Absolution Gap (103 page)

No one said anything for a moment. There was a hiatus, a stillness in the room. It reminded him of something, but it took a while to remember what it was. When he did, he almost flinched away from the memory: Clavain. There had been a similar pause whenever the old man had finished one of his rabble-rousing monologues.

“We could still storm the cathedral,” Urton said, her voice low. “There’s time. We’ve taken losses, but we have operational shuttles. How about it, Scorp: a precision raid on the Lady Morwenna, in and out, snatch the suit and our people?”

“It’d be dangerous,” said another of the Security Arm people. “We don’t just have Khouri and Malinin to worry about. There’s Aura. What if Quaiche suspects she’s one of us?”

“He won’t,” Urton said. “There’s no reason for him to do that.”

Scorpio wrestled away from Valensin long enough to lift up his sleeve and inspect the plastic and metal ruin of his communicator. He did not remember when he had damaged it, just as he did not recall where all the additional bruises and cuts had come from.

“Someone get me a line to the cathedral,” he said. “I want to talk to the man in charge.”

“You never used to think much of negotiation,” Urton said. “You said all it ever got you was a world of pain.”

“Trouble is,” Scorpio acknowledged ruefully, “sometimes that’s the best you can hope for.”

“You’re wrong about this,” Urton said. “This isn’t the way to handle things.”

“Like I was wrong about letting those twenty Adventists aboard the ship? That wasn’t my bright idea, the last time I checked.”

“They slipped past your security checks,” Urton said.

“You wouldn’t let me examine them as thoroughly as I’d have liked.”

Urton glanced at her fellows. “Look, we’re grateful for your help in regaining control.
Deeply
grateful. But now that the situation is stable again, wouldn’t it be better if—”

The ship moaned. Someone else slid a communicator across the polished gloss of the table. Scorpio reached for it, snapped it around his wrist, and called Vasko.

 

Hela Surface, 2727

 

Grelier stepped into the garret and took a moment to adjust to the scene that met his eyes. Superficially, the room was much as he had left it. But now it had extra guests—a man and an older woman—detained by a small detachment of the Cathedral Guard. The guests—they were from the Ultra ship, he realised—looked at him as if expecting an explanation. Grelier merely brushed a hand through the white shock of his hair and placed his cane by the door. There was a lot he wanted to get off his chest, but the one thing he couldn’t do was explain what was happening here.

“I go away for a few hours and all hell breaks loose,” he commented.

“Have a seat,” the dean said.

Grelier ignored the suggestion. He did what he usually did upon his arrival in the garret, which was to attend to the dean’s eyes. He opened the wall cabinet and took out his usual paraphernalia of swabs and ointments.

“Not now, Grelier.”

“Now is as good a time as any,” he said. “Infection won’t stop spreading merely because it is inconvenient to treat it.”

“Where have you been, Grelier?”

“First things first.” The surgeon-general leant over the dean, inspecting the points where the barbs of the eye-opener hooked into the delicate skin of Quaiche’s eyelids. “Might be my imagination, but there seemed to be a wee bit of an atmosphere when I came in here.”

“They’re not too thrilled about my taking the cathedral over the rift.”

“Neither am I,” Grelier said, “but you’re not holding me at gunpoint.”

“It’s rather more complicated than that.”

“I’ll bet it is.” More than ever, he was glad that he had left his shuttle in a state of immediate flight-readiness. “Well, is someone going to explain? Or is this a new parlour game, where I have twenty guesses?”

“He’s taken over our ship,” the man said.

Grelier glanced back at him, continuing to dab at the dean’s eyes. “I’m sorry?”

“The Adventist delegates were a trick,” the ma elaborated. “They were sent up there to seize control of the
Nostalgia for Infinity
.”

“Nostalgia for Infinity,”
Greleir said. “Now there’s a name that keeps coming up.”

Now it was the man’s turn to be puzzled. “I’m sorry?”

“Been here before, haven’t you? About nine years ago.”

The two prisoners exchanged glances. They did their best to hide it, but Grelier had been expecting some response.

“You’re ahead of me,” Quaiche said.

“I think we’re all ahead of each other in certain respects,” Grelier said. He scooped his swab under an eyelid, the tip yellow with infection. “Is it true what he said, about the delegates taking over their ship?”

“I don’t think he’d have any reason to lie,” Quaiche said.

“You set that up?”

“I needed their ship,” Quaiche said. He sounded like a child explaining why he had been caught stealing apples.

“We know that much. Why else did you spend all that time looking for the right one? But now that they’ve brought the ship, what’s the problem? You’re better off letting them run it, if protection’s what you want.”

“It was never about protection.”

Grelier froze, the swab still buried under the dean’s eyelid. “It wasn’t?”

“I wanted a ship,” Quaiche said. “Didn’t matter which one, so long as it was in reasonably good condition and the engines worked. It wasn’t as if I was planning on taking it very far.”

“I don’t understand,” Grelier said.

“I know why,” the man said. “At least, I think I have a good idea. It’s about Hela, isn’t it?”

Grelier looked at him. “What about it?”

“He’s going to take our ship and land it on this planet. Somewhere near the equator, I’d guess. He’s probably already constructed something for docking a cradle of some kind.”

“A cradle?” Grelier said blankly.

“A holdfast,” Quaiche said, as if that explained everything. Grelier thought about the diverted Permanent Way resources, the fleet of construction machines Rashmika had described to him. Now he knew exactly what they were for. They must have been on their way to the holdfast—whatever that was—to put the finishing touches to it.

“Just one question,” Grelier said. “Why?”

“He’s going to land the ship sideways,” the man replied. “Lie it down on Hela with the hull aligned east-west, parallel to the equator. Then he’ll lock it in place, so that it can’t move.”

“There’s a point to all this?” Grelier said.

“There will be when I start the engines,” Quaiche said, unable to contain himself. “Then you’ll see. Then everyone will see.”

“He’s going to change the spin rate of Hela,” the man said.

“He’s going to use the ship’s engines to lock Hela into synchronous rotation around Haldora. He doesn’t have to change the length of the day by much—twelve minutes will do the trick. Won’t they, Dean?”

“One part in two hundred,” Quaiche said. “Sounds trivial, doesn’t it? But worlds—even small ones like Hela—take a lot of shifting. I always knew I’d need a lighthugger to do it. Think about it: if those engines can push a million tonnes of ship to within a scratch of the speed of light, I think they can change Hela’s day by twelve minutes.”

Grelier retrieved the swab from under Quaiche’s eyelid. “What God failed to put right, you can fix. Is that it?”

“Now don’t go giving me delusions of grandeur,” Quaiche chided.

Vasko’s bracelet chimed. He looked at it, not daring to move.

“Answer it,” Quaiche said eventually. “Then we can all hear how things are going.”

Vasko did as he was told. He listened to the report very carefully, then snapped the bracelet from his wrist and passed it to Grelier. “Listen to it yourself,” he said. “I think you’ll find it very interesting.”

Grelier examined the bracelet, his lips pursed in suspicion. “I’ll take this call, I think,” he said.

“Suits me either way,” Vasko said.

Grelier listened to the voice coming out of the bracelet. He spoke into it carefully, then listened to the answers, nodding occasionally, raising his snowwhite eyebrows in mock astonishment. Then he shrugged and passed it back to Vasko.

“What?” Quaiche said.

“The Cathedral Guard have failed in their attempt to take the ship,” he said. “They’ve been cut to shreds, including the reinforcements. I had a nice chat with the pig in command of ship operations. Seemed a very reasonable fellow, for a pig.”

“No,” Quaiche breathed. “Seyfarth gave me his promise. He told me he had the men to do it. It can’t have failed.”

“It did.”

“What happened? What did they have on that ship that Seyfarth didn’t know about? A whole army?”

“That’s not what the pig says.”

“The pig’s right,” Vasko said. “It was the ship that ruined your plans. It’s not like other ships, not inside. It has ideas of its own. It didn’t take very kindly to your intruders.”

“This wasn’t how it was meant to happen,” Quaiche moaned.

“You’re in a spot of bother, I think,” Grelier said. “The pig mentioned something about taking the cathedral by force.”

“They set me up,” Quaiche said, realisation dawning.

“Oh, don’t think ill of them. They just wanted access to Haldora. It wasn’t their fault they stumbled into your scheme. They’d have left you alone if you hadn’t tried to use them.”

“We’re in trouble,” Quaiche said quietly.

“Actually,” Grelier said, as if remembering something important, “things aren’t quite as bad as you think.” He leant closer to the dean, then looked back at the three people sitting around the table. “We still have a bit of leverage, you see.”

“We do?” Quaiche said.

“Give me the bracelet,” he told Vasko.

Vasko passed it to him. Grelier smiled and spoke into it. “Hello, is that the pig? Nice to speak to you again. Got a bit of news for you. We have the girl. If you want her back in one piece, I suggest you start taking instructions.”

Then he handed the bracelet to the dean. “You’re on,” he said.

Scorpio struggled to hear the whispery, paper-thin voice of Dean Quaiche. He held up a hand to silence his companions, screwing his eyes closed against the tight, nagging discomfort of his sealed wounds. His work finished, Valensin began wrapping up the soiled blood-red bundle of surgical tools and ointments.

“I don’t know about any girl,” Scorpio said.

The dean’s answer was like a scratch of nails against tin. “Her name is Rashmika Els. Her real name, I neither know nor care. What I do know is that she arrived on Hela from your ship nine years ago. We’ve established the connection beyond any doubt. And so much else suddenly tumbles into place.”

“It does?”

The voice changed: it was the other man again, the surgeon-general. “I don’t know exactly how you did it,” he said, “but I’m impressed. Buried memories, autosuggestion . . . what was it?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“The business with the Vigrid constabulary.”

Again, “I’m sorry?”

“The girl had to be primed to emerge from her shell. There must have been a trigger. Perhaps after eight or nine years she knew, on a subconscious level, that she had spent enough time amongst the badland villagers to begin the next phase of her infiltration: penetrating the highest level of our very order. Why, I don’t yet know, although I’m a wee bit inclined to think
you
do.”

Scorpio said nothing. He let the man continue speaking.

“She had to wait until a means arrived to reach the Permanent Way. Then she had to signal to you that she was on her way, so that you would know to bring your ship in from the cold. It was a question of timing: your successful dealings with the dean obviously depended on internal intelligence fed to you by the girl. There are machines in her head—they rather resemble Conjoiner implants—but I doubt that you could read them from orbit. So you needed another sign, something you couldn’t possibly miss. The girl sabotaged a store of demolition charges, didn’t she? She blew it up, drawing down the attention of the constabulary. I doubt that she even knew she had done it herself: it was probably more like sleepwalking, acting out buried commands. Then she felt an inexplicable need to leave home and journey to the cathedrals. She concocted a motive for herself: a search for her long-lost brother, even though every rational bone in her body must have told her he was already dead. You, meanwhile, had your signal. The sabotage was reported on all the local news networks; doubtless you had the means to intercept them even far beyond Hela. I imagine there was something unambiguous about it—the time of day, perhaps—that made it absolutely clear that it was the work of your spy.”

Scorpio saw that there was no further point in bluffing. “You’ve done your homework,” he said.

“Bloodwork, really, but I take your point.”

“Touch her, and I’ll turn you to dust.”

He heard the smile in the surgeon-general’s voice. “I think touching her is the last thing any of us have in mind. I don’t think we intend to harm a hair on her head. On that note, why don’t I put you back on to the dean? I think he has an interesting proposition.”

The whispery voice again, like someone blowing through driftwood: “A proposition, yes,” the dean said. “I was prepared to take your ship by force because I never imagined I’d have any leverage over you. Force, it seems, has failed. I’m surprised: Seyfarth assured me he had every confidence in his own abilities. Frankly, it doesn’t matter now that I have the girl. Obviously she means something to you. That means you’re going to do what I want, without a single one of my agents lifting a finger.”

“Let’s hear your proposition,” Scorpio said.

“I told you I wanted the loan of your ship. As a gesture of my good faith—and my extremely forgiving nature—that arrangement still stands. I will take your ship, use it as I see fit, and then I shall return it to you, its occupants and infrastructure largely intact.”