Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

Scorpio had no choice but to accept the Conjoiners. They were not a permanent fixture in any case; in fewer than eight days they would have to leave if they wanted to return home to the Zodiacal Light and their other remaining ships. There were already fewer of them than there had been at first.

They had helped to reinstall nanotechnological manufactories, plague-hardened so that they would continue to function even in the contagious environment of the Infinity . Primed with blueprints and raw matter, the forges spewed out gleaming new technologies of mostly unfamiliar function. The same blueprints showed how the newly minted components were to be assembled into even larger—yet equally unfamiliar—new shapes. In evacuated shafts running the length of the Nostalgia for Infinity— just like the one he was looking into now—these contraptions grew and grew. The thing that looked like an elongated silver tree—or a dizzyingly complicated turbine, or some weird alien take on DNA—was a hypometric weapon. Perhaps sensing their value, the Captain tolerated the activity, although at any moment he could have remade his interior architecture, crushing the shafts out of existence.

Elsewhere, Conjoiners crawled through the skin of the ship, installing a network of cryo-arithmetic engines. Tiny as hearts, each limpetlike engine was a sucking wound in the corpus of classical thermodynamics. Scorpio recalled what had happened to Skade’s corvette when the cryo-arithmetic engines had gone wrong. The runaway cooling must have begun with a tiny splinter of ice, smaller than a snowflake. But it had been growing all the while, as the engines locked into manic, spiralling feedback loops, destroying more heat with every computational cycle, the cold feeding the cold. In space, the ship would simply have cooled down to within quantum spitting distance of absolute zero. On Ararat, however, with an ocean at hand, it had grown an iceberg around itself.

Other Conjoiners were crawling through the ship’s original engines, tinkering with the hallowed reactions at their core. More were out on the hull, tethered to the encrusted architecture of the Captain’s growth patterns. They were installing additional weapons and armouring devices. Still more—secluded deep within the ship, far from any other focus of activity—were assembling the inertia-suppression devices that had been tested during the Zodiacal Light’s chase from Yellowstone to Resurgam. This was alien technology, Scorpio knew, machinery that humans had appropriated without Aura’s assistance. But they had never been able to get it to work reliably. By all accounts, Aura had shown them how to modify it for relatively safe operation. Skade, in desperation, had attempted to use the same technology for faster-than-light travel. Her effort had failed catastrophically, and Aura had refused to reveal any secrets that might make another attempt possible. Amongst the gifts she was giving them, there was to be no superluminal technology.

He watched the servitors slip another blade into place. The device had looked finished a day ago, but since then they had added about three times more machinery. Yet, strangely, the structure looked even more lacy and fragile than it had before. He wondered when it would be done—and what exactly it would do when it was done—and then began to turn from the window, apprehension lying heavy in his heart.

“Scorp.”

He had not been expecting company, so was surprised to hear his own name. He was even more surprised to see Vasko Malinin standing there.

“Vasko,” he said, offering a noncommittal smile. “What brings you down here?”

“I wanted to find you,” he said. Vasko was wearing a stiff, fresh-looking Security Arm uniform. Even his boots were clean, a miracle aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity .

“You managed.”

“I was told you’d probably be down here somewhere.” Vasko’s face was lit from the side by the red glow spilling from the hypometric weapon shaft. It made him look young and feral by turns. Vasko glanced through the window. “Quite something, isn’t it?”

“I’ll believe it works when I see it do something other than sit there looking pretty.”

“Still sceptical?”

“Someone should be.”

Scorpio realised now that Vasko was not alone. There was a figure looming behind him. He would have been able to see the person clearly years ago; now he had difficulty making out detail when the light was gloomy.

He squinted. “Ana?”

Khouri stepped into the pool of red light. She was dressed in a heavy coat and gloves, enormous boots covering her legs up to her knees—they were much dirtier than Vasko’s—and she was carrying something, tucked into the crook of her arm. It was a bundle, a form wrapped in quilted silver blanketing. At the top end of the bundle, near the crook of her arm, was a tiny opening.

“Aura?” he said, startled.

“She doesn’t need the incubator now,” Khouri said.

“She might not need it, but…”

“Dr. Valensin said it was holding her back, Scorp. She’s too strong for it. It was doing more harm than good.” Khouri angled her face down towards the open end of the bundle, her eyes meeting the hidden eyes of her daughter. “She told me she wanted to be out of it as well.”

“I hope Valensin knows what he’s doing,” Scorpio said.

“He does, Scorp. More importantly, so does Aura.”

“She’s just a child,” he said, keeping his voice low. “Barely that.”

Khouri stepped forwards. “Hold her.”

She was already offering the bundle to him. He wanted to say no. It wasn’t just that he did not quite trust himself with something as precious and fragile as a child. There was something else: a voice that warned him not to make this physical connection with her. Another voice—quieter—reminded him that he was already bound to her in blood. What more harm could be done now?

He took Aura. He held her against his chest, just tight enough to feel that he had her safely. She was astonishingly light. It stunned him that this girl—this asset they had lost their leader to recover—could feel so insubstantial.

“Scorpio.”

The voice was not Khouri’s. It was not an adult voice; barely a child’s. It was more a gurgling croak that half-approximated the sound of his name.

He looked down at the bundle, into the opening. Aura’s face turned towards his. Her eyes were still tightly closed gummy slits. There was a hubble emerging from her mouth.

“She didn’t just say my name,” he said incredulously.

“I did,” Aura said.

He felt, for a heartbeat, as if he wanted to drop the bundle. There was something wrong lying there in his arms, something that had no right to exist in this universe. Then the shameful reflex passed, as quickly as it had come. He looked away from the tiny pink-red face, towards her mother.

“She can’t even see me,” he said.

“No, Scorp,” Khouri confirmed, “she can’t. Her eyes don’t work yet. But mine do. And that’s all that matters.”

Throughout the ship, Scorpio’s technicians worked day and night laying listening devices. They glued newly manufactured microphones and barometers to walls and ceilings, then un-spooled kilometres of cables, running them through the natural ducts and tunnels of the Captain’s anatomy, splicing them at nodes, braiding them into thickly entwined trunk lines that ran back to central processing points. They tested their devices, tapping stanchions and bulkheads, opening and closing pressure doors to create sudden draughts of air from one part of the ship to another. The Captain tolerated them, even, it seemed, did his best to make their efforts easier. But he was not always in complete control of his reshaping processes. Fibre-optic lines were repeatedly severed; microphones and barometers were absorbed and had to be remade. The technicians accepted this stoically, going back down into the bowels of the ship to re-lay a kilometre of line that they had just put in place; even, sometimes, repeating the process three or four times until they found a better, less-vulnerable routing.