Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

The tiny ship fell away from the Dominatrix , orientating herself with a quick, excited shiver of thrust. To Quaiche it always felt as if the craft enjoyed her sudden liberation from the docking harness.

He lay with his arms stretched ahead of his face, each hand gripping an elaborate control handle bristling with buttons and levers. Between the control handles was a head-up display screen showing an overview of the Scavenger’s Daughter’s systems and a schematic of her position in relation to the nearest major celestial body. The diagrams had the sketchy, cross-hatched look of early Renaissance astronomy or medical illustrations: quilled black ink against sepia parchment, annotated in crabby Latin script. His dim reflection hovered in the glass of the head-up display.

Through the translucent hull he watched the docking bay seal itself. The

Dominatrix grew rapidly smaller, dwindling until it was only a dark, vaguely cruciform scratch against the face of Haldora. He thought of Morwenna, still inside the Dominatrix and encased within the scrimshaw suit, with a renewed sense of urgency. The bridge on Hela was without doubt the strangest thing he had seen in all his travels. If this was not precisely the kind of exotic item Jasmina was interested in, then he had no idea what was. All he had to do was sell it to her, and make her forgive him his earlier failures. If a huge alien artefact didn’t do the trick, what would?

When it became difficult to pick out the other ship without an overlay, Quaiche felt a palpable easing in his mood. Aboard the Dominatrix he never entirely lost the feeling that he was under the constant vigilance of Queen Jasmina. It was entirely possible that the queen’s agents had installed listening devices in addition to those he was meant to know about. Aboard the much smaller Scavenger’s Daughter , though, he seldom felt Jasmina’s eye on him. The little ship actually belonged to him: she answered only to Quaiche and was the single most valuable asset he had ever owned in his life. She had been a not-insignificant incentive when he had first offered his services to the queen.

The Ultras were undoubtedly clever, but he did not think they were quite clever enough to bypass the many systems the Daughter carried aboard her to prevent surveillance taps or other forms of unwarranted intrusion. It was not much of an empire, Quaiche supposed, but the little ship was his and that was all that mattered. In her he could revel in solitude, every sense splayed open to the absolute.

To feel oneself so tiny, so fragile, so inherently losable, was at first spiritually crushing. But, by the same token, this realisation was also strangely liberating: if an individual human existence meant so little, if one’s actions were so cosmically irrelevant, then the notion of some absolute moral framework made about as much sense as the universal ether. Measured against the infinite, therefore, people were no more capable of meaningful sin—or meaningful good—than ants, or dust.

Worlds barely registered sin. Suns hardly deigned to notice it. On the scale of solar systems and galaxies, it meant nothing at all. It was like some obscure subatomic force that simply petered out on those scales.

For a long time this realisation had formed an important element of Quaiche’s personal creed, and he supposed he had always lived by it, to one degree or another. But it had taken space travel—and the loneliness that his new profession brought—to give him some external validation of his philosophy.

But now there was something in his universe that really mattered to him, something that could be hurt by his own actions. How had it come to this? he wondered. How had he allowed himself to make such a fatal mistake as to fall in love? And especially with a creature as exotic and complicated as Morwenna?

“Where had it all begun to go wrong?

Gloved within the Daughter’s hull, he barely felt the surge of acceleration as the ship powered up to her maximum sustainable thrust. The sliver of the Dominatrix was utterly lost now; it may as well not have existed.

Quaiche’s ship aimed for Hela, Haldora’s largest moon.

He opened a communications channel back to the Gnostic Ascension to record a message.

“This is Quaiche. I trust all is well, ma’am. Thank you for the little incentive you saw fit to pop aboard. Very thoughtful of you. Or was that all Grelier’s work? A droll gesture, one that—I’m sure you can imagine—was also appreciated by Morwenna.” He waited a moment. “Well, to business. You may be interested to hear that I have detected… something: a large horizontal structure on the moon that we’re calling Hela. It looks rather like a bridge. Beyond that, I can’t say for sure. The Dominatrix doesn’t have the sensor range, and I don’t want to risk taking it closer. But I think it is very likely to be an artificial structure. I am therefore investigating the object using the Scavenger’s Daughter —she’s faster, smarter and she has better armour. I do not expect my excursion to last more than twenty-six hours. I will of course keep you informed of any developments.“

Quaiche replayed the message and decided that it would be unwise to transmit it. Even if he did find something, even if that something turned out to be more valuable than anything he had turned up in the five previous systems, the queen would still accuse him of making it sound more promising than it actually was. She did not like to be disappointed. The way to play the queen, Quaiche now knew, was with studied understatement. Give her hints, not promises.

He wiped the message and started again.

“Quaiche here. Have an anomaly that requires further investigation. Commencing EVA excursion in the Daughter . Estimate return to the Dominatrix within… one day.”

He listened to that and decided it was an improvement, but not quite there yet.

He scrubbed the buffer again and drew a deep breath.

“Quaiche. Popping outside for a bit. May be some time. Call you back.”

There. That did it.

He transmitted the buffer, aiming the message laser in the computed direction of the Gnostic Ascension and applying the usual encryption filters and relativistic corrections. The queen would receive his announcement in seven hours. He hoped she would be suitably mystified, without in any way being able to claim that he was exaggerating the likely value of a find.

Keep the bitch guessing.

What Culver had told Rashmika Els was not quite the truth. The icejammer was moving as quickly as it could in ambulatory mode, but once it cleared the slush and obstacles of the village and hit a well-maintained trail, it locked its two rear legs in a fixed configuration and began to move by itself, as if pushed along by an invisible hand. Rashmika had heard enough about icejammers to know that the trick was down to a layer of material on the soles of the skis that was programmed with a rapid microscopic ripple. It was the same way slugs moved, scaled up a few thousand times in both size and speed. The ride became smoother and quieter then; there was still the occasional lurch or veer, but for the most part it was tolerable.

“That’s better,” Rashmika said, now sitting up front with just Crozet and his wife Linxe. “I thought I was going to…”

“Throw up, dear?” Linxe asked. “There’s no shame in that. We’ve all thrown up around here.”

“She can’t do this on anything other than smooth ground,” Crozet said. “Trouble is, she doesn’t walk properly either. Servo’s fucked on one of the legs. That’s why it was so rough back there. It’s also the reason we’re making this trip. The caravans carry the kind of high-tech shit we can’t make or repair back in the badlands.”