Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

No one had told the Captain to do this, just as no one had told him to lower himself towards Hela. Even if there had been a rebellion—even if some of the seniors had decided to abandon Aura—it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference. Captain John Brannigan had made up his mind.

When he was clear of the tumbling cloud of sloughed parts, Scorpio told the ship to accelerate harder. It had been a long time since he had sat behind the controls of a spacecraft, but that didn’t matter: the little machine knew exactly where it needed to go. Hela rolled below: he saw the diagonal scratch of the rift, and the even fainter scratch of the bridge spanning it. He turned up the magnification, steadied the image and tracked back from the bridge until he made out the tiny form of the Lady Mor-wenna, creeping towards the edge of the plain. He had no idea what was going on aboard it now: since the appearance of the Haldora machinery, all attempts to communicate with. Quaiche or his hostages had failed. Quaiche must have destroyed or disabled all the communication channels, no longer wishing to be distracted by outside parties now that he had finally seized effective control of the Nostalgia for Infinity . All Scorpio could do was assume that Aura and the others were still safe, and that there was still some measure of rationality in Quaiche’s mind. If he could not be contacted by conventional means, then he would have to be sent a very obvious and compelling signal to stop.

Scorpio’s ship aimed itself for the bridge.

The pressure of thrust, mild as it was, made Scorpio’s chest hurt. Valensin had told him he was a fool even to think about riding a ship down to Hela after what he had been through in the last few years.

Scorpio had shrugged. A pig had to do what a pig had to do, he’d said.

Grelier attended to Quaiche, dribbling solutions into the blinded eye. Quaiche flinched and moaned at each drop, but gradually his moans became intermittent whimpers, signifying irritation and disappointment more than pain.

“You still haven’t told me what she’s doing here,” Quaiche said, finally.

“That wasn’t my job,” Grelier replied. “I established that she wasn’t who she said she was, and I established that she had arrived on Hela nine years ago. The rest you’ll have to ask her yourself.”

Rashmika stood up and walked over to the dean, brushing the surgeon-general aside. “You don’t have to ask,” she said. “I’ll tell you myself. I came here to find you. Not because I was particularly interested in you , but because you were the key to reaching the shadows.”

“The shadows?” Grelier asked, screwing the lid on to a thumb-sized bottle of blue fluid.

“He knows what I’m talking about,” Rashmika said. “Don’t you, Dean?”

Even through the masklike rigidity of his face, Quaiche managed to convey his sense of awful realisation. “But it took you nine years to find me.”

“It wasn’t just about finding you, Dean. I always knew where you were: no one ever made a secret of that. A lot of people thought you were dead, but it was always clear where you were meant to be.”

“Then why wait all this time?”

“I wasn’t ready,” she said. “I had to learn more about Hela and the scuttlers, otherwise I couldn’t be sure that the shadows were the right people to talk to. It was no good trusting the church authorities: I had to learn things for myself, make my own deductions. And, of course, I had to have a convincing background, so you’d trust me.”

“But nine years,” Quaiche said again, marvelling. “And you’re still just a child.”

“I’m seventeen. And it’s been a lot more than nine years, believe me.”

“The shadows,” Grelier said. “Will one of you please do me the courtesy of explaining who or what they are?”

“Tell him, Dean,” Rashmika said.

“I don’t know what they are.”

“But you know they exist. They talk to you, don’t they, just the way they talk to me. They asked you to save them, to make sure they weren’t destroyed when the Lady Morwenna goes over the bridge.”

Quaiche raised a hand, dismissing her. “You’re quite deluded.”

“Just like Saul Tempier was deluded, Dean? He knew about the missing vanishing, and he didn’t believe the official denials. He also knew that the vanishings were due to end, just like the Numericists did.”

“I’ve never heard of Saul Tempier.”

“Perhaps you haven’t,” Rashmika said, “but your church had him killed because he couldn’t be allowed to speak of the missing vanishing. Because you couldn’t face the fact that it had happened, could you?”

Grelier’s fingers shattered the little blue vial. ‘Tell me what this is about,“ he demanded.

Rashmika turned to him, cleared her throat. “If he won’t tell you, I will. The dean had a lapse of faith during one of those periods when he began to build up immunity to his own blood viruses. He began to question the entire edifice of the religion he’d built around himself, which was painful for him, because without this religion the death of his beloved Morwenna becomes just another meaningless cosmic event.”

“Be careful what you say,” Quaiche said.

She ignored him. “During this crisis, he felt compelled to test the nature of a vanishing, using the tools of scientific enquiry normally banned by the church. He arranged for a probe to be fired into the face of Haldora during a vanishing.”

“Must have called for some careful preparations,” Grelier said. “A vanishing’s so brief—”

“Not this one,” Rashmika said. ‘The probe had an effect: it prolonged the vanishing by more than a second. Haldora is an illusion, nothing more: a piece of camouflage to hide a signalling mechanism. The camouflage has been failing, lately—that’s why the vanishings have been happening in the first place. The dean’s probe added additional stress, prolonging the vanishing. It was enough, wasn’t it, Dean?“

“I have no…”

Grelier pulled out another vial—a smoky shade of green, this time—and held it over his master, pinched tight between thumb and forefinger. “Let’s stop mucking about, shall we? I’m convinced that she knows more than you’d like the rest of us to know, so will you please stop denying it?”

“Tell him,” Rashmika said.

Quaiche licked his lips: they were as pale and dry as bone. “She’s right,” he said. “Why deny it now? The shadows are just a distraction.” He tilted his head towards Vasko and Khouri. “I have your ship. Do you think I give a damn about anything else?”

The skin of Grelier’s fingers whitened around the vial. “Tell us,” he hissed.

“I sent a probe into Haldora,” Quaiche said. “It prolonged the vanishing. In that extended glimpse I saw… things —shining machinery, like the inside of a clock, normally hidden within Haldora. And the probe made contact with something. It was destroyed almost instantly, but not before that something —whatever it was—had managed to transmit itself into the Lady Morwenna.”

Rashmika turned and pointed towards the suit. “He keeps it in that.”

Grelier’s eyes narrowed. “The scrimshaw suit?”

“Morwenna died in it,” Quaiche said, picking his way through his words like someone crossing a minefield. “She was crushed in it when our ship made an emergency sprint to Hela, to rescue me. The ship didn’t know that Morwenna couldn’t tolerate that kind of acceleration. It pulped her, turned her into red jelly, red jelly with bone and metal in it. / killed her, because if I hadn’t gone down to Hela…”

“I’m sorry about what happened to her,” Rashmika said.

“I wasn’t like this before it happened,” Quaiche said.