Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

No one said anything for a moment. There was a hiatus, a stillness in the room. It reminded him of something, but it took a while to remember what it was. When he did, he almost flinched away from the memory: Clavain. There had been a similar pause whenever the old man had finished one of his rabble-rousing monologues.

“We could still storm the cathedral,” Urton said, her voice low. “There’s time. We’ve taken losses, but we have operational shuttles. How about it, Scorp: a precision raid on the Lady Morwenna, in and out, snatch the suit and our people?”

“It’d be dangerous,” said another of the Security Arm people. “We don’t just have Khouri and Malinin to worry about. There’s Aura. What if Quaiche suspects she’s one of us?”

“He won’t,” Urton said. “There’s no reason for him to do that.”

Scorpio wrestled away from Valensin long enough to lift up his sleeve and inspect the plastic and metal ruin of his communicator. He did not remember when he had damaged it, just as he did not recall where all the additional bruises and cuts had come from.

“Someone get me a line to the cathedral,” he said. “I want to talk to the man in charge.”

“You never used to think much of negotiation,” Urton said. “You said all it ever got you was a world of pain.”

‘Trouble is,“ Scorpio acknowledged ruefully, ”sometimes that’s the best you can hope for.“

“You’re wrong about this,” Urton said. “This isn’t the way to handle things.”

“Like I was wrong about letting those twenty Adventists aboard the ship? That wasn’t my bright idea, the last time I checked.”

“They slipped past your security checks,” Urton said.

“You wouldn’t let me examine them as thoroughly as I’d have liked.”

Urton glanced at her fellows. “Look, we’re grateful for your help in regaining control. Deeply grateful. But now that the situation is stable again, wouldn’t it be better if—”

The ship moaned. Someone else slid a communicator across the polished gloss of the table. Scorpio reached for it, snapped it around his wrist, and called Vasko.

Grelier stepped into the garret and took a moment to adjust to the scene that met his eyes. Superficially, the room was much as he had left it. But now it had extra guests—a man and an older woman—detained by a small detachment of the Cathedral Guard. The guests—they were from the Ultra ship, he realised—looked at him as if expecting an explanation. Grelier merely brushed a hand through the white shock of his hair and placed his cane by the door. There was a lot he wanted to get off his chest, but the one thing he couldn’t do was explain what was happening here.

“I go away for a few hours and all hell breaks loose,” he commented.

“Have a seat,” the dean said.

Grelier ignored the suggestion. He did what he usually did upon his arrival in the garret, which was to attend to the dean’s eyes. He opened the wall cabinet and took out his usual paraphernalia of swabs and ointments.

“Not now, Grelier.”

“Now is as good a time as any,” he said. “Infection won’t stop spreading merely because it is inconvenient to treat it.”

“Where have you been, Grelier?”

“First things first.” The surgeon-general leant over the dean, inspecting the points where the barbs of the eye-opener hooked into the delicate skin of Quaiche’s eyelids. “Might be my imagination, but there seemed to be a wee bit of an atmosphere when I came in here.”

“They’re not too thrilled about my taking the cathedral over the rift.”

“Neither am I,” Grelier said, “but you’re not holding me at gunpoint.”

“It’s rather more complicated than that.”

“I’ll bet it is.” More than ever, he was glad that he had left his shuttle in a state of immediate flight-readiness. “Well, is someone going to explain? Or is this a new parlour game, where I have twenty guesses?”

“He’s taken over our ship,” the man said.

Grelier glanced back at him, continuing to dab at the dean’s eyes. “I’m sorry?”

“The Adventist delegates were a trick,” the ma elaborated. “They were sent up there to seize control of the Nostalgia for Infinity ?

“ Nostalgia for Infinity ,” Greleir said. “Now there’s a name that keeps coming up.”

Now it was the man’s turn to be puzzled. “I’m sorry?”

“Been here before, haven’t you? About nine years ago.”

The two prisoners exchanged glances. They did their best to hide it, but Grelier had been expecting some response.

“You’re ahead of me,” Quaiche said.

“I think we’re all ahead of each other in certain respects.” Grelier said. He scooped his swab under an eyelid, the tip yellow with infection. “Is it true what he said, about the delegates taking over their ship?”

“I don’t think he’d have any reason to lie,” Quaiche said.

“You set that up?”

“I needed their ship,” Quaiche said. He sounded like a child explaining why he had been caught stealing apples.

“We know that much. Why else did you spend all that time looking for the right one? But now that they’ve brought the ship, what’s the problem? You’re better off letting them run it, if protection’s what you want.”

“It was never about protection.”

Grelier froze, the swab still buried under the dean’s eyelid. “It wasn’t?”

“I wanted a ship,” Quaiche said. “Didn’t matter which one, so long as it was in reasonably good condition and the engines worked. It wasn’t as if I was planning on taking it very far.”

“I don’t understand,” Grelier said.

“I know why,” the man said. “At least, I think I have a good idea. It’s about Hela, isn’t it?”

Grelier looked at him. “What about it?”

“He’s going to take our ship and land it on this planet. Somewhere near the equator, I’d guess. He’s probably already constructed something for docking a cradle of some kind.”

“A cradle?” Grelier said blankly.

“A holdfast,” Quaiche said, as if that explained everything. Grelier thought about the diverted Permanent Way resources, the fleet of construction machines Rashmika had described to him. Now he knew exactly what they were for. They must have been on their way to the holdfast—whatever that was—to put the finishing touches to it.

“Just one question,” Grelier said. “Why?”

“He’s going to land the ship sideways,” the man replied. “Lie it down on Hela with the hull aligned east-west, parallel to the equator. Then he’ll lock it in place, so that it can’t move.”

“There’s a point to all this?” Grelier said.

“There will be when I start the engines,” Quaiche said, unable to contain himself. “Then you’ll see. Then everyone will see.”

“He’s going to change the spin rate of Hela,” the man said. “He’s going to use the ship’s engines to lock Hela into synchronous rotation around Haldora. He doesn’t have to change the length of the day by much—twelve minutes will do the trick. Won’t they, Dean?”

“One part in two hundred,” Quaiche said. “Sounds trivial, doesn’t it? But worlds—even small ones like Hela—take a lot of shifting. I always knew I’d need a lighthugger to do it. Think about it: if those engines can push a million tonnes of ship to within a scratch of the speed of light, I think they can change Hela’s day by twelve minutes.”

Grelier retrieved the swab from under Quaiche’s eyelid. “What God failed to put right, you can fix. Is that it?”

“Now don’t go giving me delusions of grandeur,” Quaiche chided.