Absolution Gap (108 page)

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 eye-opener, 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 Some part of him wanted the bridge to still be there; wanted his last act to have been revoked so that he could have more time to consider its consequences.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.

The detachment of Cathedral Guard kept watch over their prisoners while Grelier left the garret with whispered orders from Quaiche buzzing in his ear. When he returned he brought with him a suit of approximately the right size for Rashmika: a blood-red Adventist model rather than the one she had worn during her journey aboard the caravan.

Grelier dropped the pieces of the suit into her lap. “Put it on,” he said. “And don’t take an eternity doing it. I want to get off this thing as much as you do.”

“I’m not leaving without the scrimshaw suit,” she said, before glancing at her mother. “Or my friends. They’re coming with me, both of them.”

“No,” Quaiche said. “They’re staying here, at least until you and I reach the safety of the ship.”

“Which ship?” Vasko asked.

“Your ship, of course,” Quaiche said, as if this should have been obvious. “The
Nostalgia for Infinity
. There’s still rather a lot I don’t know about it. The ship even appears to have something of a mind of its own. Mysteries, mysteries: doubtless we’ll get to the bottom of them all in good time. What I do know is this: I don’t trust that ship not to do something stupid like making itself blow up.”

“There are people aboard it,” Vasko said.

“A fully armed squad of Cathedral Guard will be attempting occupation from the holdfast even as I speak. They will have the weapons and armour denied to the earlier infiltration units, and they won’t need to wait for back-up from spaceborne elements. I assure you: they’ll have that ship flushed clean in a matter of hours, no matter what tricks it tries to play on them. In the meantime, it seems to me that the one thing guaranteed to stop that ship from doing anything foolish would be the presence of Rashmika—apologies,
Aura
—herself. After all, it practically threw itself into my holdfast as soon as I declared my position.”

“I won’t save you,” Rashmika said. “With me or without me, Dean, you’re a dead man unless you give me the shadows.”

“The shadows stay here, with your friends.”

“That’s murder.”

“No, merely prudence.” He beckoned one of the Cathedral Guard officers closer to his couch. “Haken, keep them here until you have news of my safe arrival in the holdfast. I should be there within thirty minutes, but you are not to act without my word. Understood?”

The guard acknowledged him with a nod. “And if we don’t hear from you, Dean?

“The cathedral won’t reach the western limit of the bridge for another four hours. In three hours and thirty minutes, you may release your prisoners and make your own escape. Regroup at the holdfast at your earliest convenience.”

“And the suit, sir?” Haken asked.

“It goes down with the Lady Mor. The cathedral will take its demons with it when it dies.” Quaiche directed his attention towards Grelier, who was helping Rashmika with the final details of the Adventist suit. “Surgeon-General? Would you happen to have your medical kit, by any chance?”

Grelier looked affronted. “I never leave home without it.”

“Then open it. Find a syringe containing something potent, like DEUS-X. That should be sufficient encouragement, don’t you agree?”

“Find your own way of controlling the girl,” Grelier said. “I’m leaving on my own. I think it’s about time you and I went our separate ways.”

“We can talk about that later,” Quaiche said, “but for the time being I think you need me as much as I need you. I guessed that you and I might be headed for a slight crisis in our relationship, so I had Haken’s men disable your ship.”

“I’m not fussed. I’ll take the other one.”

“There isn’t another one. Haken’s men took care of the Ultra shuttle at the same time.”

“Then we’re all stuck aboard the cathedral, is that it?” Grelier asked.

“No. I
said
we were going to the holdfast, didn’t I? Have some faith, Surgeon-General. Have some faith.”

“Bit late in the day for that, I think,” Grelier said. But even as he spoke he began rummaging in his case, flipping it open to reveal the ranked sets of syringes.

Rashmika finished putting on the suit by herself. There was no helmet: they were keeping that from her for the moment. She looked at her mother, then at Vasko. “You can’t leave them here. They have to come with us.”

“They’ll be allowed to leave in good time,” Quaiche said.

Rashmika felt the cold pressure of the syringe against her neck.

“Ready to move?” Grelier asked.

“I’m not leaving them here,” Rashmika insisted.

“We’ll be all right,” Khouri said. “Just go with him and do what he says. You’re the one that matters now.”

She breathed heavily, accepting it, knowing she had no other choice. “Let’s get this over with,” Rashmika said.

 

Glaur allowed himself one last look at the throbbing empire of Motive Power before he left it for ever. He felt an unconscionable twinge of pride: the machines were performing flawlessly even though they had been running without human assistance ever since Seyfarth and he had turned their dual keys in the lockout console, thereby putting the Lady Morwenna on autonomic control. It was the feeling a headmaster might have experienced upon spying into a classroom of diligent scholars, busy with their studies even in the absence of authority. Given time, the lack of human attention would make its mark: warning lights would begin to appear on the reactor, and the turbines and their associated mechanisms would begin to overheat from the lack of lubrication and adjustment. But that was many hours in the future: far beyond the likely lifetime of the Lady Morwenna. Glaur was no longer concerned about the probability of the cathedral sustaining a crossing of the bridge. He knew from the telltale indicators on the main navigation board that the inductance cable had been broken some distance ahead of the cathedral. It could have been at any point within a hundred kilometres of the Lady Mor’s present position, but Glaur knew, with absolute conviction, that it was because the bridge itself had been taken down. He couldn’t say how, or who had done it. A rival cathedral, most likely, intent on robbing the dean of even this one foolhardy shot at glory. It must have been quite a thing to see, though. Almost as spectacular a sight as the one the cathedral herself would make very shortly.

He turned from the machines and began to ascend the spiral staircase that accessed the next level of the cathedral. He trudged from tread to tread, awkward in the emergency vacuum suit he had retrieved from the repair shop. He had the faceplate raised, but shortly he expected to be out on Hela’s surface, retracing the cathedral’s footsteps back towards the orthodox route of the Way. Many had already left: if he maintained a brisk pace, he was sure to catch up with one of the parties before very long. There might even be a vehicle he could take from the garage deck, if they hadn’t all been used.

Glaur neared the top. Something was wrong: his usual exit was obstructed, blocked by grilled metal. It was the protective gate: normally open, only rarely locked by members of the Clocktower when they were on sensitive duties.

He had been locked into Motive Power.

Glaur backed away from the gate. There were other stairwells, but he was certain that he would find similar obstructions at the top of them. Why go to the trouble of blocking one route, and not all the rest?