But even Resurgam could be ignored for a while. The system was an archaeological colony, isolated from the main web of interstellar commerce, its government a totalitarian regime with a taste for disinformation. The reports of what had happened there could not be verified. And so for several more decades, life in the other systems of human-settled space continued more or less unaffected.
But now the Inhibitors had arrived around other stars.
The Ultras had been the first to bring the bad news. Communications between their ships warned them to steer clear of certain systems. Something was happening, something that transgressed the accepted scales of human catastrophe. This was not war or plague, but something infinitely worse. It had happened to the Amarantin and—presumably—to the scuttlers.
The number of human colonies known to have witnessed direct intervention by Inhibitor machines was still fewer than a dozen, but the ripples of panic spreading outwards at the speed of radio communications were almost as effective at collapsing civilisations. Entire surface communities were being evacuated or abandoned, as citizens tried to reach space or the hopefully safer shelter of underground caverns. Crypts and bunkers, disused since the dark decades of the Melding Plague, were hastily reopened. There were, invariably, too many people for either the evacuation ships or the bunkers. There were riots and furious little wars. Even as civilisation crumbled, those with an eye for the main chance accumulated small, useless fortunes. Doomsday cults flourished in the damp, inviting loam of fear, like so many black orchids. People spoke of End Times, convinced that they were living through the final days.
Against this background, it was hardly any wonder that so many people were drawn to Hela. In better times, Quaiche’s miracle would have attracted little attention, but now a miracle was precisely what people were looking for. Every new Ultra ship arriving in the system brought tens of thousands of frozen pilgrims. Not all of them were looking for a religious answer, but before very long, if they wanted to stay on Hela, the Office of Blood-work got to them anyway. Thereafter, they saw things differently.
Rashmika could not really blame them for coming to Hela. Had she not been born here, she sometimes thought she might well have made the same pilgrimage. But her motives would have been different. It was truth she was after: the same drive that had taken Dan Sylveste to Resurgam; the same drive that had brought him into conflict with his colony and which, ultimately, had led to his death.
She thought back to Linxe’s question. Was it really Harbin driving her towards the Permanent Way, or was Harbin just the excuse she had made up to conceal—as much from herself as anyone else—the real reason for her journey?
Her reply that it was all to do with Harbin had been so automatic and flippant that she had almost believed it. But now she wondered whether it was really true. Rashmika could tell when anyone around her was lying. But seeing through her own deceptions was another matter entirely.
“It’s Harbin,” she whispered to herself. “Nothing else matters except finding my brother.”
But she could not stop thinking of the scuttlers, and when she dozed off with the mug of chocolate still clasped in her hands, it was the scuttlers that she dreamed of, the mad permutations of their insectile anatomy shuffling and reshuffling like the broken parts of a puzzle.
Rashmika snapped awake, feeling a rumble as the icejammer slowed, picking up undulations in the ice trail.
“I’m afraid this is as far as we can go tonight,” Crozet said. “I’ll find somewhere discreet to hide us away, but I’m near my limit.” He looked drawn and exhausted to Rashmika, but then again that was how Crozet always looked.
“Move over, love,” Linxe said to Crozet. “I’ll take us on for a couple of hours, just until we’re safe and sound. You can both go back and catch forty winks.”
“I’m sure we’re safe and sound,” Rashmika said.
“Never you mind about that. A few extra miles won’t hurt us. Now go back and try to get yourself some sleep, young lady. We’ve another long day ahead of us tomorrow and I can’t swear we’ll be out of the woods even then.”
Linxe was already easing into the driver’s position, running her thick babylike fingers over the icejammer’s timeworn controls. Until Crozet had mentioned pulling over for the night, Rashmika had assumed that the machine would keep travelling using some kind of autopilot, even if it had to slow down a little while it guided itself. It was a genuine shock to learn that they would be going nowhere unless someone operated the ice-jammer manually.
“I can do a bit,” she offered. “I’ve never driven one of these before, but if someone wants to show me…”
“We’ll do fine, love,” Linxe said, “It’s not just Crozet and me, either. Culver can do a shift in the morning.”
“I wouldn’t want…”
“Oh, don’t worry about Culver,” Crozet said. “He needs something else to occupy his hands.”
Linxe slapped her husband, but she was smiling as she did it. Rashmika finished her now-cold chocolate drink, dog-tired but glad that she had at least made it through the first day. She was under no illusions that she was done with the worst of her journey, but she supposed that every successful stage had to be treated as a small victory in its own right. She just wished she could tell her parents not to worry about her, that she had made good progress so far and was thinking of them all the time. But she had vowed not to send a message home until she had joined the caravan.
Crozet walked her back through the rumbling innards of the icejammer. It moved differently under Linxe’s direction. It was not that she was a worse or even a better driver than Crozet, but she definitely favoured a different driving style. The icejammer flounced, flinging itself through the air in long, weightless parabolic arcs. It was all quite conducive to sleep, but a sleep filled with uneasy dreams in which Rashmika found herself endlessly falling.
She woke the next morning to troubling and yet strangely welcome news.
“There’s been an alert on the news service,” Crozet said. ‘The word’s gone out now, Rashmika. You’re officially missing and there’s a search operation in progress. Doesn’t that make you feel proud?“
“Oh,” she said, wondering what could have happened since the night before.
“It’s the constabulary,” Linxe said, meaning the law-enforcement organisation that had jurisdiction in the Vigrid region. “They’ve sent out search parties, apparently. But there’s a good chance we’ll make the caravan before they find us. Once we get you on the caravan, the constabulary can’t touch you.”
“I’m surprised they’ve actually sent out parties,” Rashmika said. “It’s not as if I’m in any danger, is it?”
“Actually, there’s a bit more to it than that,” Crozet said.
Linxe looked at her husband.
What did the two of them know that Rashmika didn’t? Suddenly she felt a tension in her belly, a line of cold trickling down her spine. “Go on,” she said.
“They say they want to bring you back for questioning,” Linxe said.
“For running away from home? Haven’t they got anything better to do with their time?”
“It’s not for running away from home,” Linxe said. Again she glanced at Crozet. “It’s about that sabotage last week. You know the one I mean, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Rashmika said, remembering the crater where the demolition store had been.
“They’re saying you did it,” Crozet said.