He removed a pallet: a thing the size of a dinner-tray. Nestling in it, like Faberge eggs, were three bladder-mines. He took one mine out, handling it with instinctive caution—even though the one thing a bladder-mine wasn’t very likely to do was go off by accident—and walked away from the parked ship.
He walked one hundred paces from it: far enough mat there was no chance of the ship’s exhaust washing over the mine. Then he knelt down and used Clavain’s knife to carve out a little cone-shaped depression in the surface frost. He pressed the bladder-mine firmly down into the depression until only the top part was showing. Then he twisted a knurled dial on the mine’s surface through thirty degrees. His gloves kept slipping, but eventually he managed it. The dial clicked into place. A tiny red indicator shone in the upper pole of the bladder-mine: it was armed. Scorpio stood up.
He paused: something had caught his eye. He looked up into the face of Haldora. The planet was gone now; in its place, occupying a much smaller part of the sky, was a kind of mechanism. It had the look of some unlikely diagram from mediaeval cosmology, something crafted in the ecstatic grip of a vision: a geometric, latticelike structure, a thing of many finely worked parts. Around its periphery, distinct twinkling spars crisscrossed each other, radiating away from linking nodes. Towards the middle it became far too complicated to take in, let alone to describe or memorise. He retained only a sense of vertiginous complexity, like a glimpse of the clockwork mind of God. It made his head hurt. He could feel the swarming, tingling onset of a migraine, as if the thing itself was defying him to look at it for one moment longer.
He turned away, kept his eyes on the ground and trudged back to the ship. He placed the two remaining mines back inside the cargo recess, then climbed aboard, leaving the hull door lying on the ground. No need to repressurise now: he would just have to trust the suit.
The ship bucked into the air. Through the open part of the hull he watched the deck of the bridge drop away until the sides came into view. Below: the distant floor of Absolution Gap. He felt a lurch of dizziness. When he had been standing on the bridge, laying the mine, it had been easy to forget how far from the ground he really was.
He wouldn’t have that comfort the next time.
The holdfast readied itself below the Nostalgia for Infinity. The ship was close now, or at least what remained of it. During his descent from orbit, the Captain had committed himself to a series of terminal transformations, intent on protecting those in his care while doing what was necessary to safeguard Aura. He had shed much of his hull cladding around the midsection, revealing the festering complexity of his innards: structural spars and bulkhead partitions larger than many medium-sized spacecraft, the gristlelike tangle of densely packed ship systems, grown wild and knotted as strangler vines. As he discarded these protective sections he felt a chill of nakedness, as if he was exposing vulnerable skin where once he had been armoured. It had been centuries since these internal regions had last been open to vacuum.
He continued his transformation. Within him, major elements of ship architecture were reshuffled like dominos. Umbilical lines were severed and reconnected. Parts of the ship that had relied on others for the supply of life-giving power, air and water were now made self-sufficient. Others were allowed to die. The Captain felt these changes take place within him with a queasy sense of abdominal movement: pressure and cold, sharp pains and the sudden, troubling absence of any sensation whatsoever. Although he had instigated and directed the alterations, he still felt an unsettling sense of self-violation.
What he was doing to himself could not be easily undone.
He lowered closer to Hela, correcting his descent with bursts of docking thrust. Gravitational gradients stressed the geometry of his hull, soft fingers threatening to rip him apart.
He fell further. The landscape slid beneath him—not just ice and crevasses now, but an inhabited territory pocked with tiny hamlets and scratched with lines of communication. The maw of the holdfast was a golden cleft on the horizon.
He convulsed, like something giving birth. All the preparations were complete. From his midsection, neatly separated chunks of himself detached from the hull, leaving geometric holes. They trailed thousands of severed connections, like the pale roots beneath blocks of uprooted turf. The Captain had dulled the pain where it was possible, but ghost signals still reached him where cables and feed-lines had been ripped in two. This, the Captain thought, is how it feels to be gored. But he had expected the pain and was ready for it. In a way, it was actually quite bracing. It was a reminder that he was alive, that he had begun his thinking existence as a creature of flesh and blood. As long as he felt pain, he could still think of himself as distantly human.
The twenty chunks fell with the Nostalgia for Infinity, but only for a moment. Once they were safely clear of each other, the tiny sparks of steering rockets boosted them away. The rockets were not capable of pushing the chunks beyond Hela’s gravitational influence, but they were sufficient to lift them back into orbit. There, they would have to take care of themselves. He had done what he could for his eighteen thousand sleepers—he had brought many of them all the way from Ararat, and some from Yellowstone—but now they were safer outside him than within.
He just hoped someone else would arrive to take care of them.
The holdfast loomed much larger now. Within it, the waiting cradles and harnesses were moving, preparing to lock themselves around his gutted remains.
“What do you want with the scrimshaw suit?” Quaiche asked.
“I want to take it with me,” Rashmika said, with a forcefulness that surprised her. “I want to remove it from the Lady Morwenna.”
Vasko looked at Khouri, then at Rashmika. “You remember it all now?” he asked.
“I remember more than I did,” she said, turning to her mother. “It’s coming back.”
“She means something to you?” Quaiche asked.
“She’s my mother,” Rashmika said. “And my name isn’t Rashmika. That was the name of the daughter they lost. It’s a good name, but it isn’t mine. My real name is something else, but I don’t quite remember it yet.”
“It’s Aura,” Khouri said.
Rashmika heard the name, considered it, and then looked her mother in the eye. “Yes. I remember now. I remember you calling me that.”
“I was right about the blood,” Grelier said, unable to suppress a smirk of satisfaction.
“Yes, you were right,” Quaiche said. “Happy now? But you brought her here, Surgeon-General. You brought this viper into our nest. It was your mistake.”
“She’d have found her way here in the end,” Grelier replied. “It was what she came to do. Anyway, why should you worry?” Grelier indicated the video capture of the descending ship. “You’ve got the thing you wanted, haven’t you? You’ve even got your holy machinery looking down at you in congratulation.”
“Something’s happened to the ship,” Quaiche said, raising a trembling hand towards the image. He snapped a look at Vasko. “What is it?”
“I have no idea,” he replied.
“The ship will still work,” Khouri said. “You only needed it for its engines. You’ve got that much. Now let us leave with the scrimshaw suit.”