Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

He turned, vectoring along the length of the rift. He had drifted one or two kilometres out from the nearest wall, but the more distant one looked no closer than it had before he crossed the threshold. The spacing of the walls was irregular, but here at the equator the sides of the rift were never closer than thirty-five kilometres apart. The rift was a minimum of five or six kilometres deep, pitching down to ten or eleven in the deepest, most convoluted parts of the valley floor. The feature was hellishly vast, and Quaiche came to the gradual conclusion that he did not actually like being in it very much. It was too much like hanging between the sprung jaws of a trap.

He checked the clock: four hours before the Dominatrix was due to emerge from the far side of Haldora. Four hours was a long time; he expected to be on his way back well before then.

“Hang on, Mor,” he said. “Not long now.”

But of course she did not hear him.

He had entered the rift south of the equator and was now moving towards the northern hemisphere. The fractured mosaic of the floor oozed beneath him. Measured against the far wall, the motion of his ship was hardly apparent at all, but the nearer wall slid past quickly enough to give him some indication of his speed. Occasionally he lost his grasp of scale, and for a moment the rift would become much smaller. These were the dangerous moments, for it was usually when an alien landscape became familiar, homely and containable that it would reach out and kill you.

Suddenly he saw the bridge coming over the horizon between the pinning walls. His heart hammered in his chest. No doubt at all now, if ever there had been any: the bridge was a made thing, a confection of glistening thin threads. He wished Morwenna were here to see it as well.

He was recording all the while as the bridge came closer, looming kilometres above him: a curving arc connected to the walls of the rift at either end by a bewildering filigree of supporting scrollwork. There was no need to linger. Just one sweep under the span would be enough to convince Jasmina. They could come back later with heavy-duty equipment, if that was what she wished.

Quaiche looked up in wonder as he passed under the bridge. The roadbed—what else was he meant to call it?—bisected the face of Haldora, glowing slightly against the darkness of the gas giant. It was perilously thin, a ribbon of milky white. He wondered what it would be like to cross it on foot.

The Daughter swerved violently, the gee-force pushing red curtains into his vision.

“What…” Quaiche began.

But there was no need to ask: the Daughter was taking evasive action, doing exactly what she was meant to. Something was trying to attack him. Quaiche blacked out, hit consciousness again, blacked out once more. The landscape hurtled around him, pulsing bright light back at him, reflected from the Daughter’s steering thrusters. Blackout again. Fleeting consciousness. There was a roaring in his ears. He saw the bridge from a series of abrupt, disconnected angles, like jumbled snapshots. Below it. Above it. Below it again. The Daughter was trying to find shelter.

This wasn’t right. He should have been up and out, no questions asked. The Daughter was supposed to get him away from any possible threat as quickly as possible. This veering—this indecision—was not characteristic at all.

Unless she was cornered. Unless she couldn’t find an escape route.

In a window of lucidity he saw the situational display on the console. Three hostile objects were firing at him. They had emerged from niches in the ice, three metallic echoes that had nothing to do with the first one he had seen.

The Scavenger’s Daughter shook herself like a wet dog. Quaiche saw the exhaust plumes of his own miniature missiles whipping away, corkscrewing and zigzagging to avoid being shot down by the buried sentries. Blackout again. This time when he came around he saw a small avalanche oozing down one side of the cliff. One of the attacking objects was now offline: at least one of his missiles had found its mark.

The console flickered. The hull’s opacity switched to absolute black. When the hull cleared and the console recovered he was looking at emergency warnings across the board, scribbled in fiery red Latinate script. It had been a bad hit.

Another shiver, another pack of missiles streaking away. They were tiny things, thumb-sized antimatter rockets with kilotonne yields.

Black-out again. A sensation of falling when he came round.

Another little avalanche; one fewer attacker on the display. One of the sentries was still out there, and he had no more ordnance to throw at it. But it wasn’t firing. Perhaps it was damaged—or maybe just reloading.

The Daughter dithered, caught in a maelstrom of possibilities.

“Executive override,” Quaiche said. “Get me out of here.”

The gee-force came hard and immediately. Again, curtains of red closed on his vision. But he did not black out this time. The ship was keeping the blood in his head, drying to preserve his consciousness for as long as possible.

He saw the landscape drop away below, saw the bridge from above.

Then something else hit him. The little ship stalled, thrust interrupted for a jaw-snapping instant. She struggled to regain power, but something—some vital propulsion subsystem—must have taken a serious hit.

The landscape hung motionless below him. Then it began to approach again.

He was going down.

Fade to black. Quaiche fell obliquely towards the vertical wall of the rift, slipping in and out of consciousness. He assumed he was going to die, smeared across that sheer cliff face in an instant of glittering destruction, but at the last moment before impact, the Scavenger’s Daughter used some final hoarded gasp of thrust to soften the crash.

It was still bad, even as the hull deformed to soften the blow. The wall wheeled around: now a cliff, now a horizon, now a flat plane pressing down from the sky. Quaiche blacked out, came to consciousness, blacked out again. He saw the bridge wheel around in the distance. Clouds of ice and rubble were still belching from the avalanche points in the sides of the cliff where his missiles had taken out the attacking sentries.

All the while, Quaiche and his tiny jewel of a ship tumbled towards the floor of the rift.

Vasko followed Clavain and Scorpio into the administration compound, Blood escorting them through a maze of underpopulated rooms and corridors. Vasko expected to be turned back at any moment: his Security Arm clearance definitely did not extend to this kind of business. But although each security check was more stringent than the last, his presence was ac-cepted. Vasko supposed it unlikely that anyone was going to argue with Scorpio and Clavain about their choice of guest.

Presently they arrived at a quarantine point deep within the compound, a medical centre housing several freshly made beds. Waiting for them in the quarantine centre was a sallow-faced human physician named Valensin. He wore enormous rhomboid-lensed spectacles; his thin black hair was glued back from his scalp in brilliant waves, and he carried a small scuffed bag of medical tools. Vasko had never met Valensin before, but as the highest-ranking physician on the planet, his name was familiar.

“How do you feel, Nevil?” Valensin asked.

“I feel like a man overstaying his welcome in history,” Clavain said.

“Never one for a straight answer, were you?” But even as he was speaking Valensin had whipped some silvery apparatus from his bag and was now shining it into Clavain’s eyes, squinting through a little eyepiece of his own.