“I’ll bet those bastards on the Palestine poisoned him,” Valdivia said. “I always was against him going over, you know.”
“It was certainly a stressful meeting,” Sky said.
“That was probably all it took,” Rengo said, scratching at the raw pink skin under his eye. “There’s no need to blame it on the others. He just couldn’t take the stress.”
“There’s nothing I could have done, then?”
The other medic was examining the prosthetic web across Balcazar’s chest, strapped on beneath the side-buttoned tunic which the men had now opened. Valdivia prodded the device doubtfully. “This should have given off an alarm. You didn’t hear one, I take it?”
“As I said, not a peep.”
“Damn thing must have broken down again. Listen, Sky,” Valdivia said. “If a word of this gets out, we’re absolutely done for. That damn web was always breaking down, but the way Rengo and I have been over-stretched recently . . .” He blew out air and shook his head in disbelief at the hours he had been working. “Well, I’m not saying we didn’t repair it, but obviously we couldn’t spend all our time nursing Balcazar to the exclusion of everyone else. I know they’ve got gear on the Brazilia better than this clapped-out rubbish, but what good does it do us?”
“Very little,” Sky said, nodding keenly. “Other people would have died if you had devoted too much attention to the old man. I understand perfectly.”
“I hope you do, Sky—because there’s going to be one hell of a shitstorm once news of his death leaks out.” Valdivia looked at the Captain again, but if he was hoping for a miraculous recovery, there was no sign of it. “We’re going to come under examination for the quality of our medical support. You’re going to be grilled about the way you handled the trip over to the Palestine. Ramirez and those other council bastards are going to try and say we screwed up. They’re going to try and say you were negligent. Trust me; I’ve seen it all before.”
“We all know it wasn’t our fault,” Sky said. He looked down at the Captain, the snail-trail of dried saliva still adorning his epaulette. “He was a good man; he served us well, long after he should have retired. But he was old.”
“Yes, and he would have died in a year or so, no matter what happened. But try explaining that to the ship.”
“We’ll just have to watch our backs, then.”
“Sky . . . you won’t say a word, will you? About what we’ve told you?”
Someone was banging on the airlock, trying to get into the taxi. Sky ignored the commotion. “What do you want me to say, exactly?”
The medic drew in a breath. “You have to say the web gave you a warning. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t act on it. You couldn’t have—you didn’t have the resources or the expertise, and you were a long way from the ship.”
Sky nodded, as if all this was perfectly reasonable and exactly what he would have suggested. “Just so long as I never imply that the prosthetic web never actually worked in the first place?”
The two medics glanced at each other. “Yes,” said the first. “That’s exactly it. No one will blame you, Sky. They’ll see that you did everything you could have done.”
The Captain, now that Sky thought about it, looked very peaceful now. His eyes were shut—one of the medics had fingered down his eyelids to give the man some semblance of dignity in death. It was, as Clown had said, entirely possible to imagine that the man was dreaming of his boyhood. Never mind that the man’s childhood, aboard the ship, had been every bit as sterile and claustrophobic as Sky’s own.
The knocking on the airlock had not stopped. “I’d better let that fellow in,” Sky said.
“Sky . . .” the first medic said imploringly.
He put a hand on the man’s forearm. “Don’t worry about it.”
Sky composed himself and palmed the door control. Behind, there were at least twenty people all wanting to be first into the cabin. They were all trying to get a look at the dead Captain, professing concern while secretly hoping this was not another false alarm. Balcazar had been in the distasteful habit of almost dying for several years now.
“Dear God,” said one of them, a woman from Propulsion Concepts. “It’s true, isn’t it . . . what in heaven’s name happened?”
One of the medics started to speak, but Sky was faster. “His prosthetic web malfunctioned,” he said.
“What?”
“You heard me. I was watching Balcazar the whole time. He was fine until his web started making an alarm sound. I opened his tunic and looked at the diagnostic readout. It said he was having a coronary.”
“No . . .” one of the medics said, but he might as well have been addressing an empty room.
“And you’re sure he wasn’t having one?” the woman said.
“Hardly. He was talking to me at the time, quite lucidly. No sign of discomfort, just annoyance. Then the web told me it was going to attempt defibrillation. Needless to say, he became quite agitated at that point.”
“And what happened then?”
“I started to try and remove the web, but with all the lines running into him, I realised it was going to be impossible in the seconds I had before the defib began. I had no choice but to get away from Balcazar. I might have been killed myself had I been touching him.”
“He’s lying!” the medic said.
“Ignore him,” Sky said placidly. “He’s bound to say that, isn’t he? I’m not saying this was deliberate . . .” He allowed the word to linger, so that it would at least have time to settle in people’s imaginations before he moved on. “I’m not saying this was deliberate, just a terrible mistake due to overwork. Look at the two of them. These two men are close to nervous exhaustion. It’s no wonder they started making mistakes. We shouldn’t blame them too much for that.”
There. When the conversation was replayed in people’s memories, what would stick out would not be Sky trying to weasel out of accepting the blame himself, but Sky being magnanimous in victory; even compassionate. They would see that and applaud, while at the same time conceding that some blame should still be apportioned to the sleepwalking medics. They would see no harm in that, Sky thought. A great and respected old man had died under regrettable circumstances. It was only right and proper that there should be some recrimination.
He had covered himself well.
An autopsy would establish that the Captain had indeed died from heart failure, although neither the autopsy nor the memory readout from the prosthetic web would ever quite elucidate the precise chronology of his death.
“You did very well,” Clown said.
True; but Clown deserved some credit as well. It was Clown who had told him to unbutton the tunic when Balcazar was asleep, and Clown who had shown him how to access the web’s private functions so that he could program it to deliver the defibrillating pulse even though the Captain was as well as he had ever been lately. Clown had been clever, even if on some level Sky knew that this knowledge had always been his. But Clown had dredged it from his memory, and for that he was thankful.
“I think we make a good team,” Sky said, under his breath.
Sky watched the bodies of the men tumble into space.
Valdivia and Rengo had died by the simplest means of execution available aboard a spacecraft: asphyxiation in an airlock, followed by ejection into the vacuum. The trial into the old man’s death had taken up two years of shiptime; grind ingly slow as appeals were lodged, discrepancies found in Sky’s account. But the appeals had failed and Sky had managed to explain the discrepancies to almost everyone’s satisfaction. Now a retinue of senior ship’s officers crowded around the adjacent portholes, straining for a glimpse into the darkness. They had already heard the dying men thumping on the door of the airlock as the air was sucked from the chamber.
Yes, it was a harsh punishment, he reflected—more so, given the already overstretched medical expertise aboard the ship. But such crimes could not be taken lightly. It hardly mattered that these men had n
ot meant to kill Balcazar with their negligence—although that lack of intention itself was open to doubt. No; aboard a ship negligence was itself scarcely less a crime than mutiny. It would have been negligent, too, not to make examples of these men.
“You murdered them,” Constanza said, quietly enough so that only he heard it. “You may have convinced the others, but not me. I know you too well for that, Sky.”
“You don’t know me at all,” he said, his voice a hiss.
“Oh, but I do. I’ve known you since you were a child.” She smiled exaggeratedly, as if the two of them were sharing an amusing piece of smalltalk. “You were never normal, Sky. You were always more interested in twisted things like Sleek than real people. Or monsters like the infiltrator. You’ve kept him alive, haven’t you?”
“Kept who alive?” he said, his expression as strained as Constanza’s.
“The infiltrator.” She looked at him with narrow, suspicious eyes. “If it even happened that way. Where is he, anyway? There are a hundred places you could hide something like that aboard the Santiago. One day I’ll find out, you know, put an end to whatever sadistic little experiment you’re running. The same way I’ll eventually prove that you framed Valdivia and Rengo. You’ll get your punishment.”
Sky smiled, thinking of the torture chamber where he kept Sleek and the Chimeric. The dolphin was several degrees less sane than he had ever been: an engine of pure hate that existed only to inflict pain on the Chimeric. Sky had conditioned Sleek to blame the Chimeric for his confinement, and now the dolphin had assumed the role of Devil against the God that Sky had become in the Chimeric’s eyes. It had been much easier to shape the Chimeric that way, giving him a figure to fear and despise as well as one to revere. Slowly but surely, the Chimeric was approaching the ideal Sky had always had in mind. By the time the Chimeric was needed—and that would not be for years to come—the work would be done.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.
A hand rested on his shoulder. It was Ramirez, the leader of the executive council, the shipwide body with the power to elect someone to the vacant Captaincy. Ramirez, they were saying, was very likely to be Balcazar’s successor.
“Monopolising him again, Constanza?” the man said.
“We were just going over old times,” she answered. “Nothing that can’t wait, I assure you.”
“He did us proud, don’t you think, Constanza? Other men might have been tempted to give those fellows the benefit of the doubt, but not our Sky.”
“Not him, no,” Constanza said, before turning away.
“There’s no room for doubt in the Flotilla,” Sky said, watching the two bodies dwindle. He nodded to the Captain, lying in state in his own cooled casket. “If there’s one lesson that dear old man taught me, it’s never to give any house room to uncertainty.”
“That dear old man?” Ramirez sounded amused. “Balcazar, you mean?”
“He was like a father to me. We’ll never see his like again. If he were alive, these men would be lucky to get away with anything as painless as asphyxiation. Balcazar would have seen a painful death as the only valid form of deterrence.” Sky looked at him intently. “You do agree, don’t you, sir?”
“I . . . wouldn’t pretend to know.” Ramirez seemed slightly taken aback, but he blinked and continued speaking, “I had no great insights into Balcazar’s mind, Haussmann. Word is, he wasn’t at his very sharpest towards the end. But I suppose you’d know all about that, having been his favourite.” Again that hand on his shoulder. “And that means something to some of us. We trusted Balcazar’s judgement, just as he trusted Titus, your father. I’ll be frank: your name has been bandied about . . . what would you think to . . .”
“The Captaincy?” No sense in beating about the bush. “It’s a bit premature, isn’t it? Besides—someone with your own excellent record and depth of experience . . .”
“A year ago, I might have agreed. I will probably take over, yes—but I’m not a young man, and I doubt that it’ll be very long before questions are being asked about my likely successor.”
“You have years ahead of you, sir.”
“Oh, I may live to see Journey’s End, but I’ll be in no position to oversee the difficult early years of the settlement. Even you will no longer be a young man when that happens, Haussmann . . . but you will be much younger than some of us. Importantly, I see you have nerve as well as vision . . .” Ramirez glanced at Sky oddly. “Something’s troubling you, isn’t it?”
Sky was watching the dots of the executed men dissolve into darkness, like two tiny spots of cream dropped into the blackest coffee imaginable. The ship was not under thust, of course—it had been drifting for Sky’s entire life—which meant that the men were taking an eternity to fall away.
“Nothing, sir. I was just thinking. Now that those two men have been ejected, and we don’t have to carry them with us any more, we’ll be able to decelerate just that little bit harder when it comes time to initiate the slow-down burn. That means we can stay in cruise-mode a little longer, at our current speed. It means we’ll reach our destination sooner. Which means those men have, in some small, barely sufficient way, paid us back for their crimes.”
“You do come out with the oddest things, Haussmann.” Ramirez tapped him on the nose and leaned closer. There had never been any danger of the other officers overhearing the conversation, but now he was whispering. “Word of advice. I wasn’t joking when I said your name had been bandied about—but you aren’t the only candidate, and one wrong word from you could have a disastrous effect on your chances. Am I making myself clear?”
“Crystal, sir.”
“Good. Then watch your step, keep your head about you at all times, and you may be in with a chance.”
Sky nodded. He imagined that Ramirez expected him to feel grateful for this titbit of confidentiality, but what Sky actually felt—and did his level best to hide—was unmitigated contempt. As if the wishes of Ramirez and his cronies in any way influenced him! As if they actually had any say in whether he became Captain or not. The poor, blind fools.
“He’s nothing,” Sky breathed. “But I’ve got to let him feel he is useful to us.”
“Of course,” Clown said, for Clown had never been far away. “It’s what I would do.”
TWENTY-FIVE
After the episode had happened, I walked around the concourse until I found a tent where I could rent the use of a telephone for a few minutes. Everyone relied on phones now that the city’s original elegantly swift data networks had stopped working. It was something of a comedown for a society whose machines had once elevated the art of communication into an effortless form of near-telepathy, but the phones had become a minor fashion accessory in their own right. The poor didn’t have them and so the rich flaunted them, the larger and more conspicuous the better. The phone I rented looked like a crude, military-hardened walkie-talkie: a bulky black handheld unit with a popup two-d screen and a matrix of scuffed push-buttons marked with Canasian characters.
I asked the man renting the phone what I needed to do to reach both an orbital number and someone in the Canopy. He gave me a long and involved explanation about both, the details of which I struggled to hold in my head. The orbital number was easier since I already knew it—engraved onto the Mendicant business card which Sister Amelia had left me—but I had to get through four or five temperamental network layers before I reached it.
The Mendicants conducted their business in an interesting manner. They maintained ties with many of their clients long after they had left Hospice Idlewild. Some of those clients, on ascending to positions of power in the system, returned favours to the Mendicants—donations which allowed them to keep their habitat solvent. But it went beyond that. The Mendicants relied on their clients returning to them for additional services—information and the something which could only be described as the politest kind of espionage, so it was always in their interests to be in easy reach.
I had to
walk out of the station, into the rain, before the phone was able to hook into any of the city’s surviving data systems. Even then it took many seconds of stuttering attempts before an informational route was established to the Hospice, and once our conversation began it was punctuated by significant timelags and dropouts as data packets rico cheted around near-Yellowstone space, occasionally arcing off on parabolas which never returned.
“Brother Alexei of the Ice Mendicants, how may I serve God through you?”
The face which had appeared on the screen was gaunt and lantern-jawed, the man’s eyes gleaming with calm benevolence, like an owl. One of the eyes, I noticed, was surrounded by a deep purple bruise.
“Well, well,” I said. “Brother Alexei. How nice. What happened? Fell on your trowel?”
“I’m not sure I follow you, friend.”
“Well, I’ll jog your memory for you. My name is Tanner Mirabel. I came through the Hospice a few days ago, from the Orvieto.”
“I’m . . . not sure I recall you, brother.”
“Funny. Don’t you remember how we exchanged vows in the cave?”
He gritted his teeth, all the while maintaining that benevolent half-smile. “No . . . sorry. Drawing a blank there. But please continue.”
He was wearing an Ice Mendicant smock, hands clasped across his stomach. Behind him, I was afforded a view of climbing stepped vineyards which rose up and up until they curved overhead, bathed in the mirrored light of the habitat’s sunscreens. Little chalets and rest places dotted the steps, blocks of cool white amidst the overwhelmingly florid green, like icebergs on a briny sea.
“I need to speak to Sister Amelia,” I said. “She was very kind to me during our stay and she dealt with my personal affairs. I seem to remember you and she are acquainted?”