The Revelation Space Collection (160 page)

‘Get on with it.’

‘I’m wondering why I’m talking to you, and not Cahuella. Why didn’t Cahuella come here?’

I found it hard to answer, at least not to my own satisfaction. Cahuella had been a hard man, but he had never been a soldier. There were skills which I had learned on a level below recall, which Cahuella simply lacked - and would have taken half a lifetime to gain. He knew weapons, but he did not really know war. His understanding of tactics and strategy was strictly theoretical - he played the game well, and understood the subtleties buried in its rules - but he had never been thrown into the dirt by the concussion of a shell, or seen a part of himself lying beyond reach on the ground, quivering like a beached jellyfish. Experiences like that did not necessarily improve one - but they certainly changed one. But would any of those deficits have handicapped him? This was not war, after all. And I had hardly come well equipped for it myself. It was a sobering thought, but I found it hard to entirely dismiss the idea that Cahuella might have already succeeded by now.

So why had I come here, rather than him?

‘He would have found it difficult to get off the planet,’ I said. ‘He was a war criminal. His freedom of movement was restricted.’

‘He’d have found a way round it,’ Chanterelle said.

The troubling thing was, I thought she was right. And it was the last thing in the world I wanted to think about.

‘It’s been nice knowing you, Tanner. I think.’

‘Chanterelle, don’t—’

As the door of the cable-car sealed us from each other, I saw her shake her head, expressionless behind that mask of cattish indifference. Her cable-car lofted, hauling itself away with a series of whisking noises, underpinned by the musical creaking as the cables stressed and released like catgut.

At least she had resisted the temptation to dump me in the Mulch.

But she had dumped me in a part of the Canopy I had no knowledge of. What exactly had I been expecting? I suppose, somewhere at the back of my mind was the thought that we might have ended up sharing a bed by the end of the evening. Given that we had commenced our affair by pointing weapons at each other and trading threats, it would certainly have been an unanticipated coda. She was beautiful enough as well - less exotic than Zebra; perhaps less sure of herself - a trait which undoubtedly brought out the protector in me. She would have laughed in my face at that - stupid male pride - and of course she would have been correct. But so what. I liked her, and if I needed justification for that attraction, it hardly mattered how irrational it was.

‘Damn you, Chanterelle,’ I said, without very much conviction.

She had left me on a landing ledge, similar to the touchdown point outside Escher Heights, but significantly less busy - Chanterelle’s car had been the only one here, and now that was gone. A muted rain was descending, like a constant moist exhalation from some great dragon poised over the Canopy.

I walked to the edge, feeling Sky come down with the rain.

TWENTY-NINE

He was doing his rounds of the sleepers.

Sky and Norquinco were far along one of the train tunnels that stretched along the ship’s spine, their feet clanging against catwalked flooring. Occasionally strings of robot freight pods clattered past along the track, ferrying supplies to and from the small band of technicians who lived at the far end of the ship, studying the engines night and day like worshipping acolytes. Here came one now, its orange hazard lights flashing as it rumbled towards them. The train almost filled the corridor. Sky and Norquinco stepped into a recess while the shipment went past. Sky noticed Norquinco slipping something into a shirt pocket, a piece of paper covered with what looked like a series of numbers partially crossed-out.

‘Come on,’ Sky said. ‘I want to make it to node three before the next shipment comes along.’

‘No problem,’ the other man said. ‘The next one isn’t due for . . . seventeen minutes.’

Sky looked at him oddly. ‘You know that?’

‘Of course. They do run to a timetable, Sky.’

‘Of course; I knew that. I just couldn’t see why anyone in their right mind would actually memorise the times.’

They walked on in silence to the next node. This far from the main living areas, the ship was uncommonly quiet, with hardly any sound of air-pumps or any of the other chugging systems of life-support. The sleepers, for all that they needed constant cybernetic supervision, drew very little power from the ship’s grid. The momios’ refrigeration systems did not have to work hard, for the sleepers had been deliberately situated close to naked space; slumbering only metres from the absolute chill of interstellar vacuum. Sky wore a thermal suit, his breath blasting out in white gouts with each exhalation. Periodically he lifted the hood over his head until he felt warm again. Norquinco, by contrast, kept his hood permanently up.

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 regime, 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 sizeable 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 you 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.