Absolution Gap (95 page)

“I’m sure you managed,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose. He had woken up with a headache. It was still there.

“We arrived here in 2717,” Vasko said, “after a nineteen-year flight from the Yellowstone system.”

The back of Scorpio’s neck prickled. “That’s not the date Valensin just gave me.”

“Valensin didn’t lie,” Urton said. “The local system date is 2727. We arrived around Hela nearly ten years ago. We’d have woken you then, but the time wasn’t right. Valensin told us we’d only get one shot. If we woke you then, you’d either be dead now or frozen again with only a small chance of revival.”

“This is the way it had to happen, Scorp,” Vasko said. “You were a resource we couldn’t afford to squander.”

“You’ve no idea how good that makes me feel.”

“What I mean is, we had to think seriously about when would be the best time to wake you. You always told us to wait until we’d arrived around Hela.”

“I did, didn’t I?”

“Well, think of this as our proper arrival. As far as the system authorities are concerned—the Adventists—we’ve only shown up in the last few weeks. We left and came back again, making a loop through local interstellar space.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because of what had to happen,” Vasko said. “When we got here ten years ago, we realised that the situation in this system was vastly more complex than we’d anticipated. The Adventists controlled access to Haldora, the planet that keeps vanishing. You had to deal with the church to get near Hela, and even then you weren’t allowed to send any probes anywhere near the gas giant.”

“You could have shot your way in, taken what you wanted by force.”

“And risked a bloodbath? There are a million innocent civilians on Hela, not to mention all the tens of thousands of sleepers in the ships parked in this system. And it’s not as if we knew exactly what we were looking for. If we’d come in with guns blazing, we might have destroyed the very thing we needed, or at the very least made sure that we’d never get our hands on it. But if we could get close to Quaiche, then we could get at the problem from the inside.”

“Quaiche is still alive?” Scorpio asked.

“We know that for sure now—Khouri and I met him today,” Vasko said. “But he’s a recluse, kept alive with faltering longevity therapies. He never leaves the Lady Morwenna, his cathedral. He doesn’t sleep. He’s had his brain altered so that he doesn’t need to. He doesn’t even blink. He spends every waking instant of his life staring at Haldora, waiting for
it
to blink instead.”

“He’s insane, then.”

“In his situation, wouldn’t you be? Something awful happened to him down there. It pushed him over the edge.”

“He has an indoctrinal virus,” Cruz said. “It’s always been in his blood, since before he came to Hela. Now there’s a whole industry down there, fractioning it off, splicing it into different grades, mixing it with other viruses brought in by the evacuees. They say he has moments of doubt, when he realises that everything he’s created here is a sham. That deep down inside he knows the vanishings are a rational phenomenon, not a miracle. That’s when he has a new strain of the indoctrinal virus pumped back into his blood.”

“Difficult man to get to know, sounds like,” Scorpio observed.

“More difficult than we anticipated,” Vasko said. “But Aura saw the way. It was her plan, Scorp, not ours.”

“And the plan was?”

“She went down there nine years ago,” Khouri said, looking straight at him, as if the two of them were alone in the room. “She was eight years old, Scorp. I couldn’t stop her. She knew what she’d been sent out into the world to do, and it was to find Quaiche.”

He shook his head. “You didn’t send an eight-year-old girl down there alone. Tell me you didn’t do it.”

“We had no choice,” Khouri said. “Trust me. I’m her mother. Trying to stop her from going down there was like trying to stop a salmon swimming upriver. It was going to happen whether we liked it or not.”

“We found a family,” Vasko said. “Good people, living in the Vigrid badlands.

They had a son, but they’d lost their only daughter in an accident a couple of years earlier. They didn’t know who or what Aura was, only that they weren’t to ask too many questions. They were also told to treat her exactly as if she’d always been with them. They fell into the role very easily, telling her stories of things that their other daughter had done when she was younger. They loved her very much.”

“Why the pretence?”

“Because she didn’t remember who she really was,” Khouri said. “She buried her own memories, suppressing them. She’s halfway to being a Conjoiner. She can arrange her own head the way the rest of us arrange furniture. It wasn’t all that difficult for her to do, once she realised it had to happen.”

“Why?” he asked.

“So that she’d fit in without her whole life becoming an act. If she believed she’d been born on Hela, so would the people she met.”

“That’s horrific.”

“You think it was any easier for me, Scorp? I’m her mother. I was with her the day she decided to forget me. I walked into the same room as her and she barely noticed me.”

 

He gradually learned the rest of the story, doing his best to ignore the sense of unreality he felt. More than once he had to examine his surroundings, convincing himself that this was not just another revival nightmare. He felt foolish, having slept through all these machinations. But their story, or at least what he had been told of it, was seamless. It also had, he was forced to admit, a brutal inevitability. It had taken the
Nostalgia for Infinity
decades to reach Hela: more than forty years just travelling from Ararat via the Yellowstone system. But Aura’s mission had begun long before that, when she was hatched within the matrix of the Hades neutron star. Given all the time that she had been on her way, an extra nine years was really not all that serious an addition. Yes:now that he put it like that, it all made a horrid kind of sense. But only if you chose not to view the universe through the eyes of a pig close to the end of his life.

“She didn’t really forget anything,” Vasko said. “It was just buried subconsciously, planted there to bubble up as she grew older. We knew that sooner or later she would start to be compelled by those hidden memories, even if she didn’t know exactly what was going on herself.”

“And?” Scorpio asked.

“She sent us a signal. It was to warn us that she was on her way to meet Quaiche. That was our cue to start making approaches to the Adventists. By the time we got through to him, Aura had already worked her way into his confidence.”

The leather of Scorpio’s jacket creaked as he folded his arms across his chest. “She just strolled into his life?”

“She’s his advisor,” Vasko said. “Sits in on his dealings with Ultras. We don’t know exactly what she’s doing there, but we can guess. Aura had—has—a gift. We saw it even when she was a baby.”

“She can read our faces better than we can,” Khouri said, “can tell if we’re lying, if we’re sad when we say we’re happy. It doesn’t have anything to do with her implants, and it won’t have gone away just because she hid those memories of herself.”

“She must have drawn attention to herself,” Vasko said, “made herself irresistible to Quaiche. But that was really just a short cut to his attention. Sooner or later she’d have found her way there, no matter what the obstacles. It was what she was born to do.”

“Did you talk to her?” Scorpio asked.

“No,” Vasko said. “It wasn’t possible. We couldn’t let Quaiche suspect that we’d ever met. But Khouri has the same implants, with the same compatibilities.”

“I was able to dig into her memories,” Khouri said, “once we were in the same room. It was close enough for direct contact between our implants without her suspecting anything.”

“You revealed yourself to her?” Scorpio asked.

“No. Not yet,” Khouri said. “She’s too vulnerable. It’s safer if she doesn’t remember everything straight away. That way she can continue to play the role Dean Quaiche expects of her. If he suspects she’s an Ultra spy, she’s in as much trouble as we are.”

“Let’s hope no one takes too close an interest in her, then,” Scorpio said. “How long are we looking at before she remembers everything on her own?”

“Days,” Khouri said. “No more than that. Maybe less. The cracks must already be showing.”

“About these talks with the dean,” Scorpio said. “Would you mind telling me exactly what was discussed?”

Vasko told him what he had talked about with the dean. Scorpio could tell that he was glossing over details, omitting anything not strictly essential. He learned of the dean’s request for a ship to provide local defence duties for Hela, orbiting the planet, sponsored by the Adventists. He learned that many Ultras were unwilling to accept the contract even with the sweeteners Quaiche had offered. They were frightened that their ships would be damaged by whatever had destroyed the
Gnostic Ascension,
the ship that had originally brought Quaiche to Hela.

“But that isn’t a problem for us,” Vasko said. “The risk is probably overstated in any case, but even if something does take a pot shot at us, we’re not exactly lacking defences. We’ve kept all the new technologies hidden ever since we approached the system, but that doesn’t mean we can’t turn them on again if we need them. I doubt that we’d have much to worry about from a few buried sentry weapons.”

“And for that protection, Quaiche is willing to let us take a closer look at Haldora?”

“Grudgingly,” Vasko said. “He still doesn’t like the idea of anyone poking sticks into the face of his miracle, but he wants that protection very badly.”

“Why is he so scared? Have other Ultras been causing trouble?”

Vasko shrugged. “The occasional incident, but nothing serious.”

“Sounds like an overreaction, in that case.”

“It’s his paranoia. There’s no need to second-guess him, so long as it gives us a licence to get close to Haldora without firing a gun.”

“Something isn’t right,” Scorpio said, his headache returning, having gone away and sharpened itself.

“You’re naturally cautious,” Vasko said. “There’s no fault in that. But we’ve waited nine years for this. This is our one chance. If we don’t take it, he’ll make the contract with another ship.”

“I still don’t like it.”

“Maybe you’d feel differently if it was your plan,” Urton said. “But it’s not. You were sleeping while we put this together.”

“That’s all right,” he said, obliging her with a smile. “I’m a pig. We don’t do long-term plans anyway.”

“What she means is,” Vasko said, “try to see it from our side. If you’d lived through all the years of waiting, you’d see things differently.” He leant back in his seat and shrugged. “Anyway, what’s done is done. I told Quaiche that we’d have to discuss the issue of the delegates, but other than that, all we’re waiting for is the agreement to come through from his side. Then we can go on in.”

“Wait,” Scorpio said, raising his hand. “Did you say delegates? What delegates?”

“Quaiche insists on it,” Vasko said. “Says he’ll need to station a small party of Adventists on the ship.”

“Over my dead body.”

“It’s all right,” Urton said. “The arrangement is reciprocal. The church sends up a party, we send one down to the cathedral. It’s all above board.”

Scorpio sighed. What point was there in arguing? He was already tired, and all he had done was sit in on this discussion. This discussion in which everything was already agreed, and he was—to all intents and purposes—relegated to the role of passive observer. He could object all he wanted, but for all the difference he made he might as well have stayed in the reefersleep casket.

“You’re making a serious mistake,” he said. “Trust me on this.”

 

Hela Surface, 2727

 

Captain Seyfarth was a slight, unsmiling man with a small thin-lipped mouth ideally evolved for the registering of contempt. In fact, beyond his neutral calm, Quaiche had never known the captain of the Cathedral Guard to show any other emotion. Even Seyfarth’s contempt was deployed sparingly, like a very expensive, difficult to procure item of military ordnance. It was usually in connection with his opinion of someone else’s security arrangements. He was a man who liked his work very much, and little else. He was, in Quaiche’s opinion, the perfect man for the job.

Standing in the garret, he wore the highly polished armour of the Guard, with his pink-plumed ceremonial vacuum helmet tucked under arm. The ostentatiously flanged and recurved armour was the deep maroon of arterial blood. Many medals and ribbons had been painted on the chest-plate, commemorating the actions Seyfarth had led in defence of the Lady Morwenna’s interests. Officially, they had all been aboveboard and within the generally accepted rules of Way behaviour. He had fought off raiding parties of disgruntled villagers; he had repelled hostile actions by rogue trading elements, including small parties of Ultras. But there had been covert operations as well, matters too delicate to commemorate: pre-emptive sabotage of both the Permanent Way and other cathedrals; the discreet removal from the church hierarchy of progressive elements hostile to Quaiche. Assassination was too strong a word, but that, too, was within Seyfarth’s repertoire of possible effects. He had the kind of past best left unmentioned. It included wars and war crimes.

But he remained fiercely loyal to Quaiche. In thirty-five years of service, there had been enough opportunities for Seyfarth to betray his master in return for personal advancement. It had never happened; all he cared about was the excellence with which he discharged his duty as Quaiche’s protector.

It had still been a risk, all the same, for Quaiche to let him know of his plans in advance. Everyone else involved—even the master of holdfast construction—needed to know only certain details. Grelier knew nothing at all. But Seyfarth required an overview of the entire scheme. He was the one, after all, who was going to have to take the ship.