So be it. He had been serious in his promise to Clavain to protect Aura.
Lines of fire were stabbing out from the Nostalgia for Infinity, sweeping around and scything into the closing wall of wolf machinery. They were very high above Ararat now and there was little atmosphere left to make the beam weapons — or whatever they were — visible for more than few dozen metres along their course. Vasko guessed that the great ship, after so long in an atmosphere, was still bleeding trapped air and water from pockets in the folds and crevices of its hull. He watched the dark clots of wolf machinery squirm away from the impact points of the beams, like specks of iron being repelled by a magnet. The beams moved quickly, but the cubes moved faster, slipping from one point to another with dizzying rapidity. Vasko realised, dejectedly, that Scorpio was right. It was a gesture of defiance, nothing more. Everything they had learned about the wolves, in all the glancing contacts to date, had taught them that conventional human weapons had almost no effect on them whatsoever. They might slow the closing of the shell, but no more than that.
Perhaps Aura was right all along. Better for her to die now, before the machines drained every last scrap of knowledge from her head. She had told them that Hela was significant. Perhaps no one would survive to act on that knowledge. But if anyone did, they would at least be able to act without the wolves knowing their exact intentions.
He looked at the sheath where the pig kept his knife.
No. There had to be another way. If they started murdering children to gain a tactical advantage, the Inhibitors might as well win the war now.
‘They’re backing off,’ Valensin said. ‘Look. Something’s hurting them. I don’t think it’s the Infinity.’
The wall of machines was peppered with gaping, irregular holes. Carnations of colourless white light flashed from the cores of the cube structures. Chunks of cubic machinery veered into each other or dropped out of sight entirely. Tentacles of cubes thrashed purposelessly. The lightning pulsed in ugly, spavined shapes. And, suddenly, dashing through the gaps, machines appeared.
Vasko recognised the smooth, melted, muscular lines of spacecraft much like their shuttle. They moved like projections rather than solid objects, slowing down in an eyeblink.
‘Remontoire,’ Khouri breathed.
Beyond the ragged shell of Inhibitor machines, Vasko glimpsed a much wider battle, one that must have been encompassing many light-seconds of space around Ararat. He saw awesome eruptions of light, flashes that grew and faded in slow motion. He saw purple-black spheres simply appear, visible only when they formed against some brighter background, lingering for a few seconds, their wrinkled surfaces undulating, before popping out of existence.
Vasko faded out. When he came to, Valensin was inspecting his wound. ‘It’s clean and not too deep, but it will need treating,’ he said.
‘But it isn’t serious, is it?’
‘No. I don’t think Aura really wanted to hurt you.’
Vasko felt some of the tension drain from his body. Then he realised that Scorpio had said very little since their scuffle over the knife. ‘Scorp,’ he began, ‘we couldn’t just kill her like that.’
‘It’s easy to say that now. It’s what she wanted of us that matters.’ Valensin dabbed at his wound with something that stung. Vasko drew in a sharp breath. ‘What did she mean when she spoke? She said something about shadows.’
Scorpio’s expression gave nothing away. As calm as he now appeared, Vasko did not think it likely that the pig had forgiven him for the struggle.
‘I don’t know,’ Scorpio said, ‘except I didn’t like the sound of it very much.’
‘What matters is Hela,’ Khouri said. She sighed, rubbed at the fatigue-darkened skin under her eyes. Vasko thought it safe to assume that they were dealing with Ana rather than Aura now.
‘And the other thing — the business with shadows?’
‘We’ll find out when we get there.’
There was a call from the flight deck. ‘Incoming transmission from the Nostalgia for Infinity,’ said the pilot. ‘We’re being invited aboard.’
‘By whom?’ Scorpio asked.
‘Antoinette Bax,’ the pilot said, his voice trailing off hesitantly. ‘With — um — the compliments of Captain John Brannigan.’
‘Good enough for me,’ Scorpio said.
Vasko felt the shuttle turn, arrowing towards the much larger vessel. At the same time, one of the small, sleek human-controlled ships detached from its neighbours and accompanied them, making an almost painful effort not to outpace them there.
One further incident stuck in Rashmika’s mind before the caravan arrived at the Permanent Way. It was a day after the crossing of the bridge, and the caravan had finally climbed out of the Rift on to the bone-white level plateau of the Jarnsaxa Flats. To the north, the southern limits of the Western Hyrrokkin Uplands were visible as a roughness on the horizon, while to the east, Rashmika knew, lay the complex volcano fields of the Glistenheath and Ragnarok complexes, all currently dormant. By contrast, the Jarnsaxa Flats were mirror smooth and geologically stable. There were no scuttler digs in this area — whatever geological process had created the Flats had also erased or subducted any scuttler relics in this part of Hela — but there were still many small communities that made a direct living from their proximity to the Way. Now and then the caravan passed one of these dour little hamlets of surface bubbletents, or barrelled past a roadside shrine commemorating some recent but unspecified tragedy. Occasionally they saw pilgrims hauling their penitential life-support systems across the ice. To Rashmika they looked like returning hunters in some brown-hued painting by Brueghel, sledges topheavy with winter foodstock.
The buildings, shrines and figures slipped from horizon to horizon with indecent speed. With a broad, straight road ahead of it, the caravan had been able to move at maximum velocity for several hours, and now it seemed to have settled into a rhythm, an unstoppable stampede of machinery. Wheels rolled, tracks whirled around, traction limbs disappeared in a blur of pistoning motion. Visibly, Haldora moved closer to the zenith, until — by Rashmika’s estimation — they could not be more than a few tens of kilometres from the Way.
Very soon the cathedrals would be visible, their spires clawing above the horizon.
But before she saw the cathedrals she saw other machines. They began as dots in the distance, throwing up pure white ballistic plumes from their rumbling wheels and treads. For many minutes they did not appear to move at all. Rashmika wondered if the caravan was simply catching up with similar processions arriving at the Way from elsewhere on Hela. This seemed reasonable, for many roads had joined up with the one they were on since they had climbed out of the Rift.
But then she realised that the vehicles were actually racing towards them. Even this did not strike her as particularly noteworthy, but then she felt the caravan slow and begin to oscillate from one side of the road to the other, as if uncertain which side it ought to be on. The swerves made her feel nauseous. She had the viewing area largely to herself, but the few caravan personnel that she saw also appeared ill at ease with developments.
The other machines continued to sweep towards them. In a few moments they had swelled to enormous size. They were much larger than any of the caravan’s components. Rashmika saw a blur of treads and wide meshwork road wheels, with a superstructure of vicious ice-and-rock-moving machinery. The machines were painted a dusty yellow, with bee-stripes and rotating warning beacons. Many of the components were half-familiar to her: massively scaled-up counterparts of the heavy excavation equipment her fellow villagers used in the scuttler digs.