Absolution Gap

FORTY

The threshing machinery of Motive Power seemed to salute Captain Seyfarth as he strode through the chamber, his gloved hands tucked behind his back. As the leader of the Cathedral Guard, he never counted on a warm welcome from the mechanically minded denizens of the propulsion department. While they had no instinctive dislike for him, they did have long memories: it was always Seyfarth’s people who put down any rebellions within the Lady Morwenna’s technical workforce. There were surprisingly few workers in the chamber now, but in his mind’s eye Seyfarth sketched in the fallen bodies and injured victims of the last “arbitration action,” as the cathedral authorities had referred to the matter. Glaur, the shift boss he was looking for now, had never been directly linked to the rebellion, but it was clear from their infrequent dealings that Glaur had no love for either the Cathedral Guard or its chief.

“Ah, Glaur,” he said, catching sight of the man next to an open access panel.

“Captain. What a pleasure.”

Seyfarth made his way to the panel. Wires and cables hung from its innards, like disembowelled vitals. Seyfarth pulled the access hatch down so that it hung half-opened over the dangling entrails. Glaur started to say something—some useless protestation—but Seyfarth silenced him by touching a finger to his own lips. “Whatever it is, it can wait.”

“You have no…”

“Bit quiet in here, isn’t it?” Seyfarth said, looking around the chamber at the untended machines and empty catwalks. “Where is everyone?”

“You know exactly where everyone is,” Glaur said. “They got themselves off the Lady Mor as soon as they could. By the end of it they were charging a year’s wages for a surface suit. I’m down to a skeleton crew now, just enough lads to keep the reactor sweet and the machines greased.”

“Those who left,” Seyfarth mused. It was happening all over the cathedral: even the Guard was having trouble stopping the exodus. “They’d be in violation of contract, wouldn’t they?”

Glaur looked at him incredulously. “You think they give a damn about that, Captain? All that they care about is getting off this thing before we reach the bridge.”

Seyfarth could smell the man’s fear boiling off him like a heat haze. “You mean they don’t think we’ll make it?”

“Do you?”

“If the dean says we’ll make it, who are we to doubt him?”

“I doubt him,” Glaur said, his voice a hiss. “I know what happened the last time, and we’re bigger and heavier. This cathedral isn’t going to cross that bridge, Captain, no matter how much blood the surgeon-general pumps into us.”

“Fortunate, then, that I won’t be on the Lady Morwenna when it happens,” Seyfarth said.

“You’re leaving?” Glaur asked, suddenly keen.

Did he imagine, Seyfarth thought, that he was actually proposing rebellion? “Yes, but on church business. Something that’ll keep me away until the bridge is either crossed… or it isn’t. What about you?”

Glaur shook his head, stroking the filthy handkerchief he kept knotted around his neck. “I’ll stay, Captain.”

“Loyalty to the dean?”

“Loyalty to my machines, more like.”

Seyfarth touched him on the shoulder. “I’m impressed. You wouldn’t be tempted, not even once, to steer the cathedral from the Way, or to sabotage the motors?”

Glaur’s teeth flashed. “I’m here to do a job.”

“It’ll kill you.”

“Then maybe I’ll leave at the last moment. But this cathedral’s staying on the Way.”

“Good man. We’d better make sure of that, all the same.”

Glaur looked into his eyes. “I’m sorry, Captain?”

“Walk me to the lock-out controls, Glaur.”

“No.”

Seyfarth seized him by the neckerchief, lifted him half his height from the ground. Glaur choked, flailing his fists uselessly against Seyfarth’s chest.

“Walk me to the lock-out controls,” Seyfarth repeated, his voice still calm.

The surgeon-general’s private shuttle made its own approach, squatting down on a stiletto of fusion thrust. The landing pad Grelier had selected was a small, derelict affair on the outskirts of the Vigrid settlement. His red cockleshell of a ship came to rest with a pronounced lean, the pad’s surface subsiding into the ground. The pad clearly saw very little traffic: it might easily have been decades since anything larger than a robot supply drone had landed on it.

Grelier gathered his belongings and exited his ship. The pad was decrepit, but the walkway leading away from it was still more or less serviceable. Tapping his cane against the fractured craquelure of the concrete surface, he made his way to the nearest public entrance point. The airlock, when he tried it, refused to open. He resorted to the all-purpose Clocktower key—it was supposed to open just about any door on Hela—but that didn’t work either. Gloomily he concluded that the door was simply broken, its mechanism failed.

He followed the trail for another ten minutes, casting around until he found a lock that actually worked. He was near the centre of the little buried hamlet now; the topside was a confusion of parked vehicles, abandoned equipment modules, scorched and broken-faceted solar collectors. This was all very well, but the closer he was to the heart of the settlement, the more likely he was to be discovered going about his business.

No matter: it had to be done, and he had exhausted the alternatives. Still suited, he cycled through the airlock and then descended a vertical ladder. This brought him into a dimly lit tunnel network, with corridors radiating in five different directions. Fortunately, they were colour-coded, indicating the residential and industrial districts they led to. Except districts wasn’t really the right word, Grelier thought. This tiny community, though it might have enjoyed social ties with others in the badlands, was smaller in population than one floor of the Lady Morwenna.

He hummed as he walked. As bothered as he was by recent events, he always enjoyed being on Clocktower business. Even if, as now, the business was verging on the personal, a mission the precise reason for which Grelier had not told the dean.

Fair enough, he said to himself. If the dean kept secrets from him, then he would keep secrets from the dean.

Quaiche was up to something. Grelier had suspected as much for months, but the girl’s remarks about witnessing the construction fleet had clinched it. Although Grelier had done his best to dismiss her observation, it had continued to gnaw at him. It chimed with other odd things that he had noticed lately. The skimping on Way maintenance, for instance. They had got stuck behind the ice blockage precisely because Way maintenance lacked the usual resources to clear it. Quaiche had been forced to deploy nuclear demolition charges: God’s Fire.

At the time, Grelier had put it down to nothing more than a happy coincidence. But the more he thought about it, the less likely that seemed. Quaiche had wanted to make his announcement about taking the Lady Morwenna over the bridge with the maximum fanfare. What better way to underline his words than with a dose of God’s Fire shining through his newly installed stained-glass window?

The use of God’s Fire had only been justified because Way maintenance was already stretched. But what if Way maintenance was stretched precisely because Quaiche had ordered the diversion of its equipment and manpower?

Another thought occurred to Grelier: the blockage itself might even have been orchestrated. Quaiche had blamed it on sabotage by another church, but Quaiche could easily have arranged it himself. It would only have been a question of laying fuses and explosives the last time the Lady Mor went through.

A year earlier.

Did he honestly think Quaiche had been planning something all that time? Well, perhaps. People who built cathedrals tended to take the long view, after all.

Grelier still couldn’t see where all this was heading. All he knew—with a growing conviction—was that Quaiche was keeping something from him.

Something to do with the Ultras?

Something to do with the bridge crossing?

Events did after all seem to be rushing towards some grand culmination. And then there was the girl. Where did she fit into all this? Grelier could have sworn he had picked her, not the other way around. But now he was not so certain. She had made herself conspicuous to him, that much was true. It was like that trick they did with cards, suggesting the one you were meant to take from the spread.

Of course, he’d have had no suspicions if her blood had checked out.

“It’s a wee bit of a puzzle,” he said to himself.

He stopped suddenly, for in his cogitations he had walked straight past the address he was looking for. He backtracked, grateful that no one else seemed to be about at this hour. He had no idea what the local time was, whether everyone was asleep, or down at the scuttler mines.

Didn’t care, either.

He opened his helmet visor, ready to introduce himself, and then rapped his cane smartly against the outer door of the Els residence. And then waited, humming to himself, until he heard the door opening.

The Adventist delegates had arrived at the Nostalgia for Infinity. There were twenty of them, all seemingly stamped from the same production mould. They came aboard with apparent trepidation, their politeness exaggerated to the point of insolence. They wore hard-shelled scarlet vacuum suits marked with the cruciform spacesuit insignia of their church, and they all carried their pink-plumed helmets tucked under the same arm.

Scorpio studied their leader through the window in the inner airlock door. He was a small man with a cruel, petulant slot of a mouth seemingly cut into his face as an afterthought.

“I’m Brother Seyfarth,” the man announced.

“Glad to have you aboard, Brother,” Scorpio said, “but before we let you into the rest of the ship, we’re going to have to run some decontamination checks.”

The man’s voice rattled through the speaker grille. “Still concerned about plague traces? I thought we all had other things to worry about these days.”

“Can’t be too careful,” Scorpio said. “It’s nothing personal, of course.”

“I wouldn’t dream of complaining,” Brother Seyfarth replied.

In truth, they had been scanned from the moment they entered the Infinity’s airlock. Scorpio had to know whether there was anything hidden under that armour, and if there was, he had to know what it was.

He had studied the Nostalgia for Infinity’s history. Once, when the ship had been under the command of its old triumvirate, they had made the mistake of allowing someone aboard with a tiny anti-matter device implanted in the mechanism of their artificial eyes. That pin-sized weapon had enabled the entire ship to be hijacked. Scorpio didn’t blame Volyova and the others for having made that mistake: such devices were both rare and exquisitely difficult to manufacture, and you didn’t encounter them very often. But it was not the kind of mistake he was. going to allow on his watch, if there was anything he could do to stop it.

Elsewhere in the ship, Security Arm officers examined the spectral images of the scanned delegates, peering through smoky grey-green layers of armour to the flesh, blood and bone beneath. There were no obvious concealed weapons: no guns or knives. But that didn’t surprise Scorpio. Even if the delegates had ill intentions, they’d have known that even a cursory scan would pick up normal weapons. If they had anything, it was going to be a lot less obvious.

But perhaps they had nothing at all. Perhaps they were what they said they were, and nothing more. Perhaps he was only objecting to the delegates because he had not been consulted before they were allowed aboard.

But there was something about Brother Seyfarth that he didn’t like, something in the cruel set of his mouth that made him think of other violent men he had known. Something in the way he kept clenching and unclenching the metal fists of his gloves as he waited to be processed through the airlock.

Scorpio touched his earpiece. “Clear on concealed weapons,” he heard. “Clear on chemical traces for explosives, toxins or nerve agents. Clear on standard nanotech filters. Nothing pre-plague here, and no plague traces either.”

“Look for implants,” he said, “any mechanisms under those suits that don’t serve an obvious function. And check the ones that do, as well. I don’t want hot dust within a light-year of this ship.”

He was asking a lot of them, he knew. They couldn’t risk annoying the delegates by subjecting them to an obvious invasive examination. But—again—this was his watch. He had a reputation to live up to. It hadn’t been him who had invited the fuckers aboard.

“Clear on implants,” he heard. “Nothing large enough to contain a standard pinhead device.”

“Meaning that none of the delegates have implants of any kind?”

“Like I said, sir, nothing large enough…”

“Tell me about all the implants. We can’t assume anything.”

“One of them has something in his eye. Another has a prosthetic hand. A total of half a dozen very small neural implants spread throughout the whole delegation.”

“I don’t like the sound of any of that.”

“The implants aren’t anything we wouldn’t expect to see in a random sample of Hela refugees, sir. Most of them look inactive, anyway.”

“The one with the eye, the one with the hand—I want to know for sure that there isn’t any nasty stuff inside those things.”

“Going to be tricky, sir. They might not like it if we start bombarding them with protons. If there is anti-matter in those things, there’ll be local cell damage from the spallation products…”

“If there is anti-matter in those things, they’re going to have a lot more than cancer to worry about,” Scorpio said.

Trouble was, so would he.

He waited as the man sent a mantislike servitor into the airlock, a bright-red stick-limbed contraption equipped with a proton beam generator. Scorpio told the delegates it was just a more refined form of the plague scanners they had already used, designed to sniff out some of the less common strains. They probably knew this was a lie, but agreed to go along with it for the sake of avoiding a scene. Was that a good sign? he wondered.

The proton beam drilled through flesh and bone, too narrow to hurt major bodily structures. At worst, it would inflict some local tissue damage. But if it touched anti-matter, even a microgram nugget of anti-matter suspended in vacuum in an electromagnetic cradle, it would induce a burst of proton-antiproton reactions.

The servitor listened for the back-scatter of gamma rays, the incriminating sizzle of annihilation.

It heard nothing: not from the hand, not from the eye.

“They’re clean, sir,” the SA operative announced into Scorpio’s earpiece.

No, he thought, they weren’t. At least, he couldn’t be sure of it. He’d ruled out the obvious, done what he could. But the proton beam might have missed the cradles: there hadn’t been time to make an exhaustive sweep of either the hand or the eye. Or the cradles themselves might have been surrounded with deflection or absorption barriers: he’d heard of such things. Or the nuggets could be in the neural implants, hidden behind too many centimetres of bone and tissue for non-surgical scanning.

“Sir? Permission to let them through?”

Scorpio knew that there was nothing else he could do except keep a close watch on them.

“Open the door,” he said.

Brother Seyfarth stepped through the aperture and stood eye to eye with Scorpio. “Don’t trust us, sir?”

“Got a job to do,” Scorpio said. “That’s all.”

The leader nodded gravely. “Don’t we all? Well, no hard feelings. I take it you didn’t find anything suspicious?”

“I didn’t find anything, no.”

The man winked at him, as if the two of them were sharing a joke. The other nineteen delegates bustled through, Scorpio’s distorted reflection gleaming back at him in the buffed and polished plates of their armour. He looked worried.

Now that they were aboard he had to keep them where he wanted them. They didn’t need to see the whole of the ship, just the parts that related to their specific areas of interest. No tour of the cache weapon chambers, no tour of the hypometric weapon shafts or any of the other modifications installed after their departure from Ararat. He’d be careful to keep the delegates away from the weirder manifestations of the Captain’s transforming illness, too, although some of the changes were always going to be apparent. They bobbed along behind him like twenty ducklings, showing emphatic interest in everything he stopped to point out.

“Interesting interior design you have here,” the leader said, fingering—with vague distaste—a riblike extrusion sticking out from a wall. “We always knew that your ship looked a little odd from the outside, but we never imagined you’d have extended the theme all the way through.”

“It grows on you,” Scorpio said.

“I don’t suppose it makes very much difference, from our point of view. As long as the ship does what you’ve claimed it can, who are we to care about the decor?”

“What you really care about is our hull defences and long-range sensors, I imagine,” Scorpio said.

“Your technical specifications were very impressive,” Brother Seyfarth said. “Naturally, we’ll have to double check. The security of Hela depends on our knowing that you can deliver the protection you promised.”

“I don’t think you need lose any sleep over that,” Scorpio said.

“You’re not offended, I hope?”

The pig turned back to him. “Do I look like someone easily offended?”

“Not at all,” Seyfarth said, his fists clenching.

They were uneasy around him, Scorpio realised. He doubted that they saw many pigs on Hela. “We’re not great travellers,” he elaborated. “We tend to die on the way.”

“Sir?” asked one of the other delegates. “Sir, if it isn’t too much bother, we’d really like to see the engines.”

Scorpio checked the time. They were on schedule. In fewer than six hours he would be able to launch the two instrument packages into Haldora. They were simply modified automated drones, hardened slightly to tolerate passage into-the atmos-phere of a gas giant. No one was exactly certain what they would encounter when they hit the visible surface of Haldora, but it seemed prudent to take every precaution, even if the planet popped like a soap bubble.

“You want to see the engines?” he said. “No problem. No problem at all.”

The light from Hela’s sun was low on the horizon, casting the cathedral’s great gothic shadow far ahead of it. It was more than two days since Vasko and Khouri had first visited Quaiche, and in the intervening time the Lady Morwenna had nearly reached the western edge of the rift. The bridge lay before it: a sparkling, dreamlike confection of sugar-ice and gossamer. Now that they were so close to it, the cathedral looked heavier, the bridge less substantial, the very idea of taking one across the other even more absurd.

A thought occurred to Vasko: what if the bridge didn’t exist any more? It was a foolhardy thing to take the Lady Morwenna across such a fragile structure, but in Quaiche’s mind there must have been at least a glimmer of hope that he might succeed. But if the bridge was destroyed, surely he wouldn’t take the cathedral over the edge, to certain destruction?

“How far?” Khouri asked.

“Twelve, thirteen kilometres,” Vasko said. “She travels about a kilometre per hour, which gives us around half a day before it really wouldn’t be a good idea to be aboard any more.”

“That doesn’t give us much time.”

“We don’t need much time,” he said. “Twelve hours should be more than enough time to get in and out. All we have to do is find Aura, and whatever we need from Quaiche. How difficult can it be?”

“Scorpio needs time to drop those instrument packages into Haldora,” she said. “If we break our side of the agreement before he’s done, there’s no telling how much trouble we’ll be in. Things could start getting messy. That’s exactly what we spent nine years trying to avoid.”

“It’ll be all right,” Vasko said. “Trust me on this, it’ll be all right.”

“Scorp didn’t like the idea of those delegates,” she said.

“They’re church dignitaries,” Vasko said. “How much of a problem can they be?”

“In these matters,” Khouri said, “I’m inclined to trust Scorpio’s judgement. Sorry, but he’s got a bit more mileage on him than you have.”

“I’m getting there,” Vasko said.

Their shuttle picked its way down to the cathedral. It grew from something small and delicate, like an ornate architectural model, to something huge and threatening. Something more than a building, Vasko thought: more like a pinnacled chunk of the landscape that had decided to make a slow circumnavigation of its world.

They landed. Suited Adventist officials were there to usher them deep into the iron heart of the Lady Morwenna.