Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

“I’ve earned the right to be here,” he said, quietly, but loud enough for the pig to hear. “I have a stake in Aura’s future.”

“You’re keen, Malinin, but you’re way out of your depth.”

“I’m also involved.”

“You were embroiled. It isn’t the same thing.”

Vasko started to say something, but there was a flicker of static across all the display read-outs hovering around the pilot. He felt the shuttle lurch.

“Picking up interference on all comms frequencies,” the pilot reported. “We’ve lost all surface transponder contacts and all links to First Camp. There’s a lot of EM noise out here—more than we’re used to. There’s stuff the sensors can’t even interpret. Avionics are responding sluggishly. I think we’re entering some kind of jamming zone.”

“Can you keep us close to the Infinity !” Scorpio asked.

“I’m more or less flying this thing manually. I guess if I still have the ship as a reference, we’re not going to get lost. But I’m not making any promises.”

“Altitude?”

“One hundred and twenty klicks. We must be entering the lower sphere of battle about now.”

Above, the view had not changed dramatically since the departure of the ship. The scratches of light had faded, perhaps because Remontoire was aware that the message had been received and acted upon. There were still flashes of light, ex-panding spheres and arcs, and the occasional searing passage of an atmosphere-skimming object, but other than the darkness becoming a more intense, deeper shade of black, there was no real difference compared to the surface view.

Khouri came through to join them. “I’m hearing Aura,” she said. “She’s awake now.”

“Good,” Scorpio began.

“There’s more. I’m seeing things. So’s Aura. I think it must be the same kind of thing Clavain and I saw before things got really serious—leakage from the war. It’s getting through again.”

“We must be close,” Vasko said. “I guess the wolves blocked those signals when they could, to stop Remontoire sending a message through that easily. Now that we’re getting so close they can’t stop all of them.”

From somewhere, Vasko heard a noise he didn’t recognise. It was shrill, ragged, pained. It was muffled by plastic. He realised it was Aura, crying.

“She doesn’t like it,” Khouri said. “It’s painful.”

“Contacts,” the pilot announced. “Radar returns, incoming. Fifty klicks and closing. They weren’t there a moment ago.”

The shuttle lurched violently, throwing Vasko and Khouri to one side. The walls deformed to soften the impact, but Vasko still felt the wind knocked out of him. “What’s happening?” he asked, breathless.

“The Infinity is making evasive manoeuvres. She’s seen the same radar echoes. I’m just trying to keep up.” The pilot glanced at a read-out again. “Thirty klicks. Twenty and slowing. Jamming is getting worse. This isn’t good, folks.”

“Do your best,” Scorpio said. “Everyone else—secure yourselves. It’s going to get rough.”

Vasko and Khouri went back to where Valensin and his machines were continuing their vigil over Aura. She was still moving, but had at least stopped crying. Vasko wished that there was something he could do to help her, some way to temper the voices screaming into her head. He could not imagine what it must be like for her. By rights she should not even have been born yet; should barely have had any sense of her own individuality or the wider world in which she existed. Aura was not an ordinary baby, that much was clear—she already had the language skills of a two- or three-year-old child, in Vasko’s estimation—but it was also unlikely that all parts of her mind were developing at the same accelerated rate. There was only room in that tiny wrinkled head for a certain amount of complexity; she must still have had an infant’s view of many things. When he had been two years older than Aura, Vasko’s own grasp of the world had barely reached further than the handful of rooms that made up his home. Everything else had been hazy, unimportant, subject to comic misapprehension.

The Nostalgia for Infinity was now further away from the shuttle than it had been: tens of kilometres distant, easily. The shuttle’s hull had still not turned fully transparent again, but in the light from its engines he caught the reflections of things moving closer. Not just moving, but fluttering, swirling, splin-tering and reforming, retreating and advancing in pulsing waves.

They came closer. Now the glare of the engines revealed hints of stepped structures: tiers, contours, zigzag edges. It was the same machinery they had found in Skade’s ship, the same stuff that had reached down from the clouds and ripped the corvette apart, but this time the scale was immeasurably larger—these cubes were almost as large as houses, forming structures hundreds of metres across. The wolf cubes were in constant, sliding motion: slithering across each other, swelling and contracting, larger structures organising and dissipating with hypnotic fluidity. Filaments of cubes spanned the larger structures; clusters of them fluttered from point to point like messengers. The scale was still difficult to judge, but the cubes were converging from nearly all sides and it seemed to Vasko that they had already formed a loose shell around both the shuttle and the Nostalgia for Infinity . What was certain was that the shell was tightening, the gaps becoming smaller.

“Ana?” Vasko asked. “You’ve seen these things before, haven’t you? They attacked your ship. Is this how it begins?”

“We’re in trouble,” she confirmed.

“What happens next, if we can’t escape?”

“They come inside.” Her voice was hollow, like a cracked bell. “They invade your ship and then they invade your head. You don’t want that to happen, Vasko. Trust me on this one.”

“How long will we have, if they reach the ship?”

“Seconds, if we’re lucky. Maybe not even that.” Then she convulsed, a whiplash movement that had her body slamming against the restraining surface that the ship had fashioned around her. Her eyes closed and then reopened, her pupils raised to the ceiling, the whites bright and frightened. “Kill me. Now.”

“Ana?”

“Aura,” she said. “Kill me. Kill us both . Now.”

“No,” he said. He looked at Valensin, hoping for some explanation.

The doctor simply shook his head. “I won’t do it,” he said. “No matter what she wants. I won’t take a life.”

“Listen to me,” she insisted. “What I know—too important. They can’t find out. Will read our minds. Cannot allow that to happen. Kill us now.“

“No, Aura. I won’t do it. Not now. Not ever,” Vasko said.

Valensin’s servitors moved nearer to the incubator. Their jointed limbs twitched, clicking against their drab bodies. One of the machines extended a manipulator towards the incubator, grasping it. The servitor then backed away, trying to tug the incubator away from the niche.

Vasko leapt forwards and wrestled the machine away from the baby. The machine was lighter than it looked, but much stronger than he had anticipated. The many limbs thrashed against him, hard articulated metal pressing into his skin.

“Valensin!” he shouted. “Do something!”

“They’re beyond my control,” Valensin said, calmly, as if all that followed was out of his hands.

Vasko sucked in his chest, making a cavity between his body and the machine in an attempt to avoid the swiping pass of a sharp-bladed manipulator. He wasn’t fast enough. He felt a nick through his clothing, the instant cold that told him he had been wounded. He fell back, hitting the wall, and tried to kick out at the wide base of the servitor. The machine toppled, clattering against its companion. The thrashing limbs entwined, knives sparking against knives.