Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

“Quaiche was wrong,” she said, not moving. “You were never safe.”

“Shut up and walk.”

His presence must have alerted it. The red cockleshell-shaped spacecraft blinked two green lights in acknowledgement. A small door opened in one side.

“Get in,” Grelier said.

“Your ship’s no good,” Rashmika said. “Didn’t you hear Quaiche? He had his men shoot it up.”

“It doesn’t have to get us very far. Just getting off this cathedral would be a start.”

“And then where, assuming it even takes off? Not the holdfast, surely?”

“That was Quaiche’s plan, not mine.”

“Where, then?”

“I’ll think of something,” he said. “I know a lot of places to hide on this planet.”

“You don’t have to take me with you.”

“You’re useful, Miss Els, too useful to throw away just this moment. You do understand, don’t you?”

“Let me go. Let me go back and save my mother. You don’t need me now.” She nodded at his waiting spacecraft. “Take it, and they’ll assume I’m with you. They won’t attack you.”

“Wee bit risky,” he said.

“Please… just let me save her.”

He took a step towards the waiting ship, then halted. It was as if he had remembered something he had forgotten, something that meant he would have to go back into the Lady Morwenna.

But instead he just looked at her, and made a horrible sound.

“Surgeon-General?” she said.

The pressure of the needle was gone. The syringe hit the deck in silence. The surgeon-general twitched, and then sagged to his knees. He made that sound again: a pained gurgling she hoped never to hear again.

She stood up, still unsteady on her feet. She did not know whether it was due to the after-effects of the explosion or the relaxation of the fear she had felt with the syringe pressed against her all that time.

“Grelier?” she said quietly.

But Grelier said nothing. She looked down at him, realising then that there was something very, very wrong with him. The abdomen of his suit had caved in, as if an entire part of him had been scooped away from within.

Rashmika reached down, fumbling through the surgeon-general’s belongings until she found the Clocktower key. She stood up, stepping back from the body, and watched as it suddenly disintegrated, spheres of nothingness chewing into it until all that remained was a kind of frozen interstitial residue.

“Thank you, Captain,” she said, without quite knowing why.

She looked ahead, towards the broken bridge. Not much time now.

Alone, Rashmika rode an elevator back down into the Lady Morwenna, closing her eyes against the stained-glass light, forcing concentration. Thoughts crashed through her head: Quaiche was dead; the surgeon-general was dead. Quaiche had ordered the Cathedral Guard not to let anyone leave until he reached the holdfast, or until thirty minutes before the Lady Morwenna was due to fall over the western limit of the bridge. And the scrimshaw suit was to remain aboard: he had been very specific about that. But the suit was heavy and cumbersome: even if the guards could be persuaded to let them take it, they would need more than thirty minutes to get it off the cathedral. They might even need more time than the handful of hours they had left before the cathedral ceased to exist.

Perhaps, she thought, it was time to make a deal with the shadows, here and now. Even they must see that she had no other choice, no way of saving their envoy. She had done the best she could, hadn’t she? If they had information regarding what Rashmika and her allies needed to do to allow the other shadows to cross over, then they would lose nothing by giving it to her now.

The elevator came to a clanging halt. Gingerly, Rashmika slid aside the trellised gate. She still had to move through the interior of the cathedral, retracing the route along which Grelier and the dean had brought her. Then she would have to find the other elevator that would take her to the high levels of the Clocktower. And she would have to do all this while avoiding any contact with the remaining elements of the Cathedral Guard.

She stepped out of the elevator. Anxious to conserve suit air for when she really needed it, she slid up her visor. The cathedral had never been this quiet before. She could still hear the labouring of the engines, but even that seemed muted now. There was no choir, no voices raised in prayer, no solemn processions of footsteps.

Her heart quickened. The cathedral was already deserted. The Cathedral Guard must have left already, during the commotion on the landing stage. If that was the case, all she had to do was find her mother and Vasko and hope that the scrimshaw suit was still in a communicative frame of mind.

She orientated herself using the designs in the stained-glass windows as a reference, and set off towards the Clocktower. But she had barely taken a step when two officers of the Cathedral Guard emerged from an annexe, pointing weapons at her. They had their helmets on, visors down, pink plumes hanging from their crests.

“Please,” Rashmika said, “let me through. All I want is to reach my friends.”

“Stay where you are,” said one of the guards, training his gun on the flickering indices of her life-support tabard. He nodded to his partner. “Secure her.”

His companion shouldered his gun and reached for something on his belt.

“The dean is dead,” Rashmika said. “The cathedral is about to be smashed to pieces. You should leave, now, while you still can.”

“We have orders,” the guard said, while his partner pushed her against a slab of stonework.

“Don’t you understand?” she asked. “It’s all over now. Everything has changed. It doesn’t matter.”

“Bind her. And if you can shut her up, do that as well.”

The guard moved to slide her visor down. Rashmika started to protest, wanting to fight but knowing she didn’t have the strength. But even as she struggled, she saw something lurch from the shadows behind the guard holding the gun.

A flicker of a moving blade flashed through her peripheral vision. The guard made a guttural sound, his gun dropping to the floor.

The other one started to react, springing away from Rashmika and making an effort to bring his own weapon around. Rashmika kicked him, her boot catching him in the knee. He stumbled back into the masonry, still fumbling for the gun. The vacuum-suited pig crossed the distance to him, slid the silver gleam of his knife into the man’s abdomen and then dragged it upwards through his sternum in one smooth arc.

Scorpio killed the knife, slipped it back into its sheath. Firmly but gently, he pushed Rashmika into the shadows, where the two of them crouched together.

She pushed her visor up again, surprised at the harshness of her own breathing.

“Thanks, Scorp.”

“You know who I am? After all this time?”

“You left your mark,” she said, between breaths. She reached and touched his hand with hers. “Thanks for coming.”

“Had to drop in, didn’t I?”

She waited until her breathing had settled down. “Scorp—was that you, with the bridge?”

“Had my trademark on it, did it?” He pushed his own visor up and smiled. “Yes. How else was I going to get them to stop this thing?”

“I understand,” she said. “It was a good idea, too. Shame about the bridge, but—”

“But?”

“The cathedral can’t stop, Scorp. It’s going over.”

He seemed to take this as only a minor adjustment to his world view. “Then we’d better get off it as soon as we can. Where are the others?”

“Up the Clocktower, in the dean’s garret. They’re under guard.”

“We’ll get them out,” he said. “Trust me.”