“You’re not offended, I hope?”
The pig turned back to him. “Do I look like someone easily offended?”
“Not at all,” Seyfarth said, his fists clenching.
They were uneasy around him, Scorpio realised. He doubted that they saw many pigs on Hela. “We’re not great travellers,” he elaborated. “We tend to die on the way.”
“Sir?” asked one of the other delegates. “Sir, if it isn’t too much bother, we’d really like to see the engines.”
Scorpio checked the time. They were on schedule. In fewer than six hours he would be able to launch the two instrument packages into Haldora. They were simply modified automated drones, hardened slightly to tolerate passage into-the atmos-phere of a gas giant. No one was exactly certain what they would encounter when they hit the visible surface of Haldora, but it seemed prudent to take every precaution, even if the planet popped like a soap bubble.
“You want to see the engines?” he said. “No problem. No problem at all.”
The light from Hela’s sun was low on the horizon, casting the cathedral’s great gothic shadow far ahead of it. It was more than two days since Vasko and Khouri had first visited Quaiche, and in the intervening time the Lady Morwenna had nearly reached the western edge of the rift. The bridge lay before it: a sparkling, dreamlike confection of sugar-ice and gossamer. Now that they were so close to it, the cathedral looked heavier, the bridge less substantial, the very idea of taking one across the other even more absurd.
A thought occurred to Vasko: what if the bridge didn’t exist any more? It was a foolhardy thing to take the Lady Morwenna across such a fragile structure, but in Quaiche’s mind there must have been at least a glimmer of hope that he might succeed. But if the bridge was destroyed, surely he wouldn’t take the cathedral over the edge, to certain destruction?
“How far?” Khouri asked.
“Twelve, thirteen kilometres,” Vasko said. “She travels about a kilometre per hour, which gives us around half a day before it really wouldn’t be a good idea to be aboard any more.”
“That doesn’t give us much time.”
“We don’t need much time,” he said. “Twelve hours should be more than enough time to get in and out. All we have to do is find Aura, and whatever we need from Quaiche. How difficult can it be?”
“Scorpio needs time to drop those instrument packages into Haldora,” she said. “If we break our side of the agreement before he’s done, there’s no telling how much trouble we’ll be in. Things could start getting messy. That’s exactly what we spent nine years trying to avoid.”
“It’ll be all right,” Vasko said. “Trust me on this, it’ll be all right.”
“Scorp didn’t like the idea of those delegates,” she said.
“They’re church dignitaries,” Vasko said. “How much of a problem can they be?”
“In these matters,” Khouri said, “I’m inclined to trust Scorpio’s judgement. Sorry, but he’s got a bit more mileage on him than you have.”
“I’m getting there,” Vasko said.
Their shuttle picked its way down to the cathedral. It grew from something small and delicate, like an ornate architectural model, to something huge and threatening. Something more than a building, Vasko thought: more like a pinnacled chunk of the landscape that had decided to make a slow circumnavigation of its world.
They landed. Suited Adventist officials were there to usher them deep into the iron heart of the Lady Morwenna.
FORTY-ONE
At long last, Quaiche could see the bridge for himself. The spectacle sent a shiver of excitement through him. There was less ground to cover to reach it now than the span of the bridge itself. Everything he had planned, everything he had schemed into existence, was now tantalisingly close to fruition.
“Look at it, Rashmika,” he said, inviting the girl to stand by the garret window and admire the view for herself. “So ancient, yet so sparklingly ageless. From the moment I announced that we were to cross the rift, I’ve been counting every second. We’re not there yet, but at least now I can see it.”
“Are you really going to do it?” she asked.
“You think I’ve come all this way just to back down now? Not likely. The prestige of the church is at stake, Rashmika. Nothing matters more to me than that.”
“I wish I could read your face,” she said. “I wish I could see your eyes and I wish Grelier hadn’t deadened all your nerve endings. Then I’d know if you were telling the truth.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“I don’t know what to believe,” she said.
“I’m not asking you to believe anything,” he said, turning his couch around so that all the mirrors had to adjust their angles. “I’ve never asked you to submit to faith, Rashmika. All I’ve ever asked of you is honest judgement. What troubles you, all of a sudden?”
“I need to know the truth,” she said. “Before you take this thing over the bridge, I want some answers.”
His eyes quivered in their sockets. “I’ve always been open with you.”
“Then what about the vanishing that never happened? Was that you, Dean? Did you make that happen?”
“Make that happen?” he echoed, as if her words made no sense at all.
“You had a lapse of faith, didn’t you? A crisis during which you began to think that there was a rational explanation for the vanishings after all. Maybe you’d developed immunity to whatever was the strongest indoctrinal virus Grelier could offer you that week.”
“Be very, very careful, Rashmika. You’re useful to me, but you’re far from indispensable.”
She gathered her composure. “What I mean is, did you decide to test your faith? Did you arrange for an instrument package to be dropped into the face of Haldora, at the moment of a vanishing?”
His eyes became quite still, regarding her intently. “What do you think?”
“I think you sent something into Haldora—a machine, a probe of some kind. Perhaps some Ultras sold it to you. You hoped to glimpse something in there. What, I don’t know. Maybe something you’d already glimpsed years earlier, but which you didn’t want to admit to yourself.”
“Ridiculous.”
“But you succeeded,” she said. “The probe did something: it caused the vanishing to be prolonged. You threw a spanner in, Dean, and you got a reaction. The probe encountered something when the planet vanished. It made contact with whatever the planet was meant to conceal. And whatever it was had precious little to do with miracles.” He started to say something, tried to cut her off, but she forced herself to continue, speaking over him. “I have no idea whether the probe came back or not, but I do know that you’re still in contact with something. You opened a window, didn’t you?” Rashmika pointed at the welded metal suit, the one that had disturbed her so much on her first visit to the garret. “They’re in there, trapped within it. You made a prison of the same suit in which Morwenna died.”
“Why would I do that?” Quaiche asked.
“Because,” she said, “you don’t know if they’re demons or angels.”
“And you do know, I take it?”
“I think they might be both,” she said.
Scorpio whisked back a heavy metal shutter, revealing a tiny oval porthole. The scuffed and scratched glass was as thick and dark as burned sugar. He pushed himself away from the window.
“You’ll have to take turns,” he said.
They were in a zero-gravity section of the Infinity. It was the only way to view the engines while the ship was in orbit, since the rotating sections of the ship that provided artificial gravity were set too deeply back into the hull to permit observation of the engines. Had the engines themselves been pushed up to their usual one-gee of thrust—providing the illusion of gravity by another means throughout the entire ship—the orbit around Hela could not have been sustained.