Absolution Gap (98 page)

“You think I’ve come all this way just to back down now? Not likely. The prestige of the church is at stake, Rashmika. Nothing matters more to me than that.”

“I wish I could read your face,” she said. “I wish I could see your eyes and I wish Grelier hadn’t deadened all your nerve endings. Then I’d know if you were telling the truth.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“I don’t know what to believe,” she said.

“I’m not asking you to believe anything,” he said, turning his couch around so that all the mirrors had to adjust their angles. “I’ve never asked you to submit to faith, Rashmika. All I’ve ever asked of you is honest judgement. What troubles you, all of a sudden?”

“I need to know the truth,” she said. “Before you take this thing over the bridge, I want some answers.”

His eyes quivered in their sockets. “I’ve always been open with you.”

“Then what about the vanishing that never happened? Was that you, Dean? Did
you
make that happen?”

“Make that happen?” he echoed, as if her words made no sense at all.

“You had a lapse of faith, didn’t you? A crisis during which you began to think that there was a rational explanation for the vanishings after all. Maybe you’d developed immunity to whatever was the strongest indoctrinal virus Grelier could offer you that week.”

“Be very, very careful, Rashmika. You’re useful to me, but you’re far from indispensable.”

She gathered her composure. “What I mean is, did you decide to test your faith? Did you arrange for an instrument package to be dropped into the face of Haldora, at the moment of a vanishing?”

His eyes became quite still, regarding her intently. “What do you think?”

“I think you sent something into Haldora—a machine, a probe of some kind. Perhaps some Ultras sold it to you. You hoped to glimpse something in there. What, I don’t know. Maybe something you’d already glimpsed years earlier, but which you didn’t want to admit to yourself.”

“Ridiculous.”

“But you succeeded,” she said. “The probe
did
something: it caused the vanishing to be prolonged. You threw a spanner in, Dean, and you got a reaction. The probe encountered something when the planet vanished. It made contact with whatever the planet was meant to conceal. And whatever it was had precious little to do with miracles.” He started to say something, tried to cut her off, but she forced herself to continue, speaking over him. “I have no idea whether the probe came back or not, but I do know that you’re still in contact with something. You opened a window, didn’t you?” Rashmika pointed at the welded metal suit, the one that had disturbed her so much on her first visit to the garret. “They’re in there, trapped within it. You made a prison of the same suit in which Morwenna died.”

“Why would I do that?” Quaiche asked.

“Because,” she said, “you don’t know if they’re demons or angels.”

“And you do know, I take it?”

“I think they might be both,” she said.

 

Hela Orbit, 2727

 

Scorpio whisked back a heavy metal shutter, revealing a tiny oval porthole. The scuffed and scratched glass was as thick and dark as burned sugar. He pushed himself away from the window.

“You’ll have to take turns,” he said.

They were in a zero-gravity section of the
Infinity
. It was the only way to view the engines while the ship was in orbit, since the rotating sections of the ship that provided artificial gravity were set too deeply back into the hull to permit observation of the engines. Had the engines themselves been pushed up to their usual one-gee of thrust—providing the illusion of gravity by another means throughout the entire ship—the orbit around Hela could not have been sustained.

“We’d like to see them fire up, if that’s possible,” Brother Seyfarth said.

“Not exactly standard procedure while we’re holding orbit,” Scorpio said.

“Just for a moment,” Seyfarth said. “They don’t have to operate at full capacity.”

“I thought it was the defences you were interested in.”

“Those as well.”

Scorpio spoke into his cuff. “Give me a burst of drive, counteracted by the steering jets. I don’t want to feel this ship move
one inch
.”

The order was implemented almost instantly. Theoretically, one of his people had to send the command into the ship’s control system, whereupon Captain Brannigan might or might not choose to act upon it. But he suspected that the Captain had made the engines fire before the command had ever been entered.

The great ship groaned as the engines lit up. Through the dark glass of the porthole, the exhaust was a scratch of purple-white—visible only because the stealthing modifications to the drives had been switched off during the
Nostalgia for Infinity
’s final approach to the system. At the other end of the hull, multiple batteries of conventional fusion rockets were balancing the thrust from the main drives. The ancient hull creaked and moaned like some vast living thing as it absorbed the compressive forces. The ship could take a lot more punishment than this, Scorpio knew, but he was still grateful when the drive flame flicked out. He felt a tiny lurch, evidence of the minutest lack of synchrony between the shutting down of the fusion rockets and the drives, but then all was motionless. The great, saurian protestations of stressed ship fabric died away like diminishing thunder.

“Good enough for you, Brother Seyfarth?”

“I think so,” the leader said. “They seem to be in excellent condition. You wouldn’t believe how difficult it is to find well-maintained Conjoiner drives now that their makers are no longer with us.”

“We do our best,” Scorpio said. “Of course, it’s the weapons you’re really interested in, isn’t it? Shall I show them to you, and then we can call it a day? There’ll be plenty of time for a more detailed examination later.” He was fed up with small talk, fed up with showing the twenty intruders around his empire.

“Actually,” Brother Seyfarth said, when they were safely back inside one of the rotating sections, “we’re more interested in the engines than we admitted.”

There was an itch at the back of Scorpio’s neck. “You are?”

“Yes,” Seyfarth said, nodding to the nineteen others.

In one smoothly choreographed blur, the twenty delegates touched parts of their suits, causing them to fly apart in irregular scablike pieces, as if spring-loaded. The hard-shelled components rained down around them, clattering in untidy piles at their feet. Beneath the suits, as he already knew from the scans, they wore only flimsy inner layers.

He wondered what he had missed. There were still no obvious weapons; still no guns or knives.

“Brother,” he said, “think very carefully about this.”

“I’ve already thought about it,” Seyfarth replied. Along with the other delegates, he knelt down and—his hands still gloved—rummaged with quick efficiency through the pile of sloughed suit parts.

His fist rose clutching something sharp-edged and aerodynamically formed. It was a shard of suit, viciously curved along its leading edge. Seyfarth raised himself on one knee and flicked his wrist. Tumbling end over end, the projectile wheeled through the air towards Scorpio. He heard it coming: the
chop, chop, chop
of its whisking approach. The fraction of a second of its flight stretched to a subjective eternity. A small, plaintive voice—lacking any tone of recrimination—told him it had been the suits all along. He had been looking so hard
through
them, so convinced they had to be hiding something, that he had missed the suits themselves.

The suits were the weapons.

The tumbling thing speared into his shoulder, the brutality of its impact knocking him against the slick, ribbed side of the corridor. It pinned him, through leather and flesh, to the wall itself. He thrashed in pain, but the shard had anchored itself firmly.

Seyfarth stood up, a bladed weapon in each hand. There was nothing accidental about them: their lines were too spare and deliberate for that. The suits must have been primed to fall apart along precise flaw lines etched into them with ångström precision.

“I’m sorry I had to do that,” he said.

“You’re a dead man.”

“And you’d be a dead pig if I’d intended to kill you.” Scorpio knew it was true: the casual way Seyfarth had tossed the weapon towards him had betrayed an easy fluency in its use. It would have cost him no more effort to sever Scorpio’s head. “But instead I’ve spared you. I’ll spare all your crew if we have the co-operation we request.”

“No one’s co-operating with anything. And you won’t get far with knives, no matter how clever you think you are.”

“It’s not just knives,” Seyfarth said.

Behind him, two of the other Adventist delegates stood up. They were holding something between them: a rig containing the lashed-together parts of their air-tanks. One of them was pointing the open nozzle of a hose in Scorpio’s direction.

“Show him,” Seyfarth said, “just so he gets the picture.”

Fire roared from the nozzle, jetting five or six metres beyond the pair of Adventists. The curving plume of the flame scythed against the corridor wall, blistering the surface. Again the ship groaned. Then the flames died, the only sound the hiss of fuel escaping from the nozzle.

“This is a bit of a surprise,” Scorpio said.

“Do what we say and no one will come to any harm,” Seyfarth said. Behind him, the other delegates were looking around: they had heard that groan as well. Perhaps they thought the ship was still settling down after the drive burn, creaking like an old house after sunset.

The moment stretched. Scorpio felt strangely calm. Perhaps, he thought, that was what being old did to you. “You’ve come to take my ship?” he asked.

“Not
take
it,” Seyfarth said, with urgent emphasis. “We just want to borrow it for a while. When we’re finished, you can have it back.”

“I think you picked the wrong ship,” Scorpio said.

“On the contrary,” Seyfarth replied, “I think we picked exactly the right ship. Now stay there, like a good pig, and we’ll all come away from this as friends.”

“You can’t seriously expect to take my ship with just twenty of you.”

“No,” Seyfarth said. “That would be silly, wouldn’t it?”

Scorpio tried to free himself. He could not move his arm enough to bring the communicator up to his face. The weapon had pinned him too tightly. He shifted, the pain of movement like so many shards of glass twisting within his shoulder. It was
that
shoulder: the one he had burned.

Seyfarth shook his head. “What did I say about being a good pig?” He knelt down, examined another weapon, something like a dagger this time. He walked slowly over to Scorpio. “I’ve never been overly fond of pigs, truth be told.”

“Suits me.”

“You’re quite an old one, aren’t you? What are you—forty, fifty years old?”

“Young enough to take the shine off your day, pal.”

“We’ll see about that.”

Seyfarth stabbed the dagger in, impaling Scorpio through the other shoulder in more or less the corresponding position. Scorpio yelped in pain: a high-pitched squeal that sounded nothing like a human scream.

“I can’t claim an exhaustive knowledge of pig anatomy,” Seyfarth said. “All being well, I haven’t severed anything I shouldn’t have. But if I were you, I’d play it safe and not wriggle about too much.”

Scorpio tried to move, but gave up before the tears of pain blocked his view. Behind Seyfarth, another pair of delegates test-fired their makeshift flame-thrower. Then the whole party split into two groups and moved away into the rest of the ship, leaving Scorpio alone.

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.