Absolution Gap

FORTY-EIGHT

From their newly constructed garrisons in the steep walls of the holdfast, detachments of Cathedral Guard stormed the downed hulk of the Nostalgia for Infinity. This time they were prepared: they had sifted the intelligence reports from the earlier attack and had some idea of what to expect. They knew that they were entering an active and hostile environment—not just because of the resistance they could expect from the Ultras, but because this ship had the means to turn against them, crushing and impaling, drowning and suffocating. None of this needed explanation, however: that was someone else’s problem. All that concerned the Guard units was the appropriate response.

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.”

“I’d worry about that ship if I were you,” Rashmika said. “It’s close enough to make trouble, even now. Are you sure you feel safe, Surgeon-General?”

“They won’t try anything,” Quaiche said. “Too much risk of hurting you. That’s why we’ve got you with us.”

Unlike Grelier and Rashmika, the dean was not wearing any kind of vacuum suit. He still travelled in his mobility couch, but now a transparent blister had been fitted into place around the couch’s upper surface, providing the necessary amenities of life-support. They heard his voice through their helmet speakers: it sounded just as thin and papery as usual.

“We can’t all fit in my ship,” Grelier said. “And I’m certainly not taking the risk of getting into their shuttle. We don’t know what booby traps might be aboard it.”

“That’s all right,” Quaiche said. “I’ve thought of that.”

Light hit their faces. Despite Grelier’s hold on her, Aura looked around. A third ship—one she had not seen before—was holding station on the side of the ramp. It was long and thin, like an arrow. It held itself upright, balancing on a single spike of thrust. Where had it come from? Rashmika was quite certain she would have noticed if another ship had approached the cathedral from any direction.

“It was here all along,” Quaiche said, as if reading her mind, “built into the architecture below us. I always knew I’d need it one day.” She noticed now that he had something in his lap: a portable control deck of some kind. The bony tips of his fingers were skating over it, like a spiritualist’s over a Ouija board.

“Your ship?” Rashmika asked.

“It’s the Dominatrix,” Grelier interjected, as if this was supposed to mean something to her. “The ship that brought him to Hela in the first place. The one that rescued him when he got into trouble poking his nose into things that didn’t concern him.”

“So it has history,” Quaiche said. “All right, let’s get aboard. We haven’t got time to stand around admiring things. I told Haken we’d be at the holdfast within half an hour. I want to be there when the Guards declare her secured.“

“You’ll never take the Infinity,” Rashmika said.

A door opened in the side of Quaiche’s ship, exactly aligned with the side of the ramp. Quaiche steered his couch towards it, obviously intent on being the first aboard his private craft. Rashmika felt a tingle of apprehension: was he going to leave without them? She supposed anything was possible now: all the talk of safeguards, of having her along for the ride, might have been lies. As he had said in the garret, one era was ending and another beginning. Old loyalties—and possibly even rationality itself—could not be counted upon.

“Wait for us,” Grelier said.

“Of course I’ll wait for you! Who else is going to keep me alive?”

The ship yawed away from the landing pad, leaving a metre-wide gap. Rashmika saw Quaiche’s fingers skate with panicked speed over the control board. The stabilising jets from the waiting ship stammered out in different directions: rapiers of purple-edged fire lasting a fraction of a second.

Glaur reached the repair shop. It was a lavish grotto of possible escape tools, all sparklingly clean and neatly racked. He could cut his way out of anything, given the equipment at hand. His only problem would be manhandling whatever he chose all the way back up the spiral staircase to the locked gate. And he would need space to use it safely, without injuring himself: not so simple given the tight spiral of the stairs. He appraised the tools: even given that constraint, there were still adequate possibilities. It would just take a little time, that was all. His gloved hands dithered over one tool, then another. Make the right choice: the one thing he didn’t want to have to do was come back down the stairs again, especially not while wearing the suit.

He looked back across the floor of Motive Power. Now that the idea of cutting his way out had occurred to him, he realised that he had no need to ascend the stairs at all. His only objective was to leave the Lady Morwenna by the quickest possible means: he had no possessions worth saving, no loved ones he needed to find and rescue, and there was—now that he thought about it properly—very little chance of finding a vehicle on the garage deck.

He could cut his way out right here, right now.

Glaur gathered the tools of his choice and walked across the floor to one of the transparent panels set into it. The ground was still oozing below: almost a twenty-metre drop, but that was a lot more palatable than going all the way back up to the next level and finding his way out by other means. He could cut through the glass and its associated grillework easily: all he needed was a means to lower himself to the ground.

He went back to the repair shop and found a spool of wire cabling. There was probably some rope somewhere, but he didn’t have time to hunt for it. The wire would have to do. He wouldn’t be asking very much of it, not in Hela’s gravity.

Back at the window in the floor, Glaur looked around for the nearest solid piece of machinery. There: the support stanchion for one of the catwalks, bolted solidly to the floor. There was more than enough cable to reach it.

He looped the line around the stanchion, then walked back to the glass panel. One end of the cable formed a convenient loop: he undid his suit utility belt and passed the loop through from one end, then refastened the belt securely.

He judged that the line would drop him to within three or four metres of the surface. The crudity of the arrangement offended Glaur’s engineering sensibilities, but he did not want to spend one minute longer than was absolutely necessary aboard the doomed cathedral.

He closed his helmet faceplate and made sure that the air was chugging in correctly. Then he sat on the floor, the glass panel between his legs, and turned on the cutter. Glaur plunged die blinding stiletto of the beam into the glass, and almost immediately saw the cold jet of escaping gas on the other side of the panel. Very shortly it would be a gale as all the air in the hall was sucked away. Emergency shutters would seal off the rest of the cathedral, but anyone still up there was probably on borrowed time already. It was possible, Glaur reflected, that he was the last man aboard the Lady Morwenna. The thought thrilled him: he had never expected fate to lay that kind of significance upon his life.

He carried on cutting, thinking of the stories he would tell.