In the gloom of the corridor ahead of him, something moved.
“Scorpio.”
He squinted, half-expecting it to be another Adventist, hoping it was someone from the Security Arm. “Took your time,” he said, which seemed to cover either possibility.
“We’ve got trouble, Scorp. Big trouble.”
The figure stepped out of the gloom. Scorpio flinched: it was no one he had been expecting. “Captain,” he breathed.
“I thought you needed some help to get free of that wall. Sorry it took me so long.”
“Better late than never,” Scorpio said.
It was a class-three apparition. No, Scorpio thought, strike that: this apparition demanded a new category all of its own. It was more than just a local alteration of the ship’s fabric, a remodelling of a wall or the temporary reassignment of some servitor parts. This thing was real and distinct from the ship itself. It was a physical artefact: a spacesuit, a huge, lumbering golemlike servo-powered affair. And it was empty. The faceplate was cranked up: there was only darkness within the helmet. The voice he heard came through the speaker grille beneath the helmet’s chin that was normally used for audio communications in a pressurised environment.
“Are you all right, Scorp?”
He dabbed at the blood again.“I’m not down yet. Doesn’t look as if you are, either.”
“It was a mistake to let them aboard.”
“I know,” Scorpio said, looking down at his shoes. “I’m sorry.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” the Captain said. “It was mine.”
Scorpio looked up at the apparition again. Something forced him to direct his attention into the darkness within the helmet: it seemed impolite not to. “So what now? They’re bringing reinforcements, aren’t they?”
“That’s their plan. Ships have begun to attack. I’ve parried most of them, but a handful have slipped through my hull defences. They’ve begun to drill into the hull. They’re hurting me, Scorp.”
He echoed the Captain’s earlier question: “Are you all right?”
“Oh, I’m all right, it’s just that I’m beginning to get a little pissed off. I think they’ve had enough fun for one day, don’t you?”
Though it hurt him, Scorpio nodded vigorously. “They picked the wrong pig to fuck with.”
The vast suit bowed towards him, then turned, its huge boots sending sluggish wakes through the effluent. “They did more than pick the wrong pig. They picked the wrong ship. Now, shall we go and do some damage?”
“Yes,” Scorpio said,smiling wickedly. “Let’s do some damage.”
Orca Cruz and her party had retreated as far as they could go. The two Adventists had pushed her group to a major nexus of corridors and shafts, something like a heart valve in the Captain’s anatomy, from which point it would be possible to reach any other part of the Nostalgia for Infinity with comparative ease. Cruz knew that she could not allow the Adventists such access. There were only twenty of them, maybe fewer now—it was unthinkable that they could ever gain more than a transient, faltering control over very small districts of the ship—but it was still her duty to limit their nuisance value. If that meant inflicting some small, local hurt on John Brannigan, then that was what she had to do.
“All right,” she said. “Disarm them. Short, controlled bursts. I want something at the end to interrogate.”
Her last few words were drowned out by the sudden, enraged roar of her soldiers’ slug-firing automatic weapons. Tracers sliced bright convergent lines down the corridor. The Adventist with the false hand fell down, his right leg peppered with bullet holes. The whirling demon of the scythe bit an arc into the floor, then fell silent. Some retraction mechanism inched the fingertip back to the rest of the hand as the line spooled itself in.
The other Adventist lay on his side, his chest bloody despite the protection of the armour pieces.
The ship groaned.
“I did warn you,” Cruz said. Her own weapon lay cold in her hand. She hadn’t fired a shot.
The second Adventist moved, clawing at his face with his hand, like a man trying to remove a bee.
“Don’t move,” Cruz said, approaching him cautiously. “Don’t move and you might make it through the day.”
He kept clawing at his face, concentrating his efforts around his eye. He dug his fingers into the socket, popping something loose. He held it between thumb and forefinger for a moment: a perfect human eye, glassily solid, bloodied like some horrid raw delicacy.
“I said—” Orca Cruz began.
He crunched his fingers down on the eye, shattering it. Something chrome-yellow emerged in smoky wisps. A moment later Cruz felt the nerve agent infiltrate her lungs.
No one had to tell her it would be fatal.
From the safe vantage point of his garret, the dean studied the progress of his takeover effort. Cameras around Hela offered him continuous real-time imagery of the Ultras’ ship, no mat-ter where its orbit took it. He had seen the telling flicker of drive flame: Seyfarth’s message that the first phase of the acquisition operation had been successful. He had seen—indeed, felt—the departure of the massed ships of the Cathedral Guard, and he had also seen the gathering and co-ordination of the squadrons above Hela. Tiny, flimsy ships, to be sure, but many of them. Crows could mob a man to death.
He had no data about the ensuing activities within the ship. If Seyfarth had followed his own plan, then the twenty members of the spearhead unit would have begun their attack shortly after the signal was returned to Hela. Seyfarth was a brave man: he must have known that his chances of surviving until the arrival of reinforcements were not excellent. He was also, it had to be remembered, a career survivor. More than likely Seyfarth had lost some of his squad by now, but Quaiche very much doubted that Seyfarth himself was amongst the casualties. Somewhere on that ship he was still fighting, still surviving.
The dean craved, desperately, some means of divining what was happening in the ship at this moment. After all the planning, all the years of dreaming and scheming this mad folly into existence, it struck him as the height of unfairness not to be able to see whether events were unfolding as planned. He had always skipped over this hiatus in his imagination: it was either successful or it wasn’t, and there had been little point dwelling on the agony of uncertainty it represented.
But now he had doubts. The squadrons were meeting unexpected resistance from the ship’s hull defences. The imagery showed the ship to be surrounded by a spangling halo of explosions, like a dark and foreboding castle throwing a fireworks display. Most Ultra craft had defences of some kind, so Quaiche had not been greatly surprised to see them deployed here. His cover story had even demanded that the ship have the means to defend itself. But the scale of the defences and the speed and efficiency with which they had reacted: that had taken him aback. What if the forces within the ship were encountering the same unexpected resistance? What if Seyfarth was dead? What if everything was going slowly, catastrophi-cally wrong?
His couch chimed: an incoming message. Shaking, his hand worked the control. “Quaiche,” he said.
“Report from Cathedral Guard,” said a muffled voice, lashed by static. “Report successful incursion of relief units three and eight. Hull has been breached; no significant airloss. Reinforcement squads are now aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity. Attempting to rendezvous with elements of spearhead.”
Quaiche sighed, disappointed in himself. Of course it was going according to plan, and of course it was turning out to be a little more difficult than anticipated. That was the nature of worthy tasks. But he should never have doubted its ultimate success.