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place.
    They walked at a steady, unhurried pace for the benefit of the state propaganda and news agencies recording today’s events. Joining the recorded choir now could be heard the massed voices
of the pilgrims gathered beyond the palace walls, filling the air with their chattering and shouting and occasional singing.
    They’re here because of me
, she realized in a daze. She wondered what it would be like to walk, unknown and unrecognized, through those same streets beyond the palace, to be able
to engage fully with the Tabernacle, or experience life far from Redstone. She wondered how the pilgrims would react if they knew the truth of Gabrielle’s purpose in life – a truth she
had learned from Karl in her bedchamber after he had chased Mater Cassanas away with threats to her son’s life.
    She thought of those long evenings of lovemaking, when she had given herself all too willingly to him. She would lie in his arms as he described how her physical appearance, and that of every
Speaker-Elect who had ever lived, had been carefully tweaked at a young age to hide the fact they were all clones of the same woman – the first human being ever to communicate with and then
pilot a Magi ship.
    At that moment she saw a figure wearing the armour of the Demarchy’s security services step out from under the broad wing of the transport. His feet were clad in heavy black boots, a
decoratively filigreed breather mask strapped over his nose and mouth. This was Karl Petrova: bodyguard to the Speaker-Elect, confidant, lover and, before very long, partner in crime.
    Gabrielle struggled to hide her joy at the sight of him. His eyes, however, met hers only briefly before moving on to regard Thijs and the other members of the Demarchy’s ruling junta with
apparent equanimity. And yet she knew that Karl’s rapid rise through the security services, despite his not being a citizen of the Demarchy – despite
not even having a faith
chip
– had earned him the security chief’s unending enmity.
    Along with the rest of her entourage, she was swept through the palace gates and on board the transport. Steps had emerged from within its hull as they approached, the doors sliding apart like
steel jaws. Almost as soon as she had taken a seat within the transport’s opulent interior, it lifted off the ground on a cushion of shaped fields.
    The journey to the docks and the Grand Barge took barely more than a minute or two, the transport seeming to drop towards its destination almost as soon as it had risen. She had a brief glimpse
of the massed pilgrims filling the streets beyond the palace, before they dropped to make a landing on the dockside. The Grand Barge was riding low in the Ka’s lapping waters, while an Accord
dropship stood a short distance away, with defensive fields flickering around its outer skin.
    They disembarked to find a thin sleet outlining the shape of the containment field around them. The Grand Barge, dwarfing everything in its vicinity, had recently been repainted and refitted,
and its upper hull was now festooned with pennants.
    Gabrielle tried to look appreciative. Indeed, under any other circumstances, the sights and sounds of this day would have struck her as extraordinary. Her younger self would have revelled in the
commotion, in the smell of the water able to find its way through the containment field. Yes, that previous Gabrielle would have been thrilled, but she now had to force herself to pay attention
– to conceal the tension and fear that gripped her.
    Other barges, equally opulent if not quite so enormous, waited at alternative moorings. These would be transporting Abramovic’s research staff, whose purpose was to analyse and measure all
the data recovered from the Ship of the Covenant.
    And then, unless she acted, she herself would be killed and her body secretly disposed of, as had happened to every Speaker-Elect before her.
    Members of the security services expeditionary forces, under