Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

“That’s fine, then,” Scorpio said. “Just gives us an excuse not even to think about rescuing those poor bastards, right?”

“If they’re wolves, everything we’ve done so far will have been wasted.” Vasko lowered his voice, as if afraid of disturbing Aura. “There are seventeen thousand people on this ship. They’re relatively safe. But you’d be gambling those seventeen thousand lives against the vague chance of saving only a few thousand more.”

“So we should just let them die, is that it?”

“If you knew there were only a few dozen people on that ship, what would you do then? Still take that risk?” Vasko argued.

“No, of course not.”

“Then where do you draw the line? When does the risk become acceptable?”

“It never does,” Scorpio said. “But this is where / draw the line. Here. Now. We’re saving that shuttle.”

“Maybe you should ask Aura what she thinks,” Vasko said, “because it’s not just about those seventeen thousand lives, is it? It’s about the millions of lives that might depend on Aura’s survival. It’s about the future of the human species.”

Scorpio looked at the little girl, at her white dress and neat hair, the absurdity of the situation pressing in on him like a concrete shroud. No matter her history, no matter what she had already cost them, no matter what else was going on inside her head, it all boiled down to this: she was still a six-year-old girl, sitting there with her mother, speaking when she was spoken to. And now he was going to consult her about a tactical situation upon which depended the lives of thousands.

“You have an opinion on the matter?” he asked her.

She looked to her mother first for approval. “Yes,” she said. Her small, clear voice filled the capsule like a flute. “I have an opinion, Scorpio.”

“I’d really like to hear it.”

“You shouldn’t rescue those people.”

“You mind if I ask why not?”

“Because they won’t be people any more,” she said. “And neither will we.”

Scorpio sat in an oversized command chair, in a windowless room that in the days of the old Triumvirate had formed part of the Nostalgia for Infinity’s gunnery-control complex. He felt like a child in an adult’s world of huge furniture, his feet not even touching the chair’s grilled footrest.

He was surrounded by screens showing the cautious approach of the shuttle. Lasers picked it out of the darkness, scribing the boxy blunt-nosed rectangle of its hull. Three-dimensional realisations grew more detailed with each passing second. He could see docking gear, comms antennae, thrusters’ venturi tubes, airlock panels and windows.

“Be ready, Scorp,” Vasko said.

“I’m ready,” he replied, gripping the makeshift trigger he had ordered installed on the armrest of the command chair. It had been shaped for his trotters, but it still felt alien in his hand. One squeeze, that was all it would take. The three hypo-metric weapons had been spun up to discharge speed, corkscrewing even now in their shafts and ready for their first shot. They were locked on to the moving target of the shuttle, ready to attack if he squeezed the trigger. So was the one remaining cache weapon and all the other hull mounted defences. Scorpio hoped that the cache weapon would make some difference if the shuttle suddenly revealed itself to be a wolf machine, but he doubted that the hull-mounted defences would have any effect at all, other than giving the wolves something conspicuous to retaliate against. But there seemed little sense in underplaying his hand. Full-spectrum dominance, that was what Clavain had always said.

But even the hypometric weapons could not be relied upon at such short range. There was a savage, shifting relationship between the size of the target region and the certainty with which its radial distance and direction from the ship could be predetermined. When a target was distant—light-seconds away or further—the target volume could be made large enough to destroy a ship in one go. When the target was closer—when it was only hundreds of metres away, as was now the case—the degree of unpredictability increased vastly. The target volume had to be kept very small, mere metres across, so that it could be positioned with some reliability. The hypometric weapons each needed several seconds to spin up to their discharge speeds after firing, so the best Scorpio could hope for was to inflict an early, crippling wound. He doubted that he would have the chance to spin up and retire the hypometric weapons a second time.

But he hoped it was not going to come to that. When the shuttle was still at a safe distance, there had been talk of sending out one of their own vessels to meet it, so that a crew could verify that it was really what it appeared to be. But Scorpio had vetoed the idea. It would have taken too much time, delaying the rescue of the shuttle long enough for the other wolves to come dangerously close. And even if a human crew got aboard the shuttle and reported back that it was genuine, there would have been no way of knowing for sure that they had not been co-opted by the wolves, their memories sucked dry for codewords. By the same token, he could place no real reliance on the voices and faces of the shuttle’s crew that had been transmitted to the Infinity . They had seemed genuine enough, but the wolves had had millions of years to learn the art of expert, swift mimicry. Doubtless the crews of the lighthuggers had been certain that they were receiving friendly evacuees as well. No, there were only two choices, really: abandon it (probably destroying it to be on the safe side) or stake everything upon it being real. No half-measures. He was certain Clavain would have agreed with this analysis. The only thing he wasn’t certain of was which choice Clavain would have taken in the end. He could be a cold-hearted bastard when the situation demanded it.

Well, so can I , Scorpio thought to himself. But this wasn’t the time.

“Two hundred metres,” Vasko called, studying the laser ranger. “Getting close, Scorp. Are you certain you don’t have second thoughts?”

“I’m certain.”

He became aware, joltingly, of Aura’s presence next to him. She appeared less childlike with each apparition. “This is too dangerous,” she said. “You mustn’t take this risk, Scorpio. There’s too much to be lost.”

“You don’t know any more about that shuttle than I do,” he said.

“I know that I don’t like it,” she said.

He gritted his teeth. “This isn’t one of your little girl days, is it? This is one of your scary prophet days.”

“She’s only telling us how she feels,” Khouri said, sitting on Scorpio’s opposite side. “She has that right, doesn’t she, Scorp?”

“I got the message already,” he said.

“Destroy it now,” Aura said, golden-brown eyes aflame with authority.

“One-fifty metres,” Vasko said. “I think she means it, Scorp.”

“I think she’d better shut up.” But involuntarily his hand tightened on the trigger. He was one twitch away from doing it himself. He wondered how much warning the other ships had received before it was too late to do anything about it.

“One-thirty. She’s within floodlight range now, Scorp.”

“Light her up. Let’s see what happens.”

The view shuffled, making way for the grab from the optical cameras, the scene now illuminated by the floods. The shuttle was veering, turning end over end as it made its final approach. The light caught the texture of the hull: battered metal and ceramics, hyperdiamond viewing blisters, scratched and scuffed surface markings, glints of bare metal along the edges of panel lines, spirals of vapour from attitude jets. It looked terribly real, Scorpio thought. Too real, surely, to be the product of wolf camouflage. A wolf machine would only look human from a distance; up close, surely, it would reveal itself to be no more than a crude approximation shaped from myriad black cubes rather than metals and ceramics. There would be no smooth curves, no subtlety of detail, no uneven coloration or signs of damage and repair…