Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

“Are you really going to do it?” she asked.

“You think I’ve come all this way just to back down now? Not likely. The prestige of the church is at stake, Rashmika. Nothing matters more to me than that.”

“I wish I could read your face,” she said. “I wish I could see your eyes and I wish Grelier hadn’t deadened all your nerve endings. Then I’d know if you were telling the truth.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“I don’t know what to believe,” she said.

“I’m not asking you to believe anything,” he said, turning his couch around so that all the mirrors had to adjust their angles. “I’ve never asked you to submit to faith, Rashmika. All I’ve ever asked of you is honest judgement. What troubles you, all of a sudden?”

“I need to know the truth,” she said. “Before you take this thing over the bridge, I want some answers.”

His eyes quivered in their sockets. “I’ve always been open with you.”

“Then what about the vanishing that never happened? Was that you, Dean? Did you make that happen?”

“Make that happen?” he echoed, as if her words made no sense at all.

“You had a lapse of faith, didn’t you? A crisis during which you began to think that there was a rational explanation for the vanishings after all. Maybe you’d developed immunity to whatever was the strongest indoctrinal virus Grelier could offer you that week.”

“Be very, very careful, Rashmika. You’re useful to me, but you’re far from indispensable.”

She gathered her composure. “What I mean is, did you decide to test your faith? Did you arrange for an instrument package to be dropped into the face of Haldora, at the moment of a vanishing?”

His eyes became quite still, regarding her intently. “What do you think?”

“I think you sent something into Haldora—a machine, a probe of some kind. Perhaps some Ultras sold it to you. You hoped to glimpse something in there. What, I don’t know. Maybe something you’d already glimpsed years earlier, but which you didn’t want to admit to yourself.”

“Ridiculous.”

“But you succeeded,” she said. “The probe did something: it caused the vanishing to be prolonged. You threw a spanner in, Dean, and you got a reaction. The probe encountered something when the planet vanished. It made contact with whatever the planet was meant to conceal. And whatever it was had precious little to do with miracles.” He started to say something, tried to cut her off, but she forced herself to continue, speaking over him. “I have no idea whether the probe came back or not, but I do know that you’re still in contact with something. You opened a window, didn’t you?” Rashmika pointed at the welded metal suit, the one that had disturbed her so much on her first visit to the garret. “They’re in there, trapped within it. You made a prison of the same suit in which Morwenna died.”

“Why would I do that?” Quaiche asked.

“Because,” she said, “you don’t know if they’re demons or angels.”

“And you do know, I take it?”

“I think they might be both,” she said.

Scorpio whisked back a heavy metal shutter, revealing a tiny oval porthole. The scuffed and scratched glass was as thick and dark as burned sugar. He pushed himself away from the window.

“You’ll have to take turns,” he said.

They were in a zero-gravity section of the Infinity . It was the only way to view the engines while the ship was in orbit, since the rotating sections of the ship that provided artificial gravity were set too deeply back into the hull to permit observation of the engines. Had the engines themselves been pushed up to their usual one-gee of thrust—providing the illusion of gravity by another means throughout the entire ship—the orbit around Hela could not have been sustained.

“We’d like to see them fire up, if that’s possible,” Brother Seyfarth said.

“Not exactly standard procedure while we’re holding orbit,” Scorpio said.

“Just for a moment,” Seyfarth said. “They don’t have to operate at full capacity.”

“I thought it was the defences you were interested in.”

‘Those as well.“

Scorpio spoke into his cuff. “Give me a burst of drive, counteracted by the steering jets. I don’t want to feel this ship move one inch”

The order was implemented almost instantly. Theoretically, one of his people had to send the command into the ship’s control system, whereupon Captain Brannigan might or might not choose to act upon it. But he suspected that the Captain had made the engines fire before the command had ever been entered.

The great ship groaned as the engines lit up. Through the dark glass of the porthole, the exhaust was a scratch of purple-white—visible only because the stealthing modifications to the drives had been switched off during the Nostalgia for Infinity’s , final approach to the system. At the other end of the hull, multiple batteries of conventional fusion rockets were balancing the thrust from the main drives. The ancient hull creaked and moaned like some vast living thing as it absorbed the compressive forces. The ship could take a lot more punishment than this, Scorpio knew, but he was still grateful when the drive flame flicked out. He felt a tiny lurch, evidence of the minutest lack of synchrony between the shutting down of the fusion rockets and the drives, but then all was motionless. The great, saurian protestations of stressed ship fabric died away like diminishing thunder.

“Good enough for you, Brother Seyfarth?”

“I think so,” the leader said. “They seem to be in excellent condition. You wouldn’t believe how difficult it is to find well-maintained Conjoiner drives now that their makers are no longer with us.”

“We do our best,” Scorpio said. “Of course, it’s the weapons you’re really interested in, isn’t it? Shall I show them to you, and then we can call it a day? There’ll be plenty of time for a more detailed examination later.” He was fed up with small talk, fed up with showing the twenty intruders around his empire.

“Actually,” Brother Seyfarth said, when they were safely back inside one of the rotating sections, “we’re more interested in the engines than we admitted.”

There was an itch at the back of Scorpio’s neck. “You are?”

“Yes,” Seyfarth said, nodding to the nineteen others.

In one smoothly choreographed blur, the twenty delegates touched parts of their suits, causing them to fly apart in irregular scablike pieces, as if spring-loaded. The hard-shelled components rained down around them, clattering in untidy piles at their feet. Beneath the suits, as he already knew from the scans, they wore only flimsy inner layers.

He wondered what he had missed. There were still no obvious weapons; still no guns or knives.

“Brother,” he said, “think very carefully about this.”

“I’ve already thought about it,” Seyfarth replied. Along with the other delegates, he knelt down and—his hands still gloved—rummaged with quick efficiency through the pile of sloughed suit parts.

His fist rose clutching something sharp-edged and aerodynamically formed. It was a shard of suit, viciously curved along its leading edge. Seyfarth raised himself on one knee and flicked his wrist. Tumbling end over end, the projectile wheeled through the air towards Scorpio. He heard it coming: the chop, chop, chop of its whisking approach. The fraction of a second of its flight stretched to a subjective eternity. A small, plaintive voice—lacking any tone of recrimination—told him it had been the suits all along. He had been looking so hard through them, so convinced they had to be hiding something, that he had missed the suits themselves.