Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

He was thinking about that when Khouri spoke excitedly. She had pushed ahead of them all despite their best efforts to hold her back.

“There’s something ahead,” she said, “and I think I can feel Aura now. We must be near.”

Clavain was immediately behind her. “What can you see?

“The side of something dark,” she said. “Not like the ice.”

“Must be the corvette,” Clavain said.

They advanced another ten or twelve metres, taking at least two minutes to gain that distance. The ice was so thick now that Clavain’s little knife could only hack and pare away insignificant parts of it, and Khouri was wise enough not to use her weapon so close to the heart of the iceberg. Around them, the ice formations had taken on an unsettling new character. Jaccottet’s torch beam glanced off conjunctions resembling thigh bones or weird sinewy articulations of bone and gristle.

Then the density of the obstructions thinned out. They were suddenly in the core of the iceberg. A sort of roof folded over them, veined and buttressed by enormous trunks of scaly ice rising up from the floor below. The thick weavelike tangle was also visible on the far side of the chamber.

In the middle was the ruin of a ship.

Scorpio did not consider himself any kind of an expert on Conjoiner spacecraft, but from what he did know, the moray-class corvette ought to have been a sleek ultra-black chrysalis of a vessel. It should have been flanged and spined like some awful instrument of interrogation. There should have been no hint of a seam in the light-sucking surface of its hull. And the ship should most certainly not have lain on one side, broken-backed, splayed open like a dissected specimen, its guts frozen in mid-explosion. The gore of machine entrails should not have surrounded the corpse, and nor should bits of the hull, as sharp and irregular as glass shards, have been lying around the wreck like so many toppled gravestones.

That wasn’t the only thing wrong with the ship. It was throbbing, making staccato purring noises at the low-frequency limit of Scorpio’s hearing. He felt it in his belly more than he heard it. It was the music.

“This isn’t good,” Clavain said.

“I can still feel Aura,” Khouri said. “She’s in there, Clavain.”

“There isn’t much of it left for her to be in,” he told her.

Scorpio saw that for an instant the muzzle of Khouri’s Bre-itenbach cannon tipped towards Clavain, sweeping across him. It was only for an instant, and there was nothing in Khouri’s expression to suggest that she was on the point of losing control, but it still gave him pause for thought.

“There’s still a ship here,” Scorpio said. “It may be a wreck, Nevil, but someone could be aboard it. And something’s making that music. We shouldn’t give up yet.”

“No one was about to give up,” Clavain said.

“The cold’s coming from the ship,” Khouri said. “It’s pouring out of it, as if it’s bleeding cold.”

Clavain smiled. “Bleeding cold? You can say that again.”

“Sorry?”

“Old joke. One that doesn’t work too well in Norte.”

Khouri shrugged. They walked towards the wreck.

At the foot of the sloping green-lit corridor down which she had been invited, Antoinette found an echoing chamber of indistinct proportions. She estimated that she had descended five or six levels before the corridor flattened out, but there was no point attempting to plot her position on the pocket blow-up of the main ship map. It had already proven itself to be hopelessly out of date even before the apparitions had summoned her down here.

She halted, keeping the torch on for now. Green light poked through gill-like slats in the ceiling. Wherever she aimed the beam she found machinery, huge rusting piles of it reaching as far away as the torchlight penetrated. The metallic junk ranged from curved scabs of hull plating taller than Antoinette to thumb-sized artefacts covered in brittle green corrosive fur. In between were bronze pump parts and the damaged limbs and sensory organs of shipboard servitors, tossed into loose, teetering piles. The effect was exactly as if she had stumbled into the waste room of a mechanical abattoir.

“Well, Captain,” Antoinette said. Gently, she put the helmet down in front of her. “Here I am. I presume you’ve brought me here for a reason.”

The machinery stirred. One of the heaps moved as if being pushed by an invisible hand. The slurry of mechanical parts flowed and gyred, animated by the still-working servitor parts that lay embedded in the charnel pile. The articulated limbs twitched and flexed with a mesmerising degree of coordination. Antoinette held her breath. She supposed that she had been expecting something along these lines—a fully fledged class-three apparition, exactly as Palfrey had described—but the actuality of it was still unnerving. This close, the potential dangerousness of the machinery was stark. There were sharp edges that could cut or shear, hinged parts that could crush and maim.

But the machinery did not lurch towards her. Instead it continued to shuffle and organise itself. Bits dropped to the floor, twitching stupidly. Detached limbs flexed and grasped. Eye parts goggled and blinked. The red scratches of optical lasers rammed from the pyre, sliding harmlessly over Antoinette’s chest.

She was being triangulated.

The pile collapsed. A layer of useless slurry had avalanched away to reveal the thing that had been assembling at its core. It was a machine, an accumulation of junk parts in the schematic shape of a man. The skeleton—the main armature of the thing—was composed of perhaps a dozen servitor limbs, grasping each other by their manipulators. It stood expertly balanced on the scuffed metal bulbs of ball-and-socket joints. Cables and feedlines were wrapped around it like tinsel, lashing the looser parts together. The head was a ramshackle conglomeration of sensor parts, stacked in a way that vaguely suggested the proportions of a human skull and face. In places, the cables were still sparking from intermittent short circuits. The smell of hot soldered metal hit her, slamming her back to times when she had worked on the innards of Storm Bird under the watchful supervision of her father.

“I suppose I should say hello,” Antoinette said.

There was something in one of the Captain’s hands. She hadn’t noticed it before. The limb whipped towards her and the thing arced through the air, describing a graceful parabola. A reflex made her reach out and snatch the thing from the air.

It was a pair of goggles.

“I guess you want me to put these on,” Antoinette said.

The broken black hull loomed above them. There was a tall rent in the side, a gash fringed by a scurf of something black and crystalline. Scorpio watched silently as Jaccottet knelt down and examined it. The white pulse of his breath was as crisp as a vapour trail against the ruined armour. His gloved fingers touched the froth, tracing its peculiar angularity. It was a growth of dice-sized black cubes, arranged into neatly stepped structures.

“Be careful,” Khouri said. “I think I recognise that stuff.”

“It’s Inhibitor machinery,” Clavain said, his own voice barely a breath.

“Here?” Scorpio asked.

Clavain nodded gravely. “Wolves. They’re here, now, on Ararat. I’m sorry, Scorp.”

“You’re absolutely sure? It couldn’t just be something weird that Skade was using?”

“We’re sure,” Khouri said. “Thorn and I got a dose of that stuff around Roc, in the last system. I haven’t seen it up close since then, but it’s not something you forget in a hurry. Scares the hell out of me just to see it again.”

“It doesn’t seem to be doing much,” Jaccottet said.