Above them all, something was very wrong with Haldora. Where the beam from the weapon had struck the planet, some-thing like a ripple had raced out, expanding concentrically. The weapon itself was gone now; even the beam had vanished into Haldora, and only a dispersing silvery-white cloud remained at the point where the device had been activated.
But the effects continued. Within the circular interior of the expanding ripple, the usual swirls and bands of gas-giant chemistry were absent. Instead there was just a ruby-red bruise, smooth and undifferentiated. In seconds it grew to encompass the entire planet. What had been Haldora was now something like a bloodshot eye.
It stayed like that for a few seconds, staring balefully down at Hela. Then hints of patterning began to appear in the ruby-red sphere: not the commas and horsetails of random chemical boundaries, not the bands of differentiated rotation belts, not the cyclopean eyes of major storm foci. These patterns were regular and precise, like designs worked into carpets. They sharpened, as if being worked and neatened by an invisible hand. Then they shifted: now a tidily manicured ornamental labyrinth, now a suggestion of cerebral folds. The colour flicked from ruby-red to bronze to a dark silver. The planet erupted forth a thousand spikes. The spikes lingered, then collapsed back into a sea of featureless mercury. The mercury became a chequerboard; the chequerboard became a spherical city scape of fantastic complexity; the city scape became a crawling Armageddon.
The planet returned. But it wasn’t the same planet. In a blink, Haldora became another gas giant, then another—the colouring and banding different each time. Rings appeared in the sky. A garland of moons, orbiting in impossible procession. Two sets of rings, intersecting at an angle, passing through each other. A dozen perfectly square moons.
A planet with a neat chunk taken out of it, like a half-eaten wedding cake.
A planet that was a reflected mirror of stars.
A dodecahedral planet.
Nothing.
For a few seconds there was only a black sphere up there. Then the sphere began to wobble, like a balloon full of water.
At last the great concealment mechanism was breaking down.
FORTY-FIVE
Quaiche clawed at his eyes, making a faint screaming sound, the words I’m blind, I’m blind his pitiful refrain.
Grelier put down the pneumatic speaking tube. He leant over the dean, pulling some gleaming ivory-handled optical device from his tunic pocket and peering into the trembling horror of Quaiche’s exposed eyes. With the other hand he cast shadows over them, watching the reactions of the twitching irises.
“You’re not blind,” he said. “At least, not in both eyes.”
“The flash—”
“The flash damaged your right eye. I’m not surprised: you were staring straight at the face of Haldora when it happened, and you have no blink reflex, of course. But we happened to lurch at the same moment: whatever caused that flash also upset Glaur’s machines. It was enough to perturb the optical light path from the collecting apparatus above the garret. You were spared the full effect of it.”
“I’m blind,” Quaiche said again, as if he had heard nothing that Grelier had told him.
“You can still see me,” Grelier said, moving his finger, “so stop snivelling.”
“Help me.”
“I’ll help you if you tell me what just happened—-and also why the hell the Lady Mor is on automatic control.”
Quaiche’s voice regained a semblance of calm. “I don’t know what happened. If I’d been expecting that, do you think I’d have been looking at it?”
“I imagine it was your friends the Ultras. They professed an interest in Haldora, didn’t they?”
“They said they were going to send in instrument packages.”
“I think they fibbed,” Grelier replied.
“I trusted them.”
“You still haven’t told me about the automatic control. Glaur says we can’t stop.”
“Twenty-six-hour lockout,” Quaiche said, as if reciting from a technical manual. “To be used in the event of a complete collapse of cathedral authority, ensuring that the Lady Mor continues to move along the Way until order is restored. All manual control of the reactor and propulsion systems is locked out on sealed, tamper-proof timing systems. Guidance cameras detect the Way; gyroscopes prevent drift even if there’s a loss of all visual cues; multiply redundant star-trackers come online for celestial navigation. There’s even a buried inductance cable we can follow, if all else fails.”
“When was the lockout instigated?”
“It was the last thing Seyfarth did before departing for the Infinity.”
Many hours ago, Grelier thought, but fewer than twenty-six. “So she’s going over that bridge, and nothing can stop it, short of sabotage?”
“Have you tried sabotaging a reactor lately, Grelier? Or a thousand tonnes of moving machinery?”
“Just wondering what the chances were.”
“The chances are, Surgeon-General, that she’s going over that bridge.”
It was a tiny surface-to-orbit ship, barely larger than the reentry capsule that had brought Khouri to Ararat, It slipped from the belly of the Nostalgia for Infinity, impelled by the merest whisper of thrust. Through the transparent patches in the cockpit armour, Scorpio watched the huge old ship fall slowly away, more like a receding landscape than another vessel. He gasped: at last he could see the changes for himself.
Wonderful and frightening things were happening to the Nostalgia for Infinity. As she made her slow approach to the surface holdfast, vast acres of the hull were peeling away, sheets of biomechanical cladding and radiation shielding breaking loose like flakes of sloughed skin. As the ship approached Hela, the pieces stretched behind her, forming a dark, jostling tail, like a comet’s. It was the perfect camouflage for Scorpio, permitting him to make his departure undetected.
None of it, Scorpio knew, was unintentional. The ship wasn’t breaking up because of the unbalanced stresses of its sidelong approach to Hela. It was breaking up because the Captain was choosing to fling away entire parts of himself. Where the skin cladding had gone, the ship’s innards were revealed in all their bewildering intricacy. And even there—in the solid depths of the Nostalgia for Infinity —great changes were afoot. The Captain’s ordinary transformative processes had been accelerated. The former maps of the ship were now utterly useless—no one had the slightest idea how to navigate through those deep districts. Not that it mattered: the living crew were crammed into a tiny, stable district near the nose, and if anyone was alive and warm down in the parts of the ship that were changing, they were only the last, wandering elements of the Cathedral Guard. In Scorpio’s opinion, it was unlikely that they’d be alive and warm for very much longer.
No one had told the Captain to do this, just as no one had told him to lower himself towards Hela. Even if there had been a rebellion—even if some of the seniors had decided to abandon Aura—it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference. Captain John Brannigan had made up his mind.
When he was clear of the tumbling cloud of sloughed parts, Scorpio told the ship to accelerate harder. It had been a long time since he had sat behind the controls of a spacecraft, but that didn’t matter: the little machine knew exactly where it needed to go. Hela rolled below: he saw the diagonal scratch of the rift, and the even fainter scratch of the bridge spanning it. He turned up the magnification, steadied the image and tracked back from the bridge until he made out the tiny form of the Lady Mor-wenna, creeping towards the edge of the plain. He had no idea what was going on aboard it now: since the appearance of the Haldora machinery, all attempts to communicate with. Quaiche or his hostages had failed. Quaiche must have destroyed or disabled all the communication channels, no longer wishing to be distracted by outside parties now that he had finally seized effective control of the Nostalgia for Infinity. All Scorpio could do was assume that Aura and the others were still safe, and that there was still some measure of rationality in Quaiche’s mind. If he could not be contacted by conventional means, then he would have to be sent a very obvious and compelling signal to stop.