Exactly what he feared, she could not guess. He told the Ultras that he desired protection from other spacefaring elements, that he had lately thwarted a number of schemes to seize control of Hela and wrest the supply of scuttler relics from the Adventist authorities. With a fully armed lighthugger in orbit around Hela, he said, his enemies would think twice about meddling in Hela’s affairs. The Ultras, in return, would enjoy favoured trader status, a necessary compensation for the risk entailed in bringing their valuable ship so close to the world that had destroyed the Gnostic Ascension. She could smell their nervousness: even though they only ever came down to Hela in shuttles, leaving their main spacecraft parked safely on the system’s edge, they did not want to spend a minute longer than necessary in the Lady Morwenna.
But there was, Rashmika suspected, something more to Quaiche’s plan than mere protection. She was certain that Quaiche was hiding something. It was a hunch this time, not something she saw in his face. He was, to all intents and purposes, unreadable. It was not just the mechanical eye-opener, hiding all those nuances of expression she counted on. There was also a torpid, masklike quality to his face, as if the nerves that operated his muscles had been severed or poisoned. When she stole glances at him she saw a vacuity of expression. The faces he made were stiff and exaggerated, like the expressions of a glove puppet. It was ironic, she thought, that she had been brought in to read people’s faces by a man whose own face was essentially closed. Almost deliberately so, in fact.
Finally the interviews for the day were over. She had reported her findings to Quaiche and he had listened appreciatively to what she had to say. There was no guessing where his own intuitions lay, but at no point did he question or contradict any of her observations. He merely nodded keenly, and told her she had been very helpful.
There would be more Ultras to interview, she was assured, but that was it for the day.
“You can go now, Miss Els. Even if you leave the cathedral now, you will still have been very useful to me and I will see to it that your efforts are rewarded. Did I mention a good position in the Catherine of Iron?”
“You did, Dean.”
“That is one possibility. Another is for you to return to the Vigrid region. You have family there, I take it?”
“Yes,” she said, but even as the word left her mouth, her own family suddenly felt distant and abstract to her, like something she had only been told about. She could remember the rooms of her house, the faces and voices of her parents, but the memories felt thin and translucent, like the facets in the stained-glass windows.
“You could return with a nice bonus—say, five thousand ecus. How does that sound?”
“That would be very generous,” she replied.
“The other possibility—the preferred one from my point of view—is that you remain in the Lady Morwenna and continue to assist me in the interviewing of Ultras. For that I will pay you two thousand ecus for every day of work. By the time we reach the bridge, you will have made double what you could have taken back to your home if you’d left today. And it doesn’t have to stop there. For as long as you are willing, there will always be work. In a year’s service, think what you could earn.”
“I’m not worth that much to anyone,” she said.
“But you are, Miss Els. Didn’t you hear what Grelier said? One in a thousand. One in a million, perhaps, with your degree of receptivity. I’d say that makes you worth two thousand ecus per day of anyone’s money.”
“What if my advice isn’t right?” she asked. “I’m only human. I make mistakes.”
“You won’t get it wrong,” he said, with more certainty than she liked. “I have faith in few things, Rashmika, beyond God Himself. But you are one of them. Fate has brought you to my cathedral. A gift from God, almost. I’d be foolish to turn it away, wouldn’t I?”
“I don’t feel like a gift from anything,” she said.
“What do you feel like, then?”
She wanted to say, like an avenging angel. But instead she said, “I feel tired and a long way from home, and I’m not sure what I should do.”
“Work with me. See how it goes. If you don’t like it, you can always leave.”
“Is that a promise, Dean?”
“As God is my witness.”
But she couldn’t tell if he was lying or not. Behind Quaiche, Grelier stood up with a click of his knee-joints. He ran a hand through the electric-white bristles of his hair. “I’ll show you to your quarters, then,” he said. “I take it you’ve agreed to stay?”
“For now,” Rashmika said.
“Good. Right choice. You’ll like it here, I’m sure. The dean is right: you are truly privileged to have arrived at such an auspicious time.” He reached out a hand. “Welcome aboard.”
“That’s it?” she said, shaking his hand. “No formalities? No initiation rituals?”
“Not for you,” Grelier said. “You’re a secular specialist, Miss Els, just like myself. We wouldn’t want to go clouding your brain with all that religious claptrap, would we?“
She looked at Quaiche. His metal-goggled face was as unreadable as ever. “I suppose not.”
“There is just one thing,” Grelier said. “I’m going to have a take a bit of blood, if you don’t mind.”
“Blood?” she asked, suddenly nervous.
Grelier nodded. “Strictly for medical purposes. There are a lot of nasty bugs going around these days, especially in the Vi-grid and Hyrrokkin regions. But don’t worry.” He moved towards the wall-mounted medical cabinet. “I’ll only need a wee bit.”
Energies pocked the space around Ararat. Scorpio watched the distant, receding battle from the spider-shaped observation capsule, secure in the warm, padded plush of its upholstery.
Carnations of light bloomed and faded over many seconds, slow and lingering as violin chords. The lights were concentrated into a tight, roughly spherical volume, centred on the planet. Around them was a vaster darkness. The slow brightening “and fading, the pleasing randomness of it, stirred some memory—probably second hand—of sea creatures communicating in benthic depths, throwing patterns of bioluminescence towards each other. Not a battle at all but a rare, intimate gathering, a celebration of the tenacity of life in the cold lightless-ness of the deep ocean.
In the early phases of the space war in the p Eridani A system, the battle had been fought under a ruling paradigm of maximum stealth. All parties, Inhibitor and human, had cloaked their activities by using drives, instruments and weapons that radiated energies—if they radiated anything—only into the narrow, squeezed blind spots between orthodox sensor bands. The way Remontoire had described it, it had been like two men in a dark room, treading silently, slashing almost randomly into the darkness. When one man took a wound, he could not cry out for fear of revealing his location. Nor could he bleed, or offer tangible resistance to the passage of the blade. And when the other man struck, he had to withdraw the blade quickly, lest he signal his own position. A fine analogy, if the room had been light-hours wide, and the men had been human-controlled spacecraft and wolf machines, and the weapons had kept escalating in size and reach with every feint and parry. Ships had darkened their hulls to the background temperature of space; masked the emissions from their drives; used weapons that slid undetected through darkness and killed with the same discretion.