She could not help but glance towards the welded-up space suit. It was an involuntary shift in her attention, unlikely to have been noticed by the dean, but it still annoyed her. If only she could control her own reactions as well as she read those of others.
“I don’t,” she said. “But I do have some suspicions.”
The dean’s couch shifted, sending a wave of accommodating movement through the mirrors. “The first time Grelier told me about you—when it seemed likely that you might prove of use to me—he said that you were on something of a personal crusade.”
“Did he?”
“In Grelier’s view, it had something to do with your brother. Is that true?”
“My brother came to the cathedrals,” she said.
“And you feared for him, anxious because you had heard nothing from him for a while, and decided to come after him. That’s the story, isn’t it?”
There was something about the way he said “story” that she did not care for. “Why shouldn’t it be?”
“Because I wonder how much you really care about your brother. Was he really the reason you came all this way, Rashmika, or did he just legitimise your quest by making it seem less intellectually vain?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I think you gave up on your brother years ago,” the dean said. “I think you knew, in your heart, that he was gone. What you really cared about was the scuttlers, and your ideas about them.”
“That’s preposterous.”
“That bundle of letters says otherwise. It speaks of a deep-rooted obsession, quite unseemly in a child.”
“I came here for Harbin.”
He spoke with the calm insistence of a Latin tutor emphasising some subtlety of tense and grammar. “You came here for me, Rashmika. You came to the Way with the intention of climbing to the top of the cathedral administration, convinced that only I had the answers you wanted, the answers you craved, like an addict.”
“I didn’t invite myself here,” she said, with something of the same insistence. “You brought me here, from the Catherine of Iron.”
“You’d have found your way here sooner or later, like a mole burrowing its way to the surface. You’d have made yourself useful in one of the study groups, and from there you’d have found a connection to me. It might have taken months; it might have taken years. But Grelier—bless his sordid little heart—expedited something that was already running its course.”
“You’re wrong,” she said, her hands trembling. “I didn’t want to see you. I didn’t want to come here. Why would that have meant so much to me?”
“Because you’ve got it into your head that I know things,” the dean said. “Things that might make a difference.”
Her hands fumbled for the box. “I’ll take this,” she said. “It’s mine, after all.”
“The letters are yours. But you may keep the box.”
“Is it over, now?”
He seemed surprised. “Over, Miss Els?”
“The agreement. My period of employment.”
“I don’t see why it should be,” he said. “As you pointed out, you were never obliged to mention your interest in the scuttlers. No crimes have been committed; no trust betrayed.”
Her hands left sweaty imprints on the box. She had not expected him to let her keep it. All that lost correspondence: sad, earnest little messages from her past self to her present. “I thought you’d be displeased,” she said.
“You still have your uses. I’m expecting more Ultras very shortly, as a matter of fact. I’ll want your opinions on them, your peculiar insights and observations, Miss Els. You can still do that for me, can’t you?”
She stood up, clutching the box. From the tone of his voice it was clear that her audience with the dean was at an end. “Might I ask one thing?” she enquired, nearly stammering over her words.
“I’ve asked you enough questions. I don’t see why not.”
She hesitated. Even as she made her request, she had meant to ask him about Harbin. The dean must have known what had happened to him: it wouldn’t have cost him anything to uncover the truth from cathedral records, even if he’d never set eyes on her brother. But now that the moment was here, now that it had arrived and the dean had granted her permission to ask her question, she knew that she did not have the strength of mind to go through with it. It was not simply that she was frightened of hearing the truth. She already suspected the truth. What frightened her was finding out how she would react when that truth was revealed. What if she turned out not to care about Harbin as much as she claimed? What if everything the dean had said was true, about Harbin just being the excuse she gave for her quest?
Could she take that?
Rashmika swallowed. She felt very young, very alone. “I wanted to ask if you had ever heard of the shadows,” she said.
But the dean said nothing. He had never, she realised, promised her an answer.
Three days later, the Inhibitor aggregate had moved within range of the weapon. The technicians still felt they had more calibration to do, more parameter space to explore. Every now and then the weapon did something weird and frightening, taking a nibble out of something local when it was supposed to be tuned for a target several AU distant. Sometimes, most frighteningly of all, its effects seemed only loosely coupled to any input. It was weakly acausal, after alclass="underline" a weapon that undercut both time and space, and did so according to rules of Byzantine and shifting complexity. It was no wonder that the wolves had nothing analogous to it in their own arsenal. Perhaps they had decided that, all told, it was more trouble than it was worth. The same logic probably applied to Skade’s faster-than-light drive. A great many things were possible in the universe, far more than appeared so at first glance. But many of them were unhealthy, on both the individual and the species/galactic culture level.
But the lights kept dimming, and the weapon kept operating, and Scorpio’s private sense of self continued, unperturbed. The weapon might be doing grotesque things to the very foundations of reality, but all he cared about was what it did to the wolves. Slowly, it was taking chunks out of the pursuing swarm.
He wasn’t winning. He was surviving. That was good enough, for now.
Aura was wrapped in her customary quilted silver blanket, supported on her mother’s lap. Scorpio still found her frighten-ingly small, like a doll designed to sit inside a cabinet rather than be subjected to the damaging rough-and-tumble of the outside world. But there was something else, too: a quiet sense of invulnerability that made the back of his neck tingle. He only felt it now that her eyes were fully open. Focused and bright, like the eyes of some hunting bird, she absorbed everything that took place around her. Her eyes were golden-brown, flecked with glints of gold and bronze and some colour closer to electric blue. They didn’t simply look around. They probed and extracted. They surveilled.
Scorpio and the other seniors had gathered in the usual meeting room, facing each other around the dark mirror of the table. He studied his companions, mentally listing his allies and adversaries and those who had probably still to make up their minds. He could have counted on Antoinette, but she was back on Ararat now. He was sure that Blood would also have seen things his way, not because Blood would necessarily have thought things through, but because it took imagination to think of disloyalty, and imagination had never been Blood’s strong point. Scorpio missed him already. He had to keep reminding himself that his old deputy was not in fact dead, just out of reach.
It was two weeks since they had left Ararat. The Nostalgia for Infinity had pushed its way out of Ararat’s system at a steady one-gee acceleration, slipping between the meshing gear-teeth of the battle. In the first week, the Infinity had put twelve AU between itself and Ararat, reaching a fiftieth of the speed of light. By the end of the second week it had reached a twenty-fifth of light speed and was now nearly fifty AU from Ararat. Scorpio felt that distance now: looking back, Ararat’s Bright Sun, p Eridani A—the one that had warmed them for the last twenty-three years—was now only a very bright star, one hundred thousand times fainter than when seen from the the planet’s surface. It looked no brighter now than its binary companion, Faint Sun or p Eridani B; they were two amber eyes falling behind the lighthugger, pulling together as the ship headed further and further out into interstellar space. He couldn’t see the wolves—only the sensors could even begin to pick them out of the background, and then with only limited confidence—but they were there. The hypometric weapons—there were three of them online now—had been chewing holes in the pursuing elements, but not all of the wolves had been destroyed.