Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

Scorpio groaned: not with pain, this time, but with the realisation that he had made a dreadful mistake. He couldn’t be blamed for letting the delegates aboard: he had been overruled on that one, and if he had missed the true nature of their armour, it was only because he had never heard of anyone using that particular trick before. Anyway, he had scanned the armour—even if he’d been looking through, rather than at it—and he’d seen nothing suspicious. The armour would have to have been removed and examined in a lab before the microscopic flaws and weak points would have revealed themselves. No: that wasn’t his mistake either. But he really shouldn’t have turned on the engines. Why had the Adventists needed to see them? They’d already observed the ship making its approach to the system, if that was what they were interested in.

What they were really interested in, if he read them rightly, was something else entirely: they had been using the engines to send a signal to Hela. The burst of thrust meant they were in place—that they had passed through his security arrangements and were ready to begin the take-over operation.

It was a signal to send in reinforcements.

Even as that thought crystallised in his head, he heard the ship groan again. But it was a different kind of groan this time. It was more like the sonorous off-key tolling of a very large, very cracked bell.

Scorpio closed his eyes: he knew exactly what that sound was. It was the hull defences: the Nostalgia for Infinity was under attack from outside as well as from within. Great , he thought. This was really shaping up to be one of those days when he should have stayed inside the reefersleep casket. Or, better still, should never have survived thawing in the first place.

A moment later, the entire fabric of the ship trembled. He felt it through the sharp-edged things pinning him to the wall. He screamed and blacked out again.

What woke him was pain—more than he had felt so far. It was hard and strangely rhythmic, as if he had been convulsing in his sleep. But he was making no conscious movements at all. Instead, the wall against which he was pinned was bellowing in and out, like a huge breathing lung.

Suddenly, anticlimactically, he popped loose. He hit the deck, sprawling, his lower jaw in the filthy, stinking overflow of ship effluent. The two bladed weapons clattered to the ground beside him. He experimented with pushing himself to his knees, and—to his surprise—found he was able to exert pressure on his arms without the pain becoming more than two or three times as intense. Nothing was broken, then—or at least nothing that had much to do with either arm.

Scorpio struggled to his feet. He touched the first wound, then the second. There was a lot of blood, but it wasn’t jetting out under arterial pressure. Presumably it was the same story with the two exit wounds. No telling about internal bleeding, but he’d cross that bridge when it became a problem.

Still unsure exactly what had happened to him, he knelt down again and picked up one of the bladed things. It was the first one: the boomerang weapon. He could see the curve of the original armour, the larger form implied by the fragment. He threw it away, kicked the other one aside. Then he reached down to his belt, through waves of pain, and found the haft of Clavain’s knife. He removed it from its sheath and flicked on the piezoelectric effect, feeling the hum transmitted to his palm.

In the gloom of the corridor ahead of him, something moved.

“Scorpio.”

He squinted, half-expecting it to be another Adventist, hoping it was someone from the Security Arm. “Took your time,” he said, which seemed to cover either possibility.

“We’ve got trouble, Scorp. Big trouble.”

The figure stepped out of the gloom. Scorpio flinched: it was no one he had been expecting. “Captain,” he breathed.

“I thought you needed some help to get free of that wall. Sorry it took me so long.”

“Better late than never,” Scorpio said.

It was a class-three apparition. No, Scorpio thought, strike that: this apparition demanded a new category all of its own. It was more than just a local alteration of the ship’s fabric, a remodelling of a wall or the temporary reassignment of some servitor parts. This thing was real and distinct from the ship itself. It was a physical artefact: a spacesuit, a huge, lumbering golemlike servo-powered affair. And it was empty. The faceplate was cranked up: there was only darkness within the helmet. The voice he heard came through the speaker grille beneath the helmet’s chin that was normally used for audio communications in a pressurised environment.

“Are you all right, Scorp?”

He dabbed at the blood again.“I’m not down yet. Doesn’t look as if you are, either.”

“It was a mistake to let them aboard.”

“I know,” Scorpio said, looking down at his shoes. “I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” the Captain said. “It was mine.”

Scorpio looked up at the apparition again. Something forced him to direct his attention into the darkness within the helmet: it seemed impolite not to. “So what now? They’re bringing reinforcements, aren’t they?”

“That’s their plan. Ships have begun to attack. I’ve parried most of them, but a handful have slipped through my hull defences. They’ve begun to drill into the hull. They’re hurting me, Scorp.”

He echoed the Captain’s earlier question: “Are you all right?”

“Oh, I’m all right, it’s just that I’m beginning to get a little pissed off . I think they’ve had enough fun for one day, don’t you?”

Though it hurt him, Scorpio nodded vigorously. “They picked the wrong pig to fuck with.”

The vast suit bowed towards him, then turned, its huge boots sending sluggish wakes through the effluent. “They did more than pick the wrong pig. They picked the wrong ship. Now, shall we go and do some damage?”

“Yes,” Scorpio said,smiling wickedly. “Let’s do some damage.”

Orca Cruz and her party had retreated as far as they could go. The two Adventists had pushed her group to a major nexus of corridors and shafts, something like a heart valve in the Captain’s anatomy, from which point it would be possible to reach any other part of the Nostalgia for Infinity with comparative ease. Cruz knew that she could not allow the Adventists such access. There were only twenty of them, maybe fewer now—it was unthinkable that they could ever gain more than a transient, faltering control over very small districts of the ship—but it was still her duty to limit their nuisance value. If that meant inflicting some small, local hurt on John Brannigan, then that was what she had to do.

“All right,” she said. “Disarm them. Short, controlled bursts. I want something at the end to interrogate.”

Her last few words were drowned out by the sudden, enraged roar of her soldiers’ slug-firing automatic weapons. Tracers sliced bright convergent lines down the corridor. The Adventist with the false hand fell down, his right leg peppered with bullet holes. The whirling demon of the scythe bit an arc into the floor, then fell silent. Some retraction mechanism inched the fingertip back to the rest of the hand as the line spooled itself in.

The other Adventist lay on his side, his chest bloody despite the protection of the armour pieces.

The ship groaned.

“I did warn you,” Cruz said. Her own weapon lay cold in her hand. She hadn’t fired a shot.

The second Adventist moved, clawing at his face with his hand, like a man trying to remove a bee.

“Don’t move,” Cruz said, approaching him cautiously. “Don’t move and you might make it through the day.”