He appeared to consider her request. “Where will you take it, without a ship?”
“Anywhere other than the Lady Morwenna would be a good start,” Khouri said. “You may have suicidal inclinations, Dean, but we don’t.”
“If I had the slightest inclination towards suicide, do you think I’d have lived as long as I have?”
Khouri looked at Malinin, then at Rashmika. “He has a way off this thing. You were never planning on staying aboard, were you?”
“It’s a question of timing,” Quaiche said. “The ship is nearly in the holdfast. That’s the moment of triumph. That’s the moment when everything on Hela changes. The moment—indeed—when Hela itself changes. Nothing will be the same again, you see. There will be no more Permanent Way, no more procession of cathedrals. There will be only one spot on Hela that is precisely beneath Haldora, and that spot will no longer be moving. And there will only be one cathedral occupying it.”
“You haven’t built it yet,” Grelier said.
“There’s time, Surgeon-General. All the time in the world, once I stake my claim. I choose where that spot falls, understand? I have my hand on Hela. I can spin this world like a globe. I can stop it with my finger.”
“And the Lady Morwenna?” Grelier asked.
“If this cathedral crosses the bridge, so be it. If it doesn’t, it will only emphasise the end of one era and the start of another.”
“He doesn’t want it to succeed,” Vasko whispered. “He never did.”
On the dean’s couch something started chiming.
Scorpio stood his ground even though every instinct told him to run backwards. The wrinkled purple-black sphere of the nearest bladder-mine detonation had raced towards him in an eyeblink, an unstoppable wall threatening to engulf him and the portion of the bridge on which he stood. But he had placed the three charges carefully, and he knew from Remontoire’s specifications that the bladder-mines were highly predictable in their effects, assuming that they worked in the first place. There was no air on Hela, so no Shockwave to consider; all he had to worry about was the limiting radius of the nearest expanding sphere. With a small margin of error to allow for undulations in the surface, he would be safe only a few hundred metres beyond the nominal boundary.
The bridge was forty kilometres wide; he had arranged the charges in a row with their centres seven kilometres apart, the middle one situated at the highest point of the span. The combined effect of the overlapping spheres would take out the central thirty-four kilometres of the bridge, leaving only a few intact kilometres at either side of the rift. When he detonated the charges, Scorpio had still been standing more than a kilometre and a half out over open space.
The boundary of the sphere was nearly a kilometre away, but it looked as if it was just beyond his nose. It rippled and bulged, wrinkles and blisters rising and falling on its shrivelled surface. The nearest part of the bridge still plunged into the walclass="underline" in his mind’s eye it was impossible not to imagine it continuing across the gap. But the bridge was already gone: nothing material would be left behind when the sphere evaporated.
It vanished. The middle one had already gone, and the furthest one popped out of existence a moment later.
He started walking to the edge. The tongue of bridge beneath his feet felt as steady as ever, even though it was no longer connected to the other side. He slowed as he neared the point where the tongue ended, mindful that this part might be a lot less stable than the portion nearer the cliff. It had been within metres of the edge of the bladder-mine detonation, where all sorts of peculiar quantum effects were to be expected. The atomic properties of the bridge’s material might have been altered, fatal flaws introduced. Time for a person—even a pig—to tread carefully.
Vertigo gripped him as he approached the edge. The cut was miraculously clean. The surgical neatness of it, and the complete absence of debris from the intervening scei ton, made it look as if the bridge was merely under construction. It macie him feel less like a vandal than a spectator, anticipating something yet to be finished.
He turned around. In the distance, beyond the crouched form of his parked ship, he saw the Lady Morwenna. From his point of view the cathedral looked as if it had virtually reached the edge of the cliff. He knew that it still had some way to travel, but it would not be long before it arrived there.
Now that the bridge was gone, though, they would have no choice but to stop. There was no longer any question of degrees of risk, any question of just possibly being able to cross Absolution Gap. He had removed any doubt from the situation. There would be no glory, only devastation.
If they were sane, they’d stop.
A flashing pink light came on inside his helmet, synchronised with a shrill alarm tone. Scorpio halted, wondering at first if there was something wrong with his suit. But the pink light meant only that the suit was receiving a powerful modulated radio signal, outside of the usual assigned communications bands. The suit was asking him if he wanted to have the signal interpreted and passed through to him.
He looked at the cathedral again. It had to be from the Lady Morwenna.
“Do it,” Scorpio said.
The radio signal, the suit told him, was a repeating one: it was cycling through a short prerecorded transmission. The format was audio/holographic.
“Let me see it,” he said, less sure now that it had anything to do with the cathedral.
A figure appeared on the ice a dozen metres from him. It was nobody he had been expecting; in fact, it was nobody he even recognised. The figure wore no spacesuit and had the odd, asymmetrical anatomy of someone who spent most of their existence in free fall. He had plug-in limbs and a face like a planetary surface after a small nuclear exchange. An Ultra, Scorpio thought; but then, after a moment’s consideration, he decided that the man probably wasn’t an Ultra at all, but a member of that other, less social spacefaring human faction: the Skyjacks.
“You couldn’t leave it alone, could you?” the figure asked. “You couldn’t just live with it; couldn’t tolerate the existence of something so beautiful and yet so enigmatic. You had to know what it was. You had to know what its limits were. My lovely bridge. My beautiful, delicate bridge. I made it for you, placed it here like a gift. But that wasn’t enough for you, was it? You had to test it. You had to destroy it. You had to fucking ruin it.”
Scorpio walked through the figure. “Sorry,” he said. “Not interested.”
“It was a thing of beauty,” the man said. “It was a thing of fucking beauty.”
“It was in my way,” Scorpio said.
None of them could see the report Quaiche was accessing, sent through to the private display of his couch. But Rashmika watched his lips move and observed the barest crease of a frown as he reread the summary, as if he had made a mistake the first time.
“What is it?” Grelier asked.
“The bridge,” Quaiche answered. “It doesn’t seem to be there any more.”
Grelier leant closer to the couch. “There must be some mistake.”
“There doesn’t seem to be one, Surgeon-General. The inductance cable—the line we use for emergency navigation—is quite clearly severed.”
“So someone cut the cable.”
“I’ll have surface imagery in a moment. Then we’ll know.”
They all turned to the screen that had been showing the descent of the Nostalgia for Infinity. The image flickered with ghostly colours, then stabilised around a familiar view captured by a static camera that must have been mounted on the wall of Ginnungagap Rift itself.