Absolution Gap

THIRTY-THREE

Scorpio had hoped for some rest. But the days immediately following Antoinette’s departure were as tiring as any that had preceded them. He stayed awake nearly all the time, watching the arrival and departure of shuttles and tugs, supervising the processing of new evacuees and the comings and goings of Re-montoire’s technical personnel.

He felt stretched beyond breaking point, never certain that he was more than one or two breaths from collapsing. And yet he kept functioning, sustained by Antoinette’s words and his own stubborn refusal to show the slightest glimmer of weakness around the humans. It was becoming difficult. More and more it seemed to him that they had an energy that he lacked; that they were never as close to exhaustion or complete breakdown as he was. It had been different in his younger days. He had been the unstoppable powerhouse then, stronger not only than the humans who made up part of his coterie but also many of the pigs. He had been foolish to imagine that this would be the pattern for the whole of his life, that he would always have that edge. He had never quite noticed the moment when parity occurred; it might have happened months or years in the past, but now he was quite sure that the humans had pulled ahead of him. In the short term he still had a furious, impulsive strength that they lacked, but what use was thuggish immediacy now? What mattered were slow-burning, calculated strength, endurance and presence of mind. The humans were quicker-minded than he was, much less prone to making mistakes. Did they realise that? he wondered. Perhaps not immediately, for he was working hard to compensate for this intrinsic weaknesses. But sooner or later the effort would take its toll and then they would start to notice his failings. Many of them—the allies Antoinette had spoken of-—would do their best to ignore his increasing inadequacy, making excuses for his failings. But again, that process could only continue for so long. Inevitably there would come a time when his enemies would pick up on that creeping weakness and use it against him. He wondered if he would have the courage to step down first, before it became so obvious. He didn’t know. It was too hard to think about that, because it cut too close to the essence of what he was, and what he could never be.

Antoinette had not meant to be cruel when she had talked of their time on Ararat as being “good years.” She had meant it sincerely, and twenty-three years was no small chunk out of anyone’s life. But Antoinette was a human. True enough, she did not have access to all the life-extension procedures that had been commonplace a couple of hundred years earlier. Nobody did nowadays. But Antoinette still had advantages that Scorpio lacked. The genes she had inherited had been modified many hundreds of years earlier, weeding out many of the commoner causes of death. She could expect to live about twice as long as she would have had her ancestors never undergone those changes. A one-hundred-and-fifty-year lifespan was not unthinkable for her. Given exceptional luck, she might even see two hundred. Long enough, perhaps, to witness and maybe even benefit from a resurgence in the other kinds of life-extending medicine, the kinds that had been in short supply since the Melding Plague. Granted, the present crisis didn’t make that likely, but it was still a remote possibility, still something she could hope for.

Scorpio was fifty now. He would be lucky to see sixty. He had never heard of a pig living longer than seventy-five years, and the oldest pig he had ever met had been seventy-one years old. That pig had died one year later, as a constellation of time-bomb illnesses had ripped him apart over a period of a few months.

Even if, by some stroke of luck, he found a medical facility that still had access to the old rejuvenation and life-extension treatments, they would be useless to him, too finely tuned to human biochemistry. He had heard about pigs who had tried such things, and their efforts had invariably been unsuccessful. More often than not they had died prematurely, as the procedures triggered fatal iatrogenic side effects.

It wasn’t an option. The only option, really, was to die, in about ten to fifteen years’ time. Twenty if he was astonishingly lucky. Less time, even then, than he had already spent on Ararat.

“It was half my life,” he had told her. But he didn’t think she had understood exactly what that meant. Not just half the life he had lived to date, but a decent fraction of the life he could ever hope to live. The first twenty years of his life barely counted, anyway. He hadn’t really been born until he turned the laser on his shoulder and burned the green scorpion into scar tissue. The humans were making plans for decades to come. He was thinking in terms of years, and even then counting on nothing.

The question was, did he have the courage to acknowledge this? If he stepped down now and made it clear that it was be-cause of his genetic inheritance—because of the encroach-ment of premature death that was part and parcel of the pig package-r-no one would criticise him. They would understand, and he would have their sympathy. But what if he was wrong to relinquish power now, just because he felt the shadow on him? The shadow was still faint. He thought it likely that only he had seen it clearly. Surely it was a kind of cowardice to give up now, when he still had five or ten more years of useful service in him. Surely he owed Ararat—or Ararat’s refugees—more than that. He was many things—violent, stubborn, loyal—but he had never been a coward.

He thought, then, of Aura. It came to him with crystal clarity: she would be followed. She was a child who spoke of things beyond her reach. She had, in a way, already saved thousands of lives by preventing Scorpio from attacking the Jugglers as they tried to haul the Infinity to a safe distance from First Camp. She had known what the right thing to do was.

She was just a small thing now, encased in the transparent crib of the incubator, but she was growing. In ten years, what would she be like? It hurt him to have to think so far ahead. He did it anyway. He saw a flash of her then, a girl who looked older than her years, the expression on her face hovering somewhere between serene certainty and the stiff mask of a zealot, untroubled by the smallest flicker of doubt. She would be beautiful, in human terms, and she would have followers. He saw her wearing Skade’s armour—the armour as it had been when they had found Skade in the crashed ship, tuned to white, its chameleoflage permanently jammed on that one setting.

She might be right, he thought. She might know exactly what had to be done to make a difference against the Inhibitors. Given what she had already cost them, he desperately hoped that this would be the case. But what if she was wrong? What if she was a-weapon, implanted in their midst? What if her one function was to lead them all to extinction, by the most efficient means?

He didn’t really think that likely, though. If he had, he would have killed her already, and then perhaps himself. But the chance was still there. She might even be innocent, but still wrong. In some respects that was an even more dangerous possibility.

Vasko Malinin had already sided with her. So, Scorpio thought, had a number of the seniors. Others were uncommitted, but might turn either way in the coming days. Against this, against what would surely be the magnetic charisma of the girl, there had to be a balance, something stolid and unimaginative, not much given to crusades or the worship of zealots. He couldn’t step down. It might wear him out even sooner, but—somehow or other—he had to be there. Not as Aura’s antagonist, necessarily, but as her brake. And if it came to a confrontation with Aura or one of her supporters (he could see them now, rallying behind the white-armoured girl) then it would only vindicate his decision to stay.

The one thing Scorpio knew about himself was that when he made a decision it stayed made. In that respect, he thought, he had much in common with Clavain. Clavain had been a better forward-thinker than Scorpio, but at the end—when he had met his death in the iceberg—all his life had amounted to was a series of dogged stands.

There were, Scorpio concluded, worse ways to live.

“You’re quite happy with this?” Remontoire asked Scorpio.

They were sitting alone in a spider-legged inspection saloon, a pressurised cabin clutching the sheer clifflike face of the accelerating starship. From an aperture below them—a docking gate framed by bony structures that resembled fused spinal vertebrae—the cache weapons were being unloaded. It would have been a delicate operation at the best of times, but with the Nostalgia for Infinity continuing to accelerate away from Ararat, following the trajectory Remontoire and his projections had specified, it was one that required the utmost attention to detail.

“I’m happy,” Scorpio said. “I thought you’d be the one with objections, Rem. You wanted all of these things. I’m not letting you have them all. Doesn’t that piss you off?”

“Piss me off, Scorp?” There was a faint, knowing smile on his companion’s face. Remontoire had prepared a flask of tea and was now pouring it into minuscule glass tumblers. “Why should it? The risk is shared equally. Your own chance of sur-vival—according to our forecasts, at least—is now significantly reduced. I regret this state of affairs, certainly, but I can appreciate your unwillingness to hand over all the weapons. That would require an unprecedented leap of faith.”

“I don’t do faith,” Scorpio said.

“In truth, the cache weapons may not make very much difference in the long run. I did not want to say this earlier, for fear of dispiriting our associates, but the fact remains that our forecasts may be too optimistic. When Ilia Volyova rode Storm Bird into the heart of the wolf concentration around Delta Pavonis, the cache weapons she deployed made precious little impact.”

“As far as we know. Maybe she did slow things down a bit.”

“Or perhaps she did not deploy the weapons in the most effective manner possible—she was ill, after all—or perhaps those were not the most dangerous weapons in the arsenal. We shall never know.”

“What about these other weapons,” Scorpio asked, “the ones that they’re making for us now?”

“The hypometric devices? They have proven useful. You saw how the wolf concentration around your shuttle and the

Nostalgia for Infinity was dispersed. I also used a hypometric weapon against the wolf aggregate that was causing you difficulties on the surface of Ararat.“

Scorpio sipped at his tea, holding the little tumbler—it was barely larger than a thimble—in the clumsy vice of his hands. He felt as if at any minute he was going to shatter the glass. “These are the weapons Aura showed you how to make?”

“Yes.”

“And you still don’t really know any of it works?”

“Let’s just say that theory is lagging some distance behind practice, shall we?”

“All right. It’s not as if I’d be able to understand it even if you knew. But one thing does occur to me. If this shit is so useful, why aren’t the wolves using it against us?”

“Again, we don’t know,” Remontoire admitted.

“Doesn’t that worry you? Doesn’t it concern you that maybe there’s some kind of long-term problem with this new technology that you don’t know about?”

Remontoire arched an eyebrow. “You, thinking ahead, Scorpio? Whatever next?”

“It’s a legitimate point.”

“Conceded. And yes, it does, amongst other things, give me pause for concern. But given the choice between extinction now and dealing with an unspecified problem at a later point… well, it’s not much of a contest, is it?” Remontoire peered through the amber belly of his tiny glass, one eye looming large in distortion. “Anyway, there’s another possibility. The wolves may not have this technology.”

Beyond the observation spider, framed by the brass-ringed eye of one of its portholes, Scorpio saw one of the cache weapons emerge. The weapon—it was all bronze^:green lustre and art deco flanges, like an old radio or cinema—was encased in a cradle studded with steering jets. The cradle, in turn, was being grasped by four tugs of Conjoiner manufacture.

“Then where did this technology come from?”

“The dead. The collective memories of countless extinct cultures, gathered together in the neutron-crust matrix of the Hades computer. Clearly it wasn’t enough to make a difference to those extinct species; maybe none of the other techniques Aura has given us will make a difference to our eventual fu-ture. But perhaps they have served to slow things down. It might be that all we need is time. If there is something else out there—something more significant, something more potent than the wolves—then all we need is time to discover it.”

“You think it’s Hela, don’t you?”

“Doesn’t it intrigue you, Scorpio? Don’t you want to go there and see what you find?”

“We looked it up, Rem. Hela is an iceball, home to a bunch of religious lunatics tripping on the tainted blood of an indoc-trinal virus carrier.”

“Yet they speak of miracles.”

“A planet that disappears. Except no one you’d trust to fix a vac-suit seal has ever seen it happen.”

“Go there and find out. One-oh-seven Piscium is the system. The Inhibitors haven’t reached it yet, by all accounts.”

“Thanks for the information.”

“It will be your decision, Scorpio. You already know what Aura will recommend, but you don’t have to be swayed by that.”

“I won’t.”

“But keep this in mind: one-oh-seven Piscium is an outlying system. Reports of wolf incursions into human space are fragmentary at best, but you can be certain that when they move in, the core colonies—the worlds within a dozen or so light years of Earth—will be the first to fall. That’s how they work: identify the hub, attack and destroy it. Then they pick off the satellite colonies and anyone trying to flee deeper into the galaxy.”

Scorpio shrugged. “So nowhere’s safe.”

“No. But given your responsibilities—given the seventeen thousand individuals now in your care—it would be far safer to head outwards than to dive back towards those hub worlds. But I sense that you may feel otherwise.”

“I have unfinished business back home,” Scorpio replied.

“You don’t mean Ararat, do you?”

“I mean Yellowstone. I mean the Rust Belt. I mean Chasm City and the Mulch.”

Remontoire finished his tea, consuming the last drop with the fastidious neatness of a cat. “I understand that you still have emotional ties to that place, but don’t underestimate the danger of returning there. If the wolves have gathered any in-telligence on us, it won’t have taken them very long to identify Yellowstone as a critical hub. It will be high on their list of priorities. They may already be there, building a Singer, as they did around Delta Pavonis.”

“In which case there’ll be a lot of people needing to get out.”

“You can’t make enough of a difference to justify the risk,” Remontoire told him.

“I can try.” Scorpio gestured through the window of the inspection spider, towards the looming presence of the ship. “The Infinity brought one hundred and sixty thousand people from Resurgam. I may not be much of a mathematician, but with only seventeen thousand aboard her now, that means we have some spare capacity.”

“You will be risking all the lives we have already saved.”

“I know,” he replied.

“You will be squandering any advantage you gain in the next few days, as we draw the machines away from you.”

“I know,” he said again.

“You will also be risking your own life.”

“I know that as well, and it isn’t going to make one damned bit of difference, Rem. The more you try to talk me out of it, the more I know I’m going to do it.”

“If you have the backing of the seniors.”

“They either back me or sack me. It’s their choice.”

“You’ll also need the ship to agree to it.”

“I’ll ask nicely,” Scorpio said.

The tugs had dragged the cache weapon to a safe distance from the ship. He expected to see their main drives flick on, bright spears of scattered light from plasma exhausts, but the whole assembly just accelerated away, as if moved by an invisible hand.

“I don’t agree with your stance,” Remontoire said, “but I respect it. You remind me of Nevil, in some ways.”

Scorpio recalled the ludicrously brief episode of “grieving” Remontoire had undergone. “I thought you were over him now.”

“None of us are over him,” Remontoire said curtly. Then he gestured to the flask again and his mood lightened visibly. “More tea, Mr. Pink?”

Scorpio didn’t know what to say. He looked at the bland-faced man and shrugged. “If you don’t mind, Mr. Clock.”

The surgeon-general ushered Rashmika through the labyrinthine Lady Morwenna. It was clearly not a sightseeing trip. Though she dawdled when she was able—slowing down to look at the windows, or something of equal interest—Grelier always chivvied her on with polite insistence, tapping his cane against the walls and floor to emphasise the urgency of his mission. ‘Time is of the essence, Miss Els,“ he kept saying. That and, ”We’re in a wee bit of a hurry.“

“It would help if you told me what all this is about,” she said.

“No, it wouldn’t,” he replied. “Why would it help? You’re here and we’re on our way.”

He had a point, she supposed. She just didn’t like it very much.

“What happened with the Catherine of Iron?” she asked, determined not to give up too easily.

“Nothing that I’m aware of. There was a change of assignment. Nothing significant. You’re still being employed by the First Adventist Church, after all. We’ve just relocated you from one cathedral to another.” He tapped the side of his nose, as if sharing a grand confidence. “Frankly, you’ve done rather well out of it. You don’t know how difficult it is to get into the Lady Mor these days. Everyone wants to work in the Way’s most historic cathedral.”

“I was given to understand that its popularity had taken a bit of a knock lately,” she said.

Grelier looked back at her. “Whatever do you mean, Miss Els?”

“The dean is taking it over the bridge. At least, that’s what people are saying.”

“And if that were the case?”

“I wouldn’t be too surprised if people aren’t all that keen to stay aboard. How far from the crossing are we, Surgeon-General?”

“Navigation’s not really my thing.”

“You know exactly how far away we are,” she said.

He flashed a smile back at her. She decided that she did not like his smile at all. It looked altogether too feral. “You’re good, Miss Els. As good as I’d hoped.”

“Good, Surgeon-General?”

“The lying thing. The ability to read faces. That’s your little stock in trade, isn’t it? Your little party trick?”

They had arrived at what Rashmika judged to be the base of the Clocktower. The surgeon-general pulled out a key, slipped it into a lock next to a wooden door and admitted them into what was obviously a private compartment. The walls were made of trellised iron. Inside he pressed a sequence of brass knobs and they began to rise. Through the trelliswork, Rashmika watched the walls of the elevator shaft glide by. Then the walls became stained glass, and as they ascended past each coloured facet the light changed in the compartment: green to red, red to gold, gold to a cobalt blue that made the surgeon-general’s shock of white hair glow as if electrified.

“I still don’t know what this is about,” she persisted.

“Are you frightened?”

“A bit.”

“You needn’t be.” She saw that he was telling the truth, at least as he perceived it. This calmed her slightly. “We’re going to treat you very well,” he added. “You’re too valuable to us to be treated otherwise.”

“And if I decide I don’t want to stay here?”

He looked away from her, glancing out of the window. The light traced the outline of his face with dying fire. There was something about him—a muscular compactness to his body, that bulldog face—that made her think of circus performers she had seen in the badlands, who were actually unemployed miners touring from village to village to supplement their income. He could have been a fire-eater or an acrobat.

“You can leave,” he said, turning back to her. “There’d be no point keeping you here without your permission. Your usefulness to us depends entirely on your good will.”

Perhaps she was reading him incorrectly, but she did not think he was lying about that, either.

“I still don’t see…” she said.

“I’ve done my homework,” he told her. “You’re a rara avis, Miss Els. You have a gift shared by fewer than one in a thousand people. And you have the gift to a remarkable degree. You’re off the scale. I doubt that there’s anyone else quite like you on the whole of Hela.”

“I just see when people lie,” she said.

“You see more than that. Look at me now.” He smiled at her again. “Am I smiling because I am genuinely happy, Miss Els?”

It was the same feral smile she had seen before. “I don’t think so.”

“You’re right. Do you know why you can tell?”

“Because it’s obvious,” she said.

“But not to everyone. When I smile on demand—as I did just then—I make use of only one muscle in my face: the zygomatics major. When 1 smile spontaneously—which I confess does not happen very often—I flex not only my zygomaticus major but I also tighten the orbicularis oculi, pars lateralis.” Grelier touched a finger to the side of his temple. “That’s the muscle that encircles the eye. The majority of us cannot tighten that muscle voluntarily. I certainly can’t. By the same token the majority of us cannot stop it tightening when we are genuinely pleased.” He smiled again; the elevator was slowing. “Many people do not see the difference. If they notice it, they notice it subliminally, and the information is lost in the welter of other sensory inputs. The crucial data is ignored. But to you these things come screaming through. They sound trumpets. You are incapable of ignoring them.”

“I remember you now,” she said.

“I was there when they interviewed your brother, yes. I remember the fuss you made when they lied to him.”

“Then they did lie.”

“You always knew it.”

She looked at him: square in the face, alert to every nuance. “Do you know what happened to Harbin?”

“Yes,” he replied.

The trelliswork carriage rattled to a halt.

Grelier led her into the dean’s garret. The six-sided room was alive with mirrors. She saw her own startled expression jangling back at her, fragmented like a cubist portrait. In the confusion of reflections she did not immediately notice the dean himself. She saw the view through the windows, the white curve of Hela’s horizon reminding her of the smallness of her world, and she saw the suit—the strange, roughly welded one—that she recognised from the Adventist insignia. Rash-mika’s skin prickled: just looking at the suit disturbed her. There was something about it, an impression of evil radiating from it in invisible lines, flooding the room; a powerful sense of presence, as if the suit itself embodied another visitor to the garret.

Rashmika walked past the suit. As she neared it the impression of evil became perceptibly stronger, almost as if invisible rays of malevolence were boring into her head, fingering their way into the private cavities of her mind. It was not like her to respond so irrationally to something so obviously inanimate, but the suit had an undeniable power. Perhaps, buried inside it, was a mechanism for inducing disquiet. She had heard of such things: vital tools in certain spheres of negotiation. They tickled the parts of the brain responsible for stimulating dread and the registering of hidden presences.

Now that she thought she could explain the suit’s power she felt less disturbed by it. All the same, she was glad when she reached the other side of the garret, into full view of the dean. At first she thought he was dead. He was lying back on his couch, hands clasped across his blanketed chest like a man in the repose of the recently deceased. But then the chest moved. And the eyes—splayed open for examination—were horribly alive within their sockets. They trembled like little warm eggs about to hatch.

“Miss Els,” the dean said. “I hope your trip here was an enjoyable one.”

She couldn’t believe she was in his presence. “Dean Quaiche,” she said. “I heard… I thought…”

“That I was dead?” His voice was a rasp, the kind of sound an insect might have manufactured by the deft rubbing of chitinous surfaces. “I have never made any secret of my continued existence, Miss Els… for all these years. The congregation has seen me regularly.”

“The rumours are understandable,” Grelier said. The surgeon-general had opened a medical cabinet on the wall and was now fishing through its innards. “You don’t show your face outside of the Lady Morwenna, so how are the rest of the population expected to know?”

“Travel is difficult for me.” Quaiche pointed with one hand towards a small hexagonal table set amid the mirrors. “Have some tea, Miss Els. And sit down, take the weight off your feet. We have much to talk about.”

“I have no idea why I am here, Dean.”

“Didn’t Grelier tell you anything? I told you to brief the young lady, Grelier. I told you not to keep her in the dark.”

Grelier turned from the wall and walked towards Quaiche, carrying bottles and swabs. “I told her precisely what you asked me to tell her: that her services were required, and that our use for her depended critically on her sensitivity to facial microexpressions.”

“What else did you tell her?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

Rashmika sat down and poured herself some tea. There appeared little point in refusing. And now that she was being offered a drink she realised that she was very thirsty.

“I presume you want me to help you,” she ventured. “You need my skill, for some reason or other. There is someone you’re not sure if you trust or not.” She sipped at the tea: whatever she thought of her hosts, it tasted decent enough. “Am I warm?”

“You’re more than warm, Miss Els,” Quaiche remarked. “Have you always been this astute?”

“Were I truly astute, I’m not sure I’d be sitting here.”

Grelier leant over the Dean and began dabbing at the exposed whites of his eyes. She could see neither of their faces.

“You sound as if you have misgivings,” the dean said. “And yet all the evidence suggests you were rather keen on reaching the Lady Morwenna.”

“That was before I found out where it was going. How close are we to the bridge, Dean? If you don’t mind my asking.”

‘Two hundred and fifty-six kilometres distant,“ he said.

Rashmika allowed herself a moment of relief. She sipped another mouthful of the tea. At the crawling pace the cathedrals maintained, that was sufficiently far away not to be of immediate concern. But even as she enjoyed that solace, another part of her mind quietly informed her that it was really much closer than she feared. A third of a metre a second did not sound very fast, but there were a lot of seconds in a day.

“We’ll be there in ten days,” the dean added.

Rashmika put down her tea. “Ten days isn’t very long, Dean. Is it true what they say, that you’ll be taking the Lady Morwenna over Absolution Gap?”

“God willing.”

That was the last thing she wanted to hear. “Forgive me, Dean, but the one thing I didn’t have in mind when I came here was dying in some suicidal folly.”

“No one’s going to die,” he told her. “The bridge has been proven able to take the weight of an entire supply caravan. Measurements have never detected an ångström of deflection under any load.”

“But no cathedral has ever crossed it.”

“Only one has ever tried, and it failed because of guidance control, not any structural problem with the bridge.”

“You think you’ll be more successful, I take it?”

“I have the finest cathedral engineers on the Way. And the finest cathedral, too. Yes, we’ll make it, Miss Els. We’ll make it and one day you’ll tell your children how fortunate you were to enter my employment at such an auspicious time.”

“I sincerely hope you’re right.”

“Did Grelier tell you that you could leave at any time?”

“Yes,” she said, hesitantly.

“It was the truth. Go now, Miss Els. Finish your tea and go. No one will stop you, and I will make arrangements for your employment in the Catherine. Good work, too.”

She was about to ask: the same good work you promised my brother? But she stopped herself. It was too soon to go barging in with another question about Harbin. She had come this far, and either extraordinary luck or extraordinary misfortune had propelled her into the heart of Quaiche’s order. She still did not know exactly what they wanted of her, but she knew she had been granted a chance that she must not throw away with one idle, ill-tempered question. Besides, there was another reason not to ask: she was frightened of what the answer might be.

“I’ll stay,” she said, adding quickly, “For now. Until we’ve talked things over properly.”

“Very wise, Miss Els,” Quaiche said. “Now, would you do me a small favour?”

“That would depend,” she said.

“I only want you to sit there and drink your tea. A gentleman is going to come into this room and he and I are going to have a little chat. I want you to observe the gentleman in question—carefully, but not obtrusively—and report your observations to me when the gentleman has departed. It won’t take long, and there’s no need for you to say anything while the man is present. In fact, it would be better if you didn’t.”

“Is that what you want me for?”

“That is part of it, yes. We can discuss terms of employment later. Consider this part of your interview.”

“And if I fail?”

“It isn’t a test. You’ve already been tested on your basic skills, Miss Els. You came through with flying colours. In this instance, I just want honest observation. Grelier, are you done yet? Stop fussing around. You’re like a little girl playing with her dolly.”

Grelier began to put away his swabs and ointments. “I’m done,” he said curtly. “That abscess has nearly stopped weeping pus/‘

“Would you care for more tea before the gentleman arrives, Miss Els?”

“I’m fine with this,” she said, holding on to her empty cup.

“Grelier, make yourself scarce, then have the Ultra representative shown in.”

The surgeon-general locked the medical cabinet, said goodbye to Rashmika and walked out of the room by a different door than the one through which they had entered. His cane tapped into the distance.

Rashmika waited. Now that Grelier had gone she felt uncomfortable in Quaiche’s presence. She did not know what to say. She had never wanted to reach him specifically. She found the very idea distasteful. It was his order she had wanted to infiltrate, and then only to the point necessary to find Harbin. It was true that she did not care how much damage she did along the way, but Quaiche himself had never been of interest to her. Her mission was selfish, concerned only with the fate of her brother. If the Adventist church continued to inflict misery and hardship on the population of Hela, that was their problem, not hers. They were complicit in it, as much a part of the problem as Quaiche. And she had not come to change any of that, unless it stood in her way.

Eventually the representative arrived. Rashmika observed his entry, remembering that she had been told to say nothing. She presumed that extended to not even greeting the Ultra.

“Come in, Triumvir,” Quaiche said, his couch elevating to something approximating a normal sitting position. “Come in and don’t be alarmed. Triumvir, this is Rashmika Els, my assistant. Rashmika, this is Triumvir Guro Harlake of the lighthugger That Which Passes, recently arrived from Sky’s Edge.”

The Ultra arrived in a shuffling red mobility contraption. His skin had the smooth whiteness of a baby reptile’s, faintly tattooed with scales, and his eyes were partially concealed behind slitted yellow contacts. His short white hair fell over his face in a stiff, foppish fringe. His fingernails were long, green, vicious as scythes, and they kept clicking against the armature of his mobility device.

“We were the last ship out during the evacuation,” the Triumvir said. “There were ships behind us, but they didn’t make it.”

“How many systems have fallen so far?” Quaiche asked.

“Eight… nine. Maybe more by now. News takes decades to reach us. They say Earth is still intact, but there have been confirmed attacks against Mars and the Jovian polities, including the Europan Demarchy and Gilgamesh Isis. No one has heard anything from Zion or Prospekt. They say every system will fall eventually. It’ll just be a matter of time until they find us all.”

“In which case, why did you stop here? Wouldn’t it have been better to keep moving outwards, away from the threat?”

“We had no choice,” the Ultra said. His voice was deeper than Rashmika had expected. “Our contract required that we bring our passengers to Hela. Contracts mean a great deal to us.”

“An honest Ultra? What is the world coming to?”

“We’re not all vampires. Anyway, we had to stop for another reason, not just because our sleepers wanted to come here as pilgrims. We had shield difficulties. We can’t make another interstellar transit without major repairs.”

“Costly ones, I’d imagine,” Quaiche said.

The Triumvir bowed his head. “That is why we are having this conversation, Dean Quaiche. We heard that you had need of the services of a good ship. A matter of protection. You feel yourself threatened.”

“It’s not a question of feeling threatened,” he said. “It’s just that in these times… we’d be foolish not to want to protect our assets, wouldn’t we?”

“Wolves at the door,” the Ultra said.

“Wolves?”

“That’s what the Conjoiners named the Inhibitor machines, just before they evacuated human space. That was a century ago. If we’d had any sense we’d all have followed them.”

“God will protect us,” Quaiche said. “You believe that, don’t you? Even if you don’t, your passengers do, otherwise they wouldn’t have embarked upon this pilgrimage. They know something is going to happen, Triumvir. The series of vanishings we have witnessed here is merely the precursor—the countdown—to something truly miraculous.”

“Or something truly cataclysmic,” the Ultra said. “Dean, we are not here to discuss the interpretation of an anomalous astronomical phenomenon. We are strict positivists. We believe only in our ship and its running costs. And we need a new shield very badly. What are your terms of employment?”

“You will bring your ship into close orbit around Hela. Your weapons will be inspected for operational effectiveness. Naturally, a party of Adventist delegates will be stationed aboard your ship for the term of the contract. They will have complete control of the weapons, deciding who and what constitutes a threat to the security of Hela. In other respects, they won’t get in your way at all. And as our protectors, you will be in a very advantageous position when it comes to matters of trade.” Quaiche waved his hand, as if brushing away an insect. “You could walk away from here with a lot more than a new shield if you play your cards right.”

“You make it sound very tempting.” The Ultra drummed his fingernails against the chest-plate of his mobility device. “But don’t underestimate the risk that we perceive in bringing our ship close to Hela. We all know what happened to the… ” He paused. “The Gnostic Ascension.”

“That’s why our terms are so generous.”

“And the matter of Adventist delegates? You should know how unusual it is for anyone to be permitted aboard one of our ships. We could perhaps accommodate two or three hand-picked representatives, but only after they had undergone extensive screening…”

“That part isn’t negotiable,” Quaiche said abruptly. “Sorry, Triumvir, but it all boils down to one thing: how badly do you want that shield?”

“We’ll have to think about it,” the Ultra said.

Afterwards, Quaiche asked Rashmika for her observations. She told him what she had picked up, restricting her remarks to the things she was certain she had detected rather than vague intuitions.

“He was truthful,” she said, “right up to the point where you mentioned his weapons. Then he was hiding something. His expression changed, just for a moment. I couldn’t tell you what it was, exactly, but I do know what it means.”

“Probably a contraction of the zygomaticus major,” Grelier said, sitting with his fingers knitted together before his face. He had removed his vacuum suit while he was away and now wore a plain grey Adventist smock. “Coupled with a depressing of the corners of the lips, using the risorius. Some flexion of the mentalis—chin elevation.”

“You saw all that, Surgeon-General?” Rashmika asked.

“Only by slowing down the observation camera and running a tedious and somewhat unreliable interpretive routine on his face. For an Ultra he was rather expressive. But it wasn’t in real-time, and even when the routine detected it, I didn’t see it for myself. Not viscerally. Not the way you saw it, Rashmika: instantly, written there as if in glowing letters.”

“He was hiding something,” she said. “If you’d pushed him on the topic of the weapons, he’d have lied to your face.”

“So his weapons aren’t what he makes them out to be,” Quaiche said.

“Then he’s no use to us,” Grelier said. “Tick him off the list.”

“We’ll keep him on just in case. The ship’s the main thing. We can always augment his weapons if we decide we have to.”

Grelier looked up at his master, peering over the steeple of his fingers. “Doesn’t that rather defeat the purpose?”

“Perhaps.” Quaiche seemed irritated by his surgeon’s needling. “In any case, there are other candidates. I have two more waiting in the cathedral. I take it, Rashmika, that you’d be willing to sit through another couple of interviews?”

She poured herself some more tea. “Send them in,” she said. “It’s not as if I have anything else to do.”