The Revelation Space Collection (417 page)

‘I sent a probe into Haldora,’ Quaiche said. ‘It prolonged the vanishing. In that extended glimpse I saw . . .
things
- shining machinery, like the inside of a clock, normally hidden within Haldora. And the probe made contact with something. It was destroyed almost instantly, but not before that
something
- whatever it was - had managed to transmit itself into the Lady Morwenna.’

Rashmika turned and pointed towards the suit. ‘He keeps it in that.’

Grelier’s eyes narrowed. ‘The scrimshaw suit?’

‘Morwenna died in it,’ Quaiche said, picking his way through his words like someone crossing a minefield. ‘She was crushed in it when our ship made an emergency sprint to Hela, to rescue me. The ship didn’t know that Morwenna couldn’t tolerate that kind of acceleration. It pulped her, turned her into red jelly, red jelly with bone and metal in it.
I
killed her, because if I hadn’t gone down to Hela ...’

‘I’m sorry about what happened to her,’ Rashmika said.

‘I wasn’t like this before it happened,’ Quaiche said.

‘No one could have blamed you for her death.’

Grelier sneered. ‘Don’t let him fool you. He wasn’t exactly an angel before that happened.’

‘I was just a man with something bad in his blood,’ Quaiche said defensively, ‘just a man trying to make his way.’

Quietly, Rashmika said, ‘I believe you.’

‘You can read my face?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I just believe you. I don’t think you were a bad man, Dean.’

‘And now, after all that I’ve made happen? After what happened to your brother?’ There was, she heard, an audible crack of hope in his voice. This late in the day, this close to the crossing, he still craved absolution.

‘I said that I believed you, not that I was in a forgiving mood,’ she said.

‘The shadows,’ Grelier said. ‘You still haven’t told me what they are, or what they have to do with the suit.’

‘The suit is a holy relic,’ Rashmika said, ‘his one tangible link with Morwenna. In testing Haldora, he was also validating the sacrifice she’d made for him. That was why he put the receiving apparatus inside the suit: so that when the answer came, when he discovered whether or not Haldora was a miracle, it would be Morwenna who told him.’

‘And the shadows?’ Grelier asked.

‘Demons,’ Quaiche said.

‘Entities,’ Rashmika corrected. ‘Sentient beings trapped in a different universe, adjacent to this one.’

Grelier smiled. ‘I think I’ve heard enough.’

‘Listen to the rest,’ Vasko said. ‘She’s not lying. They’re real, and we need their help very badly.’

‘Their help?’ Grelier repeated.

‘They’re more advanced than us,’ Vasko said, ‘more advanced than any other culture in this galaxy. They’re the only things that are going to make a difference against the Inhibitors.’

‘And in return for this help, what do
they
want?’ Grelier asked.

‘They want to be let out,’ Rashmika said. ‘They want to be able to cross over into this universe. The thing in the suit - it’s not really the shadows, just a negotiating agent, like a piece of software - it knows what we have to do to let the rest of them through. It knows the commands we need to send to the Haldora machinery.’

‘The Haldora machinery?’ the surgeon-general asked.

‘Take a look for yourself,’ the dean said. The arrangement of mirrors had locked on to him again, beaming a shaft of focused light into his one good eye. ‘The vanishings have ended, Grelier. After all this time, I can see the holy machinery.’

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 meltdown - 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 Fabergé 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 that 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 medieval 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.