Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

“Why aren’t we going to the ship?” Valensin kept asking.

Scorpio hadn’t answered him. He was communicating with someone via the bracelet again, most likely Blood or one of his deputies. Scorpio shook his head and snarled out an oath. Whatever the news was, Vasko doubted it was welcome.

“I’m going up front,” Antoinette said, “see if the pilot needs any help.”

“Tell him to keep it slow and steady,” Scorpio ordered. “No risks. And be prepared to get us up and out if it comes to that.”

“Assuming this thing still has the legs to reach orbit.”

They took off. Vasko helped the doctor and his mechanical aides to secure the incubator, Valensin showing him how the shuttle’s interior walls could be persuaded to form outgrowths and niches with varying qualities of adhesion. The incubator was soon glued down, with the two servitors standing watch over its functions. Aura, visible as a wrinkled thing within the tinted plastic, bound up in monitors and tubes, appeared oblivious to all the fuss.

“Where are we going?” Khouri asked. “The ship?”

“Actually, there’s a bit of a problem with the ship,” Scorpio said. “C’mon, take a look. I think you’ll find it interesting.”

They circled the ship again, at the same altitude as before. Khouri stared at the view with wide, uncomprehending eyes. Vasko did not blame her in the slightest. When he had seen the ship himself, only thirty minutes earlier, it had been in the earliest stages of being consumed by the Juggler biomass. Because the process had only just begun, it had been easy enough to assimilate what was going on. But now the ship was gone . In its place was a towering, irregular fuzzy green spire. He knew that there was a ship under the mass, but he could only guess at how strange the view must look to someone who hadn’t seen the early stages of the Juggler envelopment.

But there was something else, wasn’t there? Something that Vasko had noticed almost immediately but had dismissed as an optical illusion, a trick of his own tilted vantage point within the shuttle. But now that he was able to see the horizon where it poked through rents in the sea mist, it was obvious that there was no illusion, and that what he saw had nothing to do with his position.

The ship was tilting. It was a slight lean, only a few degrees away from vertical, but it was enough to inspire terror. The edifice that had for so long been a solid fixture of the landscape, seemingly as ancient as geography itself, was leaning to one side.

It was being pulled over by the collective biomass of the Pattern Juggler organisms.

“This isn’t good,” Vasko said.

“Tell me what’s happening,” Khouri said, standing next to him.

“We don’t know,” Scorpio said. “It started an hour or so ago. The sea thickened around the base, and the ring of material started swallowing the ship. Now it looks as if the Jugglers are trying to topple it.”

“Could they?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. The ship must weigh a few million tonnes. But the mass of all that Juggler material isn’t exactly negligible. I wouldn’t worry about the ship toppling, though.”

“No?”

“I’d be more worried about it snapping. That’s a lighthugger. It’s designed to tolerate one or more gees of acceleration along its axis. Standing on the surface of a planet doesn’t impose any more stress on it than normal starflight. But they don’t build those ships to handle lateral stresses. They’re not designed to stay in one piece if the forces are acting sideways. A couple more degrees and I’ll start worrying. She might come down.”

Khouri said, “We need that ship, Scorp. It’s our only ticket out of here.”

“Thanks for the newsflash,” he said, “but right now I’d say there isn’t a lot I can do about it—unless you want me to start fighting the Pattern Jugglers.”

The very notion was extreme, almost absurd. The Pattern Jugglers were harmless to all but a few unfortunate individuals. Collectively, they had never indicated any malicious intentions towards humanity. They were archives of lost knowledge, lost minds. But if the Pattern Jugglers were trying to destroy the Nostalgia for Infinity , what else could the humans do but retaliate? That simply could not be allowed to happen.

“Do you have weapons on this shuttle?” Khouri asked.

“Some,” Scorpio said. “Light ship-to-ship stuff, mainly.”

“Anything you could use against that biomass?”

“Some particle beams which won’t work too well in Ararat’s atmosphere. The rest? Too likely to take chunks out of the ship as well. We could try the particle beams…”

“No!”

The voice had come from Khouri’s mouth. But it had emerged explosively, like a vomit of sound. It almost didn’t resemble her voice at all.

“You just said…” Scorpio began.

Khouri sat down suddenly, falling—as if exhausted—into one of the couches that the shuttle had provided. She pressed a hand to her brow.

“No,” she said again, less stridently this time. “No. Leave. Leave alone. Help us.”

Wordlessly, Vasko, Scorpio, Valensin—and Khouri too—turned to look at the incubator, where Aura lay entombed in the care of machines. The tiny red-pink form within was moving, writhing gently against those restraints.

“Help us?” Vasko asked.

Khouri answered, but again the words seemed to emerge without her volition. She had to catch her breath between them. “They. Help us. Want to.”

Vasko moved over to the incubator. He had one eye on Khouri, another on her daughter. Valensin’s machines shuffled agitatedly. They did not know what to do, and their jointed arms were jerking with nervous indecision.

“They?” Vasko asked. “They as in the Pattern Jugglers?”

The pink form kicked her little legs, the tiny, perfectly formed nub of a fist clenched in front of the miniature scowl of her face. Aura’s eyes were sealed slits.

“Yes. They. Pattern Jugglers,” Khouri said.

Vasko turned to Scorpio. “I think we’ve got this all wrong,” he said.

“You do?”

“Wait. I need to talk to Antoinette.”

He went forward to the bridge without waiting for the pig’s permission. In the shuttle’s cockpit he found Antoinette and the pilot strapped into their command couches. They had turned the entire cockpit transparent, so that they appeared to be floating in midair, accompanied only by various disembodied read-out panels and controls. Vasko took a dizzy step back and then collected himself.

“Can we hover?” he asked.

Antoinette looked at him over her shoulder. “Of course.”

“Then bring us to a stop. Do you have any ranging equipment? Anticollision sensors, that sort of thing?”

“Of course,” she said again, as if both questions were amongst the least intelligent she had heard in a long while.

“Then shine something on the ship.”

“Any particular reason, Vasko? We can all see that the damned thing’s tilting.”

“Just do it, all right?”

“Yes, sir,” she said. Her small hands, clinking with jewellery, worked the controls floating above her couch. Vasko felt the ship nudge to a halt. The view ahead rotated, bringing the leaning tower directly in front of them.

“Hold it there,” Vasko said. “Now get that ranging thing—whatever it is—on to the ship. Somewhere near the base if you can manage it.”

“That isn’t going to help us figure out the tilt angle,” Antoinette said.

“It’s not the tilt I’m interested in. I don’t think they’re really trying to topple it.”

“You don’t?”

Vasko smiled. “I think it’s just a by-product. They’re trying to move it.”

He waited for her to set up the ranging device. A pulsing spherical display floated in front of her, filled with smoky green structures and numbers. “There’s the ship,” she said, pointing to the thickest return in the radar plot.