But something was slightly different now.
No one was lazing around or trying to look busy. In fact, there were hardly any techs in the room at all, and the few that were here looked edgy, as if waiting for an alarm to go off.
“What’s the matter?” Sky said.
But the man who stepped gingerly from behind the nearest tower of equipment pallets was not a tech. He brushed his hand across the chrome shoulder of a crouched handler robot as if looking for support, sweat blistering on his forehead.
“Dad?” Sky said. “What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same question, unless this is one of your chores.”
“Of course it is. I told you we work the trains now and then, didn’t I?”
Titus looked distracted. “Yes . . . yes, you did. I forgot. Sky, help these men unload the goods, and then get you and your friends away from here, will you?”
Sky looked at his father. “I don’t understand.”
“Just do it, will you?” Then Titus Haussmann turned to the nearest tech, a heavily bearded fellow with grotesquely muscled forearms folded across his chest like hams. “The same goes for you and your men, Xavier. Get all nonessential people out of here, all the way back up the spine. As a matter of fact I want the engine section evacuated while we’re at it.” He flipped up his sleeve and whispered orders into his bracelet. Recommendation, more accurately, Sky thought, but Old Man Balcazar would never fail to abide by Titus Haussmann’s advice. Then he turned to Sky again, blinking to see his son still present. “Didn’t I just tell you to get on with it, son? I wasn’t kidding.”
Norquinco and Gomez took their leave, accompanying a couple of techs to the waiting train, flipping open one of its freight covers and beginning the knuckle-grazing work of unloading supplies. They passed the boxes from hand to hand, out of the bay altogether, where they would presumably be lowered down the levels to the sleeper berths themselves.
“Dad, what is it?” Sky said.
He thought his father was going to reprimand him, but Titus simply shook his head. “I don’t know. Not yet. But there’s something not right with one of our passengers—something that has me a little worried.”
“What do you mean, not right?”
“One of the bastard momios is waking up.” He mopped his forehead. “That’s not supposed to happen. I’ve been down there, into the berth, and I still don’t understand it. But it has me worried. That’s why I want this area cleared.”
This was a marvel indeed, Sky thought. None of the passengers had ever awakened, even though a few of them had certainly died. But his father seemed less than overjoyed at the situation. Gravely concerned, more accurately.
“Why is it a problem, Dad?”
“Because they’re not meant to wake up, that’s why. If it happens at all, it must mean it was planned from day one. Before we ever left the solar system.”
“But why clear the area?”
“Because of something my father told me, Sky. Now do what I just told you and get that train unloaded and then get the hell away from here, will you?”
At that moment another train slid into the bay from the opposite direction, nosing up against the one Sky had arrived upon. Four of Titus’s security people emerged from it, three men and a woman, and began buckling on plastic armour that had been too bulky to wear during the journey. This was practically the entire operational militia for the ship, its police force and army, and even these people were not fulltime security officers. The squad moved forward to another part of the train and unracked guns: gloss-white weapons which they handled with nervous care. His father had always told him that there were no guns aboard ship, but never very convincingly.
There were, in fact, many aspects of shipboard security about which Sky wanted to know more. His father’s small, tight, highly efficient organisation fascinated him. But Sky had never been allowed to work with his father. The explanation which Titus gave for this was plausible enough: he could not claim impartiality or fairness if his son were to be given a role in the organisation, no matter how apt Sky might have been—but that did not make it any less bitter a pill to swallow. Consequently the tasks Sky was assigned were always as far away from anything remotely security-related as Titus could ensure. Nothing would or could change while Titus remained head of security, and both of them understood that.
Sky went to join his friends, helping them off-load the supplies. They were getting through the job quickly, without any of the carefully honed dawdling that usually accompanied the process. His friends were unnerved; whatever was going on here was out of the ordinary and Titus Haussmann was not a man to pretend there was a crisis where none existed.
Sky kept one eye on the security squad.
They settled fabric headsets over their shaven skulls, tapping microphones and checking communication frequencies. Then they pulled armoured helmets from the train and pushed their heads into them, adjusting dropdown overlay monocles which covered one eye. A slim black line ran from each helmet to the sight attached to the top of each gun, so that the guns could be discharged without the guard having to look in the direction of fire. They probably had infra-red or sonar overlays as well. That would be useful down in the gloomy sub-levels.
When they had stopped fiddling with their equipment, the squad moved over to his father, who briefed them quickly and quietly, with the absolute minimum of fuss. Sky watched his father’s lips move; his expression one of complete calm now that he was in the presence of his own squad. Occasionally he made a taut, precise hand gesture or shook his head. He might as well have been telling them all a nursery rhyme. Even the sweat on his forehead seemed to have dried up.
Then Titus Haussmann left the squad, and went back over to the train they had arrived on and pulled his own gun from it. No armour or helmet; just the weapon. It was the same gloss-white as the others. There was a sickle-shaped magazine beneath it and a skeletal stock. His father handled it with quiet respect rather than easy familiarity: the way a man might handle a venomous snake that had just been milked.
All for a single sleepless passenger?
“Dad . . .” Sky said, leaving his duty again. “What is it? What is it really?”
“Nothing you need worry about,” his father said.
Titus took three of the squad with him and left the fourth behind, standing guard in the freight bay. The detachment disappeared down one of the access shafts which led to the berths, the clatter of their progress growing quieter, but never quite silencing. When he was certain that his father was out of earshot, Sky moved over to the guard who had been stationed in the bay.
“What’s going on, Constanza?”
She flipped up the monocle. “What makes you think I’m about to tell you, if your father didn’t?”
“I don’t know. A wild shot in the dark along the lines of us both having been friends at one point, I suppose.”
He had known it was her the instant the train had arrived; given the apparent severity of the situation it had been certain that she would be amongst the squad.
“I’m sorry,” Constanza said. “It’s just that we’re all a tiny bit edgy, understand?”
“Of course.” He studied her face, as beautiful and fierce as ever, wondering how it would feel to trace the line of her jaw. “I heard it was about one of the passengers waking up too early. Is that true?”
“More or less,” she said, as if through gritted teeth.
“And for that you need more firepower than I’ve ever seen before on the ship? More than I ever knew existed?”
“Your father determines how we handle individual incidents, not me.”
“But he must have said something. What is it about this one passenger?”
“Look, I don’t know, all right? Just that whatever it is, it isn’t supposed to happen. The momios aren’t meant to wake up early. That just isn’t possible, unless someone programmed their sleeper berth to make it happen. And no one would have done that unless they ha
d a good reason.”
“I still don’t understand why anyone would want to wake up early.”
“To sabotage the mission, of course.” She lowered her voice now, and clicked her fingernails against the gun, edgily. “A single sleeper placed aboard not as a passenger, but as a time-bomb. A volunteer on a suicide mission, say—a criminal, or someone else with nothing to lose. Someone angry enough to want to kill us all. It wasn’t easy to get a slot on the Flotilla when she left Sol, remember. The Confederacion made as many enemies as friends when it built the fleet. It wouldn’t be difficult to find someone willing to die, if it allowed them to punish us.”
“It would be difficult to do, though.”
“Only if you forgot to bribe the right people.”
“I suppose you’re right. When you say time-bomb you’re not talking literally, are you?”
“No—but now that you mention it, it isn’t such an absurd idea. What if they—whoever they were—managed to plant a saboteur aboard every ship? Maybe the one aboard the Islamabad was just the first to wake. And they wouldn’t have had any warning.”
“Maybe a warning wouldn’t have helped them much, in that case.”
She clenched her teeth. “I guess we’re about to find out. On the other hand, it could just be a malfunctioning sleeper berth.”
That was when the first gunshots were heard.
Whatever was happening was taking place tens of metres beneath the loading bay, but the shots still sounded fear somely loud. There were shouts as well. He thought he heard his father, but it was difficult to tell: the acoustics lent a metallic quality to the voices, rendering the words indistinct and blurring the differences in timbre.
“Shit,” Constanza said. For a moment she froze, then she was making for the access well. She turned and flashed wild eyes at him. “You stay here, Sky.”
“I’m coming with you. That’s my father down there.”
The shots had ceased, but there was still a lot of noise, voices mainly, raised to the point of hysteria, and what sounded like things being thrown around. Constanza checked her gun again and then stowed it over a shoulder. She walked towards the access well, preparing to lever herself into its lad dered, echoing depths.
“Constanza . . .”
He grabbed her gun and wrestled it from her shoulder before she had time to act. Constanza turned round in fury, but he was already easing past her, not exactly pointing the gun at her, but not exactly pointing it away from her either. He had no idea how to use it, but he must have looked sufficiently purposeful. Constanza backed off now, her eyes flicking to the gun. It was still tethered to her helmet by the black flex, which was now stretched to its limit.
“Give me the head-gear,” Sky said, nodding towards her.
“You’ll be in deep shit for this,” she said.
“What, going after my father when he’s in danger? I don’t think so. A mild reprimand at the very worst, I think.” He nodded again. “The helmet, Constanza.”
She grimaced and pulled the helmet from her head. Sky settled it over his own, not bothering to ask her for the fabric underlayer. The helmet was a little small for him, but there was no time to adjust it now. He flipped down the monocle, gratified when it lit up with the view that the gun was seeing. The image was all shades of grey-green, overlaid by cross-hairs, range-finder numerics and weapons-status summaries. None of that meant anything to him, but when he looked at Constanza he saw her nose stand out as a white smudge of heat. Infra-red; that was all he needed to know.
He lowered himself into the shaft, aware that Constanza was following him at a discreet distance.
There were no shouts now, but there were still voices. They were quiet, but there was nothing calm about them. He could hear his father quite distinctly now; there was something not quite right about the way he was talking.
He reached the nexus which connected the sleeper berths of this node. They radiated out in ten directions, but only one of the connecting doors was open. That was where the voices were coming from. He pointed the gun ahead of him and moved towards the berth, down the normally dark, pipe-lined corridor which led to it. Now the corridor shone in sickly shades of grey-green. He was scared, he realised. Fear had always been there, but it was only now that he had the gun and had climbed down that he had time to pay attention to it. Fear was a nearly unfamiliar thing to him, but not completely so. He remembered his first real taste of it, alone in the nursery, betrayed and deserted. Now he watched his own shadow trace phantom shapes along the wall, and for a fleeting moment wished that Clown were with him now to offer guidance and friendship. The idea of returning to the nursery was suddenly very tempting. It was a world unsullied by rumours of ghost ships or sabotage, of present and real hardships.
He crept round a dogleg in the corridor and there was the berth ahead of him: the large, machine-filled support chamber for a single sleeper. It was like a dedicated burial room in a church, reeking of antiquity and reverence. The room had been cold until recently and much of it was still olive-green or black in his vision.
From behind he heard Constanza speak. “Give me the gun, Sky, and no one will know you took it.”
“I’ll give it back when the danger’s passed.”
“We don’t even know what the danger is yet. Perhaps someone’s gun just went off by accident.”
“And the sleeper berth just happened to be malfunctioning, as well? Yeah, right.”
He entered the sleeper berth and took in the tableau that greeted him. The three security guards were there, as was his father—blobs of pale-green shading to white.
“Constanza,” one of them said. “I thought you were supposed to cover . . . shit. It isn’t you, is it?”
“No. It’s me. Sky Haussmann.” He flipped up the monocle, the room gloomier than it had been a moment ago.
“And where’s Constanza?”
“I took her helmet and gun, entirely against her wishes.” He looked behind him, hoping that Constanza had heard this attempt at exonerating her. “She did put up a fight, believe me.”
The berth was one of ten in a ring, each fed by its own corridor from the node. The room had probably been entered only one or two times since the Flotilla’s launch. The sleeper support systems were as delicate and complex as the antimatter engines; just as likely to go horribly wrong if tampered with by anything other than expert hands. Like buried pharaohs, the sleepers had not expected their places of slumber to be violated until they reached what passed for the after-life—arrival around 61 Cygni-A. It felt a little wrong just to be here at all.
But not half as wrong as it felt to see his father.
Titus Haussmann was lying on the floor, his upper body cradled by one of the security guards. His chest was covered in a dark, cloying fluid that Sky knew was blood. There were canyonlike gashes in his uniform, in which the blood was pooling thickly, gurgling disgustingly with each laboured breath.
“Dad . . . ’Sky said.
“It’s all right,” one of the guards answered. “There’s a medical team on their way.”
Which, Sky thought—given the general state of medical expertise aboard the Santiago—was about as useful as saying there were priests coming. Or undertakers.
He looked at the sleeper casket; the long, plinth-like, machine-encrusted cryo-coffin which filled much of the room. The upper half of it was cracked wide open, huge jagged fractures like shattered glass. Sharp bits of it formed a haphazard glass mosaic on the floor. It was exactly as if something inside the casket had forced its way out.
And there was something inside it.
The passenger was dead, or nearly dead; that much was obvious. At first glance the man looked normal enough apart from the bullet wounds: a naked human being invaded by monitoring wires, blood-shunts and catheters. He was younger than most of them, Sky thought—excellent fanatic fodder, in other words. But with his bald head and masklike lack of facial muscle tone, the man could have passed for a thousand other sleepers.
Except that his forearm had come off.
It was lying on the floor, in fact—a limp, glove-like thing, ending in flaps of ragged skin. But there was no bone or meat showing from the end, and very little blood had leaked from the severed limb. The stump was wrong as well. The man’s skin and bone stopped a few inches below his elbow, and then it was all tapering metal prosthesis: a complex, blood-lathered, glittering obscenity which ended not in steel fingers but in a vicious assemblage of blades.
Sky imagined how it must have happened.
The man had woken inside his casket, probably following a plan laid down before the Flotilla had left Mercury. He must have intended to wake up unobserved, smash his way to freedom and then set about inflicting stealthy harm on the ship, in precisely the way that might have happened on the Islamabad, if Constanza’s theory was correct. A lone man could certainly do great damage, if he was not obliged to allow for his own survival.