was on her way, so that you would know to bring your ship in from the cold. It was a question of timing: your successful dealings with the dean obviously depended on internal intelligence fed to you by the girl. There are machines in her head — they rather resemble Conjoiner implants — but I doubt that you could read them from orbit. So you needed another sign, something you couldn’t possibly miss. The girl sabotaged a store of demolition charges, didn’t she? She blew it up, drawing down the attention of the constabulary. I doubt that she even knew she had done it herself: it was probably more like sleepwalking, acting out buried commands. Then she felt an inexplicable need to leave home and journey to the cathedrals. She concocted a motive for herself: a search for her long-lost brother, even though every rational bone in her body must have told her he was already dead. You, meanwhile, had your signal. The sabotage was reported on all the local news networks; doubtless you had the means to intercept them even far beyond Hela. I imagine there was something unambiguous about it — the time of day, perhaps — that made it absolutely clear that it was the work of your spy.’
Scorpio saw that there was no further point in bluffing. ‘You’ve done your homework,’ he said.
‘Bloodwork, really, but I take your point.’
‘Touch her, and I’ll turn you to dust.’
He heard the smile in the surgeon-general’s voice. ‘I think touching her is the last thing any of us have in mind. I don’t think we intend to harm a hair on her head. On that note, why don’t I put you back on to the dean? I think he has an interesting proposition.’
The whispery voice again, like someone blowing through drift-wood: ‘A proposition, yes,’ the dean said. ‘I was prepared to take your ship by force because I never imagined I’d have any leverage over you. Force, it seems, has failed. I’m surprised: Seyfarth assured me he had every confidence in his own abilities. Frankly, it doesn’t matter now that I have the girl. Obviously she means something to you. That means you’re going to do what I want, without a single one of my agents lifting a finger.’
‘Let’s hear your proposition,’ Scorpio said.
‘I told you I wanted the loan of your ship. As a gesture of my good faith — and my extremely forgiving nature — that arrangement still stands. I will take your ship, use it as I see fit, and then I shall return it to you, its occupants and infrastructure largely intact.’
‘Largely intact,’ Scorpio said. ‘I like that.’
‘Don’t play games with me, pig. I’m older and uglier, and that’s really saying something.’
Scorpio heard his own voice, as if from a distance. ‘What do you want?’
‘Take a look at Hela,’ Quaiche said. ‘I know you have cameras spotted all around your orbit. Examine these co-ordinates; tell me what you see.’
It took a few seconds to acquire an image of the surface. When the picture on the compad stabilised, Scorpio found himself looking at a neatly excavated rectangular hole in the ground, like a freshly prepared grave. The co-ordinates referred to a part of Hela that was in daylight, but even so the sunken depths of the hole were in shadow, relieved by strings of intense industrial floodlights. The overlaid scale said that the trench was five kilometres long and nearly three wide. Three of the sides were corrugated grey revetments, sloping steeply, slightly outwards from their bases, carved with ledges and sloping access ramps. Windows shone in the two-kilometre-high walls, peering through plaques of industrial machinery and pressurised cabins. Around the upper edges of the trench, Scorpio saw retracted sheets, serrated to lock together. In the shadowed depths, sketchy, floodlit suggestions of enormous mechanisms were barely visible, things like grasping lobster claws and flattened molars: the movable components of a harness as large as the
Only three walls of the trench were sheer. The fourth — one of the two short sides — provided a much shallower transition to the level of the surrounding plain. From the fall of surface shadows it was obvious that the trench was aligned parallel to Hela’s equator.
‘Got the message?’ Quaiche asked.
‘I’m getting it,’ Scorpio said.
‘The structure is a holdfast: a facility for supporting the mass of your ship and preventing her escape, even while she is under thrust.’
Scorpio noted how the rear parts of the cradle could be raised or lowered to enable adjustment of the angle of the hull by precise increments. In his mind’s eye he already saw the
‘What is it for, Dean?’
‘Haven’t you grasped it yet?’
‘I’m a little slow on the uptake. It comes with my genes.’
‘Then I’ll explain. You’re going to slow Hela for me. I’m going to use your ship as a brake, to bring this world into perfect synchronisation with Haldora.’
‘You’re a madman.’
Scorpio heard a dry rattle of laughter, like old twigs being shaken in a bag. ‘I’m a madman with something you want very badly. Shall we do business? You have sixty minutes from now. In exactly one hour, I want your ship locked down in that holdfast. I have an approach trajectory already plotted, one that will minimise lateral hull stresses. If you follow it, the damage and discomfort will be minimalised. Would you like to see it?’
‘Of course I’d like to…’
But even before he had finished the sentence he felt a lurch, the impulse as the ship broke from orbit. The other seniors reached instinctively for the table, clawing at it for support. Valensin’s bundle of medical tools slid to the floor. Groans and bellows of protest from the ship’s fabric were like the creaking of vast old trees in a thunderstorm.
They were going down. It was what the Captain wanted.
Scorpio snarled into the communicator, ‘Quaiche: listen to me. We can work this out. You can have your ship — we’re already on our way — but you have to do something for me in return.’
‘You can have the girl when the ship has finished its business.’
‘I’m not expecting you to hand her over right now. But do one thing: stop the cathedral. Don’t take it over the bridge.’
The whisper of a voice said, ‘I’d love to, I really would, but I’m afraid we’re already committed.’
In the core of the cache weapon, the cascade of reactions passed an irreversible threshold. Exotic physical processes simmered, rising like boiling water. No conceivable intervention could now prevent the device from firing, short of the violent destruction of the weapon itself. Final systems checks were made, targeting and yield cross- checked countless times. The spiralling processes continued: something like a glint became a spark, which in turn became a little marble-sized sphere of naked, swelling energy. The fireball grew larger still, swallowing layer after layer of containment mechanisms. Microscopic sensors, packed around the expanding sphere, recorded squalls of particle events. Space-time itself began to curl and crisp, like the edge of a sheet of parchment held too close to a candle flame. The sphere engulfed the last bastion of containment and kept growing. The weapon sensed parts of itself being eaten from within: glorious and chilling at the same time. In its last moments it reassigned functions from the volume around the expanding sphere, cramming more and more of its control sentience into its outer layers. Still the sphere kept growing, but now it was beginning to deform, elongating in one direction in exact accordance with prediction. A spike of annihilating force rammed forwards, blasting through a marrow of abandoned machine layers. The weapon felt it as a cold steel impalement. The tip of the spike reached beyond its armour, beyond the harness, towards the face of Haldora.
The expanding sphere had now consumed eighty per cent of the cache weapon’s volume. Shockwaves were racing towards the gas giant’s surface: in a matter of nanoseconds, the weapon would cease to exist except as a glowing cloud at one end of its beam.
It had nearly run out of viable processing room. It began to discard higher sentience functions, throwing away parts of itself. It did so with a curious discrimination, intent on preserving a tiny nugget of intelligence until the last possible moment. There were no more decisions to be made; nothing to do except await destruction. But it had to know: it had to cling to sentience long enough to know that it had done some damage.
Ninety-five per cent of the cache weapon was now a roiling ball of photo-leptonic hellfire. Its thinking systems were smeared in a thin, attenuated crust on the inside of the weapon’s skin: a crust that was itself
