He had to believe that, or else everything was futile.

But he kept not waking up. This nightmare into which he had woken had the stubborn texture of reality.

He was going to have to get used to it.

Aboard the ship, a great many things had changed while he had been sleeping. Time dilation had compressed the twenty-three-year journey between Ararat and the Yellowstone system into six years of shiptime, with many of the crew staying awake for a significant portion of that time. Some had spent the entire trip warm, unwilling to submit to reefersleep when the future was so uncertain. They had coaxed and nursed the new technologies into life—not just the hypometric weapons, but the other gifts that Remontoire had left. When Scorpio’s companions took him beyond the hull in the observation capsule, they traversed a landscape darker and colder than space itself. Nested in the outer layer of the hull, the cryo-arithmetic engines conjured heat out of existence by a sleight of quantum computation. A technician had tried to explain how the cryo-arithmetic engines worked, but some crucial twist had lost him halfway through. In Chasm City he had once hired an accountant to make his finances disappear from the official scrutiny of the Canopy financial regulators. He had experienced a similar feeling when his accountant explained the devious little principle that underpinned his patented credit-laundering technique: some detail that made his head hurt. Scorpio just couldn’t grasp it. Similarly, he simply couldn’t grasp the paradox of quantum computation that allowed the engines to launder heat away from under the noses of the universe’s thermal regulators.

Just as long as they kept working, just as long they didn’t spiral out of control like they had on Skade’s ship: that was all he cared about.

There was more. The ship was under thrust, but there was no sign of exhaust glare from the Conjoiner drives. The ship slid through space on a wake of darkness.

“They tweaked the engines,” Vasko said, “did something to the reaction processes deep inside them. The exhaust—the stuff that gives us thrust—doesn’t interact with this universe for very long. Just enough time to impart momentum—a couple of ticks of Planck time—and then it decays away into something we can’t detect. Maybe something that isn’t really there at all.”

“You’ve learned some physics while I was sleeping.”

“I had to keep up. But I don’t pretend to understand it.”

“All that matters is that it’s something the wolves can’t track,” Khouri said. “Or at least not very easily. Maybe if they had a solid lock on us, they could sniff out something. But they’d have to get close for that.”

“What about the neutrinos coming from the reaction cores?” Scorpio asked.

“We don’t see them any more. We think they’ve been shifted into some flavour no one knew about.”

“And you hope the wolves don’t know about it either.”

“The one way to find out, Scorp, would be to get too close.”

She meant the shuttle. They knew a little more about it now: it was a blunt-hulled in-system vehicle with no transatmospheric capability, one example of what must have been tens of thousands of similar ships operating in Yellowstone space before the arrival of the wolves. Although a large ship by the standards of shuttles, it was still small enough to have been carried within the lighthugger. There was no guessing how much time the crew and passengers had had to board it, but a ship like that could easily have carried five or six thousand people; more if some of them were frozen or sedated in some way.

“I’m not turning my back on them,” Scorpio insisted.

“They could be wolves,” Vasko said.

“They don’t look like wolves to me. They look like people scared for their lives.”

“Scorp, listen to me,” Khouri said. “We picked up transmissions from some of those lighthuggers before they vanished. Omnidirectional distress broadcasts to anyone who was listening. The early ones, the first to go? They talked about being attacked by the wolves as we know them—machines made from black cubes, like the ones that brought down Skade’s ship. But the ships that went later, they said something different.”

“She’s right,” Vasko said. “The reports were sketchy—understandable, given that the ships were being overrun by wolf machines—but what came through was that the wolves don’t always
look
like wolves. They learn camouflage. They learn how to move amongst us, disguising themselves. Once they’d ripped apart one lighthugger, they began to learn how to make themselves look like our ships. They mimicked shuttles and other transports; made exhaust signatures and put out identification signals. It wasn’t perfect—you could tell the difference close up—but it was enough to fool some lighthuggers into staging rescue attempts. They thought they were being good Samaritans, Scorp. They thought they were helping other evacuees.”

“That’s fine, then,” Scorpio said. “Just gives us an excuse not even to think about rescuing those poor bastards, right?”

“If they’re wolves, everything we’ve done so far will have been wasted.” Vasko lowered his voice, as if afraid of disturbing Aura. “There are seventeen thousand people on this ship. They’re relatively safe. But you’d be gambling those seventeen thousand lives against the vague chance of saving only a few thousand more.”

“So we should just let them die, is that it?”

“If you knew there were only a few dozen people on that ship, what would you do then? Still take that risk?” Vasko argued.

“No, of course not.”

“Then where do you draw the line? When does the risk become acceptable?”

“It never does,” Scorpio said. “But this is where
I
draw the line. Here. Now. We’re saving that shuttle.”

“Maybe you should ask Aura what she thinks,” Vasko said, “because it’s not just about those seventeen thousand lives, is it? It’s about the millions of lives that might depend on Aura’s survival. It’s about the future of the human species.”

Scorpio looked at the little girl, at her white dress and neat hair, the absurdity of the situation pressing in on him like a concrete shroud. No matter her history, no matter what she had already cost them, no matter what else was going on inside her head, it all boiled down to this: she was still a six-year-old girl, sitting there with her mother, speaking when she was spoken to. And now he was going to consult her about a tactical situation upon which depended the lives of thousands.

“You have an opinion on the matter?” he asked her.