Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

Scorpio knelt down to pick it up.

“Careful,” Clavain said again.

Scorpio’s trotters closed on the rounded contours of the Conjoiner side arm. He tried to close his hand around the grip in such a way that he could still depress the trigger. It wasn’t possible. The grip had never been engineered for use by pigs.

In fury he tossed it to Clavain. “Maybe you can get this thing to work.”

“Easy, Scorp.” Clavain pocketed the weapon. “It won’t work for me, either, not unless Skade was very careless with her defences. But we can keep it out of harm’s way, at least.”

Khouri shouldered the cannon and lowered herself down next to the crashed armour of the figure. “It ain’t Skade,” she said. “Too big, and the helmet crest isn’t the right shape. You picking up anything, Clavain?”

“Nothing intelligible,” he said. He stilled the shivering blade of his knife and slipped it back into one of his pockets. “But let’s get that helmet off and see where we are, shall we?”

“We don’t have time to waste,” Scorpio said.

Clavain started working the helmet seals. “This will only take a moment.”

The extremities of Scorpio’s hands were numb, his coordination beginning to show signs of impairment. He did not doubt that Clavain was suffering much the same thing; it must have taken real strength and precision to unlock the intricate mechanism of the helmet seal.

There was a latching sound, then a scrape of metal against metal and a gasp of equalising air pressure. The helmet popped off, trapped between Clavain’s trembling fingertips. He placed it gently on to the ice, rim down.

The face of a young female Conjoiner looked back at them. She had something of the same sleekly sculpted look as her mentor, but she was clearly not Skade. Her face was wide and flat-featured, her bloodless skin the colour of static on a monitor. Her neural crest—the heat-dissipating ridge of bone and cartilage running from the very top of her forehead to the nape of her neck—was less extravagant than the one Scorpio remembered seeing on Skade, and was almost certainly a much less useful indicator of her state of mind. It probably incorporated a more advanced set of neural mechanisms, with lower heat-dissipation burdens.

Her lips were grey and her eyebrows pure chrome white. She opened her eyes. In the torchlight her irises were a metallic blue-grey.

“Talk to me,” Clavain said.

She coughed and laughed at the same time. The appearance of a human expression on that stiff mask shocked them all.

Khouri leaned closer. “I’m only picking up mush,” she said.

“There’s something wrong with her,” Clavain replied quietly. Then he held the woman’s head from behind, supporting it off the ice. “Listen to me carefully. We don’t want to hurt you. You’ve been injured, but if you help us we will take care of you. Can you understand me?”

The woman laughed again, a spasm of delight creasing her face. “You…” she began.

Clavain leaned closer. “Yes?”

“Clavain.”

Clavain nodded. “Yes, that’s me.” He looked back at the others. “Damage can’t be too severe if she remembers me. I’m sure we’ll be able…”

She spoke again. “Clavain. Butcher of Tharsis.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Clavain. Defector. Traitor ? She smiled again, coughed, and then hacked a mouthload of saliva into his face. ”Betrayed the Mother Nest.“

Clavain wiped the spit from his face with the back of his glove. “I didn’t betray the Mother Nest,” he said, with an alarming lack of anger. “It was actually Skade who betrayed it.” He corrected her with avuncular patience, as if putting right some minor misapprehension about geography.

She laughed and spat at him again. The power of it surprised Scorpio. It caught Clavain in the eye and made him hiss in pain.

Clavain leant closer to the woman, keeping a hand over her mouth this time. “We have some work to do, I think. A little bit of re-education. A little bit of attitude adjustment. But that’s all right, I’ve got plenty of time.”

The woman coughed again. Her titanium-grey eyes were bright and joyful, even as she struggled for breath. There was something idiotic about her, Scorpio realised.

The armoured body started convulsing. Clavain kept hold of her head, his other hand still across her mouth.

“Let her breathe,” Khouri said.

He released the pressure across her mouth for an instant. The woman kept smiling, her eyes wide, unblinking. Something black squeezed between Clavain’s fingers, forcing its way through the gaps like some manifestation of demonic foulness. Clavain flinched back, letting go of the woman, dropping her head against the floor. The black stuff pulsed out of her mouth, out of her nostrils, the flows merging into a horrible black beard which began to engulf her face.

“Live machinery,” Clavain said, falling back. His own left hand was covered in ropes of the black stuff. He swatted it against the ice, but the black ooze refused to dislodge. The ropes combined into a coherent mass, a plaque covering his fingers to the knuckle. It was composed of hundreds of smaller versions of the same cubes they had seen elsewhere. They were swelling perceptibly, enlarging as they consolidated their hold on his hand. The black growth progressed towards his wrist in a series of convulsive waves, cubes sliding over each other.

From behind, something lit up the entire cavity of the wrecked ship. Scorpio risked a glance back, just long enough to see the barrel of Khouri’s cannon glowing cherry-red from a minimum-yield discharge. Jaccottet was aiming his own weapon at the corpse of the Conjoiner, but it was obvious that nothing more remained of the organic part of the Inhibitor victim. The emerging machines appeared totally unaffected: the blast had dispersed some of them from the main mass, but there was no sign that the energy had harmed them in any way whatsoever.

Scorpio had only glanced away for a second, but when he returned his attention to Clavain, he was horrified to see Clavain slumped back against the wall, grimacing.

“They’ve got me, Scorp. It hurts.”

Clavain closed his eyes. The black plaque had now taken his hand to the wrist. At the finger end it had formed a rounded stump which was creeping slowly back as the wrist end advanced.

“I’ll try to lever it off,” Scorpio said, fumbling in his belt for something thin and strong, but not so sharp that it would damage Clavain’s hand.

Clavain opened his eyes. “It won’t work.”

With his good hand he reached into the pocket where he had put the knife. A moment earlier his face had been a grey testament to pain, but now there was an easing there, as if the agony had abated.

It hadn’t, Scorpio knew. Clavain had merely dulled off the part of his brain that registered it.

Clavain had the knife out. He held it by the haft, trying to make the blade Come alive. It wasn’t happening. Either the control could never be activated single-handedly, or Clavain’s other hand was too numb from the cold to do the job. In error or frustration, the knife tumbled from his grip. He groped towards it, then abandoned the effort.

“Scorp, pick it up.”

He took the knife. It felt odd in his trotter, like something precious he had stolen, something he had never been meant to handle. He moved to give it back to Clavain.

“No. You have to do it. Activate the blade with that stud. Be careful: she kicks when the piezo-blade starts up. You don’t want to drop it. She’ll cut through hyperdiamond like a laser through smoke.”

“I can’t do this, Nevil.”

“You have to. It’s killing me.”

The black caul of Inhibitor machinery was eating back into his hand. There was no room in that thing for his fingertips, Scorpio realised. It had devoured them already.