‘Just get in the machine, will you?’
I turned to Zebra and Chanterelle. ‘Take care. I don’t think you’ll be in any danger here, but keep an eye out in any case. I expect to be back within a few hours. Can you wait that long?’
Zebra nodded. ‘I could, but I’m not planning to. There’s enough room in that thing for three of us, if Chanterelle can hold the fort back here.’
Chanterelle shrugged. ‘Can’t say I’m exactly looking forward to spending a few hours up here on my own, but I think I’d rather be here than down there. I guess this is one you owe to your sister?’
Zebra nodded. ‘She’d have done the same for me, I think.’
‘Way to go. I just hope the trip’s worth it.’
I spoke to Chanterelle now. ‘Don’t put yourself in any more danger than necessary. We can find our own way out of here if we have to, so if anything happens . . . you know where the car’s parked.’
‘Don’t worry about me, Tanner. Just take care of yourself.’
‘It’s a habit of mine.’ I slapped Quirrenbach on the shoulder, with all the hearty bonhomie I’d have liked to have felt. ‘Well, are you ready? You never know. You might be inspired on the way down; something even more depressing than normal.’
He looked at me grimly. ‘Let’s get this over with, Tanner.’
Despite what Zebra had said, there was barely room for two people in the inspection robot, and it was a painful squeeze to accommodate a third. But Zebra’s articulation was not fully human, and she had an uncanny ability to fold herself into what space remained, even if the process caused her some discomfort.
‘I hope to God this isn’t going to take too long,’ she said.
‘Start her up,’ I told Quirrenbach.
‘Tanner, there’s still . . .’
‘Just start the fucking thing up,’ Zebra said. ‘Or the only composing you’ll be doing is decomposing.’
That did the trick; Quirrenbach pressed a button and the machine rumbled into life. It clunked its way along the pipe, moving like a slow mechanical centipede. The machine’s front and back moved jerkily, the suction grips hammering the wall, but the part where we were seated travelled relatively smoothly. Though there was no steam in the tunnel now, the metal sides were hot to the touch and the air was like a steady belch from the depths of hell. It was cramped and dark except for the weak illumination from the basic controls placed in front of our seats. The pipeline walls were smooth as glacial ice, polished that way by the monstrous pressures of the steam. Though the pipe had started out horizontally, it soon began to curve, gently at first, and then to something that was not far off vertical. My seat was now a deeply uncomfortable harness from which I was hanging, constantly aware of the kilometres of pipe that fell away below me and the fact that all that was stopping me dropping into those depths was the suction pressure of the cups arrayed around the inspection robot.
‘We’re heading for the cracking station, aren’t we?’ Zebra said, raising her voice above the machine’s hammering progress. ‘That’s where they make it, isn’t it?’
‘Makes a kind of sense,’ I said, thinking about the station. That was where all the pipes came from: the city’s great taproots. The station nestled deep in the chasm, lost under the perpetual mist layer. It was where titanic conversion machines sucked in the hot, raw gaseous poison rising from the chasm’s depths. ‘It’s out of the way of any jurisdiction, and the people who crew it must have the kinds of advanced chemical tools they’d need to synthesise something like Dream Fuel.’
‘You think everyone who works down there is in on the secret?’
‘No; probably just a small clique of workers producing the drug, unknown to anyone else in the station. Isn’t that the case, Quirrenbach?’
‘I told you,’ he said, adjusting a control so that our rate of progress increased, the hammering becoming a harsh tattoo. ‘I was never allowed close to the source.’
‘So how much do you know, exactly? You must know something about the synthesis process.’
‘Why would it interest you if I did?’
‘Because it doesn’t make much sense to me,’ I said. ‘The plague made a lot of things stop working. Implants - complicated ones, anyway. Sub-cellular nano robots; medichines - whatever you want to call them. That was bad news for the postmortals, wasn’t it? Their therapies usually needed some intervention by those little machines. Now they had to make do without.’
‘And?’
‘Suddenly something else shows up which almost does the job just as well. Better, in some ways. Dream Fuel’s childishly easy to administer - it doesn’t even need to be tailored to the person it’s being used on. It heals injuries and it restores memories.’ I thought back to the man I’d seen thrashing on the ground, desperate for a tiny drop of the scarlet stuff even though the plague had already subsumed half his body. ‘It even confers protection from the plague for people who haven’t discarded their machines. It’s almost too good to be true, Quirrenbach.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Meaning I’m wondering how something that useful ended up being invented by criminals. It would be hard enough to imagine it being created before the plague, even when the city still had the means to create wonderful new technologies. Now? There are parts of the Mulch where they haven’t even got steam power. And while there might be a few high-tech enclaves in the Canopy, they’re more interested in playing games than developing miracle cures. But that seems to be exactly what they’ve ended up with - even if the supply is currently a little tight.’
‘It didn’t exist before the plague,’ Zebra said.
‘Too much of a coincidence,’ I said. ‘Which makes me wonder if they might both have the same origin.’
‘Don’t flatter yourself that you’re the first to have had that thought.’
‘No, I wouldn’t dream of it.’ I scraped sweat from my brow, already feeling like I’d been in a sauna for an hour. ‘But you have to admit the point is valid.’
‘I wouldn’t know. I don’t profess any great interest in the matter.’
‘Not even when the fate of the city might depend on it?’
‘Except it wouldn’t, would it? A few thousand postmortals, ten at the most. Dream Fuel may be a precious substance to those who’ve acquired a dependence on it, but for the majority it’s of no consequence whatsoever. Let them die; see if I care. In a few centuries everything that’s happened here will be little more than a historical footnote. I, meanwhile, have considerably larger and more ambitious fish to fry.’ Quirrenbach adjusted some more controls, tapping a gauge here and there. ‘But then I’m an artist. All this is mere diversion. You, on the other hand . . . I confess I really don’t understand you, Tanner. Yes, you may now have some obligation to Taryn, but your interest in Dream Fuel was apparent from the moment we searched Vadim’s cabin. By your own admission you came here to murder Argent Reivich, not to sort out a minor supply shortage in our sordid little drugs industry.’
‘Things became a little more complicated, that’s all.’
‘And?’
‘There’s something about Dream Fuel, Quirrenbach. Something that makes me think I’ve seen it before.’
But there was a way in. Sky, Norquinco and Gomez located it by undocking and scouting around the ship for another thirty minutes, until they found the hole that Oliveira and Lago must have used to get inside. It was only a few tens of metres from where Oliveira’s shuttle was parked; near the point where the spine connected to the rest of the ship. It was so small that Sky had missed it completely on the first pass, lost as it was amongst the blisterlike protuberances on the ship’s ruined side.
‘I think we should go back,’ Gomez said.
‘We’re going in.’
‘Didn’t you listen to a word of what Oliveira said to us? And doesn’t it worry you in the slightest that this ship appears to be made of something strange? That it looks like a crude attempt at copying one of our ships?’
‘It worries me, yes. It also makes me even more determined to get inside.’
‘Lago went inside as well.’
‘Well, I guess we’ll just have to keep a look-out for him, won’t we?’ Sky was ready now. He had not bothered removing his helmet since the last time he had gone through the airlock.
‘I also want to see what’s inside,’ Norquinco said.
‘One of us at least should stay aboard the shuttle,’ Gomez said. ‘If the ship that swept us with the radar gets here in the next few hours, it would be good to have someone ready to do something about it.’
‘Fine,’ said Sky. ‘You just volunteered for the job.’
‘I didn’t mean . . .’
‘I don’t care what you meant. Just accept it. If Norquinco and I run into anything that needs your input, you’ll be the first to know.’
They left the shuttle, using thruster harnesses to cross the short distance to the Caleuche’s hull. When they landed near the hole it was like touching down on a softly yielding mattress. They stood up, gripped to the ship by the adhesive soles of their shoes.
There was an obvious and vital question that Sky had almost managed not to ask himself, but now it must be dealt with. There was no way in his experience that the hull of a ship could be transmuted to this sponge-like state. Metal simply did not do that by itself - even if it had been exposed to the glare of an antimatter explosion. No; whatever had happened here was far beyond his experience. It was as if the ghost ship’s hull had been replaced, atom by atom, by some new and disturbingly pliant substance which replicated the old details in only the broadest terms. There was shape and texture and colour, but no function, like a crude cast of the original ship. Was he even standing on the Caleuche, or was that just another flawed assumption?
Sky and Norquinco walked to the lip of the hole, poking the muzzles of their guns into the gloom. The lip was ragged and scorched with heat marks and had the puckered, wrinkled look of a half-closed mouth. A metre or two below the surface, however, the wall of the hole was lined with a thick, fibrous mass which glistened gently as their torchlight skittered across it. Sky thought he recognised that mass; it was a matrix of extruded diamond fibres embedded in epoxy, a quick-drying paste that could be used to repair hull punctures. Oliveira had probably located a weak spot on the Caleuche - he must have taken the time to make a density map before selecting this point - and had then used something to cut through, a laser torch or even the exhaust of his shuttle. Once he had bored the shaft, he had lined it with the spray-on sealant from his shuttle’s emergency kit, presumably to prevent it collapsing shut.
‘We’ll go in this way,’ Sky said. ‘Oliveira must have found the most promising entry point; there’s no sense in duplicating his effort when we’ve so little time to spare.’
They checked that the inertial compasses built into their suits were functioning accurately, defining their current position as a zero point. The Caleuche was neither spinning nor tumbling, so the compasses would prevent them getting lost once they were inside, but even if the compasses proved unreliable, they would be able to retrace their way to the wound in the hull, deploying a line as they went.
Sky halted in his thoughts, wondering why he had just thought of the hole in the hull as a wound?
They went in, Sky first. The hole led into a rough-walled tunnel which cut straight into the hull, threading down for ten or twelve metres. Normally by this point - had the ship been the Santiago - they would have passed right through the hull’s outer integument and would be passing through a series of narrow service cavities, squeezing between the multitude of data-lines, power cables and refrigerant pipes; perhaps even one of the train tunnels. There were, Sky knew, points where the hull was more or less solid for several metres, but he was reasonably sure this was not one of them.
Now the sides of the shaft, or tunnel, or however he preferred to think of it, had become harder and more glossy - less like elephant hide and more like insect chitin. He shone his torch light ahead into the gloom, the beam sliding off the shining black surface. Then - just when it looked like it would end abruptly - the shaft jogged violently to the right. Fully suited, with the additional bulk of the thruster harness, it was an effort to squeeze round the bend - but at least the smooth-sided shaft would not snag his suit or rip away any vital component. He looked back and saw Norquinco following him, the other man’s slightly larger bulk making the exercise even less easy.
But now the shaft widened out, and after it intersected with another the going became even easier. Periodically Sky stopped and asked Norquinco to ensure that the line was spooling out properly and that the line was still taut, but the inertial compasses were still functioning properly, recording their movements relative to the entry point.
He tried the radio. ‘Gomez? Can you read me?’
‘Loud and clear. What have you found?’
‘Nothing. Yet. But I think we can say with some confidence that this isn’t the Caleuche. Norquinco and I must be twenty metres into the hull, and we’re still moving through what feels like solid material.’
Gomez waited for a few moments before answering. ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’
‘No, not if we keep on assuming this is a ship like our own. I don’t think it is. I think it’s something else - something we definitely weren’t expecting.’
‘Do you think it came from home - that it’s something they sent out after we left?’
‘No. They’ve only had a century, Gomez. I don’t think that’s enough time to come up with something like this.’ They slithered deeper. ‘It doesn’t feel like anything human. It doesn’t even feel like we’re inside a machine.’
‘But whatever it is, it just happens to look exactly like one of our own ships from the outside.’
‘Yes - until you get close. My guess is it altered its shape to mimic us; some kind of protective camouflage. Which worked, didn’t it? Titus . . . my father . . . he always thought there was another Flotilla ship trailing us. That was disturbing, but it could be explained by some event which had happened in the past. If he’d known there was an alien ship following us, it would have changed everything.’
‘What could he have done about it?’
‘I don’t know. Alert the other ships, perhaps. He would have assumed it meant us harm.’
‘Maybe he was right.’
‘I don’t know. It’s been out here an awfully long time. It hasn’t done much in all those years.’
Something happened then - a noise that they felt, rather than heard, like the sonorous clang of a very large bell. They were floating through vacuum so the reverberation must have been transmitted through the hull.
‘Gomez - what the hell was that?’
His voice came through weakly. ‘I don’t know - nothing happened here. But you’re suddenly a lot fainter.’
After we had been descending for nearly two hours, I saw something below, far down the vertical pipeline.
It was a faint golden glow, but it was coming closer.
I thought about the episode I had just had. I could still taste Sky’s fear as he entered the Caleuche; hard and metallic like the taste of a bullet. It seemed very much like the fear I was feeling myself. We were both descending into darkness; both of us seeking answers - or rewards - but also knowing that we were placing ourselves in great danger, with very little idea of what lay ahead. The way the episode resonated with my present experience was chilling. Sky had gone beyond simply infecting my mind with images. Now he seemed to be steering me, shaping my actions to commemorate his own ancient deeds; like a puppeteer whose strings stretched across three centuries of history. I clenched my fist, expecting that the episode would have caused blood to gush from my hand.
But my palm was perfectly dry.
The inspection robot continued its clunking descent. Nothing that Quirrenbach had done lately had made the machine move any faster. It was unbearably hot now and I reckoned none of us would have survived more than three or four hou
rs before dying of heat exhaustion.
But it was getting lighter.
I soon saw why. Below us, but coming closer now, was a section of pipeline walled in filthy glass. Quirrenbach made the machine rotate so that none of us were easily visible by the time the robot began to descend through the transparent section. I still had a good view of the dark chamber we were moving through, a cavernous room infested with looming curved machinery: huge stovelike pressure vessels connected by networks of shiny intestinal tubing and festooned with slender catwalks. Rows of mighty turbines stretched away across the floor like sleeping dinosaurs.
We had reached the cracking station.
I looked around, wondering at the silent vastness.
‘There doesn’t seem to be anyone on duty,’ Zebra said.
‘Is this normal?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘This part of the operation more or less runs itself. But I’d hated to have picked the one day when there was someone on duty who noticed the three of us coming down.’
Many dozens of pipes, much like the one I was descending, reached to the ceiling, a wide circular sheet of glass spoked by dark metal supports, and then rammed through it. Beyond it was only a stained soot-grey fog, for the cracking station lay deep in the chasm and was usually covered by the mist. Only when the fog parted momentarily, cleaved open by the chaotic thermals which spiralled up the chasm’s side, could I see the immense sheer walls of planetary rock rising above. Far, far above was the antenna-like extension of the stalk, where Sybilline had taken me to watch the mist jumpers. That had been only a couple of days ago, but it felt like an eternity.
We were far beneath the city now.
The inspection robot continued its descent. I had expected that we would stop somewhere near the floor of the cracking chamber, but Quirrenbach carried us slowly below the turbine floor, into darkness again. Perhaps there was another chamber to the cracking station, below the one we had passed through. I managed to cling to this idea for a while . . . until I knew that we had descended much too far for that to be the case.
The Revelation Space Collection Page 128