Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

He kept clawing at his face, concentrating his efforts around his eye. He dug his fingers into the socket, popping something loose. He held it between thumb and forefinger for a moment: a perfect human eye, glassily solid, bloodied like some horrid raw delicacy.

“I said—” Orca Cruz began.

He crunched his fingers down on the eye, shattering it. Something chrome-yellow emerged in smoky wisps. A moment later Cruz felt the nerve agent infiltrate her lungs.

No one had to tell her it would be fatal.

From the safe vantage point of his garret, the dean studied the progress of his takeover effort. Cameras around Hela offered him continuous real-time imagery of the Ultras’ ship, no mat-ter where its orbit took it. He had seen the telling flicker of drive flame: Seyfarth’s message that the first phase of the acquisition operation had been successful. He had seen—indeed, felt—the departure of the massed ships of the Cathedral Guard, and he had also seen the gathering and co-ordination of the squadrons above Hela. Tiny, flimsy ships, to be sure, but many of them. Crows could mob a man to death.

He had no data about the ensuing activities within the ship. If Seyfarth had followed his own plan, then the twenty members of the spearhead unit would have begun their attack shortly after the signal was returned to Hela. Seyfarth was a brave man: he must have known that his chances of surviving until the arrival of reinforcements were not excellent. He was also, it had to be remembered, a career survivor. More than likely Seyfarth had lost some of his squad by now, but Quaiche very much doubted that Seyfarth himself was amongst the casualties. Somewhere on that ship he was still fighting, still surviving.

The dean craved, desperately, some means of divining what was happening in the ship at this moment. After all the planning, all the years of dreaming and scheming this mad folly into existence, it struck him as the height of unfairness not to be able to see whether events were unfolding as planned. He had always skipped over this hiatus in his imagination: it was either successful or it wasn’t, and there had been little point dwelling on the agony of uncertainty it represented.

But now he had doubts. The squadrons were meeting unexpected resistance from the ship’s hull defences. The imagery showed the ship to be surrounded by a spangling halo of explosions, like a dark and foreboding castle throwing a fireworks display. Most Ultra craft had defences of some kind, so Quaiche had not been greatly surprised to see them deployed here. His cover story had even demanded that the ship have the means to defend itself. But the scale of the defences and the speed and efficiency with which they had reacted: that had taken him aback. What if the forces within the ship were encountering the same unexpected resistance? What if Seyfarth was dead? What if everything was going slowly, catastrophi-cally wrong?

His couch chimed: an incoming message. Shaking, his hand worked the control. “Quaiche,” he said.

“Report from Cathedral Guard,” said a muffled voice, lashed by static. “Report successful incursion of relief units three and eight. Hull has been breached; no significant airloss. Reinforcement squads are now aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity . Attempting to rendezvous with elements of spearhead.”

Quaiche sighed, disappointed in himself. Of course it was going according to plan, and of course it was turning out to be a little more difficult than anticipated. That was the nature of worthy tasks. But he should never have doubted its ultimate success.

“Keep me posted,” he said.

The two mismatched figures—the Captain’s hulking, vacant suit and the childlike form of the pig—sloshed their way towards the scene of battle. They moved through corridors and passages that had never been fully reclaimed for human habitation: rat-ridden, rank with effluent and other toxins, crypt-dark save for the occasional weak and stuttering light source. When the Adventists had turned on him, Scorpio had known exactly where he was. But since then he had been following the Captain, allowing himself to be led into areas of the ship that were completely unfamiliar. As the tour progressed, and as the Captain ushered him through obscure hatchways and hidden apertures, he was struck by the increasing absence of the usual markers of ship wide authority: the jury-rigged electrical and hydraulic systems, the painted, luminescent direction arrows. There was only anatomy. They were navigating parts of the ship known only to the Captain, he realised: private corridors he must have haunted alone. It was his flesh and blood, Scorpio thought: up to him what he did with it.

The pig was under no illusion that he was actually in the Captain’s physical presence. The suit was just a focus for his attention; in every other respect the Captain was as omnipresent as ever, surrounding him in every sinew of the architecture. But for all that Scorpio would have preferred something with a face to talk to rather than the empty suit, it was a lot better than being on his own. He knew that he had been hurt badly by the Adventist leader, and that sooner or later he was going to feel the delayed shock of those injuries. How hard it would hit him, he couldn’t say. He’d have shrugged off the wounds twenty years ago. Now, shrugging off anything seemed unlikely. Yet while he had some form of companion, he felt he could keep delaying that moment of accounting. Just give me a few hours , he thought, just long enough to sort out this mess .

A few hours were all he needed; all he wanted.

“There’s something we need to discuss, Scorp. You and me. Before it’s too late.”

“Captain?”

“I need to do something before it becomes impractical. We came here on Aura’s instructions, in the hope that we’d find something that might make a difference against the Inhibitors. Quaiche and the scuttlers were always the key, which is why we sent Aura into Hela society nine years ago. She was to gather information, to infiltrate the cathedrals through the back door, without anyone ever suspecting her connection to us. That was a good plan, Scorp. It was the best we had at the time. But we mustn’t neglect Haldora itself.”

“No one’s neglecting it,” Scorpio said. “Aura already thinks she’s made contact with the shadows, via that suit. Isn’t that good enough for now?”

“It might have been if the Adventists hadn’t betrayed us. But we don’t control that suit: Quaiche does, and he’s no longer a man we can trust. It’s time to up the ante, Scorp. We can’t put all our faith in that one line of negotiation.”

“So we launch the instrument packages, just like we always planned.”

“The packages were only ever intended as a precursor. More than likely, they’d have told us nothing we haven’t already learned from Aura. Sooner or later we’d have had to bring in the big guns.”

For a moment Scorpio had forgotten his pain. “So what have you got in mind?”

“We need to know what’s inside Haldora,” the Captain said. “We need to break through the camouflage, and we can’t afford to sit around waiting for a vanishing.”

“The cache weapon,” Scorpio said, guessing his companion’s intentions. “You want to use it, don’t you? Fire it into the face of that planet, and see what happens?”

“Like I said, it’s time to bring out the big guns.”

“It’s the last one we’ve got. Make it count, Captain.”

The suit studied him with the blank aperture of its faceplate. “I’ll do my best,” it said.

Presently, the suit slowed its pace. The pig halted, using the wide bulk of the suit for cover.

“There’s something ahead, Scorp.”

Scorpio looked into darkness. “I don’t see anything.”