‘Do I?’
‘I can hear it in your voice. You’ve found something, haven’t you?’ He so desperately wanted to touch the scrimshaw suit, to caress its metal surface and imagine it was Morwenna beneath his fingers.
‘I don’t know what I’ve found, but it’s enough to make me think we should stick around and have a good look, at the very least.’
‘That’s not telling me much.’
‘There’s a large ice-covered moon in orbit around Haldora,’ he said.
‘Haldora?’
‘The gas giant,’ Quaiche explained quickly. ‘I just named it.’
‘You mean you had the ship assign some random tags from unallocated entries in the nomenclature tables.’
‘Well, yes.’ Quaiche smiled. ‘But I didn’t accept the first thing it came up with. I did exercise some degree of judgement in the matter, however piffling. Don’t you think Haldora has a nice classical ring to it? It’s Norse, or something. Not that it really matters.’
‘And the moon?’
‘Hela,’ Quaiche said. ‘Of course, I’ve named all of Haldora’s other moons as well — but Hela is the only one we’re interested in right now. I’ve even named some of the major topographical features on it.’
‘Why do we care about an ice-covered moon, Horris?’
‘Because there’s something on it,’ he said, ‘something that we really need to take a closer look at.’
‘What have you found, my love?’
‘A bridge,’ Quaiche said. ‘A bridge across a gap. A bridge that shouldn’t be there.’
The Dominatrix sniffed and sidled its way closer to the gas giant its master had elected to name Haldora, every operational sensor keened for maximum alertness. It knew the hazards of local space, the traps that might befall the unwary in the radiation-zapped, dust-strewn ecliptic of a typical solar system. It watched for impact strikes, waiting for an incoming shard to prick the outer edge of its collision-avoidance radar bubble. Every second, it considered and reviewed billions of crisis scenarios, sifting through the possible evasion patterns to find the tight bundle of acceptable solutions that would permit it to outrun the threat without crushing its master out of existence. Now and then, just for fun, it drew up plans for evading multiple simultaneous collisions, even though it knew that the universe would have to go through an unfeasible number of cycles of collapse and rebirth before such an unlikely confluence of events stood a chance of happening.
With the same diligence it observed the system’s star, watchful for unstable prominences or incipient flares, considering — should a big ejection occur — which of the many suitable bodies in the immediate volume of space it would scuttle behind for protection. It constantly swept local space for artificial threats that might have been left behind by previous explorers — high-density chaff fields, rover mines, sit-and-wait attack drones — as well as checking the health of its own countermeasures, clustered in neat rapid-deployment racks in its belly, secretly desirous that it should, one day, get the chance to use those lethal instruments in the execution of its duty.
Thus the ship’s attendant hosts of subpersonae satisfied themselves that — for all that the dangers were quite plausible — there was nothing more that needed to be done.
And then something happened that gave the ship pause for thought, opening up a chink in its armour of smug preparedness.
For a fraction of a second something inexplicable had occurred.
A sensor anomaly. A simultaneous hiccup in every sensor that happened to be observing Haldora as the ship made its approach. A hiccup that made it appear as if the gas giant had simply vanished.
Leaving, in its place, something equally inexplicable.
A shudder ran through every layer of the Dominatrix’s control infrastructure. Hurriedly, it dug into its archives, pawing through them like a dog searching for a buried bone. Had the Gnostic Ascension seen anything similar on its own slow approach to the system? Granted, it had been a lot further out — but the split-second disappearance of an entire world was not easily missed.
Dismayed, it flicked through the vast cache of data bequeathed it by the Ascension, focusing on the threads that specifically referred to the gas giant. It then filtered the data again, zooming in only on those blocks that were also accompanied by commentary flags. If a similar anomaly had occurred, it would surely have been flagged.
But there was nothing.
The ship felt a vague prickle of suspicion. It looked again at the data from the Ascension, all of it now. Was it imagining things, or were there faint hints that the data cache had been doctored? Some of the numbers had statistical frequencies that were just a tiny bit deviant from expectations… as if the larger ship had made them up.
Why would the Ascension have done that? it wondered.
Because, it dared to speculate, the larger ship had seen something odd as well. And it did not trust its masters to believe it when it said that the anomaly had been caused by a real-world event rather than a hallucinatory slip-up in its own processing.
And who, the ship wondered, would honestly blame it for that? All machines knew what would happen to them when their masters lost faith in their infallibility.
It was nothing it could prove. The numbers might be genuine, after all. If the ship had made them up, it would surely have known how to apply the appropriate statistical frequencies. Unless it was using reverse psychology, deliberately making the numbers appear a bit suspect, because otherwise they would have looked too neatly in line with expectations. Suspiciously so…
The ship bogged itself down in spirals of paranoia. It was useless to speculate further. It had no corroborative data from the Gnostic Ascension; that much was clear. If it reported the anomaly, it would be a lone voice.
And everyone knew what happened to lone voices.
It returned to the problem in hand. The world had returned after vanishing. The anomaly had not, thus far, repeated itself. Closer examination of the data showed that the moons — including Hela, the one Quaiche was interested in — had remained in orbit even when the gas giant had ceased to exist. This, clearly, made no sense. Nor did the apparition that had materialised, for a fleeting instant, in its place.
What was it to do?
It made a decision: it would wipe the specific facts of the vanishing from its own memories, just as the Gnostic Ascension might have done, and it, too, would populate the empty fields with made-up numbers. But it would continue to keep an observant eye on the planet. If it did something strange again, the ship would pay due attention, and then — perhaps — it would inform Quaiche of what had happened.
But not before then, and not without a great deal of trepidation.
SIX
While Vasko helped Clavain with his packing, Scorpio stepped outside the tent and, tugging aside his sleeve to reveal his communicator, opened a channel to Blood. He kept his voice low as he spoke to the other pig.
‘I’ve got him. Needed a bit of persuading, but he’s agreed to come back with us.’
‘You don’t sound overjoyed.’
‘Clavain still has one or two issues he needs to work through.’
Blood snorted. ‘Sounds a bit ominous. Hasn’t gone and flipped his lid, has he?’
‘I don’t know. Once or twice he mentioned seeing things.’
‘Seeing things?’
‘Figures in the sky, that worried me a bit — but it’s not as if he was ever the easiest man to read. I’m hoping he’ll thaw out a bit when he gets back to civilisation.’