Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

“If we need to leave quickly,” Clavain said, “could we do it? Could any of the other ships be used? Once the Zodiacal Light arrives, they only have to reach orbit. I’m not asking for full space-worthiness, just something that will make a few trips.”

“ Zodiacal Light will have its own shuttles,” Scorpio said. “And even if it doesn’t, we still have the only ship we need to reach orbit.”

“You’d better hope and pray we neyer have to use it,” Clavain said.

“By the time we need the shuttles,” Scorpio said, “we’ll have contingencies in place.”

“The time we need them might be this evening . Has that occurred to you?”

They had arrived at the entrance to the cordon of structures surrounding the dome. As they approached it, another pig stepped out into the night, moving with the exaggerated side-to-side swagger common to his kind. He was shorter and stockier than Scorpio, if such a thing were possible. His shoulders were so massive and yokelike that his arms hung some distance from the sides of his body, swinging like pendulums when he walked. He looked as if he could pull a man limb from limb.

The pig glared at Vasko, deep frown lines notching his brow. “Looking at something, kid?”

Vasko hurried out his answer. “No, sir.”

“Relax, Blood,” Scorpio said. “Vasko’s had a busy day. He’s just a bit overwhelmed by it all. Right, son?”

“Yes, sir.”

The pig called Blood nodded at Clavain. “Good to have you back, old guy.”

Quaiche was still close enough to Morwenna for real-time communication. “You won’t like what I’m going to do,” he said, “but this is for the good of both of us.”

Her reply came after a crackle of static. “You promised you wouldn’t be long.”

“I still intend to keep that promise. I’m not going to be gone one minute longer than I said. This is more about you than me, actually.”

“How so?” she asked.

“I’m worried that there might be something down on Hela apart from the bridge. I’ve been picking up a metallic echo and it hasn’t gone away. Could be nothing—probably is nothing—but I can’t take the chance that it might be a booby trap. I’ve encountered this kind of thing before and it makes me nervous.”

“Then turn around,” Morwenna said.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t. I really need to check out this bridge. If I don’t come back with something good, Jasmina’s going to have me for breakfast.” He would leave it to Morwenna to figure out what that would mean for her, still buried in the scrimshaw suit with Grelier her only hope of escape.

“But you can’t just walk into a trap,” Morwenna said.

“I’m more worried about you, frankly. The Daughter will take care of me, but if I trigger something it might start taking pot shots at anything it sees, up to and including the Dominatrix .”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I thought about having you pull away from the Haldora/Hela system, but that would waste too much time and fuel. I’ve got a better idea: we’ll use what we’ve been given. Haldora is a nice, fat shield. It’s just sitting there doing nothing. I’m going to put it between you and whatever’s on Hela, make some bloody use of the thing.”

Morwenna considered the implications for a few seconds. There was a sudden urgency in her voice. “But that will mean…”

“Yes, we’ll be out of line-of-sight contact, so we won’t be able to talk to each other. But it’ll only be for a few hours, six at the most.” He got that in before she could protest further. “I’ll program the Dominatrix to wait behind Haldora for six hours, then return to its present position relative to Hela. Not so bad, is it? Get some sleep and you’ll barely realise I’m gone.”

“Don’t do this, Horris. I don’t want to be in a place where I can’t talk to you.”

“It’s only for six hours.”

When she responded she did not sound any calmer, but he could hear the shift in pitch in her voice that meant she had at least accepted the futility of argument. “But if something happens in that time—if you need me, or I need you—we won’t be able to talk.”

“Only for six hours,” he said. “Three hundred minutes or so. Nothing. Be done in a flash.”

“Can’t you drop some relays, so we can still keep in touch?”

“Don’t think so. I could sew some passive reflectors around Haldora, but that’s exactly the kind of thing that might lead a smart missile back to you. Anyway, it would take a couple of hours to get them into position. I could be down under the bridge by then.”

“I’m frightened, Horris. I really don’t want you to do this.”

“I have to,” he said. “I just have to.”

“Please don’t.”

“I’m afraid the plan is already under way,” Quaiche replied gently. “I’ve sent the necessary commands to the Dominatrix . It’s moving, love. It’ll be inside Haldora’s shadow in about thirty minutes.”

There was silence. He thought for a moment that the link might already have broken, that his calculations had been in error. But then she said, “So why did you bother to ask me if you’d already made up your mind?”

For the first day they travelled hard, putting as much distance between themselves and the badlands communities as possible. For hours on end they sped along white-furrowed trails, slicing through slowly changing terrain beneath a sable sky. Occasionally they passed a transponder tower; an outpost or even another machine moving in the other direction.

Rashmika gradually became used to the hypnotic, bouncing motion of the skis, and was able to walk around the icejammer without losing her balance. Now and then she sat in her personal compartment, her knees folded up to her chin, looking out of the window at the speeding landscape and imagining that every malformed rock or ice fragment contained a splinter of alien empire. She thought about the scuttlers a lot, picturing the blank pages of her book filling with neat handwriting and painstaking crosshatched drawings.

She drank coffee or tea, consumed rations and occasionally spoke to Culver, though not as often he would have wished.

When she had planned her escape—except “escape” wasn’t quite the right word, because it was not as if she was actually running from anything—but when she had planned it, anyway, she had seldom thought very far beyond the point when she left the village. The few times she had allowed her mind to wander past that point, she had always imagined herself feeling vastly more relaxed now that the difficult part:—actually leaving her home, and the village—was over.

It wasn’t like that at all. She was not as tense as when she had climbed out of her home, but only because it would have been impossible to stay in that state for very long. Instead she had come down to a plateau of continual tension, a knot in her stomach that would not undo. Partly it was because she was now thinking ahead, into the territory she had left vague until now. Suddenly, dealing with the churches was a looming concrete event in the near future. But she was also concerned about what she had left behind. Three days, even six, had not seemed like such a long time when she had been planning the trip to the caravans, but now she counted every hour. She imagined the village mobilising behind her, realising what had happened and uniting to bring her back. She imagined constabulary officers following the icejammer in fast vehicles of their own. None of them liked Crozet or Linxe to begin with. They would assume that the couple had talked her into it, that in some way they were the real agents of her misfortune. If they caught up, she would be chastised, but Crozet and Linxe would be ripped apart by the mob.