Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

“I’m sure we’re safe and sound,” Rashmika said.

“Never you mind about that. A few extra miles won’t hurt us. Now go back and try to get yourself some sleep, young lady. We’ve another long day ahead of us tomorrow and I can’t swear we’ll be out of the woods even then.”

Linxe was already easing into the driver’s position, running her thick babylike fingers over the icejammer’s timeworn controls. Until Crozet had mentioned pulling over for the night, Rashmika had assumed that the machine would keep travelling using some kind of autopilot, even if it had to slow down a little while it guided itself. It was a genuine shock to learn that they would be going nowhere unless someone operated the ice-jammer manually.

“I can do a bit,” she offered. “I’ve never driven one of these before, but if someone wants to show me…”

“We’ll do fine, love,” Linxe said, “It’s not just Crozet and me, either. Culver can do a shift in the morning.”

“I wouldn’t want…”

“Oh, don’t worry about Culver,” Crozet said. “He needs something else to occupy his hands.”

Linxe slapped her husband, but she was smiling as she did it. Rashmika finished her now-cold chocolate drink, dog-tired but glad that she had at least made it through the first day. She was under no illusions that she was done with the worst of her journey, but she supposed that every successful stage had to be treated as a small victory in its own right. She just wished she could tell her parents not to worry about her, that she had made good progress so far and was thinking of them all the time. But she had vowed not to send a message home until she had joined the caravan.

Crozet walked her back through the rumbling innards of the icejammer. It moved differently under Linxe’s direction. It was not that she was a worse or even a better driver than Crozet, but she definitely favoured a different driving style. The icejammer flounced, flinging itself through the air in long, weightless parabolic arcs. It was all quite conducive to sleep, but a sleep filled with uneasy dreams in which Rashmika found herself endlessly falling.

She woke the next morning to troubling and yet strangely welcome news.

“There’s been an alert on the news service,” Crozet said. ‘The word’s gone out now, Rashmika. You’re officially missing and there’s a search operation in progress. Doesn’t that make you feel proud?“

“Oh,” she said, wondering what could have happened since the night before.

“It’s the constabulary,” Linxe said, meaning the law-enforcement organisation that had jurisdiction in the Vigrid region. “They’ve sent out search parties, apparently. But there’s a good chance we’ll make the caravan before they find us. Once we get you on the caravan, the constabulary can’t touch you.”

“I’m surprised they’ve actually sent out parties,” Rashmika said. “It’s not as if I’m in any danger, is it?”

“Actually, there’s a bit more to it than that,” Crozet said.

Linxe looked at her husband.

What did the two of them know that Rashmika didn’t? Suddenly she felt a tension in her belly, a line of cold trickling down her spine. “Go on,” she said.

“They say they want to bring you back for questioning,” Linxe said.

“For running away from home? Haven’t they got anything better to do with their time?”

“It’s not for running away from home,” Linxe said. Again she glanced at Crozet. “It’s about that sabotage last week. You know the one I mean, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Rashmika said, remembering the crater where the demolition store had been.

“They’re saying you did it,” Crozet said.

Out of orbit now, Quaiche felt his weight increasing as the Daughter slowed down to only a few thousand kilometres per hour. Hela swelled, its hectic terrain rising up to meet him. The radar echo—the metallic signature—was still there. So was the bridge.

Quaiche had decided to spiral closer rather than making a concerted dash for the structure. Even on the first loop in, still thousands of kilometres above Hela’s surface, what he had seen had been tantalising, like a puzzle he needed to assemble. From deep space the rift had been visible only as a change in albedo, a dark scar slicing across the world. Now it had palpable depth, especially when he examined it with the magnifying cameras. The gouge was irregular: there were places where there was a relatively shallow slope all the way down to the valley floor, but elsewhere the walls were vertical sheets of ice-covered rock towering kilometres high, as smooth and foreboding as granite. They had the grey sheen of wet slate. The floor of the rift varied between the flatness of a dry salt lake to a crazed, fractured quilt of tilted and interlocking ice panels separated by hair-thin avenues of pure sable blackness. The closer he came the more it indeed resembled an unfinished puzzle, tossed aside by a god in a tantrum.

Once every minute or so he checked the radar. The echo was still there, and the Daughter had detected no signs of imminent attack. Perhaps it was just junk after all. The thought troubled him, for it meant someone else must have come this close to the bridge without finding it remarkable enough to report to anyone else. Or perhaps they had meant to report it, but some subsequent misfortune had befallen them. He wasn’t sure that was any less worrying, on balance.

By the time he had completed the first loop he had reduced his speed to five hundred metres a second. He was close enough to the surface now to appreciate the texturing of the ground as it changed from jagged uplands to smooth plains. It was not all ice; most of the moon’s interior was rocky, and a great deal of fractured rocky material was embedded in the ice, or lying upon it. Ash plumes radiated away from dormant volcanoes. There were slopes of fine talus and up-rearing sharp-sided boulders as big as major space habitats; some poked through the ice, tipped at absurd angles like the sterns of sinking ships; others sat on the surface, poised on one side in the manner of vast sculptural installations.

The Daughter’s thrusters burned continuously to support it against Hela’s gravity. Quaiche fell lower, edging closer to the lip of the rift. Overhead, Haldora was a brooding dark sphere illuminated only along one limb. Amused and distracted for a moment, Quaiche saw lightning storms play across the gas giant’s darkened face. The electrical arcs coiled and writhed with mesmerising slowness, like eels.

Hela was still catching starlight from the system’s sun, but shortly its orbit around Haldora would take it into the largdr world’s shadow. It was fortuitous, Quaiche thought, that the source of the echo had been on this face of Hela, or else he would have been denied the impressive spectacle of the gas giant looming over everything. If he had arrived later in the world’s rotation cycle, of course, the rift would have been pointing away from Haldora. A difference of one hundred and sixty days and he would have missed this amazing sight.

Another lightning flash. Reluctantly, Quaiche turned his attention back to Hela.

He was over the edge of Ginnungagap Rift. The ground tumbled away with unseemly haste. Even though the pull of gravity was only a quarter of a standard gee, Quaiche felt as much vertigo as he would have on a heavier world. It made perfect sense, for the drop was still fatally deep. Worse, there was no atmosphere to slow the descent of a falling object, no terminal velocity to create at least an outside chance of a survivable accident.

Never mind. The Daughter had never failed him, and he did not expect her to start now. He focused on the thing he had come to examine, and allowed the Daughter to sink lower, dropping below the zero-altitude surface datum.