beginning to break up, sundered and riven by the racing shockwave of the explosion. The machine’s intelligence slid down the cognitive ladder until all that remained was a stubborn, bacterial sense of its own existence and the fact that it was there to do something.
The light rammed through the last millimetre of armour. By then, the first visual returns were arriving from Haldora. The cameras on the cache weapon’s skin relayed the news to the shrinking puddle of mind that was all that remained of the once-sly intelligence.
The beam had touched the planet. And something was happening to it, spreading away from the impact point in a ripple of optical distortion.
The mind shrivelled out of existence. The last thing it allowed itself was a dwindling thrill of consummation.
In the depths of the Lady Morwenna — in the great hall of Motive Power — several things happened almost at once. An intense flash of light flooded the hall through the narrow colourless slits of the utilitarian windows above the coupling sleeves. Glaur, the shift boss, was just blinking away the afterimages of the flash — the propulsion systems etched into his retinae in looming pink-and-green negative forms — when he saw the machinery lose its usual keen synchronisation: the scissoring aerial intricacy of rods and valves and compensators appearing, for a heart-stopping moment, to be about to work loose, threshing itself and anyone nearby into a bloody amalgam of metal and flesh.
But the instant passed: the governors and dampers worked as they were meant to, forcing the motion back into its usual syncopated rhythm. There were groans and squeals of mechanical protestation — deafening, painful — as hundreds of tonnes of moving metal struggled against the constraints of hinge-point and valve sleeve, but nothing actually worked loose, or came flying through the air towards him. Glaur noticed, then, that the emergency lights were flashing on the reactor, as well as on the servo-control boxes of the main propulsion assembly.
The wave of unco-ordinated motion had been damped and controlled within the Motive Power hall, but these mechanisms were only part of the chain: the wave itself was still travelling. In half a second it passed through the airtight seals in the wall and out into vacuum. An observer, watching the Lady Morwenna from a distance, would have seen the usual smooth movements of the flying buttresses slip out of co-ordination. Glaur didn’t need to be outside: he knew exactly what was about to happen, saw it in his imagination with the clarity of an engineering blueprint. He even reached for a handhold before he had made a conscious decision to do so.
The Lady Morwenna stumbled. Huge reciprocating masses of moving machinery — normally counterweighted so that the walking motion of the cathedral was experienced as only the tiniest of sways even at the top of the Clocktower — were now appallingly unbalanced. The cathedral lurched first to one side, then to the other. The effect was catastrophic and predictable: the lurch sent a fresh shudder through the propulsion mechanisms, and the entire process began again even before the first lurch had been damped out.
Glaur gritted his teeth and hung on. He watched the floor tilt by entire, horrifying degrees. Klaxons tripped automatically; red emergency lights flashed from the chamber’s vaulted heights.
A voice sounded on the pneumatic speaker system. He reached for the mouthpiece, raising his own voice above the racket.
‘This is the surgeon-general. What, exactly, is happening?’
‘Glaur, sir. I don’t know. There was a flash… systems went berserk. If I didn’t know better I’d say someone just let off a very powerful demolition charge, hit our ’tronics boxes.’
‘It wasn’t a nuke. I meant, what is happening with your control of the cathedral?’
‘She’s on her own now, sir.’
‘Will she topple?’
Glaur looked around. ‘No, sir. No.’
‘Will she leave the Way?’
‘No sir, not that either.’
‘Very well. I just wanted to be certain.’ Grelier paused: in the gap between his words Glaur heard something odd, like a kettle whistling. ‘Glaur… what did you mean by “she’s on her own”?’
‘I mean, sir, that we’re on automatic control, like we’re supposed to be during times of emergency. Manual control is locked out on the twenty-six-hour timer. Captain Seyfarth made me do it, sir: said it was on Clocktower authority. So we don’t stop, sir. So we
‘Thank you,’ Grelier said quietly.
Above them all, something was very wrong with Haldora. Where the beam from the weapon had struck the planet, something like a ripple had raced out, expanding concentrically. The weapon itself was gone now; even the beam had vanished into Haldora, and only a dispersing silvery-white cloud remained at the point where the device had been activated.
But the effects continued. Within the circular interior of the expanding ripple, the usual swirls and bands of gas-giant chemistry were absent. Instead there was just a ruby-red bruise, smooth and undifferentiated. In seconds it grew to encompass the entire planet. What had been Haldora was now something like a bloodshot eye.
It stayed like that for a few seconds, staring balefully down at Hela. Then hints of patterning began to appear in the ruby-red sphere: not the commas and horsetails of random chemical boundaries, not the bands of differentiated rotation belts, not the cyclopean eyes of major storm foci. These patterns were regular and precise, like designs worked into carpets. They sharpened, as if being worked and neatened by an invisible hand. Then they shifted: now a tidily manicured ornamental labyrinth, now a suggestion of cerebral folds. The colour flicked from ruby-red to bronze to a dark silver. The planet erupted forth a thousand spikes. The spikes lingered, then collapsed back into a sea of featureless mercury. The mercury became a chequerboard; the chequerboard became a spherical cityscape of fantastic complexity; the cityscape became a crawling Armageddon.
The planet returned. But it wasn’t the same planet. In a blink, Haldora became another gas giant, then another — the colouring and banding different each time. Rings appeared in the sky. A garland of moons, orbiting in impossible procession. Two sets of rings, intersecting at an angle, passing through each other. A dozen perfectly square moons.
A planet with a neat chunk taken out of it, like a half-eaten wedding cake.
A planet that was a reflected mirror of stars.
A dodecahedral planet.
Nothing.
For a few seconds there was only a black sphere up there. Then the sphere began to wobble, like a balloon full of water.
At last the great concealment mechanism was breaking down.
FORTY-FIVE
Quaiche clawed at his eyes, making a faint screaming sound, the words
Grelier put down the pneumatic speaking tube. He leant over the dean, pulling some gleaming ivory-handled optical device from his tunic pocket and peering into the trembling horror of Quaiche’s exposed eyes. With the other hand he cast shadows over them, watching the reactions of the twitching irises.
‘You’re not blind,’ he said. ‘At least, not in both eyes.’
‘The flash—’
‘The flash damaged your right eye. I’m not surprised: you were staring straight at the face of Haldora when it happened, and you have no blink reflex, of course. But we happened to lurch at the same moment: whatever caused that flash also upset Glaur’s machines. It was enough to perturb the optical light path from the collecting apparatus above the garret. You were spared the full effect of it.’
‘I’m blind,’ Quaiche said again, as if he had heard nothing that Grelier had told him.
‘You can still see me,’ Grelier said, moving his finger, ‘so stop snivelling.’
‘Help me.’
