Maybe she was being too cynical, thought LizAlec, maybe the man really was after her soul: but given the way his fingers now rested lightly on the nape of her neck, she doubted it. Cash first, LizAlec decided, and then something rather more basic.

“If we could have cabins close together?”

“Cabins?” Brother Michael asked. Beyond his shoulder, LizAlec could see Sister Rachel smile sourly.

“This is a cargo shuttle,” Brother Michael said gently. “We have two dormitories. Men to port, women starboard, just like Noah’s ark. Though I have a small prayer room, just behind the cockpit. You could sleep there, for tonight only...”

Very softly, one of the bodyguards shook her head; so briefly that for a second LizAlec almost thought she was imagining it.

“No,” said LizAlec. “I’ll sleep in the dorm.”

“No special treatment.” Brother Michael nodded to himself. “Perhaps that’s for the best.”

The Arc looked like nothing so much as a fat ring-doughnut with a pen pushed through the hole in the middle. Except that, instead of just hanging there, the doughnut was attached to the pen with four vast steel spars and the ten-klick-long pen was actually the Arc’s spindle, capped at the top end with a vast Gothic cathedral fashioned from glass and steel.

Far down at the other end of the spindle were the computing rooms of NilApocrypha, where every word of the Old Testament was to be referenced and cross-referenced by vast banks of parallel processors. Until God’s certain opinion — on everything — could be had at the click of a key. The “southern” end was also where the shuttle was to dock, swallowed whole by an iris-ringed door in the spar.

But that wasn’t what was impressive.

What impressed the fuck out of LizAlec, though she wouldn’t admit it, was the doughnut itself, a fat fifty-kilometre silver ring that spun twenty times an hour around the spindle, like a vast wheel rolling around a hub.

LizAlec decided to be impressed. Anchee would have been.

“It’s incredible,” she said softly.

Beside her, Brother Michael smiled.

“No,” said Brother Michael, “it’s a miracle.” The bodyguard on the other side of him sighed slightly and LizAlec realized it wasn’t the first time she’d heard that line. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. To build that...

“It’s huge,” said LizAlec. None of the newsfeeds had done The Arc justice in their descriptions. God, if only she had a camera. LizAlec could just imagine what CySat would pay for on-site digital grabs of the finished colony. They had shots of the squat fat drones that would haul it out into deep space and they had long-range grabs of the outside seen from Earth, from the Moon, from passing shuttles. But shots of the actual inside...?

“Fabulous,” LizAlec whispered to herself, almost shivering with excitement.

“God’s purpose always is.”

“How many people?” asked LizAlec.

“Just ten of us,” Brother Michael said, sounding amused. “Sister Aaron, myself, Brother Gerard, my two protectors and five handmaidens. We tend to our hope and the world.” Brother Michael gestured towards the distant ring. “Once the new primal couple are in place the world will be left to look after itself. Well...” Brother Michael smiled. “Perhaps with a little help.”

LizAlec nodded, watching the distant ring on one screen, while on another the cargo shuttle got closer and closer to the central spar. The man was barking, certifiably mad. “What about the animals?” LizAlec asked.

“We loaded American reptiles last month, this month it’s smaller African mammals. Of course...” His voice sounded sad, resigned...” These days it’s hard to find species that aren’t geneered, which means it takes us longer.” He nodded towards the hold. “That’s why we ended up having to buy those beasts from the Voertrekkers. But then, we don’t want sheep that produce human milk, or rice that cooks itself. We want what God intended...”

Which counted her out, LizAlec thought darkly. Though how right she was LizAlec didn’t yet know. The product of an inactivated clone and frozen sperm, especially one whose cortex was overrun with bioClay symbiote, wasn’t what the Family had in mind. As for being the daughter of Alex Gibson... The girl shivered and turned her attention back to the screen. However hard she tried, she couldn’t take in the size of that spinning wheel.

“Here,” Brother Michael said. “Let me.” He leant across, his shoulder just brushing her front as he opened a distant window. That is, he hit a key that activated a camera floating by itself in space, ten klicks distant. If LizAlec didn’t know better, she’d have thought it part of some defence system.

She’d have liked to have seen The Arc for real, with her own eyes. But radiation was too much of a problem to allow random use of window glass, even the toughened stuff. And the other alternatives were too expensive for a mere shuttle.

“You can see the ring better from the cathedral,” Brother Michael told her. “It has shielded glass.” His hands rested lightly on the console, tapping at an occasional key, but he wasn’t actually docking the ship himself. A semi-AI was taking them in, LEDs on the deck lighting as retros fired in turn to slow the shuttle even further.

Ahead of the shuttle, a vast circle opened like an eye widening with surprise and the shuttle flew through it into darkness, lights immediately flicking on around them as booms moved out to steady and then hold the ship. That was what the apparently random splatter of diodes had been talking about.

Except the optics flashing like tiny electronic fireflies were anything but random. Fixx could have told LizAlec that... Look long enough and you’ll always find the pattern. And even though it might be chaotic, fractal or crypted within itself, the pattern is always there.

Always.

Anchee, Que... Quiet, intelligent, polite... Outstanding SATS... Unquestionably rich in her own right... So far so good. What wasn’t was the lack of visual confirmation that the girl he was holding was indeed the General’s daughter.

Not one current tri-D, no digital grabs, no pix of any sort... Sitting in his darkened vestry, tucked away in a corner of the cathedral, Brother Michael decided he could cope with the irritating time/distancing induced by accessing a cuts library in Los Angeles: it was the lack of photographs that was beginning to concern him.

Of course, had he been Anchee’s father he’d have done exactly the same. Ring-fenced her from paparazzi, made sure no one knew what she looked like and let slip dark hints about what was likely to happen to Ishies who tried to find out. It was a sinful world, full of misguided people.

Something more concrete than threats were in place too, they’d have to be. Anchee’s father would have bodyguards, self-covering contracts. Of course, the man would have a family clone somewhere on ice, but to need a clone was a sign of family failure and it didn’t seem like the General would be happy with that idea.

Brother Michael shivered. It was possible that the girl had run away, but unlikely. And yet, if she hadn’t run off what was she doing stowed away on an Arc-bound shuttle? The question was impossible to answer without more information, and nagging at the problem didn’t make it better.

All recorded information was automatically out of date, that was obvious. The used-news value of information fell rapidly from gold dust to worthless. Only the word of God never corrupted. Even so, there should be news somewhere of Anchee’s disappearance. Brother Michael was paying through the nose for a commercial search that was thorough, up to the minute and, most of all, breathtakingly discreet. And all the agency could come back with was nothing.

Europe he could have understood: after all, the Azerbaijani virus had more or less bombed it back to the Stone Age. But Shanghai produced no news and nor did Los Angeles, and the Web infrastructure was working fine for both. Brother Michael had had that checked, adding to his already astronomical bill.