Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

He turned his attention to the other aggregate, the one that was now very close to the planet. At extreme magnification he saw a black mass squatting a few hours into the dayside of the planet, hovering above a specific point on the surface. It was doing something.

Quaiche was alone in his garret, save for the scrimshaw suit. He heard only his own breathing and the attentive sounds of the couch on which he rested. The jalousies were half-drawn, the room scribed with parallel lines of fiery red.

He could feel, very faintly—and only because he had learned to feel it—the tiny residual side-to-side and back-to-front lurching of the Lady Morwenna as it progressed along the Way. Far from annoying him, the swaying was a source of reassurance. The instant the cathedral became rock steady, he would know that they were losing ground on Haldora. But the cathedral had not stopped for more than a century, and then only for a matter of hours during a reactor failure. Ever since then, even as it had grown in size, doubling and then quadrupling in height, it had kept moving, sliding along the Way at the exact speed necessary to keep Haldora fixed directly above, and therefore transmitted via the mirrors into his pinned-open, ever-watchful eyes. No other cathedral on the Way had such a record: the Lady Morwenna’s nearest rival, the Iron Lady, had failed for an entire rotation fifty-nine years earlier. The shame of that breakdown—having to wait in the same spot until the other cathedrals came around again after three hundred and twenty days—still hung heavy six decades later. Every other cathedral, including the Lady Morwenna, had a stained-glass window in commemoration of that humiliation.

The couch propelled him to the westerly window, tipping up slightly to improve his view. As he moved, the mirrors shuffled around him, maintaining sight-lines. No matter which way he steered the couch, Haldora was the predominant object reflected back to him. He was seeing it after multiple reflections, the light jogged through right angles, reversed and inverted again, magnified and diminished by achromatic lenses, but it was still the light itself, not some second- or third-hand image on a screen. It was always there, but the view was never quite the same from hour to hour. For one thing, the illumination of Haldora changed throughout the forty-hour cycle of Hela’s orbit: from fully lit face, to crescent, to storm-racked nightside. And even during any given phase the details of shading and banding were never quite the same from one pass to the next. It was enough, just, to stave off the feeling that the image had been branded into his brain.

It was not all that he saw, of course. Surrounding Haldora was a ring of black shading to silver grey, and then—packed into a band of indistinct detail—his immediate surroundings. He could look to one side and shift Haldora into his peripheral vision, for the mirrors were focusing the image on to his eyes, not just his pupils. But he did not do this very often, fearful that a vanishing would happen when the planet did not have his full attention.

Even with Haldora looming head-on, he had learned how to make the most of his peripheral vision. It was surprising how the brain was able to fill in the gaps, suggesting details that his eyes were really not capable of resolving. More than once it had struck Quaiche that if human beings really grasped how synthetic their world was—how much of it was stitched to-gether not from direct perception, but from interpolation, memory, educated guesswork—they would go quietly mad.

He looked at the Way. In the far easterly distance, in the direction that the Lady Morwenna was headed, there was a distinct -twinkling. That was the northern limit of the Gullveig Mountains, the largest range in Hela’s southern hemisphere. It was the last major geological feature to be crossed before the relative ease of the Jarnsaxa Flats and the associated fast run to the Devil’s Staircase. The Way cut through the northern flanks of the Gullveig Range, pushing through foothills via a series of high-walled canyons. And that was where an icefall had been reported. It was said to be a bad one, hundreds of metres deep, completely blocking the existing alignment. Quaiche had personally interviewed the leader of the Permanent Way repair team earlier that day, a man named Wyatt Benjamin who had lost a leg in some ancient, unspecified accident.

“Sabotage, I’d say,” Benjamin had told him. “A dozen or so demolition charges placed in the wall during the last crossing, with delayed timing fuses. A spoiling action by trailing cathedrals. They can’t keep up, so they don’t see why anyone else should.”

“That would be quite a serious allegation to make in public,” Quaiche had said, as if the very thought had never occurred to him. “Still, you may be right, much as it pains me to admit it.”

“Make no mistake, it’s a stitch-up.”

“The question is, who’s going to clear it? It would need to be done in—what, ten days at the maximum, before we reach the obstruction?”

Wyatt Benjamin had nodded. “You may not want to be that close when it’s cleared, however.”

“Why not?”

“We’re not going to be chipping this one away.”

Quaiche had absorbed that, understanding exactly what the man meant. “There was a fall of that magnitude three, four years ago, wasn’t there? Out near Glum Junction? I seem to remember it was cleared using conventional demolition equipment. Shifted the lot in fewer than ten days, too.”

“We could do this one in fewer than ten days,” Benjamin told him, “but we only have about half of our usual allocation of equipment and manpower.”

“That sounds odd,” Quaiche had replied, frowning. “What’s wrong with the rest?”

“Nothing. It’s just that it’s all been requisitioned, men and machines. Don’t ask me why or who’s behind it. I only work for the Permanent Way. And I suppose if it was anything to do with Clocktower business, you’d already know, wouldn’t you?”

“I suppose I would,” Quaiche had said. “Must be a bit lower down than Clocktower level. My guess? Another office of the Way has discovered something they should have fixed urgently already, a job that got forgotten in the last round. They need all that heavy machinery to get it done in a rush, before anyone notices.”

“Well, we’re noticing,” Benjamin had said. But he had seemed to accept the plausibility of Quaiche’s suggestion.

“In that case, you’ll just have to find another means of clearing the blockage, won’t you?”

“We already have another means,” the man had said.

“God’s Fire,” Quaiche had replied, forcing awe into his voice.

“If that’s what it takes, that’s what we’ll have to use. It’s why we carry it with us.”

“Nuclear demolitions should only ever be used as the absolute final last resort,” Quaiche had said, with what he hoped was the appropriate cautioning tone. “Are you quite certain that this blockage can’t be shifted by conventional means?”

“In ten days with the available men and equipment? Not a sodding hope.”

“Then God’s Fire it will have to be.” Quaiche had steepled the twigs of his fingers. “Inform the other cathedrals, across all ecumenical boundaries. We’ll take the lead on this one. The others had better draw back to the usual safe distance, unless they’ve improved their shielding since last time.”

“There’s no other choice,” Wyatt Benjamin had agreed.

Quaiche had placed a hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right. What has to be done, has to be done. God will watch over us.”

Quaiche snapped out of his reverie and smiled. The Permanent Way man was gone now, off to arrange the rare and hal-lowed deployment of controlled fusion devices. He was alone with the Way and the scrimshaw suit and the distant, alluring twinkle of the Gullveig Range.