The Revelation Space Collection (180 page)

There would be trouble, of course, when they returned to the Flotilla. One of the other ships had sent their own shuttles here, which meant that Sky would probably face recrimination; perhaps even some kind of tribunal. But he had planned for that, knowing that, with shrewdness, he could use the moment to his advantage. The trail of evidence he had created with Norquinco’s help would, when revealed, point to Ramirez as having orchestrated the expedition to the Caleuche, with Constanza part of the conspiracy. Sky would be revealed as none other than an unwitting stooge of his Captain’s megalomaniac schemes. Ramirez would be removed from the Captaincy; perhaps even executed. Constanza would certainly be punished. There would, needless to say, be very little doubt in anyone’s minds as to who should succeed Ramirez in the Captaincy.

Sky waited another minute or so, not daring to leave it longer than that in case Travelling Fearlessly suspected what was going to happen and tried to prevent it in some way. Then he made the harbourmaker go off. The nuclear flash was bright and clean and holy, and when the sphere of plasma had spread itself thin, like a flower whose bloom turned from blue-white to interstellar black, there was nothing left at all.

‘What did you just do?’ Gomez said.

Sky smiled. ‘Put something out of its misery.’

‘I should have killed him,’ Zebra said, as the inspection robot neared the surface.

‘I know how it feels,’ I said. ‘But we probably wouldn’t have been able to walk out if you had.’ She had aimed for his body, but it had never been very obvious where Ferris ended and his wheelchair began. Her shot had only damaged his support machinery. He had moaned, and when he’d tried to compose a sentence the inner workings of the chair had rattled and scraped before delivering a scrambled sequence of piped sounds. I suspected it would take a lot more than one ill-judged shot to kill a four-hundred-year-old man whose blood was almost certainly supersaturated with Dream Fuel.

‘So what good did that little jaunt do?’ she asked.

‘I’ve been asking myself the same question,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘All we know now is a little more about the means of production. Gideon’s still down there, and so’s Ferris. Nothing’s changed.’

‘It will,’ I said.

‘Meaning what?’

‘That was just a scouting expedition. When all this is over, I’m going back there.’

‘He’ll be expecting us next time,’ Zebra said. ‘We won’t be able to breeze in so easily.’

‘We?’ Quirrenbach said. ‘Then you’re already committed to this return trip, Taryn?’

‘Yes. And do me a favour. Call me Zebra from now on, will you?’

‘I’d listen to her if I were you, Quirrenbach.’ I felt the inspection robot begin to tilt over back to the horizontal as we approached the chamber where I hoped Chanterelle would still be waiting. ‘And yes, we’re going back, and no, it won’t be so easy the second time.’

‘What do you hope to achieve?’

‘As someone close to me once said, there’s something down there that needs to be put out of its misery.’

‘You’d kill Gideon, is that it?’

‘Rather than live with the idea of it suffering, yes.’

‘But the Dream Fuel . . .’

‘The city will just have to learn to live without it. And whatever other services it owes to Gideon. You heard what Ferris said. The remains of Gideon’s ship are still down there, still altering the chemistry of the gases in the chasm.’

‘But Gideon isn’t in the ship now,’ Zebra said. ‘You don’t think he’s still influencing it, do you?’

‘He’d better not be,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘If you killed him, and the chasm stopped supplying the city with the resources it needs . . . can you honestly imagine what would happen?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And it would probably make the plague look like a minor inconvenience. But I’d still do it.’

Chanterelle was waiting for us when we arrived. She opened the exit hatch nervously, studying us for a fraction of a second before deciding that we were the ones who had gone down. She put aside her weapon and helped us out, each groaning at the relief of no longer being inside the pipe. The air in the chamber was far from fresh, but I gulped in exultant lungfuls.

‘Well?’ Chanterelle said. ‘Was it worth it? Did you get close to Gideon?’

‘Close enough.’ I said.

Just then something buried in Zebra’s clothes began to chime, like a muffled bell. She handed me her gun and then fished out one of the clumsy, antique-looking phones which were the height of modernity in Chasm City.

‘Must have been trying to reach me the whole time we were coming up the tube,’ she said, flipping open the viewscreen.

‘Who is it?’ I asked.

‘Pransky,’ Zebra said, pushing the phone against her ear, while I told Chanterelle that the man was a private investigator who was peripherally involved in all that had happened since my arrival. Zebra spoke to him in a low voice, one hand cupped round her mouth to muffle the conversation. I couldn’t hear anything that Pransky was saying, and only a half of what Zebra said - but it was more than enough to get the gist of the conversation.

Someone, presumably one of Pransky’s contacts, had been murdered. Pransky was at the crime scene even as he spoke, and from the way Zebra was talking to him, he sounded agitated; like it was the last place in the world he wanted to be.

‘Have you . . .’ She was probably about to ask him if he’d alerted the authorities, before realising that where Pransky was, there was no such thing as law; even less than in the Canopy.

‘No, wait. No one has to know about this until we get there. Stay tight.’ And with that, Zebra cuffed the phone shut, returning it to her pocket.

‘What’s up?’ I asked.

‘Someone’s killed her,’ Zebra said.

Chanterelle looked at her. ‘Killed who?’

‘The fat woman. Dominika. She’s history.’

THIRTY-SEVEN

‘Could it have been Voronoff?’ I asked as we approached Grand Central Station. We had left him at the station before going down to see Gideon, but killing Dominika didn’t seem to fit in with what I knew about the man. Killing himself, perhaps, in an interesting and boredom-offsetting manner, but not a well-known figure like Dominika. ‘It doesn’t seem like his style to me.’

‘Not him, and not Reivich either,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘Though only you can know that for sure.’

‘Reivich’s no indiscriminate killer,’ I said.

‘Don’t forget Dominika made enemies easily,’ Zebra said. ‘She wasn’t exactly the best person in the city at keeping her mouth shut. Reivich could have killed her for talking about him.’

‘Except we already know he isn’t in the city,’ I said. ‘Reivich is in an orbital habitat called Refuge. That was true, wasn’t it?’

‘To the best of my knowledge, Tanner, yes,’ Quirrenbach said.

There was no sign of Voronoff, but that was hardly to be expected: when we’d let him go, I’d never seriously expected him to stay there. Nor had it mattered. Voronoff’s role in the whole affair was incidental at best, and if I ever did need to speak to him again, his celebrity would make it easy enough to track him down.

Dominika’s tent looked exactly as I remembered it, squatting in the middle of the bazaar. The flaps were drawn, and there were no customers in the vicinity, but there was nothing to suggest that a murder had taken place here. There was no sign of her helper trying to drag anyone into the tent, but even that absence was not especially noticeable, since the bazaar itself was remarkably subdued today. There must not have been any arriving flights; no influx of willing customers for her neural excisions.

Pransky was waiting just beyond the door, peering through a tiny gap in the material.

‘You took your time getting here.’ Then his funereal gaze assimilated Chanterelle, myself and Quirrenbach, and his eyes widened momentarily. ‘Well, well. A veritable hunting party.’

‘Just let us in,’ Zebra said.

Pransky held the door open and admitted us into the reception chamber where I had waited while Quirrenbach was on the slab.

‘I must warn you,’ he said softly. ‘Everything is exactly as I found it. You won’t like what you’re about to see.’

‘Where’s her kid?’ I asked.

‘Her kid?’ he said, as if I had used some piece of obscure street argot.

‘Tom. Her helper. He can’t be far away. He might have seen something. He might also be in danger.’

Pransky clicked his tongue. ‘I didn’t see any “kid”. There was more than enough to occupy my mind. Whoever did this was . . .’ He trailed off, but I could imagine what his mind was dealing with.

‘It can’t be local talent,’ Zebra said, in the silence which followed. ‘No one local would waste a resource like Dominika.’

‘You said the people after me weren’t local.’

‘What people?’ Chanterelle said.

‘A man and a woman,’ Zebra answered. ‘They paid a visit to Dominika, trying to trace Tanner. They definitely weren’t from the city. An odd couple, as far as I can tell.’

I said, ‘You think they came back and killed Dominika?’

‘I’d say they’re fairly near the top of possible suspects, Tanner. And you still have no idea who they might be?’

I shrugged. ‘I’m a popular man, evidently.’

Pransky coughed. ‘Maybe we should, um . . .’ He gestured with one grey hand towards the inner chamber of the tent.

We stepped through, into the part of the tent where Dominika performed her operations.

Dominika was floating on her back, half a metre above her surgical couch, suspended in that position by the steam-powered, articulated-boom suspended harness which encased her lower half. The harness’s pneumatics were still hissing, gentle fingers of vapour rising towards the ceiling. Top-heavy, she had canted back to an angle where her hips floated higher than her shoulders. The head of someone thinner than Dominika would probably have lolled to one side, but the rolls of fat around her neck kept her face pointed at the ceiling, and her eyes were wide open, glazed white, her jaw hanging slackly open.

Snakes covered her body.

The largest of them were dead, draped across her girth like patterned scarves, their inanimate bodies reaching to the bed. There was no doubting that they were dead; they’d been slit along the belly with a knife, and their blood had painted ribbons on the couch. Smaller snakes were still alive, coiled across her belly, or the couch, although they hardly moved even when I approached them, which I did with exquisite caution.

I thought of the snake sellers I had seen in the Mulch. That was where these animals had come from, purchased solely to provide detail to this tableau.

‘I told you you wouldn’t like it,’ Pransky said, his voice cutting through the stunned silence of our party. ‘I’ve seen some sick things in my time, believe me, but this must be . . .’

‘There’s a method to it,’ I said, softly. ‘It’s not as sick as it seems.’

‘You must be insane.’ Pransky had said it, but I had no doubt that the sentiment was felt by the others present. It was hard to blame them for that, but I knew what I was saying was right.

‘What do you mean?’ Zebra asked. ‘A method—’

‘It’s meant as a message,’ I said, moving around the levitating corpse so that I could get a better look at her face. ‘A kind of calling-card. A message to me, actually.’

I touched Dominika’s face, the slight pressure of my hand making her head turn to one side, so that the others could see the neat wound bored into the middle of her forehead.

‘Because,’ I said, voicing what I knew to be the truth for the first time, ‘Tanner Mirabel did it.’

Somewhere near my sixtieth birthday - though I had long since ceased to mark the passage of time (what was the point, when you were immortal?) and had doctored ship’s records to obscure the details of my own past - I knew that the time had come to make my move. The choice of time was not really mine, forced upon me by the mechanics of our crossing, but I could still let the moment pass if I wished, forgetting about the plans which had occupied my mind so thoroughly for half my life. My preparations had been meticulous, and had I chosen to abandon them, my plans would never have come to light. For a moment I allowed myself the bittersweet pleasure of balancing vastly opposed futures: one in which I was triumphant; one in which I submitted meekly to the greater good of the Flotilla, even if that meant hardship for my own people. And for the tiniest of moments I hesitated.

‘On my mark,’ said Old Man Armesto of the Brazilia.

‘Deceleration burn ignition in, twenty seconds.’

‘Agreed,’ I said, from the vantage point of my command seat, poised high in the bridge. Two other voices echoed me with tiny timelags; the Captains of the Baghdad and the Palestine.

Journey’s End lay close ahead, its star the brighter of the 61 Cygni pair, a bloodshot lantern in the night. Against all the odds, against all the predictions, the Flotilla had crossed interstellar space successfully. The fact that one ship had been destroyed did not taint that victory in the slightest degree. The planners who had launched the fleet had always known that there would be losses. And those losses, of course, had not been confined solely to that ship. Many of the momio sleepers would never see their destination. But that, too, had not been unexpected.