“They had no choice,” Vasko said quietly. “Scorp’s doing the right thing.”
But the pig was still talking. “For those who wish to board the Infinity, understand die following: conditions aboard the ship will be atrocious. For the last twenty-three years, there have seldom been more than a few dozen people aboard it at any one time. Much of me ship is now uninhabitable or simply unmapped. In order to accommodate an influx of hundreds, possibly even thousands, of refugees, me Security Arm will have to enforce strict emergency rule. If you think the crisis measures in the First Camp are Draconian, you have no idea how much worse tilings will be on the ship. Your sole right will be the right of survival, and we will dictate how that is interpreted.”
“What does he mean by that?” Vasko asked, while Scorpio continued with the arrangements for the transportation.
“He means they’ll have to freeze people,” Urton said. “Squeeze them into those sleep coffins, like they did when the ship came here in the first place.”
“He should tell them, in that case.”
“Obviously he doesn’t want to.”
“Those reefersleep caskets aren’t safe,” Vasko said. “I know what happened the last time they used them. A lot of people didn’t make it out alive.”
“It doesn’t matter, does it?” Urton said. “He’s still giving them better odds than if they try to make the journey themselves—even without that execution order.”
“I still don’t understand. Why provide that option at all, if the administration doesn’t think it’s the right thing to do?”
Urton shrugged. “Because maybe the administration isn’t sure what to do. If they declare a general evacuation to the ship, they’ll really have a panic on their hands. Looking at it from their point of view, how do they know whether it’s better for the people to evacuate to the ship or remain on the ground?”
“They don’t,” he said. “Whichever they choose, there’ll always be a risk that it might be the wrong decision.”
Urton nodded emphatically. She had nearly finished her beer. “At least this way Scorpio gets to split the difference. Some people will end up in the ship, some will chose to stay at home. It’s the perfect solution, if you want to maximise the chances of some people surviving.”
“That sounds very heartless.”
“It is.”
“In which case I don’t think you need worry about Scorpio not being the callous leader you said we needed.”
“No. He’s callous enough,” Urton agreed. “Of course, we could be misreading this entirely. But assuming we aren’t, does it shock you?”
“No, I suppose not. And I think you’re right. We do need someone strong, someone prepared to think the unthinkable.” Vasko put down his glass. It was only half-empty, but his thirst had gone the same way as his appetite. “One question,” he said. “Why are you being so nice to me all of a sudden?”
Urton inspected him the way a lepidopterist might examine a pinned specimen. “Because, Vasko, it occurred to me that you might be a useful ally, in the long run.”
The scrimshaw suit said, “We’ve heard the news, Quaiche.”
The sudden voice startled him, as it always did. He was alone. Grelier had just finished seeing to his eyes, swabbing an infected abscess under one retracted eyelid. The metal clamp of the eye-opener felt unusually cruel to him today, as if, while Quaiche was sleeping, the surgeon-general had covertly sharpened all its little hooks. Not while he was really sleeping, of course. Sleep was a luxury he remembered in only the vaguest terms.
“I don’t know about any news,” he said.
“You made your little announcement to the congregation downstairs. We heard it. You’re taking the cathedral across Absolution Gap.”
“And if I am, what business is it of yours?”
“It’s insanity, Quaiche. And your mental health is very much our business.”
He saw the suit in blurred peripheral vision, around the sharp central image of Haldora. The world was half in shadow, bands of cream and ochre and subtle turquoise plunging into the sharp terminator of the nightside.
“You don’t care about me,” he said. “You only care about your own survival. You’re afraid I’ll destroy you when I destroy the Lady Morwenna.”
“‘When,’ Quaiche? Frankly, that’s a little disturbing to us. We were hoping you still had some intention of actually succeeding.”
“Perhaps I do,” he conceded.
“Where nobody has done so before?”
“The Lady Morwenna isn’t any old cathedral.”
“No. It’s the heaviest and tallest on the Way. Doesn’t that give you some slight pause for thought?”
“It will make my triumph all the more spectacular.”
“Or your disaster, should you topple off the bridge or bring the entire thing crashing down. But why now, Quaiche, after all these revolutions around Hela?”
“Because I feel that the time is right,” he said. “You can’t second-guess these things. Not the work of God.”
“You truly are a lost cause,” the scrimshaw suit said. Then the cheaply synthesised voice took on an urgency it had lacked before. “Quaiche, listen to us. Do what you will with the Lady Morwenna. We won’t stop you. But first let us out of this cage.”
“You’re scared,” he said, pulling the stiff tissue of his face into a smile. “I’ve really put the wind up you, haven’t I?”
“It doesn’t have to be this way. Look at the evidence, Quaiche. The vanishings are increasing in frequency. You know what mat means, don’t you?”
“The work of God is moving towards its culmination.”
“Or, alternatively, the concealment mechanism is failing. Take your pick. We know which interpretation we favour.”
“I know all about your heresies,” he said. “I don’t need to hear them again.”
“You still think we are demons, Quaiche?”
“You call yourselves shadows. Isn’t that a bit of a giveaway?”
“We call ourselves shadows because that is what we are, just as you are all shadows to us. It’s a statement of fact, Quaiche, not a theological standpoint.”
“I don’t want to hear any more of it.”
It was true: he had heard enough of their heresies. They were lies, engineered to undermine his faith. Time and again he had tried to purge them from his head, but always to no avail. As long as the scrimshaw suit remained with him—as long as the thing inside the scrimshaw suit remained—he would never be able to forget those untruths. In a moment of weakness, a lapse that had been every bit as unforgivable as the one twenty years earlier that had brought them here in the first place, he had even followed up some of their heretical claims. He had delved into the Lady Morwenna’s archives, following lines of enquiry.
The shadows spoke of a theory. It meant nothing to him, yet when he searched the deep archives—records carried across centuries in the shattered and corrupted data troves of Ultra trade ships—he found something, glints of lost knowledge, teasing hints from which his mind was able to suggest a whole.