There came a point where the canyon made a gentle curve to the right, blocking any view of the oncoming scenery for several minutes, and then suddenly there was an awful, heart-stopping absence in the landscape. She had not realised how used she had become to seeing white crags stepping into the distance. Now the ground fell away and the deep black sky dropped much lower than it had before, like a curtain whose tangled lower hem had just unfurled to its fullest extent. The sky bit hungrily into the land.
The road emerged from the canyon and ran along a ledge that skirted one wall of Ginnungagap Rift. To the left of the road, the sheer-sided canyon wall lurched higher; to the right, there was nothing at all. The road was just broad enough to accommodate the two-vehicle-wide procession, with the right-hand sides of the right-hand vehicles never more than two or three metres from the very edge. Rashmika looked back along the extended, motley train of the caravan — which was now thrillingly visible in its entirety as it had never been before — and saw wheels, treads, crawler plates, piston-driven limbs and flexing carapacial segments picking their way daintily along the edge, scuffing tonnes of ice into the abyss with each misplaced tread or impact. All along the caravan, the individual masters were steering and correcting like crazy, trying to navigate the fine line between smashing against the wall on the left and plunging over the side on the right. They couldn’t slow down because the whole point of this short cut was to make up valuable lost time. Rashmika wondered what would happen to the rest of the caravan if one of the elements got it wrong and went over the side. She had seen the inter-caravan couplings, but had no idea how strong they were. Would that one errant machine take the whole lot with it, or fall gallantly alone, leaving the others to close up the gap in the procession? Was there some nightmarish protocol for deciding such things in advance: a slackening of the couplings, perhaps?
Well, she was up front. If anywhere was safe, it had to be up at the front where the navigators had the best view of the terrain.
After several minutes during which no calamity occurred, she began to relax, and for the first time was able to pay due attention to the bridge, which had been looming ahead all the while.
The caravan was moving in a southerly direction, towards the equator, along the eastern flank of Ginnungagap Rift. The bridge was still some way south. Perhaps it was her imagination, but she thought she could see the curvature of the world as the high wall of the Rift marched into the distance. The top was jagged and irregular, but if she smoothed out those details in her mind’s eye, it appeared to follow a gentle arc, like the trajectory of a satellite. It was very difficult to judge how distant the bridge was, or how wide the Rift was at this point. Although Rashmika recalled that the Rift was forty kilometres wide at the point where the bridge spanned it, the ordinary rules of perspective simply had no application: there were no visual cues to assist her; no intermediate objects to offer a sense of diminishing scale; no attenuation of detail or colour due to atmosphere. Although the bridge and the far wall looked vast and distant, they could as easily have been five kilometres away as forty.
Rashmika judged the bridge to be still some fifty or sixty kilometres away as the crow flies — more than two-hundredths of the circumference of Hela — but the road along the ledge took many twists and turns getting there. She could easily believe they had another hundred kilometres of travel to go before they arrived at the eastern approach to the bridge.
Still, at least now she could see it — and it was everything she had ever imagined. Everyone said that photographs could not even remotely convey the true essence of the structure. Rashmika had always doubted that, but now she saw that the common opinion was quite correct: to appreciate the bridge, it was necessary to see it.
What people appeared to find most dismaying about the bridge, Rashmika knew, was its very lack of strangeness. Disregarding its scale and the materials that had been used to build it, it looked like something transplanted from the pages of human history, something built on Earth, in the age of iron and steam. It made her think of lanterns and horses, duels and courtships, winter palaces and musical fountains — except that it was vast and looked as if it had been blown from glass or carved from sugar.
The upper surface of the bridge described a very gentle arc as it crossed from one side of the Rift to the other, and was at its highest in the middle. Apart from that it was perfectly flat, unencumbered by any form of superstructure. There were no railings on either side of the road bed, which was breathtakingly shallow — from her present angle it looked like a rapier-thin line of light. It appeared broken in places, until she moved her head slightly and the illumination shifted. Fifty kilometres away, and the movement of her head was enough to affect what she could see of the delicate structure! The span was indeed unsupported for most of its width, but at either end — reaching out to a distance of five or six kilometres from the walls — was a delicate tracery of filigreed stanchions. They were curled into absurd spirals and whorls, scroll-like flourishes and luscious organic involutes catching the light and throwing it back to her, not in white and silver, but in a prismatic shimmer of rainbow hues. Every tilt of her head shifted the colours into some new configuration of glories.
The bridge looked evanescent, as if one ill-judged breath might be sufficient to blow it away.
Yet they were actually going to cross it.
Ararat, 2675
As soon as he had washed and breakfasted, Vasko set off to report for duty at the nearest Security Arm centre. He had slept for little more than four hours, but the alertness he had felt the night before was still there, stretched a little thinner and tighter. First Camp was deceptively quiet; the streets were littered with debris, some premises and dwellings had been damaged and the evidence of fires smouldered here and there, but the vast numbers of people he had seen the night before seemed to have vanished. Perhaps they had responded to Scorpio’s pronouncement after all and returned to their homes, having grasped how unpleasant it was going to be on the Nostalgia for Infinity.
Vasko realised his error as soon as he turned the corner next to the Security Arm compound. A huge grey mob was pressed up against the building, many hundreds of people crushed together with their belongings piled at their feet. A dozen or so SA guards were keeping order, standing on railed plinths with small weapons presented but not aimed directly at the crowd. Other Arm personnel, in addition to unarmed administration officials, were manning tables that had been set up outside the two-storey conch structure. Paperwork was being processed and stamped; personal effects were being weighed and labelled. Most of the people had obviously decided not to wait for the official rules: they were here, now, ready to depart, and very few of them looked as if they were having second thoughts.
Vasko made his way through the crowd, doing his best not to push and shove. There was no sign of Urton, but this was not her designated Arm centre. He stopped at one of the tables and waited for the officer manning it to finish processing one of the refugees.
‘Are they still planning to start flying them out at noon?’ Vasko asked quietly.
‘Earlier,’ the man replied, his voice low. ‘The pace has been stepped up. Word is we’re still going to have trouble coping.’
‘There’s no way that ship can accommodate all of us,’ Vasko said. ‘Not now. It’d take months to get us all into the sleep caskets.’
‘Tell that to the pig,’ the man said and went back to his work, stamping a sheet of paper almost without looking at it.
Sudden warmth kissed the back of Vasko’s neck. He looked up and squinted against the blinding-bright underside of a machine, an aircraft or shuttle sliding across the square. He expected it to slow and descend, but instead the machine curved away, heading beyond the shore, towards the spire. It slid under the clouds like a bright ragged flake of daylight.
‘See, they’ve already begun moving ’em out,’ the man said. ‘As if that’s going to make everyone else calmer…’
‘I’m sure Scorpio knows what he�
��s doing,’ Vasko said. He turned away before the man was able to answer.
He pushed beyond the processing tables, through the rest of the crowd, and into the conch structure. Inside, it was the same story: people squeezed in everywhere, holding paperwork and possessions aloft, children crying. He could feel the panic increasing by the minute.
He passed through into the part of the building reserved for SA personnel. In the small curved chamber where he usually received his assignments, he found a trio of people sitting around a low table drinking seaweed tea. He knew them all.
‘Malinin,’ said Gunderson, a young woman with short red hair. ‘To what do we owe the pleasure?’
He didn’t care for her tone. ‘I came for my duties,’ he said.
‘I didn’t think you mixed with the likes of us these days,’ she sneered.
He reached across the tea-drinkers to rip the assignment sheet from the wall. ‘I mix with whoever I like,’ he said.
The second of the trio, a pig named Flenser, said, ‘We heard you were more likely to be hanging around with administration stiffs.’
Vasko looked at the docket. He couldn’t see his name against any of the regular duties. ‘Like Scorpio, you mean?’
‘I bet you know a lot more than we do about what’s going on,’ Gunderson said. ‘Don’t you?’
‘If I did, I’d hardly be in a position to talk about it.’ Vasko pinned the sheet back on the wall. ‘Truthfully, I don’t know very much more.’
‘You’re lying,’ the third one — a man named Cory — said. ‘You want to climb that ladder, Malinin, you’d better learn how to lie better than that.’
‘Thanks,’ he said, smiling, ‘but I’ll settle for learning how to serve this colony.’
‘You want to know where to go?’ Gunderson asked him.
‘It would help.’
‘They told us to pass you a message,’ she said. ‘You’re expected in the High Conch at eight.’
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’ He turned to leave.
‘Fuck you, Malinin,’ he heard her say to his back. ‘You think you’re better than us, is that it?’
‘Not at all,’ he replied, surprised by his calmness. He turned back to face her. ‘I think my abilities are average. I just happen to feel a sense of responsibility, an obligation to serve Ararat to the best of my abilities. I’d be astonished if you felt differently.’
‘You think that now Clavain’s out of the picture, you can slime your way to the top?’
He looked at Gunderson with genuine surprise. ‘That thought never crossed my mind.’
‘Well, that’s good, because if it had, you’d be making a serious mistake. You don’t have what it takes, Malinin. None of us have got what it takes, but you especially don’t have it.’
‘No? And what exactly is it that I don’t have?’
‘The balls to stand up against the pig,’ she said, as if this should have been obvious to all present.
In the High Conch, Antoinette Bax was already seated at the table, a compad open in front of her. Cruz, Pellerin and several other colony seniors had joined her, and now Blood came in, swaggering like a wrestler.
‘There’d better be a good reason for this,’ he said. ‘It’s not as if I haven’t got a shitload of other things I really need to be taking care of.’
‘Where’s Scorpio?’ she asked.
‘In the infirmary, checking on mother and daughter. He’ll be here as soon as he can,’ Blood replied.
‘And Malinin?’
‘I had someone leave a message for him. He’ll get here eventually.’ Blood collapsed into a seat. Reflexively, he took out his knife and began to scrape the blade against his chin. It made a thin, insectile noise.
‘Well, we’ve got a problem,’ Antoinette said. ‘In the last six hours, the neutrino flux from the ship has about trebled. If the flux increases another ten, fifteen per cent, that ship’s going to have nowhere to go but up.’
‘There’s no exhaust yet?’ asked Cruz.
‘No,’ Antoinette replied, ‘and I’m pretty worried about what will happen when those drives do start thrusting. No one was living around the bay when she came down. We need to think seriously about an evacuation to inland areas. I’d recommend moving everyone to the outlying islands, but I know that’s not possible given the existing load on aircraft and shuttles.’
‘Yeah, dream on,’ Blood said.
‘All the same, we have to do something. When the Captain decides to take off, we’re going to have tidal waves, clouds of superheated steam, noise so loud it will deafen everyone within hundreds of kilometres, all kinds of harmful radiation spewing out…’ Antoinette trailed off, hoping she had made her point. ‘Basically, this isn’t going to be the kind of environment you want to be anywhere near unless you’re inside a spacesuit.’
Blood buried his face in his hands, making a mask of his stubby pig fingers. Antoinette had seen Scorpio do something similar when crises pressed on him from all sides. With Clavain gone and Scorpio absent, Blood was experiencing the responsibility he had always craved. Antoinette doubted that the novelty of command had lasted for more than about five minutes.
‘I can’t evacuate the town,’ he said.
‘You have no choice,’ Antoinette insisted.
He lowered his hands and jabbed a finger at the window. ‘That’s our fucking ship. We shouldn’t be speculating about what it’s going to do. We should be giving it orders, where and when it suits us.’
‘Sorry, Blood, but that isn’t how it works,’ Antoinette said.
‘There’ll be panic,’ Cruz said. ‘Worse than anything we’ve seen. All the processing stations will have to be closed down and relocated. It’ll delay exodus flights to the Infinity by at least a day. And where are those relocated people going to sleep tonight? There’s nothing for them inland — just a bunch of rocks. We’d have hundreds dead of exposure by daybreak.’
‘I don’t have all the answers,’ Antoinette said. ‘I’m just pointing out the difficulties.’
‘There must be something else we can do,’ Cruz said. ‘Damn, we should have had contingencies in place for this.’
‘Should haves don’t count,’ Antoinette said. It was something her father had always told her. It had annoyed her intensely, and she was dismayed to hear the same words coming out of her mouth before she could stop them.
‘Pellerin,’ Blood said, ‘what about swimmer corps intervention? Ararat seems to be on our side, or it wouldn’t have made a channel for the boats to reach the ship. Anything you can offer?’
Pellerin shook her head. ‘Sorry. Not now. If the Jugglers show signs of returning to normal activity patterns, we might sanction an exploratory swim, but not before then. I’m not sending someone to their death, Blood, not when there’s so little chance of a useful outcome.’
‘I understand,’ the pig said.
‘Wait,’ Cruz said. ‘Let’s turn this around. If it’s going to be such a bad thing to be anywhere near the ship when it lifts, maybe we should be looking at ways to speed up the exodus.’
‘We’re already moving ’em out as fast as we can,’ Blood said.
‘Then cut back on the bureaucracy,’ Antoinette said. ‘Just move them and worry about the details later. And don’t take all day doing it. We may not have that much time left. Shit, what I wouldn’t give for Storm Bird now.’
‘Perhaps there is something you can do for us,’ Cruz said, gazing straight at her.
Antoinette returned the one-eyed woman’s stare. ‘Name it.’
‘Go back aboard the Infinity. Reason with the Captain. Tell him we need some breathing space.’
It was not what she wanted to hear. She had, if anything, become even more frightened of the Captain since their conversation; the thought of summoning him again filled her with renewed dread.
‘He may not want to talk,’ she said. ‘Even if he does, he may not want to hear anything I have to say.’
‘You mi
ght still buy us time,’ Cruz said. ‘In my book, that’s got to be better than nothing.’
‘I guess,’ Antoinette agreed, reluctantly.
‘So you may as well try it,’ Cruz said. ‘There’s no shortage of transport to the ship, either. With administration privileges, you could be aboard in half an hour.’
As if this was meant to encourage her.
Antoinette was staring at her fingers, lost in the metal intricacies of her home-made jewellery and hoping for some remission from this duty, when Vasko Malinin entered the room. He was flushed, his hair glistening with rain or sweat. Antoinette thought he looked terribly young to be sitting amongst these seniors; it seemed unfair to taint him with such matters. The young were still entitled to believe that the world’s problems always had clear solutions.
‘Have a seat,’ Blood said. ‘Anything I can get you — coffee, tea?’
‘I had trouble collecting my orders from my duty station,’ Vasko said. ‘The crowds are getting quite heavy. When they saw my uniform, they wouldn’t let me leave until I’d more or less promised them seats on one of those shuttles.’
The pig played with his knife. ‘You didn’t, I hope.’
‘Of course not, but I hope everyone understands the severity of the problem.’
‘We’ve got a rough idea, thanks,’ Antoinette said. Then she stood up, pulling down the hem of her formal blouse.
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