Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

The suits were the weapons.

The tumbling thing speared into his shoulder, the brutality of its impact knocking him against the slick, ribbed side of the corridor. It pinned him, through leather and flesh, to the wall itself. He thrashed in pain, but the shard had anchored itself firmly.

Seyfarth stood up, a bladed weapon in each hand. There was nothing accidental about them: their lines were too spare and deliberate for that. The suits must have been primed to fall apart along precise flaw lines etched into them with angstrom precision.

“I’m sorry I had to do that,” he said.

“You’re a dead man.”

“And you’d be a dead pig if I’d intended to kill you.” Scorpio knew it was true: the casual way Seyfarth had tossed the weapon towards him had betrayed an easy fluency in its use. It would have cost him no more effort to sever Scorpio’s head. “But instead I’ve spared you. I’ll spare all your crew if we have the co-operation we request.”

“No one’s co-operating with anything. And you won’t get far with knives, no matter how clever you think you are.”

“It’s not just knives,” Seyfarth said.

Behind him, two of the other Adventist delegates stood up. They were holding something between them: a rig containing the lashed-together parts of their air-tanks. One of them was pointing the open nozzle of a hose in Scorpio’s direction.

“Show him,” Seyfarth said, “just so he gets the picture.”

Fire roared from the nozzle, jetting five or six metres beyond the pair of Adventists. The curving plume of the flame scythed against the corridor wall, blistering the surface. Again the ship groaned. Then the flames died, the only sound the hiss of fuel escaping from the nozzle.

“This is a bit of a surprise,” Scorpio said.

“Do what we say and no one will come to any harm,” Seyfarth said. Behind him, the other delegates were looking around: they had heard that groan as well. Perhaps they thought the ship was still settling down after the drive burn, creaking like an old house after sunset.

The moment stretched. Scorpio felt strangely calm. Perhaps, he thought, that was what being old did to you. “You’ve come to take my ship?” he asked.

“Not take it,” Seyfarth said, with urgent emphasis. “We just want to borrow it for a while. When we’re finished, you can have it back.”

“I think you picked the wrong ship,” Scorpio said.

“On the contrary,” Seyfarth replied, “I think we picked exactly the right ship. Now stay there, like a good pig, and we’ll all come away from this as friends.”

“You can’t seriously expect to take my ship with just twenty of you.”

“No,” Seyfarth said. “That would be silly, wouldn’t it?”

Scorpio tried to free himself. He could not move his arm enough to bring the communicator up to his face. The weapon had pinned him too tightly. He shifted, the pain of movement like so many shards of glass twisting within his shoulder. It was that shoulder: the one he had burned.

Seyfarth shook his head. “What did I say about being a good pig?” He knelt down, examined another weapon, something like a dagger this time. He walked slowly over to Scorpio. “I’ve never been overly fond of pigs, truth be told.”

“Suits me.”

“You’re quite an old one, aren’t you? What are you—forty, fifty years old?”

“Young enough to take the shine off your day, pal.”

“We’ll see about that.”

Seyfarth stabbed the dagger in, impaling Scorpio through the other shoulder in more or less the corresponding position. Scorpio yelped in pain: a high-pitched squeal that sounded nothing like a human scream.

“I can’t claim an exhaustive knowledge of pig anatomy,” Seyfarth said. “All being well, I haven’t severed anything I shouldn’t have. But if I were you, I’d play it safe and not wriggle about too much.”

Scorpio tried to move, but gave up before the tears of pain blocked his view. Behind Seyfarth, another pair of delegates test-fired their makeshift flame-thrower. Then the whole party split into two groups and moved away into the rest of the ship, leaving Scorpio alone.

A rapture of black machines climbed from the surface of Hela. They were small shuttles for the most part: surface-to-orbit vehicles bought, stolen, impounded and purloined from Ultras. Most had only chemical drives; a very few had fusion motors. The majority carried only one or two members of the Cathedral Guard, packed into armoured bubbles within their stripped-down skeletal chassis. They lifted from orthodox landing stages along the Way, or from concealed bunkers in the ice itself, dislodging plaques of surface frost as they fled. Some even departed from the superstructures of the Adventist cathedrals, including the Lady Morwenna. What had appeared to be small subsidiary spires or elbowed out-jutting towers were suddenly revealed as long-concealed spacecraft. Shells of mock architecture fell away like dead grey foliage. Complex cantilevered gantries swung the ships away from delicate masonry and glass before their drives lit. Domes and cupolas opened along ridge-lines, revealing ships packed tightly within, now rising on hydraulic launch platforms. When the ships hauled themselves aloft, the glare of their motors etched bright highlights and pitch-dark shadows into the ornate frippery of the architecture. Gargoyles seemed to turn their heads, their jaws lolling in wonderment and surprise. Below, the cathedrals trembled at the violent departure of so much mass. But when the ships had gone, the cathedrals were still there, little changed.

In seconds, the ships of the Guard had reached orbit; in several more seconds they had identified and signalled their brethren who were already parked around Hela. From every direction, drives flicked on to engagement thrust. The ships grouped into formations, stacked themselves into assault waves and commenced their run towards the Nostalgia for Infinity .

Even as the ships of the Cathedral Guard were leaving Hela, another spacecraft settled on to the pad of the Lady Morwenna, parking alongside the larger shuttle that had brought the Ultra delegates down from their lighthugger.

Grelier sat inside the cockpit for several minutes, flicking ivory-tipped toggle switches and making sure that vital systems would continue to tick over even in his absence. The cathedral was alarmingly close to the bridge now, and he had no plans to stay aboard once it had commenced the crossing. He would find an excuse to leave: Clocktower duty, something to do with Bloodwork. There were dozens of likely reasons he could give. And if the dean decided that he would much rather have the surgeon-general’s company for the crossing, then Grelier would just have to do a runner and smooth things over later. If, of course, there turned out to be a later. But the one thing he did not want to have to wait for was for his ship to go through its pre-flight cycle.

He snapped his helmet on, gathered his belongings and cycled through the airlock. Outside, standing on the pad, he had to admit that the view was awesome. He could see the point where the land just ended, that vast cliff edge towards which they were sliding. Unstoppable now, he thought. Under any circumstances even slowing the progress of the Lady Morwenna was a matter of labyrinthine bureaucratic procedure. It could take many hours for the paperwork to filter down to the Motive Power technicians who actually had their hands on the motor controls. More often than not, conditioned to believe that the cathedral should never slow, they queried their orders, sending the paperwork echoing back up through the chain of command, resulting in more hours of delay. And what the cathedral needed now was not to slow down but to come to a complete standstill. Grelier shuddered: he didn’t want to think about how long it would take for that to happen.