Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

He touched his chest, fingering through the gashed fabric. His hand came back lathered in blood. “Get Scorpio,” he said to Valensin.

But Scorpio was already on his way. Something gleamed in his right hand: a humming blur of metal, a knife-shaped smear of silver. He saw the machines, saw Vasko with blood on his fingers. The servitors had disentangled themselves and the one still standing had begun to pick at the base of the incubator, trying to claw it open. Scorpio snarled and slid the knife into the machine’s armour. The knife sailed through the drab green carapace as if it wasn’t there at all. There was a fizzle of shorting circuitry, a thrashing whirr of damaged mechanisms. The knife howled and twisted out of Scorpio’s grip, hitting the floor, where it continued to buzz and whirr.

The servitor had broken down. It remained frozen in place, limbs still extended but now immobile.

Scorpio knelt down and retrieved the piezo-knife, stilled the blade and returned it to its sheath.

Outside the shuttle, the wall of Inhibitor machinery looked close enough to touch. Jags of blue-pink lightning flickered and danced between different portions of it.

“Someone mind telling me what just happened?” Scorpio snapped.

“Aura,” said Vasko. He wiped his bloody hand against his trouser leg. “Aura tried to turn the servitors against herself.” He was breathing hard, forcing out each word between ragged gulps of air. “Trying to kill herself. She doesn’t want the cubes to reach her while she’s still alive.”

Khouri coughed. Her eyes were like a trapped animal’s. “Kill me, Scorp. Not too late. You have to do it.”

“After all we’ve been through?” he said.

“You have to go to Hela,” she said. “Find Quaiche. Negotiate with shadows. They will know.”

“Fuck,” Scorpio said.

Vasko watched as the pig pulled the knife from its sheath once more. Scorpio stared at the now-still blade, his lips curled in disgust. Did he really mean to use it, or was he simply thinking about throwing it away, before circumstances once again forced him to wield it against someone or something he cared for?

Despite himself, despite the fact that he felt his own strength draining away, Vasko reached out and took hold of the pig’s sleeve. “No,” he said. “Don’t do it. Don’t kill them.”

The pig’s expression was something beyond fury. But Vasko had him. Scorpio couldn’t activate the knife one-handed; his anatomy wouldn’t allow it.

“Malinin. Let go now.”

“Scorp, listen to me. There has to be another way. The price we paid for her… we can’t just throw her away now, no matter how much she wants it.”

“You think I don’t know what she cost us?”

Vasko shook his head. He had no idea what else to say. His strength was very nearly gone. He did not think he had been seriously injured, but the wound was still deep, and he was already desperately tired.

Scorpio tried to fight him. They were eye to eye. The pig had the advantage in strength, Vasko was sure, but Vasko had leverage and dexterity.

“Drop the knife, Scorp.”

“I’ll kill you, Malinin.”

“Wait,” Valensin said mildly, taking off his spectacles and polishing them on the hem of his tunic. “Both of you, wait. You should look outside, I think.”

Still struggling over control of the knife, they did as he suggested.

Something was happening, something that in the heat of the struggle they had missed completely. The Nostalgia for Infinity was starting to fight back. Weapons had emerged from its hull, poking out through the intricate accretion of detail that marked the Captain’s transformations. These were not the cache weapons, Vasko realised, not the major Conjoiner ordnance that the ship carried deep inside it. Instead these were the conventional armaments that it had carried for much of its lifetime, designed primarily to intimidate trading customers and to warn off potential rivals or pirates. The same weapons that had been used against the colony on Resurgam, when the colony had been slow in handing over Dan Sylveste.

Scorpio relaxed his grip on Vasko, and slowly returned the knife to its sheath. “That won’t make much difference,” he said.

“It’s buying time,” Vasko said. He let go of the pig. The two of them glowered at each other. Vasko knew he had just crossed yet another line, one that could never be traversed in the opposite direction.

So be it. He had been serious in his promise to Clavain to protect Aura.

Lines of fire were stabbing out from the Nostalgia for Infinity , sweeping around and scything into the closing wall of wolf machinery. They were very high above Ararat now and there was little atmosphere left to make the beam weapons—or whatever they were—visible for more than few dozen metres along their course. Vasko guessed that the great ship, after so long in an atmosphere, was still bleeding trapped air and water from pockets in the folds and crevices of its hull. He watched the dark clots of wolf machinery squirm away from the impact points of the beams, like specks of iron being repelled by a magnet. The beams moved quickly, but the cubes moved faster, slipping from one point to another with dizzying rapidity. Vasko realised, dejectedly, that Scorpio was right. It was a gesture of defiance, nothing more. Everything they had learned about the wolves, in all the glancing contacts to date, had taught them that conventional human weapons had almost no effect on them whatsoever. They might slow the closing of the shell, but no more than that.

Perhaps Aura was right all along. Better for her to die now, before the machines drained every last scrap of knowledge from her head. She had told them that Hela was significant. Perhaps no one would survive to act on that knowledge. But if anyone did, they would at least be able to act without the wolves knowing their exact intentions.

He looked at the sheath where the pig kept his knife.

No. There had to be another way. If they started murdering children to gain a tactical advantage, the Inhibitors might as well win the war now.

“They’re backing off,” Valensin said. “Look. Something’s hurting them. I don’t think it’s the Infinity .”

The wall of machines was peppered with gaping, irregular holes. Carnations of colourless white light flashed from the cores of the cube structures. Chunks of cubic machinery veered into each other or dropped out of sight entirely. Tentacles of cubes thrashed purposelessly. The lightning pulsed in ugly, spavined shapes. And, suddenly, dashing through the gaps, machines appeared.

Vasko recognised the smooth, melted, muscular lines of spacecraft much like their shuttle. They moved like projections rather than solid objects, slowing down in an eyeblink.

“Remontoire,” Khouri breathed.

Beyond the ragged shell of Inhibitor machines, Vasko glimpsed a much wider battle, one that must have been encompassing many light-seconds of space around Ararat. He saw awesome eruptions of light, flashes that grew and faded in slow motion. He saw purple-black spheres simply appear, visible only when they formed against some brighter background, lingering for a few seconds, their wrinkled surfaces undulating, before popping out of existence.

Vasko faded out. When he came to, Valensin was inspecting his wound. “It’s clean and not too deep, but it will need treating,” he said.

“But it isn’t serious, is it?”

“No. I don’t think Aura really wanted to hurt you.”

Vasko felt some of the tension drain from his body. Then he realised that Scorpio had said very little since their scuffle over the knife. “Scorp,” he began, “we couldn’t just kill her like that.”

“It’s easy to say that now. It’s what she wanted of us that matters.”