Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

Fair enough, he said to himself. If the dean kept secrets from him, then he would keep secrets from the dean.

Quaiche was up to something. Grelier had suspected as much for months, but the girl’s remarks about witnessing the construction fleet had clinched it. Although Grelier had done his best to dismiss her observation, it had continued to gnaw at him. It chimed with other odd things that he had noticed lately. The skimping on Way maintenance, for instance. They had got stuck behind the ice blockage precisely because Way maintenance lacked the usual resources to clear it. Quaiche had been forced to deploy nuclear demolition charges: God’s Fire.

At the time, Grelier had put it down to nothing more than a happy coincidence. But the more he thought about it, the less likely that seemed. Quaiche had wanted to make his announcement about taking the Lady Morwenna over the bridge with the maximum fanfare. What better way to underline his words than with a dose of God’s Fire shining through his newly installed stained-glass window?

The use of God’s Fire had only been justified because Way maintenance was already stretched. But what if Way maintenance was stretched precisely because Quaiche had ordered the diversion of its equipment and manpower?

Another thought occurred to Grelier: the blockage itself might even have been orchestrated. Quaiche had blamed it on sabotage by another church, but Quaiche could easily have arranged it himself. It would only have been a question of laying fuses and explosives the last time the Lady Mor went through.

A year earlier.

Did he honestly think Quaiche had been planning something all that time? Well, perhaps. People who built cathedrals tended to take the long view, after all.

Grelier still couldn’t see where all this was heading. All he knew—with a growing conviction—was that Quaiche was keeping something from him.

Something to do with the Ultras?

Something to do with the bridge crossing?

Events did after all seem to be rushing towards some grand culmination. And then there was the girl. Where did she fit into all this? Grelier could have sworn he had picked her, not the other way around. But now he was not so certain. She had made herself conspicuous to him, that much was true. It was like that trick they did with cards, suggesting the one you were meant to take from the spread.

Of course, he’d have had no suspicions if her blood had checked out.

“It’s a wee bit of a puzzle,” he said to himself.

He stopped suddenly, for in his cogitations he had walked straight past the address he was looking for. He backtracked, grateful that no one else seemed to be about at this hour. He had no idea what the local time was, whether everyone was asleep, or down at the scuttler mines.

Didn’t care, either.

He opened his helmet visor, ready to introduce himself, and then rapped his cane smartly against the outer door of the Els residence. And then waited, humming to himself, until he heard the door opening.

The Adventist delegates had arrived at the Nostalgia for Infinity . There were twenty of them, all seemingly stamped from the same production mould. They came aboard with apparent trepidation, their politeness exaggerated to the point of insolence. They wore hard-shelled scarlet vacuum suits marked with the cruciform spacesuit insignia of their church, and they all carried their pink-plumed helmets tucked under the same arm.

Scorpio studied their leader through the window in the inner airlock door. He was a small man with a cruel, petulant slot of a mouth seemingly cut into his face as an afterthought.

“I’m Brother Seyfarth,” the man announced.

“Glad to have you aboard, Brother,” Scorpio said, “but before we let you into the rest of the ship, we’re going to have to run some decontamination checks.”

The man’s voice rattled through the speaker grille. “Still concerned about plague traces? I thought we all had other things to worry about these days.”

“Can’t be too careful,” Scorpio said. “It’s nothing personal, of course.”

“I wouldn’t dream of complaining,” Brother Seyfarth replied.

In truth, they had been scanned from the moment they entered the Infinity’s airlock. Scorpio had to know whether there was anything hidden under that armour, and if there was, he had to know what it was.

He had studied the Nostalgia for Infinity’s history. Once, when the ship had been under the command of its old triumvirate, they had made the mistake of allowing someone aboard with a tiny anti-matter device implanted in the mechanism of their artificial eyes. That pin-sized weapon had enabled the entire ship to be hijacked. Scorpio didn’t blame Volyova and the others for having made that mistake: such devices were both rare and exquisitely difficult to manufacture, and you didn’t encounter them very often. But it was not the kind of mistake he was. going to allow on his watch, if there was anything he could do to stop it.

Elsewhere in the ship, Security Arm officers examined the spectral images of the scanned delegates, peering through smoky grey-green layers of armour to the flesh, blood and bone beneath. There were no obvious concealed weapons: no guns or knives. But that didn’t surprise Scorpio. Even if the delegates had ill intentions, they’d have known that even a cursory scan would pick up normal weapons. If they had anything, it was going to be a lot less obvious.

But perhaps they had nothing at all. Perhaps they were what they said they were, and nothing more. Perhaps he was only objecting to the delegates because he had not been consulted before they were allowed aboard.

But there was something about Brother Seyfarth that he didn’t like, something in the cruel set of his mouth that made him think of other violent men he had known. Something in the way he kept clenching and unclenching the metal fists of his gloves as he waited to be processed through the airlock.

Scorpio touched his earpiece. “Clear on concealed weapons,” he heard. “Clear on chemical traces for explosives, toxins or nerve agents. Clear on standard nanotech filters. Nothing pre-plague here, and no plague traces either.”

“Look for implants,” he said, “any mechanisms under those suits that don’t serve an obvious function. And check the ones that do, as well. I don’t want hot dust within a light-year of this ship.”

He was asking a lot of them, he knew. They couldn’t risk annoying the delegates by subjecting them to an obvious invasive examination. But—again—this was his watch. He had a reputation to live up to. It hadn’t been him who had invited the fuckers aboard.

“Clear on implants,” he heard. “Nothing large enough to contain a standard pinhead device.”

“Meaning that none of the delegates have implants of any kind?”

“Like I said, sir, nothing large enough…”

“Tell me about all the implants. We can’t assume anything.”

“One of them has something in his eye. Another has a prosthetic hand. A total of half a dozen very small neural implants spread throughout the whole delegation.”

“I don’t like the sound of any of that.”

“The implants aren’t anything we wouldn’t expect to see in a random sample of Hela refugees, sir. Most of them look inactive, anyway.”

“The one with the eye, the one with the hand—I want to know for sure that there isn’t any nasty stuff inside those things.”

“Going to be tricky, sir. They might not like it if we start bombarding them with protons. If there is anti-matter in those things, there’ll be local cell damage from the spallation products…”

“If there is anti-matter in those things, they’re going to have a lot more than cancer to worry about,” Scorpio said.