Absolution Gap by Alastair Reynolds Read Free Book Online

said.
    “Wait here. I’ll get you something to drink.”
    Morwenna moved off the revival couch, telescoping to her full height. Still unable to focus properly, he watched her slink across the room towards the hatch where various recuperative broths were dispensed. Her iron-grey dreadlocks swayed with the motion of her high-hipped piston-driven legs.
    Morwenna was on her way back with a snifter of recuperative broth—chocolate laced with medichines—when the door to the chamber slid open. Two more Ultras strode into the room: a man and a woman. After them, hands tucked demurely behind his back, loomed the smaller, unaugmented figure of the surgeon-general. He wore a soiled white medical smock.
    “Is he fit?” the man asked.
    “You’re lucky he’s not dead,” Morwenna snapped.
    “Don’t be so melodramatic,” the woman said. “He was never going to die just because we thawed him a bit faster than usual.”
    “Are you going to tell us what Jasmina wants with him?”
    “That’s between him and the queen,” she replied.
    The man threw a quilted silver gown in Quaiche’s general direction. Morwenna’s arm whipped out in a blur of motion and caught it. She walked over to Quaiche and handed it to him.
    “I’d like to know what’s going on,” Quaiche said.
    “Get dressed,” the woman said. “You’re coming with us.”
    He pivoted around on the couch and lowered his feet to the coldness of the floor. Now that the discomfort was wearing off he was starting to feel scared instead. His cock had shrivelled in on itself, retreating into his belly as if already making its own furtive escape plans. Quaiche put on the gown, cinching it around his waist. To the surgeon-general he said, “You had something to do with this, didn’t you?”
    Grelier blinked. “My dear fellow, it was all I could do to stop them warming you even more rapidly.”
    “Your time will come,” Quaiche said. “Mark my words.”
    “I don’t know why you insist on that tone. You and I have a great deal in common, Horris. Two human men, alone aboard an Ultra ship? We shouldn’t be bickering, competing for prestige and status. We should be supporting each other, cementing a friendship.” Grelier wiped the back of his glove on his tunic, leaving a nasty ochre smear. “We should be allies, you and I. We could go a long way together.”
    “When hell freezes over,” Quaiche replied.
     
    The queen stroked the mottled cranium of the human skull resting on her lap. She had very long finger- and toenails, painted jet-black. She wore a leather jerkin, laced across her cleavage, and a short skirt of the same dark fabric. Her black hair was combed back from her brow, save for a single neatly formed cowlick. Standing before her, Quaiche initially thought she was wearing makeup, vertical streaks of rouge as thick as candlewax running from her eyes to the curve of her upper lip. Then, joltingly, he realised that she had gouged out her eyes.
    Despite this, her face still possessed a certain severe beauty.
    It was the first time he had seen her in the flesh, in any of her manifestations. Until this meeting, all his dealings with her had been at a certain remove, either via alpha-compliant proxies or living intermediaries like Grelier.
    He had hoped to keep things that way.
    Quaiche waited several seconds, listening to his own breathing. Finally he managed, “Have I let you down, ma’am?”
    “What kind of ship do you think I run, Quaiche? One where I can afford to carry baggage?”
    “I can feel my luck changing.”
    “A bit late for that. How many stopovers have we made since you joined the crew, Quaiche? Five, isn’t it? And what have we got to show for ourselves, after those five stopovers?”
    He opened his mouth to answer her when he saw the scrimshaw suit lurking, almost lost, in the shadows behind her throne. Its presence could not be accidental.
    It resembled a mummy, worked from wrought iron or some other industrialage metal. There were