The Revelation Space Collection

blamed it on sabotage by another church, but Quaiche could easily have arranged it himself. It would only have been a question of laying fuses and explosives the last time the Lady Mor went through.

A year earlier.

Did he honestly think Quaiche had been planning something all that time? Well, perhaps. People who built cathedrals tended to take the long view, after all.

Grelier still couldn’t see where all this was heading. All he knew — with a growing conviction — was that Quaiche was keeping something from him.

Something to do with the Ultras?

Something to do with the bridge crossing?

Events did after all seem to be rushing towards some grand culmination. And then there was the girl. Where did she fit into all this? Grelier could have sworn he had picked her, not the other way around. But now he was not so certain. She had made herself conspicuous to him, that much was true. It was like that trick they did with cards, suggesting the one you were meant to take from the spread.

Of course, he’d have had no suspicions if her blood had checked out.

‘It’s a wee bit of a puzzle,’ he said to himself.

He stopped suddenly, for in his cogitations he had walked straight past the address he was looking for. He backtracked, grateful that no one else seemed to be about at this hour. He had no idea what the local time was, whether everyone was asleep, or down at the scuttler mines.

Didn’t care, either.

He opened his helmet visor, ready to introduce himself, and then rapped his cane smartly against the outer door of the Els residence. And then waited, humming to himself, until he heard the door opening.

Hela Orbit, 2727

The Adventist delegates had arrived at the Nostalgia for Infinity. There were twenty of them, all seemingly stamped from the same production mould. They came aboard with apparent trepidation, their politeness exaggerated to the point of insolence. They wore hard-shelled scarlet vacuum suits marked with the cruciform spacesuit insignia of their church, and they all carried their pink-plumed helmets tucked under the same arm.

Scorpio studied their leader through the window in the inner airlock door. He was a small man with a cruel, petulant slot of a mouth seemingly cut into his face as an afterthought.

‘I’m Brother Seyfarth,’ the man announced.

‘Glad to have you aboard, Brother,’ Scorpio said, ‘but before we let you into the rest of the ship, we’re going to have to run some decontamination checks.’

The man’s voice rattled through the speaker grille. ‘Still concerned about plague traces? I thought we all had other things to worry about these days.’

‘Can’t be too careful,’ Scorpio said. ‘It’s nothing personal, of course.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of complaining,’ Brother Seyfarth replied.

In truth, they had been scanned from the moment they entered the Infinity’s airlock. Scorpio had to know whether there was anything hidden under that armour, and if there was, he had to know what it was.

He had studied the Nostalgia for Infinity’s history. Once, when the ship had been under the command of its old triumvirate, they had made the mistake of allowing someone aboard with a tiny anti-matter device implanted in the mechanism of their artificial eyes. That pin-sized weapon had enabled the entire ship to be hijacked. Scorpio didn’t blame Volyova and the others for having made that mistake: such devices were both rare and exquisitely difficult to manufacture, and you didn’t encounter them very often. But it was not the kind of mistake he was going to allow on his watch, if there was anything he could do to stop it.

Elsewhere in the ship, Security Arm officers examined the spectral images of the scanned delegates, peering through smoky grey-green layers of armour to the flesh, blood and bone beneath. There were no obvious concealed weapons: no guns or knives. But that didn’t surprise Scorpio. Even if the delegates had ill intentions, they’d have known that even a cursory scan would pick up normal weapons. If they had anything, it was going to be a lot less obvious.

But perhaps they had nothing at all. Perhaps they were what they said they were, and nothing more. Perhaps he was only objecting to the delegates because he had not been consulted before they were allowed aboard.

But there was something about Brother Seyfarth that he didn’t like, something in the cruel set of his mouth that made him think of other violent men he had known. Something in the way he kept clenching and unclenching the metal fists of his gloves as he waited to be processed through the airlock.

Scorpio touched his earpiece. ‘Clear on concealed weapons,’ he heard. ‘Clear on chemical traces for explosives, toxins or nerve agents. Clear on standard nanotech filters. Nothing pre-plague here, and no plague traces either.’

‘Look for implants,’ he said, ‘any mechanisms under those suits that don’t serve an obvious function. And check the ones that do, as well. I don’t want hot dust within a light-year of this ship.’

He was asking a lot of them, he knew. They couldn’t risk annoying the delegates by subjecting them to an obvious invasive examination. But — again — this was his watch. He had a reputation to live up to. It hadn’t been him who had invited the fuckers aboard.

‘Clear on implants,’ he heard. ‘Nothing large enough to contain a standard pinhead device.’

‘Meaning that none of the delegates have implants of any kind?’

‘Like I said, sir, nothing large enough…’

‘Tell me about all the implants. We can’t assume anything.’

‘One of them has something in his eye. Another has a prosthetic hand. A total of half a dozen very small neural implants spread throughout the whole delegation.’

‘I don’t like the sound of any of that.’

‘The implants aren’t anything we wouldn’t expect to see in a random sample of Hela refugees, sir. Most of them look inactive, anyway.’

‘The one with the eye, the one with the hand — I want to know for sure that there isn’t any nasty stuff inside those things.’

‘Going to be tricky, sir. They might not like it if we start bombarding them with protons. If there is anti-matter in those things, there’ll be local cell damage from the spallation products…’

‘If there is anti-matter in those things, they’re going to have a lot more than cancer to worry about,’ Scorpio said.

Trouble was, so would he.

He waited as the man sent a mantislike servitor into the airlock, a bright-red stick-limbed contraption equipped with a proton beam generator. Scorpio told the delegates it was just a more refined form of the plague scanners they had already used, designed to sniff out some of the less common strains. They probably knew this was a lie, but agreed to go along with it for the sake of avoiding a scene. Was that a good sign? he wondered.

The proton beam drilled through flesh and bone, too narrow to hurt major bodily structures. At worst, it would inflict some local tissue damage. But if it touched anti-matter, even a microgram nugget of anti-matter suspended in vacuum in an electromagnetic cradle, it would induce a burst of proton-antiproton reactions.

The servitor listened for the back-scatter of gamma rays, the incriminating sizzle of annihilation.

It heard nothing: not from the hand, not from the eye.

‘They’re clean, sir,’ the SA operative announced into Scorpio’s earpiece.

No, he thought, they weren’t. At least, he couldn’t be sure of it. He’d ruled out the obvious, done what he could. But the proton beam might have missed the cradles: there hadn’t been time to make an exhaustive sweep of either the hand or the eye. Or the cradles themselves might have been surrounded with deflection or absorption barriers: he’d heard of such things. Or the nuggets could be in the neural implants, hidden behind too many centimetres of bone and tissue for non-surgical scanning.

‘Sir? Permission to let them through?’

Scorpio knew that there was nothing else he could do except keep a close watch on them.

‘Open the door,’ he said.