Absolution Gap

  “The repairs took longer than we anticipated,” Khouri replied. “We had problems obtaining the raw materials now that the Inhibitors had so much of the system under their control.”

  “But not twenty years, surely,” said Scorpio.

  “No, but once we’d been there a few years it became clear we were in no immediate danger of persecution by the Inhibitors provided we stayed near the Hades object, the re-engineered neutron star. That meant we had more time to study the thing. We were scared at first, but the Inhibitors always kept clear of it, as if there was something about it they didn’t like. Actually, Thorn and I had already guessed as much.”

  ‘Tell us a bit more about Thorn,“ Clavain said gently.

  They all heard the crack in her voice. “Thorn was the resis-tance leader, the man who made life difficult for the regime until the Inhibitors showed up.”

  “Volyova and you struck up some kind of relationship with him, didn’t you?” Clavain asked.

  “He was our way of getting the people to accept our help to evacuate. Because of that I had a lot of involvement with Thorn. We got to know each other quite well.” She faltered into silence.

  “Take your time,” Clavain said, with a kindness Scorpio had not heard in his voice lately.

  “One time, stupid curiosity drew Thorn and I too close to the Inhibitors. They had us surrounded, and they’d even started pushing their probes into our heads, drinking our memories. But then something—some entity—intervened and saved us. Whatever it was, it appeared to originate around Hades. Maybe it was even an extension of Hades itself, another kind of probe.”

  Scorpio tapped the summary before him. “You reported contact with a human mind.”

  “It was Dan Sylveste,” she said, “the same self-obsessed bastard who started all this in the first place. We know he found a way into the Hades matrix all those years ago, using the same route that the Amarantin took to escape the Inhibitors.”

  “And you think Sylveste—or whatever he had become by then—intervened to save you and Thorn?” Clavain asked.

  “I know he did. When his mind touched mine, I got a blast of… call it remorse. As if the penny had finally dropped about how big a screw-up he’d been, and the damage he’d done in the name of curiosity. It was as if he was ready, in a small way, to start making amends.”

  Clavain smiled. “Better late than never.”

  “He couldn’t work miracles, though,” Khouri said. “The envoy that Hades sent to Roc to help us was enough to intimidate the Inhibitor machines, but it didn’t do more than hamper them, allowing us to make it back to Ilia. But it was a sign, at least, that if we stood a hope of doing something about the Inhibitors, the place to look for help was in Hades. Some of us had to go back inside.”

  “You were one of them?” Clavain said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I did it the same way I’d done it before, because I knew that would work. Not via the front door inside the thing orbiting Hades, the way Sylveste did it, but by falling towards the star. By dying, in other words; letting myself get ripped apart by the gravitational field of Hades and then reassembled inside it. I don’t remember any of that. I guess I’m grateful.”

  It was clear to Scorpio that even Khouri had little idea of what had really happened to her during her entry into the Hades object. Her earlier account of things had made it clear that she believed herself to have been physically reconstituted within the star, preserved in a tiny, quivering bubble of flat space-time, so that she was immune to the awesome crush of Hades’ gravitational field. Perhaps that had indeed been the case. Equally, it might have been some fanciful fiction created for her by her once-human hosts. All that mattered, ultimately, was that there was a way to communicate with entities running inside the Hades matrix—and, perhaps more importantly, a way to get back out into the real universe.

  Scorpio was contemplating that when his communicator buzzed discreetly. As he stood up from the table, Khouri halted her monologue.

  Irritated at the interruption, Scorpio lifted the communicator to his face and unspooled the privacy earpiece. “This had better be good.”

  The voice that came was thready and distant. He recognised it as belonging to the Security Arm guard that had met them at the landing stage. “Thought you needed to know this, sir.”

  “Make it quick.”

  “Class-three apparition reported on five eighty-seven. That’s the highest in nearly six months.”

  As if he needed to be told. “Who saw it?”

  “Palfrey, a worker in bilge management.”

  Scorpio lowered his voice and pressed the earpiece in more tightly. He was conscious that he had the full attention of everyone in the room. “What did Palfrey see?”

  “The usual, sir: not very much, but enough that we’ll have a hard time persuading him to go that deep again.”

  “Interview him, get it on record, make it clear that he speaks of this to no one. Understood?”

  “Understood, sir.”

  “Then find him another line of work.” Scorpio paused, frowning as he thought through all the implications. “On second thoughts, I’d like a word with him as well. Don’t let him leave the ship.”

  Without waiting for a reply, Scorpio broke the link, spooled the earpiece back into the communicator and returned to the table. He sat down, gesturing at Khouri for her to continue.

  “What was all that about?” she asked.

  “Nothing that need worry you.”

  “I’m worried.”

  He felt a splinter of pain between his eyes. He had been getting a lot of headaches lately, and this kind of day didn’t help. “Someone reported an apparition,” he said, “one of the Captain’s little manifestations that Antoinette mentioned. Doesn’t mean anything.”

  “No? I show up, he shows up, and you think that doesn’t mean something?” Khouri shook her head. “I know what it means, even if you don’t. The Captain understands there’s some heavy stuff going down.”

  The splinter of pain had become a little broken arrowhead. He pinched the bridge of skin between snout and forehead. “Tell us about Sylveste,” he said with exaggerated patience.

  Khouri sighed, but did as she was asked. “There was a kind of welcoming committee inside the star, Sylveste and his wife, just as I’d last met them. It even looked like the same room—a scientific study full of old bones and equipment. But it didn’t feel the same. It was as if I was taking part in some kind of parlour game, but I was the only one not in on it. I wasn’t talking to Sylveste any more, if I ever had been.”

  “An impostor?” Clavain asked.

  “No, not that. I was talking with the genuine article… I’m sure of that… but at the same time it wasn’t Sylveste, either. It was as if… he was condescending to me, putting on a mask so that I’d have something familiar to talk to. I knew I wasn’t getting the whole story. I was getting the comforting version, with the creepy stuff taken out. I don’t think Sylveste thought I was capable of dealing with what he’d really become, after all that time.” She smiled. “I think he thought he’d blow my mind.”

  “After sixty years in the Hades matrix, he might have,” Clavain said.

  “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.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ararat, 2675

  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.”

  “That’s very reassuring.”

  “It should be. I can also tell you that despite rumours to the contrary no one has ever been harmed by an apparition, and that very few workers have ever seen a class three on more than one Occasion.”

  “You’re still not getting me to go down there again.”

  “I’m not asking you to. You’ll be reassigned to some other duty, either in the high ship levels or back on the mainland.”

  “The sooner I’m off this ship, the better.”

  “Good. That’s sorted, then.” Scorpio moved to stand up, the chair scraping against the floor.

  ‘That’s it?“ Palfrey asked.

  “You’ve told me everything I need to know.”

  Palfrey poked around in the ashtray with the dead stub of his last cigarette. “I see a ghost and I get interviewed by one of the most powerful men in the colony?”

  Scorpio shrugged. “I just happened to be in the area, thought you’d appreciate my taking an interest.”
r />   The man looked at him with a critical expression Scorpio seldom saw in pigs. “Something’s up, isn’t it?”

  “Not sure I follow you.”

  “You wouldn’t interview someone from bilge management unless something was going down.”

  “Take it from me, something’s always going down.”

  “But this must be more than that.” Palfrey smiled at him, the way people smiled when they thought they knew something you’d have preferred them not to know, or when they imagined they had figured out an angle they weren’t supposed to see. “I listen. I hear about all the other apparitions, not just the ones on my shift.”

  “And your conclusion is?”

  “They’ve been growing more frequent. Not just in the last day or so, but over the last few weeks or months. I knew it was only a matter of time before I saw one for myself.”

  “That’s a very interesting analysis.”

  “The way I see it,” Palfrey said, “it’s as if he—the Captain—is getting restless. But what would I know? I’m just a bilge mechanic.”

  “Indeed,” Scorpio said.

  “You know something’s happening, though, don’t you? Or you wouldn’t be taking so much interest in a single sighting. I bet you’re interviewing everyone these days. He’s really got you worried, hasn’t he?”

  “The Captain’s on our side.”

  “You hope.” Palfrey sniggered triumphantly.

  “We all hope. Unless you have some other plans for getting off this planet, the Captain’s our only ticket out of here.”

  “You’re talking as if there’s some sudden urgency to leave.”

  Scorpio considered telling him that there might well be, just to mess with his mind. He had decided that he did not very much like Palfrey. But Palfrey would talk, and the last thing Scorpio needed now was a wave of panic to deal with in addition to Khouri’s little crisis. He would just have to deny himself that small, puissant pleasure.