Absolution Gap

FORTY-SIX

Glaur was alone, the only member of the technical staff left in the vaulted hall of Motive Power. The cathedral had recovered from the earlier disturbance; the klaxon had silenced, the emergency lights on the reactor had dimmed, and the motion of the rods and spars above his head had fallen back into their usual hypnotic rhythm. The floor swayed from side to side, but only Glaur had the hard-won acuity of balance to detect that. The motion was within normal limits, and to someone unfamiliar with the Lady Morwenna the floor would have felt rock steady, as if anchored to Hela.

Breathing heavily, he made his way around one of the catwalks that encircled the central core of turbines and generators. He felt the breeze as the whisking spars moved just above his head, but years of familiarity with the place meant that he no longer ducked unnecessarily.

He reached an anonymous, unremarkable-looking access panel. Glaur flipped the toggles that held the panel shut, then hinged it open above his head. Inside were the gleaming silver-blue controls of the lockout system: two enormous levers, with a single keyhole beneath each. The procedure had been simple enough: well rehearsed in many exercises using the dummy panel on the other side of the machine.

Glaur had inserted a key into one lock. Seyfarth had inserted his key into the corresponding hole. The keys had been engaged simultaneously, and then the two of them had pulled the levers as far as they would travel, in one smooth, synchronised movement. Things had clunked and whirred. All around the chamber there had been the chatter of relays as the normal control inputs were disconnected. Behind this one panel, Glaur knew, was an armoured clock ticking down the seconds from the moment the levers had been pulled. The levers had now moved through half of their travel: there were another twelve or thirteen hours before the relays would chatter again, restoring manual control.

Too long. In thirteen hours, there probably wouldn’t be a Lady Morwenna.

Glaur braced himself against the catwalk handrail, then positioned both gloved hands on the left-side handle. He squeezed down, applying as much force as he could muster. The handle didn’t budge: it felt as solid as if it had been welded into place, at exactly that angle. He tried the other, and then tried to pull both of them down at the same time. It was absurd: his own knowledge of the lockout system told him that it was engineered to resist a lot more interference than this. It was built to withstand a rioting gang, let alone one man. But he had to try, no matter how unlikely the chances of success.

Sweating, his breathing even more laboured, Glaur returned to the floor of Motive Power and gathered some heavy tools. He climbed back up to the catwalk, found the panel again and began attacking the levers with the instruments he had chosen. The clanging rang out across the hall, audible above the smooth churning of the machinery…

That didn’t work either.

Glaur collapsed in exhaustion. His hands were too sweaty to hold anything made of metal, his arms too weak to lift even the lightest hammer.

If he couldn’t force the lockout mechanism to skip forwards to the end of its twenty-six-hour run, what else could he do? He only wanted to stop the Lady Morwenna or steer it off course, not destroy it. He could damage the reactor—there were plenty of access ports still accessible to him—but it would take hours for his actions to have any effect. Sabotaging the propulsion machinery was no more realistic: the only way to do it would be to jam something into it, but it would have to be something huge. There might be chunks of metal in the repair shops—entire spars or rods removed for refurbishment or melt-down—but he could never lift one on his own. It would be asking a lot of him to throw a spanner at the moment.

Glaur had considered his chances of sabotaging or fooling the guidance systems: the cameras watching the Way, the star-trackers scanning the sky, the magnetic field sensors sniffing for the signature of the buried cable. But those systems were all multiply redundant, and most of them were situated beyond the pressurised areas of the cathedral, high above ground or in difficult-to-access parts of the substructure.

Face it, he told himself: the engineers who had designed the lockout controls hadn’t been born yesterday. If there was an obvious way to stop the Lady Morwenna, they would have taken care of it.

The cathedral wasn’t going to stop, and it wasn’t going to deviate from the Way. He had told Seyfarth that he would stay aboard until the last minute, tending his machines. But what was there to tend now? His machines had been taken from him, taken out of his hands as if he couldn’t be trusted with them.

From the catwalk, Glaur looked down at the floor, at one of the observation windows he had often walked over. He could see the ground sliding below, at one-third of a metre per second.

Scorpio’s little ship touched down, its retractile skids crunching into the hardening slush of just-melted ice. The ship rocked as he unstrapped himself and fussed with his vacuum-suit connections, verifying that all was well. He was having trouble concentrating, clarity of mind fading in and out like a weak radio signal. Perhaps Valensin had been right, after all, and he should have stayed on the ship, deputising someone else to come down to Hela.

Fuck that, Scorpio thought.

He checked the helmet indicators one final time, satisfying himself that all the telltales were in the green. No point spending any more time worrying about it: the suit was either ready or it wasn’t, and if it didn’t kill him, something else was probably waiting around the corner.

He groaned in pain as he twisted around to release the exit latch. The side door popped away, splatting silently into the slush. Scorpio felt the slight tug as the last whiff of air in the cabin found its way into space. The suit seemed to be holding: none of the green lights had changed to red.

A moment later he was out on the ice: a squat, childlike figure in a metallic-blue vacuum suit designed for pigs. He waddled around to the rear of the ship, keeping away from the cherry-red exhaust vents, and opened a cargo recess. He reached into it, grunting against pain, and fumbled around with the clumsy two-fingered gauntlets of his suit. Pig hands were not exactly masterpieces of dexterity to begin with, but put them in a suit and they were not much better than stumps. But he’d been practising. He’d had a lifetime of practice.

He removed a pallet: a thing the size of a dinner-tray. Nestling in it, like Faberge eggs, were three bladder-mines. He took one mine out, handling it with instinctive caution—even though the one thing a bladder-mine wasn’t very likely to do was go off by accident—and walked away from the parked ship.

He walked one hundred paces from it: far enough mat there was no chance of the ship’s exhaust washing over the mine. Then he knelt down and used Clavain’s knife to carve out a little cone-shaped depression in the surface frost. He pressed the bladder-mine firmly down into the depression until only the top part was showing. Then he twisted a knurled dial on the mine’s surface through thirty degrees. His gloves kept slipping, but eventually he managed it. The dial clicked into place. A tiny red indicator shone in the upper pole of the bladder-mine: it was armed. Scorpio stood up.

He paused: something had caught his eye. He looked up into the face of Haldora. The planet was gone now; in its place, occupying a much smaller part of the sky, was a kind of mechanism. It had the look of some unlikely diagram from mediaeval cosmology, something crafted in the ecstatic grip of a vision: a geometric, latticelike structure, a thing of many finely worked parts. Around its periphery, distinct twinkling spars crisscrossed each other, radiating away from linking nodes. Towards the middle it became far too complicated to take in, let alone to describe or memorise. He retained only a sense of vertiginous complexity, like a glimpse of the clockwork mind of God. It made his head hurt. He could feel the swarming, tingling onset of a migraine, as if the thing itself was defying him to look at it for one moment longer.

He turned away, kept his eyes on the ground and trudged back to the ship. He placed the two remaining mines back inside the cargo recess, then climbed aboard, leaving the hull door lying on the ground. No need to repressurise now: he would just have to trust the suit.

The ship bucked into the air. Through the open part of the hull he watched the deck of the bridge drop away until the sides came into view. Below: the distant floor of Absolution Gap. He felt a lurch of dizziness. When he had been standing on the bridge, laying the mine, it had been easy to forget how far from the ground he really was.

He wouldn’t have that comfort the next time.

The holdfast readied itself below the Nostalgia for Infinity. The ship was close now, or at least what remained of it. During his descent from orbit, the Captain had committed himself to a series of terminal transformations, intent on protecting those in his care while doing what was necessary to safeguard Aura. He had shed much of his hull cladding around the midsection, revealing the festering complexity of his innards: structural spars and bulkhead partitions larger than many medium-sized spacecraft, the gristlelike tangle of densely packed ship systems, grown wild and knotted as strangler vines. As he discarded these protective sections he felt a chill of nakedness, as if he was exposing vulnerable skin where once he had been armoured. It had been centuries since these internal regions had last been open to vacuum.

He continued his transformation. Within him, major elements of ship architecture were reshuffled like dominos. Umbilical lines were severed and reconnected. Parts of the ship that had relied on others for the supply of life-giving power, air and water were now made self-sufficient. Others were allowed to die. The Captain felt these changes take place within him with a queasy sense of abdominal movement: pressure and cold, sharp pains and the sudden, troubling absence of any sensation whatsoever. Although he had instigated and directed the alterations, he still felt an unsettling sense of self-violation.

What he was doing to himself could not be easily undone.

He lowered closer to Hela, correcting his descent with bursts of docking thrust. Gravitational gradients stressed the geometry of his hull, soft fingers threatening to rip him apart.

He fell further. The landscape slid beneath him—not just ice and crevasses now, but an inhabited territory pocked with tiny hamlets and scratched with lines of communication. The maw of the holdfast was a golden cleft on the horizon.

He convulsed, like something giving birth. All the preparations were complete. From his midsection, neatly separated chunks of himself detached from the hull, leaving geometric holes. They trailed thousands of severed connections, like the pale roots beneath blocks of uprooted turf. The Captain had dulled the pain where it was possible, but ghost signals still reached him where cables and feed-lines had been ripped in two. This, the Captain thought, is how it feels to be gored. But he had expected the pain and was ready for it. In a way, it was actually quite bracing. It was a reminder that he was alive, that he had begun his thinking existence as a creature of flesh and blood. As long as he felt pain, he could still think of himself as distantly human.

The twenty chunks fell with the Nostalgia for Infinity, but only for a moment. Once they were safely clear of each other, the tiny sparks of steering rockets boosted them away. The rockets were not capable of pushing the chunks beyond Hela’s gravitational influence, but they were sufficient to lift them back into orbit. There, they would have to take care of themselves. He had done what he could for his eighteen thousand sleepers—he had brought many of them all the way from Ararat, and some from Yellowstone—but now they were safer outside him than within.

He just hoped someone else would arrive to take care of them.

The holdfast loomed much larger now. Within it, the waiting cradles and harnesses were moving, preparing to lock themselves around his gutted remains.

“What do you want with the scrimshaw suit?” Quaiche asked.

“I want to take it with me,” Rashmika said, with a forcefulness that surprised her. “I want to remove it from the Lady Morwenna.”

Vasko looked at Khouri, then at Rashmika. “You remember it all now?” he asked.

“I remember more than I did,” she said, turning to her mother. “It’s coming back.”

“She means something to you?” Quaiche asked.

“She’s my mother,” Rashmika said. “And my name isn’t Rashmika. That was the name of the daughter they lost. It’s a good name, but it isn’t mine. My real name is something else, but I don’t quite remember it yet.”

“It’s Aura,” Khouri said.

Rashmika heard the name, considered it, and then looked her mother in the eye. “Yes. I remember now. I remember you calling me that.”

“I was right about the blood,” Grelier said, unable to suppress a smirk of satisfaction.

“Yes, you were right,” Quaiche said. “Happy now? But you brought her here, Surgeon-General. You brought this viper into our nest. It was your mistake.”

“She’d have found her way here in the end,” Grelier replied. “It was what she came to do. Anyway, why should you worry?” Grelier indicated the video capture of the descending ship. “You’ve got the thing you wanted, haven’t you? You’ve even got your holy machinery looking down at you in congratulation.”

“Something’s happened to the ship,” Quaiche said, raising a trembling hand towards the image. He snapped a look at Vasko. “What is it?”

“I have no idea,” he replied.

“The ship will still work,” Khouri said. “You only needed it for its engines. You’ve got that much. Now let us leave with the scrimshaw suit.”

He appeared to consider her request. “Where will you take it, without a ship?”

“Anywhere other than the Lady Morwenna would be a good start,” Khouri said. “You may have suicidal inclinations, Dean, but we don’t.”

“If I had the slightest inclination towards suicide, do you think I’d have lived as long as I have?”

Khouri looked at Malinin, then at Rashmika. “He has a way off this thing. You were never planning on staying aboard, were you?”

“It’s a question of timing,” Quaiche said. “The ship is nearly in the holdfast. That’s the moment of triumph. That’s the moment when everything on Hela changes. The moment—indeed—when Hela itself changes. Nothing will be the same again, you see. There will be no more Permanent Way, no more procession of cathedrals. There will be only one spot on Hela that is precisely beneath Haldora, and that spot will no longer be moving. And there will only be one cathedral occupying it.”

“You haven’t built it yet,” Grelier said.

“There’s time, Surgeon-General. All the time in the world, once I stake my claim. I choose where that spot falls, understand? I have my hand on Hela. I can spin this world like a globe. I can stop it with my finger.”

“And the Lady Morwenna?” Grelier asked.

“If this cathedral crosses the bridge, so be it. If it doesn’t, it will only emphasise the end of one era and the start of another.”

“He doesn’t want it to succeed,” Vasko whispered. “He never did.”

On the dean’s couch something started chiming.

Scorpio stood his ground even though every instinct told him to run backwards. The wrinkled purple-black sphere of the nearest bladder-mine detonation had raced towards him in an eyeblink, an unstoppable wall threatening to engulf him and the portion of the bridge on which he stood. But he had placed the three charges carefully, and he knew from Remontoire’s specifications that the bladder-mines were highly predictable in their effects, assuming that they worked in the first place. There was no air on Hela, so no Shockwave to consider; all he had to worry about was the limiting radius of the nearest expanding sphere. With a small margin of error to allow for undulations in the surface, he would be safe only a few hundred metres beyond the nominal boundary.

The bridge was forty kilometres wide; he had arranged the charges in a row with their centres seven kilometres apart, the middle one situated at the highest point of the span. The combined effect of the overlapping spheres would take out the central thirty-four kilometres of the bridge, leaving only a few intact kilometres at either side of the rift. When he detonated the charges, Scorpio had still been standing more than a kilometre and a half out over open space.

The boundary of the sphere was nearly a kilometre away, but it looked as if it was just beyond his nose. It rippled and bulged, wrinkles and blisters rising and falling on its shrivelled surface. The nearest part of the bridge still plunged into the wall: in his mind’s eye it was impossible not to imagine it continuing across the gap. But the bridge was already gone: nothing material would be left behind when the sphere evaporated.

It vanished. The middle one had already gone, and the furthest one popped out of existence a moment later.

He started walking to the edge. The tongue of bridge beneath his feet felt as steady as ever, even though it was no longer connected to the other side. He slowed as he neared the point where the tongue ended, mindful that this part might be a lot less stable than the portion nearer the cliff. It had been within metres of the edge of the bladder-mine detonation, where all sorts of peculiar quantum effects were to be expected. The atomic properties of the bridge’s material might have been altered, fatal flaws introduced. Time for a person—even a pig—to tread carefully.

Vertigo gripped him as he approached the edge. The cut was miraculously clean. The surgical neatness of it, and the complete absence of debris from the intervening scei ton, made it look as if the bridge was merely under construction. It macie him feel less like a vandal than a spectator, anticipating something yet to be finished.

He turned around. In the distance, beyond the crouched form of his parked ship, he saw the Lady Morwenna. From his point of view the cathedral looked as if it had virtually reached the edge of the cliff. He knew that it still had some way to travel, but it would not be long before it arrived there.

Now that the bridge was gone, though, they would have no choice but to stop. There was no longer any question of degrees of risk, any question of just possibly being able to cross Absolution Gap. He had removed any doubt from the situation. There would be no glory, only devastation.

If they were sane, they’d stop.

A flashing pink light came on inside his helmet, synchronised with a shrill alarm tone. Scorpio halted, wondering at first if there was something wrong with his suit. But the pink light meant only that the suit was receiving a powerful modulated radio signal, outside of the usual assigned communications bands. The suit was asking him if he wanted to have the signal interpreted and passed through to him.

He looked at the cathedral again. It had to be from the Lady Morwenna.

“Do it,” Scorpio said.

The radio signal, the suit told him, was a repeating one: it was cycling through a short prerecorded transmission. The format was audio/holographic.

“Let me see it,” he said, less sure now that it had anything to do with the cathedral.

A figure appeared on the ice a dozen metres from him. It was nobody he had been expecting; in fact, it was nobody he even recognised. The figure wore no spacesuit and had the odd, asymmetrical anatomy of someone who spent most of their existence in free fall. He had plug-in limbs and a face like a planetary surface after a small nuclear exchange. An Ultra, Scorpio thought; but then, after a moment’s consideration, he decided that the man probably wasn’t an Ultra at all, but a member of that other, less social spacefaring human faction: the Skyjacks.

“You couldn’t leave it alone, could you?” the figure asked. “You couldn’t just live with it; couldn’t tolerate the existence of something so beautiful and yet so enigmatic. You had to know what it was. You had to know what its limits were. My lovely bridge. My beautiful, delicate bridge. I made it for you, placed it here like a gift. But that wasn’t enough for you, was it? You had to test it. You had to destroy it. You had to fucking ruin it.”

Scorpio walked through the figure. “Sorry,” he said. “Not interested.”

“It was a thing of beauty,” the man said. “It was a thing of fucking beauty.”

“It was in my way,” Scorpio said.

None of them could see the report Quaiche was accessing, sent through to the private display of his couch. But Rashmika watched his lips move and observed the barest crease of a frown as he reread the summary, as if he had made a mistake the first time.

“What is it?” Grelier asked.

“The bridge,” Quaiche answered. “It doesn’t seem to be there any more.”

Grelier leant closer to the couch. “There must be some mistake.”

“There doesn’t seem to be one, Surgeon-General. The inductance cable—the line we use for emergency navigation—is quite clearly severed.”

“So someone cut the cable.”

“I’ll have surface imagery in a moment. Then we’ll know.”

They all turned to the screen that had been showing the descent of the Nostalgia for Infinity. The image flickered with ghostly colours, then stabilised around a familiar view captured by a static camera that must have been mounted on the wall of Ginnungagap Rift itself.

The dean was right: there was no longer any bridge. All that remained were the extremities of the span: those curlicued fancies of scrolled sugar and icing flung out from either cliff as if to suggest the rest of the bridge by a process of elegant mathematical extrapolation. But most of the span was simply not there. Nor was there any hint of wreckage down on the floor. In her mind’s eye, Rashmika had thought of the bridge collapsing time and again, ever since she had known she would have to cross it. But always she had seen it coming down in an avalanche of splintering shards, forming a jewelled, glinting scree that was in itself a thing of wonder: an enchanted glass forest you could lose yourself in.

“What happened?” the dean asked.

Rashmika turned to him. “Does it matter? It’s gone: you can see for yourself. Crossing it isn’t an issue now. There’s no reason not to stop the cathedral.”

“Weren’t you listening, girl?” he asked. “The cathedral doesn’t stop. The cathedral cannot stop.”

Khouri stood up, followed by Vasko. “We can’t stay aboard any longer. You’ll come with us, Aura.”

Rashmika shook her head. She was still not used to being called by that name. “I’m not leaving without the thing I came for.”

“She is right,” said a new voice, thin and metallic.

No one said anything. It was not the intrusion of a new voice that alarmed them, but its obvious point of origin. As one, they all turned to look at the scrimshaw suit. Outwardly, nothing about it had changed: it was exactly the same brooding silver-grey form, crawling with manic detail and the blistered seams of crude welding.

“She is right,” the suit continued. “We must leave now, Quaiche. You have your ship, the thing you wanted so badly. You have your means of stopping Hela. Now let us go. We are of no consequence to any of your plans.”

“You never spoke except when I was alone before,” Quaiche said.

“We spoke to the girl, when you wouldn’t listen. She was easier: we could see straight into her head. Couldn’t we, Rashmika?”

Bravely, she said, “I’d rather you called me Aura now.”

“Aura it is, then. It changes nothing, does it? You came all this way to find us. Now you have. And there’s nothing to prevent the dean from giving us to you.”

Grelier shook his head, as if he alone were the victim of an extended joke. “The suit is talking. The suit is talking and you’re all just standing around as if this happens every day.”

“For some of us,” Quaiche said, “it does.”

“These are the shadows?” Grelier asked.

“An envoy of the shadows,” the suit said. “The distinction need not detain us. Now, please, we must be removed from the Lady Morwenna immediately.”

“You’ll stay here,” Quaiche said.

“No,” Rashmika said. “Dean—give us the suit. It doesn’t matter to you, but it means everything to us. The shadows are going to help us survive the Inhibitors. But that suit is our only direct line of communication with them.”

“If they mean that much to you, send another probe into Haldora.”

“We don’t know that it will work twice. Whatever happened to you may have been a fluke. We can’t gamble everything on the off chance that it might happen again.”

“Listen to her,” the suit said urgently. “She is right: we are your only guaranteed contact with the shadows. You must safeguard us, if you wish our assistance.”

“And the price of this assistance?” Quaiche asked.

“Nothing compared to the price of extinction. We wish only to be allowed to cross over from our side of the bulk. Is that so much to ask? Is that so great a cost to pay?”

Rashmika faced the others, feeling as if she had been appointed as witness for the shadows. “They can cross over provided that the matter-synthesiser is allowed to function. It’s a machine at the heart of the Haldora receiver. It will make them bodies, and their minds will slip across the bulk and inhabit them.”

“Machines, again,” Vasko said. “We run from one group, and now we negotiate with another.”

“If that’s what it takes,” Rashmika said. “And they’re only machines because they had no choice, after everything they’d lived through.” She remembered, in hypnagogic flashes, the vision she had been granted of life in the shadow universe: of entire galaxies stained green with the marauding blight; suns like emerald lanterns. “They were a lot like us once,” she added. “Closer than we realise.”

“They’re demons,” Quaiche said. “Not people at all. Not even machines.”

“Demons?” Grelier asked tolerantly.

“Sent to test my faith, of course. To undermine my belief in the miracle. To pollute my mind with fantasies of other universes. To make me doubt that the vanishings are the word of God. To cause me to stumble, in the hour of my greatest testing. It’s no coincidence, you know: as my plans for Hela grew towards culmination, so the demons increased their taunting of me.”

“They were scared you’d destroy them,” Rashmika said. “The mistake they made was to deal with you as a rational individual. If only they had pretended to be demons or angels they might have got somewhere.” She leant over him, until she could smell his breath: old and vinegary, like a disused wine cellar. “They may be demons to you, Dean, I won’t deny it. But don’t deny them to us.”

‘They are demons,“ he said. ”And that’s why I can’t let you have them. I should have had the courage to destroy them years ago.“

“Please,” Rashmika said.

Something else chimed on his couch. Quaiche pursed his lips, closed his eyes in ecstasy or dread.

“It’s done,” he said. “The ship’s in the holdfast. I have what I wanted.”

The viewscreen showed them everything. The Nostalgia for Infinity lay lengthwise in the pen Quaiche had prepared for it, like some captured sea creature of monstrous, mythic proportions. The clasps and supports of the cradle clutched the hull in a hundred places, expertly conforming to its irregularities and architectural flourishes. The damage that the ship had wrought upon itself during its descent—the shedding of the hull around the midsection and the disgorging of so many internal parts—was obvious now, and for a moment Quaiche wondered if his prize would be too weakened to serve his needs. But the doubt vanished immediately: the ship had withstood the stresses of the approach to the holdfast and the final, brutal mating procedure as it came to a crunching stop in the cradle. The harness machinery had been engineered to dampen the impact of that moving mass, but the instant of collision had still sent all the stress indicators into the red. Yet the harness had held—enough of it, anyway—and so had the ship. The lighthugger had not broken her back, her engines had not been ripped away from their outriggers. It had survived the hardest part of its journey, and nothing else that he asked of it would put quite the same load on it as the capture. It was everything that he had anticipated.

Quaiche signalled his audience closer. “Look at it. See how the rear of the ship is being elevated to align the exhaust away from Hela’s surface. A slight angle, but critical nonetheless.”

“As soon as the engines are fired,” Vasko said, “she’ll rip her way out of your holdfast.”

Quaiche shook his head. “No, she won’t. I didn’t just pick the first place on the map, you know. This is a region of extreme geological stability. The holdfast itself is anchored deep into Hela’s crust. It won’t budge. Trust me: after all the effort I went to getting my hands on that ship, do you think I’d forget geology?” Another chime. Quaiche bent a speaking stalk towards his lips and whispered something to his contact in the holdfast. “She’s elevated now,” he said. “No reason not to begin firing. Mr. Malinin?”

Vasko spoke into his communicator. He asked for Scorpio, but it was another senior who answered.

“Request that the ship fire its engines,” Vasko said.

But even before he had finished his sentence they saw the engines light. Twin spikes of purple-edged white lanced from the Conjoiner drives, their brilliance overloading the camera. The ship crept forwards in the harness, like a last, weakened effort at escape by a captured sea creature. But the holding machines flexed, absorbing the shock of drive activation, and the ship gradually returned to its earlier position. The engines burned clean and steady.

“Look,” Grelier said, pointing to one of the garret’s windows. “We can see it.”

The exhaust beams were two scratches of fading white, probing over the horizon like searchlights.

A moment later, they felt a tremble run through the Lady Morwenna.

Quaiche summoned Grelier, gestured at his eyes. “Take this monstrosity off my face. I don’t need it any more.”

“The eye-opener?”

“Remove it. Gently.”

Grelier did as he was told, carefully levering the metal frame away from its subject.

“Your eyelids will take a while to settle back,” Grelier told him. “In the meantime, I’d keep the glasses on.”

Quaiche held the shades to his face, like a child playing with an adult’s spectacles. Without the eye₇opener, they were much too large to stay in place.

“Now we can leave,” he said.

Scorpio loped back to the squat pebble of his ship, climbed in through the open doorframe and took the little craft away from the remains of the bridge. The gashed landscape wheeled below him, myriad sharp black shadows stretching across it like individual ink-spills. One wall of the Rift was now as dark as night, while the other was illuminated only near its top. Some part of him wanted the bridge to still be there; wanted his last act to have been revoked so that he could have more time to consider its consequences. He had always felt that way after he hurt someone or something. He always regretted his impulsiveness, but the one thing about the regret was that it never lasted.

The experts had been wrong about the bridge, he now knew. It was a human artefact, not something made by the scuttlers at all. It had certainly been here for more than a century, but it might not have been very much older than that. But until it was shattered, broken open, its origin—its very nature—had remained unknown. It was a thing of advanced science, but it was the advanced science of the Demarchist era rather than the vanished aliens.“ He thought of the man who had appeared on the ice, his sense of anguish that his beautiful, pointless creation had been destroyed. But it was a recording, not a live transmission. It must have been made when the bridge was made, designed to activate when the structure was damaged or destroyed. It meant that the man had always considered this possibility; had even perhaps anticipated it. To Scorpio he had sounded very much like someone being vindicated.

The ship pulled away from the side of the Rift. He was over solid ground now, with the roughly defined track of the Way visible below him. There, no more than three or four kilometres away, was the Lady Morwenna, throwing its own shadow far back along the route it had travelled, dragging it like a great black wedding train. He pushed the bridge and its maker from his mind. Everything he wanted, everything that mattered now, was in that cathedral. And he had to find a way to get inside it.

He took his ship closer, until he could make out the slow, inching crawl of the great walking machine. There was something hypnotic and calming about the sequenced movements of the flying buttresses. It was not his imagination, then: the Lady Morwenna was still moving, seemingly oblivious to the nonexistence of any safe crossing ahead of it.

He hadn’t expected that.

Perhaps it would start slowing any moment now, as forward sensors detected the interruption in its route. Or perhaps it was simply going to keep walking towards the edge, exactly as if the bridge still existed. A thought occurred to him for the first time: what if stopping really wasn’t an option, and not just bluster on Quaiche’s part?

He slid the ship to within five hundred metres of the cathedral, approximately level with the top of its main tower. All he needed was a landing stage, or something he could improvise as one, and some means of accessing the interior of the cathedral from there. The main landing pad was too crowded; he couldn’t put his ship down on it without risking a collision with one of the other two craft already occupying it. One of them was an unfamiliar red cockleshell; the other was the shuttle Vasko and Khouri had brought from the Nostalgia for Infinity. The shuttle was the only ship capable of getting all of them—including Aura and the suit—back into orbit, so he was anxious not to damage it or push it from the landing stage.

But there were other possibilities, and a landing on the designated pad would have lacked the element of surprise. He circled the cathedral, tapping the thruster stud to hold his altitude steady, watching the stuttering glare flicker against the Lady Morwenna like midsummer lightning. The shadows and highlights moved with him, making the architectural features appear to slide and ooze against each other, as if the cathedral were yawning, waking from some tremendous sleep of stone and metal. Even the gargoyles joined in the illusion of movement, their gape-jawed heads seeming to track him with the smooth, oiled malevolence of weapons turrets.

It wasn’t an illusion.

He saw a flash of fire from one of the gargoyles, and then felt his ship shudder and lurch. In his helmet, alarms rang. The console lit up with emergency icons. He saw the cathedral and the landscape tilt alarmingly and felt the ship begin a sharp, barely controlled descent. The thrusters fired urgently, doing their best to stabilise the falling craft, but there was no hope of getting away from the Lady Morwenna, let alone of reaching orbit. Scorpio pulled hard on the controls, trying to steer the damaged ship away from the gargoyle defence systems. His chest hurt as he applied maximum pressure to the steering stick, making him groan and bite his bottom lip. He tasted his own blood. Another head vomited red fire towards him. The ship lurched and fell even more swiftly. He braced for the impact; it came an instant later. He stayed conscious as the ship slammed into the ice, but cried out with the pain—a pure meaningless roar of rage and indignation. The ship rolled, finally coming to rest on its side. The open door was above him, neatly framing the revealed heart of Haldora.

He waited for at least a minute before moving.