“A gun?” Scorpio asked.
“Something more reliable,” Clavain said. “A knife.”
Quaiche worked his way along the absurdly narrow companionway that threaded the Dominatrix from nose to tail. The ship ticked and purred around him, like a room full of well-oiled clocks.
“It’s a bridge. That’s all I can tell at the moment.”
“What type of bridge?” Morwenna asked.
“A long, thin one, like a whisker of glass. Very gently curved, stretching across a kind of ravine or fissure.”
“I think you’re getting overexcited. If it’s a bridge, wouldn’t someone else have seen it already? Leaving aside whoever put it there in the first place.”
“Not necessarily,” Quaiche said. He had thought of this al-ready, and had what he considered to be a fairly plausible explanation. He tried not to make it sound too well rehearsed as he recounted it. “For a start, it isn’t at all obvious. It’s big, but if you weren’t looking carefully, you might easily miss it. A quick sweep through the system wouldn’t necessarily have picked it up. The moon might have had the wrong face turned to the observer, or the shadows might have hidden it, or the scanning resolution might not have been good enough to pick up such a delicate feature… it’d be like looking for a cobweb with a radar. No matter how careful you are, you’re not going to see it unless you use the right tools.” Quaiche bumped his head as he wormed around the tight right angle that permitted entry into the excursion bay. “Anyway, there’s no evidence that anyone ever came here before us. The system’s a blank in the nomenclature database—that’s why we got first dibs on the name. If someone ever did come through before, they couldn’t even be bothered tossing a few classical references around, the lazy sods.”
“But someone must have been here before,” Morwenna said, “or there wouldn’t be a bridge.”
Quaiche smiled. This was the part he had been looking forward to. “That’s just the point. I don’t think anyone did build this bridge.” He wriggled free into the cramped volume of the excursion bay, lights coming on as the chamber sensed his body heat. “No one human, at any rate.”
Morwenna, to her credit, took this last revelation in her stride. Perhaps he was easier to read than he imagined.
“You think you’ve stumbled on an alien artefact, is that it?”
“No,” Quaiche said. “I don’t think I’ve stumbled on an alien artefact. I think I’ve stumbled on the fucking alien artefact to end them all. I think I’ve found the most amazing, beautiful object in the known universe.”
“What if it’s something natural?”
“If I could show you the images, rest assured that you would immediately dismiss such trifling concerns.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be so hasty, all the same. I’ve seen what nature can do, given time and space. Things you wouldn’t believe could be anything other than the work of intelligent minds.”
“Me, too,” he said. “But this is something different. Trust me, all right?”
“Of course I’ll trust you. It’s not as if I have a lot of choice in the matter.”
“Not quite the answer I was hoping for,” Quaiche said, “but I suppose it’ll have to do for now.”
He turned around in the tight confines of the bay. The entire space was about the size of a small washroom, with something of the same antiseptic lustre. A tight squeeze at the best of times, but even more so now that the bay was occupied by Quaiche’s tiny personal spacecraft, clamped on to its berthing cradle, poised above the elongated trap door that allowed access to space.
With his usual furtive admiration, Quaiche stroked the smooth armour of the Scavenger’s Daughter. The ship purred at his touch, shivering in her harness.
“Easy, girl,” Quaiche whispered.
The little craft looked more like a luxury toy than the robust exploration vessel it actually was. Barely larger than Quaiche himself, the sleek vessel was the product of the last wave of high Demarchist science. Her faintly translucent aerodynamic hull resembled something that had been carved and polished with great artistry from a single hunk of amber. Mechanical viscera of bronze and silver glimmered beneath the surface. Flexible wings curled tightly against her flanks, various sensors and probes tucked back into sealed recesses within the hull.
“Open,” Quaiche whispered.
The ship did something that always made his head hurt. With a flourish, various parts of the hull hitherto apparently seamlessly joined to their neighbours slid or contracted, curled or twisted aside, revealing in an eyeblink the tight cavity inside. The space—lined with padding, life-support apparatus, controls and read-outs—was just large enough for a prone human being. There was something both obscene and faintly seductive about the way the machine seemed to invite him into herself.
By rights, he ought to have been filled with claustrophobic anxiety at the thought of climbing into her. But instead he looked forward to it, prickling with eagerness. Rather than feeling trapped within the amber translucence of the hull, he felt connected through it to the rich immensity of the universe. The tiny jewel-like ship had enabled him to skim deep into the atmospheres of worlds, even beneath the surfaces of oceans. The ship’s transducers relayed ambient data to him through all his senses, including touch. He had felt the chill of alien seas, the radiance of alien sunsets. In his five previous survey operations for the queen he had seen miracles and wonders, drunk in the giddy ecstasy of it all. It was merely unfortunate that none of those miracles and wonders had been the kind you could take away and sell at a profit.
Quaiche lowered himself into the Daughter. The ship oozed and shifted around him, adjusting to match his shape.
“Horris?”
“Yes, love?”
“Horris, where are you?”
“I’m in the excursion bay, inside the Daughter.”
“No, Horris.”
“I have to. I have to go down to see what that thing really is.”
“I don’t want you to leave me.”
“I know. I don’t want to leave either. But I’ll still be in contact. The timelag won’t be bad; it’ll be just as if I’m right next to you.”
“No, it won’t.”
He sighed. He had always known this would be the difficult part. More than once it had crossed his mind that perhaps the kindest thing would be to leave without telling her, and just hope that the relayed communications gave nothing away. Knowing Morwenna, however, she would have seen through this gambit very quickly. -
“I’ll be quick, I promise. I’ll be in and out in a few hours.” A day, more likely, but that was still a “few” hours, wasn’t it? Morwenna would understand.
“Why can’t you just take the Dominatrix closer?”
“Because I can’t risk it,” Quaiche said. “You know how I like to work. The Dominatrix is big and heavy. It has armour and range, but it lacks agility and intelligence. If we—I—run into anything nasty, the Daughter can get me out of harm’s way a lot faster. This little ship is cleverer than me. And we can’t risk damaging or losing the Dominatrix. The Daughter doesn’t have the range to catch up with the Gnostic Ascension. Face it, love, the Dominatrix is our ticket out of here. We can’t place it in harm’s way.” Hastily he added, “Or you, for that matter.”