Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

And before that, of course, he had to know if he had made a terrible mistake by persuading the ship to travel to Yellowstone first.

He thought of the dust leaking from his hand, spilling on to the table, the trail drifting towards the Y he had marked rather than the H. Within minutes it had been confirmed: the ship was executing a slow turn, steering for Epsilon Eridani rather than the dim, unfamiliar star of 107 Piscium.

He had been pleased with the Captain’s decision, but it also frightened him. The Captain had followed the minority view rather than the democratic wish of the seniors. It had suited Scorpio, but he wondered how he would have felt if the Captain had sided with the others. It was one thing to know that he had an ally in John Brannigan. It would be quite another to feel himself the prisoner of the ship.

“It’s not too late,” Khouri said. “You can stop now, spend the trip awake.”

“Is that what you’re planning to do?”

“At least until Aura is older,” she said.

The girl laughed.

“I can’t take the risk,” Scorpio said. “I may not last the journey if they don’t freeze me. Five or six years might not be much to you, but it’s a big chunk out of my life.”

“It might not be that long if they can get the new machines to work. Our subjective time to Yellowstone might only be a couple of years.”

“Still too long for my liking.”

“It worries you that much? I thought you said you never thought much about the future.”

“I don’t. Now you know why.”

She came closer to the black cabinet, lowering down on one knee, presenting Aura to him. “She thinks this is the wrong thing to do,” Khouri said. “I feel it coming through. She really thinks we should be going straight to Hela.”

“We’ll get there eventually,” he said. “John willing.” He directed his attention to Aura, looking into her golden-brown eyes. He expected her to flinch, but she held his gaze, barely blinking.

“Shadows,” she said, in her liquid gurgle, a voice that always seemed on the edge of hilarity. “Negotiate with shadows.”

“I don’t believe in negotiation,” Scorpio said. “All it gets you into is a world of pain.”

“Maybe it’s time you changed your opinion,” Khouri said.

Khouri and Aura left him alone with the technicians. He had been glad of the visit, but he was also glad to have a moment to marshal his thoughts, making sure that he did not forget the important things. One thing in particular assumed particular importance in his mind. He had still not told either of them about the private conversation he had had with Re-montoire just before the Conjoiner’s departure. The conversation had not been recorded, and Remontoire had given little more than his words: no data, no written evidence, just a shard of translucent white material small enough to fit in his pocket.

Now that omission was beginning to weigh upon him. Was it right to keep Remontoire’s doubts from Aura and her mother? Remontoire had left the final decision to him, in the end: a measure of the extent to which he trusted Scorpio.

Now, in the casket, Scorpio could have done with a bit less of that trust.

He didn’t have the shard with him now. It was with his personal effects, awaiting his revival. It had no intrinsic worth in its own right, and had anyone else found it, it was more than likely that they would have left it undisturbed, assuming only that it was some personal trinket or totem of purely sentimental value. What mattered was where Remontoire had found it. And aboard the ship, to the best of his knowledge, Scorpio was the only one who knew.

“I don’t know what to make of it,” Remontoire said, handing him the curved white shard. Scorpio examined it, immediately disappointed at what had he been given. He could see through it. The edges were sharp enough to be dangerous, and it was too hard to flex or break. The thing looked like a dinosaur’s toenail clipping.

“I know what it is, Rem.”

“You do?”

“It’s a piece of conch material. We found it all the time on Ararat, washed up after storms or floating out at sea. Much bigger than this piece.”

“How big?” Remontoire asked, steepling his fingers.

“Large enough to use for dwellings, sometimes. Sometimes even for major administrative structures. We didn’t have enough metal or plastic to go around, so we were always trying to make the best use of local resources. We had to anchor the conch pieces down, because otherwise they blew away in the first storm.”

“Difficult to work with?”

“We couldn’t cut them with anything other than torches, but that’s not saying much. You should have seen the state of our tools.”

“What did you make of the conch pieces, Scorp? Did you have a theory about them?”

“We didn’t have much time for theories about anything.”

“You must have had an inkling.”

Scorpio shrugged and passed the fragment back to him. “We assumed they were the discarded shells of extinct marine creatures, bigger than anything now living on Ararat. The Jugglers weren’t the only organism in that ocean; there was always room for other kinds of life, maybe relics of the original inhabitants, before the Juggler colonisation.”

Remontoire tapped a finger against the shard. “I don’t think we’re dealing with marine life, Scorp.”

“Does it matter?”

“It might do, especially given the fact that I found this in space, around Ararat.” He handed it back to the pig. “Interested now?”

“I might be.”

Remontoire told him the rest. During the last phase of the battle around Ararat, he had been contacted by a group of Conjoiners from Skade’s party. “They knew she was dead. Without a leader, they were devolving into a directionless squabble. They approached me, hoping to steal the hypometric technology. They’d learned much already, but that was the one thing they didn’t have. I resisted, fought them off, but I also let them go with a warning. I considered it rather late in the day to be making new enemies.”

“And?”

“They came back to help me when the wolf aggregate was about to finish me off. A suicidal move on their part. I think it convinced me and my associates to accept terms of cooperation from Skade’s people. But there was something else.”

“The shard?”

“Not the shard itself, but data pertaining to the same mystery. I viewed it with suspicion, as I still do. I can’t rule out the possibility that it may have been a piece of disinformation sown by Skade when she knew her days were numbered. Just like her to throw a posthumous spanner into our works, wouldn’t you say?”

“I wouldn’t put it past her for a second,” Scorpio replied. Now that he knew it had some deeper significance, the piece of conch material felt like some holy relic in his hands. He held it with reverential care, as if he might damage it. “What did the data tell you?”

“Before they transmitted the data, they spoke of the situation around Ararat being more complicated than we had assumed. I didn’t admit it at the time, but what they said chimed with my own observations. There had, for some time, been hints of something else in the game. Not my people, nor Skade’s, not even the Inhibitors, but another party, lurking on the very edge of events, like spectators. Of course, in the confusion of battle it was easy to dismiss such speculation: ghost returns from mass sensors, vague phantom forms glimpsed during intense energy bursts. There was a great deal of deliberate confusion.“

“And the data?”

“It only confirmed those fears. Added to my own observations, the conclusion was inescapable: we were being watched. Something else—neither human nor Inhibitor—had followed us to Ararat. It may even have been there before us.”