Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

The two of them wore white. Khouri was dressed in a floor-length ruffled skirt and a high-collared white jacket over a scoop-necked blouse. Her daughter wore a knee-length skirt over white leggings, with a simple long-sleeved top. Aura’s hair was a short, tomboyish black crop, the fringe cut straight above her eyes. Mother and daughter stood before him like angels, too clean to be a part of the ship he knew. But perhaps things had changed. It had been six years, after all.

“Have you remembered anything?” he asked Aura.

“I’m six,” she said. “Do you want to see the ship?”

He smiled, hoping it wouldn’t frighten the child. “That would be nice. But someone told me there was something else I had to deal with first.”

“What did they tell you?” Khouri asked.

“That it wasn’t good.”

“Understatement of the century,” she replied.

But Valensin would not let him out of the reefersleep chamber without a full medical examination. The doctor made him lie back on a couch and submit to the silent scrutiny of the green medical servitors. The machines fussed over his abdomen with scanners and probes while Valensin peeled back Scorpio’s eyelids and shone a migraine-inducing light into his head, tutting to himself as if he had found something slightly sordid hidden away inside.

“You had me asleep for six years,” Scorpio said. “Couldn’t you have made your examinations then?”

“It’s the waking that kills you,” Valensin said breezily. “That and the immediate period after revival. Given the antiquity of the casket you just came out of and the unavoidable idiosyncrasies of your anatomy, I’d say you have no more than a ninety-five per cent chance of making it through the next hour.”

“I feel fine.”

“If you do, that’s quite some achievement.” Valensin held up a hand, flicking his fingers around Scorpio’s face. “How many?”

“Three.”

“Now?”

“Two.”

“And now?”

“Three.”

“And now?”

“Three. Two. Is there a point to this?”

“I’ll need to run some more exhaustive tests, but it looks to me as if you’re exhibiting a ten or fifteen per cent degradation in your peripheral vision.” Valensin smiled, as if this was exactly the sort of news Scorpio needed: just the ticket for getting him off the couch and putting a spring in his step.

“I’ve just come out of reefersleep. What do you expect?”

“More or less what I’m seeing,” Valensin said. “There was some loss of peripheral vision before we put you under, but it has definitely worsened now. There may be some slight recovery over the next few hours, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you never get back to where you were.”

“But I haven’t aged. I was in the casket all the time.”

“It’s the transitions,” Valensin said, spreading his hands apologetically. “In some respects, they’re as hard on you as staying awake. I’m sorry, Scorp, but this technology just wasn’t made for pigs. The best I can say is that if you’d stayed awake, the loss in vision would have been five to ten per cent worse.”

“Well, that’s fine, then. I’ll bear it in mind next time. Nothing I like better than having to choose between two equally fucked-up options.”

“Oh, you made the right decision,” Valensin said. “From a hard-nosed statistical viewpoint, it was your best chance of surviving through the last six years. But I’d think very carefully about the ‘next time,’ Scorp. The same hard-nosed statistical viewpoint gives you about a fifty per cent chance of surviving another reefersleep immersion. After that, it drops to about ten per cent. Throughout your body, your cells will be putting their affairs in order, settling their debts and making sure their wills are up to date.”

“What does that mean? That I’ve got one more shot in that thing?”

“About that. You weren’t planning on going back in there in a hurry, were you?”

“What, with your bedside manner to cheer me up? I’d be mad to.”

“It’s the lowest form of wit,” Valensin said.

“It beats a kick in the teeth.”

Scorpio pushed himself off the couch, sending Valensin’s robots scurrying for cover. Check-out time for the pig , he thought.

Symbols floated in the sphere of a holographic display, resolving into suns, worlds, ships and ruins. Scorpio, Vasko, Khouri and Aura stood before it, their reflections looming spectrally in the sphere’s glass. With them were half a dozen other ship seniors, including Cruz and Urton.

“Scorp,” Khouri said, “take it easy, all right? Valensin’s a certified prick, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore what he said. We need you in one piece.”

“I’m still here,” he said. “Anyway, you woke me for a reason. Let’s get the bad news over with, shall we?”

It was worse than anything he could have anticipated.

Wolves had reached Epsilon Eridani, the Yellowstone system. The evidence from departing ships suggested that their depredations had begun only recently. Three light-months from Yellowstone, expanding outwards in all directions, was a ragged shell of lighthuggers: the leading edge of an evacuation wave. He saw them in the display when the scale was adjusted to include the entire volume of surrounding space to a light-year out from Epsilon Eridani. The ships each marked with its own colourfully annotated symbol—ship ID and vector—looked like startled fish racing in radial lines away from some central threat. Some had pulled slightly ahead of the rest, some were lagging, but the one-gee acceleration ceiling of their drives guaranteed that the shell was only now beginning to lose its symmetry.

On either side of the wave there were hardly any ships. Those few vessels further out must have left Yellowstone before the wolves arrived. They were on routine trade routes. Some of them were travelling so fast that it would be years before news of the crisis caught up with them. Further in, there were a handful of ships—the last to leave, or perhaps they had been unable to maintain their usual acceleration rate for some reason. Closer to Epsilon Eridani, within a light-week of the system, there was no outbound traffic at all. If there were any starships left down in the still-hot ruins, they were not going anywhere in a hurry. There was no indication of in-system traffic, and nor were there any signals being received from the system’s colonies or navigation beacons. Those few ships that had been on approach patterns when the crisis erupted were now engaged in wide, lazy turnarounds. They had heard the warnings and seen the evacuees streaming out in the other direction; now they were trying to head back into interstellar space.

It had taken the wolves a year to sterilise every world around Delta Pavonis. Here, Scorpio doubted that more than half a year had passed since the onset of the cull.

This, however, was a different kind of cull from that which had obliterated Resurgam and its fellow worlds. Around Delta Pavonis, an earlier cull—a million years previously—had already failed, so the Inhibitor elements tasked with the current clean-up operation had gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure the job was done properly this time. They had ripped worlds apart, mining them for raw materials to be assembled into an engine that murdered stars. They had turned it on Delta Pavonis, stabbing deep to the star’s heart and unleashing an arterial gush of core material at fusion temperatures and pressures. They had sprayed this hellfire across the face of Resurgam, incinerating every organism unfortunate enough not to be shielded beneath hundreds of kilometres of crust. If life was ever to arise again on Resurgam, it would have to start almost from scratch. Faced with the unambiguous evidence of two prior extinctions, even other starfaring cultures would want to give the place a wide berth.