‘The probes just blew up, Sky - like they’d hit something.’
‘Nuclear?’
‘No. They weren’t carrying harbourmakers.’
‘Good. Stay where you are.’
‘Sky - what the hell is going on inside there?’
‘You don’t want to know, Gomez - you really don’t want to know.’
He had to strain to pick out the next question. ‘Did you find - what was his name? Lago?’
‘Oh yes, we found Lago. Didn’t we, Lago?’
Now Norquinco was speaking. ‘Sky. Listen. We should go now. We don’t have to kill the other people. We don’t want to start a war between the ships.’ He raised his voice, his helmet speaker booming out across the red lake. ‘You can protect us in other ways, can’t you? You could move us; move this whole ship - this whole void warren, to safety? Out of the range of the shuttles?’
‘No,’ Sky said. ‘I want those shuttles destroyed. If they want a war between the ships, they’ll get one. We’ll see how long they last.’
‘For God’s sake, Sky.’ Norquinco reached out to him, as if to grasp him. Sky stepped away and lost his footing on the chamber’s hard and slick surface. Suddenly he was toppling over; falling backwards into the red brine. He landed on his backpack, half submerged in the shallows. The red liquid sloshed across his faceplate with strange eagerness, as if seeking a way into his suit. Out of the corner of his eye he saw two helper grubs undulating towards him. Sky thrashed, but he could not get a grip on any surface to lift himself out, let alone stand up.
‘Norquinco. Get me out.’
Norquinco moved cautiously to the edge of the red lake. ‘Maybe I should leave you there, Sky. Maybe that would be the best thing for all of us.’
‘Get me out, you bastard.’
‘I didn’t come here to do any evil, Sky. I came here to help the Santiago - and maybe the rest of the Flotilla.’
‘I have the harbourmaker.’
‘But I don’t think you have the courage to let it off.’
The grubs had reached him now - two and then a third he had not seen approaching. They were poking and prodding him with differently shaped clusters of appendages, exploring his suit. He thrashed, but the red fluid seemed to be thickening, conspiring to hold him prisoner.
‘Get me out, Norquinco. That’s your last warning . . .’
Norquinco still stood over him, but he had not come any closer to the edge. ‘You’re sick, Sky. I’ve always suspected it, but I never saw it until now. I really don’t know what you’re capable of.’
Then something he had not been expecting happened. He had stopped thrashing because it was almost too much effort, and now he was being lifted out of the red fluid, the fluid itself seeming to elevate him, while the grubs pushed him gently. Shivering with fear, he found himself on the shore. The last traces of the red fluid raced off him.
For a moment, wordlessly, he stared at Travelling Fearlessly, knowing that the grub sensed his attention.
‘You believe me, don’t you. You won’t kill me. You know what it would mean.’
‘I don’t want to kill you,’ Travelling Fearlessly said. ‘Because then I’d be lonely again, like I was before you came.’
He understood, and the understanding itself was vile. It still cherished his company even after he had inflicted pain on it; even after he had murdered part of it. The thing was so desperately lonely that it even desired the presence of its torturer. He thought of a small child screaming in absolute darkness, betrayed by a friend that had never properly existed, and - while at the same time hating it absolutely for its weakness - did at least understand.
And that made his hatred all the more intense.
He had to kill another grub before he persuaded Travelling Fearlessly to destroy the two approaching shuttles, and this time it was not just the murder of the grub that agonised the creature. Generating the skein seemed to pain it as well, as if the grub could sense the ship’s damage.
But by then it was over. He could have stayed; could have kept torturing the grub until it told him all it knew. He could have forced the grub to show him how the ship moved, and found out whether it was capable of taking them to Journey’s End quicker than the Santiago. He could even have considered bringing some of the Santiago’s crew here, aboard the void warren - living in its endless tunnels, forcing the grubs to adjust the air mix and temperature until it suited human tastes. How many could the alien ship have supported - dozens, or hundreds? Perhaps even the momios, if they were woken? Maybe some of them would have had to be fed to the helper grubs to keep them happy, but he could have lived with that.
But he decided, instead, to destroy the ship.
It was simpler by far; it freed him from negotiating with the grub; freed him from the sense of revulsion he felt when he recognised its loneliness. It also freed him from running the risk of the void warren ever falling into the hands of the other Flotilla vessels.
‘Let us leave,’ he told Travelling Fearlessly. ‘Clear a route right to the surface, near where we came in.’
He heard sonorous clangs as passageways were rerouted; airlocks opening and shutting. A breeze caressed the red water.
‘You can leave now,’ the grub told him. ‘I’m sorry that we had a disagreement. Will you come back soon?’
‘Count on it,’ Sky said.
Later, they pulled away in the shuttle. Gomez still had no idea what had happened; no idea why the approaching forces had simply blown up.
‘What did you find in there?’ he asked. ‘Did anything that Oliveira said make sense, or was he just insane?’
‘I think he was insane,’ Sky said. Norquinco made no comment; they had barely spoken at all since the incident by the lake. Perhaps Norquinco thought it would slip from his memory if it was not remarked upon - an understandable lapse of nerve in a tense situation. But Sky kept replaying the fall in his mind; remembering the red tide fingering his faceplate; wondering how many molecules of it had actually slipped through.
‘What about the medical supplies - did you find anything? And did you get any idea what happened to her hull?’
‘We found out a few things,’ Sky said. ‘Just get us away from here, will you? Max thrust.’
‘But what about the propulsion section? I need to look at the containment; need to see if we can get that antimatter . . .’
‘Just do it, Gomez.’ He offered a comforting lie. ‘We’ll come back for the antimatter another time. She isn’t going anywhere.’
The void warren pulled away from them. Gomez looped them around to her intact side, then kicked in the shuttle’s thrusters. Once they had moved two or three hundred metres from her, it was impossible to tell that she was anything other than what she seemed to be. For a fleeting instant Sky thought of her again as the Caleuche: the ghost ship. They had been so wrong; so utterly wrong. But no one could blame them for that - the truth, after all, had been far stranger.
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 i
tself 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.
The Revelation Space Collection Page 133