Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

Quaiche adjusted the radar, making sure that the echo was genuine. It did not vanish. He had not seen it before, but it would have been at the limit of his sensor range until now. The Dominatrix would have missed it entirely.

He didn’t like it. He had convinced himself that there had never been a human presence out here and now he was getting exactly the sort of signature he would have expected from discarded junk.

“Be careful,” he said to himself.

On an earlier mission, he had been approaching a moon a little smaller than Hela. There had been something on it that enticed him, and he had advanced incautiously. Near the surface he had picked up a radar echo similar to this one, a glint of something down there. He had pushed on, ignoring his better instincts.

The thing had turned out to be a booby trap. A particle cannon had popped out of the ice and locked on to his ship. Its beam had chewed holes in the ship’s armour, nearly frying Quaiche in the process. He had made it back to safety, but not before sustaining nearly fatal damage to both the ship and himself. He had recovered and the ship had been repaired, but for years afterwards he had been wary of similar traps. Things got left behind: automated sentries, plonked down on worlds centuries earlier to defend property claims or mining rights. Sometimes they kept on working long after their original owners were dust.

Quaiche had been lucky: the sentry, or whatever it was, had been damaged, its beam less powerful than it had once been. He had got off with a warning, a reminder not to assume anything. And now he was in serious danger of making the same mistake again.

He reviewed his options. The presence of a metallic echo was dispiriting, making him doubtful that the bridge was as ancient and alien as he had hoped. But he would not know until he was closer, and that would mean approaching the source of the echo. If it was indeed a waiting sentry, he would be placing himself in harm’s way. But, he reminded himself, the Scavenger’s Daughter was a good ship, nimble, smart and well armoured. She was crammed with intelligence and guile. Reflexes were not much use against a relativistic weapon like a particle beam, but the Daughter would be monitoring the source of the echo all the while, just in case there was some movement before firing. The instant the ship saw anything she found alarming, she would execute a high-gee random evasion pattern designed to prevent the beam-weapon from predicting its position. The ship knew the precise physiological tolerances of Quaiche’s body, and was prepared nearly to kill him in the interests of his ultimate survival. If she got really annoyed, she would deploy microde-fences of her own.

“I’m all right,” Quaiche said aloud. “I can go deeper and still come out of this laughing. I’m sorted .”

But he had to consider Morwenna as well. The Dominatrix was further away, granted, but it was slower and less responsive. It would be a stretch for a beam-weapon to take out the Dominatrix , but it was not impossible. And there were other weapons that a sentry might deploy, such as hunter-seeker missiles. There might even be a distributed network of the things, talking to each other.

Hell, he thought. It might not even be a sentry. It might just be a metal-rich boulder or a discarded fuel tank. But he had to assume the very worst. He needed to keep Morwenna alive. Equally, he needed the Dominatrix to be able to get back to Jasmina. He could not risk losing either his lover or the ship that was now her extended prison. Somehow, he had either to protect both of them or give up now. He was not in the mood to give up. But how was he going to safeguard his ticket out of there and his lover without waiting hours for them to get a safe distance away from Hela?

Of course . The answer was obvious. It was—almost—staring him in the face. It was beautifully simple and it made elegant use of local resources. Why had he not thought of it sooner?

All he had to do was hide them behind Haldora.

He made the necessary arrangements, then opened the communications channel back to Morwenna.

Vasko observed the approach to the main island with great interest. They had been flying over black ocean for so long that it was a relief to see any evidence of human presence. Yet at the same time the lights of the outlying settlements, strung out in the filaments, arcs and loops that implied half-familiar bays, peninsulas and tiny islands, looked astonishingly fragile and evanescent. Even when the brighter outlying sprawls of First Camp came into view, they still looked as if they could be quenched at any moment, no more permanent or meaningful than a fading pattern of bonfire embers. Vasko had always known that the human presence on Ararat was insecure, something that could never be taken for granted. It had been drummed into him since he was tiny. But until now he had never felt it viscerally.

He had-created a window for himself in the hull of the shuttle, using his fingertip to sketch out the area he wanted to become transparent. Clavain had shown him how to do that, demonstrating the trick with something close to pride. Vasko suspected that the hull still looked perfectly black from the outside and that he was really looking at a form of screen which exactly mimicked the optical properties of glass. But where old technology was concerned—and the shuttle was very definitely old technology—it never paid to take anything for granted. All he knew for certain was that he was flying, and that he knew of none amongst his peers who had ever done that before.

The shuttle had homed in on the signal from Scorpio’s bracelet. Vasko had watched it descend out of the cloud layer attended by spirals and curlicues of disturbed air. Red and green lights had blinked on either side of a hull of polished obsidian that had the deltoid, concave look of a manta ray.

At least a third of the surface area of the underside had been painfully bright: grids of actinically bright, fractally folded thermal elements hazed in a cocoon of flickering purple-indigo plasma. Elaborate clawed undercarriage had emerged from the cool spots on the underside, unfolding and elongating in a hypnotic ballet of pistons and hinges. Neon patterns had flicked on in the upper hull, delineating access hatches, hotspots and exhaust apertures. The shuttle had picked its landing zone, rotating and touching down with dainty precision, the undercarriage contracting to absorb the weight of the craft. For a moment the roar of the plasma heaters had remained, before stopping with unnerving suddenness. The plasma had dissipated, leaving only a nasty charred smell.

Vasko had caught glimpses of the colony’s aircraft before, but only from a distance. This was the most impressive thing he had seen.

The three of them had walked towards the boarding ramp. They had almost reached it when Clavain misjudged his footfall and began to tumble towards the rocks. Vasko and the pig had both lurched forward at the same time, but it was Vasko who had taken the brunt of Clavain’s weight. There had been a moment of relief and shock—Clavain had felt terribly light, like a sack of straw. Vasko’s intake of breath had been loud, distinct even above the kettlelike hissing of the transport.

“Are you all right, sir?” he had asked.

Clavain had looked at him sharply. “I’m an old man,” he had replied. “You mustn’t expect the world of me.”

Reflecting now on his past few hours in Clavain’s presence, Vasko had no idea what to make of him. One minute the old man was showing him around the shuttle with a kind of avuncular hospitality, asking him about his family, complimenting him on the perspicacity of his questions, sharing jokes with him in the manner of a long-term confidant. The next minute he was as icy and distant as a comet.