Now they carried heavy-duty flame-throwers and energy weapons, massive high-penetration slug-guns and hyperdiamond-tipped drilling rigs. They carried hydraulic bulwarks to shore up corridors and bulkheads against collapse or unwanted closure. They carried shock-hardening epoxy sprays to freeze changing structures into shape. They carried explosives and nerve agents. They carried outlawed nanotechnologies.
Their mandate was still the same: they were to take the ship with minimum casualties. But the strict interpretation of that mandate was to be left at the discretion of the commanding of-fleers. And any damage to the ship itself—while regrettable—was not as serious an issue as it had been while the Nostalgia for Infinity was still in orbit. The dean had promised the Ultras that they could have their ship back, but—given all that had happened since the last attempt at takeover—it appeared very unlikely that the ship would ever be leaving Hela’s surface. It had, perhaps, ceased even to be a ship.
The Cathedral Guard made swift progress. They swarmed through the vessel, neutralising resistance with maximum force. Surrender was always an option, but it was never one that Ultras took.
So be it. If the minimum of casualties meant the death of every remaining crew member, then that was the way it would have to be.
The ship groaned around them as they gouged and cleaved and burned their way through it. It fought back, taking some of their number, but its efforts were becoming sporadic and misdirected. As the Cathedral Guard declared more and more of the ship to be under their secure control, it struck them that the ship was dying. It didn’t matter: all the dean had ever wanted was the engines. The rest of it was an unnecessary complication.
He knew that he was dying. There was a place of rest for all things, and after all the centuries, all the light-years, all the changes, he began to think that he had found his final destination. He supposed that he had known it even before he saw the holdfast; even, perhaps; before he had gutted himself to save the sleepers he had carried from Ararat and Yellowstone. Perhaps he had known it from the moment he slowed from interstellar space into this place of miracle and pilgrimage, nine years earlier. There had been a weariness in him ever since he had been woken from his sleep in the ocean of Ararat, drawn to bad-tempered alertness by the newcomers and the urgent need to evacuate. Like Clavain, brooding alone on his island, he had really only wanted rest and solitude and an ease from his own unresolved burden of sins. Had none of that happened, he thought he would have been very content to remain in that bay, rusting into history, becoming part of the geography, no longer even haunting himself, fading into a final, mindless dream of flight.
He felt the Cathedral Guards enter his body, their violent progress at first no worse than pins and needles, but gradually becoming more unpleasant—an intense, fiery indigestion which in turn became a prickling agony. He could not guess their number, whether there were a hundred or a thousand of them. He could not guess at the weapons they used against him, or the damage they left behind. They burned his nerve endings and blinded his eyes. They left trails of numbness behind them. The lack of pain where they had passed—the lack of any sensation whatsoever—was the worst thing of all. They were reclaiming the dead machinery of the ship from the temporary grasp of his living infection. It had been a nice dream, what he had become. Now it was coming to an end.
When he was gone, when they had cleansed him, everything essential would remain. Even if the engines faltered as his mind ceased to control them, the people in the holdfast would find a way to make them fire again. They would make his corpse work for them, jerking him into a twitching parody of life. It would not be the work of days to bring Hela into synchronisation with Haldora, but something like the building of a cathedral itself. They would run his corpse until that work was done, and then, perhaps, enshrine or sanctify him.
The Guards were pushing deeper. The numbness that they left behind them was no longer confined to the narrow, winding routes they had taken into him, but had enlarged to consume entire districts of his anatomy. He had felt a similar sense of absence when he released the sleepers into orbit, but that wounding had been self-inflicted, and he had wrought no more harm upon himself than absolutely necessary. Now, the damage was indiscriminate, and the absence of sensation all the more terrifying. In a little while—a few hours, perhaps—the voids would have swallowed everything. He would be gone, then, leaving only the autonomic processes behind.
There was still time to act. He was becoming blind to himself, but his own body formed only the tiny, glittering kernel of his sphere of consciousness. Even as he rested in the cradle of the holdfast, he was still in receipt of data from the drones he had already released around Hela. He apprehended everything that was happening on the planet, his view synthesised and enhanced from the patchwork impressionism of the cameras.
And in his belly, yet to be reached by the Cathedral Guard, he still had the three hypometric weapons. They were excruciatingly delicate things: it had been difficult enough using them under normal conditions of thrust, let alone when he was lying on his side. It was anyone’s guess as to how the threshing machinery would react if he started it now; how long it would function before ripping itself and everything around it to shreds.
But he thought it likely they would work at least once. All he needed was a target, some means of making a difference.
His view of Hela changed emphasis. With an effort of will he focused on the streams of data that included imagery of the cathedral; shot from a variety of angles and elevations. For a moment, the effort of assembling these faint, fuzzy, multispeetral moving views into a single three-dimensional picture was sufficiently taxing that he forgot all about the Cathedral Guards and what they were doing to him. Then, in his mind’s eye, with the unnatural clarity of a vision, he saw the Lady Morwenna. He felt his ever-shifting spatial relationship to the cathedral, as if a taut iron chain bound them together. He knew how far away it was. He knew in which direction it lay.
High on the flat surface of one tower, tiny figures moved like clockwork marionettes.
They had reached the Lady Morwenna’s landing stage. Two spacecraft waited there: the vehicle that the Ultras had arrived in, and the red cockleshell that Rashmika recognised as belonging to the surgeon-general. Both ships were peppered with the scorched holes of impact points where they had been shot at close range. Given time, Rashmika thought, the ships might have been able to repair themselves enough to leave the cathedral. But the one thing they didn’t have now was time.
Grelier had the syringe pressed hard against the outer integument of her suit. She didn’t know if the needle would be able to penetrate that layer and reach through to her skin, but she was certain that she did not want to take the chance. She had heard of DEUS-X; she knew what it could do. There might be a cure, and maybe the virus’s effects would even begin to fade after a while as her body developed its own immune response. But the one thing everyone agreed on where indoctri-nal viruses were concerned was that once you’d had one in your blood, you were never quite the same again.
“Look,” Grelier said, with the cheerfulness of someone pointing out beautiful scenery, “you can still see the exhaust beams.” He directed Rashmika’s attention to the double-edged sliver of light, like a highway in the sky. “Say what you like about our dean, but once he makes a plan, he sticks to it. It’s just such a shame he couldn’t bear to tell me about it first.”