‘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.’
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.’