“Then you know what it says?”
“I think you should read it for yourself,” he said.
Chapter Seventeen
Hela, 2727
THE TICKING OF his cane marked the surgeon-general’s progress through the iron of the great cathedral. Even in the parts of the cathedral where the engines and traction mechanisms were audible, they heard him coming long before he arrived. His footsteps were as measured and regular as the beats of a metronome, the tap of his cane punctuating the rhythm, iron against iron. He moved with a deliberate arachnoid slowness, giving the nosy and the idle time to disperse. Occasionally he was aware of watchers secreted behind metal pillars or grilles, spying on him, thinking themselves discreet. More often than not he knew with certainty that he went about his errands unobserved. In the long years of his service to Quaiche, one thing had been made clear to the cathedral populace: Grelier’s business was not a matter for the curious.
But sometimes those who fled from him were doing so for reasons other than the edict to keep their noses out of his work.
He reached a spiral staircase, a helix of skeletal iron plunging down into the clanking depths of Motive Power. The staircase was ringing like a struck tuning fork. Either it was picking up a vibration from the machines below or someone had just employed it to get away from Grelier.
He leant over the balustrade, peering down the corkscrewing middle of the staircase. Two turns below, pudgy fingers slipped urgently along the handrail. Was that his man? Very probably.
Humming to himself, Grelier unlatched the protective gate that allowed entry to the stairwell. He flipped it shut with the sharp end of his cane and began to descend. He took his time, allowing each pair of footfalls to echo before proceeding down to the next step. He let the cane tap, tap, tap against the balusters, informing the man that he was coming and that there was no conceivable avenue of escape. Grelier knew the innards of Motive Power as intimately as he knew the innards of every section of the cathedral. He had sealed all the other stairwells with the Clocktower key. This was the only way up or down, and he would be sure to seal it once he reached the bottom. His heavy medical case knocked against one thigh as he descended, in perfect synchrony with the tapping of the cane.
The machines in the lower levels sang more loudly as he approached them. There was no part of the cathedral where you couldn’t hear those grinding mechanisms, if there were no other sounds. But in the high levels the noise from the motors and traction systems had to compete with organ music and the permanently singing voices of the choir. The mind soon filtered out that faint background component.
Not here. Grelier heard the shrill whine of turbines, which set his teeth on edge. He heard the low clank and thud of massive articulated cranks and eccentrics. He heard pistons sliding, valves opening and closing. He heard relays chattering, the low voices of technical staff.
He descended, cane tapping, medical kit ready.
Grelier reached the lowest turn of the spiral. The exit gate squeaked on its hinges: it hadn’t been latched. Someone had been in a bit of a hurry. He stepped through the doorframe and placed his medical kit between his shoes. He took the key from his breast pocket and locked the gate, preventing anyone from ascending from this level. Then he picked up the medical kit and resumed his leisurely progress.
Grelier looked around. There was no sign of the fugitive, but there were plenty of places where a man might hide. This did not concern Grelier: in time, he was bound to find the pudgy-fingered absconder. He could allow himself a few moments to look around, take a break from his usual routine. He did not come down here all that often, and the place always impressed him.
Motive Power occupied one of the largest chambers of the cathedral, on the lowest pressurised level. The chamber ran the entire two-hundred-metre length of the moving structure. It was one hundred metres wide and fifty metres from floor to magnificently arched ceiling. Machinery filled much of the available volume, except for a gap around the walls and another of a dozen or so metres below the ceiling. The machinery was immense: it lacked the impersonal, abstract vastness of starship mechanisms, but there was something more intimate and therefore more personally threatening about it. Starship machinery was vast and bureaucratic: it just didn’t notice human beings. If they got on the wrong side of it they simply ceased to exist, annihilated in a painless instant. But as huge as the machinery in Motive Power was, it was also small enough to notice people. If they got in the way of it they were liable to find themselves maimed or crushed.
It wouldn’t be painless and it wouldn’t be instantaneous.
Grelier pushed his cane against the pale-green carapace of a turbine. Through the cane he felt the vigorous thrum of trapped energies. He thought of the blades whisking round, drawing energy from the superheated steam spewing from the atomic reactor. All it would take was a flaw in one of the blades and the turbine could blow apart at any instant, bringing whirling, jagged death to anyone within fifty metres. It happened now and then; he usually came down to clean up the mess. It was all rather thrilling, really.
The reactor—the cathedral’s atomic power plant—was the largest single chunk of machinery in the chamber, housed in a bottle-green dome at the rear end of the room. The kindest thing you could say about it was that it worked and it was cheap. There was no nuclear fuel to be mined on Hela, but the Ultras provided a ready supply. Dirty and dangerous, maybe, but more economical than antimatter and easier to work with than a fusion power plant. They had done the calculations: refining local ice to provide fusion fuel would have required a pre-processing plant as large as the entire existing Motive Power assembly. But the cathedral had already grown as big as it ever could, given the dimensions of the Way and the Devil’s Staircase. Besides, the reactor worked and supplied all the power that the cathedral required, and the reactor workers didn’t get sick all that often.
From the reactor’s apex sprouted a tangle of high-pressure steam pipes. The gleaming silver intestines traversed the entire chamber, subject to inexplicable hairpin bends and right angles. They fed into thirty-two turbines, stacked atop one another in two rows, each row eight turbines long. Catwalks, inspection platforms, access tunnels, ladders and equipment elevators caged the whole humming mass. The turbines were dynamos, converting the rushing steam into electrical power. They fed the electrical energy into the main traction motors, twenty-four of them squatting atop the turbines in two rows of twelve. The traction motors in turn converted the electrical energy into mechanical force, propelling the great cranked and hinged mechanisms that ultimately moved the cathedral along the Way. At any one time only ten of the twelve motors on one side were doing any work: the spare set was idling, ready to be connected into use if another motor or set of motors needed to be taken offline for overhaul.
The mechanisms themselves passed overhead, extending from the traction motors to the walls on either side. They pen-etrated the walls via pressure-proofed gaskets positioned at the precise rocking points of the main coupling rods. The gaskets were troublesome, Grelier gathered: they were always failing and having to be replaced. But somehow or other the mechanical motion generated inside the Motive Power chamber had to be conveyed beyond the walls, into vacuum.
Above him, with a dreamlike slowness, the coupling rods swept back and forth and up and down in orchestrated waves, beginning at the front of the chamber and working back. A complicated arrangement of smaller cranks and eccentrics connected the rods to each other, synchronising their movements. Aerial catwalks threaded between the huge spars of thrusting metal, allowing workers to lubricate joints and inspect failure points for metal fatigue. It was risky work: one moment of inattention and there’d be lubrication of entirely the wrong sort.
There was more to Motive Power, of course. A lot more. Somewhere there was even a small foundry, working day and night to fabricate replacement parts. The largest components had to be made in Wayside plants, but it always took time to procure and deliver such replacements. The art
isans in Motive Power took great pride in their ingenuity when it came to fixing something at short notice, or pressing a part into service for a different function than intended. They knew what the bottom line was: the cathedral had to keep moving, no matter what. No one was asking the world of them—it only had to move a third of a metre a second, after all. You could crawl faster than that, easily. The point was not the speed, but that the cathedral must never, ever stop.
“Surgeon-General, might I help you?”
Grelier tracked the voice to its source: someone was looking down at him from one of the catwalks above. The man wore the grey overalls of Motive Power, and was gripping the handrail with oversized gloves. His bullet-shaped scalp was blue with stubble, a filthy neckerchief around his collar. Grelier recognised the man as Glaur, one of the shift bosses.
“Perhaps you could come down here for a moment,” Grelier said.
Glaur complied immediately, traversing the catwalk and vanishing back into the machinery. Grelier tapped his cane idly against the cleated metal floor, waiting for the man to make his way down.
“Something up, Surgeon-General?” Glaur asked when he arrived.
“I’m looking for someone,” Grelier told him. No need to say why. “He won’t belong down here, Glaur. Have you seen anyone unexpected?”
“Like who?”
“The choirmaster. I’m sure you know the fellow. Pudgy hands.”
Glaur looked back up to the slowly threshing coupling rods. They moved like the oars of some biblical galleon, manned by hundreds of slaves. Grelier imagined that Glaur would much rather be up there working with the predictable hazards of moving metal than down here navigating the shifting treacheries of cathedral politics.
“There was someone,” Glaur offered. “I saw a man move through the hall a few minutes ago.”
“Seem in a bit of a rush, did he?”
“I assumed he was on Clocktower business.”
“He wasn’t. Any idea where I might find him now?”
Glaur glanced around. “He might have taken one of the staircases back up to the main levels.”
“Not likely. He’ll still be down here, I think. In which direction was he moving When you saw him?”
A moment of hesitation, which Grelier duty noted. “Towards the reactor,” Glaur said.
“Thank you.” Grelier tapped his cane smartly and left the shift boss standing there, his momentary usefulness over.
He followed his quarry’s path towards the reactor. He resisted the temptation to pick up his pace, maintaining his stroll, tapping the cane against the floor or any suitably resonant thing he happened to pass. Now and then he stepped over a glassed, grilled window in the floor, and paused awhile to watch the faintly lit ground crawl beneath him, twenty metres below. The cathedral’s motion was rock steady, the jerky walking motion of the twenty buttressed treads smoothed out by the skill of engineers like Glaur.
The reactor loomed ahead. The green dome was surrounded by its own rings of catwalks, rising to the apex. Heavily riveted viewing windows were set with thick dark glass.
He caught sight of a sleeve vanishing around the curve of the second catwalk from the ground.
“Hello,” Grelier called, “Are you there, Vaustad? I’d like a wee word.”
No reply. Grelier circled the reactor, taking his time. From above, its originator always out of sight, came a metallic scamper. He smiled, dismayed at Vaustad’s stupidity. There were a hundred places to hide in the traction hall. Simian instinct, however, had driven the choirmaster to head for higher ground, even if that meant being cornered.
Grelier reached the gated access point to the ladder. He stepped through it and locked the gate behind him. He could not climb and carry the medical kit and the cane, so he left the medical kit on the ground. He tucked the cane into the crook of his arm and made his way upwards, one rung at a time, until he reached the first catwalk.
He walked around it once, just to unnerve Vaustad further. Humming quietly to himself, he looked over the edge and took in the scenery. Occasionally he rapped the cane against the curving metal sides of the reactor, or the black glass of one of the inspection portholes. The glass reminded him of the tarlike chips in the cathedral’s front-facing stained-glass window, and he wondered for a moment if it was the same material.
Well, on to business.
He reached the ladder again and ascended to the next level. He could still hear that pathetic lab-rat scampering.
“Vaustad? Be a good fellow and come here, will you? It’ll all be over in a jiffy.”
The scampering continued. He could feel the man’s footfalls through the metal, transmitted right around the reactor.
“I’ll just have to come over to you myself, then, won’t I?”
He began to circumnavigate the reactor. He was on a level with the coupling rods now. There were none close to him, but—seen in foreshortened perspective—the moving spars of metal threshed like scissor blades. He saw some of Glaur’s technicians moving amongst that whisking machinery, oiling and checking. They appeared imprisoned in it, yet magically uninjured.
The hem of a trouser leg vanished around the curve. The scampering increased in pace. Grelier smiled and halted, leaning over the edge. He was close now. He took the top end of his cane and twisted the head one quarter turn.
“Up or down?” he whispered to himself. “Up or down?”
It was up. He could hear the clattering rising above him, to the next level of the catwalk. Grelier didn’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed. Down, and the hunt would be over. The man would find his escape blocked, and Grelier would have had no difficulty pacifying him with the cane. With the man docile, it would only take a minute or two to inject him with the top-up dose. Efficient, but where was the fun in that?
At least now he was getting a run for his money. The end result would still be the same: the man cornered, no way out. Touch him with the cane and he’d be putty in Grelier’s hands. There would be the problem of getting him down the ladder, of course, but one of Glaur’s people could help with that.
Grelier climbed to the next level. This catwalk was smaller in diameter than the two below, set back towards the apex of the reactor dome. There was only one more level, at the apex itself, accessed by a gently sloping ramp. Vaustad was moving up the ramp as Grelier watched.
“There’s nothing for you up there,” the surgeon-general said. “Turn around now and we’ll forget all about this.”
Would he hell. But Vaustad was beyond reason in any case. He had arrived at the apex and was taking a moment to look back at his pursuer. Pudgy hands, mooncalf face. Grelier had his man all right, not that there had ever been much doubt.
“Leave me alone,” Vaustad shouted. “Leave me alone, you bloody ghoul!”
“Sticks and stones,” Grelier said with a patient smile. He tapped his cane against the railing and began to ascend the ramp.
“You won’t get me,” Vaustad said. “I’ve had enough. Too many bad dreams.”
“Oh, come now. A little prick and it’ll all be over.”
Vaustad grabbed hold of one of the silver steam pipes erupting from the top of the reactor dome, wrapping himself around it. He began to scramble up it, using the pipe’s metal ribs for grip. There was nothing graceful or speedy about his progress, but it was steady and methodical. Had he planned this? Grelier wondered. It had been a mistake to forget about the steam pipes.
But where would he go, ultimately? The pipes would only take him back along the hall towards the turbines and the traction motors. It might prolong the chase, but it was still futile in the long run.
Grelier reached the reactor’s apex. Vaustad was a metre or so above his head. He held up the cane, trying to tap Vaustad’s heels. No good; he had made too much height. Grelier turned the head of the cane another quarter turn, increasing the stun setting, and touched it against the pipework. Vaustad yelped, but kept moving. Another quarter turn of the cane: maximum-discharge setting, lethal
at close quarters. He kissed the end of the cane against the metal and watched Vaustad hug the pipe convulsively. The man clenched his teeth, moaned, but still managed to hold on to the pipe.
Grelier dropped the cane, the charge exhausted. Suddenly this wasn’t proceeding quite the way he had planned it.
“Where are you going?” Grelier asked, playfully. “Come down now, before you hurt yourself.”
Vaustad said nothing, just kept crawling.
“You’ll do yourself an injury,” Grelier said.
Vaustad had reached the point where his pipe curved over to the horizontal, taking it across the hall towards the turbine complex. Grelier expected him to stop at the right-angled turn, having made his point. But instead Vaustad wriggled around the bend until he was lying on the upper surface of the pipe with his arms and legs wrapped around it. He was now thirty metres from the ground.
The scene was drawing a small audience. About a dozen of Glaur’s men were standing in the hall below, looking up at the spectacle. Others had paused in their work amongst the coupling rods.
“Clocktower business,” Grelier said warningly. “Go back to your jobs.”
The workers drifted away, but Grelier was aware that most of them were still keeping one eye on what was happening. Had the situation reached the point where he needed to call in additional assistance from Bloodwork? He hoped not; it was a matter of personal pride that he always took care of these house calls on his own. But the Vaustad call was turning messy.
The choirmaster had made about ten metres of horizontal distance, carrying him beyond the perimeter of the reactor. There was only floor below him now. Even in Hela’s reduced gravity, a fall from thirty metres on to a hard surface was probably not going to be survivable.
Grelier looked ahead. The pipe was supported from the ceiling at intervals, hanging by thin metal lines anchored to enlarged versions of the ribs. The nearest line was about five metres in front of Vaustad. There was no way he would be able to get around that.
Absolution Gap Page 27