Seyfarth could smell the man’s fear boiling off him like a heat haze. “You mean they don’t think we’ll make it?”
“Do you?”
“If the dean says we’ll make it, who are we to doubt him?”
“I doubt him,” Glaur said, his voice a hiss. “I know what happened the last time, and we’re bigger and heavier. This cathedral isn’t going to cross that bridge, Captain, no matter how much blood the surgeon-general pumps into us.”
“Fortunate, then, that I won’t be on the Lady Morwenna when it happens,” Seyfarth said.
“You’re leaving?” Glaur asked, suddenly keen.
Did he imagine, Seyfarth thought, that he was actually proposing rebellion? “Yes, but on church business. Something that’ll keep me away until the bridge is either crossed… or it isn’t. What about you?”
Glaur shook his head, stroking the filthy handkerchief he kept knotted around his neck. “I’ll stay, Captain.”
“Loyalty to the dean?”
“Loyalty to my machines, more like.”
Seyfarth touched him on the shoulder. “I’m impressed. You wouldn’t be tempted, not even once, to steer the cathedral from the Way, or to sabotage the motors?”
Glaur’s teeth flashed. “I’m here to do a job.”
“It’ll kill you.”
“Then maybe I’ll leave at the last moment. But this cathedral’s staying on the Way.”
“Good man. We’d better make sure of that, all the same.”
Glaur looked into his eyes. “I’m sorry, Captain?”
“Walk me to the lock-out controls, Glaur.”
“No.”
Seyfarth seized him by the neckerchief, lifted him half his height from the ground. Glaur choked, flailing his fists uselessly against Seyfarth’s chest.
“Walk me to the lock-out controls,” Seyfarth repeated, his voice still calm.
The surgeon-general’s private shuttle made its own approach, squatting down on a stiletto of fusion thrust. The landing pad Grelier had selected was a small, derelict affair on the outskirts of the Vigrid settlement. His red cockleshell of a ship came to rest with a pronounced lean, the pad’s surface subsiding into the ground. The pad clearly saw very little traffic: it might easily have been decades since anything larger than a robot supply drone had landed on it.
Grelier gathered his belongings and exited his ship. The pad was decrepit, but the walkway leading away from it was still more or less serviceable. Tapping his cane against the fractured craquelure of the concrete surface, he made his way to the nearest public entrance point. The airlock, when he tried it, refused to open. He resorted to the all-purpose Clocktower key—it was supposed to open just about any door on Hela—but that didn’t work either. Gloomily he concluded that the door was simply broken, its mechanism failed.
He followed the trail for another ten minutes, casting around until he found a lock that actually worked. He was near the centre of the little buried hamlet now; the topside was a confusion of parked vehicles, abandoned equipment modules, scorched and broken-faceted solar collectors. This was all very well, but the closer he was to the heart of the settlement, the more likely he was to be discovered going about his business.
No matter: it had to be done, and he had exhausted the alternatives. Still suited, he cycled through the airlock and then descended a vertical ladder. This brought him into a dimly lit tunnel network, with corridors radiating in five different directions. Fortunately, they were colour-coded, indicating the residential and industrial districts they led to. Except districts wasn’t really the right word, Grelier thought. This tiny community, though it might have enjoyed social ties with others in the badlands, was smaller in population than one floor of the Lady Morwenna.
He hummed as he walked. As bothered as he was by recent events, he always enjoyed being on Clocktower business. Even if, as now, the business was verging on the personal, a mission the precise reason for which Grelier had not told the dean.
Fair enough, he said to himself. If the dean kept secrets from him, then he would keep secrets from the dean.
Quaiche was up to something. Grelier had suspected as much for months, but the girl’s remarks about witnessing the construction fleet had clinched it. Although Grelier had done his best to dismiss her observation, it had continued to gnaw at him. It chimed with other odd things that he had noticed lately. The skimping on Way maintenance, for instance. They had got stuck behind the ice blockage precisely because Way maintenance lacked the usual resources to clear it. Quaiche had been forced to deploy nuclear demolition charges: God’s Fire.
At the time, Grelier had put it down to nothing more than a happy coincidence. But the more he thought about it, the less likely that seemed. Quaiche had wanted to make his announcement about taking the Lady Morwenna over the bridge with the maximum fanfare. What better way to underline his words than with a dose of God’s Fire shining through his newly installed stained-glass window?
The use of God’s Fire had only been justified because Way maintenance was already stretched. But what if Way maintenance was stretched precisely because Quaiche had ordered the diversion of its equipment and manpower?
Another thought occurred to Grelier: the blockage itself might even have been orchestrated. Quaiche had blamed it on sabotage by another church, but Quaiche could easily have arranged it himself. It would only have been a question of laying fuses and explosives the last time the Lady Mor went through.
A year earlier.
Did he honestly think Quaiche had been planning something all that time? Well, perhaps. People who built cathedrals tended to take the long view, after all.
Grelier still couldn’t see where all this was heading. All he knew—with a growing conviction—was that Quaiche was keeping something from him.
Something to do with the Ultras?
Something to do with the bridge crossing?
Events did after all seem to be rushing towards some grand culmination. And then there was the girl. Where did she fit into all this? Grelier could have sworn he had picked her, not the other way around. But now he was not so certain. She had made herself conspicuous to him, that much was true. It was like that trick they did with cards, suggesting the one you were meant to take from the spread.
Of course, he’d have had no suspicions if her blood had checked out.
“It’s a wee bit of a puzzle,” he said to himself.
He stopped suddenly, for in his cogitations he had walked straight past the address he was looking for. He backtracked, grateful that no one else seemed to be about at this hour. He had no idea what the local time was, whether everyone was asleep, or down at the scuttler mines.
Didn’t care, either.
He opened his helmet visor, ready to introduce himself, and then rapped his cane smartly against the outer door of the Els residence. And then waited, humming to himself, until he heard the door opening.
The Adventist delegates had arrived at the Nostalgia for Infinity. There were twenty of them, all seemingly stamped from the same production mould. They came aboard with apparent trepidation, their politeness exaggerated to the point of insolence. They wore hard-shelled scarlet vacuum suits marked with the cruciform spacesuit insignia of their church, and they all carried their pink-plumed helmets tucked under the same arm.
Scorpio studied their leader through the window in the inner airlock door. He was a small man with a cruel, petulant slot of a mouth seemingly cut into his face as an afterthought.
“I’m Brother Seyfarth,” the man announced.
“Glad to have you aboard, Brother,” Scorpio said, “but before we let you into the rest of the ship, we’re going to have to run some decontamination checks.”