Absolution Gap

THIRTY-NINE

When the Ultras’ shuttle had departed, Quaiche turned to her and said, “Well? Are they the ones?”

“I think they are,” she said.

“The ship looks very suitable from a technical standpoint, and they certainly want the position very badly. The woman didn’t give us much to go on. What about the man: did you sense that Malinin was hiding anything?”

This was it, she thought: the crux moment. She had known that Vasko Malinin meant something important as soon as she heard his name: it had felt like the right key slipping into a lock after so many wrong ones, like the sequenced falling of well-oiled tumblers.

She had felt the same thing when she had heard the woman’s name.

I know these people, she thought. They were older than she remembered them, but their faces and mannerisms were as familiar to her as her own flesh and blood.

There had been something in Malinin’s manner, too: he knew her, just as she knew him. The recognition went both ways. And she had sensed, too, that he was hiding something. He had lied blatantly about his motive for coming to Hela, but there had been more to it than that. He wanted more than just the chance to make an innocent study of Haldora.

This was it: the crux moment.

“He seemed honest enough,” Rashmika said.

“He did?” the dean asked.

“He was nervous,” she replied, “and he was hoping you wouldn’t ask too many questions, but only because he wants his ship to get the position.”

“It’s odd that they should show such an interest in Haldora. Most Ultras are only interested in trade advantages.”

“You heard what he said: the market’s crashed.”

“Still doesn’t explain his interest in Haldora, though.”

Rashmika sipped at her tea, hoping to hide her own expression. She was nowhere near as successful at lying as she was adept at its detection.

“Doesn’t really matter, does it? You’ll have your representatives aboard their ship. They won’t be able to get up to anything fishy with a bunch of Adventists breathing down their necks.”

“There’s still something,” Quaiche said. With no visitors to intimidate he had replaced his sunglasses, clipping them into place over the eye-opener. “Something I just can’t put my finger… I know, did you see the way he kept looking at you? And the woman, too? Odd, that. The others have barely looked at you.”

“I didn’t notice,” she said.

Vasko felt his weight increase as the shuttle pushed them back towards orbit. As the vessel altered its course, he saw the Lady Morwenna again, looking tiny and toy like compared to when they had first approached it. The great cathedral sat alone on its own diverging track of the Permanent Way, so far from the others that it appeared to have been cast into the icy wilderness for some unspeakable heresy, excommunicated from the main family of cathedrals. He knew it was moving, but at this distance the cathedral might as well have been fixed to the landscape, turning with Hela. It took ten minutes to travel its own length, after all.

He looked at Khouri, sitting next to him. She had said nothing since they left the cathedral.

An odd thought occurred to him, popping into his mind from nowhere. All this trouble that the cathedrals went to—the great circumnavigation of Hela’s equator—was undertaken to ensure that Haldora was always overhead, so that it could be observed without interruption. And that was because Hela had not quite settled into synchronous rotation around the larger planet. How much simpler it would have been had Hela reached that state, so that it always kept the same face turned towards Haldora. Then all the cathedrals could have gathered at the same spot and set down roots. There would have been no need for them to move, no need for the Permanent Way, no need for the unwieldy culture of support communities that the cathedrals both depended upon and nurtured. And all it would have taken was a tiny adjustment in Hela’s rotation. The planet was like a clock that almost kept time. It only needed a tiny nudge to fall into absolute, ticking synchrony. How much? Vasko ran the numbers in his head, not quite believing what they told him. The length of Hela’s day would only have to be changed by one part in two hundred. Just twelve minutes out of the forty hours.

He wondered how any of them could keep their faith knowing that. For if there was anything miraculous about Haldora, why would the Creator have slipped up over a matter of twelve minutes in forty hours when arranging Hela’s diurnal rotation? It was a glaring omission, a sign of cosmic sloppiness. Not even that, Vasko corrected himself. It was a sign of cosmic obliviousness. The universe didn’t know what was happening here. It didn’t know and it didn’t care. It didn’t even know that it didn’t know.

If there was a God, he thought, then there wouldn’t be wolves. They weren’t part of anyone’s idea of heaven and hell.

The shuttle banked away from the cathedral. He could see the rough, ungraded surface of the Permanent Way stretching ahead of the Lady Morwenna. But it did not stretch very far before meeting the dark, shadowed absence of Ginnungagap Rift. Vasko knew exactly what the locals called it.

The Way appeared to end at the edge of Absolution Gap. On the far side of the Rift, forty kilometres from the near side, the road continued. There appeared to be nothing in between but forty kilometres of empty space. It was only when the shuttle had climbed a little higher that a particular angle of the light picked out the absurdly delicate filigree of the bridge, as if it had been breathed into being just at that moment.

Vasko looked at the bridge, then back to the cathedral. It still appeared to be stationary, but he could see that the landmarks that had been next to it a few minutes earlier were now just behind it. The crawl was slug-slow, but there was also an inevitability about it.

And the bridge did not look remotely capable of carrying the cathedral to the other side of the rift.

He opened the secure channel to the larger shuttle waiting in orbit, the one that would relay his signal to the Nostalgia for Infinity, which was still waiting in the parking swarm.

“This is Vasko,” he said. “We’ve made contact with Aura.”

“Did you get anything?” asked Orca Cruz.

He looked at Khouri. She nodded, but said nothing.

“We got something,” Vasko said.

Scorpio came to consciousness knowing that this sleep had been even longer than the one before. He could feel the messages of chemical protestation from his cells flooding his system as they were cajoled back towards the grudging labour of metabolism. They were picking up tools like disgruntled workers, ready to down them for good at the slightest provocation. They had had enough mistreatment for one lifetime. Join the club, Scorpio thought. It was not as if the management was enjoying it, either.

He groped back into memory. He recalled, clearly enough, the episode of waking in the Yellowstone system. He remembered seeing the evidence of the wolves’ handiwofk, Yellowstone and its habitats reduced to ruins, the system gutted. He remembered also the part he had played in the dispute over the evacuees. He had won that particular battle—the shuttle had been allowed aboard—but it seemed-that he had lost the war. The choice had been his: surrender command and submit to a passive role as an observer, or go into the freezer again. Practically, the two amounted to the same thing: he would be out of the picture, leaving the running of the ship to Vasko and his allies. But at least if frozen he would not have to stand there watching it happen. It was a small compensation, but at his point in life it was the small compensations that mattered.

And now at last he was being awoken. His position aboard the ship might be just as compromised as before he went under, but at least he would have the benefit of some different scenery.

“Well?” he asked Valensin, while the doctor ran his usual battery of tests. “Ducked the odds again, didn’t I?”

“You always had an even chance of surviving it, Scorpio, but that doesn’t make you immortal. You go into that thing again, you won’t come out of it.”

“You said I had a ten per cent chance of survival the next time.”

“I was trying to cheer you up.”

“It’s worse than that?”

Valensin pointed at the reefersleep casket. “You climb into that box one more time, we might as well paint it black and put handles on it.”

But the true state of his current health, even when he filtered out Valensin’s usual tendency to put a positive spin on things, was still bad. In some respects it was as if he had not been in the casket at all; as if the flow of time had operated on him with stealthy disregard for the supposed effects of cryogenic stasis. His vision and hearing had degenerated further. He could barely see anything in his peripheral vision now, and even in full view, things that had been sharp before now appeared granular and milky. He kept having to ask Valensin to speak up above the churn of the room’s air conditioners. He had never had to do that before. When he walked around he found himself tiring quickly, always looking for somewhere to rest and catch his breath. His heart and lung capacities had weakened. Pig cardiovascular systems had been engineered by commercial interests for maximum ease of transgenic transplantation. The same interests hadn’t been overly concerned about the longevity of their products. Planned obsolescence, they called it.

He had been fifty when he left Ararat. To all intents and purposes he was still fifty: he had lived through only a few subjective weeks of additional time. But the transitions to and from reefersleep had put another seven or eight years on the clock, purely because of the battering his cells had taken. It would have been worse if he had stayed awake, living through all those years of shiptime, but not by very much.

Still, he was alive. He had lived through more years of worldtime than most pigs. So what if he was pushing the envelope of pig longevity? He was weakened, but he wasn’t on his back just yet.

“So where are we?” he asked Valensin. “I take it we’re around 107 Piscium. Or did you just wake me up to tell me how bad an idea it was to wake me up?”

“We’re around 107 Piscium, yes, but you still need to do a little catching up.” Valensin helped him off the examination couch, Scorpio noticing that the two old servitors had finally broken down and been consigned to new roles as coat racks, standing guard on either side of the door.

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Scorpio said. “How long has it been? What’s the year?”

“Twenty-seven twenty-seven,” Valensin said. “And no, I don’t like the sound of that any more than you do. One other thing, Scorpio.”

“Yes?”

Valensin handed him a curved white shard, like a flake of ice. “You were holding this when you went under. I presumed it had some significance.”

Scorpio took the piece of conch material from the doctor.

There was something wrong, something that no one was telling him. Scorpio looked at the faces around the conference table, trying to see it for himself. Everyone that he would have expected to be there was present: Cruz, Urton, Vasko, as well as a good number of seniors he did not know so well. Khouri was also there. But now that he saw her he realised the obvious, screaming absence. There was no sign of Aura.

“Where is she?” he asked.

“She’s all right, Scorp,” Vasko said. “She’s safe and well. I know because I’ve just seen her.”

“Someone tell him,” Khouri said. She looked older than last time, Scorpio thought. There were more lines on her face, more grey in her hair. She wore it short now, combed across her brow. He could see the shape of her skull shining through the skin.

“Tell me what?” he asked.

“How much did Valensin explain?” Vasko asked him.

“He told me the date. That was about it.”

“We had to take some difficult decisions, Scorp. In your absence, we did the best we could.”

In my absence, Scorpio thought: as if he had walked out on them, leaving them in the lurch when they most needed him; making him feel as if he was the one at fault, the one who had shirked his responsibilities.

“I’m sure you managed,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose. He had woken up with a headache. It was still there.

“We arrived here in 2717,” Vasko said, “after a nineteen-year flight from the Yellowstone system.”

The back of Scorpio’s neck prickled. “That’s not the date Valensin just gave me.”

“Valensin didn’t lie,” Urton said. “The local system date is 2727. We arrived around Hela nearly ten years ago. We’d have woken you then, but the time wasn’t right. Valensin told us we’d only get one shot. If we woke you then, you’d either be dead now or frozen again with only a small chance of revival.”

“This is the way it had to happen, Scorp,” Vasko said. “You were a resource we couldn’t afford to squander.”

“You’ve no idea how good that makes me feel.”

“What I mean is, we had to think seriously about when would be the best time to wake you. You always told us to wait until we’d arrived around Hela.”

“I did, didn’t I?”

“Well, think of this as our proper arrival. As far as the system authorities are concerned—the Adventists—we’ve only shown up in the last few weeks. We left and came back again, making a loop through local interstellar space.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because of what had to happen,” Vasko said. “When we got here ten years ago, we realised that the situation in this system was vastly more complex than we’d anticipated. The Adventists controlled access to Haldora, the planet that keeps vanishing. You had to deal with the church to get near Hela, and even then you weren’t allowed to send any probes anywhere near the gas giant.”

“You could have shot your way in, taken what you wanted by force.”

“And risked a bloodbath? There are a million innocent civilians on Hela, not to mention all the tens of thousands of sleepers in the ships parked in this system. And it’s not as if we knew exactly what we were looking for. If we’d come in with guns blazing, we might have destroyed the very thing we needed, or at the very least made sure that we’d never get our hands on it. But if we could get close to Quaiche, then we could get at the problem from the inside.”

“Quaiche is still alive?” Scorpio asked.

“We know that for sure now—Khouri and I met him today,” Vasko said. “But he’s a recluse, kept alive with faltering longevity therapies. He never leaves the Lady Morwenna, his cathedral. He doesn’t sleep. He’s had his brain altered so that he doesn’t need to. He doesn’t even blink. He spends every waking instant of his life staring at Haldora, waiting for it to blink instead.”

“He’s insane, then.”

“In his situation, wouldn’t you be? Something awful happened to him down there. It pushed him over the edge.”

“He has an indoctrinal virus,” Cruz said. “It’s always been in his blood, since before he came to Hela. Now there’s a whole industry down there, fractioning it off, splicing it into different grades, mixing it with other viruses brought in by the evacuees. They say he has moments of doubt, when he realises that everything he’s created here is a sham. That deep down inside he knows the vanishings are a rational phenomenon, not a miracle. That’s when he has a new strain of the indoctrinal virus pumped back into his blood.”

“Difficult man to get to know, sounds like,” Scorpio observed.

“More difficult than we anticipated,” Vasko said. “But Aura saw the way. It was her plan, Scorp, not ours.”

“And the plan was?”

“She went down there nine years ago,” Khouri said, looking straight at him, as if the two of them were alone in the room. “She was eight years old, Scorp. I couldn’t stop her. She knew what she’d been sent out into the world to do, and it was to find Quaiche.“

He shook his head. “You didn’t send an eight-year-old girl down there alone. Tell me you didn’t do it.”

“We had no choice,” Khouri said. “Trust me. I’m her mother. Trying to stop her from going down there was like trying to stop a salmon Swimming upriver. It was going to happen whether we liked it or not.”

“We found a family,” Vasko said. “Good people, living in the Vigrid badlands.

They had a son, but they’d lost their only daughter in an accident a couple of years earlier. They didn’t know who or what Aura was, only that they weren’t to ask too many questions. They were also told to treat her exactly as if she’d always been with them. They fell into the role very easily, telling her stories of things that their other daughter had done when she was younger. They loved her very much.“

“Why the pretence?”

“Because she didn’t remember who she really was,” Khouri said. “She buried her own memories, suppressing them. She’s halfway to being a Conjoiner. She can arrange her own head the way the rest of us arrange furniture. It wasn’t all that difficult for her to do, once she realised it had to happen.”

“Why?” he asked.

“So that she’d fit in without her whole life becoming an act. If she believed she’d been born on Hela, so would the people she met.”

“That’s horrific.”

“You think it was any easier for me, Scorp? I’m her mother. I was with her the day she decided to forget me. I walked into the same room as her and she barely noticed me.”

He gradually learned the rest of the story, doing his best to ignore the sense of unreality he felt. More than once he had to examine his surroundings, convincing himself that this was not just another revival nightmare. He felt foolish, having slept through all these machinations. But their story, or at least what he had been told of it, was seamless. It also had, he was forced to admit, a brutal inevitability. It had taken the Nostalgia for Infinity decades to reach Hela: more than forty years just trav-elling from Ararat via the Yellowstone system. But Aura’s mission had begun long before that, when she was hatched within the matrix of the Hades neutron star. Given all the time that she had been on her way, an extra nine years was really not all that serious an addition. Yes:now that he put it like that, it all made a horrid kind of sense. But only if you chose not to view the universe through the eyes of a pig close to the end of his life.

“She didn’t really forget anything,” Vasko said. “It was just buried subconsciously, planted there to bubble up as she grew older. We knew that sooner or later she would start to be compelled by those hidderf memories, even if she didn’t know exactly what was going on herself.”

“And?” Scorpio asked.

“She sent us a signal. It was to warn us that she was on her way to meet Quaiche. That was our cue to start making approaches to the Adventists. By the time we got through to him, Aura had already worked her way into his confidence.”

The leather of Scorpio’s jacket creaked as he folded his arms across his chest. “She just strolled into his life?”

“She’s his advisor,” Vasko said. “Sits in on his dealings with Ultras. We don’t know exactly what she’s doing there, but we can guess. Aura had—has—a gift. We saw it even when she was a baby.”

“She can read our faces better than we can,” Khouri said, “can tell if we’re lying, if we’re sad when we say we’re happy. It doesn’t have anything to do with her implants, and it won’t have gone away just because she hid those memories of herself.”

“She must have drawn attention to herself,” Vasko said, “made herself irresistible to Quaiche. But that was really just a short cut to his attention. Sooner or later she’d have found her way there, no matter what the obstacles. It was what she was born to do.”

“Did you talk to her?” Scorpio asked.

“No,” Vasko said. “It wasn’t possible. We couldn’t let Quaiche suspect that we’d ever met. But Khouri has the same implants, with the same compatibilities.”

“I was able to dig into her memories,” Khouri said, “once we were in the same room. It was close enough for direct contact between our implants without her suspecting anything.”

“You revealed yourself to her?” Scorpio asked.

“No. Not yet,” Khouri said. “She’s too vulnerable. It’s safer if she doesn’t remember everything straight away. That way she can continue to play the role Dean Quaiche expects of her. If he suspects she’s an Ultra spy, she’s in as much trouble as we are.”

“Let’s hope no one takes too close an interest in her, then,” Scorpio said. “How long are we looking at before she remembers everything on her own?”

“Days,” Khouri said. “No more than that. Maybe less. The cracks must already be showing.”

“About these talks with the dean,” Scorpio said. “Would you mind telling me exactly what was discussed?”

Vasko told him what he had talked about with the dean. Scorpio could tell that he was glossing over details, omitting anything not strictly essential. He learned of the dean’s request for a ship to provide local defence duties for Hela, orbiting the planet, sponsored by the Adventists. He learned that many Ultras were unwilling to accept the contract even with the sweeteners Quaiche had offered. They were frightened that their ships would be damaged by whatever had destroyed the Gnostic Ascension, the ship that had originally brought Quaiche to Hela.

“But that isn’t a problem for us,” Vasko said. “The risk is probably overstated in any case, but even if something does take a pot shot at us, we’re not exactly lacking defences. We’ve kept all the new technologies hidden ever since we approached the system, but that doesn’t mean we can’t turn them on again if we need them. I doubt that we’d have much to worry about from a few buried sentry weapons.”

“And for that protection, Quaiche is willing to let us take a closer look at Haldora?”

“Grudgingly,” Vasko said. “He still doesn’t like the idea of anyone poking sticks into the face of his miracle, but he wants that protection very badly.”

“Why is he so scared? Have other Ultras been causing trouble?”

Vasko shrugged. “The occasional incident, but nothing serious.”

“Sounds like an overreaction, in that case.”

“It’s his paranoia. There’s no need to second-guess him, so long as it gives us a licence to get close to Haldora without firing a gun.”

“Something isn’t right,” Scorpio said, his headache returning, having gone away and sharpened itself.

“You’re naturally cautious,” Vasko said. “There’s no fault in that. But we’ve waited nine years for this. This is our one chance. If we don’t take it, he’ll make the contract with another ship.”

“I still don’t like it.”

“Maybe you’d feel differently if it was your plan,” Urton said. “But it’s not. You were sleeping while we put this together.”

“That’s all right,” he said, obliging her with a smile. “I’m a pig. We don’t do long-term plans anyway.”

“What she means is,” Vasko said, “try to see it from our side. If you’d lived through all the years of waiting, you’d see things differently.” He leant back in his seat and shrugged. “Anyway, what’s done is done. I told Quaiche that we’d have to discuss the issue of the delegates, but other than that, all we’re waiting for is the agreement to come through from his side. Then we can go on in.”

“Wait,” Scorpio said, raising his hand. “Did you say delegates? What delegates?”

“Quaiche insists on it,” Vasko said. “Says he’ll need to station a small party of Adventists on the ship.”

“Over my dead body.”

“It’s all right,” Urton said. “The arrangement is reciprocal. The church sends up a party, we send one down to the cathedral. It’s all above board.”

Scorpio sighed. What point was there in arguing? He was already tired, and all he had done was sit in on this discussion. This discussion in which everything was already agreed, and he was—to all intents and purposes—relegated to the role of passive observer. He could object all he wanted, but for all the difference he made he might as well have stayed in the reefer-sleep casket.

“You’re making a serious mistake,” he said. “Trust me on this.”

Captain Seyfarth was a slight, unsmiling man with a small thin-lipped mouth ideally evolved for the registering of con-tempt. In fact, beyond his neutral calm, Quaiche had never known the captain of the Cathedral Guard to show any other emotion. Even Seyfarth’s contempt was deployed sparingly, like a very expensive, difficult to procure item of military ordnance. It was usually in connection with his opinion of someone else’s security arrangements. He was a man who liked his work very much, and little else. He was, in Quaiche’s opinion, the perfect man for the job.

Standing in the garret, he wore the highly polished armour of the Guard, with his pink-plumed ceremonial vacuum helmet tucked under arm. The ostentatiously flanged and recurved armour was the deep maroon of arterial blood. Many medals and ribbons had been painted on the chest-plate, commemorating the actions Seyfarth had led in defence of the Lady Morwenna’s interests. Officially, they had all been aboveboard and within the generally accepted rules of Way behaviour. He had fought off raiding parties of disgruntled villagers; he had repelled hostile actions by rogue trading elements, including small parties of Ultras. But there had been covert operations as well, matters too delicate to commemorate: pre-emptive sabotage of both the Permanent Way and other cathedrals; the discreet removal from the church hierarchy of progressive elements hostile to Quaiche. Assassination was too strong a word, but that, too, was within Seyfarth’s repertoire of possible effects. He had the kind of past best left unmentioned. It included wars and war crimes.

But he remained fiercely loyal to Quaiche. In thirty-five years of service, there had been enough opportunities for Seyfarth to betray his master in return for personal advancement. It had never happened; all he cared about was the excellence with which he discharged his duty as Quaiche’s protector.

It had still been a risk, all the same, for Quaiche to let him know of his plans in advance. Everyone else involved—even the master of holdfast construction—needed to know only certain details. Grelier knew nothing at all. But Seyfarth required an overview of the entire scheme. He was the one, after all, who was going to have to take the ship.

“It’s going to happen, then,” Seyfarth said. “I wouldn’t have been called here otherwise.”

“I’ve found a willing candidate,” Quaiche said. “More importantly, one that also suits my needs.” He passed Seyfarth a picture of the starship, captured by spy remotes. “What do you think? Can you do the business?”

Seyfarth took his time studying the picture. “I don’t like the look of it,” he said. “All that gothic ornamentation… it looks like a chunk of the Lady Morwenna; flying through space.”

“All the more appropriate, then.”

“My objection stands.”

“You’ll have to live with it. No two Ultra ships look alike, and we’ve seen stranger. Anyway, the holdfast can accommodate any hull profile, within reason. This won’t pose any problems. And it’s what’s inside that really matters.”

“You’ve managed to put a spy aboard?”

“No,” Quaiche said. “Too little time. But it doesn’t matter. They’ve more or less agreed to accept a small party of Adven-tist observers. That’s all we need.”

“And the condition of the engines?”

“Nothing to cause alarm. We observed her approach: everything looked clean and stable.”

Seyfarth was still studying the picture, his lips signalling the contempt Quaiche recognised so well. “Where had she come from?”

“Could have been anywhere. We didn’t see her until she was very near. Why?”

“There’s something about this ship that I don’t like.”

“You’d say that no matter which one I offered you. You’re a bom pessimist, Seyfarth: that’s why you’re so good at your work. But the matter is closed. The ship’s already been selected.”

“Ultras aren’t to be trusted,” he said. “Now more than ever. They’re as scared as everyone else.” He flicked the picture, making it crack. “What is it they want, Quaiche? Have you asked yourself that?”

“What I’m giving them.”

“Which is?”

“Favoured trading incentives, first refusal on relics, that kind of thing. And…” He left the sentence unfinished.

“And what?”

“They’re mainly interested in Haldora,” Quaiche said. “They have some studies they’d like to make.”

Seyfarth watched him inscrutably; Quaiche felt as if he was being peeled open like a fruit. “You’ve always denied anyone that kind of access in the past,” he said. “Why the sudden change of heart?”

“Because,” Quaiche said, “it doesn’t really matter now. The vanishings are heading towards some sort of conclusion anyway. The word of God is about to be revealed whether we like it or not.”

“There’s more to it than that.” Idly, Seyfarth ran one red gauntlet through the soft pink plume of his helmet. “You don’t care now, do you? Not now that your triumph is so close at hand.”

“You’re wrong,” Quaiche said. “I do care, more than ever. But perhaps this is God’s way after all. The Ultras may even hasten the end of the vanishings by their interference.”

“The word of God revealed, on the eve of your victory? Is that what you’re hoping for?”

“If that’s the way it’s meant to happen,” Quaiche said, with a fatalistic sigh, “then who am I to stand in the way?”

Seyfarth returned the picture to Quaiche. He walked around the garret, his form sliced and shuffled by the intervening mirrors. His armour creaked with every footstep, his gauntleted fists opening and closing in neurotic rhythm.

‘The advance party: how many delegates?“

“They agreed to twenty. Seemed unwise to try to talk them up. You can make do with twenty, can’t you?”

“Thirty would have been better.”

“Thirty begins to look too much like an army. In any case, the twenty will only be there to make sure the ship’s really worth taking. Once they’ve started softening things up, you can send in as many Cathedral Guard as you can spare.”

“I’ll need authorisation to use whatever weapons I see fit.”

“I don’t want you murdering people, Captain,” Quaiche said, raising a forbidding finger. “Reasonable resistance may be dealt with, yes, but that doesn’t mean turning the ship into a bloodbath. Pacify the security elements, by all means, but emphasise that we only want the loan of the ship: we’re not stealing it. Once our work is done, they can have it back, with our gratitude. I need hardly add that you’d better make sure you deliver the ship to me in one piece.”

“I only asked for permission to use weapons.”

“Use whatever you see fit, Captain, provided you can smug-gle it past the Ultras. They’ll be looking for the usual: bombs, knives and guns. Even if we had access to anti-matter, we’d have a hard time getting it past them.”

“I’ve already made all the necessary arrangements,” Seyfarth said.

“I’m sure you have. But—please—show a modicum of restraint, all right?”

“And your magic advisor?” Seyfarth asked. “What did she have to say on the matter?”

“She concluded there was nothing to worry about,” Quaiche said.

Seyfarth turned around, latching his helmet into place. The pink plume fell across the black strip of his faceplate. He looked both comical and fearsome, which was exactly the intended effect.

“I’ll get to work, then.”

An hour later there was an official transmission from the Clocktower of the Lady Morwenna. The arrangement had been accepted by the Adventist party. Subject to the installation of twenty clerical observers aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity, the lighthugger was free to move into near-Hela space and commence the defence watch. Once the observers had come aboard and inspected the weapons setup, the crew would be permitted to make a limited physical study of the Haldora phenomenon.

The reply was sent back within thirty minutes. The terms were acceptable to the Nostalgia for Infinity, and the Adventist party would be welcomed aboard as the ship made its approach-spiral to Hela orbit. At the same time, an Ultra delegation would proceed by shuttle to the landing stage of the Lady Morwenna.

Thirty minutes after that, with a flicker of main drive thrust, the Nostalgia for Infinity broke station from the parking swarm.