When the chamber was fully evacuated, a relay allowed the outer door to be opened. Rashmika pushed hard, but at first nothing happened. Then the door budged - only by an inch, but it was enough to let in a sheet of blindingly bright daylight that scythed against her faceplate. She pushed harder and the door moved higher, hinging back as it did so. Rashmika pushed through until she was sitting on the surface. She saw now that the door had been covered in an inch of recent frost. It snowed on Hela, especially when the Kelda or Ragnarok geysers were active.
Although the house clock had said it was dawn, this meant very little on the surface. The villagers still lived by a twenty-six-hour clock (many of them were interstellar refugees from Yellowstone) despite the fact that Hela was a different world entirely, with its own complex cycles. A day on Hela was actually about forty hours long, which was the time it took Hela to complete one orbit around its mother world, the gas giant Haldora. Since the moon’s inclination to the plane of its orbit was essentially zero, all points on the surface experienced about twenty hours of darkness during each orbit. The Vigrid badlands were on the dayside now, and would remain so for another seven hours. There was another kind of night on Hela, for once in its orbit around Haldora the moon swung into the gas giant’s shadow. But that short night was only two hours long, brief enough to be of little consequence to the villagers. At any given time the moon was far more likely to be out of Haldora’s shadow than within it.
After a few seconds, Rashmika’s visor had compensated for the glare and she was able to get her bearings. She extracted her legs from the hole and carefully closed the surface door, latching it shut so that it would begin pressurising the lower chamber. Perhaps her parents were waiting below, but even if that was the case they could not reach the surface for another two minutes, even if they were already wearing suits. It would take them even longer to navigate the community tunnels to reach the next-nearest surface exit.
Rashmika stood up and began walking briskly but with what she hoped was no apparent sense of haste or panic. There was some more good fortune: she had expected to have to cross several dozen metres of unmarked ice, so that her trail would at first be easy to follow. But someone else had come this way recently, and their prints meandered away in a different direction from the one she intended to take. Anyone following her now would have no idea which set of prints to follow. They looked like her mother’s, for the shoe-prints were too small to have belonged to her father. What kind of business had her mother been on? It bothered Rashmika for a moment, for she did not recall anyone mentioning any recent trips to the surface.
Never mind: there was bound to be an innocent explanation. She had enough to think about without adding to her worries.
Rashmika followed a circuitous path between the black upright slabs of radiator panels, the squatting orange mounds of generators or navigation transponders and the soft snow-covered lines of parked icejammers. She had been right about the footprints, for when she looked back it was impossible to separate her own from the muddle of those that had been left before.
She rounded a huddle of radiator fins and there it was, looking much like the other parked icejammers except that the snow had melted from the flanged radiator above the engine cowlings. It was too bright to tell if there were lights on inside the machine. There were fan-shaped arcs of transparency in the windscreen where the mechanical wiper blades had flicked aside the snow. Rashmika thought she saw figures moving behind the glass.
Rashmika walked around the low, splayed-legged jammer. The black of its boat-shaped hull was relieved only by a glowing snake motif coiling along the side. The single front leg ended in a broad, upturned ski blade, with smaller skis tipping the two rear legs. Rashmika wondered if it was the right machine. She would look rather silly if she made a mistake now. She felt certain that there was no one in the village who would not recognise her, even though she had a suit on.
But Crozet had been very specific in his instructions. With some relief she saw a boarding ramp was already waiting for her, lowered down into the snow. She walked up the flexing metal slope and knocked politely on the jammer’s outer door. There was an agonising moment and then the door slid aside, revealing another airlock. She squeezed into it - there was only room for one person.
A man’s voice - she recognised it immediately as Crozet’s - came through on her helmet channel. ‘Yes?’
‘It’s me.’
‘Who is “me”?’
‘Rashmika,’ she said. ‘Rashmika Els. I think we had an arrangement.’
There was a pause - an agonising pause during which she began to think that, yes, she had made an error - when the man said, ‘It’s not too late to change your mind.’
‘I think it is.’
‘You could go home now.’
‘My parents won’t be very pleased that I came this far.’
‘No,’ the man said, ‘I doubt that they’ll be thrilled. But I know your folks. I doubt that they’d punish you too severely.’
He was right, but she did not want to be reminded of that now. She had spent weeks psyching herself up for this, and the last thing she needed was a rational argument for backing out at the final minute.
Rashmika knocked on the inner door again, knuckling it hard with her gauntlet. ‘Are you going to let me in or not?’
‘I just wanted to make sure you’re certain. Once we leave the village, we won’t turn back until we meet the caravan. That’s not open to negotiation. Step inside, you’re committed to a three-day trip. Six if you decide to come back with us. No amount of pissing and moaning is going to make me turn around.’
‘I’ve waited eight years,’ she said. ‘Three more days won’t kill me.’
He laughed, or sniggered - she wasn’t sure which. ‘You know, I almost believe you.’
‘You should do,’ Rashmika told him. ‘I’m the girl that never lies, remember?’
The outer door closed itself, cramming her even further into the tight cavity of the lock. Air began to skirl in through grilles. At the same time she felt motion. It was soft and rhythmic, like being rocked in a cradle. The jammer was on the move, propelling itself with alternating movements of its rear skis.
She supposed that her escape had begun the moment she crawled out of bed, but only now did it feel as if she was actually on her way.
When the inner door allowed Rashmika into the body of the jammer, she snapped off her helmet and hung it dutifully next to the three that were already there. The jammer had looked reasonably large from the outside, but she had forgotten how much of the interior volume would be occupied by its own engines, generators, fuel tanks, life-support equipment and cargo racks. Inside it was cramped and noisy, and the air made her want to put the helmet back on again. She imagined she could get used to it, but she wondered if three days would be anywhere near enough time.
The jammer lurched and yawed. Through one of the windows she saw the blazing white landscape tilt and tilt again. Rashmika reached for a handhold and was just beginning to make her way to the front when a figure stepped into view.
It was Crozet’s son, Culver. He wore grubby ochre overalls, tools cramming the many pockets. He was a year or two younger than Rashmika, blond-haired and with a permanent look of malnourishment. He viewed Rashmika with lecherous intent.
‘Decided to stay aboard after all, did you? That’s good. We can get to know each other a bit better now, can’t we?’
‘It’s only for three days, Culver. Don’t get any ideas.’
‘I’ll help you get that suit off, then we can go up front. Dad’s busy steering us out of the village now. We’re having to take a detour because of the crater. That’s why it’s a bit bumpy.’
‘I’ll manage my suit on my own, thank you.’ Rashmika nodded encouragingly towards the icejammer’s cabin. ‘Why don’t you go back and see if your dad needs any help?’
‘He doesn’t need any help. Mother’s there as well.’
Rashmika beamed approvingly. ‘
Well, I expect you’re glad that she’s here to keep you two men out of trouble. Right, Culver?’
‘She doesn’t mind what we get up to, so long as we stay in the black.’ The machine lurched again, knocking Rashmika against the metal wall. ‘Fact of the matter is, she mostly turns a blind eye.’
‘So I’ve heard. Well, I really need to get this suit off . . . would you mind telling me where I’m sleeping?’
Culver showed her a tiny compartment tucked away between two throbbing generators. There was a mattress, a pillow and a blanket made of slippery quilted silver material. A curtain could be tugged across for privacy.
‘I hope you weren’t expecting luxury,’ Culver said.
‘I was expecting the worst.’
Culver lingered. ‘You sure you don’t want any help getting that suit off?’
‘I’ll manage, thanks.’
‘Got something to wear afterwards, have you?’
‘What I’m wearing under the suit, and what I brought with me.’ Rashmika patted the bag which was now tucked beneath her life-support pack. Through the fabric she could feel the hard edge of her compad. ‘You didn’t seriously think I’d forget to bring any clothes with me, did you?’
‘No,’ Culver said, sullenly.
‘Good. Now why don’t you run along and tell your parents that I’m safe and sound? And please let them know that the sooner we clear the village, the happier I’ll be.’
‘We’re moving as fast as we can go,’ Culver said.
‘Actually,’ Rashmika said, ‘that’s just what’s worrying me.’
‘In a bit of a hurry, are you?’
‘I’d like to reach the cathedrals as soon as I can, yes.’
Culver eyed her. ‘Got religion, have you?’
‘Not exactly,’ she said. ‘More like some family business I have to take care of.’
107 Piscium, 2615
Quaiche awoke, his body insinuated into a dark form-fitting cavity.
There was a moment of blissful disconnection while he waited for his memories to return, a moment in which he had no cares, no anxieties. Then all the memories barged into his head at once, announcing themselves like rowdy gate-crashers before shuffling themselves into something resembling chronological order.
He remembered being woken, to be greeted with the unwelcome news that he had been granted an audience with the queen. He remembered her dodecahedral chamber, furnished with instruments of torture, its morbid gloom punctuated by the flashes of electrocuted vermin. He remembered the skull with the television eyes. He remembered the queen toying with him the way cats toyed with sparrows. Of all his errors, imagining that she had it in her to forgive him had been the most grievous, the least forgivable.
Quaiche screamed now, grasping precisely what had happened to him and where he was. His screams were muffled and soft, uncomfortably childlike. He was ashamed to hear such sounds coming out of his mouth. He could move no part of himself, but he was not exactly paralysed - rather, there was no room to move any part of his body by more than a fraction of a centimetre.
The confinement felt oddly familiar.
Gradually Quaiche’s screams became wheezes, and then merely very hard rasping breaths. This continued for several minutes, and then Quaiche started humming, reiterating six or seven notes with the studied air of a madman or a monk. He must already be under the ice, he decided. There had been no entombment ceremony, no final chastising meeting with Jasmina. They had simply welded him into the suit and buried him within the shield of ice that Gnostic Ascension pushed ahead of itself. He could not guess how much time had passed, whether it was hours or larger fractions of a day. He dared not believe it was any longer than that.
As the horror hit him, so did something else: a nagging feeling that some detail was amiss. Perhaps it was the sense of familiarity he felt in the confined space, or perhaps it was the utter absence of anything to look at.
A voice said, ‘Attention, Quaiche. Attention, Quaiche. Deceleration phase is complete. Awaiting orders for system insertion.’
It was the calm, avuncular voice of the Dominatrix’s cybernetic subpersona.
He realised, joltingly, that he was not in the iron suit at all, but rather inside the slowdown coffin of the Dominatrix, packed into a form-fitting matrix designed to shield him during the high-gee deceleration phase. Quaiche stopped humming, simultaneously affronted and disorientated. He was relieved, no doubt about that. But the transition from the prospect of years of torment to the relatively benign environment of the Dominatrix had been so abrupt that he had not had time to depressurise emotionally. All he could do was gasp in shock and wonderment.
He felt a vague need to crawl back into the nightmare and emerge from it more gradually.
‘Attention, Quaiche. Awaiting orders for system insertion.’
‘Wait,’ he said. His throat was raw, his voice gummy. He must have been in the slowdown coffin for quite some time. ‘Wait. Get me out of here. I’m . . .’
‘Is everything satisfactory, Quaiche?’
‘I’m a bit confused.’
‘In what way, Quaiche? Do you need medical attention?’
‘No, I’m . . .’ He paused and squirmed. ‘Just get me out of here. I’ll be all right in a moment.’
‘Very well, Quaiche.’
The restraints budged apart. Light rammed in through widening cracks in the coffin’s walls. The familiar onboard smell of the Dominatrix hit his olfactory system. The ship was nearly silent, save for the occasional tick of a cooling manifold. It was always like that after slowdown, when they were in coast phase.
Quaiche stretched, his body creaking like an old wooden chair. He felt bad, but not nearly as bad as he had felt after his last hasty revival from reefersleep on board the Gnostic Ascension. In the slowdown coffin he had been drugged into a state of unconsciousness, but most bodily processes had continued normally. He only spent a few weeks in the coffin during each system survey, and the medical risks associated with being frozen outweighed the benefits to the queen of arresting his ageing.
He looked around, still not quite daring to believe he had been spared the nightmare of the scrimshaw suit. He considered the possibility that he might be hallucinating, that he had perhaps gone mad after spending several months under the ice. But the ship had a hyper-reality about it that did not feel like any kind of hallucination. He had no recollection of ever dreaming in slowdown before - at least, not the kind of dreams that resulted in him waking screaming. But the more time that passed, and the more the ship’s reality began to solidify around him, the more that seemed to be the most likely explanation.
He had dreamed every moment of it.
‘Dear God,’ Quaiche said. With that came a jolt of pain, the indoctrinal virus’s usual punishment for blasphemy, but the feeling of it was so joyously real, so unlike the horror of being entombed, that he said it again. ‘Dear God, I’d never have believed I had that in me.’
‘Had what in you, Quaiche?’ Sometimes the ship felt obliged to engage in conversation, as if secretly bored.
‘Never mind,’ he said, distracted by something. Normally when he emerged from the coffin he had plenty of room to twist around and align himself with the long, thin axis of the little ship’s main companionway. But now something chafed his elbow, something that was not usually there. He turned to look at it, half-knowing as he did so exactly what it would be.
Corroded and scorched metal skin the colour of pewter. A festering surface of manic detail. The vague half-formed shape of a person with a dark grilled slot where the eyes would have been.
‘Bitch,’ he said.
‘I am to inform you that the presence of the scrimshaw suit is a spur to success in your current mission,’ the ship said.
‘You were actually programmed to say that?’
‘Yes.’
Quaiche observed that the suit was plumbed into the life-support matrix of the ship. Thick lines ran from the wall sockets to their counterparts in the skin o
f the suit. He reached out again and touched the surface, running his fingers from one rough welded patch to another, tracing the sinuous back of a snake. The metal was mildly warm to the touch, quivering with a vague sense of subcutaneous activity.
‘Be careful,’ the ship said.
‘Why - is there something alive inside that thing?’ Quaiche said. Then a sickening realisation dawned. ‘Dear God. Someone’s inside it. Who?’
‘I am to inform you that the suit contains Morwenna.’
Of course. Of course. It made delicious sense.
‘You said I should be careful. Why?’
‘I am to inform you that the suit is rigged to euthanise its occupant should any attempt be made to tamper with the cladding, seams or life-support couplings. I am to inform you that only Surgeon-General Grelier has the means to remove the suit without euthanising the occupant.’
Quaiche pulled away from the suit. ‘You mean I can’t even touch it?’
‘Touching it would not be your wisest course of action, given the circumstances.’
He almost laughed. Jasmina and Grelier had excelled themselves. First the audience with the queen to make him think that she had at last run out of patience with him. Then the charade of being shown the suit and made to think that punishment was finally upon him. Made to believe that he was about to be buried in ice, forced into consciousness for what might be the better part of a decade. And then this: the final, mocking reprieve. His last chance to redeem himself. And make no bones about it: this would be his last chance. That was clear to him now. Jasmina had shown him exactly what would happen if he failed her one more time. Idle threats were not in Jasmina’s repertoire.
But her cleverness ran deeper than that, for with Morwenna imprisoned in the suit he had no hope of doing what had sometimes occurred to him, which was to hide in a particular system until the Gnostic Ascension had passed out of range. No - he had no practical choice but to return to the queen. And then hope for two things: firstly, that he would not have disappointed her; and secondly, that she would free Morwenna from the suit.
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