It was a long time since he’d had any contact with Norquinco. They had barely spoken since Balcazar’s death, after which Sky had spent time establishing himself in a position of considerable seniority within the crew. From head of security he had moved to overall third-in-command, and now second-in-command, with only Ramirez standing between him and absolute control of the Santiago. Constanza was still problematic, of course, even though he had relegated her to a minor role in security—but he would not allow her to upset his plans. In the new régime, Captain was an extremely precarious position. A state of cold war existed between all the ships; internal shipboard politics were a web of paranoia in which errors of judgement were punished mercilessly. It would take only one carefully engineered scandal to oust Ramirez; murdering him would begin to look just a little too suspicious. Sky had something in mind; a scandal that would remove Ramirez and provide a convenient cover for his own plans.
They reached the node and descended to one of the six sleeper modules situated at that point on the spine. Each module held ten berths, and accessing each berth was itself an awkward process, so it wasn’t possible to visit more than a small fraction of the momios in a single day. Yet throughout his climb to second-in-command, Sky had never allowed himself to spend too much time away from the sleepers.
The task of visiting them all, checking on their progress, had, however, become easier with each year. Now and then one of the sleeper berths failed, ensuring that the momio could never be revived. Sky had mapped the dead laboriously, noting clusters which might signify some rogue support system. But by and large the deaths were distributed randomly along the spine. It was all that could be expected from such ancient machinery, both delicate and highly experimental at the time the Flotilla had departed. Messages from back home suggested that they had made great improvements in cryonics technology—advances which would have made these sleeper caskets look scarcely more civilised than Egyptian sarcophagi. But that didn’t help anyone on the Flotilla. It was far too risky to try to improve the existing berths.
Sky and Norquinco crawled through the hull until they reached the first sleeper module. They emerged into one of the ten berths spaced around its circumference. Sensing them, pressure had flooded into the chamber, lights warmed and status displays came alive, but it remained deathly cold.
“This one’s dead, Sky . . .”
“I know.” Norquinco had not visited many of the sleepers before; this was the first time Sky had felt it necessary to have him along. “I marked this one down as a failure on one of my earlier inspections.”
The casket’s warning icons were pulsing all the shades of hell, to no avail. The glass cover remained hermetic, and Sky had to peer close to satisfy himself that the sleeper really was dead, and not about to become the victim of malfunctioning readouts. But there was no arguing with the mummified form he glimpsed within. He glanced at the sleeper’s nameplate, checked it against his list and was satisfied that his judgement before had been wise.
Sky left the chamber, Norquinco following him, and they moved along to the next.
Similar story. Another dead passenger, killed by a similar error. No point even thinking about keeping this one thawed. There was unlikely to be a single intact cell anywhere in her body.
“What a waste,” Norquinco said.
“I don’t know,” Sky said. “Maybe some good can come of these deaths. Norquinco, I’ve brought you here for a reason. I want you to listen carefully and be very certain that nothing I say goes beyond these walls. Understand?”
“I wondered why you wanted to meet me again. It’s been a few years, Sky.”
Sky nodded. “Yes, and there’ve been a lot of changes. I’ve kept my eye on you, though. I’ve watched you find a niche for your skills, and I’ve seen how good you are at your job. The same goes for Gomez—but I’ve already spoken to him.”
“What is this all about, Sky?”
“Two things, really. I’ll come to the most urgent in a moment. First of all I want to ask you about something technical. What do you know about these modules?”
“What I need to know, no more and no less. There are ninety-six of them spaced along the spine, ten sleepers to each.”
“Yes. And a lot of those sleepers are dead now.”
“I don’t follow, Sky.”
“They’re dead mass. Not just the sleepers, but all the useless machinery which is no longer being used to support them. Add it up and it’s a sizable fraction of the ship’s total mass.”
“I still don’t follow.”
Sky sighed, wondering why nothing was ever as clear to other people as it was to him. “We don’t need that mass any more. Right now it doesn’t hurt us, but as soon as we start slowing down, it’ll prevent us braking as fast as we’d like. Shall I spell it out? That means if we want to come to a stop around 61 Cygni-A, we have to start slowing down sooner than we’d otherwise need to. On the other hand, if we could detach the modules we don’t need now, we’d be able to slow down harder and faster. That would give us a lead on the other ships. We could reach the planet months ahead of anyone else; time to pick the best landing sites and establish surface settlements.”
Norquinco thought about it. “That won’t be easy, Sky. There are, um, safeguards. The modules aren’t meant to be detached until we reach orbit around Journey’s End.”
“I’m well aware of that. That’s why I’m asking you.”
“Ah. I, um, see.”
“Those safeguards must be electronic. That means they can eventually be bypassed, given time. You still have years in which to do it—I won’t want to detach the modules until the absolute last moment before we begin slowing down.”
“Why wait until then?”
“You still don’t get it, do you? This is cold war, Norquinco. We have to keep the element of surprise.” He stared hard at the man, knowing that if he decided he could not trust Norquinco, he would soon have to kill him. But he was gambling that the problem itself would entice Norquinco.
“Yes,” he said. “I mean, yes, technically, I could hack those safeguards. It would be difficult—monumentally difficult—but I could do it. And it would take years. Perhaps a decade. To do the work covertly, it would have to be carried out under the camouflage of the six-monthly total system audits . . . that’s the only time when those deep-layer functions are even glimpsed, let alone accessed.” His mind was racing ahead now, Sky saw. “And I’m not even on the squad that runs those audits.”
“Why not? You’re clever enough, aren’t you?”
“They say I’m not a ‘team player’.” If they were all like me, those audits wouldn’t take half as long as they do.”
“I can see how they’d have difficulty adjusting to your ethos,” Sky said. “That’s the problem with genius, Norquinco. It’s seldom appreciated.”
Norquinco nodded, foolishly imagining that their relationship had finally traversed that hazy line between mutual usefulness and genuine friendship. “A prophet is without honour, et cetera. You’re right, Sky.”
“I know,” Sky said. “I’m always right.”
He opened his computer slate, shuffling through layers of data until he found the abstracted map of the sleepers. It looked like a strange species of cactus rendered in neon: a spiny, many-branched plant. The living were marked with red icons; the dead with black. For years now, Sky had been segregating the living from the dead, until several sleeper modules were filled only with dead momios. It was very tricky work because it required moving the living while they were still frozen, uncoupling their caskets and transporting them by train from one part of the spine to another while they were kept cool on reserve power. Sometimes you ended up with another dead momio.
It was all part of the plan. When the time came, and with Norquinco’s assistance, Sky would be ready.
But there was another matter he wanted to talk to Norquinco about.
“You said there was something else, Sky.”
“Yes. There is. Do yo
u remember, Norquinco, when we were much younger? Before my father died? You and I and Gomez spoke about something. We called it the sixth ship, but you had another name for it.”
Norquinco looked at him suspiciously, as if certain that there must be a trap. “You mean the, um, Caleuche?”
Sky nodded. “Yes, exactly that. Remind me—what was the story behind that name again?”
Norquinco filled in more details about the myth than Sky remembered from the first time. It was as if Norquinco had done some research of his own.
But when he had finished, having told Sky about the dolphin that accompanied the ghost ship, he said, “It doesn’t exist, Sky. It was just a story we liked to tell each other.”
“No. That’s what I thought, but it was real. Is real, in fact.” Sky looked at him carefully, studying the effect his words had on Norquinco. “My father told me. Security have always known that it exists. They know a thing or two about it, too. It’s about half a light second behind us, and it’s about the same size and shape as the Santiago. It’s another Flotilla ship, Norquinco.”
“Why have you waited until now to tell me, Sky?”
“Because until now I haven’t had the means to do anything about it. Now, though . . . I do have the means. I want to go there, Norquinco—take a small expedition to her. But it has to be conducted in absolute secrecy. The strategic value of that ship is beyond imagining. There’ll be supplies on her. Components. Machines. Drugs. Everything we’ve had to make do without for decades. More than that, though, she’ll have anti matter on her, and she’ll probably have a functioning propulsion system. That’s why I want Gomez along. But I’ll need you as well. I don’t expect to find anyone alive on her, but we’ll have to get into her; warm her systems and bypass her security.”
Norquinco looked at him wonderingly. “I can do that, Sky.”
“Good. I knew you wouldn’t let me down.”
He told Norquinco that they would leave for the ghost ship as soon as he could arrange to take a shuttle without anyone suspecting his real intention—a problem that in itself would require some careful planning. They would be gone for several days, too, and no one must notice that either. But the risk, he thought, would be worth it. That ship was sitting behind them like a lure, inviting them to plunder the riches that lay aboard her. Only Sky even knew for sure that the ghost ship existed.
“You know,” Clown murmured, with him again, “it would be a crime to ignore it.”
When Sky had left me—the episode, as usual, had occupied only an instant of actual time—I reached into my pocket for the gun, wondering as I did about the phallic significance of that gesture. Then I shrugged and did the only thing which seemed reasonable, which was to walk towards the light, and the entrance which fed back into the particular neighbourhood of the Canopy where I had been deposited.
I entered the plaza-like interior, trying to put a cocky swagger into my stride, as if by feedback it might make me feel more confident. The place was just as bustling as Escher Heights, even though it was now well beyond midnight. But the architecture was like nothing I had seen. It had been hinted at in the place where Waverly worked me over, and the geometries which passed for domestic in Zebra’s rooms. But here, that curvilinear juxtaposition of mismatched topologies, stomachlike tubes and doughy walls and ceilings had been pushed to a mind-wrenching extreme.
I wandered around for an hour, studying the faces and occasionally sitting down near a koi pond (they were ubiquitous), just letting recent events jostle around in my mind. I kept hoping that one of the patterns would strike me as being somehow more truthful than the rest, and that I’d then know what was happening, and what my own part in it all was. But the patterns were halfhearted and incomplete, shards missing and troubling asymmetries spoiling their veracity. Maybe a more intelligent man than I might have seen something, but I was too tired to search for any artfully concealed subtleties. All I knew was the surface events. I’d been sent here to kill a man and, despite all the odds, I had found myself standing only a few metres from him, before I was even properly searching for him. I ought to have felt elated, even though I had failed to put the moment to proper use. But what I felt instead was a queasy sense of wrongness, as if I had drawn four aces in the first hand of a poker game.
The kind of luck which felt like the prelude to ill fortune.
I reached into my pocket, feeling the wad of money I still had. There was less than I’d begun the night with—the clothes and the consultation with the Mixmaster hadn’t come cheap—but I wasn’t out of cash just yet. I retraced my steps back towards the ledge where Chanterelle had left me, debating what to do next; knowing only that I wanted to speak to Zebra again.
As I prepared to leave the plaza, a swarm of brightly attired socialites emerged from the night, attended by pets, servitors and floatcams, looking for all the world like a procession of mediaeval saints served by cherubim and seraphim. A pair of baroquely ornamented bronze palanquins followed, both no larger than a child’s coffin, with a more austere model trailing some distance behind: a hard-edged grey box with a tiny grilled window set into the front. It had no manipulators and I could hear its motors labouring, leaving a greasy trail behind it.
I had a plan, but not much of one. I’d mingle with the party and try and find out if any of them knew Zebra. From there, I could work out a way of getting to her, even if meant forcing one of them to take me there by cable-car.
The party halted, and I watched as a man with a head like a crescent moon removed a cachet of Dream Fuel vials from a pocket. He did it carefully, trying to make sure general passers-by wouldn’t see what he had, but not attempting to hide the Fuel from the rest of the party.
I melted into the shadows, satisfied that no one had noticed me until then.
The other members of the party clustered around the man and I saw the gleam of wedding-guns and less ceremonial syringes, both men and women in the party tugging down collars to plunge steel into skin. The two child-sized palanquins remained with the group, but the plainer one was circling the party, and I saw one or two of the people in the group eye it nervously, even as they waited to spike themselves with Fuel.
The grey palanquin wasn’t part of the group.
I’d just come to that conclusion when it halted, the front of the palanquin wheezing open, belching vapour from its hinges, and a man almost stumbling out. Someone in the party screamed and pointed at him, and in an instant the party as a whole had fallen back; even the miniature palanquins raced away from the man.
There was something terribly wrong with him.
Down one half of his naked body he was deceptively normal; as cruelly handsome and young as any in the party he’d approached. But the other half of him was submerged in a glistening growth that locked him rigid, countless branching filaments of silver-grey piercing his flesh, radiating outwards for tens of centimetres until they became only an indistinct grey haze. As he shuffled forward, the haze of filaments made a constant, barely audible tinkling noise as tiny shards detached themselves like seeds.
The man tried to speak, but what came out of his lopsided mouth was only an appalling moan.
“Burn him!” someone in the party shouted. “For God’s sake, burn him!”
“The brigade are on their way already,” someone else said.
The man with the moon-shaped head stepped a little closer to the plague victim, brandishing a single, nearly-exhausted vial.
“Is this what you want?”
The plague victim moaned something, still stumbling closer. He must have risked it, I thought, retaining his implants while not taking the proper precautions to protect himself. Perhaps he’d chosen a cheap palanquin that lacked the hermetic security of a more expensive model. Or perhaps he’d only taken to the device after the plague had reached him, hoping that the spread would be slower if he were barriered from further exposure.
“Here. Take this and leave us all alone, quickly. The brigade won’t take long to get here.” r />
The moon-faced man threw him the vial; the plague victim lunged forward to try and grab it with his good arm. He missed, and the vial shattered on the ground, leaking its reserve of Fuel.
But the plague victim fell forwards anyway; hitting the ground so that his face almost touched the small scarlet puddle. The impact raised a grey cloud of shattered extrusions from his body, but I couldn’t tell if the moan he emitted at that point was pleasure or pain. With his good arm, he clawed a few drops of Fuel towards his mouth, while the party looked on with horror and fascination, maintaining their distance but capturing the incident on camera. The spectacle had attracted a few other people by then, and they all studied the man as if his contortions and moans were simply a bizarre piece of performance art.
“He’s an extreme case,” someone said. “I’ve never seen that degree of asymmetry. Do you think we’re far enough away from him?”
“You’ll find out eventually.”
The man was still thrashing stiffly on the ground when the brigade arrived from inside the plaza. They couldn’t have had far to travel. It was a detachment of armoured technicians, propelling a cumbersome machine which resembled an extremely large, open-fronted palanquin, marked with bas-relief biohazard symbols. Oblivious to their presence, the plague victim kept clawing at the Fuel even as they pushed the humming machine over him and lowered a door over its front. The technicians moved with clinical speed, communicating with precise hand gestures and whispers as their machine thumped and hummed. The party watched wordlessly; no sign now of the Dream Fuel or the devices they’d been using to administer it. Then the technicians propelled their machine backwards, leaving only polished ground behind, one of them sweeping the area with something that looked like a cross between a broom and a mine-detector. After a few sweeps he gave a thumbs-up signal to his colleagues and followed them back into the plaza, behind the still-humming machine.