Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

“They’re still here,” he said. For a moment he was again distracted by the functions of his chest-pack. He looked more vigilant than concerned. She saw him tap the little bracelet of controls that encircled one wrist, then nod as if satisfied with some subtle change in the suit’s parameter settings.

“Yes,” she said.

“They’re also closer. Aren’t they?”

“We think so, John. That’s what Khouri told us was happening, and everything she’s said has checked out so far.”

“I’d listen to her, if I were you.”

“It’s not just a question of listening to Khouri now. We have her daughter. Her daughter knows things, or so we’ve been led to believe. We think we may have to start listening to what she tells us to do.”

“Clavain will guide you. Like me, he understands the reach of historical time. We’re both phantoms from the past, hurtling into futures neither of us expected to see.”

Antoinette bit her lower lip. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got some bad news. Clavain’s dead. He was killed saving Khouri’s daughter. We have Scorpio, but…”

The Captain was a long time answering. She wondered if the news of Clavain’s death had affected him more than she had anticipated. She had never thought of Clavain and the Captain as having any kinship, but now that the Captain put it like that, the two had a lot more in common with each other than with most of their peers.

“You don’t have absolute faith in Scorpio’s leadership?” he asked.

“Scorpio’s served us well. In a crisis, you couldn’t ask for a better leader. But he’d be the first to admit that he doesn’t think strategically.”

“Then find another leader.”

Something happened then that surprised her. Unbidden, she had a flashback to the earlier meeting in the High Conch. She saw Blood swaggering in at the start of it and then she saw Vasko Malinin arriving late for the same meeting. She saw Blood reprimanding him for his lateness and Vasko shrugging off that same reprimand as an irrelevance. And she realised, with hindsight, that she had accepted the young man’s insouciance as a necessary correlative to what he was and what he would become, and that she had, on some level, found it admirable.

She had seen a gleam of something shining through, like steel.

“This isn’t about leaders,” Antoinette said hastily. “It’s about you, John. Are you intending to leave?”

“You suggested I should give the matter some thought.”

She recalled those elevating neutrino levels. “You seem to be giving it a bit more than thought.”

“Perhaps.”

“We need to be careful,” she said. “We may well need to get into space at short notice, but we have to think about the consequences for those around us. It will take days to get everyone loaded aboard, even if everything goes without a hitch.”

“There are thousands aboard now. Their survival will have to be my main priority. I’m sorry about the others, but if they don’t get here in time they may have to be left behind. Does that sound callous to you?”

“I’m not the one to judge. Look, some people will choose to stay behind anyway. We may even encourage them, just in case leaving Ararat turns out to be a mistake. But if you leave now, you’ll kill everyone not already aboard.”

“Have you considered moving them aboard faster?”

“We’re doing what we can, and we’ve begun to make plans to relocate a limited number of people away from the bay. But by this time tomorrow there’ll still be at least a hundred thousand people we haven’t moved.”

I For a moment the Captain faded back into the dust storm. Antoinette stared at the rough leathery texture of the wall. She thought she had lost him and was about to turn away. Then he emerged again, stooping against an imagined wind.

He raised his voice over something only he could hear. “I’m sorry, Antoinette. I understand your concerns.”

“Does that mean you’ve listened to a word I said, or are you just going to leave when it suits you, regardless?”

He reached up to lower his visor. “You should do all that you can to get the others to safety, whether it’s aboard the ship or further from the bay.”

“That’s it, then, is it? Those that we haven’t moved will just have to take their chances?”

“None of this is easy for me.”

“It wouldn’t kill you to wait until we can get everyone to safety.”

“But it might, Antoinette. It might do exactly that.”

Antoinette turned away in disgust. “Remember what I told you last time? I was wrong. I see it now, even if I didn’t then.”

“What was that exactly?”

She looked back at him. She felt spiteful and reckless. “I said you’d paid for your crimes. I said you’d done it a hundred thousand times over. Nice dream, John, but it wasn’t true, was it? You didn’t care a damn about those people. It was only ever about saving yourself.”

The Captain did not answer her. He pulled down the visor and vanished back into the storm, still angling his body against the tremendous lacerating force of that invisible wind. And Antoinette began to wonder whether this visit hadn’t after all been a grave mistake, exactly the sort of reckless behaviour that her father had always warned her about.

“No joy,” she told her companions back in the High Conch.

Around the table sat a quorum of colony seniors. She did not notice any obvious absences except for Pellerin, the swimmer. Even Scorpio was now present. It was the first she had seen of him since Clavain’s death, and there was, Antoinette thought, something in his gaze that she had never seen there before. Even when he looked directly at her his eyes were focused on something distant and almost certainly hostile—a glint on some imagined horizon, an enemy sail or the gleam of armour. She had seen that look somewhere else recently, but it took her a moment to remember where. The old man had been sitting in the same place at the table, fixated on the same remote threat. It had taken years of pain and suffering to bring Clavain to that state, but only days to do it to the pig.

Antoinette knew that something awful had happened in the iceberg. She had flinched from the details. When the others had told her she did not need to know—that she was much better off not knowing—she had decided to believe them. But although she had never been very good at reading the expressions of pigs, in Scorpio’s face half the story was already laid out for her inspection, the horror anatomised if only she had the wit to read the signs.

“What did you tell him?” Scorpio asked.

“I told him we’d be looking at tens of thousands of casualties if he decided to lift off.”

“And?”

“He more or less said ‘too bad.’ His only immediate concern was for the people already aboard the ship.”

“Fourteen thousand at the last count,” Blood commented.

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” Vasko said. “That’s—what? Not far off a tenth of the colony already?”

Blood toyed with his knife. “You want to come and help us squeeze in the next five hundred, son, you’re more than welcome.”

“It’s that difficult?” Vasko asked.

“It gets worse with every consignment. We might manage to get it up to twenty thousand by dawn, but only if we start treating them like cattle.”

‘They’re human beings,“ Antoinette said. ”They deserve better treatment than that. What about the freezers? Aren’t they helping?“

“The caskets aren’t working as well as they used to,” Xavier Liu said, addressing his wife exactly as he would any other colony senior. “Once they’re cooled down they’re OK, but putting someone under means hours of supervision and tinkering. There’s no way to process them fast enough.”