Absolution Gap

NINE

Quaiche came around, upside down. He was still. Everything, in fact, was immensely still: the ship, the landscape, the sky. It was as if he had been planted here centuries ago and had only just opened his eyes.

But he did not think he could have been out for long: his memories of the terrifying attack and the dizzying fall were very clear. The wonder of it, really, was not that he remembered those events, but that he was alive at all.

Moving very gently in his restraints, he tried to survey the damage. The tiny ship creaked around him. At the limit of his vision, as far as he could twist his neck (which seemed not to be broken), he saw dust and ice still settling from one of the avalanche plumes. Everything was blurred, as if seen through a thin grey veil. The plume was the only thing moving, and it confirmed to him that he could not have been under for more than a few minutes. He could also see one end of the bridge, the marvellous eye-tricking complexity of scrolls supporting the gently curving roadbed. There had been a moment of anxi-ety, as he watched his ordnance rip away, when he had worried about destroying the thing that had brought him here. The bridge was huge, but it also looked as delicate as tissue paper. But there was no evidence that he had inflicted any damage. The thing must be stronger than it looked.

The ship creaked again. Quaiche could not see the ground with any clarity. The ship had come to rest upside down, but lad it really reached the bottom of Ginnungagap Rift?

He looked at the console but couldn’t focus on it properly. Couldn’t—now that he paid attention to the fact—focus on much at all. It was not so bad if he closed his left eye. The gee-force might have knocked a retina loose, he speculated. It was precisely that kind of fixable damage that the Daughter was prepared to inflict in the interests of bringing him back alive.

With his right eye open he appraised the console. There was a lot of red there—Latinate script proclaiming systems defects—but also many blank areas where there should have been something. The Daughter had clearly sustained heavy damage, he realised: not just mechanical, but also to the cybernetic core of her avionics suite. The ship was in a coma.

He tried speaking. “Executive override. Reboot.”

Nothing happened. Voice recognition might be one of the lost faculties. Either that or the ship was as alive as she was ever going to be.

He tried again, just to be on the safe side. “Executive override. Reboot.”

But still nothing happened. Close down that line of enquiry, he thought.

He moved again, shifting an arm until his hand came into contact with one of the tactile control clusters. There was discomfort as he moved, but it was mostly the diffuse pain of heavy bruising rather than the sharpness of broken or dislocated limbs. He could even shift his legs without too much unpleasantness. A screaming jag of pain in his chest didn’t bode well for his ribs, however, but his breathing seemed normal enough and there were no odd sensations anywhere else in his chest or abdomen. If a few cracked ribs and a detached retina were all he had suffered, he had done rather well.

“You always were a jammy sod,” he said to himself as his fingers groped around the many stubs and stalks of the tactile control cluster. Every voice command had a manual equivalent; it was just a question of remembering the right combinations of movements.

He had it. Finger there, thumb there. Squeeze. Squeeze again.

The ship coughed. Red script flickered momentarily into view where there had been nothing a moment before.

Getting somewhere. There was still juice in the old girl. He tried again. The ship coughed and hummed, trying to reboot herself. Flicker of red, then nothing.

“Come on,” Quaiche said through gritted teeth.

He tried again. Third time lucky? The ship spluttered, seemed to shiver. The red script appeared again, faded, then came back. Other parts of the display changed: the ship explored her own functionality as she came out of the coma.

“Nice one,” Quaiche said as the ship squirmed, reshaping her hull—probably not intentional, just some reflex adjustment back to the default profile. Rubble sputtered against the armour, dislodged in the process. The ship pitched several degrees, Quaiche’s view shifting.

“Careful…” he said.

It was too late. The Scavenger’s Daughter had begun to roll, keeling off the ledge where it had come to temporary rest. Quaiche had a glimpse of the floor, still a good hundred metres below, and then it was coming up to meet him, fast.

Subjective time stretched the fall to an eternity.

Then he hit the deck; although he didn’t black out, the tumbling series of impacts felt as if something had him in its jaws and was whacking him against the ground until he either snapped or died.

He groaned. This time it seemed unlikely that he was going to get away so lightly. There was heavy pressure on his chest, as if someone had placed an anvil there. The cracked ribs had given in, most likely. That was going to hurt when he had to move. He was still alive, though. And this time the Daughter had landed right-way-up. He could see the bridge again, framed like a scene in a tourist brochure. It was as if Fate were rubbing it in, reminding him of just what it was that had got him into this mess in the first place.

Most of the red parts on the console had gone out again. He could see the reflection of his own stunned-looking face hovering behind the fragmented Latinate script, deep shadows cutting into his cheeks and eye sockets. He had seen a similar image, once: the face of some religious figure burned into the fabric of an embalming shroud. Just a sketch of a face, like something done in thick strokes of charcoal.

The indoctrinal virus grumbled in his blood.

“Reboot,” he said, spitting crunched tooth.

There was no response. Quaiche groped for the tactile input cluster, found the same sequence of commands, applied them. Nothing happened. He tried again, knowing that this was his only option. There was no other way to awaken the ship without a full diagnostic harness.

The console flickered. Something was still alive; there was still a chance. As he kept on applying the wake-up command, a few more systems returned from sleep each time, until, after eight or nine tries, there was no further improvement. He didn’t want to continue for fear of draining the remaining avionics power reserves, or stressing the systems that were already alive. He would just have to make do with what he had.

Closing his left eye, he scanned the red messages: a cursory glance told him that the Scavenger’s Daughter was going nowhere in a hurry. Critical flight systems had been destroyed in the attack, secondaries smashed during the collision with the wall and the long tumble to the ground. His beautiful, precious gem of a private spacecraft was ruined. Even the self-repair mechanisms would have a hard time fixing her now, even if he had months to wait while they worked. But he supposed he should be grateful that the Daughter had kept him alive. In that sense she had not failed him.

He examined the read-outs again. The Daughter’s automated distress beacon was working. Its range would be restricted by the walls of ice on either side, but there was nothing to obstruct the signal from reaching upwards—except, of course, the gas giant he had positioned between himself and Morwenna. How long was it until she would emerge from the sunlit side of Haldora?

He checked the ship’s oneworking chronometer. Four hours until the Dominatrix would emerge from behind Haldora.

Four hours. That was all right. He could last that long. The Dominatrix would pick up the distress signal as soon as she came out from behind Haldora, and would then need an hour or so to get down to him. Ordinarily he would never have risked bringing the other ship so close to a potentially dangerous site, but he had no choice. Besides, he doubted that the booby-trap sentries were anything to worry about now: he had destroyed two of three and the third looked to have run out of power; it would surely have taken another pot shot at him by now if it had the means.

Four hours, plus another one to reach him: five in total. That was all it would take until he was safe and sound. He would sooner have been out of the mess right now, this instant, but he could hardly complain, especially not after telling Morwenna that she had to endure six hours away from him. And that business about not sewing the relay satellites? He had to admit to himself now that he had been thinking less about Morwenna’s safety and more about not wanting to waste any time. Well, he was getting a dose of his own medicine now, wasn’t he? Better take it like a man.

Five hours. Nothing. Piece of piss.

Then he noticed one of the other read-outs. He blinked, opened both eyes, hoping that it was some fault of his vision. But there was no mistake.

The hull was breached. The flaw must be tiny: a hairline crack. Ordinarily, it would have been sealed without him knowing about it, but with so much damage to the ship, the normal repair systems were inoperable. Slowly—slowly enough that he had yet to feel it—he was losing air pressure. The Daughter was doing her best to top up the supply with the pressurised reserves, but it could not continue this indefinitely.

Quaiche did the sums. Time to exhaustion: two hours.

He wasn’t going to make it.

Did it make any difference whether or not he panicked? He mulled this over, feeling that it was important to know. It was not simply the case that he was stuck in a sealed room with a finite amount of oxygen slowly being replaced by the carbon dioxide of his exhalations. The air was whistling out through a crack in the hull, and the leak was going to continue no matter how quickly he used up the oxygen by breathing. Even if he only drew one breath in the next two hours, there would still be no air left when he came to take the next. It wasn’t depleting oxygen that was his problem, it was escaping atmosphere. In two hours he would be sucking on good hard vacuum, the kind some people paid money for. They said it hurt, for the first few seconds. But for him the transition to airlessness would be gradual. He would be unconscious—more than likely dead—long before then. Perhaps within the next ninety minutes.

But it probably wouldn’t hurt not to panic, would it? It might make a slight difference, depending on the details of the leak. If the air was being lost as it made its way through the recycling system, then it would certainly help matters if he used it as slowly as possible. Not knowing where the crack was, he might as well assume that panic would make a difference to his life expectancy. Two hours might stretch to three… three to four if he was really lucky and prepared to tolerate a bit of brain damage. Four might, just might, stretch to five.

He was kidding himself. He had two hours. Two and a half at the absolute limit. Panic all you like, he told himself. It was not going to make a shred of difference.

The virus tasted his fear. It gulped it up, feeding on it. It had been simmering until now, but as he tried to hold the panic at bay it rose in him, crushing rational thought.

“No,” Quaiche said, “I don’t need you now.”

But maybe he did. What good was clarity of mind if there was nothing he could do to save himself? At least the virus would let him die with the illusion that he was in the presence of something larger than himself, something that cared for him and was there to watch over him as he faded away.

But the virus simply did not care either way. It was going to flood him with immanence whether he liked it or not. There was no sound save his own breathing and the occasional patter of icy scree still raining down on him, dislodged from the high sides of the rift during his descent. There was nothing to look at except the bridge. But in the silence, distantly, he heard organ music. It was quiet now, but coming nearer, and he knew that when it reached its awesome crescendo it would fill his soul with joy and terror. And though the bridge looked much the way it had before, he could see the beginnings of stained-glass glories in the black sky beyond it, squares and rectangles and lozenges of pastel light starting to shine through the darkness, like windows into something vaster and more glorious.

“No,” Quaiche said, but this time without conviction.

An hour passed. Systems gave up the ghost, portions of the red script dropping off the console. Nothing that failed was going to make much difference to Quaiche’s chances of survival. The ship was not going to put him out of his misery by blowing up, however painless and immediate that might have been. No, Quaiche thought: the Scavenger’s Daughter would do all in her power to keep him alive until that last ragged breath. The sheer futility of the exercise was completely wasted on the machine. She was still sending out that distress signal, even though he would be two or three hours dead by the time the Dominatrix received it.

He laughed: gallows humour. He had always thought of the Daughter as a supremely intelligent machine. By the standards of most spacecraft—certainly anything that did not already have at least a gamma-level subpersona running it—that was probably the case. But when you boiled it down to essentials she was still a bit on the dim side.

“Sorry, ship,” he said. And laughed again, except this time the laughing segued into a series of self-pitying sobs.

The virus was not helping. He had hoped that it would, but the feelings it brought were too superficial. When he most needed their succour he could feel them for the paper-thin facades they were. Just because the virus was tickling the parts of his brain that produced feelings of religious experience didn’t mean he was able to turn off the other parts of his mind that recognised these feelings as having been induced artificially. He truly felt himself to be in the presence of something sacred, but he also knew, with total clarity, that this was due to neuroanatomy. Nothing was really with him: the organ music, the stained-glass windows in the sky, the sense of proximity to something huge and timeless and infinitely compassionate were all explicable in terms of neural wiring, firing potentials, synaptic gaps.

In his moment of greatest need, when he most desired that comfort, it had deserted him. He was just a godless man with a botched virus in his blood, running out of air, running out of time, on a world to which he had given a name that would soon be forgotten.

“I’m sorry, Mor,” he said. “I screwed up. I really fucking screwed up.”

He thought of her, so distant from him, so unreachable… and then he remembered the glass-blower.

He hadn’t thought about the man for a long time, but then again it had been a long time since he had felt this alone. What was his name? Trollhattan, that was it. Quaiche had encountered him in one of the migrogravitic commercial atria of Pygmalion, one of Parsifal’s moons, around Tau Ceti.

There had been a glass-blowing demonstration. The free-fall artisan Trollhattan had been an ancient Skyjack defector with plug-in limbs and a face with skin like cured elephant hide, cratered with the holes where radiation-strike melanomas had been inexpertly removed. Trollhattan made fabulous glass constructs: lacy, room-filling things, some of them so delicate that they could not withstand even the mild gravity of a major moon. The constructs were always different. There were three-dimensional glass orreries that stressed the eye with their aching fineness. There were flocks of glass birds, thousands of them, linked together by the tiniest mutual contact of wingtip against wingtip. There were shoals of a thousand fish, the glass of each fish shot through with the subtlest of colours, yellows and blues, the rose-tipped fins of a heartbreaking translucence. There were squadrons of angels, skirmishes of galleons from the age of fighting sail, fanciful reproductions of major space battles. There were creations that were almost painful to look at, as if by the very act of observation one might subtly unbalance the play of light and shade across them, causing some tiny latent crack to widen to the point where the structure became unsustainable. Once, an entire Trollhattan glasswork had indeed spontaneously exploded during its public unveiling, leaving no shard larger than a beetle. No one had ever been sure whether that had been part of the intended effect.

What everyone agreed on was that Trollhattan artefacts were expensive. They were not cheap to buy in the first place, but the export costs were a joke. Just getting one of the things off Pygmalion would bankrupt a modest Demarchist state. They could be buffered in smart packing to tolerate modest accelerations, but every attempt to ship a Trollhattan artefact between solar systems had resulted in a lot of broken glass. All surviving works were still in the Tau Ceti system. Entire families had relocated to Parsifal just to be able to possess and show off their own Trollhattan creation.

It was said that somewhere in interstellar space, a slow-moving automated barge carried hundreds of the artefacts, crawling towards another system (which one depended on which story you listened to) at a few per cent of lightspeed, fulfilling a commission placed decades earlier. It was also said that whoever had the wit to intercept and pirate that barge—without shattering the Trollhattan artefacts—would be wealthy beyond the bounds of decency. In an era in which practically anything with a blueprint could be manufactured at negligible cost, handmade artefacts with watertight provenance were amongst the few “valuable” things left.

Quaiche had considered dabbling in the Trollhattan market during his stay on Parsifal. He had even, briefly, hooked up with an artisan who believed he could produce high-quality fakes using miniature servitors to chew away an entire room-sized block of glass. Quaiche had seen the dry-runs: they were good, but not that good. There was something about the prismatic quality of a real Trollhattan that nothing else in the universe quite matched. It was like the difference between ice and diamond. In any case, the provenance part had been the killer. Unless someone killed off Trollhattan, there was no way the market would swallow the fakes.

Quaiche had been sniffing around Trollhattan when he saw the demonstration. He had wanted to see if there was any dirt he could use on the glass-blower, anything that might make him open to negotiation. If Trollhattan could be persuaded to turn a blind eye when the fakes started hitting the market—saying he didn’t exactly remember making them, but didn’t exactly remember not making them either—then there might still be some mileage to be had out of the scam.

But Trollhattan had been untouchable. He never said anything and he never moved in the usual artist’s circles.

He just blew glass.

Dismayed, his enthusiasm for the whole thing waning in any case, Quaiche had lingered long enough to watch part of the demonstration. His cold, dispassionate interest in the practical matter of the value of Trollhattan’s art had quickly given way to awe at what was actually involved.

Trollhattan’s demonstration involved only a small work, not one of the room-filling creations. When Quaiche arrived, the man had already crafted a wonderfully intricate free-floating plant, a thing of translucent green stem and leaves with many horn-shaped flowers in pale ruby; now Trollhattan was fashioning an exquisite shimmering blue thing next to one of the flowers. Quaiche did not immediately recognise the shape, but when Trollhattan began to draw out the incredibly fine curve of a beak towards the flower, Quaiche saw the hummingbird. The arc of amber tapered to its point a finger’s width from the flower, and Quaiche imagined that this would be it, that the bird and the plant would float next to one another without being connected. But then the angle of the light shifted and he realised that between the tip of the beak and the stigma of the plant was the finest possible line of blown glass, a crack of gold like the last filament of daylight in a planetary sunset, and that what he was seeing was the tongue of the hummingbird, blown in glass.

The effect had surely been deliberate, for the other onlookers noticed the tongue at more or less the same moment. No suggestion of emotion flickered on the parts of Trollhattan’s face still nominally capable of registering it.

In that moment, Quaiche despised the glass-blower. He despised the vanity of his genius, judging that studied and total absence of emotion to be as reprehensible as any display of pride. Yet he also felt a vast upwelling of admiration for the trick he had just seen performed. How would it feel, Quaiche wondered, to import a glimpse of the miraculous into everyday life? Trollhattan’s spectators lived in an age of miracles and wonders. Yet that glimpse of the hummingbird’s tongue had clearly been the most surprising and wonderful thing any of them had seen in a long time.

It was certainly true for Quaiche. A sliver of glass had moved him to the core, when he was least expecting it.

He thought now of the hummingbird’s tongue. Whenever he was forced to leave Morwenna, he always imagined a thread of stretching molten glass, tinged with gold and spun out to the exquisite thinness of the hummingbird’s tongue, connecting himself to her. As the distance increased, so did the thinness and inherent fragility of the tongue. But as long as he was able to hold that image in mind, and consider himself still linked to her, his isolation did not seem total. He could still feel her through the glass, the tremors of her breathing racing along the thread.

But the thread seemed thinner and frailer now than he had ever imagined it, and he didn’t think he could feel her breathing at all.

He checked the time: another half-hour had passed. Optimistically, he could not have much more than thirty or forty minutes’ of air left. Was it his imagination or had the air already begun to taste stale and thin?

Rashmika saw the caravan before the others did. It was half a kilometre ahead, merging on to the same track they were following, but still half-hidden by a low series of icy bluffs. It appeared to move very slowly compared to Crozet’s vehicle, but as they got closer she realised that this was not true: the vehicles of the caravan were much larger, and it was only this size that made their progress seem at all ponderous.

The caravan was a string of perhaps four dozen machines stretching along nearly a quarter of a kilometre of the trail. They moved in two closely spaced columns, almost nose-to-tail, with no more than a metre or two between the back of each vehicle and the front of the one behind it. In Rashmika’s estimation, no two of them were exactly alike, although in a few cases it was possible to see that the vehicles must have started off identically, before being added to, chopped about or generally abused by their owners. Their upper structures were a haphazard confusion of jutting additions buttressed with scaffolding. Symbols of ecclesiastical affiliation had been sprayed on wherever possible, often in complicated chains denoting the shifting allegiances between the major churches. On the rooftops of many of the caravan machines were enormous tilted surfaces, all canted at the same precise angle by gleaming pistons. Vapour puffed from hundreds of exhaust apertures.

The majority of the caravan vehicles moved on wheels as tall as houses, six or eight under each machine. A few others moved on plodding caterpillar tracks, or multiple sets of jointed walking limbs. A couple of the vehicles used the same kind of rhythmic skiing motion as Crozet’s icejammer. One machine moved like a slug, inching itself along via propulsive waves of its segmented mechanical body. She had no idea at all how a couple of them were propelled. But regardless of their mismatched designs, all the machines were able to keep exact pace with each other. The entire ensemble moved with such coordinated precision that there were walkways and tunnels thrown across the gaps between them. They creaked and flexed as the distances varied by fractions of a metre, but were never broken or crushed.

Crozet steered his icejammer alongside the caravan, using what remained of the trail, and inched forwards. The rumbling wheels towered above the little vehicle. Rashmika watched Crozet’s hands on the controls with a degree of unease. All it would take would be a slip of the wrist, a moment’s inattention, and they would be crushed under those wheels. But Crozet looked calm enough, as if he had done this kind of thing hundreds of times before.

“What are you looking for?” Rashmika asked.

“The king vehicle,” Crozet said quietly. “The reception point—the place where the caravan does business. It’s normally somewhere near the front. This is a pretty big lash-up, though. Haven’t seen one like this for a few years.”

“I’m impressed,” Rashmika said, looking up at the moving edifice of machinery towering above the little jammer.

“Well, don’t be too impressed,” Crozet said. “A cathedral—a proper cathedral—is a bit bigger than this. They move slower, but they don’t stop either. They can’t, not easily. Like stopping a glacier. Near one of those mothers, even I get a bit twitchy. Wouldn’t be half so bad if they didn’t move…”

“There’s the king,” Linxe said, pointing through the gap in the first column. “Other side, dear. You’ll have to loop around.”

“Fuck. This is the bit I really don’t like.”

“Play it safe and come up from the rear.”

“Nah.” Crozet flashed an arc of dreadful teeth. “Got to show some bloody balls, haven’t I?”

Rashmika felt her seat kick into the back of her spine as Crozet applied full power. The column slid past as they overtook the vehicles one by one. They were moving faster, but not by very much. Rashmika had expected the caravan to move silently, the way most things did on Hela. She couldn’t exactly hear it, but she felt it—a ramble below audible sound, a chorus of sonic components reaching her though the ice, through the ski blades, through the complicated suspension systems of the icejammer. There was the steady rumble of the wheels, like a million booted feet being stamped in impatience. There was the thud, thud, thud, as each plate of the caterpillar tracks slammed into ice. There was the scrabble of picklike mechanical feet struggling for traction against frosty ground. There was the low, groaning scrape of the segmented machine, and a dozen other noises she couldn’t isolate. Behind it all, like a series of organ notes, Rashmika heard the labour of countless engines.

Crozet’s icejammer had gained some distance from the leading pair of machines, which had dropped back behind them by perhaps twice their own length. Batteries of floodlights shone ahead of the caravan, bathing Crozet’s vehicle in harsh blue radiance. Rashmika saw tiny figures moving behind windows, and even on the top of the machines themselves, leaning against railings. They wore pressure suits marked with religious iconography.

The caravans were a fact of life on Hela, but Rashmika admitted to only scant knowledge of how they operated. She knew the basics, though. The caravans were the mobile agents of the great churches, the bodies that ran the cathedrals. Of course, the cathedrals moved—slowly, as Crozet had said—but they were almost always confined to the equatorial belt of the Permanent Way. They sometimes deviated from the Way, but never this far north or south.

The all-terrain caravans, however, could travel more freely. They had the speed to make journeys far from the Way and yet still catch up with their mother cathedrals on the same revolution. They split up and re-formed as they moved, sending out smaller expeditions and merging with others for parts of their journeys. Often, a single caravan might represent three or four different churches, churches that might have fundamentally different views on the matter of the Quaiche miracle and its interpretation. But all the churches shared common needs for labourers and component parts. They all needed recruits.

Crozet steered the icejammer into the central part of the path, immediately ahead of the convoy. They had encountered a slight upgrade now, and the slope was causing the icejammer to lose its advantage of speed compared to the caravan, which merely rolled on, oblivious to the change in level.

“Be careful now,” Linxe said.

Crozet flicked his control sticks and the rear of the icejammer swung to the other side of the procession. The nose followed, and with a thud the skis settled into older grooves in the ice. The gradient had sharpened even more, but that was all right now—Crozet no longer needed to keep ahead of the caravan. Slowly, therefore, but with the unstoppable momentum of land sliding past a ship, the lead machines caught up with them.

“That’s the king, all right,” Crozet said. “Looks like they’re ready for us, too.”

Rashmika had no idea what he meant, but as they drew alongside, she saw a pair of skeletal cranes swinging out from the roof, dropping metal hooks. A jaunty pair of suited figures rode down on the cable lines, one standing on each hook. Then they passed out of view, and nothing happened for several further seconds until she heard heavy footsteps stomping around somewhere on the roof of the jammer. Then she heard the clunk of metal against metal, and a moment later the motion of the icejammer was dreamily absent. They were being winched off the ice, suspended to one side of the caravan.

“Cheeky sods do it every time,” Crozet said. “But there’s no point arguing with ‘em. You either take it or leave it.”

“At least we can get off and stretch our legs for a bit,” Linxe said.

“Are we on the caravan now?” Rashmika asked. “Officially, I mean?”

“We’re on it,” Crozet said.

Rashmika nodded, relieved that they were now out of reach of the Vigrid constabulary. There had been no sign of the investigators, but in her mind’s eye they had only ever been one or two bends behind Crozet’s icejammer.

She still did not know what to make of the business of the constabulary. She had expected some fuss to be made if the authorities discovered she had run away. But beyond a request for people to keep a lookout for her—and to return her to the badlands if they found her—she had not expected any active efforts to be made to bring her back. It was worse than that, of course, since the constabulary had got it into their heads that she’d had something to do with the explosion in the demolition store. She guessed they were assuming that she was running away because she had done it, out of fear at being found out. They were wrong, of course, but in the absence of a better suspect she had no obvious defence.

Crozet and Linxe, thankfully, had given her the benefit of the doubt: either that or they just didn’t care what she might have done. But she had still been worried about a constabulary roadblock bringing the icejammer to a halt before they reached the caravan.

Now she could stop worrying—about that, at least.

It only took a minute for a docking arrangement to be set up. Crozet appeared to have precious little say in the matter, for without him doing anything that Rashmika was aware of, the air in the vehicle gusted, making her ears pop slightly. Then she heard footsteps coming aboard.

“They like you to know who’s boss,” Crozet told her, as if this needed explaining. “But don’t be afraid of anyone here, Rashmika. They put on a show of strength, but they still need us badlanders.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Rashmika told him.

A man bustled into the cabin as if he had left on some minor errand only a minute earlier. His wide froglike face had a meaty complexion, the bridge of skin between the base of his flat nub of a nose and the top of his mouth glistening with something unpleasant. He wore a long-hemmed coat of thick purple fabric, the collars and cuffs generously puffed. A lopsided beret marked with a tiny intricate sigil sat lopsidedly on the red froth of his hair, while his fingers were encumbered by many ornate rings. He carried a compad in one hand, its read-out screen scrolling through columns of numbers in antique script. There was, Rashmika noticed, a kind of construction perched on his right shoulder, a jointed thing of bright green columns and tubes. She had no idea of its function, whether it was an ornament or some arcane medical accessory.

“Mr. Crozet,” the man said by way of welcome. “What an unexpected surprise. I really didn’t think you were going to make it this time.”

Crozet shrugged. Rashmika could tell he was doing his best to look nonchalant and unconcerned, but the act needed some work. “Can’t keep a good man down, Quaestor.”

“Perhaps not.” The man glanced at the screen, pursing his lips in the manner of someone sucking on a lemon. “You have, however, left things a tiny bit late in the day. Pickings are slim, Crozet. I trust you will not be too disappointed.”

“My life is a series of disappointments, Quaestor. I think I’ve probably got used to it by now.”

“One devoutly hopes that is the case. We must all of us know our station in life, Crozet.”

“I certainly know mine, Quaestor.” Crozet did something to the control panel, presumably powering down the icejammer. “Well, are you open for business or not? You’ve really been working hard to polish that lukewarm welcome routine.”

The man smiled very thinly. “This is hospitality, Crozet. A lukewarm welcome would have involved leaving you on the ice, or running you over.”

“I’d best count my blessings, then.”

“Who are you?” Rashmika asked suddenly, surprising herself.

“This is Quaestor…” Linxe said, before she was cut off.

“Quaestor Rutland Jones,” the man interrupted, his tone ac-torly, as if playing to the gallery. “Master of Auxiliary Supplies, Superintendent of Caravans and other Mobile Units, Roving Legate of the First Adventist Church. And you’d be?”

“The First Adventists?” she asked, just to make sure she had heard him properly. There were many offshoots of the First Adventists, a number of them rather large and influential churches in their own right, and some of them had names so similar that it was easy to get them confused. But the First Ad-ventist Church was the one she was interested in. She added, “As in the oldest church, the one that goes all the way back?”

“Unless I am very mistaken about my employer, yes. I still don’t believe you have answered my question, however.”

“Rashmika,” she said, “Rashmika Els.”

“Els.” The man chewed on the syllable. “Quite a common name in the villages of the Vigrid badlands, I believe. But I don’t think I’ve ever encountered an Els this far south.”

“You might have, once,” Rashmika said. But that was a little unfair: though the caravan her brother had travelled on had also been affiliated to the Adventists, it was unlikely that it had been this one.

“I’d remember, I think.”

“Rashmika is travelling with us,” Linxe said. “Rashmika is… a clever girl. Aren’t you, dear?”

“I get by,” Rashmika said.

“She thought she might find a role in the churches,” Linxe said. She licked her fingers and neatened the hair covering her birthmark.

He put down the compad. “A role?”

“Something technical,” Rashmika said. She had rehearsed this encounter a dozen times, always in her imagination having the upper hand, but it was all happening too quickly and not the way she had hoped.

“We can always use keen young girls,” the quaestor said. He was digging in a chest pocket for something. “And boys, for that matter. It would depend on your talents.”

“I have no talents” Rashmika said, transforming the word into an obscenity. “But I happen to be literate and numerate. I can program most marques of servitor. I know a great deal about the study of the scuttlers. I have ideas about their extinction. Surely that can be of use to someone in the church.”

“She wonders if she couldn’t find a position in one of the church-sponsored archaeological study groups,” Linxe said.

“Is that so?” the quaestor asked.

Rashmika nodded. As far as she was concerned, the church-sponsored study groups were a joke, existing only to rubber-stamp current Quaicheist doctrine regarding the scuttlers; but she had to start somewhere. Her real goal was to reach Harbin, not to advance her study of the scuttlers. However, it would be much easier to find him if she began her service in a clerical position—such as one of the study groups—rather than with lowly work like Way repair.

“I think I could be of value,” she said.

“Knowing a great deal about the study of a subject is not the same as knowing anything about the subject itself,” the quaestor told her with a sympathetic smile. He pulled his hand from his breast pocket, a smaHpinch of seeds between forefinger and thumb. The jointed green thing on his shoulder stirred, moving with a curious stiffness that reminded Rashmika of something inflated, like a balloon-creature. It was an animal, but unlike any that Rashmika—in her admittedly limited experience-remembered seeing. She saw now that at one end of its thickest tube was a turretlike head, with faceted eyes and a delicate, mechanical-looking mouth. The quaestor offered his fingers to the creature, pursing his lips in encouragement. The creature stretched itself down his arm and attacked the pinch of seeds with a nibbling politeness. What was it? she wondered. The body and limbs were insectile, but the elongated coil of its tail, which was wrapped around the quaestor’s upper arm several times, was more suggestive of a reptile. And there was something uniquely birdlike about the way it ate. She remembered birds from somewhere, brilliant crested strutting things of cobalt blue with tails that opened like fans. Peacocks. But where had she ever seen peacocks?

The quaestor smiled at his pet. “Doubtless you have read many books,” he said, looking sidelong at Rashmika. “That is to be applauded.”

She looked at the animal warily. “I grew up in the digs, Quaestor. I’ve helped with the excavation work. I’ve breathed scuttler dust from the moment I was born.”

“Unfortunately, though, that’s hardly the most unique of claims. How many scuttler fossils have you examined?”

“None,” Rashmika said, after a moment.

“Well, then.” The quaestor dabbed his forefinger against his lip, then touched it against the mouthpiece of the animal. “That’s enough for you, Peppermint.”

Crozet coughed. “Shall we continue this discussion aboard the caravan, Quaestor? I don’t want to have too great a journey back home, and we still have a lot of business to attend to.”

The creature—Peppermint—retreated back along the quaestor’s arm now that its feast was over. It began to clean its face with tiny scissoring forelimbs.

“The girl’s your responsibility, Crozet?” the quaestor asked.

“Not exactly, no.” He looked at Rashmika and corrected himself. “What I mean is, yes, I’m taking care of her until she gets where she’s going, and I’ll take it personally if anyone lays a hand on her. But what she does with herself after that is none of my business.”

The quaestor’s attention snapped back to Rashmika. “And how old are you, exactly?”

“Old enough,” she said.

The green creature turned the turret of its head towards her, its blank faceted eyes like blackberries.

Quaiche slipped in and out of consciousness. With each transition, the difference between the two states became less clear cut. He hallucinated, and then hallucinated that the hallucinations were real. He kept seeing rescuers scrabbling over the scree, picking up their pace as they saw him, waving their gloved hands in greeting. The second or third time, it made him laugh to think that he had imagined rescuers arriving under exactly the same circumstances as the real ones. No one would ever believe him, would they?

But somewhere between the rescuers arriving and the point where they started getting him to safety, he always ended up back in the ship, his chest aching, one eye seeing the world as if through a gauze.

The Dominatrix kept arriving, sliding down between the sheer walls of the rift. The long, dark ship would kneel down on spikes of arresting thrust. The mid-hull access hatch would slide open and Morwenna would emerge. She would come out in a blur of pistons, racing to his rescue, as magnificent and terrible as an army arrayed for battle. She would pull him from the wreck of the Daughter, and with a dreamlike illogic he would not need to breathe as she helped him back to the other ship through a crisp, airless landscape of shadow and light. Or she would come out in the scrimshaw suit, somehow managing to make it move even though he knew the thing was welded tight, incapable of flexing.

Gradually the hallucinations took precedence over rational thought. In a period of lucidity, it occurred to Quaiche that the kindest thing would be for one of the hallucinations to occur just as he died, so that he was spared the jolting realisation that he had still to be rescued.

He saw Jasmina coming to him, striding across the scree with Grelier lagging behind. The queen was clawing out her eyes as she approached, banners of gore streaming after her.

He kept waking up, but the hallucinations blurred into one another, and the feelings induced by the virus became stronger. He had never known such intensity of experience before, even when the virus had first entered him. The music was behind every thought, the stained-glass light permeating every atom of the universe. He felt intensely observed, intensely loved. The emotions did not feel like a fa?ade any more, but the way things really were. It was as if until now he had only been seeing the reflection of something, or hearing the muffled echo of some exquisitely lovely and heart-wrenching music. Could this really just be the action of an artificially engineered virus on his brain? It had always felt like that before, a series of crude mechanically induced responses, but now the emotions felt like an integral part of him, leaving no room for anything else. It was like the difference between a theatrical stage effect and a thunderstorm.

Some dwindling, rational part of him said that nothing had really changed, that the feelings were still due to the virus. His brain was being starved of oxygen as the air in the cabin ran out. Under those circumstances, it would not have been unusual to feel some emotional changes. And with the virus still present, the effects could have been magnified many times.

But that rational part was quickly squeezed out of existence.

All he felt was the presence of the Almighty.

“All right,” Quaiche said, before passing out, “I believe now. You got me. But I still need a miracle.”