Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

Vasko’s bracelet chimed. He looked at it, not daring to move.

“Answer it,” Quaiche said eventually. “Then we can all hear how things are going.”

Vasko did as he was told. He listened to the report very carefully, then snapped the bracelet from his wrist and passed it to Grelier. “Listen to it yourself,” he said. “I think you’ll find it very interesting.”

Grelier examined the bracelet, his lips pursed in suspicion. “I’ll take this call, I think,” he said.

“Suits me either way,” Vasko said.

Grelier listened to the voice coming out of the bracelet. He spoke into it carefully, then listened to the answers, nodding occasionally, raising his snowwhite eyebrows in mock astonishment. Then he shrugged and passed it back to Vasko.

“What?” Quaiche said.

“The Cathedral Guard have failed in their attempt to take the ship,” he said. “They’ve been cut to shreds, including the reinforcements. I had a nice chat with the pig in command of ship operations. Seemed a very reasonable fellow, for a pig.”

“No,” Quaiche breathed. “Seyfarth gave me his promise. He told me he had the men to do it. It can’t have failed.”

“It did.”

“What happened? What did they have on that ship that Seyfarth didn’t know about? A whole army?”

“That’s not what the pig says.”

“The pig’s right,” Vasko said. “It was the ship that ruined your plans. It’s not like other ships, not inside. It has ideas of its own. It didn’t take very kindly to your intruders.”

“This wasn’t how it was meant to happen,” Quaiche moaned.

“You’re in a spot of bother, I think,” Grelier said. “The pig mentioned something about taking the cathedral by force.”

“They set me up,” Quaiche said, realisation dawning.

“Oh, don’t think ill of them. They just wanted access to Haldora. It wasn’t their fault they stumbled into your scheme. They’d have left you alone if you hadn’t tried to use them.”

“We’re in trouble,” Quaiche said quietly.

“Actually,” Grelier said, as if remembering something important, “things aren’t quite as bad as you think.” He leant closer to the dean, then looked back at the three people sitting around the table. “We still have a bit of leverage, you see.”

“We do?” Quaiche said.

“Give me the bracelet,” he told Vasko.

Vasko passed it to him. Grelier smiled and spoke into it. “Hello, is that the pig? Nice to speak to you again. Got a bit of news for you. We have the girl. If you want her back in one piece, I suggest you start taking instructions.”

Then he handed the bracelet to the dean. “You’re on,” he said.

Scorpio struggled to hear the whispery, paper-thin voice of Dean Quaiche. He held up a hand to silence his companions, screwing his eyes closed against the tight, nagging discomfort of his sealed wounds. His work finished, Valensin began wrapping up the soiled blood-red bundle of surgical tools and ointments.

“I don’t know about any girl,” Scorpio said.

The dean’s answer was like a scratch of nails against tin. “Her name is Rashmika Els. Her real name, I neither know nor care. What I do know is that she arrived on Hela from your ship nine years ago. We’ve established the connection beyond any doubt. And so much else suddenly tumbles into place.”

“It does?”

The voice changed: it was the other man again, the surgeon-general. “I don’t know exactly how you did it,” he said, “but I’m impressed. Buried memories, autosuggestion… what was it?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about?‘

“The business with the Vigrid constabulary.”

Again, “I’m sorry?”

“The girl had to be primed to emerge from her shell. There must have been a trigger. Perhaps after eight or nine years she knew, on a subconscious level, that she had spent enough time amongst the badland villagers to begin the next phase of her infiltration: penetrating the highest level of our very order. Why, I don’t yet know, although I’m a wee bit inclined to think you do.”

Scorpio said nothing. He let the man continue speaking.

“She had to wait until a means arrived to reach the Permanent Way. Then she had to signal to you that she was on her way, so that you would know to bring your ship in from the cold. It was a question of timing: your successful dealings with the dean obviously depended on internal intelligence fed to you by the girl. There are machines in her head—they rather resemble Conjoiner implants—but I doubt that you could read them from orbit. So you needed another sign, something you couldn’t possibly miss. The girl sabotaged a store of demolition charges, didn’t she? She blew it up, drawing down the attention of the constabulary. I doubt that she even knew she had done it herself: it was probably more like sleepwalking, acting out buried commands. Then she felt an inexplicable need to leave home and journey to the cathedrals. She concocted a motive for herself: a search for her long-lost brother, even though every rational bone in her body must have told her he was already dead. You, meanwhile, had your signal. The sabotage was reported on all the local news networks; doubtless you had the means to intercept them even far beyond Hela. I imagine there was something unambiguous about it—the time of day, perhaps—that made it absolutely clear that it was the work of your spy.”

Scorpio saw that there was no further point in bluffing. “You’ve done your homework,” he said.

“Bloodwork, really, but I take your point.”

“Touch her, and I’ll turn you to dust.”

He heard the smile in the surgeon-general’s voice. “I think touching her is the last thing any of us have in mind. I don’t think we intend to harm a hair on her head. On that note, why don’t I put you back on to the dean? I think he has an interesting proposition.”

The whispery voice again, like someone blowing through driftwood: “A proposition, yes,” the dean said. “I was prepared to take your ship by force because I never imagined I’d have any leverage over you. Force, it seems, has failed. I’m surprised: Seyfarth assured me he had every confidence in his own abilities. Frankly, it doesn’t matter now that I have the girl. Obviously she means something to you. That means you’re going to do what I want, without a single one of my agents lifting a finger.”

“Let’s hear your proposition,” Scorpio said.

“I told you I wanted the loan of your ship. As a gesture of my good faith—and my extremely forgiving nature—that arrangement still stands. I will take your ship, use it as I see fit, and then I shall return it to you, its occupants and infrastructure largely intact.”

“Largely intact,” Scorpio said. “I like that.”

“Don’t play games with me, pig. I’m older and uglier, and that’s really saying something.”

Scorpio heard his own voice, as if from a distance. “What do you want?”

“Take a look at Hela,” Quaiche said. “I know you have cameras spotted all around your orbit. Examine these coordinates; tell me what you see.”

It took a few seconds to acquire an image of the surface. When the picture on the compad stabilised, Scorpio found himself looking at a neatly excavated rectangular hole in the ground, like a freshly prepared grave. The coordinates referred to a part of Hela that was in daylight, but even so the sunken depths of the hole were in shadow, relieved by strings of intense industrial floodlights. The overlaid scale said that the trench was five kilometres long and nearly three wide. Three of the sides were corrugated grey revetments, sloping steeply, slightly outwards from their bases, carved with ledges and sloping access ramps. Windows shone in the two-kilometre-high walls, peering through plaques of industrial machinery and pressurised cabins. Around the upper edges of the trench, Scorpio saw retracted sheets, serrated to lock together. In the shadowed depths, sketchy, floodlit suggestions of enormous mechanisms were barely visible, things like grasping lobster claws and flattened molars: the movable components of a harness as large as the Nostalgia for Infinity . He could see the tracks and piston-driven hinges that would enable the harness to lock itself around almost any kind of lighthugger hull, within limits.