Absolution Gap

FORTY-TWO

A rapture of black machines climbed from the surface of Hela. They were small shuttles for the most part: surface-to-orbit vehicles bought, stolen, impounded and purloined from Ultras. Most had only chemical drives; a very few had fusion motors. The majority carried only one or two members of the Cathedral Guard, packed into armoured bubbles within their stripped-down skeletal chassis. They lifted from orthodox landing stages along the Way, or from concealed bunkers in the ice itself, dislodging plaques of surface frost as they fled. Some even departed from the superstructures of the Adventist cathedrals, including the Lady Morwenna. What had appeared to be small subsidiary spires or elbowed out-jutting towers were suddenly revealed as long-concealed spacecraft. Shells of mock architecture fell away like dead grey foliage. Complex cantilevered gantries swung the ships away from delicate masonry and glass before their drives lit. Domes and cupolas opened along ridge-lines, revealing ships packed tightly within, now rising on hydraulic launch platforms. When the ships hauled themselves aloft, the glare of their motors etched bright highlights and pitch-dark shadows into the ornate frippery of the architecture. Gargoyles seemed to turn their heads, their jaws lolling in wonderment and surprise. Below, the cathedrals trembled at the violent departure of so much mass. But when the ships had gone, the cathedrals were still there, little changed.

In seconds, the ships of the Guard had reached orbit; in several more seconds they had identified and signalled their brethren who were already parked around Hela. From every direction, drives flicked on to engagement thrust. The ships grouped into formations, stacked themselves into assault waves and commenced their run towards the Nostalgia for Infinity.

Even as the ships of the Cathedral Guard were leaving Hela, another spacecraft settled on to the pad of the Lady Morwenna, parking alongside the larger shuttle that had brought the Ultra delegates down from their lighthugger.

Grelier sat inside the cockpit for several minutes, flicking ivory-tipped toggle switches and making sure that vital systems would continue to tick over even in his absence. The cathedral was alarmingly close to the bridge now, and he had no plans to stay aboard once it had commenced the crossing. He would find an excuse to leave: Clocktower duty, something to do with Bloodwork. There were dozens of likely reasons he could give. And if the dean decided that he would much rather have the surgeon-general’s company for the crossing, then Grelier would just have to do a runner and smooth things over later. If, of course, there turned out to be a later. But the one thing he did not want to have to wait for was for his ship to go through its pre-flight cycle.

He snapped his helmet on, gathered his belongings and cycled through the airlock. Outside, standing on the pad, he had to admit that the view was awesome. He could see the point where the land just ended, that vast cliff edge towards which they were sliding. Unstoppable now, he thought. Under any circumstances even slowing the progress of the Lady Morwenna was a matter of labyrinthine bureaucratic procedure. It could take many hours for the paperwork to filter down to the Motive Power technicians who actually had their hands on the motor controls. More often than not, conditioned to believe that the cathedral should never slow, they queried their orders, sending the paperwork echoing back up through the chain of command, resulting in more hours of delay. And what the cathedral needed now was not to slow down but to come to a complete standstill. Grelier shuddered: he didn’t want to think about how long it would take for that to happen.

Something caught his eye. He looked up, seeing countless sparks zip across the sky. Dozens—no, hundreds—of ships. What was going on?

Then he looked towards the horizon and saw the much larger bulk of the lighthugger, a small but visibly elongated sliver of twinkling iron-grey. The other ships were obviously heading towards it.

Something was up.

Grelier turned from the shuttle, anxious to make his way indoors and find out what was happening. Then he noticed the smudge of red on the end of his cane. He thought he had cleaned it thoroughly before leaving the settlement in the Vi-grid region, but evidently he had been remiss.

Tutting to himself, he wiped the end of the cane against the frost-covered surface of the landing pad, leaving smears of pink.

Then he set off to find the dean, for he had interesting news to deliver.

Orca Cruz saw the two Adventists before the rest of her party. They were at the end of a wide, low-ceilinged corridor, one against each wall, moving towards her with the measured pace of sleepwalkers.

Cruz turned to the three Security Arm officers behind her. “Minimum necessary force,” she said quietly. “Bayonets and stun-prods only. This lot don’t have a flame-gun, and I’d really like to do some questioning.”

The Arm unit nodded in unison. They all knew what Cruz meant by that.

She started towards the Adventists, pushing the sharp blade of her weapon before her. The Adventists had little armour now. Garbled reports from the other elements of the Security Arm—the same messages that had warned her about the flame-throwers—had suggested that they had removed their vacuum suits, but she had not been prepared to believe it until she saw it with her own eye. But they hadn’t discarded the armour entirely: they carried jagged bits, of it in their hands, and had lashed large curved parts to their chests. They still wore their metal glovesand pink-plumed helmets.

She admired the thinking behind their strategy. Once a boarding party had reached this far inside a lighthugger, armour was largely superfluous. Ultras would be very unwilling to deploy energy weapons against boarders even if they knew themselves to be safely distant from vacuum or ship-critical systems. The instinct not to harm their own ship was just too deeply ingrained, even when the ship was under threat of takeover. And aboard a ship like the Nostalgia for Infinity—with every inch of the ship’s fabric wired into the Captain’s nervous system—that instinct was all the stronger. They had all seen what happened when some accident inflicted a wound in the ship; they had all felt the Captain’s pain.

Cruz advanced down the corridor. “Put down your weapons,” she called. “You know you can’t succeed.”

“Put down your weapons,” one of the Adventists replied, chidingly. “We only want your ship. No one will be harmed, and the ship will be returned to you.”

“You could have asked nicely,” Cruz said.

“Would you have been likely to agree?”

“Not very,” she said, after a moment’s reflection.

“Then I think we have nothing else to say to each other.”

Cruz’s party moved forwards to within ten metres of the Adventists. She noticed that one of them was not in fact wearing a gauntlet at all; his hand was artificial. She remembered him: Scorpio had gone to extra pains to make sure the hand did not contain an anti-matter bomb.

“Final warning,” she said.

The other Adventist flung a bladed weapon towards her. It gyred through the air; Cruz threw herself back against the wall and felt the sharp, brief breeze as the weapon whisked past her throat and buried itself in the wall. Another weapon spun through the air; she heard glance against body armour without finding a weak spot.

“All right, game over,” Cruz said. She gestured to her people. “Pacification strength. Take ‘em down.”

They pushed ahead of her, bayonets and snub-nosed stun-prods at the ready. The Adventist with the artificial hand pointed it in Cruz’s direction, like an admonition. It didn’t worry her: Scorpio’s examination had been thorough; the hand couldn’t possibly contain a concealed projectile or beam weapon.

The tip of the index finger came off. It detached from the rest of the finger, but instead of dropping to the ground it just floated there, slowly drifting away from the hand like a spacecraft on a lazy departure.

Cruz watched it, stupidly transfixed. The tip accelerated, travelled ten, twenty centimetres. It approached her party, bobbing slightly, and then yawed to the right as the hand moved, as if still connected to it by an invisible thread.

Which, she realised, it was.

“Monofilament scythe,” she shouted. “Fall back. Fall the fuck back!”

Her party got the message. They retreated from the Adventists even as the tip of the finger began to move in a vertical circle, seemingly of its own volition. The man’s hand was making tiny, effortless movements. The circle widened, the tip of the finger becoming a blurred grey ring a metre wide. In Chasm City, Orca Cruz had seen the grotesque results of scythe weapons. She had seen what happened when people blundered into static scythe defence lines, or moving scythes like the one being demonstrated here. It was never pretty. But what she remembered, more than the screams, more than the hideously sculpted and segregated corpses left behind, was the expression she always saw on the faces of the victims an instant after they’d realised their mistake. It was less fright, less shock, more acute embarrassment: the realisation that they were about to make a terrible, sickening spectacle of themselves.

“Fall back,” she repeated.

“Permission to fire,” one of her party said.

Cruz shook her head. “Not yet,” she said. “Not until we’re cornered.”

The whisking blur of the scythe advanced further down the corridor, emitting a high-pitched quavering note that was almost musical.

Scorpio tried again, shifting his weight as much as he was able, to prise himself away from the wall. He had given up calling for help and had long since stopped paying attention to his own yelps and squeals. The Adventist delegates had not returned, but they were still out there: intermittently, the muffled sounds of battle reached him through the echoing labyrinth of corridors, ducts and elevator shafts. He heard shouts and screams, and very occasionally he heard the basso groan of the ship itself, responding to some niggling internal injury. Nothing that the delegates did—either with their cutting tools or their flamethrowers—could possibly inflict any real harm upon the Captain. The Nostalgia for Infinity had survived a direct attack by one of its own cache weapons, after all. But even a tiny splinter could become an irritation out of all proportion to its physical size.

He thrashed again, feeling savage fire in both shoulders. There: something was beginning to give, wasn’t it? Was it him or the throwing weapons?

He tried again, and blacked out. He came around seconds or possibly minutes later, still pinned to the wall, an unpleasant metallic taste in his mouth. He was still alive, and—pain aside—he didn’t feel much worse than when Seyfarth had stuck him here. He supposed there must have been something in Seyfarth’s boast about not damaging any of his internal organs. But there was no guarantee that Scorpio wouldn’t start bleeding all over the place as soon as the weapons were removed. Why were the Security Arm taking so long to find him?

Twenty soldiers, he thought. That was enough to make trouble, no doubt about it, but they couldn’t possibly hope to take the entire ship. They had known all along that they could not smuggle serious firepower aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity, not in these hair-trigger times. But Seyfarth had struck him as a man who knew what he was doing, very unlikely to have volunteered for a futile suicide mission.

Scorpio groaned: not with pain, this time, but with the realisation that he had made a dreadful mistake. He couldn’t be blamed for letting the delegates aboard: he had been overruled on that one, and if he had missed the true nature of their armour, it was only because he had never heard of anyone using that particular trick before. Anyway, he had scanned the armour—even if he’d been looking through, rather than at it—and he’d seen nothing suspicious. The armour would have to have been removed and examined in a lab before the microscopic flaws and weak points would have revealed themselves. No: that wasn’t his mistake either. But he really shouldn’t have turned on the engines. Why had the Adventists needed to see them? They’d already observed the ship making its approach to the system, if that was what they were interested in.

What they were really interested in, if he read them rightly, was something else entirely: they had been using the engines to send a signal to Hela. The burst of thrust meant they were in place—that they had passed through his security arrangements and were ready to begin the take-over operation.

It was a signal to send in reinforcements.

Even as that thought crystallised in his head, he heard the ship groan again. But it was a different kind of groan this time. It was more like the sonorous off-key tolling of a very large, very cracked bell.

Scorpio closed his eyes: he knew exactly what that sound was. It was the hull defences: the Nostalgia for Infinity was under attack from outside as well as from within. Great, he thought. This was really shaping up to be one of those days when he should have stayed inside the reefersleep casket. Or, better still, should never have survived thawing in the first place.

A moment later, the entire fabric of the ship trembled. He felt it through the sharp-edged things pinning him to the wall. He screamed and blacked out again.

What woke him was pain—more than he had felt so far. It was hard and strangely rhythmic, as if he had been convulsing in his sleep. But he was making no conscious movements at all. Instead, the wall against which he was pinned was bellowing in and out, like a huge breathing lung.

Suddenly, anticlimactically, he popped loose. He hit the deck, sprawling, his lower jaw in the filthy, stinking overflow of ship effluent. The two bladed weapons clattered to the ground beside him. He experimented with pushing himself to his knees, and—to his surprise—found he was able to exert pressure on his arms without the pain becoming more than two or three times as intense. Nothing was broken, then—or at least nothing that had much to do with either arm.

Scorpio struggled to his feet. He touched the first wound, then the second. There was a lot of blood, but it wasn’t jetting out under arterial pressure. Presumably it was the same story with the two exit wounds. No telling about internal bleeding, but he’d cross that bridge when it became a problem.

Still unsure exactly what had happened to him, he knelt down again and picked up one of the bladed things. It was the first one: the boomerang weapon. He could see the curve of the original armour, the larger form implied by the fragment. He threw it away, kicked the other one aside. Then he reached down to his belt, through waves of pain, and found the haft of Clavain’s knife. He removed it from its sheath and flicked on the piezoelectric effect, feeling the hum transmitted to his palm.

In the gloom of the corridor ahead of him, something moved.

“Scorpio.”

He squinted, half-expecting it to be another Adventist, hoping it was someone from the Security Arm. “Took your time,” he said, which seemed to cover either possibility.

“We’ve got trouble, Scorp. Big trouble.”

The figure stepped out of the gloom. Scorpio flinched: it was no one he had been expecting. “Captain,” he breathed.

“I thought you needed some help to get free of that wall. Sorry it took me so long.”

“Better late than never,” Scorpio said.

It was a class-three apparition. No, Scorpio thought, strike that: this apparition demanded a new category all of its own. It was more than just a local alteration of the ship’s fabric, a remodelling of a wall or the temporary reassignment of some servitor parts. This thing was real and distinct from the ship itself. It was a physical artefact: a spacesuit, a huge, lumbering golemlike servo-powered affair. And it was empty. The faceplate was cranked up: there was only darkness within the helmet. The voice he heard came through the speaker grille beneath the helmet’s chin that was normally used for audio communications in a pressurised environment.

“Are you all right, Scorp?”

He dabbed at the blood again.“I’m not down yet. Doesn’t look as if you are, either.”

“It was a mistake to let them aboard.”

“I know,” Scorpio said, looking down at his shoes. “I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” the Captain said. “It was mine.”

Scorpio looked up at the apparition again. Something forced him to direct his attention into the darkness within the helmet: it seemed impolite not to. “So what now? They’re bringing reinforcements, aren’t they?”

“That’s their plan. Ships have begun to attack. I’ve parried most of them, but a handful have slipped through my hull defences. They’ve begun to drill into the hull. They’re hurting me, Scorp.”

He echoed the Captain’s earlier question: “Are you all right?”

“Oh, I’m all right, it’s just that I’m beginning to get a little pissed off. I think they’ve had enough fun for one day, don’t you?”

Though it hurt him, Scorpio nodded vigorously. “They picked the wrong pig to fuck with.”

The vast suit bowed towards him, then turned, its huge boots sending sluggish wakes through the effluent. “They did more than pick the wrong pig. They picked the wrong ship. Now, shall we go and do some damage?”

“Yes,” Scorpio said,smiling wickedly. “Let’s do some damage.”

Orca Cruz and her party had retreated as far as they could go. The two Adventists had pushed her group to a major nexus of corridors and shafts, something like a heart valve in the Captain’s anatomy, from which point it would be possible to reach any other part of the Nostalgia for Infinity with comparative ease. Cruz knew that she could not allow the Adventists such access. There were only twenty of them, maybe fewer now—it was unthinkable that they could ever gain more than a transient, faltering control over very small districts of the ship—but it was still her duty to limit their nuisance value. If that meant inflicting some small, local hurt on John Brannigan, then that was what she had to do.

“All right,” she said. “Disarm them. Short, controlled bursts. I want something at the end to interrogate.”

Her last few words were drowned out by the sudden, enraged roar of her soldiers’ slug-firing automatic weapons. Tracers sliced bright convergent lines down the corridor. The Adventist with the false hand fell down, his right leg peppered with bullet holes. The whirling demon of the scythe bit an arc into the floor, then fell silent. Some retraction mechanism inched the fingertip back to the rest of the hand as the line spooled itself in.

The other Adventist lay on his side, his chest bloody despite the protection of the armour pieces.

The ship groaned.

“I did warn you,” Cruz said. Her own weapon lay cold in her hand. She hadn’t fired a shot.

The second Adventist moved, clawing at his face with his hand, like a man trying to remove a bee.

“Don’t move,” Cruz said, approaching him cautiously. “Don’t move and you might make it through the day.”

He kept clawing at his face, concentrating his efforts around his eye. He dug his fingers into the socket, popping something loose. He held it between thumb and forefinger for a moment: a perfect human eye, glassily solid, bloodied like some horrid raw delicacy.

“I said—” Orca Cruz began.

He crunched his fingers down on the eye, shattering it. Something chrome-yellow emerged in smoky wisps. A moment later Cruz felt the nerve agent infiltrate her lungs.

No one had to tell her it would be fatal.

From the safe vantage point of his garret, the dean studied the progress of his takeover effort. Cameras around Hela offered him continuous real-time imagery of the Ultras’ ship, no mat-ter where its orbit took it. He had seen the telling flicker of drive flame: Seyfarth’s message that the first phase of the acquisition operation had been successful. He had seen—indeed, felt—the departure of the massed ships of the Cathedral Guard, and he had also seen the gathering and co-ordination of the squadrons above Hela. Tiny, flimsy ships, to be sure, but many of them. Crows could mob a man to death.

He had no data about the ensuing activities within the ship. If Seyfarth had followed his own plan, then the twenty members of the spearhead unit would have begun their attack shortly after the signal was returned to Hela. Seyfarth was a brave man: he must have known that his chances of surviving until the arrival of reinforcements were not excellent. He was also, it had to be remembered, a career survivor. More than likely Seyfarth had lost some of his squad by now, but Quaiche very much doubted that Seyfarth himself was amongst the casualties. Somewhere on that ship he was still fighting, still surviving.

The dean craved, desperately, some means of divining what was happening in the ship at this moment. After all the planning, all the years of dreaming and scheming this mad folly into existence, it struck him as the height of unfairness not to be able to see whether events were unfolding as planned. He had always skipped over this hiatus in his imagination: it was either successful or it wasn’t, and there had been little point dwelling on the agony of uncertainty it represented.

But now he had doubts. The squadrons were meeting unexpected resistance from the ship’s hull defences. The imagery showed the ship to be surrounded by a spangling halo of explosions, like a dark and foreboding castle throwing a fireworks display. Most Ultra craft had defences of some kind, so Quaiche had not been greatly surprised to see them deployed here. His cover story had even demanded that the ship have the means to defend itself. But the scale of the defences and the speed and efficiency with which they had reacted: that had taken him aback. What if the forces within the ship were encountering the same unexpected resistance? What if Seyfarth was dead? What if everything was going slowly, catastrophi-cally wrong?

His couch chimed: an incoming message. Shaking, his hand worked the control. “Quaiche,” he said.

“Report from Cathedral Guard,” said a muffled voice, lashed by static. “Report successful incursion of relief units three and eight. Hull has been breached; no significant airloss. Reinforcement squads are now aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity. Attempting to rendezvous with elements of spearhead.”

Quaiche sighed, disappointed in himself. Of course it was going according to plan, and of course it was turning out to be a little more difficult than anticipated. That was the nature of worthy tasks. But he should never have doubted its ultimate success.

“Keep me posted,” he said.

The two mismatched figures—the Captain’s hulking, vacant suit and the childlike form of the pig—sloshed their way towards the scene of battle. They moved through corridors and passages that had never been fully reclaimed for human habitation: rat-ridden, rank with effluent and other toxins, crypt-dark save for the occasional weak and stuttering light source. When the Adventists had turned on him, Scorpio had known exactly where he was. But since then he had been following the Captain, allowing himself to be led into areas of the ship that were completely unfamiliar. As the tour progressed, and as the Captain ushered him through obscure hatchways and hidden apertures, he was struck by the increasing absence of the usual markers of ship wide authority: the jury-rigged electrical and hydraulic systems, the painted, luminescent direction arrows. There was only anatomy. They were navigating parts of the ship known only to the Captain, he realised: private corridors he must have haunted alone. It was his flesh and blood, Scorpio thought: up to him what he did with it.

The pig was under no illusion that he was actually in the Captain’s physical presence. The suit was just a focus for his attention; in every other respect the Captain was as omnipresent as ever, surrounding him in every sinew of the architecture. But for all that Scorpio would have preferred something with a face to talk to rather than the empty suit, it was a lot better than being on his own. He knew that he had been hurt badly by the Adventist leader, and that sooner or later he was going to feel the delayed shock of those injuries. How hard it would hit him, he couldn’t say. He’d have shrugged off the wounds twenty years ago. Now, shrugging off anything seemed unlikely. Yet while he had some form of companion, he felt he could keep delaying that moment of accounting. Just give me a few hours, he thought, just long enough to sort out this mess.

A few hours were all he needed; all he wanted.

“There’s something we need to discuss, Scorp. You and me. Before it’s too late.”

“Captain?”

“I need to do something before it becomes impractical. We came here on Aura’s instructions, in the hope that we’d find something that might make a difference against the Inhibitors. Quaiche and the scuttlers were always the key, which is why we sent Aura into Hela society nine years ago. She was to gather information, to infiltrate the cathedrals through the back door, without anyone ever suspecting her connection to us. That was a good plan, Scorp. It was the best we had at the time. But we mustn’t neglect Haldora itself.”

“No one’s neglecting it,” Scorpio said. “Aura already thinks she’s made contact with the shadows, via that suit. Isn’t that good enough for now?”

“It might have been if the Adventists hadn’t betrayed us. But we don’t control that suit: Quaiche does, and he’s no longer a man we can trust. It’s time to up the ante, Scorp. We can’t put all our faith in that one line of negotiation.”

“So we launch the instrument packages, just like we always planned.”

“The packages were only ever intended as a precursor. More than likely, they’d have told us nothing we haven’t already learned from Aura. Sooner or later we’d have had to bring in the big guns.”

For a moment Scorpio had forgotten his pain. “So what have you got in mind?”

“We need to know what’s inside Haldora,” the Captain said. “We need to break through the camouflage, and we can’t afford to sit around waiting for a vanishing.”

“The cache weapon,” Scorpio said, guessing his companion’s intentions. “You want to use it, don’t you? Fire it into the face of that planet, and see what happens?”

“Like I said, it’s time to bring out the big guns.”

“It’s the last one we’ve got. Make it count, Captain.”

The suit studied him with the blank aperture of its faceplate. “I’ll do my best,” it said.

Presently, the suit slowed its pace. The pig halted, using the wide bulk of the suit for cover.

“There’s something ahead, Scorp.”

Scorpio looked into darkness. “I don’t see anything.”

“I sense it, but I need the suit to take a closer look. I don’t have cameras here.”

They rounded a slight bend, easing their way through a knuckle of interconnected corridors. Suddenly they were back in a part of the ship Scorpio thought he recognised—one of the corridors he had taken the Adventists down earlier that day. Dull sepia light dribbled from sconces in the wall.

“There are bodies here, Scorp. It doesn’t look good.”

The suit strode ahead, sloshing through unspeakable fluids. The bodies were shadowed lumps, half-submerged in the muck. The suit’s head-light flicked on, playing over the forms. Feral janitor rats fled from the glare.

“They’re not Adventists,” Scorpio said.

The suit knelt down next to the closest of the bodies. “Do you recognise them?”

Scorpio squatted on his haunches, grimacing at the twin spikes of pain on either side of his chest. He touched the body nearest to the Captain, turning it over so that he could see the face. He fingered the rough leather of an eyepatch.

“It’s Orca Cruz,” he said.

His own voice sounded detached, matter-of-fact. She’s dead, he thought. This woman who was loyal to you for more than thirty years of your life is dead; this woman who aided you, protected you, fought for you and made you laugh with her stories, is dead, and she died because of your mistake, your stupidity in not seeing through the Adventists’ plans. And all you feel now is that something you own has been stepped on.

There was a hiss of pistons and servo-mechanisms. The monstrous gauntlet of the Captain’s suit touched him gently on the back. “It’s all right, Scorp. I know how you feel.”

“I don’t feel anything.”

“That’s what I mean. It’s too soon, too sudden.”

Scorpio looked at the other bodies, knowing that they were all members of the Security Arm. Their weapons were gone, but there was no obvious indication of injury on any of them. But he wouldn’t forget the expression on Cruz’s face in a hurry.

“She was good,” he said. “She stuck by me when she could have carved out a little empire of her own in Chasm City. She didn’t deserve this. None of them deserved this.”

He forced himself to his full height, steadying himself against the wall. First Lasher, on the trip to Resurgam. Then he’d had to say goodbye to Blood, probably for ever. Now Cruz was gone: his last, precious link to that half-remembered life in Chasm City.

“I don’t know about you, Captain,” he said, “but I’m about ready to start taking things personally.”

“I’ve already started,” the empty suit said.

Battle continued to rage within the Nostalgia for Infinity. Slowly, however, the tide was turning against the Adventist boarders. Around the ship, the last elements of the Cathedral Guard had either tunnelled through to the interior or were being picked off by the hull-mounted defences. Damage had been sustained: fresh craters and scars gouged into the already treacherous landscape of the starship’s hull. The tiny ships that had reached the hull and anchored themselves in place—with projectile barbs, epoxy-pads, rocket grapples and drilling equipment—resembled mechanical ticks half-embedded in the flesh of some monstrous animal. Elsewhere, the mashed corpses of other ships lay entangled in the crevices and folds of the Nostalgia for Infinity’s architecture, quills of escaping air and fluid bleeding into space. Other ships had been ripped apart before they got close to the lighthugger, their hot, mangled wreckage trailing the larger vessel as it orbited Hela. No additional reinforcements had been launched from the moon: the assault had been designed to be total and overwhelming, and only a handful of Cathedral Guard units had not been mobilised during the first wave.

The few elements still trying to make their boarding approach must have known that their chances were not excellent. The resistance had been greater than expected: for the first time, a group of Ultras had actually downplayed the effective-ness of their defences. But the regular soldiers of the Cathedral Guard were blood-loyal to the Adventist order, Quaicheist doctrine running thick and true in their veins, and for them retreat was literally unthinkable. They did not have to know the purpose of their mission to understand that it was of the utmost importance to the dean.

Preoccupied with the matter of finding a safe route to the hull, none of them observed the opening of a space-door in the side of the Nostalgia for Infinity, a chink of golden-yellow light amidst the complexity of the Captain’s transformations. The door looked tiny, but that was only because of the dizzying scale of the ship itself.

Something emerged, moving with the smooth, unhesitating autonomy of a machine. It did not look very much like a spacecraft, even the ungainly sort used for ship-to-ship operations. It resembled a strange abstract ornament: a surreal juxtaposition of flanged bronze-green shapes, windowless and seamless, as if carved from soap or marble, the whole thing encased in a skeletal black harness, a geodesic framework stubbed with docking latches, thrusters and navigation and aiming devices.

It was a cache weapon: There had been forty of the hell-class devices once; now only this unit remained. The science that had made it, the engineering principles embodied in its construction, were almost certainly less advanced than those in the latest additions to the Infinity’s arsenal, like the bladder-mines or the hypometric weapons. No one would ever know for sure. But one thing was clear: the new weapons were instruments of surgical precision rather than brute force, so the cache weapon still had its uses.

It cleared the space-door. Around the skeletal framework of the harness, thrusters sparked blue-white. The glare lit the Nostalgia for Infinity, throwing hard radiance across the black shapes of the last few ships of the Cathedral Guard.

No one noticed.

The cache weapon wheeled around, the harness aligning itself with the looming face of Haldora. Then it accelerated, climbing away from the Nostalgia for Infinity, away from the battle, away from the scratched face of Hela.

Vasko and Khouri stepped into the mirror-filled room of the garret. Vasko looked around, satisfying himself that the room was much as they had left it. The dean was still sitting in the same couch, in the same part of the chamber. Rashmika was seated at the table in the middle of the room, watching their arrival. She had a tea set before her: a neat china service. Vasko observed her reactions carefully, wondering how much of her memory she had recovered. Even if she had not recalled everything, he could not believe that the sight of her mother’s face would not elicit some reaction. There were certain things that cut through memory, he thought.

But if there was a flicker of reaction from Rashmika, he missed it. She simply inclined her head towards them, the way she would have to greet any arriving visitors.

“Just the two of you?” Dean Quaiche asked.

“We’re the advance party,” Vasko said. “There didn’t seem to be any need to send down dozens of us, not until we’ve assessed the facilities.”

“I told you there were many rooms available,” he said, “for as many delegates as you cared to send.”

Rashmika spoke up. “They’re not mad, Dean. They know what’s going to happen in a few hours.”

“The crossing concerns you?” he asked the Ultras, as if the very thought was ludicrous.

“Let’s just say we’d rather observe it from a distance,” Vasko said. “That’s fair enough, isn’t it? There was nothing in our agreement that said we absolutely had to remain aboard the Lady Morwenna. The disadvantage is on our side if we choose not to have delegates present.”

“I’m disappointed, all the same,” Quaiche said. “I’d hoped you would want to share it with me. The spectacle won’t be anywhere near as impressive from a distance.”

“I don’t doubt that for a moment,” Vasko said. “All the same, we’ll leave you in peace to enjoy it first-hand.” He looked at Khouri, choosing his words carefully. “We wouldn’t want to interfere with a sacred event.”

“You wouldn’t be interfering,” the dean said. “All the same, if that’s what you wish… I can hardly stop you. But we’re still twelve hours from the crossing. There’s no need to get nervous just yet.”

“Are you nervous?” Khouri asked him.

“Not in the slightest,” he said. “That bridge was put there for a reason. I’ve always believed that.”

“There’s the wreckage of another cathedral at the bottom of the rift,” Vasko said. “Doesn’t that worry you at all?”

“It tells me that the dean of that cathedral lacked faith,” Quaiche said.

Vasko’s communicator chimed. He lifted the bracelet to his ear, listened carefully. He frowned, then turned and whispered something into Khouri’s ear.

“Something the matter?” Quaiche asked.

“There’s some trouble on the ship,” Vasko said. “I’m not sure exactly what it is, but it seems to have something to do with your delegates.”

“My delegates? Why would they be causing trouble?”

“It seems they’re trying to take over the ship,” Vasko said. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

“Well, now that you mention it—” Quaiche made a very poor imitation of a smile “—I might have an inkling.”

One of the doors to the garret swung open. Six red-uniformed Adventist guards walked in, carrying weapons and looking as if they knew what to do with them.

“I’m sorry it’s come to this,” Quaiche said, as the guards motioned for Vasko and Khouri to sit down opposite Rash-mika. “But I really need your ship, and—let’s be honest—there was never much chance of you just giving it to me, was there?”

“But we had an agreement,” Vasko said, one of the guards prodding him on the shoulder. “We offered you protection.”

“The trouble was, it wasn’t protection I was after,” Quaiche said. The rim of his eye-opener flashed polished brass. “It was propulsion.”