“I did warn you,” the pig said.
All around Seyfarth, walls, floor and ceiling erupted spikes. He felt them slide into him, freezing him in place. The gun fell from his hand, clattering to the ground through the labyrinth of interlaced metal rods.
“That’s for Orca,” the pig said.
IT WENT QUICKLY after that. The Captain’s control over his own local transformations seemed to grow in confidence and dexterity with each kill. It was, at times, quite sickening to watch. How much more terrible it must have been for the Adventists, to suddenly have the ship itself come alive and turn against them. How shocking, when the supposedly fixed surfaces of walls and floors and ceilings became mobile, crushing and pinning, maiming and suffocating. How distressing, when the fluids that ran throughout the ship—the fluids that the bilge pumps strove to contain—suddenly became the liquid instruments of murder, gushing out at high pressure, drowning hapless Adventists caught in the Captain’s hastily arranged traps. Growing up on Hela, drowning probably hadn’t been amongst the ways they expected to die. But that, Scorpio reflected, was life: full of nasty little surprises.
The tide had been turning against the Adventists, but now it was in full ebb. Scorpio felt his strength redouble, tapping into some last, unexpected reserve. He knew he was going to pay for it later, but for now it felt good to be pushing the enemy back, doing—as the Captain had promised—some actual damage. The slug-gun wasn’t designed for a pig, but that didn’t stop him finding a way to fire it. Sooner or later he was able to trade up for a shipboard boser pistol, pig-issue. Then, as he had always liked to say in Chasm City, he was really cooking.
“Do what you have to do,” the Captain told him. “I can take a little pain, for now.”
Pushing through the ship, following the Captain’s lead, he soon met up with surviving members of the Security Arm. They were shell-shocked, confused and disorganised, but on seeing him they rallied, realising that the ship had not yet fallen to the Adventists. And when word began to spread that the Captain was assisting in the effort, they fought like devils. The nature of the battle changed from minute to minute. Now it was no longer a question of securing control of their ship, but of mopping up the few outstanding pockets of Adventist resistance holed-up in volumes of the ship where the Captain had only limited control.
“I could kill them now,” he told Scorpio. “I can’t reshape thoseparts of me, but I can depressurise them, or flood them. It will just take a little longer than usual. I could even turn the hy-pometric weapon against them.”
“Inside yourself?” Scorpio asked, remembering the last time that had happened, during the calibration exercise.
“I wouldn’t do it lightly.”
Scorpio tightened his grip on the boser pistol. His heart was hammering in his chest, his eyesight and hearing no better than when he had been revived.
None of that mattered.
“I’ll deal with them,” he said. “You’ve done your bit for the day, Captain.”
“I’ll leave things to you, then,” the suit said, stepping back into a perfectly formed aperture that had just appeared in the wall. The wall resealed itself. It was as if the Captain had never been with him.
BEYOND THE NOSTALGIA for Infinity, the Captain’s manifold attention was at least partly occupied by the progress of the cache weapon. Even as the battle raged within him, even as the ship was brought slowly back under orthodox control, he was mindful of the weapon, anxious that it should not be wasted. For years he had carried the forty hell-class weapons within him, treasuring them against the predations of theft and damage. His degree of transformation had been much less than it was now, but he still felt an intense bond of care towards the weapons that had played such a central role in his recent history. Besides, the weapons themselves had been the beloved playthings of the old Triumvir, Ilia Volyova. He still had fond thoughts for the Triumvir, despite what she had done to him. As long as he remembered Ilia—who had always found time to speak to the Captain, even when he had been at his least communicative—he was not going to let her down by misusing the last of those dark toys.
Telemetry from the cache weapon reached him through multiply secure channels. The Captain had already sown tiny spysat cameras around himself during the fiercest phase of the Cathedral Guard assault. Now that same swarm of eyes permitted continuous communication with the weapon, even as the Nostalgia for Infinity swung around the far side of Hela.
Haldora, from the cache weapon’s perspective, now swallowed half the sky. The gas giant was a striped behemoth of primal cold oozing exotic chemistries, its bands of colour so wide that you could drown a rocky world in them. It looked very real: every sensor on the cache weapon’s harness reported exactly what would have been expected this close to a gas giant. It sniffed the cruel strength of its magnetic field, felt the hard sleet of charged particles entrained by that field. Even at extreme magnification, the whorls and flurries of the atmosphere looked absolutely convincing.
The Captain had listened to the conversations of the humans in his care, to their speculations concerning the nature of the Haldora enigma. He knew what they expected to find behind this mask of a world: a mechanism for signalling between adjacent realities, entire universes fluttering there like ribbons, adjacent braneworlds in the higher dimensional reality of the bulk: a kind of radio, capable of tuning into the whisper of gravitons. The details, as yet, didn’t matter. What they needed, now, was to make contact with the entities on the other side as quickly as possible. The suit in the Lady Morwenna was one possible means—perhaps the easiest, since it was already open—but it couldn’t be relied upon. If Quaiche destroyed it, then they would need to find another way to contact the shadows. Quaiche had waited until a vanishing occurred before sending his probe into the planet. They didn’t have time for that.
They needed to provoke a vanishing, to-expose the machinery for themselves.
The weapon began to slow, taking up its firing posture. Within it, grave preparations were being made. Arcane physical processes began to occur: sequences of reactions, tiny at first, but growing towards an irreversible cascade. The commanding sentience of the device had settled into a state of calm acceptance. After so many years of inaction, it was now going to do the thing for which it had been created. The fact that it would die in the process did not alarm it in the slightest. It felt only a microscopic glimmer of regret that it was the last of its kind, and that no other cache weapons would be around to witness its furious proclamation.
That was the one thing their human masters had never grasped: cache weapons were intensely vain.
SCORPIO SAT AT the conference table, scowling. He was alone except for a handful of seniors. Valensin was tending to his wounds: there was a small museum’s worth of antiquated medical equipment spread out on a bloodstained sheet before the pig, including bandages, scalpels, scissors, needles and various bottled ointments and sterilising agents. The doctor had already cut away part of his tunic, exposing the twin wounds where the Adventist’s throwing knives had pinned him to the wall.
“You’re lucky,” Valensin said, when he had cleaned away most of the blood and began sealing the entrance and exit wounds with an adhesive salve. “He knew what he was doing. You probably weren’t meant to die.”
“And that makes me lucky? It wasn’t remotely unlucky to end up impaled on a wall in the first place? Just a thought.”
“All I’m saying is, it could have been worse. It looks to me as if they were under orders to minimalise casualties, as far as possible.”
“Tell that to Orca.”
“Yes, the nerve gas was unfortunate. At some point, obviously, they were prepared to kill, but in general it appears that they considered themselves to be on holy business, like crusaders. The sword was to be used only as an instrument of last resort. But they must have known some blood would be shed.”
Urton leant across the table. Her arm was in a sling and there was a vivid purple bruise across her right cheek, but
she was otherwise unhurt. “The question is, what now? We can’t just sit here and not react, Scorp. We have to take this back to Quaiche.”
The pig winced as Valensin tugged two folds of skin together, drawing a slug of adhesive across them. “That thought’s crossed my mind, believe me.”
“And?” Jaccottet asked.
“I’d like nothing more than to target all our hull defences on that cathedral and turn the fucker into a smouldering pile of rubble. But that‘ isn’t an option, not while we’ve got people aboard it.”
“If we could get a message to Vasko and Khouri,” Urton said, “they could start doing some damage themselves. At the very least, they could find their way to safety.”
Scorpio sighed. Of all of them, why did it fall to him—the one who had the least-developed capacity for forward thinking—to point out the problems?
“This isn’t about revenge,” he said. “Believe me, I’m big on revenge. I wrote the book on retribution.” He paused, catching his breath while Valensin started fussing around with another wound, snipping away at leather and scabbed blood. “But we came here for a reason. I don’t know what Quaiche wanted with our ship, and it doesn’t look as if any of the surviving Adventists have much of an idea either. My guess is we just got caught up in some local power game, something that probably has damn all to do with the shadows. As tempting as it might be to take revenge now, it’d be the worst thing we could do in terms of our mission objective. We still have to make contact with the shadows, and our quickest route to them is inside a metal spacesuit inside the Lady Morwenna. That, people, is what we need to focus on, not on giving Quaiche the kicking he so richly deserves because he betrayed us. We can do that later, once we’ve established contact with the shadows. Believe me, I’ll be the first in line. And I won’t be operating on a minimum-casualties basis, either.”
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 ho
ldfast,” 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.