Absolution Gap by Alastair Reynolds Read Free Book Online Page B

themselves an entirely new layer of ablative hull cladding.” She looked at him expectantly. “Any comments, thoughts, on that?”
    “My report was honest,” Quaiche said. “They must have got lucky, that’s all. Look, just give me another chance. Are we approaching another system?”
    The queen smiled. “We’re always approaching another system. This time it’s a place called 107 Piscium, but frankly from this distance it doesn’t look much more promising than the last five. What’s to say you’re going to be any use this time?”
    “Let me take the Dominatrix ,” he said, knitting his hands together involuntarily. “Let me take her down into that system.”
    The queen was silent for many seconds. Quaiche heard only his own breathing, punctuated now and then by the abrupt, attenuated sizzle of a dying insect or rat. Something moved languidly beyond the green glass of a hemispherical dome set into one of the chamber’s twelve walls. He sensed that he was being observed by something other than the eyeless figure in the chair. Without having been told, he understood then that the thing beyond the glass was the real queen, and that the ruined body in the seat was only a puppet that she currently inhabited. They were all true, then, all the rumours he had ever heard: the queen’s solipsism; her addiction to extreme pain as a reality-anchoring device; the vast reserve of cloned bodies she was said to keep for just that purpose.
    “Have you finished, Quaiche? Have you made your case?”
    He sighed. “I suppose I have.”
    “Very well, then.”
    She must have issued some secret command, because at that moment the door to the chamber opened again. Quaiche spun around as the blast of cold fresh air touched the nape of his neck. The surgeon-general and the two Ultras who had helped him during Quaiche’s revival entered the room.
    “I’m done with him,” the queen said.
    “And your intention?” Grelier asked.
    Jasmina sucked at a fingernail. “I haven’t changed my mind. Put him in the scrimshaw suit.”

FOUR
    Ararat, 2675
    Scorpio knew better than to interrupt Clavain when the old man was thinking something over. How long had it been since he had told him about the object falling from space, if that was indeed where it had come from? Five minutes, easily. In all that time, Clavain had sat there as gravely as a statue, his expression fixed, his eyes locked on the horizon.
    Finally, just when Scorpio was beginning to doubt his old friend’s sanity, Clavain spoke. “When did it happen?” he asked. “When did this ‘thing’—whatever it is—arrive?”
    “Probably in the last week,” Scorpio said. “We only found it a couple of days ago.”
    There was another troubling pause, though it was only a minute or so long this time. Water slapped against rock and gurgled in little eddies in and out of shallow pools by the shoreline.
    “And what exactly is it?”
    “We can’t be absolutely certain. It’s a capsule of some kind. A human artefact. Our best guess is that it’s an escape pod, something with re-entry capabilities. We think it splashed down in the ocean and bobbed to the surface.”
    Clavain nodded, as if the news was of only minor interest. “And you’re certain it wasn’t left behind by Galiana?”
    He said the woman’s name with ease, but Scorpio could only guess at the pain it caused him. Especially now, looking out to sea.
    Scorpio had some inkling of what the ocean meant to Clavain: both loss and the cruellest kind of hope. In an unguarded moment, not long before his voluntary exile from island affairs, Clavain had said, “They’re all gone now. There’s nothing more the sea can do to me.”
    “They’re still there,” Scorpio had replied. “They aren’t lost. If anything, they’re safer than they ever were.”
    As if Clavain could not have seen that for himself.
    “No,” Scorpio said, snapping his attention back to the present, “I don’t think Galiana left it.”
    “I