Absolution Gap (35 page)

“That doesn’t seem fast, does it?”

“Not really, no.”

“I assure you it does when you have a few hundred vertical metres of metal sliding towards you and you have a job to do that involves stepping out of the way at the last possible moment, before you fall under the traction plates.” Quaestor Rutland Jones leant forwards, compressing the bulk of his belly against the table and lacing his fingers before him. “The Permanent Way is a road of compacted ice. With one or two complications, it encircles the planet like a ribbon. It is never wider than two hundred metres, and is frequently much narrower than that. Yet even a small cathedral may be fifty metres across. The largest of them—the Lady Morwenna, for instance—are double that. And since the cathedrals all wish to situate themselves under the mathematically exact spot on the Way that corresponds to Haldora being precisely at the zenith, directly overhead, there is a certain degree of . . . ” His voice became mockingly playful. “. . . competition for the available space. Between rival churches, even those bound by the ecumenical protocols, it can be surprisingly fierce. Sabotage and trickery are not unheard of. Even amongst cathedrals belonging to one church, there is still a degree of playful jockeying.”

“I’m not sure I see your point, Quaestor.”

“I mean that damage to the Way—deliberately inflicted vandalism—is not unusual. Cathedrals may leave obstacles in their wake, or they may tamper with the integrity of the Way itself. And Hela itself does its share of harm. Rock blizzards . . . ice-flows . . . volcanic eruptions . . . all these can render the Way temporarily impassable. That is why cathedrals have Permanent Way gangs.” He looked at Rashmika sharply. “The gangs work ahead of the cathedrals. Not too far ahead, or they risk their good work being exploited by rivals, but just far enough to enable their tasks to be completed before their cathedrals arrive. I’ll make no bones about it: the work is difficult and dangerous. But it is work that requires some of the skills you have mentioned.” He tapped pudgy fingers against the table. “Working under vacuum, on ice. Using cutting and blasting tools. Programming servitors for the most hazardous tasks.”

“That’s not the kind of work I had in mind,” Rashmika said.

“No?”

“Like I said, I think my skills would be put to far better use in a clerical context, such as one of the archaeological study groups.”

“That may be so, but vacancies in those groups are rare indeed. On the other hand, by the very nature of the work, vacancies do tend to keep opening up in clearance gangs.”

“Because people keep dying?”

“It’s tough work. But it is work. And there are degrees of risk even in clearance duty. It shouldn’t be too difficult to find you something slightly less hazardous than fuse-laying, something where you might not even have to wear a surface suit all day long. And it might keep you occupied until something opens up in one of the study groups.”

Rashmika read the quaestor’s face. He had not lied to her so far. “It’s not what I wanted,” she said, “but if it’s all that’s on offer, I’ll have to take it. If I said I was prepared to do such work, could you find me a vacancy?”

“If I felt I could live with myself afterwards . . . then yes, I dare say I could.”

“I’m sure you’d sleep fine at night, Quaestor.”

“And you are certain that this is what you want?”

She nodded, before her own doubt began to show. “If you could start making the arrangements, I would be grateful.”

“There are always favours that can be called in,” he said. “But there is something I need to mention. There are people looking for you, from the Vigrid badlands. The constabulary can’t touch you here, but your absence has been noted.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.”

“There has been speculation about the purpose of your mission. Some say it has something to do with your brother.” The green creature looked up, as if taking a sudden interest in the conversation. It was definitely missing one of its forelimbs, Rashmika noted. “Harbin Els,” the quaestor continued. “That’s his name, isn’t it?”

There was clearly no point pretending otherwise. “My brother went to look for work on the Way,” she said. “They lied to him about what would happen, said they wouldn’t put the dean’s blood in him. We never saw him again.”

“And now you feel the need to find out what became of him?”

“He was my brother,” she said.

“Then perhaps this may be of interest to you.” The quaestor reached under his desk and produced a folded sheet of paper. He pushed it towards her. The green creature watched it slide across the desk.

She took the letter, rubbing her thumb against the red wax seal that held it closed. Embossed on the seal was a spacesuit, arms spread like a crucifix, radiating shafts of light. The seal had been broken; it only loosely adhered to the paper on one side of the join.

“What is it?” she asked, looking at his face very carefully.

“It came through official channels, from the Lady Morwenna. That’s a Clocktower seal.”

That part was true, she thought. Or at least the quaestor sincerely believed that was the case. “When?”

“Today.”

But that was a lie.

“Addressed to me?”

“I was told to make sure you saw it.” He looked down, not wanting to meet her eyes. It made his face harder to read.

“By whom?”

“No one . . . I . . .” Again, he was lying. “I looked at it. Don’t think ill of me—I look at all correspondence that passes through the caravan. It’s a matter of security.”

“Then you know what it says?”

“I think you should read it for yourself,” he said.

The ticking of his cane marked the surgeon-general’s progress through the iron of the great cathedral. Even in the parts of the cathedral where the engines and traction mechanisms were audible, they heard him coming long before he arrived. His footsteps were as measured and regular as the beats of a metronome, the tap of his cane punctuating the rhythm, iron against iron. He moved with a deliberate arachnoid slowness, giving the nosy and the idle time to disperse. Occasionally he was aware of watchers secreted behind metal pillars or grilles, spying on him, thinking themselves discreet. More often than not he knew with certainty that he went about his errands unobserved. In the long years of his service to Quaiche, one thing had been made clear to the cathedral populace: Grelier’s business was not a matter for the curious.

But sometimes those who fled from him were doing so for reasons other than the edict to keep their noses out of his work.

He reached a spiral staircase, a helix of skeletal iron plunging down into the clanking depths of Motive Power. The staircase was ringing like a struck tuning fork. Either it was picking up a vibration from the machines below or someone had just employed it to get away from Grelier.

He leant over the balustrade, peering down the corkscrewing middle of the staircase. Two turns below, pudgy fingers slipped urgently along the handrail. Was that his man? Very probably.

Humming to himself, Grelier unlatched the protective gate that allowed entry to the stairwell. He flipped it shut with the sharp end of his cane and began to descend. He took his time, allowing each pair of footfalls to echo before proceeding down to the next step. He let the cane
tap, tap, tap
against the balusters, informing the man that he was coming and that there was no conceivable avenue of escape. Grelier knew the innards of Motive Power as intimately as he knew the innards of every section of the cathedral. He had sealed all the other stairwells with the Clocktower key. This was the only way up or down, and he would be sure to seal it once he reached the bottom. His heavy medical case knocked against one thigh as he descended, in perfect synchrony with the tapping of the cane.

The machines in the lower levels sang more loudly as he approached them. There was no part of the cathedral where you couldn’t hear those grinding mechanisms, if there were no other sounds. But in the high levels the noise from the motors and traction systems had to compete with organ music and the permanently singing voices of the choir. The mind soon filtered out that faint background component.

Not here. Grelier heard the shrill whine of turbines, which set his teeth on edge. He heard the low clank and thud of massive articulated cranks and eccentrics. He heard pistons sliding, valves opening and closing. He heard relays chattering, the low voices of technical staff.

He descended, cane tapping, medical kit ready.

Grelier reached the lowest turn of the spiral. The exit gate squeaked on its hinges: it hadn’t been latched. Someone had been in a bit of a hurry. He stepped through the doorframe and placed his medical kit between his shoes. He took the key from his breast pocket and locked the gate, preventing anyone from ascending from this level. Then he picked up the medical kit and resumed his leisurely progress.

Grelier looked around. There was no sign of the fugitive, but there were plenty of places where a man might hide. This did not concern Grelier: in time, he was bound to find the pudgy-fingered absconder. He could allow himself a few moments to look around, take a break from his usual routine. He did not come down here all that often, and the place always impressed him.

Motive Power occupied one of the largest chambers of the cathedral, on the lowest pressurised level. The chamber ran the entire two-hundred-metre length of the moving structure. It was one hundred metres wide and fifty metres from floor to magnificently arched ceiling. Machinery filled much of the available volume, except for a gap around the walls and another of a dozen or so metres below the ceiling. The machinery was immense: it lacked the impersonal, abstract vastness of starship mechanisms, but there was something more intimate and therefore more personally threatening about it. Starship machinery was vast and bureaucratic: it just didn’t notice human beings. If they got on the wrong side of it they simply ceased to exist, annihilated in a painless instant. But as huge as the machinery in Motive Power was, it was also small enough to notice people. If they got in the way of it they were liable to find themselves maimed or crushed.

It wouldn’t be painless and it wouldn’t be instantaneous.

Grelier pushed his cane against the pale-green carapace of a turbine. Through the cane he felt the vigorous thrum of trapped energies. He thought of the blades whisking round, drawing energy from the superheated steam spewing from the atomic reactor. All it would take was a flaw in one of the blades and the turbine could blow apart at any instant, bringing whirling, jagged death to anyone within fifty metres. It happened now and then; he usually came down to clean up the mess. It was all rather thrilling, really.

The reactor—the cathedral’s atomic power plant—was the largest single chunk of machinery in the chamber, housed in a bottle-green dome at the rear end of the room. The kindest thing you could say about it was that it worked and it was cheap. There was no nuclear fuel to be mined on Hela, but the Ultras provided a ready supply. Dirty and dangerous, maybe, but more economical than antimatter and easier to work with than a fusion power plant. They had done the calculations: refining local ice to provide fusion fuel would have required a pre-processing plant as large as the entire existing Motive Power assembly. But the cathedral had already grown as big as it ever could, given the dimensions of the Way and the Devil’s Staircase. Besides, the reactor worked and supplied all the power that the cathedral required, and the reactor workers didn’t get sick all that often.

From the reactor’s apex sprouted a tangle of high-pressure steam pipes. The gleaming silver intestines traversed the entire chamber, subject to inexplicable hairpin bends and right angles. They fed into thirty-two turbines, stacked atop one another in two rows, each row eight turbines long. Catwalks, inspection platforms, access tunnels, ladders and equipment elevators caged the whole humming mass. The turbines were dynamos, converting the rushing steam into electrical power. They fed the electrical energy into the main traction motors, twenty-four of them squatting atop the turbines in two rows of twelve. The traction motors in turn converted the electrical energy into mechanical force, propelling the great cranked and hinged mechanisms that ultimately moved the cathedral along the Way. At any one time only ten of the twelve motors on one side were doing any work: the spare set was idling, ready to be connected into use if another motor or set of motors needed to be taken offline for overhaul.

The mechanisms themselves passed overhead, extending from the traction motors to the walls on either side. They penetrated the walls via pressure-proofed gaskets positioned at the precise rocking points of the main coupling rods. The gaskets were troublesome, Grelier gathered: they were always failing and having to be replaced. But somehow or other the mechanical motion generated inside the Motive Power chamber had to be conveyed beyond the walls, into vacuum.

Above him, with a dreamlike slowness, the coupling rods swept back and forth and up and down in orchestrated waves, beginning at the front of the chamber and working back. A complicated arrangement of smaller cranks and eccentrics connected the rods to each other, synchronising their movements. Aerial catwalks threaded between the huge spars of thrusting metal, allowing workers to lubricate joints and inspect failure points for metal fatigue. It was risky work: one moment of inattention and there’d be lubrication of entirely the wrong sort.

There was more to Motive Power, of course. A lot more. Somewhere there was even a small foundry, working day and night to fabricate replacement parts. The largest components had to be made in Wayside plants, but it always took time to procure and deliver such replacements. The artisans in Motive Power took great pride in their ingenuity when it came to fixing something at short notice, or pressing a part into service for a different function than intended. They knew what the bottom line was: the cathedral had to keep moving, no matter what. No one was asking the world of them—it only had to move a third of a metre a second, after all. You could crawl faster than that, easily. The point was not the speed, but that the cathedral must never, ever stop.