Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

The Guards picked their way through the dead, poking them with the cherry-red muzzles of slug-guns and boser rifles. Lights burned from sconces in the corridor walls, casting a solemn ochre sheen on the fallen. On balance, the victims did not look very much like the usual image of Ultras. The majority were unaugmented: autopsies might reveal buried implants, but there was little sign of the flamboyant display of mechanical parts usually associated with Ultra crews. Most of these people, in fact, appeared to be baseline humans, just like the Cathedral Guard themselves. The only difference was that there were, amongst the dead, an unusual number of pigs. The Guards poked and prodded the pigs with particular interest: they did not see very many of them on Hela. What had they been doing, fighting alongside these humans, often in the same uniform? It was yet another mystery to add to the pile. Yet another problem for someone else to worry about.

“Perhaps we’ll find Scorpio,” one of the officers said to a colleague.

“Scorpio?”

“The pig that was running things when Seyfarth’s unit came aboard. They say there’s a special reward for the one who brings his body out of the ship. It’ll be difficult to miss: Sey-farth impaled him, here and here.” He gestured to his collar bones.

The other officer kicked one of the pigs over, grateful for the helmet that meant he did not have to smell the carnage. “Let’s keep an eye out, then.”

The lights in the wall faded. The Cathedral Guard stepped through the bodies, only their helmet markers penetrating the darkness. Another part of the ship must have died; it was a wonder, really, that the lights had kept burning as long as they had.

But then they flickered back on again, as if to mock that assumption.

Something was wrong.

“The ship’s losing control,” Quaiche said. “This shouldn’t be happening.”

His private vessel nudged closer to the pad. The gap was only a few centimetres.

“No,” Grelier said, with sudden insistence. “Don’t risk it. There’s obviously something wrong…”

But Quaiche had seen his moment. He sped his couch towards the waiting airlock, pushing its speed to the maximum. For a long, lingering moment the spacecraft held perfect station. It looked as if he might make it, even if he had to cross a hand’s width of empty space. But then the Dominatrix lurched back again, its control jets firing chaotically. The gap enlarged: not centimetres now, but a good fraction of a metre. Quaiche began to slow down, realising his mistake. His hands worked like demons. But the gap was widening, and his couch was not going to stop in time.

The Dominatrix was now five or six metres from the landing stage, still desperately trying to orientate itself. It began to rotate, turning the open aperture of the airlock away from view.

By then it didn’t matter. Quaiche screamed. His couch passed over the edge.

“Fool,” Grelier said, before Quaiche’s scream had finished.

Rashmika looked at the ship. It had turned its rear-facing side back into view. Now, finally, they saw that the ship was terribly damaged, the smoothness of its hull ruined by a series of strange wounds. They were perfectly circular openings, revealing near-spherical interiors filled with the bright, clean metal of sheared surfaces. It was as if blisters had opened in the hull itself, bursting to reveal mathematically precise apertures.

“Something attacked it,” Grelier said.

The ship fell back, losing altitude, its corrective gestures becoming more frantic and ineffectual with each second.

“Get down,” Grelier said. He pushed her to the deck, falling beside her at the same instant. He flattened himself as efficiently as he could, one hand urging Rashmika to do likewise.

“What…” she began.

“Close your eyes.”

The warning came a fraction too late. She caught the beginning of the blast as the damaged ship hit the surface of Hela. The glare of it reached through her eyelids, a light like a hot needle pushed into her optic nerve. Through her body she felt the entire structure of the cathedral shake.

When the gale of escaping air had died down, Glaur judged that it was safe to make his escape. He had cut himself a man-sized hole in both the glass panel and the protective grille beneath it. Below were vacuum and—about twenty metres further down—the endlessly scrolling surface of Hela.

He checked his safety line once more, then heaved his lower half over the edge and pushed his legs through the hole. The edges of the glass were softly rounded where they had melted: there was no danger of them ripping any part of his suit. For a moment he lingered, his upper body still inside Motive Power, his lower half dangling into space. This was it: the final moment of surrender. Then he gave himself a valiant shove and became temporarily weightless. He fell for a second, retaining only an impression of blurred machinery rushing past. Then the line arrested his fall, snagging him sharply. The belt dug into his waist; he came to a halt on his back, with his head and shoulders at a slight angle to the ground.

He looked down: four, maybe five metres. The ground slid by beneath him. It was further than he had planned, and it would probably knock the wind out of him when he hit, but he should still be able to dust himself off and get up. Even if he was knocked out by the fall, the cathedral would just pass harmlessly over his fallen body: the huge, stomping plates of the traction feet were arranged in rows on either side of him. One set of feet would pass much nearer to him than the other, but still too far away to cause him any real anxiety.

The belt was beginning to grow uncomfortable. Now or never , Glaur thought. He reached up, fiddled with the catch, and suddenly he was falling.

He hit the ice. It was bad—he had never fallen from such a distance before—but he took the brunt of it on his back and after he had lain still for a minute he had the strength to roll over and think about standing up. The intricate machinery-filled underbelly of the Lady Morwenna had been sliding over him all the while, like a sky full of angular clouds.

Glaur stood up. To his relief, all his limbs seemed unbroken. Nor had the fall damaged his air supply: the helmet indicators were all in the green. There was enough air in the suit for another thirty hours of vigorous activity. He’d need it, too: he was going to have to hike all the way back along the Way until he met with other evacuees, or a rescue party sent out by another cathedral. It would be close, he thought, but he would far rather be walking than waiting aboard the Lady Morwenna, anticipating the first sickening lurch as she went over the edge.

Glaur was about to start walking when a vacuum-suited figure emerged from the cover of the nearest line of traction feet. The figure sprinted towards him—except it was more of a concentrated waddle than a sprint. Despite himself, Glaur laughed: there was something ludicrous about the way the childlike form moved. He racked his memory of the cathedral’s inhabitants, wondering who this dwarflike survivor could possibly be, and what he might want of Glaur.

Then he noticed the glint of a knife in the figure’s odd two-fingered gauntlet—a knife that shimmered and flickered, like something that could not decide what shape it wanted to be—and suddenly Glaur’s sense of humour deserted him.

“I was worried that might happen,” Grelier said. “Are you all right? Can you see?”

“I think so,” she said. She was dazed from the explosion of the dean’s ship, but still basically able to function.

“Then stand up. We don’t have much time.” Again Rashmika felt the needle squeeze against the outer layer of her suit.