The ship moaned. Someone else slid a communicator across the polished gloss of the table. Scorpio reached for it, snapped it around his wrist, and called Vasko.
Grelier stepped into the garret and took a moment to adjust to the scene that met his eyes. Superficially, the room was much as he had left it. But now it had extra guests—a man and an older woman—detained by a small detachment of the Cathedral Guard. The guests—they were from the Ultra ship, he realised—looked at him as if expecting an explanation. Grelier merely brushed a hand through the white shock of his hair and placed his cane by the door. There was a lot he wanted to get off his chest, but the one thing he couldn’t do was explain what was happening here.
“I go away for a few hours and all hell breaks loose,” he commented.
“Have a seat,” the dean said.
Grelier ignored the suggestion. He did what he usually did upon his arrival in the garret, which was to attend to the dean’s eyes. He opened the wall cabinet and took out his usual paraphernalia of swabs and ointments.
“Not now, Grelier.”
“Now is as good a time as any,” he said. “Infection won’t stop spreading merely because it is inconvenient to treat it.”
“Where have you been, Grelier?”
“First things first.” The surgeon-general leant over the dean, inspecting the points where the barbs of the eye-opener hooked into the delicate skin of Quaiche’s eyelids. “Might be my imagination, but there seemed to be a wee bit of an atmosphere when I came in here.”
“They’re not too thrilled about my taking the cathedral over the rift.”
“Neither am I,” Grelier said, “but you’re not holding me at gunpoint.”
“It’s rather more complicated than that.”
“I’ll bet it is.” More than ever, he was glad that he had left his shuttle in a state of immediate flight-readiness. “Well, is someone going to explain? Or is this a new parlour game, where I have twenty guesses?”
“He’s taken over our ship,” the man said.
Grelier glanced back at him, continuing to dab at the dean’s eyes. “I’m sorry?”
“The Adventist delegates were a trick,” the ma elaborated. “They were sent up there to seize control of the Nostalgia for Infinity?
“Nostalgia for Infinity,” Greleir said. “Now there’s a name that keeps coming up.”
Now it was the man’s turn to be puzzled. “I’m sorry?”
“Been here before, haven’t you? About nine years ago.”
The two prisoners exchanged glances. They did their best to hide it, but Grelier had been expecting some response.
“You’re ahead of me,” Quaiche said.
“I think we’re all ahead of each other in certain respects.” Grelier said. He scooped his swab under an eyelid, the tip yellow with infection. “Is it true what he said, about the delegates taking over their ship?”
“I don’t think he’d have any reason to lie,” Quaiche said.
“You set that up?”
“I needed their ship,” Quaiche said. He sounded like a child explaining why he had been caught stealing apples.
“We know that much. Why else did you spend all that time looking for the right one? But now that they’ve brought the ship, what’s the problem? You’re better off letting them run it, if protection’s what you want.”
“It was never about protection.”
Grelier froze, the swab still buried under the dean’s eyelid. “It wasn’t?”
“I wanted a ship,” Quaiche said. “Didn’t matter which one, so long as it was in reasonably good condition and the engines worked. It wasn’t as if I was planning on taking it very far.”
“I don’t understand,” Grelier said.
“I know why,” the man said. “At least, I think I have a good idea. It’s about Hela, isn’t it?”
Grelier looked at him. “What about it?”
“He’s going to take our ship and land it on this planet. Somewhere near the equator, I’d guess. He’s probably already constructed something for docking a cradle of some kind.”
“A cradle?” Grelier said blankly.
“A holdfast,” Quaiche said, as if that explained everything. Grelier thought about the diverted Permanent Way resources, the fleet of construction machines Rashmika had described to him. Now he knew exactly what they were for. They must have been on their way to the holdfast—whatever that was—to put the finishing touches to it.
“Just one question,” Grelier said. “Why?”
“He’s going to land the ship sideways,” the man replied. “Lie it down on Hela with the hull aligned east-west, parallel to the equator. Then he’ll lock it in place, so that it can’t move.”
“There’s a point to all this?” Grelier said.
“There will be when I start the engines,” Quaiche said, unable to contain himself. “Then you’ll see. Then everyone will see.”
“He’s going to change the spin rate of Hela,” the man said. “He’s going to use the ship’s engines to lock Hela into synchronous rotation around Haldora. He doesn’t have to change the length of the day by much—twelve minutes will do the trick. Won’t they, Dean?”
“One part in two hundred,” Quaiche said. “Sounds trivial, doesn’t it? But worlds—even small ones like Hela—take a lot of shifting. I always knew I’d need a lighthugger to do it. Think about it: if those engines can push a million tonnes of ship to within a scratch of the speed of light, I think they can change Hela’s day by twelve minutes.”
Grelier retrieved the swab from under Quaiche’s eyelid. “What God failed to put right, you can fix. Is that it?”
“Now don’t go giving me delusions of grandeur,” Quaiche chided.
Vasko’s bracelet chimed. He looked at it, not daring to move.
“Answer it,” Quaiche said eventually. “Then we can all hear how things are going.”
Vasko did as he was told. He listened to the report very carefully, then snapped the bracelet from his wrist and passed it to Grelier. “Listen to it yourself,” he said. “I think you’ll find it very interesting.”
Grelier examined the bracelet, his lips pursed in suspicion. “I’ll take this call, I think,” he said.
“Suits me either way,” Vasko said.
Grelier listened to the voice coming out of the bracelet. He spoke into it carefully, then listened to the answers, nodding occasionally, raising his snowwhite eyebrows in mock astonishment. Then he shrugged and passed it back to Vasko.
“What?” Quaiche said.
“The Cathedral Guard have failed in their attempt to take the ship,” he said. “They’ve been cut to shreds, including the reinforcements. I had a nice chat with the pig in command of ship operations. Seemed a very reasonable fellow, for a pig.”
“No,” Quaiche breathed. “Seyfarth gave me his promise. He told me he had the men to do it. It can’t have failed.”
“It did.”
“What happened? What did they have on that ship that Seyfarth didn’t know about? A whole army?”
“That’s not what the pig says.”
“The pig’s right,” Vasko said. “It was the ship that ruined your plans. It’s not like other ships, not inside. It has ideas of its own. It didn’t take very kindly to your intruders.”
“This wasn’t how it was meant to happen,” Quaiche moaned.
“You’re in a spot of bother, I think,” Grelier said. “The pig mentioned something about taking the cathedral by force.”
“They set me up,” Quaiche said, realisation dawning.
“Oh, don’t think ill of them. They just wanted access to Haldora. It wasn’t their fault they stumbled into your scheme. They’d have left you alone if you hadn’t tried to use them.”