“We do our best,” Scorpio said. “Of course, it’s the weapons you’re really interested in, isn’t it? Shall I show them to you, and then we can call it a day? There’ll be plenty of time for a more detailed examination later.” He was fed up with small talk, fed up with showing the twenty intruders around his empire.
“Actually,” Brother Seyfarth said, when they were safely back inside one of the rotating sections, “we’re more interested in the engines than we admitted.”
There was an itch at the back of Scorpio’s neck. “You are?”
“Yes,” Seyfarth said, nodding to the nineteen others.
In one smoothly choreographed blur, the twenty delegates touched parts of their suits, causing them to fly apart in irregular scablike pieces, as if spring-loaded. The hard-shelled components rained down around them, clattering in untidy piles at their feet. Beneath the suits, as he already knew from the scans, they wore only flimsy inner layers.
He wondered what he had missed. There were still no obvious weapons; still no guns or knives.
“Brother,” he said, “think very carefully about this.”
“I’ve already thought about it,” Seyfarth replied. Along with the other delegates, he knelt down and—his hands still gloved—rummaged with quick efficiency through the pile of sloughed suit parts.
His fist rose clutching something sharp-edged and aerodynamically formed. It was a shard of suit, viciously curved along its leading edge. Seyfarth raised himself on one knee and flicked his wrist. Tumbling end over end, the projectile wheeled through the air towards Scorpio. He heard it coming: the chop, chop, chop of its whisking approach. The fraction of a second of its flight stretched to a subjective eternity. A small, plaintive voice—lacking any tone of recrimination—told him it had been the suits all along. He had been looking so hard through them, so convinced they had to be hiding something, that he had missed the suits themselves.
The suits were the weapons.
The tumbling thing speared into his shoulder, the brutality of its impact knocking him against the slick, ribbed side of the corridor. It pinned him, through leather and flesh, to the wall itself. He thrashed in pain, but the shard had anchored itself firmly.
Seyfarth stood up, a bladed weapon in each hand. There was nothing accidental about them: their lines were too spare and deliberate for that. The suits must have been primed to fall apart along precise flaw lines etched into them with angstrom precision.
“I’m sorry I had to do that,” he said.
“You’re a dead man.”
“And you’d be a dead pig if I’d intended to kill you.” Scorpio knew it was true: the casual way Seyfarth had tossed the weapon towards him had betrayed an easy fluency in its use. It would have cost him no more effort to sever Scorpio’s head. “But instead I’ve spared you. I’ll spare all your crew if we have the co-operation we request.”
“No one’s co-operating with anything. And you won’t get far with knives, no matter how clever you think you are.”
“It’s not just knives,” Seyfarth said.
Behind him, two of the other Adventist delegates stood up. They were holding something between them: a rig containing the lashed-together parts of their air-tanks. One of them was pointing the open nozzle of a hose in Scorpio’s direction.
“Show him,” Seyfarth said, “just so he gets the picture.”
Fire roared from the nozzle, jetting five or six metres beyond the pair of Adventists. The curving plume of the flame scythed against the corridor wall, blistering the surface. Again the ship groaned. Then the flames died, the only sound the hiss of fuel escaping from the nozzle.
“This is a bit of a surprise,” Scorpio said.
“Do what we say and no one will come to any harm,” Seyfarth said. Behind him, the other delegates were looking around: they had heard that groan as well. Perhaps they thought the ship was still settling down after the drive burn, creaking like an old house after sunset.
The moment stretched. Scorpio felt strangely calm. Perhaps, he thought, that was what being old did to you. “You’ve come to take my ship?” he asked.
“Not take it,” Seyfarth said, with urgent emphasis. “We just want to borrow it for a while. When we’re finished, you can have it back.”
“I think you picked the wrong ship,” Scorpio said.
“On the contrary,” Seyfarth replied, “I think we picked exactly the right ship. Now stay there, like a good pig, and we’ll all come away from this as friends.”
“You can’t seriously expect to take my ship with just twenty of you.”
“No,” Seyfarth said. “That would be silly, wouldn’t it?”
Scorpio tried to free himself. He could not move his arm enough to bring the communicator up to his face. The weapon had pinned him too tightly. He shifted, the pain of movement like so many shards of glass twisting within his shoulder. It was that shoulder: the one he had burned.
Seyfarth shook his head. “What did I say about being a good pig?” He knelt down, examined another weapon, something like a dagger this time. He walked slowly over to Scorpio. “I’ve never been overly fond of pigs, truth be told.”
“Suits me.”
“You’re quite an old one, aren’t you? What are you—forty, fifty years old?”
“Young enough to take the shine off your day, pal.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Seyfarth stabbed the dagger in, impaling Scorpio through the other shoulder in more or less the corresponding position. Scorpio yelped in pain: a high-pitched squeal that sounded nothing like a human scream.
“I can’t claim an exhaustive knowledge of pig anatomy,” Seyfarth said. “All being well, I haven’t severed anything I shouldn’t have. But if I were you, I’d play it safe and not wriggle about too much.”
Scorpio tried to move, but gave up before the tears of pain blocked his view. Behind Seyfarth, another pair of delegates test-fired their makeshift flame-thrower. Then the whole party split into two groups and moved away into the rest of the ship, leaving Scorpio alone.
Chapter Forty-Two
Hela, 2727
A RAPTURE OF black machines climbed from the surface of Hela. They were small shuttles for the most part: surface-to-orbit vehicles bought, stolen, impounded and purloined from Ultras. Most had only chemical drives; a very few had fusion motors. The majority carried only one or two members of the Cathedral Guard, packed into armoured bubbles within their stripped-down skeletal chassis. They lifted from orthodox landing stages along the Way, or from concealed bunkers in the ice itself, dislodging plaques of surface frost as they fled. Some even departed from the superstructures of the Adventist cathedrals, including the Lady Morwenna. What had appeared to be small subsidiary spires or elbowed out-jutting towers were suddenly revealed as long-concealed spacecraft. Shells of mock architecture fell away like dead grey foliage. Complex cantilevered gantries swung the ships away from delicate masonry and glass before their drives lit. Domes and cupolas opened along ridge-lines, revealing ships packed tightly within, now rising on hydraulic launch platforms. When the ships hauled themselves aloft, the glare of their motors etched bright highlights and pitch-dark shadows into the ornate frippery of the architecture. Gargoyles seemed to turn their heads, their jaws lolling in wonderment and surprise. Below, the cathedrals trembled at the violent departure of so much mass. But when the ships had gone, the cathedrals were still there, little changed.
In seconds, the ships of the Guard had reached orbit; in several more seconds they had identified and signalled their brethren who were already parked around Hela. From every direction, drives flicked on to engagement thrust. The ships grouped into formations, stacked themselves into assault waves and commenced their run towards the Nostalgia for Infinity.
EVEN AS THE ships of the Cathedral Guard were leaving Hela, another spacecraft settled on to the pad of the Lady Morwenna, parking alongside the larger shuttle that had brought the Ultra delegates down from their lighthugger.
Grelier sat inside the cockpit for several minutes, flicking ivory-tipped toggle switches and making sure that vital systems would continue to tick over even in his absence. The cathedral was alarmingly close to the bridge now, and he had no plans to stay aboard once it had commenced the crossing. He would find an excuse to leave: Clocktower duty, something to do with Bloodwork. There were dozens of likely reasons he could give. And if the dean decided that he would much rather have the surgeon-general’s company for the crossing, then Grelier would just have to do a runner and smooth things over later. If, of course, there turned out to be a later. But the one thing he did not want to have to wait for was for his ship to go through its pre-flight cycle.
He snapped his helmet on, gathered his belongings and cycled through the airlock. Outside, standing on the pad, he had to admit that the view was awesome. He could see the point where the land just ended, that vast cliff edge towards which they were sliding. Unstoppable now, he thought. Under any circumstances even slowing the progress of the Lady Morwenna was a matter of labyrinthine bureaucratic procedure. It could take many hours for the paperwork to filter down to the Motive Power technicians who actually had their hands on the motor controls. More often than not, conditioned to believe that the cathedral should never slow, they queried their orders, sending the paperwork echoing back up through the chain of command, resulting in more hours of delay. And what the cathedral needed now was not to slow down but to come to a complete standstill. Grelier shuddered: he didn’t want to think about how long it would take for that to happen.
Something caught his eye. He looked up, seeing countless sparks zip across the sky. Dozens—no, hundreds—of ships. What was going on?
Then he looked towards the horizon and saw the much larger bulk of the lighthugger, a small but visibly elongated sliver of twinkling iron-grey. The other ships were obviously heading towards it.
Something was up.
Grelier turned from the shuttle, anxious to make his way indoors and find out what was happening. Then he noticed the smudge of red on the end of his cane. He thought he had cleaned it thoroughly before leaving the settlement in the Vi-grid region, but evidently he had been remiss.
Tutting to himself, he wiped the end of the cane against the frost-covered surface of the landing pad, leaving smears of pink.
Then he set off to find the dean, for he had interesting news to deliver.
ORCA CRUZ SAW the two Adventists before the rest of her party. They were at the end of a wide, low-ceilinged corridor, one against each wall, moving towards her with the measured pace of sleepwalkers.
Cruz turned to the three Security Arm officers behind her. “Minimum necessary force,” she said quietly. “Bayonets and stun-prods only. This lot don’t have a flame-gun, and I’d really like to do some questioning.”
The Arm unit nodded in unison. They all knew what Cruz meant by that.
She started towards the Adventists, pushing the sharp blade of her weapon before her. The Adventists had little armour now. Garbled reports from the other elements of the Security Arm—the same messages that had warned her about the flame-throwers—had suggested that they had removed their vacuum suits, but she had not been prepared to believe it until she saw it with her own eye. But they hadn’t discarded the armour entirely: they carried jagged bits, of it in their hands, and had lashed large curved parts to their chests. They still wore their metal glovesand pink-plumed helmets.
She admired the thinking behind their strategy. Once a boarding party had reached this far inside a lighthugger, armour was largely superfluous. Ultras would be very unwilling to deploy energy weapons against boarders even if they knew themselves to be safely distant from vacuum or ship-critical systems. The instinct not to harm their own ship was just too deeply ingrained, even when the ship was under threat of takeover. And aboard a ship like the Nostalgia for Infinity—with every inch of the ship’s fabric wired into the Captain’s nervous system—that instinct was all the stronger. They had all seen what happened when some accident inflicted a wound in the ship; they had all felt the Captain’s pain.
Cruz advanced down the corridor. “Put down your weapons,” she called. “You know you can’t succeed.”
“Put down your weapons,” one of the Adventists replied, chidingly. “We only want your ship. No one will be harmed, and the ship will be returned to you.”
“You could have asked nicely,” Cruz said.
“Would you have been likely to agree?”
“Not very,” she said, after a moment’s reflection.
“Then I think we have nothing else to say to each other.”
Cruz’s party moved forwards to within ten metres of the Adventists. She noticed that one of them was not in fact wearing a gauntlet at all; his hand was artificial. She remembered him: Scorpio had gone to extra pains to make sure the hand did not contain an anti-matter bomb.
“Final warning,” she said.
The other Adventist flung a bladed weapon towards her. It gyred through the air; Cruz threw herself back against the wall and felt the sharp, brief breeze as the weapon whisked past her throat and buried itself in the wall. Another weapon spun through the air; she heard glance against body armour without finding a weak spot.
“All right, game over,” Cruz said. She gestured to her people. “Pacification strength. Take ‘em down.”
They pushed ahead of her, bayonets and snub-nosed stun-prods at the ready. The Adventist with the artificial hand pointed it in Cruz’s direction, like an admonition. It didn’t worry her: Scorpio’s examination had been thorough; the hand couldn’t possibly contain a concealed projectile or beam weapon.
The tip of the index finger came off. It detached from the rest of the finger, but instead of dropping to the ground it just floated there, slowly drifting away from the hand like a spacecraft on a lazy departure.
Cruz watched it, stupidly transfixed. The tip accelerated, travelled ten, twenty centimetres. It approached her party, bobbing slightly, and then yawed to the right as the hand moved, as if still connected to it by an invisible thread.
Which, she realised, it was.
“Monofilament scythe,” she shouted. “Fall back. Fall the fuck back!”
Her party got the message. They retreated from the Adventists even as the tip of the finger began to move in a vertical circle, seemingly of its own volition. The man’s hand was making tiny, effortless movements. The circle widened, the tip of the finger becoming a blurred grey ring a metre wide. In Chasm City, Orca Cruz had seen the grotesque results of scythe weapons. She had seen what happened when people blundered into static scythe defence lines, or moving scythes like the one being demonstrated here. It was never pretty. But what she remembered, more than the screams, more than the hideously sculpted and segregated corpses left behind, was the expression she always saw on the faces of the victims an instant after they’d realised their mistake. It was less fright, less shock, more acute embarrassment: the realisation that they were about to make a terrible, sickening spectacle of themselves.
“Fall back,” she repeated.
“Permission to fire,” one of her party said.
Cruz shook her head. “Not yet,” she said. “Not until we’re cornered.”
The whisking blur of the scythe advanced further down the corridor, emitting a high-pitched quavering note that was almost musical.
SCORPIO TRIED AGAIN, shifting his weight as much as he was able, to prise himself away from the wall. He had given up calling for help and had long since stopped paying attention to his own yelps and squeals. The Adventist delegates had not returned, but they were still out there: intermittently, the muffled sounds of battle reached him through the echoing labyrinth of corridors, ducts and elevator shafts. He heard shouts and screams, and very occasionally he heard the basso groan of the ship itself, responding to some niggling internal injury. Nothing that the delegates did—either with their cutting tools or their flamethrowers—could possibly inflict any real harm upon the Captain. The Nos
talgia for Infinity had survived a direct attack by one of its own cache weapons, after all. But even a tiny splinter could become an irritation out of all proportion to its physical size.
He thrashed again, feeling savage fire in both shoulders. There: something was beginning to give, wasn’t it? Was it him or the throwing weapons?
He tried again, and blacked out. He came around seconds or possibly minutes later, still pinned to the wall, an unpleasant metallic taste in his mouth. He was still alive, and—pain aside—he didn’t feel much worse than when Seyfarth had stuck him here. He supposed there must have been something in Seyfarth’s boast about not damaging any of his internal organs. But there was no guarantee that Scorpio wouldn’t start bleeding all over the place as soon as the weapons were removed. Why were the Security Arm taking so long to find him?
Twenty soldiers, he thought. That was enough to make trouble, no doubt about it, but they couldn’t possibly hope to take the entire ship. They had known all along that they could not smuggle serious firepower aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity, not in these hair-trigger times. But Seyfarth had struck him as a man who knew what he was doing, very unlikely to have volunteered for a futile suicide mission.
Scorpio groaned: not with pain, this time, but with the realisation that he had made a dreadful mistake. He couldn’t be blamed for letting the delegates aboard: he had been overruled on that one, and if he had missed the true nature of their armour, it was only because he had never heard of anyone using that particular trick before. Anyway, he had scanned the armour—even if he’d been looking through, rather than at it—and he’d seen nothing suspicious. The armour would have to have been removed and examined in a lab before the microscopic flaws and weak points would have revealed themselves. No: that wasn’t his mistake either. But he really shouldn’t have turned on the engines. Why had the Adventists needed to see them? They’d already observed the ship making its approach to the system, if that was what they were interested in.
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