She looked up, craning her neck as far as the awkward articulation of the helmet joint permitted. The sky was full of counter-moving lights. It was as if there were two celestial spheres up there, two crystal globes nested one within the other. As always the effect was immediately dizzying. Normally the sense of vertigo was little more than a nuisance, but this high up it could easily kill her.
Rashmika tightened her grip on the railing and looked back down at the horizon again. Then, steeled, she looked up once more.
The illusion that she stood at the centre of two spheres was not entirely inaccurate. The lights pinned to the outermost sphere were the stars, impossibly distant; pinned to the innermost sphere were the ships in orbit around Hela, the sunlight glinting off the polished perfection of their hulls. Occasionally one or other would flicker with the hard gemlike flash of steering thrust as the Ultra crews trimmed their orbits or prepared for departure.
At any one time, Rashmika had heard, there were between thirty and fifty ships in orbit around Hela, always coming and going. Most were not large vessels, for the Ultras distrusted Haldora and preferred to hold their most valuable assets much further out. In general those she saw were in-system shuttles, large enough to hold frozen pilgrims and a modest team of Ultra negotiators. The ships that flew between Hela and orbit were usually even smaller, for the churches did not allow anything large to approach Hela’s surface.
The big ships, the starships — the lighthuggers — made only very rare visits to Hela’s orbit. When they did, they hung in the sky like ornaments, sliding along invisible tracks from horizon to horizon. Rashmika had seen very few of those in her lifetime; they always impressed and scared her at the same time. Her world was a froth of ice lathered around a core of rubble. It was fragile. Having one of those vessels nearby — especially when they made main-drive adjustments — was like holding a welding torch close to a snowball.
The vertigo returned in waves. Rashmika looked back towards the horizon, easing the strain on her neck. The old suit was dependable, but it was not exactly engineered for sightseeing.
Here, instead, was Haldora. Two-thirds of it had risen above the horizon now. Because there was no air on Hela, nothing to blur features on the horizon, there were very few visual cues to enable one to discriminate between something a few dozen kilometres away and something nearly a million kilometres beyond that. The gas giant appeared to be an extension of the world on which she stood. It looked larger when it was near the horizon than the zenith, but Rashmika knew that this was an illusion, an accidental by-product of the way her mind was wired together. Haldora loomed about forty times larger in the sky of Hela than the Moon did in the skies of Earth. She had always wondered about this, for it implied that the Moon was really not a very impressive thing compared to Haldora, in spite of the Moon’s prominence in Earth literature and mythology.
From the angle at which she saw it, Haldora appeared as a fat crescent. Even without the suit’s contrast filters slid down, she made out the bands of equatorial coloration that striped the world from pole to pole: shades of ochre and orange, sepia and buff, vermilion and amber. She saw the curlicues and flukes where the colour bands mingled or bled; the furious scarlet eye of a storm system, like a knot in wood. She saw the tiny dark shadows of the many smaller moons that wheeled around Haldora, and the pale arc of the world’s single ring.
Rashmika crouched down until she was sitting on her haunches. It was as uncomfortable as trying to look up, but she held the posture for as long as she was able. At the same time she kept on looking at Haldora, willing it, daring it to vanish, to do that which had brought them all here in the first place. But the world simply hung there, seemingly anchored to the landscape, close enough to touch, as real as anything she had ever seen in her life.
And yet, she thought, it does vanish. That it happened — that it continued to happen — was not disputed, at least not by anyone who had spent any significant time on Hela. Look at it long enough, she thought, and — unless you are unlucky — you will see it happen.
It just wasn’t her turn today.
Rashmika stood up, then made her way past the point where she had emerged, towards the rear of the vehicle. She was looking back along the procession of the caravan now, and she could see the other machines rising and falling in waves as they moved over slight undulations in the trail. The caravan was even longer than when she had first arrived: at some point, without any fanfare, a dozen more units had tagged on to the rear. It would keep growing until it reached the Permanent Way, at which point it would fragment again as various sections were assigned to specific cathedrals.
She reached the limit of the catwalk, at the back of the vehicle. There was an abyss between her and the next machine, spanned only by a flimsy-looking bridge formed from many metal slats. It had not been apparent from the ground, but now she saw that the distance — vertical and horizontal — was changing all the while, making the little bridge lash and twist like something in pain. Instead of the stiff railings she now held, there were only metal wires. Down below, halfway to the ground, was a pressurised connector that puffed in and out like a bellows. That looked much safer.
Rashmika supposed that she could go back inside the caravan and find her way to that connector. Or she could pretend that she had done enough exploring for one day. The last thing she needed to do was start making enemies this early in her quest. There would be plenty of time for that later on, she was certain.
Rashmika stepped back, but only for a moment. Then she returned to the bridge and spread her arms apart so that each hand could grip one of the wire lines. The bridge writhed ahead of her, the metal plates slipping apart, revealing an awful absence. She took a step forwards, planting one booted foot on the first plate.
It did not feel safe. The plate gave beneath her, offering no hint of solidity.
‘Go on,’ she said, goading herself.
She took the next step, and both feet were on the bridge. She looked back. The lead vehicle pitched and yawed. The bridge squirmed under her, throwing her from one side to the other. She held on tightly. She wanted desperately to turn back, but a small, quiet voice told her she must not. The voice told her that if she did not have the courage to do this one simple thing, then she could not possibly have the courage to find her brother.
Rashmika took another step along the bridge. She began to cross the gap. It was what she had to do.
FIFTEEN
Ararat, 2675
Blood bustled into the conference room, a huge number of rolled-up maps tucked beneath his arms. He placed the maps on the table and then spread one of them wide, the map flattening itself obediently. It was a single sheet of thick creamy paper as wide as the table, with the slightly mottled texture of leather. At a command from Blood, topographic features popped into exaggerated relief, then shaded themselves according to the current pattern of daylight and darkness on that part of Ararat. Latitude and longitude appeared as thin glowing lines, labelled with tiny numerals.
Khouri leant across, studying the map for a moment. She turned it slightly, then pointed to one small chain of islands. ‘Near here,’ she said, ‘about thirty kilometres west of that strait, eight hundred kilometres north of here.’
‘Is this thing updated in real time?’ Clavain asked.
‘Refresh time is about every two days on average,’ Scorpio said. ‘It can take a bit longer. Depends on the vagaries of satellite positions, high-altitude balloons and cloud cover. Why?’
‘Because it looks as if there’s something more or less where she said there would be.’
‘He’s right,’ Khouri said. ‘It has to be Skade’s ship, doesn’t it?’
Scorpio leant in to inspect the tiny white dot. ‘That’s no ship,’ he said. ‘It’s just a speck of ice, like a small iceberg.’
‘You’re sure about that?’ Clavain asked.
Blood jabbed his trotter at the point Khouri had indicated. ‘Let’s be certain. Map: magnify, tenfold.’
‘No ship,’ Scorpio said.
Clavain sounded less certain. ‘Ana, the craft Skade came down in — you said in your report that it was a heavy corvette, correct?’
‘I’m no expert on ships, but that’s what I was told.’
‘You said it was fifty metres long. That would be about right for a moray-class corvette. The funny thing is, that iceberg looks about the same size. The proportions are consistent — maybe a bit larger, but not much.’
‘Could be coincidence,’ Blood said. ‘You know there are always bits of iceberg drifting down into those latitudes. Sometimes they even make it as far south as here.’
‘But there are no other icebergs in the surrounding area,’ Clavain pointed out.
‘All the same,’ Scorpio said, ‘there can’t be a ship in that thing, can there? Why would it have ended up covered in ice? If anything, ships come in hot, not cold. And why wouldn’t the ice have melted by now?’
‘We’ll find out when we get there,’ Clavain said slowly. ‘In the meantime, let’s stick to practicalities. We won’t want to alarm Skade into doing something rash, so we’ll make sure our approach is slow and obvious.’ He indicated a spot on the map, to the south of the iceberg. ‘I suggest we take a shuttle out to about here; Antoinette can fly us. Then we’ll drop two or three boats and make the rest of the crossing by sea. We’ll carry surgical equipment and close-quarters arms, but nothing excessive. If we need to destroy the ship we can always call in an air-strike from the mainland.’ He looked up, his finger still pressing down on the map. ‘If we leave this afternoon, we can time our arrival at the iceberg for dawn, which will give us a whole day in which to complete negotiations with Skade.’
‘Wait a moment,’ said Dr Valensin, smiling slightly. ‘Before we get too carried away — are you telling me that you’re actually taking any of this seriously?’
‘You mean you’re not?’ Clavain asked.
‘She’s my patient,’ Valensin said, looking sympathetically at Khouri. ‘I’ll vouch for the fact that she’s isn’t obviously insane. She has Conjoiner implants, and if her child had them as well they could have communicated with each other while the child was still in her womb. It would have been unorthodox, but Remontoire could have put those implants in her unborn child using microsurgical remotes. Given Conjoiner medicine, too, it’s not inconceivable that Skade could have removed Khouri’s child without evidence of surgery. But the rest of it? This whole business about a space war taking place on our doorstep? It’s a bit of a stretch, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I’m not so sure,’ Clavain said.
‘Please explain,’ Valensin said, looking to his colleagues for support.
Clavain tapped the side of his skull. ‘Remember, I’m a Conjoiner as well. The last time I was able to check, all the machinery in my head was still working properly.’
‘I could have told you as much,’ Valensin said.
‘What you forget is how sensitive it is. It’s designed to detect and amplify ambient fields, signals produced by machines or other Conjoiners. Two Conjoiners can share thoughts across tens of metres of open space even if there aren’t any amplifying systems in the environment. The hardware translates those fields into patterns that the organic part of the brain can interpret, harnessing the basic visual grammar of the perceptual centre.’
‘This isn’t news to me,’ Valensin said.
‘So consider the implications. What if there really was a war going on out there — a major circumsolar engagement, with all sorts of weapons and countermeasures being deployed? There’d be a great deal of stray electromagnetic noise, much more powerful than normal Conjoiner signals. My implants might be picking up signals they can’t interpret properly. They’re feeding semi-intelligible patterns into my meat brain. The meat does its best to sort out the mess and ends up throwing shapes and faces into the sky.’
‘He told me he’d been seeing things,’ Scorpio said.
‘Figures, signs and portents,’ Clavain said. ‘It only began in the last two or three months. Khouri said the fleet arrived nine weeks ago. That’s too much of a coincidence for me. I thought that perhaps I was going mad, but it looks as if I was just picking up rumours of war.’
‘Like the good old soldier you always were,’ Scorpio said.
‘It just means I’m inclined to take Khouri seriously,’ Clavain said, ‘no matter how strange her story.’
‘Even the part about Skade?’ Valensin asked.
Clavain scratched his beard. His eyes were slit-lidded, almost closed, as if viewing a vast mental landscape of possibilities. ‘Especially the part about Skade,’ he replied.
Hela, 2727
Rashmika looked straight ahead. She had nearly reached the other machine. In the distance she could see suited figures moving about on errands, clambering from one catwalk to another. Cranes swung out, burdened by pallets of heavy equipment. Servitors moved with the eerie, lubricated glide of clockwork automata. The vast single machine, the sum of many parts that was the caravan, needed constant care. It was, Rashmika suspected, a little like a cathedral in microcosm.
She stood again on the relatively firm ground of another vehicle. The motion of this one depended on legs rather than wheels, so instead of rumbling steadily, the metal surface beneath her feet drummed a slow rhythm, a series of timed thuds as each piston-driven mechanical foot hit ice. The gap she had crossed looked trivial now, a matter of metres, but she did not doubt that it would be just as unnerving on the way back.
Now she looked around. There was something very different about the layout of this roof: it was more ordered, lacking any of the obvious mechanical clutter of the last one. The few equipment boxes had been neatly stowed around the edges of the roof, with the conduits and power lines routed likewise.
Occupying much of the central area was a tilted surface, angled up from the roof on a set of pistons; she’d seen it during the approach in Crozet’s icejammer, and she’d also seen something like it in her village: an array of solar collectors forming part of the reserve power supply in case the main generators failed. The array had been a precise mosaic of small, square photovoltaic cells that spangled emerald and blue as they caught the light. But here there were no cells; instead the surface was covered by ranks of dark cruciform objects. Rashmika counted them: there were thirty-six cruciform shapes, arranged six across and six high, and every one of the objects was about the same size as a human being.
She walked closer, but with trepidation. There really were people shackled to the tilted surface, held in place by clasps around their wrists, their heels supported by small platforms. As near as she could tell they were dressed identically. Each one wore a hooded, foot-length gown of chocolate-brown material, cinched around the waist by a braided white rope. The cowl of each hood framed the curved mirror of a vacuum suit visor. She saw no faces, just the warped reflection of the slowly crawling landscape, herself an insignificant part of it.
They were looking at Haldora. It was obvious now: the tilt of the platform was just right for observation of the rising planet. As the caravan approached the Way and the cathedrals that ran on it, the platform would approach the horizontal, until the thirty-six watchers were all flat on their backs, staring at the zenith.
They were pilgrims, she realised. They had been picked up by the caravan during its deviation away from the equatorial settlements. She had been stupid not to realise that there were bound to be some along for the ride. There was an excellent chance that some of them had even come down from the badlands, perhaps even from her village.
She looked up at them, wondering if they were somehow aware of her presence. She hoped th
at their attentions were too thoroughly fixed on Haldora for them to take any notice of her. That was the point of them being up there, after all: half-crucified, lashed to an iron raft, forced to stare into the face of the world they considered miraculous.
The thing that she found most disturbing was the speed with which these pilgrims had taken their faith to this limit. It was likely that they had only left their homes in the last few weeks. Until then, they would have had very little choice but to act like normal members of a secular community. They were welcome to their beliefs, but the necessary duties of functioning in the badlands precluded taking religious observations as seriously as this. They would have had to fit into families and work units, and to smile at the jokes of their colleagues. But here, now, they were free. Very likely there was already Quaicheist blood in their veins.
Rashmika looked back along the winding line of the caravan. There were other tilted surfaces. Assuming that they each held about the same number of pilgrims, there could easily have been two hundred just on this one caravan. And at any one time there were many other caravans on Hela. It amounted to thousands of pilgrims being transported to the shining Way, with thousands more making the journey on foot, step by agonising step.
The futility of it, the sheer miserable waste of finite human life, made her indignant and filled with self-righteous anger. She wanted to climb on to the rack herself to wrench one of the pilgrims away from the sight that transfixed them, to rip back the cowl from their helmet, to press her own face against that blank mirror and try to make contact — before it was too late — with whatever fading glimmer of human individuality remained. She wanted to drive a rock into the faceplate, shattering faith in an instant of annihilating decompression.
And yet she knew that her anger was horribly misdirected. She knew that she only loathed and despised these pilgrims because of what she feared had happened to Harbin. She could not smash the churches, so she desired instead to smash the gentle innocents who were drawn towards them. At this realisation she felt a secondary sort of revulsion directed towards herself. She could not recall ever feeling a hatred of this intensity. It was like a compass needle turning inside her, looking for a direction in which to settle. It both awed and frightened her that she had the capacity for such animus.
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