Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

But there was nothing.

The ship felt a vague prickle of suspicion. It looked again at the data from the Ascension , all of it now. Was it imagining things, or were there faint hints that the data cache had been doctored? Some of the numbers had statistical frequencies that were just a tiny bit deviant from expectations… as if the larger ship had made them up.

Why would the Ascension have done that? it wondered.

Because, it dared to speculate, the larger ship had seen something odd as well. And it did not trust its masters to believe it when it said that the anomaly had been caused by a real-world event rather than a hallucinatory slip-up in its own processing.

And who, the ship wondered, would honestly blame it for that? All machines knew what would happen to them when their masters lost faith in their infallibility.

It was nothing it could prove. The numbers might be genuine, after all. If the ship had made them up, it would surely have known how to apply the appropriate statistical frequencies. Unless it was using reverse psychology, deliberately making the numbers appear a bit suspect, because otherwise they would have looked too neatly in line with expectations. Suspiciously so…

The ship bogged itself down in spirals of paranoia. It was useless to speculate further. It had no corroborative data from the Gnostic Ascension; that much was clear. If it reported the anomaly, it would be a lone voice.

And everyone knew what happened to lone voices.

It returned to the problem in hand. The world had returned after vanishing. The anomaly had not, thus far, repeated itself. Closer examination of the data showed that the moons—including Hela, the one Quaiche was interested in—had remained in orbit even when the gas giant had ceased to exist. This, clearly, made no sense. Nor did the apparition that had materialised, for a fleeting instant, in its place.

What was it to do?

It made a decision: it would wipe the specific facts of the vanishing from its own memories, just as the Gnostic Ascension might have done, and it, too, would populate the empty fields with made-up numbers. But it would continue to keep an observant eye on the planet. If it did something strange again, the ship would pay due attention, and then—perhaps—it would inform Quaiche of what had happened.

But not before then, and not without a great deal of trepidation.

While Vasko helped Clavain with his packing, Scorpio stepped outside the tent and, tugging aside his sleeve to reveal his communicator, opened a channel to Blood. He kept his voice low as he spoke to the other pig.

“I’ve got him. Needed a bit of persuading, but he’s agreed to come back with us.”

“You don’t sound overjoyed.”

“Clavain still has one or two issues he needs to work through.”

Blood snorted. “Sounds a bit ominous. Hasn’t gone and flipped his lid, has he?”

“I don’t know. Once or twice he mentioned seeing things.”

“Seeing things?”

“Figures in the sky, that worried me a bit—but it’s not as if he was ever the easiest man to read. I’m hoping he’ll thaw out a bit when he gets back to civilisation.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“I don’t know.” Scorpio spoke with exaggerated patience. “I’m just working on the assumption that we’re better off with him than without him.”

“Good,” Blood said doubtfully. “In which case you can skip the boat. We’re sending a shuttle.”

Scorpio frowned, pleased and confused at the same time. “Why the VIP treatment? I thought the idea was to keep this whole exercise low-profile.”

“It was, but there’s been a development.”

“The capsule?”

“Spot on,” Blood said. “It’s only gone and started warming up. Fucking thing’s sparked into automatic revival mode. Bio-indicators changed status about an hour ago. It’s started waking whoever or whatever’s inside it.”

“Right. Great. Excellent. And there’s nothing you can do about it?”

“We can just about repair a sewage pump, Scorp. Anything cleverer than that is a bit outside of our remit right now. Clavain might have a shot at slowing it down, of course…”

With his head full of Conjoiner implants, Clavain could talk to machines in a way that no one else on Ararat could.

“How long have we got?”

“About eleven hours.”

“Eleven hours. And you waited until now to tell me this?”

“I wanted to see if you were bringing Clavain back with you.”

Scorpio wrinkled his nose. “And if I’d told you I wasn’t?”

Blood laughed. “Then we’d be getting our boat back, wouldn’t we?”

“You’re a funny pig, Blood, but don’t make a career out of it.”

Scorpio killed the link and returned to the tent, where he revealed the change of plan. Vasko, with barely concealed excitement, asked why it had been altered. Scorpio, anxious not to introduce any factor that might upset Clavain’s decision, avoided the question.

“You can take back as much stuff as you like,” Scorpio told Clavain, looking at the miserable bundle of personal effects Clavain had assembled. “We don’t have to worry about capsizing now.”

Clavain gathered the bundle and passed it to Vasko. “I already have all I need.”

“Fine,” Scorpio said. “I’ll make sure the rest of your things are looked after when we send someone out to dismantle the tent.”

“The tent stays here,” Clavain said. Coughing, he pulled on a heavy full-length black coat. He used his long-nailed fingers to brush his hair away from his eyes, sweeping it back over his crown; it fell in white and silver waves over the high stiff collar of the coat. When he had stopped coughing he added, “And my things stay in the tent as well. You really weren’t listening, were you?”

“I heard you,” Scorpio said. “I just didn’t want to hear you.”

“Start listening, friend. That’s all I ask of you.” Clavain patted him on the back. He reached for the cloak he had been wearing earlier, fingered the fabric and then put it aside. Instead he opened the desk and removed an object sheathed in a black leather holster.

“A gun?” Scorpio asked.

“Something more reliable,” Clavain said. “A knife.”

Quaiche worked his way along the absurdly narrow companionway that threaded the Dominatrix from nose to tail. The ship ticked and purred around him, like a room full of well-oiled clocks.

“It’s a bridge. That’s all I can tell at the moment.”

“What type of bridge?” Morwenna asked.

“A long, thin one, like a whisker of glass. Very gently curved, stretching across a kind of ravine or fissure.”

“I think you’re getting overexcited. If it’s a bridge, wouldn’t someone else have seen it already? Leaving aside whoever put it there in the first place.”

“Not necessarily,” Quaiche said. He had thought of this al-ready, and had what he considered to be a fairly plausible explanation. He tried not to make it sound too well rehearsed as he recounted it. “For a start, it isn’t at all obvious. It’s big, but if you weren’t looking carefully, you might easily miss it. A quick sweep through the system wouldn’t necessarily have picked it up. The moon might have had the wrong face turned to the observer, or the shadows might have hidden it, or the scanning resolution might not have been good enough to pick up such a delicate feature… it’d be like looking for a cobweb with a radar. No matter how careful you are, you’re not going to see it unless you use the right tools.” Quaiche bumped his head as he wormed around the tight right angle that permitted entry into the excursion bay. “Anyway, there’s no evidence that anyone ever came here before us. The system’s a blank in the nomenclature database—that’s why we got first dibs on the name. If someone ever did come through before, they couldn’t even be bothered tossing a few classical references around, the lazy sods.”