“Of course I’d like to…”
But even before he had finished the sentence he felt a lurch, the impulse as the ship broke from orbit. The other seniors reached instinctively for the table, clawing at it for support. Valensin’s bundle of medical tools slid to the floor. Groans and bellows of protest from the ship’s fabric were like the creaking of vast old trees in a thunderstorm.
They were going down. It was what the Captain wanted.
Scorpio snarled into the communicator, “Quaiche: listen to me. We can work this out. You can have your ship—we’re already on our way—but you have to do something for me in return.”
“You can have the girl when the ship has finished its business.”
“I’m not expecting you to hand her over right now. But do one thing: stop the cathedral. Don’t take it over the bridge.”
The whisper of a voice said, “I’d love to, I really would, but I’m afraid we’re already committed.”
In the core of the cache weapon, the cascade of reactions passed an irreversible threshold. Exotic physical processes simmered, rising like boiling water. No conceivable intervention could now prevent the device from firing, short of the violent destruction of the weapon itself. Final systems checks were made, targeting and yield cross-checked countless times. The spiralling processes continued: something like a glint became a spark, which in turn became a little marble-sized sphere of naked, swelling energy. The fireball grew larger still, swallowing layer after layer of containment mechanisms. Microscopic sensors, packed around the expanding sphere, recorded squalls of particle events. Space-time itself began to curl and crisp, like the edge of a sheet of parchment held too close to a candle flame. The sphere engulfed the last bastion of containment and kept growing. The weapon sensed parts of it-self being eaten from within: glorious and chilling at the same time. In its last moments it reassigned functions from the volume around the expanding sphere, cramming more and more of its control sentience into its outer layers. Still the sphere kept growing, but now it was beginning to deform, elongating in one direction in exact accordance with prediction. A spike of annihilating force rammed forwards, blasting through a marrow of abandoned machine layers. The weapon felt it as a cold steel impalement. The tip of the spike reached beyond its armour, beyond the harness, towards the face of Haldora.
The expanding sphere had now consumed eighty per cent of the cache weapon’s volume. Shockwaves were racing towards the gas giant’s surface: in a matter of nanoseconds, the weapon would cease to exist except as a glowing cloud at one end of its beam.
It had nearly run out of viable processing room. It began to discard higher sentience functions, throwing away parts of itself. It did so with a curious discrimination, intent on preserving a tiny nugget of intelligence until the last possible moment. There were no more decisions to be made; nothing to do except await destruction. But it had to know: it had to cling to sentience long enough to know that it had done some damage.
Ninety-five per cent of the cache weapon was now a roiling ball of photo-leptonic hellfire. Its thinking systems were smeared in a thin, attenuated crust on the inside of the weapon’s skin: a crust that was itself beginning to break up, sundered and riven by the racing Shockwave of the explosion. The machine’s intelligence slid down the cognitive ladder until all that remained was a stubborn, bacterial sense of its own existence and the fact that it was there to do something.
The light rammed through the last millimetre of armour. By then, the first visual returns were arriving from Haldora. The cameras on the cache weapon’s skin relayed the news to the shrinking puddle of mind that was all that remained of the once-sly intelligence.
The beam had touched the planet. And something was happening to it, spreading away from the impact point in a ripple of optical distortion.
The mind shrivelled out of existence. The last thing it allowed itself was a dwindling thrill of consummation.
In the depths of the Lady Morwenna—in the great hall of Motive Power—several things happened almost at once. An intense flash of light flooded the hall through the narrow colourless slits of the utilitarian windows above the coupling sleeves. Glaur, the shift boss, was just blinking away the afterimages of the flash—the propulsion systems etched into his retinae in looming pink-and-green negative forms—when he saw the machinery lose its usual keen synchronisation: the scissoring aerial intricacy of rods and valves and compensators appearing, for a heart-stopping moment, to be about to work loose, threshing itself and anyone nearby into a bloody amalgam of metal and flesh.
But the instant passed: the governors and dampers worked as they were meant to, forcing the motion back into its usual syncopated rhythm. There were groans and squeals of mechanical protestation—deafening, painful—as hundreds of tonnes of moving metal struggled against the constraints of hinge-point and valve sleeve, but nothing actually worked loose, or came flying through the air towards him. Glaur noticed, then, that the emergency lights were flashing on the reactor, as well as on the servo-control boxes of the main propulsion assembly.
The wave of uncoordinated motion had been damped and controlled within the Motive Power hall, but these mechanisms were only part of the chain: the wave itself was still travelling. In half a second it passed through the airtight seals in the wall and out into vacuum. An observer, watching“ the Lady Morwenna from a distance, would have seen the usual smooth movements of the flying buttresses slip out of co-ordination. Glaur didn’t need to be outside: he knew exactly what was about to happen, saw it in his imagination with the clarity of an engineering blueprint. He even reached for a handhold before he had made a conscious decision to do so.
The Lady Morwenna stumbled. Huge reciprocating masses of moving machinery—normally counterweighted so that the walking motion of the cathedral was experienced as only the tiniest of sways even at the top of the Clocktower—were now appallingly unbalanced. The cathedral lurched first to one side, then to the other. The effect was catastrophic and predictable: the lurch sent a fresh shudder through the propulsion mechanisms, and the entire process began again even before the first lurch had been damped out.
Glaur gritted his teeth and hung on. He watched the floor tilt by entire, horrifying degrees. Klaxons tripped automatically; red emergency lights flashed from the chamber’s vaulted heights.
A voice sounded on the pneumatic speaker system. He reached for the mouthpiece, raising his own voice above the racket.
“This is the surgeon-general. What, exactly, is happening?”
“Glaur, sir. I don’t know. There was a flash… systems went berserk. If I didn’t know better I’d say someone just let off a very powerful demolition charge, hit our ”tronics boxes.“
“It wasn’t a nuke. I meant, what is happening with your control of the cathedral?”
“She’s on her own now, sir.”
“Will she topple?”
Glaur looked around. “No, sir. No.”
“Will she leave the Way?”
“No sir, not that either.”
“Very well. I just wanted to be certain.” Grelier paused: in the gap between his words Glaur heard something odd, like a kettle whistling. “Glaur… what did you mean by ‘she’s on her own’?”
“I mean, sir, that we’re on automatic control, like we’re supposed to be during times of emergency. Manual control is locked out on the twenty-six-hour timer. Captain Seyfarth made me do it, sir: said it was on Clocktower authority. So we don’t stop, sir. So we can’t stop.”
“Thank you,” Grelier said quietly.