Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

“I sense it, but I need the suit to take a closer look. I don’t have cameras here.”

They rounded a slight bend, easing their way through a knuckle of interconnected corridors. Suddenly they were back in a part of the ship Scorpio thought he recognised—one of the corridors he had taken the Adventists down earlier that day. Dull sepia light dribbled from sconces in the wall.

“There are bodies here, Scorp. It doesn’t look good.”

The suit strode ahead, sloshing through unspeakable fluids. The bodies were shadowed lumps, half-submerged in the muck. The suit’s head-light flicked on, playing over the forms. Feral janitor rats fled from the glare.

“They’re not Adventists,” Scorpio said.

The suit knelt down next to the closest of the bodies. “Do you recognise them?”

Scorpio squatted on his haunches, grimacing at the twin spikes of pain on either side of his chest. He touched the body nearest to the Captain, turning it over so that he could see the face. He fingered the rough leather of an eyepatch.

“It’s Orca Cruz,” he said.

His own voice sounded detached, matter-of-fact. She’s dead , he thought. This woman who was loyal to you for more than thirty years of your life is dead; this woman who aided you, protected you, fought for you and made you laugh with her stories, is dead, and she died because of your mistake, your stupidity in not seeing through the Adventists’ plans. And all you feel now is that something you own has been stepped on .

There was a hiss of pistons and servo-mechanisms. The monstrous gauntlet of the Captain’s suit touched him gently on the back. “It’s all right, Scorp. I know how you feel.”

“I don’t feel anything.”

“That’s what I mean. It’s too soon, too sudden.”

Scorpio looked at the other bodies, knowing that they were all members of the Security Arm. Their weapons were gone, but there was no obvious indication of injury on any of them. But he wouldn’t forget the expression on Cruz’s face in a hurry.

“She was good,” he said. “She stuck by me when she could have carved out a little empire of her own in Chasm City. She didn’t deserve this. None of them deserved this.”

He forced himself to his full height, steadying himself against the wall. First Lasher, on the trip to Resurgam. Then he’d had to say goodbye to Blood, probably for ever. Now Cruz was gone: his last, precious link to that half-remembered life in Chasm City.

“I don’t know about you, Captain,” he said, “but I’m about ready to start taking things personally.”

“I’ve already started,” the empty suit said.

Battle continued to rage within the Nostalgia for Infinity . Slowly, however, the tide was turning against the Adventist boarders. Around the ship, the last elements of the Cathedral Guard had either tunnelled through to the interior or were being picked off by the hull-mounted defences. Damage had been sustained: fresh craters and scars gouged into the already treacherous landscape of the starship’s hull. The tiny ships that had reached the hull and anchored themselves in place—with projectile barbs, epoxy-pads, rocket grapples and drilling equipment—resembled mechanical ticks half-embedded in the flesh of some monstrous animal. Elsewhere, the mashed corpses of other ships lay entangled in the crevices and folds of the Nostalgia for Infinity’s architecture, quills of escaping air and fluid bleeding into space. Other ships had been ripped apart before they got close to the lighthugger, their hot, mangled wreckage trailing the larger vessel as it orbited Hela. No additional reinforcements had been launched from the moon: the assault had been designed to be total and overwhelming, and only a handful of Cathedral Guard units had not been mobilised during the first wave.

The few elements still trying to make their boarding approach must have known that their chances were not excellent. The resistance had been greater than expected: for the first time, a group of Ultras had actually downplayed the effective-ness of their defences. But the regular soldiers of the Cathedral Guard were blood-loyal to the Adventist order, Quaicheist doctrine running thick and true in their veins, and for them retreat was literally unthinkable. They did not have to know the purpose of their mission to understand that it was of the utmost importance to the dean.

Preoccupied with the matter of finding a safe route to the hull, none of them observed the opening of a space-door in the side of the Nostalgia for Infinity , a chink of golden-yellow light amidst the complexity of the Captain’s transformations. The door looked tiny, but that was only because of the dizzying scale of the ship itself.

Something emerged, moving with the smooth, unhesitating autonomy of a machine. It did not look very much like a spacecraft, even the ungainly sort used for ship-to-ship operations. It resembled a strange abstract ornament: a surreal juxtaposition of flanged bronze-green shapes, windowless and seamless, as if carved from soap or marble, the whole thing encased in a skeletal black harness, a geodesic framework stubbed with docking latches, thrusters and navigation and aiming devices.

It was a cache weapon: There had been forty of the hell-class devices once; now only this unit remained. The science that had made it, the engineering principles embodied in its construction, were almost certainly less advanced than those in the latest additions to the Infinity’s arsenal, like the bladder-mines or the hypometric weapons. No one would ever know for sure. But one thing was clear: the new weapons were instruments of surgical precision rather than brute force, so the cache weapon still had its uses.

It cleared the space-door. Around the skeletal framework of the harness, thrusters sparked blue-white. The glare lit the Nostalgia for Infinity , throwing hard radiance across the black shapes of the last few ships of the Cathedral Guard.

No one noticed.

The cache weapon wheeled around, the harness aligning itself with the looming face of Haldora. Then it accelerated, climbing away from the Nostalgia for Infinity , away from the battle, away from the scratched face of Hela.

Vasko and Khouri stepped into the mirror-filled room of the garret. Vasko looked around, satisfying himself that the room was much as they had left it. The dean was still sitting in the same couch, in the same part of the chamber. Rashmika was seated at the table in the middle of the room, watching their arrival. She had a tea set before her: a neat china service. Vasko observed her reactions carefully, wondering how much of her memory she had recovered. Even if she had not recalled everything, he could not believe that the sight of her mother’s face would not elicit some reaction. There were certain things that cut through memory, he thought.

But if there was a flicker of reaction from Rashmika, he missed it. She simply inclined her head towards them, the way she would have to greet any arriving visitors.

“Just the two of you?” Dean Quaiche asked.

“We’re the advance party,” Vasko said. “There didn’t seem to be any need to send down dozens of us, not until we’ve assessed the facilities.”

“I told you there were many rooms available,” he said, “for as many delegates as you cared to send.”

Rashmika spoke up. “They’re not mad, Dean. They know what’s going to happen in a few hours.”

“The crossing concerns you?” he asked the Ultras, as if the very thought was ludicrous.

“Let’s just say we’d rather observe it from a distance,” Vasko said. “That’s fair enough, isn’t it? There was nothing in our agreement that said we absolutely had to remain aboard the Lady Morwenna. The disadvantage is on our side if we choose not to have delegates present.”