Absolution Gap (110 page)

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 the 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.

The Cathedral Guard had finished securing an entire district of the
Nostalgia for Infinity
. The bodies of dead Ultras lay all around them, smoking from weapons hits. There were one or two Cathedral Guard, but they were far outnumbered by the victims from the crew.

The Guards picked their way through the dead, poking them with the cherry-red muzzles of slug-guns and boser rifles. Lights burned from sconces in the corridor walls, casting a solemn ochre sheen on the fallen. On balance, the victims did not look very much like the usual image of Ultras. The majority were unaugmented: autopsies might reveal buried implants, but there was little sign of the flamboyant display of mechanical parts usually associated with Ultra crews. Most of these people, in fact, appeared to be baseline humans, just like the Cathedral Guard themselves. The only difference was that there were, amongst the dead, an unusual number of pigs. The Guards poked and prodded the pigs with particular interest: they did not see very many of them on Hela. What had they been doing, fighting alongside these humans, often in the same uniform? It was yet another mystery to add to the pile. Yet another problem for someone else to worry about.

“Perhaps we’ll find Scorpio,” one of the officers said to a colleague.

“Scorpio?”

“The pig that was running things when Seyfarth’s unit came aboard. They say there’s a special reward for the one who brings his body out of the ship. It’ll be difficult to miss: Seyfarth impaled him, here and here.” He gestured to his collar bones.

The other officer kicked one of the pigs over, grateful for the helmet that meant he did not have to smell the carnage. “Let’s keep an eye out, then.”

The lights in the wall faded. The Cathedral Guard stepped through the bodies, only their helmet markers penetrating the darkness. Another part of the ship must have died; it was a wonder, really, that the lights had kept burning as long as they had.

But then they flickered back on again, as if to mock that assumption.

 

Something was wrong.

“The ship’s losing control,” Quaiche said. “This shouldn’t be happening.”

His private vessel nudged closer to the pad. The gap was only a few centimetres.

“No,” Grelier said, with sudden insistence. “Don’t risk it. There’s obviously something wrong . . .”

But Quaiche had seen his moment. He sped his couch towards the waiting airlock, pushing its speed to the maximum. For a long, lingering moment the spacecraft held perfect station. It looked as if he might make it, even if he had to cross a hand’s width of empty space. But then the
Dominatrix
lurched back again, its control jets firing chaotically. The gap enlarged: not centimetres now, but a good fraction of a metre. Quaiche began to slow down, realising his mistake. His hands worked like demons. But the gap was widening, and his couch was not going to stop in time.

The
Dominatrix
was now five or six metres from the landing stage, still desperately trying to orientate itself. It began to rotate, turning the open aperture of the airlock away from view.

By then it didn’t matter. Quaiche screamed. His couch passed over the edge.

“Fool,” Grelier said, before Quaiche’s scream had finished.

Rashmika looked at the ship. It had turned its rear-facing side back into view. Now, finally, they saw that the ship was terribly damaged, the smoothness of its hull ruined by a series of strange wounds. They were perfectly circular openings, revealing near-spherical interiors filled with the bright, clean metal of sheared surfaces. It was as if blisters had opened in the hull itself, bursting to reveal mathematically precise apertures.

“Something attacked it,” Grelier said.

The ship fell back, losing altitude, its corrective gestures becoming more frantic and ineffectual with each second.

“Get down,” Grelier said. He pushed her to the deck, falling beside her at the same instant. He flattened himself as efficiently as he could, one hand urging Rashmika to do likewise.

“What . . .” she began.

“Close your eyes.”

The warning came a fraction too late. She caught the beginning of the blast as the damaged ship hit the surface of Hela. The glare of it reached through her eyelids, a light like a hot needle pushed into her optic nerve. Through her body she felt the entire structure of the cathedral shake.

 

When the gale of escaping air had died down, Glaur judged that it was safe to make his escape. He had cut himself a man-sized hole in both the glass panel and the protective grille beneath it. Below were vacuum and—about twenty metres further down—the endlessly scrolling surface of Hela.

He checked his safety line once more, then heaved his lower half over the edge and pushed his legs through the hole. The edges of the glass were softly rounded where they had melted: there was no danger of them ripping any part of his suit. For a moment he lingered, his upper body still inside Motive Power, his lower half dangling into space. This was it: the final moment of surrender. Then he gave himself a valiant shove and became temporarily weightless. He fell for a second, retaining only an impression of blurred machinery rushing past. Then the line arrested his fall, snagging him sharply. The belt dug into his waist; he came to a halt on his back, with his head and shoulders at a slight angle to the ground.

He looked down: four, maybe five metres. The ground slid by beneath him. It was further than he had planned, and it would probably knock the wind out of him when he hit, but he should still be able to dust himself off and get up. Even if he was knocked out by the fall, the cathedral would just pass harmlessly over his fallen body: the huge, stomping plates of the traction feet were arranged in rows on either side of him. One set of feet would pass much nearer to him than the other, but still too far away to cause him any real anxiety.

The belt was beginning to grow uncomfortable.
Now or never,
Glaur thought. He reached up, fiddled with the catch, and suddenly he was falling.

He hit the ice. It was bad—he had never fallen from such a distance before—but he took the brunt of it on his back and after he had lain still for a minute he had the strength to roll over and think about standing up. The intricate machinery-filled underbelly of the Lady Morwenna had been sliding over him all the while, like a sky full of angular clouds.

Glaur stood up. To his relief, all his limbs seemed unbroken. Nor had the fall damaged his air supply: the helmet indicators were all in the green. There was enough air in the suit for another thirty hours of vigorous activity. He’d need it, too: he was going to have to hike all the way back along the Way until he met with other evacuees, or a rescue party sent out by another cathedral. It would be close, he thought, but he would far rather be walking than waiting aboard the Lady Morwenna, anticipating the first sickening lurch as she went over the edge.

Glaur was about to start walking when a vacuum-suited figure emerged from the cover of the nearest line of traction feet. The figure sprinted towards him—except it was more of a concentrated waddle than a sprint. Despite himself, Glaur laughed: there was something ludicrous about the way the childlike form moved. He racked his memory of the cathedral’s inhabitants, wondering who this dwarflike survivor could possibly be, and what he might want of Glaur.

Then he noticed the glint of a knife in the figure’s odd two-fingered gauntlet—a knife that shimmered and flickered, like something that could not decide what shape it wanted to be—and suddenly Glaur’s sense of humour deserted him.

 

“I was worried that might happen,” Grelier said. “Are you all right? Can you see?”

“I think so,” she said. She was dazed from the explosion of the dean’s ship, but still basically able to function.

“Then stand up. We don’t have much time.” Again Rashmika felt the needle squeeze against the outer layer of her suit.

“Quaiche was wrong,” she said, not moving. “You were never safe.”

“Shut up and walk.”

His presence must have alerted it. The red cockleshell-shaped spacecraft blinked two green lights in acknowledgement. A small door opened in one side.

“Get in,” Grelier said.

“Your ship’s no good,” Rashmika said. “Didn’t you hear Quaiche? He had his men shoot it up.”

“It doesn’t have to get us very far. Just getting off this cathedral would be a start.”

“And then where, assuming it even takes off? Not the holdfast, surely?”

“That was Quaiche’s plan, not mine.”

“Where, then?”

“I’ll think of something,” he said. “I know a lot of places to hide on this planet.”

“You don’t have to take me with you.”

“You’re useful, Miss Els, too useful to throw away just this moment. You do understand, don’t you?”

“Let me go. Let me go back and save my mother. You don’t need me now.” She nodded at his waiting spacecraft. “Take it, and they’ll assume I’m with you. They won’t attack you.”

“Wee bit risky,” he said.

“Please . . . just let me save her.”

He took a step towards the waiting ship, then halted. It was as if he had remembered something he had forgotten, something that meant he would have to go back into the Lady Morwenna.

But instead he just looked at her, and made a horrible sound.

“Surgeon-General?” she said.

The pressure of the needle was gone. The syringe hit the deck in silence. The surgeon-general twitched, and then sagged to his knees. He made that sound again: a pained gurgling she hoped never to hear again.

She stood up, still unsteady on her feet. She did not know whether it was due to the after-effects of the explosion or the relaxation of the fear she had felt with the syringe pressed against her all that time.

“Grelier?” she said quietly.

But Grelier said nothing. She looked down at him, realising then that there was something very, very wrong with him. The abdomen of his suit had caved in, as if an entire part of him had been scooped away from within.

Rashmika reached down, fumbling through the surgeon-general’s belongings until she found the Clocktower key. She stood up, stepping back from the body, and watched as it suddenly disintegrated, spheres of nothingness chewing into it until all that remained was a kind of frozen interstitial residue.

“Thank you, Captain,” she said, without quite knowing why.

She looked ahead, towards the broken bridge. Not much time now.

 

Alone, Rashmika rode an elevator back down into the Lady Morwenna, closing her eyes against the stained-glass light, forcing concentration. Thoughts crashed through her head: Quaiche was dead; the surgeon-general was dead. Quaiche had ordered the Cathedral Guard not to let anyone leave until he reached the holdfast, or until thirty minutes before the Lady Morwenna was due to fall over the western limit of the bridge. And the scrimshaw suit was to remain aboard: he had been very specific about that. But the suit was heavy and cumbersome: even if the guards could be persuaded to let them take it, they would need more than thirty minutes to get it off the cathedral. They might even need more time than the handful of hours they had left before the cathedral ceased to exist.

Perhaps, she thought, it was time to make a deal with the shadows, here and now. Even they must see that she had no other choice, no way of saving their envoy. She had done the best she could, hadn’t she? If they had information regarding what Rashmika and her allies needed to do to allow the other shadows to cross over, then they would lose nothing by giving it to her now.

The elevator came to a clanging halt. Gingerly, Rashmika slid aside the trellised gate. She still had to move through the interior of the cathedral, retracing the route along which Grelier and the dean had brought her. Then she would have to find the other elevator that would take her to the high levels of the Clocktower. And she would have to do all this while avoiding any contact with the remaining elements of the Cathedral Guard.

She stepped out of the elevator. Anxious to conserve suit air for when she really needed it, she slid up her visor. The cathedral had never been this quiet before. She could still hear the labouring of the engines, but even that seemed muted now. There was no choir, no voices raised in prayer, no solemn processions of footsteps.