Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

Valensin dabbed at his wound with something that stung. Vasko drew in a sharp breath. “What did she mean when she spoke? She said something about shadows.”

Scorpio’s expression gave nothing away. As calm as he now appeared, Vasko did not think it likely that the pig had forgiven him for the struggle.

“I don’t know,” Scorpio said, “except Ididn’t like the sound of it very much.”

“What matters is Hela,” Khouri said. She sighed, rubbed at the fatigue-darkened skin under her eyes. Vasko thought it safe to assume that they were dealing with Ana rather than Aura now.

“And the other thing—the business with shadows?”

“We’ll find out when we get there.”

There was a call from the flight deck. “Incoming transmission from the Nostalgia for Infinity” said the pilot. “We’re being invited aboard.”

“By whom?” Scorpio asked.

“Antoinette Bax,” the pilot said, his voice trailing off hesitantly. “With—um—the compliments of Captain John Bran-nigan.”

“Good enough for me,” Scorpio said.

Vasko felt the shuttle turn, arrowing towards the much larger vessel. At the same time, one of the small, sleek human-controlled ships detached from its neighbours and accompanied them, making an almost painful effort not to outpace them there.

One further incident stuck in Rashmika’s mind before the caravan arrived at the Permanent Way. It was a day after the crossing of the bridge, and the caravan had finally climbed out of the Rift on to the bone-white level plateau of the Jarnsaxa Hats. To the north, the southern limits of the Western Hyrrokkin Uplands were visible as a roughness on the horizon, while to the east, Rashmika knew, lay the complex volcano fields of the Glistenheath and Ragnarok complexes, all currently dormant. By contrast, the Jarnsaxa Flats were mirror smooth and geologically stable. There were no scuttler digs in this area—whatever geological process had created the Flats had also erased or subducted any scuttler relics in this part of Hela—but there were still many small communities that made a direct living from their proximity to the Way. Now and then the caravan passed one of these dour little hamlets of surface bubbletents, or barrelled past a roadside shrine commemorating some recent but unspecified tragedy. Occasionally they saw pilgrims hauling their penitential life-support systems across the ice. To Rashmika they looked like returning hunters in some brown-hued painting by Brueghel, sledges topheavy with winter foodstock.

The buildings, shrines and figures slipped from horizon to horizon with indecent speed. With a broad, straight road ahead of it, the caravan had been able to move at maximum velocity for several hours, and now it seemed to have settled into a rhythm, an unstoppable stampede of machinery. Wheels rolled, tracks whirled around, traction limbs disappeared in a blur of pistoning motion. Visibly, Haldora moved closer to the zenith, until—by Rashmika’s estimation—they could not be more than a few tens of kilometres from the Way.

Very soon the cathedrals would be visible, their spires clawing above the horizon.

But before she saw the cathedrals she saw other machines. They began as dots in the distance, throwing up pure white ballistic plumes from their rumbling wheels and treads. For many minutes they did not appear to move at all. Rashmika wondered if the caravan was simply catching up with similar processions arriving at the Way from elsewhere on Hela. This seemed reasonable, for many roads had joined up with the one they were on since they had climbed out of the Rift.

But then she realised that the vehicles were actually racing towards them. Even this did not strike her as particularly noteworthy, but then she felt the caravan slow and begin to oscillate from one side of the road to the other, as if uncertain which side it ought to be on. The swerves made her feel nauseous. She had the viewing area largely to herself, but the few caravan personnel that she saw also appeared ill at ease with developments.

The other machines continued to sweep towards them. In a few moments they had swelled to enormous size. They were much larger than any of the caravan’s components. Rashmika saw a blur of treads and wide meshwork road wheels, with a superstructure of vicious ice-and-rock-moving machinery. The machines were painted a dusty yellow, with bee-stripes and rotating warning beacons. Many of the components were half-familiar to her: massively scaled-up counterparts of the heavy excavation equipment her fellow villagers used in the scuttler digs.

She recognised the function, even if the size was daunting. There were toothed claws and gaping lantern-jawed dragline buckets. There were grader blades and mighty percussive hammers. There were angled conveyor belts like the ridged spines of dinosaurs. There were rotating shield drills: huge toothed discs as wide as any one of the caravan’s vehicles. There were fusion torches, lasers, bosers, high-pressure water cutters, steam-borers. There were tiny cabins jacked high on articulated gantries. There were vast ore hoppers and grilled, chimneyed machines she couldn’t even begin to identify. There were generators, equipment carriers and accommodation cabins painted the same dusty yellow.

All of it rolled by, machine after machine, hogging the road while the caravan bounced along in a rut on one side of it.

She sensed grinding humiliation.

Later, when the caravan was on the move again, she tried to find out what had happened. She thought Pietr might know, but he was nowhere to be found. Quaestor Jones, when she tracked him down, dismissed the matter as one of trifling importance. But he still did not tell her what she wanted to know.

“That wasn’t a caravan like ours,” she said.

“Your powers of observation do you credit.”

“So might I ask where it was going?”

“I would have thought that was obvious, especially given your chosen intention to work on the Permanent Way. Very evidently, those machines were part of a major Way taskforce. Doubtless they were on their way to clear a blockage, or to make good a defect in the infrastructure.” Quaestor Rutland Jones folded his arms, as if the matter was settled.

“Then they’d be affiliated to a church, wouldn’t they? I may not know much, but I know that all the gangs are tied to specific churches.”

“Most certainly.” He drummed his fingers on the desk before him.

“In which case, what church was it? I watched every one of those machines go past and I didn’t see a single clerical symbol on any of them.”

The quaestor shrugged, a little too emphatically for Rash-mika’s tastes. “It’s dirty work—as you will soon discover. When the clock is against a team, I doubt that touching-up painted insignia is very high on the list of priorities.”

She recalled that the excavation machines had been dusty and faded. What the quaestor said was undoubtedly true in a general sense, but in Rashmika’s opinion, not one of those machines had ever carried a clerical symbol—not since they were last painted, at least.

“One other thing, Quaestor.”

“Yes,” he said, tiredly.

“We’re heading down towards the Way because we took a short cut across Absolution Gap. We’d come from the north. It seems to me that if those machines really were on their way to clear a blockage, they’d hardly be taking the same route we did, even in reverse.”

“What are you suggesting, Miss Els?”

“It strikes me as much more likely that they were headed somewhere else entirely. Somewhere that has nothing to do with the Way.”

“And that’s your considered opinion, is it? Based on all your many years of experience with matters of the Way and the operational complexities of its maintenance?”