The Revelation Space Collection (134 page)

‘Haussmann? Are you there?’

It was Old Man Balcazar. Sky smiled and did his best to look and sound crisply professional.

‘It’s me, Captain. How may I help?’

‘Something’s come up, Haussmann. Something important. I need you to escort me.’

With his free hand Sky began to turn down the gain on the machine, then stopped before he dropped it too low. With the current off, the prisoner might regain the ability to speak. He kept the juice on while he spoke.

‘Escort you, sir? To somewhere else in the ship?’

‘No, Haussmann. Off ship. We’re going over to the Palestine. I want you to come with me. Not too much to ask, is it?’

‘I’ll be in the taxi hangar in thirty minutes, sir.’

‘You’ll be there in fifteen, Haussmann, and you’ll have a taxi prepped and ready for departure.’ The Captain inserted a phlegmatic pause. ‘Balcazar out.’

Sky stood staring at the bracelet for a few moments after the Captain’s image had blanked, wondering what was afoot. With the four remaining ships locked in what was essentially a cold war, the kind of trip of which Balcazar spoke was extremely rare, usually planned days in advance with meticulous attention to detail. A full security escort would normally accompany any senior crew making the crossing to another ship, Sky himself staying behind to co-ordinate things. But this time Balcazar had given him only a few minutes’ warning, and there had been no rumour of anything pending before the Captain’s call.

Fifteen minutes - of which he had squandered at least one already. He snapped down the cuff of his tunic and started to leave the room. He was almost gone when he remembered that the prisoner was still plugged into the God-Box, his mind still bathed in electrical ecstasy.

Sleek quivered again.

Sky returned to the machine and adjusted the settings, so that the dolphin had control of the electrical current stimulation. Sleek’s quivering became maniacal, the creature’s body thrashing against the tight constraints of the tank, enveloping his body in a manic froth of bubbles. The implants in the dolphin’s skull were able to talk to the machine now; able to make the prisoner scream in agony or gasp in the heights of joy.

With Sleek, though, it was generally the former.

He heard the old man wheezing and creaking his way across the floor of the hangar long before he saw him. The Captain’s two medical aides, Valdivia and Rengo, kept a discreet distance behind their charge, slightly crouched as they walked, monitoring his life-signs on handheld readouts, their expressions of concern so profound that it looked like the old man had only minutes of life left in him. But Sky was a long way from feeling any concern over the Captain’s imminent demise: they had been wearing those expressions for years, and what they constituted was only a glaze of carefully maintained professionalism. Valdivia and Rengo had to give everyone the impression that the Captain was almost on his deathbed, or else they would be forced to apply their not overly-honed medical skills elsewhere.

Which was not to say that Balcazar was exactly in the prime of life, either. The old man was sustained by a chest-girdling medical device, across which his dress tunic was tightly buttoned, giving him the plump-breasted look of a well-fed rooster. The effect was exacerbated by his comb of stiff grey hair and the suspicious gleam of his dark, widely-set eyes. Balcazar was easily the oldest of the crew, his Captaincy dating back to long before Titus’s time, and while it was perfectly clear that he had once had a mind like a steel trap, steering his crew through innumerable minor crises with icy skill, it was equally clear that those days were long since over; that the trap was now a rusted travesty of itself. Privately they said that his mind was nearly gone, while publicly they spoke of his infirmity and the need to hand over the reins to the younger generation; to replace him with a young or middle-aged Captain now who would be merely senior when the Flotilla arrived at its destination. Wait too long, they said, and his replacement would not have time to acquire the necessary skills before those undoubtedly difficult days were upon them.

There had been votes of censure and no confidence, and talk of forced retirement on medical grounds - nothing actually mutinous, of course - but the old bastard had stood his ground. Yet his position had never been weaker than now. His staunchest allies had themselves begun to die out. Titus Haussmann, who Sky could still not quite stop thinking of as his father, had been amongst them. Losing Titus had been a major blow for the Captain, who had long relied on the man for tactical advice and soundings regarding the true feelings of the crew. It was almost as if the Captain could not adjust to the loss of his confidant and was perfectly happy to let Sky assume Titus’s role. Speedy promotion to head of security had been only part of it. When the Captain occasionally called him Titus rather than Sky, he had at first assumed the slip was an innocent mistake, but on reflection it signified something much more problematic. The Captain, as they said, was losing his marbles; events were becoming jumbled in his head, the recent past slipping in and out of clarity. It was no way to run a ship.

Something, Sky had resolved, would have to be done about it.

‘We’ll be accompanying him, of course,’ the first of the aides whispered. The man, Valdivia, looked enough like the other one for him and Rengo to have been brothers. They both had close-cropped white hair and worry lines corrugated into their foreheads.

‘Impossible,’ Sky said. ‘There’s only a two-seat shuttle available.’ He indicated the nearest craft, parked on its transport pallet. Other, larger ships were parked around the two-seater, but all had components missing or access panels folded open. It was part of the general deterioration of services; throughout the ship, things that had been meant to last the mission were failing prematurely. The problem would not have been so severe if parts and expertise could have been swapped between the Flotilla vessels, but that was unthinkable in the current diplomatic climate.

‘How long would it take to patch together one of those larger ones?’ Valdivia said.

‘Half a day at the earliest,’ Sky said.

Balcazar must have heard part of that, because he murmured, ‘There won’t be any damned delay, Haussmann.’

‘You see?’

Rengo sprang forward. ‘Then, Captain, may I?’

It was a ritual they had gone through many times before. With a long-suffering sigh, Balcazar allowed the medic to undo his side-buttoned tunic, revealing the gleaming expanse of the medical tabard. The machine whirred and wheezed like a piece of clapped-out air purification equipment. There were dozens of windows set into it, some showing readouts or dials, others pulsing fluid lines. Rengo extended a probe from his handheld device and plugged it into various apertures, nodding or shaking his head slowly as numbers and graphs flowed across the device’s screen.

‘Something amiss?’ Sky said.

‘As soon as he gets back, I want him down in medical for a complete overhaul,’ Rengo said.

‘Pulse is a bit on the thready side,’ Valdivia said.

‘It’ll hold. I’ll up his relaxant.’ Rengo punched controls on his handset. ‘He’ll be a bit drowsy on the way over, Sky. Just don’t let the bastards on the other ship get him worked up, all right? Bring him back here on medical grounds if there’s any sign of tension.’

‘I’ll be sure to.’ Sky helped the already dozy Captain towards the two-seat shuttle. It was a lie that the larger ships were not ready, of course, but of those present only Sky had the technical knowledge to catch himself out.

Departure was uneventful. They cleared the access tunnel, unlatched and curved away from the Santiago, stabs of thrust pushing the shuttle towards their destination, the Palestine. The Captain sat before him, his reflection in the cockpit window resembling the formal portrait of some octagenarian despot from another century. Sky had expected him to nod off, but he seemed awake enough. He had the habit of delivering portentous utterances every few minutes, interspersed between fusillades of coughs.

‘Khan was a reckless bloody fool, you know . . . should never have been left in command after the upheavals of ’15 . . . if I’d damn well had my way, beggar would have been frozen for the rest of the trip, or thrown into space . . . losing his mass would have given them just the kind of decelerational edge they were looking for in the first place . . .’

‘Really, sir?’

‘Not literally, you damn fool! What would a man weigh, one ten millionth of the mass of one our ships? What kind of bloody edge would that have been?’

‘Not much of one, sir.’

‘I don’t damn well think so, no. The trouble with you, Titus, is you take everything I say too damn literally . . . like a bloody amanuensis hanging off my every word, quill poised above parchment . . .’

‘I’m not Titus, sir. Titus was my father.’

‘What?’ For a moment Balcazar glared at him, his eyes yellow with suspicion. ‘Oh, never mind, damn you!’

But this was actually one of Balcazar’s better days. There had been no outright lapses into surrealism. He could be very much worse: as poetically oblique as any sphinx, when the mood seized him. Perhaps there had once been a context in which even his maddest statement might have meant something, but to Sky they sounded only like premature deathbed ramblings. That was no problem of his. Balcazar seldom invited any kind of riposte when he was in soliloquy mode. If Sky had really back-answered him - or even dared to question some minute, trifling detail in Balcazar’s stream-of-consciousness - the shock of it would probably have given him multiple organ failure, even with the relaxant Rengo had administered.

How utterly convenient that would have been, Sky thought.

After a few minutes, he said, ‘I suppose you can tell me what this is all about now, sir.’

‘Of course, Titus. Of course.’

And as placidly as if they were two old friends catching up on lost times over a couple of pisco sours, the Captain told him that they were heading to a conclave of senior Flotilla crew. It was to be the first in many years, precipitated by the unexpected arrival of another update from Sol system. A message from home, in other words, containing elaborate technical blueprints. It was the kind of exterior event which was still sufficient to push the Flotilla towards some kind of unity, even in the midst of the cold war. It was the same kind of gift which might have annihilated the Islamabad, when Sky was very young. Even now, no one was entirely sure whether Khan had chosen to sip from that poisoned chalice, or whether the accident had just happened then out of a sense of malign cosmic caprice. Now there was a promise of another squeeze in engine efficiency, if only they would make certain trifling changes to the magnetic confinement topology; all very safe, the message said - tested endlessly back home, with mock-ups of the Flotilla’s engines; the potential for error was really negligible provided certain basic precautions were taken . . .

But at the same time, another message had arrived.

Don’t do it, said the other message. They’re trying to trick you.

It hardly mattered that the other message offered no plausible reason why such trickery might be attempted. The doubt that it brought was enough to lend this conclave an entirely new frisson of tension.

Eventually they were within visual range of the Palestine, where the conclave would be held. A whole swarm of shuttle taxis was converging on her from the other three ships, carrying senior ships’ officers. The choice of the meeting place had been arrived at in haste, but that did not mean the process had been devoid of difficulty. Yet the Palestine was the obvious choice. In any war, Sky thought, cold or otherwise, it was always to the mutual benefit of all participants to agree on a neutral ground, whether it be for negotiation, exchange of spies or - if all else failed - early demonstration of new weapons - and the Palestine was the ship that had assumed that role.

‘Do you think this is really a trick, sir?’ Sky asked, when Balcazar had finished one of his coughing sessions. ‘I mean, why would they do that?’

‘Why would they bloody do what?’

‘Try and kill us, sir, by transmitting erroneous technical data? There’d be no gain for them back home. It’s a wonder they even bother sending us anything.’

‘Precisely.’ Balcazar spat the word, as if its obviousness was beneath contempt. ‘There’d be no gain in sending us something useful, either - and it would be a lot more work than sending us something dangerous. Can’t you see that, you little fool? God help all of us if one of your generation ever assumes command . . .’ He trailed off.

Sky waited for him to finish coughing, then wheezing. ‘But there must still be a motivation . . .’

‘Pure malice.’

He was treading very thin ice now, but he soldiered on. ‘The malice could just as easily lie in the message warning us not to implement the change.’

‘Oh, and you’re willing to risk four thousand lives to put that little bit of schoolboy speculation to the test, are you?’

‘It’s not my job to take such a decision, sir. I’m just saying I don’t envy you the responsibility.’

‘And what would you know about responsibility anyway, you insolent little prick?’

Little now, Sky thought. But one day . . . perhaps one day not too far from this one, all that might change. Thinking it best not to reply, he flew the taxi on in silence, broken only by the old man’s cardiovascular labours.