Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

He pressed the activation stud. The knife twisted in his hand, alive and eager. He felt the high-frequency buzz through the hilt. The blade had become a blur of silver, like the flicker of a hummingbird’s wing.

“Take it off, Scorp. Now. Quickly and cleanly. A good inch above the machinery.”

“I’ll kill you.”

“No, you won’t. I’ll make it through this.” Clavain paused. “I’ve shut down pain reception. Bloodstream implants will handle clotting. You’ve nothing to worry about. Just do it. Now . Before I change my mind, or that stuff finds a short cut to my head.”

Scorpio nodded, horrified by what he was about to do but knowing that he had no choice.

Making sure that none of the machinery touched his own flesh, Scorpio supported Clavain’s damaged arm at the elbow. The knife buzzed and squirmed. He held the locus of the blur close to fabric of the sleeve.

He looked into Clavain’s face. “Are you sure about this?”

“Scorp. Now. As a friend. Do it .”

Scorpio pushed the knife down. He felt no resistance as it ghosted through fabric, flesh and bone.

Half a second later the work was done. The severed hand—Scorpio had cut it off just above the wrist—dropped to the ice with a solid whack. With a moan Clavain slumped back against the wall, losing whatever strength he had mustered until then. He’d told Scorpio that he had blocked all pain signals, but some residual message must have reached his brain: either that or what Scorpio heard was a moan of desperate relief.

Jaccottet knelt down by Clavain, unhitching a medical kit from his belt. Clavain had been right: there was very little in the way of the blood loss from the wound. He held the truncated forearm against his belly, pressing it tight, while Jaccottet prepared a dressing.

There was a rustle of movement from the hand. The black machines were detaching themselves, breaking free of the remaining flesh. They moved hesitantly, as if sapped of the energy they had drawn from the warmth of living bodies. The mass of cubes oozed away from the hand, slowed and then halted, becoming just another part of the dormant growth that filled the ship. The hand lay there, the flesh a contused landscape of recent bruises and older age spots, yet still largely intact save for the eroded stubs of the fingertips, which had been consumed down to the first joint.

Scorpio made the knife stop shivering and put it on the ground. “I’m sorry, Nevil.”

“I’ve lost it once already,” Clavain said. “It really doesn’t mean that much to me. I’m grateful that you did what you had to do.” Then he leant back against the wall and closed his eyes for another few seconds. His breathing was sharply audible and irregular. It sounded like someone making inexpert saw cuts.

“Are you going to be all right?” Scorpio asked Clavain, eyeing the severed hand.

Clavain did not respond.

“I don’t know enough about Conjoiners to say how much shock he can take,” Jaccottet said, keeping his voice low, “but I know this man needs rest and a lot of it. He’s old, for a start, and no one’s been around to fine-tune all those machines in his blood. It might be hitting him a lot worse than we think.”

“We have to move on,” Khouri said.

“She’s right,” Clavain said, stirring again. “Here, someone help me to my feet. Losing a hand didn’t stop me last time; it won’t now.”

“Wait a moment,” Jaccottet said, finishing off the emergency dressing.

“You need to stay here, Nevil,” Scorpio said.

“If I stay here, Scorp, I will die.” Clavain groaned with the effort of trying to stand up on his own. “Help me, God damn you. Help me!”

Scorpio eased him to his feet. He stood unsteadily, still holding the bandaged stump against his belly.

“I still think you’d be better off waiting here,” Scorpio said.

“Scorp, we’re all staring hypothermia in the face. If I can feel it, so can you. Right now the only thing that’s holding it off is adrenalin and movement. So I suggest we keep moving .” Then Clavain reached down and picked up the knife from where Scorpio had put it down. He slipped it back into his pocket. “Glad I brought it with me now,” he said.

Scorpio glanced down at the ground. “What about the hand?”

“Leave it. They can grow me a new one.”

They followed the draught of cold towards the front portion of Skade’s wrecked ship.

“Is it me,” Khouri said, “or has the music just changed?”

“It’s changed,” Clavain said. “But it’s still Bach.”

Rashmika watched the icejammer being winched down to the rolling ribbon of road. There was a scuff of ice as the skis touched the surface. On the icejammer’s roof, the two suited men unhitched the hooks and rode them up to the top of the winches, before being swung back on to the top of the caravan vehicle. Crozet’s tiny-looking vehicle bobbed and yawed alongside the caravan for several hundred metres, then allowed itself to be slowly overtaken by the rumbling procession. Rashmika watched until it was lost to view behind the grinding wheels of one of the machines.

She stepped back from the inclined viewing window. That was it, then: all her bridges burned. But her resolve to continue remained as strong as ever. She was going onwards, no matter what it took.

“I see you’ve made your mind up, then.”

Rashmika turned from the window. The sound of Quaestor Jones’s voice shocked her: she had imagined herself alone.

The quaestor’s green pet cleaned its face with its one good forelimb, its tail wrapped tight as a tourniquet around his upper arm.

“My mind didn’t need making up,” she said.

“I had hoped that the letter from your brother would knock some sense into your head. But it didn’t, and here you are. At least now we have a small treat for you.”

“I’m sorry?” Rashmika asked.

“There’s been a slight change in our itinerary,” he said. “We’ll be taking a little longer to make our rendezvous with the cathedrals than planned.”

“Nothing serious has happened, I hope.”

“We’ve already incurred delays that we can’t make up by following our usual route south. We had intended to traverse the Ginnungagap Rift near Gudbrand Crossing, then move south down the Hyrrokkin Trail until we reached the Way, where we’d meet the cathedrals. But that simply isn’t possible now, and in any case, there’s been a major icefall somewhere along the Hyrrokkin Pass. We don’t have the gear to shift it, not quickly, and the nearest caravan with ice-clearing equipment is stuck at Glum Junction, pinned down by a flash glacier. So we’ll have to take a short cut, if we aren’t to be even later.”

“A short cut, Quaestor?”

“We’re approaching the Ginnungagap Rift.” He paused. “You know about the rift, of course. Everything has to cross it at some point.”

Rashmika visualised the laceration of the Rift, a deep sheer-sided ice canyon slicing diagonally across the equator. It was the largest geological feature on the planet, the first thing Quaiche had named on his approach.

“I thought there was only one safe crossing,” she said.

“For the cathedrals, yes,” he allowed. “The Way deviates a little to the north, where the walls of the Rift have been tiered in a zigzag fashion to allow the cathedrals to descend to the floor. It’s a laborious process, costs them days, and then they have to repeat the process climbing up the far side. They need a good head start on Haldora if they aren’t to slip behind. They call that route the Devil’s Staircase, and every cathedral master secretly dreads it. The descent is narrow and collapses aren’t uncommon. But we don’t have to take the Staircase: there’s another way across the Rift, you see. A cathedral can’t make it, but a caravan doesn’t weigh anywhere near as much as a cathedral.”