Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

“All the same,” Khouri said, “I don’t think there was any actual deception. Nothing that wasn’t absolutely essential for the sake of my sanity, anyhow.”

“Tell us about your later visits,” Clavain said.

“I went in alone the first few times. Then it was always with someone else—Remontoire sometimes, Thorn, a few other volunteers.”

“But always you?” Clavain asked.

“The matrix accepted me. No one was willing to take the risk of going in without me.”

“I don’t blame them.” Clavain paused, but it was apparent to all present that he had something more to say. “But Thorn died, didn’t he?”

“We were falling towards the neutron star,” she said, “just the way we always did, and then something hit us. Maybe an energy burst from a stray weapon, we’ll never know for sure; it might have been orbiting Hades for a million years, or it could have been something from the Inhibitors, something they risked placing that close to the star. It wasn’t enough to destroy the capsule, but it was enough to kill Thorn.”

She stopped speaking, allowing an uncomfortable silence to invade the room. Scorpio looked around, observing that everyone had their eyes downcast; that no one dared look at Khouri, not even Hallatt.

Khouri resumed speaking. “The star captured me alive, but Thorn was dead. It couldn’t reassemble what was left of him into a living being.”

“I’m sorry,” Clavain said, his voice barely audible.

“There’s something else,” Khouri said, her voice nearly as quiet.

“Go on.”

“Part of Thorn did survive. We’d made love on the long fall to Hades, and so when I went into the star, I took a part of him with me. I was pregnant.”

Clavain waited a decent while before answering, allowing her words to settle in, giving them the dignified space they warranted. “And Thorn’s child?”

“She’s Aura,” Khouri said. “The baby Skade stole from me. The child I came here to get back.”

The room in which Palfrey had been told to wait for Scorpio was a small annexe off one of the larger storage areas used by bilge management, the branch of the administration tasked with keeping the lower levels of the ship as dry as possible. The curved walls of the little chamber were layered with a glossy grey-green plaque that had hardened into stringy, waxy formations. The smooth floor was sheet metal. Anchored to it with thick bolts was a small, battered desk from Central Amenities, upon which lay an ashtray, a half-empty beaker of something tarlike and the parts of several dismantled bilge pump assemblies. Bookended by the pump parts was what Scorpio took to be a vacuum helmet of antique design, silver paint peeling from its metal shell. Behind the desk, Palfrey sat chain-smoking, his eyes red with fatigue, his sparse black hair messed across the sunburned pink of his scalp. He wore khaki overalls with many pockets, and some kind of breathing apparatus hung around his neck on frayed cords.

“I understand you saw something,” Scorpio said, pulling up another chair, the legs squealing horribly against the metal, and sitting in it the wrong way around, facing the man with his legs splayed either side of the backrest.

“That’s what I told my boss. All right if I go home now?”

“Your boss didn’t give me a very clear description. I’d like to know a bit more.” Scorpio smiled at Palfrey. “Then we can all go home.”

Palfrey stubbed out his current cigarette. “Why? It’s not as if you believe me, is it?”

Scorpio’s headache had not improved. “Why do you say that?”

“Everyone knows you don’t believe in the sightings. You think we’re just finding reasons to skive off the deep-level duties.”

“It’s true that your boss will have to arrange a new detail for that part of the ship, and it’s true that I don’t believe all the reports that reach my desk. Many of them, however, I’m inclined to take seriously. Often they follow a pattern, clustering in one part of the ship, or moving up and down a series of adjacent levels. It’s as if the Captain focuses on an area to haunt and then sticks with it until he’s made his point. You ever seen him before?”

“First time,” Palfrey said, his hands trembling. His fingers were bony, the bright-pink knuckles like blisters ready to pop.

“Tell me what you saw.”

“I was alone. The nearest team was three levels away, fixing another pump failure. I’d gone down to look at a unit that might have been overheating. I had my toolkit with me and that was all. I wasn’t planning to spend much time down there. None of us like working those deep levels, and definitely not alone.”

“I thought it was policy not to send anyone in alone below level six hundred.”

“It is.”

“So what were you doing down there by yourself?”

“If we stuck to the rules you’d have a flooded ship in about a week.”

“I see.” He tried to sound surprised, but he heard the same story about a dozen times a week, all over the colony. Individually, everyone thought they were on the only team being stretched past breaking point. Collectively, the whole settlement was lurching from one barely contained crisis to another. But only Scorpio and a handful of his lieutenants knew that.

“We don’t fiddle the timesheets,” Palfrey volunteered, as if this must have been next thing on Scorpio’s mind.

“Why don’t you tell me about the apparition? You were down looking at the hot pump. What happened?”

“Out of the comer of my eye, I saw something move. Couldn’t tell what it was at first—it’s dark down there, and our lights don’t work as well as they should. You imagine a lot of stuff, so you don’t immediately jump out of your skin the first time you think you see something. But when I shone the light on it and looked properly, there was definitely something there.”

“Describe it.”

“It looked like machinery. Junk. Old pump mechanisms, old servitor parts. Wires. Cables. Stuff that must have been lying down there for twenty years.”

“You saw machinery and you thought that was an apparition?”

“It wasn’t just machinery,” Palfrey said defensively. “It was organised, gathered together, lashed into something larger. It was man-shaped. It just stood there, watching me.”

“Did you hear it approach?”

“No. As I said, it was just junk. It could have been there all along, waiting until I noticed it.”

“And when you did notice it—what happened then?”

“It looked at me. The head—it was made up of hundreds of little bits—moved, as if acknowledging me. And I saw something in the face, like an expression. It wasn’t just a machine. There was a mind there. A distinct purpose.” Redundantly, he added, “I didn’t like it.”

Scorpio drummed the tips of his fingers against the seat-back. “If it helps, what you saw was a class-three apparition. A class one is a localised change in the atmospheric conditions of the ship: an unexplained breeze, or a drop in temperature. They’re the commonest kind, reported almost daily. Only a fraction probably have anything at all to do with the Captain.”

“We’ve all experienced those,” Palfrey said.

“A class two is a little rarer. We define it as a recognisable speech sound, a word or sentence fragment, or even a whole statement. Again, there’s an element of uncertainty. If you’re scared and you hear the wind howl, it’s easy to imagine a word or two.”

“It wasn’t one of those.”

“No, clearly not. Which brings us to a class-three manifestation: a physical presence, transient or otherwise, manifesting either via a local physical alteration of the ship’s fabric—a face appearing in a wall, for instance—or the coopting of an available mechanism or group of mechanisms. What you saw was clearly the latter.”