“It’s increasing,” the pilot said.
Vasko felt hot breath on his neck. He turned around to see the pig looking over his shoulder.
“Vasko’s on to something,” Antoinette said. “Distance to the spire is now . . . four hundred and fifty metres.”
“You’re drifting,” Scorpio said.
“No, we’re not.” She sounded the tiniest bit affronted. “We’re rock steady, at least within the errors of measurement. Vasko’s right, Scorp—the ship’s moving. They’re dragging it out to sea.”
“How fast is it moving?” Scorpio asked.
“Too soon to say with any certainty. A metre, maybe two, per second.” Antoinette checked her own communicator bracelet. “The neutrino levels are still going up. I’m not sure exactly how long we have left, but I don’t think we’re looking at more than a few hours.”
“In which the case the ship isn’t going to be more than a few kilometres further away when it launches,” Scorpio said.
“That’s better than nothing,” Antoinette said. “If they can at least get it beyond the curve of the bay, so that we have some shelter from the tidal waves . . . that’s got to be better than nothing, surely?”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” the pig replied.
Vasko felt a thrilling sense of affirmation. “Aura was right. They don’t want to hurt us. They only want to save us, by getting the ship away from the bay. They’re on our side.”
“Nice theory,” Scorpio said, “but how did they know we were in this mess in the first place? It’s not as if anyone went down into the sea and explained it to them. Someone would have had to swim for that.”
“Maybe someone did,” Vasko said. “Does it matter now? The ship’s moving. That’s all that counts.”
“Yeah,” Scorpio said. “Let’s just hope it isn’t too late to make a difference.”
Antoinette turned to the pilot. “Think you can get us close to that thing? The green stuff doesn’t seem too thick near the top. It might still be possible to get into the usual landing bay.”
“You’re joking,” the pilot said, incredulously.
Antoinette shook her head. She was already assigning full control back to the regular pilot. “’Fraid not, fella. If we want John to hold his horses until the ship’s clear of the bay, someone’s going to have go down and talk to him. And guess who just drew
that
straw?”
“I think she’s serious,” Vasko said.
“Do it,” Scorpio said.
Hela, 2727
The caravan threaded cautiously through tunnels and inched along ridiculously narrow ledges. It twisted and turned, at points doubling back on itself so that the rear parts advanced while the lead machines retreated. Once, navigating a rising hairpin, engines and traction limbs labouring, part of the caravan passed over itself, letting Rashmika look down on the racked Observers.
All the while the bridge grew larger. When she had first seen it, the bridge had the appearance of something lacy and low-relief, painted on a flat black backdrop in glittering iridescent inks. Now, slowly, it was taking on a faintly threatening three-dimensional solidity. This was not some mirage, some peculiar trick of lighting and atmospherics, but a real object, and the caravan was really going to cross it.
The three-dimensionality both alarmed and comforted Rashmika. The bridge now appeared to be more than just an assemblage of infinitely thin lines, and although many of its structural parts were still very fine in cross section, now that she was seeing them at an oblique angle the structural components didn’t look quite so delicate. If the bridge could support itself, surely it could support the caravan. She hoped.
“Miss Els?”
She looked around. This time it really was Quaestor Jones. “Yes,” she said, unhappy at his attention.
“We’ll be over it before very long. I promised you that the experience would be spectacular, didn’t I?”
“You did,” she said, “but what you didn’t explain, Quaestor, was why everyone doesn’t take this short cut, if it’s as useful as you claim.”
“Superstition,” he said, “coupled with excessive caution.”
“Excessive caution sounds entirely appropriate to me where this bridge is involved.”
“Are you frightened, Miss Els? You shouldn’t be. This caravan weighs barely fifty thousand tonnes, all told. And by its very nature, the weight is distributed along a great length. It isn’t as if we’re taking a
cathedral
across the bridge. Now that
would
be folly.”
“No one would do that.”
“No one sane. And especially not after they saw what happened last time. But that needn’t concern us in the slightest. The bridge will hold the caravan. It has done so in the past. I would have no particular qualms about taking us across it during every expedition away from the Way, but the simple truth is that most of the time it wouldn’t help us. You’ve seen how laborious the approach is. More often than not, using the bridge would cost us more time than it would save. It was only a particular constellation of circumstances that made it otherwise on this occasion.” The quaestor clasped his hands decisively. “Now, to business. I believe I have secured you a position in a clearance gang attached to an Adventist cathedral.”
“The Lady Morwenna?”
“No. A somewhat smaller cathedral, the Catherine of Iron. Everyone has to start somewhere. And why are you in such a hurry to reach the Lady Morwenna? Dean Quaiche has his foibles. The Catherine’s dean is a good man. His safety record is very good, and those who serve under him are well looked after.”
“Thank you, Quaestor,” she said, hoping her disappointment was not too obvious. She had still been hoping he might be able to find her a solid clerical job, something well away from clearance work. “You’re right. Something is better than nothing.”
“The Catherine is amongst the main group of cathedrals, moving towards the Rift from the western side. We will join them when we have completed our crossing of the bridge, shortly before they begin their descent of the Devil’s Staircase. You are privileged, Miss Els: very few people get the chance to cross Absolution Gap twice in one year, let alone within a matter of days.”
“I’ll count myself lucky.”
“Nonetheless, I will repeat what I said before: the work is difficult, dangerous and poorly rewarded.”
“I’ll take what’s available.”
“In which case you will be transferred to the relevant gang as soon as we reach the Way. Keep your nose clean, and I am sure you will do very well.”
“I will certainly bear that in mind.”
He touched a finger to his lips and made to turn away, as if remembering some other errand, then halted. The eyes of his green pet—it had been on his shoulder the whole time—remained locked on to her, blank as gun barrels.
“One other matter, Miss Els,” the quaestor said, looking back at her over his shoulder.
“Yes?”
“The gentleman you were speaking to earlier?” His eyes narrowed as he studied her expression. “Well, I wouldn’t, if I were you.”
“You wouldn’t what?”
“Have anything to do with his sort.” The quaestor stared vaguely into the distance. “As a rule, it’s never wise to circulate amongst Observers, or any other pilgrims of a similarly committed strain of faith. But in my general experience it is
especially
unwise to associate with those who are vacillating between faith and denial.”
“Surely, Quaestor, it is up to me who I talk to.”
“Of course, Miss Els, and please don’t take offence. I offer only advice, from the bottomless pit of goodness which is my heart.” He popped a morsel into the mouthpiece of his pet. “Don’t I, Peppermint?”
“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” the creature observed.
The caravan surmounted the eastern approach to the bridge. A kilometre from the eastern abutment, the road had veered back into the side of the cliff, ascending a steep defile that—via scraping hairpins, treacherous gradients and brief interludes of tunnel and ledge—brought it to the level of the bridge deck. Behind them, the landscape was an apparently impassable chaos of ice boulders. Ahead, the road deck stretched away like a textbook example of perspective, straight as a rifle barrel, un-fenced on either side, gently cambered towards the middle, gleaming with the soft diamond lustre of starlit ice.
Gathering speed now that it was on a level surface with no immediate worry of obstructions, the caravan sped towards the point where the ground fell away on either side. The road beneath the procession became smoother and wider, no longer furrowed or interrupted by rock-falls or man-deep fissures. And here there were, finally, very few pilgrims to be avoided. Most of them did not take the bridge, and so there was minimal risk of any unfortunates being trundled to death beneath the machines.
Rashmika’s grasp of the scale of the structure underwent several ratchetting revisions. She recalled that, from a distance, the deck of the bridge had formed a shallow arc. From this approach, however, it appeared flat and straight, as if aligned by laser, until the point where it vanished into convergence, far ahead. She was trying to resolve this paradox when she realised—dizzyingly—that at that moment she must only be seeing a small fraction of the distance along the deck. It was like climbing a dome-shaped hill: the summit was always tantalisingly out of reach.
She walked to another viewing point and looked back. The first half-dozen vehicles of this flank of the caravan were now on the bridge proper, and the sheer walls of the cliff were dropping back to the rear, offering her the first real opportunity to judge the depth of the Rift.
It fell away with indecent swiftness. The cliff walls were etched and gouged with titanic geological clawmarks, here vertical, there horizontal, elsewhere diagonal or curled and folded into each other in a display of obscene liquidity. The walls sparkled and spangled with blue-grey ice and murkier seams of darker sediment. The ledge that the caravan had traversed, visible now to the left, appeared far too narrow and hesitant to be used as a road, let alone by something weighing fifty thousand tonnes. Beneath the ledge, Rashmika now saw, the cliff often curved in to a worrying degree. She had never exactly felt safe during the traverse, but she had convinced herself that the ground beneath them continued down for more than a few dozen metres.
She did not see the quaestor again during the rest of the crossing. Within an hour she judged that the opposite wall of the Rift looked only slightly further away than the one that was receding behind them. They must be nearing the midpoint of the bridge. Quickly, therefore, but with the minimum of fuss, Rashmika put on her vacuum suit and stole up through the caravan to its roof.
From the top of the vehicle things looked very different from the sanitised, faintly unreal scene she had observed from the pressurised compartment. She now had a panoramic view of the entire Rift, and it was much easier to see the floor, which was a good dozen kilometres below. From this perspective, the Rift floor almost appeared to be creeping forwards as the flat ribbon of the road bed streaked backwards beneath the caravan. This contradiction made her feel immediately dizzy, and she was gripped by an urgent desire to flatten herself on the roof of the machine, spread-eagled so that she could not possibly topple over the edge. But although she bent her knees, lowering her centre of gravity, Rashmika managed to screw up the courage to remain standing.
The road bed appeared only slightly wider than the caravan. They were moving down the middle of it, only occasionally veering to one side or the other to avoid a patch of thickened ice or some other obstruction. There were rocks on the frozen surface of the road, deposited there from volcanic plumes elsewhere on Hela. Some of them were half as high as the caravan’s wheels. The fact that they had managed to smash on to the road without shattering the bridge gave her a tiny flicker of reassurance. And if the road bed was just wide enough to accommodate the two rows of vehicles that made up the caravan, then it was clearly absurd to think of a cathedral making the same journey.
That was when she noticed something down in the floor of the Rift. It was a huge smear of rubble, kilometres across. It was dark and star-shaped, and as far as she could tell the epicentre of the smear lay almost directly beneath the bridge. Near the centre of the star were vague suggestions of ruined structures. Rashmika saw what she thought might be the uppermost part of a spire, leaning to one side. She made out sketchy hints of smashed machinery, smothered in dust and debris.
So someone
had
tried to cross the bridge with a cathedral.
She moved between the vehicles, focusing dead ahead as she made her own personal crossing. The Observers were still on their racks, tilted towards the swollen sphere of Haldora. Their mirrored faceplates made her think of dozens of neatly packed titanium eggs.
Then she saw another suited figure waiting on the next vehicle along, resting against a railing on one side of the roof. It became aware of her presence at about the same time that she noticed it, for the figure turned to her and beckoned her onwards.
She moved past the Observers, then crossed another swaying connection. The caravan swerved alarmingly to negotiate the chicane between two rockfalls, then bounced and crunched its way over a series of smaller obstructions.
The other figure wore a vacuum suit of unremarkable design. She had no idea whether it was the same kind that the Observers wore, since she had never seen beneath their habits. The mirrored silver visor gave nothing away.
“Pietr?” she asked, on the general channel.
There was no response, but the figure still urged her on with increased urgency.
What if this was a trap of some kind? The quaestor had known about her conversation with the young man. It was quite likely that he also knew about her earlier assignation on the roof. Rashmika had little doubt that she would be making enemies during the course of her investigations, but she did not think she had made any yet, unless one counted the quaestor. But since he had now arranged work for her in the clearance gang, she imagined that he had a vested interest in seeing her safely delivered to the Permanent Way.