By rights, he ought to have been filled with claustrophobic anxiety at the thought of climbing into her. But instead he looked forward to it, prickling with eagerness. Rather than feeling trapped within the amber translucence of the hull, he felt connected through it to the rich immensity of the universe. The tiny jewel-like ship had enabled him to skim deep into the atmospheres of worlds, even beneath the surfaces of oceans. The ship’s transducers relayed ambient data to him through all his senses, including touch. He had felt the chill of alien seas, the radiance of alien sunsets. In his five previous survey operations for the queen he had seen miracles and wonders, drunk in the giddy ecstasy of it all. It was merely unfortunate that none of those miracles and wonders had been the kind you could take away and sell at a profit.
Quaiche lowered himself into the Daughter. The ship oozed and shifted around him, adjusting to match his shape.
‘Horris?’
‘Yes, love?’
‘Horris, where are you?’
‘I’m in the excursion bay, inside the Daughter.’
‘No, Horris.’
‘I have to. I have to go down to see what that thing really is.’
‘I don’t want you to leave me.’
‘I know. I don’t want to leave either. But I’ll still be in contact. The timelag won’t be bad; it’ll be just as if I’m right next to you.’
‘No, it won’t.’
He sighed. He had always known this would be the difficult part. More than once it had crossed his mind that perhaps the kindest thing would be to leave without telling her, and just hope that the relayed communications gave nothing away. Knowing Morwenna, however, she would have seen through this gambit very quickly.
‘I’ll be quick, I promise. I’ll be in and out in a few hours.’ A day, more likely, but that was still a ‘few’ hours, wasn’t it? Morwenna would understand.
‘Why can’t you just take the Dominatrix closer?’
‘Because I can’t risk it,’ Quaiche said. ‘You know how I like to work. The Dominatrix is big and heavy. It has armour and range, but it lacks agility and intelligence. If we — I — run into anything nasty, the Daughter can get me out of harm’s way a lot faster. This little ship is cleverer than me. And we can’t risk damaging or losing the Dominatrix . The Daughter doesn’t have the range to catch up with the Gnostic Ascension. Face it, love, the Dominatrix is our ticket out of here. We can’t place it in harm’s way.’ Hastily he added, ‘Or you, for that matter.’
‘I don’t care about getting back to the Ascension. I’ve burned my bridges with that power-crazed slut and her toadying crew.’
‘It’s not as if I’m in a big hurry to get back there myself, but the fact is we need Grelier to get you out of that suit.’
‘If we stay here, there’ll be other Ultras along eventually.’
‘Yeah,’ Quaiche said, ‘and they’re all such nice people, aren’t they? Sorry, love, but this is definitely a case of working with the devil you know. Look, I’ll be quick. I’ll stay in constant voice contact. I’ll give you a guided tour of that bridge so good you’ll be seeing it in your mind’s eye, just as if you were there. I’ll sing to you. I’ll tell you jokes. How does that sound?’
‘I’m scared. I know you have to do this, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m still scared.’
‘I’m scared as well,’ he told her. ‘I’d be mad not to be scared. And I really don’t want to leave you. But I have no choice.’
She was quiet for a moment. Quaiche busied himself checking the systems of the little ship; as each element came on line, he felt a growing anticipatory thrill.
Morwenna spoke again. ‘If it is a bridge, what are you going to do with it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, how big is it?’
‘Big. Thirty, forty kilometres across.’
‘In which case you can’t very well bring it back with you.’
‘Mm. You’re right. Got me there. What was I thinking?’
‘What I mean, Horris, is that you’ll have to find a way to make it valuable to Jasmina, even though it has to stay on the planet.’
‘I’ll think of something,’ Quaiche said, with a brio he did not feel. ‘At the very least Jasmina can cordon off the planet and sell tickets to anyone who wants to take a closer look. Anyway, if they built a bridge, they might have built something else. Whoever they were.’
‘When you’re out there,’ Morwenna said, ‘you promise me you’ll take care?’
‘Caution’s my middle name,’ Quaiche said.
The tiny ship fell away from the Dominatrix, orientating herself with a quick, excited shiver of thrust. To Quaiche it always felt as if the craft enjoyed her sudden liberation from the docking harness.
He lay with his arms stretched ahead of his face, each hand gripping an elaborate control handle bristling with buttons and levers. Between the control handles was a head-up display screen showing an overview of the Scavenger’s Daughter’s systems and a schematic of her position in relation to the nearest major celestial body. The diagrams had the sketchy, crosshatched look of early Renaissance astronomy or medical illustrations: quilled black ink against sepia parchment, annotated in crabby Latin script. His dim reflection hovered in the glass of the head-up display.
Through the translucent hull he watched the docking bay seal itself. The Dominatrix grew rapidly smaller, dwindling until it was only a dark, vaguely cruciform scratch against the face of Haldora. He thought of Morwenna, still inside the Dominatrix and encased within the scrimshaw suit, with a renewed sense of urgency. The bridge on Hela was without doubt the strangest thing he had seen in all his travels. If this was not precisely the kind of exotic item Jasmina was interested in, then he had no idea what was. All he had to do was sell it to her, and make her forgive him his earlier failures. If a huge alien artefact didn’t do the trick, what would?
When it became difficult to pick out the other ship without an overlay, Quaiche felt a palpable easing in his mood. Aboard the Dominatrix he never entirely lost the feeling that he was under the constant vigilance of Queen Jasmina. It was entirely possible that the queen’s agents had installed listening devices in addition to those he was meant to know about. Aboard the much smaller Scavenger’s Daughter, though, he seldom felt Jasmina’s eye on him. The little ship actually belonged to him: she answered only to Quaiche and was the single most valuable asset he had ever owned in his life. She had been a not-insignificant incentive when he had first offered his services to the queen.
The Ultras were undoubtedly clever, but he did not think they were quite clever enough to bypass the many systems the Daughter carried aboard her to prevent surveillance taps or other forms of unwarranted intrusion. It was not much of an empire, Quaiche supposed, but the little ship was his and that was all that mattered. In her he could revel in solitude, every sense splayed open to the absolute.
To feel oneself so tiny, so fragile, so inherently losable, was at first spiritually crushing. But, by the same token, this realisation was also strangely liberating: if an individual human existence meant so little, if one’s actions were so cosmically irrelevant, then the notion of some absolute moral framework made about as much sense as the universal ether. Measured against the infinite, therefore, people were no more capable of meaningful sin — or meaningful good — than ants, or dust.