When I had finished—when Zebra and Pransky had grilled me to exhaustion, examining every facet of my story as if looking for a flaw they knew must be present—there was one last question, and it was mine.
“Why have you brought me here, Zebra?”
Hands on hips, her elbows jutting from the black enclosure of her coat, she said, “Why do you think?”
“Curiosity, I suppose. But that’s not enough.”
“You’re in danger, Tanner. I’m doing you a favour.”
“I’ve been in danger since I came here. That’s nothing new to me.”
“I mean real danger,” Pransky said. “You’re in too deep. You’ve attracted too much attention.”
“He’s right,” Zebra said. “Dominika was the weak link. She may have alerted half the city by now. Reivich almost certainly knows you’re here, and he probably knows you nearly killed him tonight.”
“That’s what I don’t understand,” I said. “If he’s already been warned of my presence, why the hell was he making himself such an easy target? If I’d been a fraction faster I’d have killed him.”
“Maybe the meeting was a coincidence,” Pransky said.
Zebra looked at him scornfully. “In a city this big? No; Tanner’s right. That meeting happened because Reivich arranged for it to happen. And there’s something else, too. Look at me, Tanner. Notice anything different?”
“You changed your appearance.”
“Yes. And it isn’t the hardest thing to do, believe me. Reivich could have done the same—nothing drastic; just enough to ensure that he wasn’t immediately recognisable in a public place. A few hours under the knife at most. Even a halfway competent bloodcutter could have done it.”
“Then that doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “It’s like he was taunting me. Like he wanted me to kill him.”
“Maybe he did,” Zebra said.
There had been moments when I thought I might never see the outside of that room; that it was where Pransky and Zebra had brought me to die.
Pransky was clearly a professional, and Zebra was no stranger to death herself, given her affiliation with the sabotage movement.
Yet they didn’t kill me.
We took a cable-car to Zebra’s place, Pransky going off on some other errand. “Who is he?” I asked, once we were alone. “Some kind of hired help?”
“Private intelligence,” Zebra said, discarding her coat in a black puddle. “It’s all the rage these days. There are rivalries in the Canopy—feuds and quiet wars, sometimes between families, and sometimes within.”
“You thought he could help trace me.”
“Seems I wasn’t wrong.”
“I still don’t know why, Zebra.” Once again I looked beyond the room, towards the maw of the chasm which was like the rim of a volcano around which a city festered, on the eve of its own destruction. There was some dawn-light on the horizon. “Unless you think you can use me in some way—in which case I’m afraid you’re wrong. I’m not interested in any Canopy power games you might be involved in. I’m only here to do one thing.”
“To kill a seemingly innocent man.”
“It’s a cruel universe. Do you mind if I sit down?” I helped myself to a seat before she had answered me, the mobile furniture shuffling into place beneath me like an obsequious servant. “I’m still a soldier at heart and it’s my job not to question these things. The instant I start doing that is the instant I stop doing my job properly.”
Zebra, all angularity and knifelike edges, folded herself into the sumptuousness of the seat opposite me, retracting her knees beneath her chin.
“Someone’s after you, Tanner. That’s why I had to find you. It’s dangerous for you to stay here. You have to get out of the city.”
“It’s nothing I didn’t expect. Reivich will have hired all the help he can get his hands on.”
“Local help?”
It was an odd question. “Yes, I suppose. You wouldn’t hire someone who didn’t already know the city.”
“Whoever’s after you isn’t local, Tanner.”
I tensed in the seat, causing its buried musculature to generate massaging ripples. “What do you know?”
“Not very much, except that Dominika said someone had been trying to find you. A man and a woman. They acted like they’d never been here before. Like offworlders. And they were very interested in finding you.”
“A man already did,” I said, thinking of Quirrenbach. “He followed me down from orbit, posing as an offworlder. I lost him in Dominika’s. It’s possible he returned with reinforcements.” Vadim, perhaps. But it would be quite a trick to mistake Vadim for a woman.
“Is he dangerous?”
“Anyone who lies for a living is dangerous.”
Zebra summoned one of her ceiling-tracked servitors, having the machine bring us a tray laden with carafes of varying size and colour. Zebra poured me a goblet of wine and I let it wash away some of the accumulated taste of the city, dull some of the roaring in my mind.
“I’m very tired,” I said. “You offered me sanctuary here a day ago, Zebra. Can I accept that offer now, if only until daybreak?”
She looked at me over the smoked rim of her glass. It was already daybreak, but she knew what I meant. “After all you’ve done, you think I’ll keep an offer like that open?”
“I’m an optimist,” I said, with what I hoped was the appropriate tone of utter resignation.
Then I took another sip of wine and began to realise how exhausted I really was.
THIRTY
The expedition to the ghost ship almost never left the Santiago . Sky and his two associates, Norquinco and Gomez, had made it as far as the cargo bay when Constanza appeared out of the shadows.
She looked much older now, Sky thought, prematurely aged compared to himself. It was hard to believe that the two of them had once been near-equals; children exploring the same dark and labyrinthine wonderland. Now the shadows etched themselves unflatteringly into her face, emphasising the wrinkles and folds of her habitual expression.
“Do you mind if I ask where you’re planning to go?” Constanza said, standing between them and the shuttle that they had gone to great trouble to make ready. “I’m not aware that anyone was supposed to be leaving the Santiago.”
“I’m afraid you weren’t in the loop on this one,” Sky said.
“I’m still a member of security, you supercilious little worm. How does that put me outside the loop?”
Sky glanced at the others, willing them to let him do the talking. “I’ll be blunt, then. It’s a matter that exceeds even the usual security channels. I can’t be specific, but the nature of this mission is both delicate and diplomatic.”
“Then why isn’t Ramirez with you?”
“It’s a high-risk mission; a possible trap. If I’m caught, Ramirez loses his second-in-command, but the routine functioning of the Santiago won’t be greatly affected. And if it is a genuine attempt to improve relations, the other ship can’t complain that we aren’t sending a senior officer.”
“Captain Ramirez would still know about this, though?”
“I should imagine so. He authorised it.”
“We’ll just check then, shall we?” She elevated her cuff, ready to speak to the Captain.
Sky allowed himself an instant of indecision before acting, weighing the outcome of two equally hazardous strategies. Ramirez did genuinely think there was a diplomatic operation in progress; an excuse that would enable Sky to leave the Santiago for a couple of days without too many questions being asked. It had taken years to lay the groundwork for that deception, faking messages from the Palestine, doctoring the real messages as they came in. But Ramirez was a clever man, and his suspicions might be raised if Constanza started showing too much interest in the validity of the mission.
So he rushed her, knocking her to the hard, polished floor of the bay. Her head whacked against the ground and she went deathly still.
“Have you killed her?
” Norquinco said.
“I don’t know,” Sky said, kneeling down.
Constanza was still alive.
They dragged her unconscious body across the cargo bay and arranged it artfully next to a pile of smashed freight pallets. It looked as if she had been exploring the bay on her own and had been knocked out when a tower of pallets had toppled over, catching her on the head.
“She won’t remember the encounter,” Sky said. “And if she doesn’t come round of her own accord before we’re back, I’ll find her myself.”
“She’ll still have her suspicions,” Gomez said.
“That won’t be a problem. I’ve set up evidence trails which’ll make it look like Ramirez and Constanza were complicit in authorising—ordering—this expedition.” He looked at Norquinco, who had actually done much of the work of which he spoke, but the other man’s expression was impassive.
They left before there was any chance of Constanza coming round. Normally Sky would have fired up the shuttle’s engines as soon as he was free of the docking bay, but that would have made their leaving all the more obvious. Instead, he gave the shuttle a small kick of thrust while it was hidden behind the Santiago—just enough to push it up to one hundred metres per second relative to the Flotilla—and then turned the engines off. With the cabin lights dimmed and maintaining strict comms silence, they fell backwards away from the mother ship.
Sky watched the hull slide by like a grey cliff. He had taken measures to conceal his own absence from the Santiago—and in the current atmosphere of paranoia very few people would ask awkward questions anyway—but there was no way that the departure of a small ship could ever be completely concealed from the other vessels. But Sky knew from experience that their radar scans were focused on detecting missiles moving between ships, rather than something falling slowly behind. In fact, now that the race was on to strip mass from all the ships, it was common for surplus equipment to be discarded. Junk was usually sent drifting forward, so that the Flotilla would never run into it while decelerating, but that was a minor detail.
“We’ll drift for twenty-four hours,” Sky said. “That’ll put us nine thousand kilometres behind the last ship in the Flotilla. Then we can turn on engines and radar and make a dash to the Caleuche. Even if they notice our thrust flame, we’ll still get there ahead of any other shuttle they send after us.”
“What if they do send something?” Gomez said. “We might still only have a few hours of grace. Maybe a day at best.”
“Then we’d better use our time wisely. A few hours will be enough to get aboard and establish what happened to her. A few hours more will give us the time we need to find any intact supplies she’s carrying—medical equipment, sleeper berth parts, you name it. We can fit enough aboard the shuttle to make a difference. If we find too much to bring back, we’ll hold her until the Santiago can dispatch a larger fleet of shuttles.”
“You’re talking as if we’d go to war over her.”
Sky Haussmann answered, “Maybe she’d be worth it, Gomez.”
“Or maybe she was cleaned out years ago by one of the other ships. Considered that, haven’t you?”
“Yes. And I’d regard that as reasonable grounds for war as well.”
Norquinco, who had barely spoken since the departure, was examining a bewilderingly complex general schematic of one of the Flotilla ships. It was the kind of thing he could get lost in for hours, his eyes glazed, ignoring sleep and food until he had solved some problem to his satisfaction. Sky envied him that singleminded devotion to one task, while flinching from the idea of ever allowing himself to become that obsessive. Norquinco’s value to him was highly specific: a tool that could be applied to certain well-defined problems with predictable results. Give Norquinco something complicated and arcane and he was in his element. Coming up with a plausible model for what the Caleuche’s internal data networks might be like was exactly that kind of problem. It could never be more than an educated guess, but there was no one Sky would rather have had doing the guessing.
He replayed what little they knew about the ghost ship. What was clear enough was that the Caleuche must once have been an acknowledged part of the Flotilla, built and launched with the other ships from Mercury orbit. Her construction and launch could never have been kept secret, even if she must have once had some more prosaic name than that of the mythical ghost ship. She would have accelerated up to cruising speed with the other five ships, and for a time—many years, perhaps—she would have travelled with them.
But something had happened during those early decades of the crossing to Swan. As political and social upheavals racked the home system, the Flotilla had become steadily more isolated. The home system had become months and then years of light-travel time away, until true communication became difficult. Technical updates had continued to arrive from home, and the Flotilla had continued to send reports back, but the intervals between these transmissions had become longer and longer, the messages increasingly desultory. Even when messages from home did arrive, they were often accompanied by contradictory ones; evidence of squabbling factions with different agendas, not all of which involved the Flotilla arriving safely at Journey’s End. Now and then a general news report was picked up, and the ships of the Flotilla even learned the unsettling truth that there were factions back home who were denying that they had ever existed. By and large these attempts to rewrite history were not taken seriously, but it was disconcerting to hear that they had gained even a toehold.
Too much time and distance, Sky thought, the words playing in his head like a mantra. So much boiled down to that, in the end.
And what it also meant was that the ships of the Flotilla became less and less accountable to any other parties save themselves; that it became easier to collectively suppress the truth of whatever had happened to the Caleuche.
Sky’s grandfather—or rather, Titus Haussmann’s father—must have known exactly what had happened. He had imparted some of that truth to Titus, but perhaps not all of it, and it might also have been the case that by the time Titus’s father had died even he had not been entirely sure what had really happened. All they could do now was speculate. There were, in Sky’s opinion, two likely scenarios. In the first, there had been some dispute between the ships which had culminated in an attack on the Caleuche. It could even have extended to the use of the landscaping nuclear weapons: though Titus had spoken of the radar echo of the ghost ship fitting the profile of one of the Flotilla vessels, there might still have been crippling damage to her. Afterwards, the other ships might have been so shamed by their actions that they had chosen to blank them from the historical record. One generation would have to live with the shame, but not the one that followed.
The other idea, and the one Sky favoured, was less dramatic but perhaps even more shaming. What if something had gone terribly wrong with the Caleuche—a plague aboard her, say—and the other ships had chosen to offer no assistance? Worse things had happened in history, and who could blame the others for fearing contamination themselves?
Shameful, perhaps. But also perfectly understandable.
What it also meant was that they would have to be very careful. He would assume nothing except that every situation was potentially lethal. Equally, he would accept the risks involved because the prize was so great. He thought of the anti matter which she had to be carrying, still dormant in her penning reservoir, waiting for the day when it should have been used to slow her down. That day might still come, but not in the way her designers had ever anticipated.
Or, for that matter, any of the other ships.
Within a few hours they had escaped the main body of the Flotilla. Once a radar beam from the Brazilia lingered over them, like the fingers of a blind person probing an unfamiliar object. The moment was tense, and while they were being scrutinised Sky wondered if this had not, after all, been a fatal misjudgement. But the beam moved on and never returned. If the Brazilia had assumed anything it must have accepted that the radar
echo signified only a chunk of receding debris; some useless, irrepairable machine jettisoned into the void.
After that they were alone.
It was tempting to fire up the thrusters, but Sky kept his nerve and maintained the drift for the twenty-four hours he had promised. No transmissions came from the Santiago, satisfying him that their absence had not yet become problematic. Had it not been for the company of Norquinco and Gomez, he would have been more alone now—further from human company—than at any point in his life. How terrifying this isolation would once have been to the small boy who had been so terrified of the dark when he had been trapped in the nursery. Almost unthinkable, to have willingly drifted this far from home.
Now, though, it was for a purpose.
He waited until the exact second, then turned on the engines again. The flame burned a deep lilac: clean and pure against the stars. He was careful to avoid shining the thrust beam directly back towards the Flotilla, but there was no way he could hide it completely. It hardly mattered; they had the edge now, and whatever the other ships chose to do, Sky would reach the Caleuche first. It would give him, he thought, a small foretaste of what the greater victory would be like, when he brought the Santiago to Journey’s End ahead of the others. It was as well to remember that everything he did now was only part of that larger plan.
But there was a difference, of course. Journey’s End was definitely out there; definitely a world which he knew to be real. He still had only Titus’s word that the Caleuche existed at all.