I worked my way towards the skin of the ship. I was sweating and short of breath by the time I reached the berth where I judged the best candidate to lie. This was one of the frozen living, I saw, and that suited my plans excellently. With Norquinco still unconscious, I accessed the casket controls and set about warming the passenger. Normally the process would have taken several hours, but I had no interest in limiting cellular damage. No one would autopsy the corpse when it was found under the train, and there would be no reason to think that I had swapped the body.
My personal comm bracelet chimed. ‘Yes?’
‘Captain Haussmann? Sir, we have a report of a possible technical malfunction with a train in spine corridor three, near node six. Should we send a breakdown team along to check it out?’
‘No, no need for that,’ I said, with what I hoped was not undue haste. ‘I’ll check it out myself. I’m near enough.’
‘You sure about that, sir?’
‘Yes, yes . . . no sense in wasting effort is there?’
When the passenger was warm - but now brain dead - I lifted him from the casket. Yes; he was passably close in build to Norquinco, with the same hair colour and skin tone. To the best of my knowledge, Norquinco had no romantic connections with anyone else on the Santiago - but even if he had, his lover was not going to be able to tell them apart once I was done.
I lifted Norquinco and placed him in the casket. The man was still breathing - once or twice he had even moaned before slipping back into unconsciousness. I stripped him naked and then arranged the web of biomonitors across his body. The inputs adhered automatically to his skin, adjusting themselves minutely. Some would burrow neatly beneath his skin, worming towards internal organs.
A series of lights flicked to green across the fascia of the casket, signifying that the unit had accepted Norquinco. The lid closed.
I studied the main status panel.
Programmed sleep time was another four years. By then the Santiago would have already made orbit around Journey’s End and it would be time for the sleepers to warm and step onto their new Eden.
Four years suited my plans, too.
Satisfied, I readied myself for the difficult task of lugging the other passenger back to the spine corridor. First, however, I had to dress the barely warm corpse in the clothes I had just taken from Norquinco.
When I reached the spine I positioned the man ten metres ahead of the train, which was still straining against its obstruction, filling the air with the smell of burning armatures. Then I found a heavy, long-handled wrench from a recessed stores locker. I used the wrench to pulp the man’s face into unrecognisability, feeling the bones crack like lacquer beneath each blow. Then I went back to the train and delivered a series of swiping strikes to the jammed toolkit, until it sprang free.
The train, no longer obstructed, began to pick up speed immediately. I had to run ahead of it to avoid being pulped against the wall. I stepped gingerly over the dead man and then retired to a safety alcove, watching with detached fascination as the string of freight pods gathered speed. It hit the man and snowploughed him along, mangling him in the process.
Finally, some distance down the corridor, the train came to a standstill.
I crept behind it. I had been through this before, half an hour earlier, and had been mildly surprised when I had found that Norquinco was only knocked out. That had, of course, been a blessing in disguise . . . but now there was to be no disappointment. The train had done its work creditably. Now, rather than the crushed toolkit, what made it stop was some sluggishly responding safety-mode . . . but it had been much too late to save the passenger.
I lifted my sleeve and spoke into my comms bracelet. ‘Sky Haussmann here. I’m afraid there’s been a terrible, terrible accident. ’
That had all been four months ago; a regrettable coda to our relationship, but Norquinco had, ultimately, not let me down. I assumed so, at least - and would know for sure in a few moments.
On the main viewscreen was a view looking down the spine of the Santiago from a vantage point a few metres above the hull. It was an exercise in vanishing points, crisp perspectives that would have thrilled a Renaissance artist. The sixteen sleeper rings containing the dead marched away, diminishing in size, foreshortened towards ellipses.
And now the first and closest of them began to move, kicked loose by a series of pyrotechnic charges studded around the ring. The ring uncoupled from the hull and drifted lazily away from it, tipping slowly to one side as it moved. Umbilicals stretched between ship and ring to breaking point and then snapped cleanly, whiplashing back. Frozen gases trapped in severed pipes erupted in crystal clouds. Somewhere, alarms began to sound. I heard them only dimly, though they seemed to be causing considerable consternation amongst my crew.
Behind the first ring, the second was breaking loose as well. The third trembled and shucked itself loose from its moorings. All along the spine the pattern was repeated. I had arranged it well. I had thought to have all the rings blow their separation charges at once, so that they would drift away in clean, parallel lines, but there was no poetry in that. It pleased me instead to stagger the releases, so that the rings seemed to follow each other, as if obeying some buried migratory instinct.
‘Do you see what I’m doing?’ I asked.
‘I see it well enough,’ the other Captain said. ‘And it sickens me.’
‘They’re dead, you fool! What do they care now, if they’re buried in space or carried with us to Journey’s End?’
‘They’re human beings. They deserve to be treated with dignity, even if they’re dead. You can’t just throw them overboard.’
‘Ah, but I can, and I have. Besides - the sleepers hardly matter. What they mass is inconsequential compared to the mass of the machines that accompany them. We have a real advantage now. That’s why we’ll stay in cruise mode longer than you.’
‘One quarter of your sleepers isn’t much of an edge, Haussmann. ’ The other Captain had obviously been doing his homework. The kind of calculations I had run could not have been far from his own thoughts. ‘What kind of lead does that give you over us when you make orbit around Journey’s End? A few weeks at best?’
‘It’ll be enough,’ I said. ‘Enough to select the plum landing sites and get our people down there and dug in.’
‘If you have anyone left. You killed a lot of those dead, didn’t you? Oh, we know what kind of losses you should have run, Haussmann. Your death-rate should not have been much higher than our own. We had intelligence, remember? But we’ve only lost one hundred and twenty sleepers ourselves. The same goes for the other ships. How did you become so careless, Haussmann? Was it that you wanted them to die?’
‘Don’t be silly. If it suited my purposes to have them die, why wouldn’t I have killed more of them?’
‘And try and settle a planet with a handful of survivors? Don’t you know anything about genetics, Haussmann? Or incest?’
I started to say that I had thought of that as well, but what was the point of letting the bastard know all my plans? If his intelligence was as good as he claimed, let him find these things out for himself.
‘I’ll cross that bridge when I reach it,’ I said.
Zamudio was the one who finally gave the others a temporary edge - even if it probably wasn’t in quite the way he would have planned. But the Palestine’s Captain must have thought he stood a very good chance of damping his antimatter flow, or else he would not have tried stopping his engine.
The explosion had been as hard and radiantly white as I remembered from the day in the nursery when the Islamabad had gone up.
But the next day, something unexpected happened.
In the instants before Zamudio’s ship had blown up, it had still been transmitting technical data to its two allies, both locked in the same deceleration burn that Zamudio had tried unsuccessfully to abort. I could guess that much myself, even though I was not directly privy to that flow of information. That was the other odd thi
ng. The rest of the Flotilla had become grudgingly united against me. I hadn’t really expected that, but in hindsight I should have realised that it would happen. I had given the bastards a common enemy. In a way, it was to my credit. There was only one of me, yet I had raised such fear in the other Captains that they had thought it best to amalgamate against me, despite all that had happened between them.
And now this - Zamudio clawing back from the grave.
‘That technical data was more useful than he realised,’ Armesto said.
‘It didn’t do Zamudio much good,’ I said.
By now there was an appreciable redshift between my ship and the other two Flotilla craft, beginning to fall behind me as they decelerated. But the communications software effortlessly removed all distortion, save for the increasing timelag which accompanied the break-up of the Flotilla.
‘No,’ Armesto said. ‘But in their sacrifice they gave us something tremendously valuable. Shall I explain?’
‘If it pleases you,’ I said, with what I hoped was a convincing show of boredom.
But rather than being bored, I was actually a little scared.
Armesto told me about the technical data, squirted across from the Palestine until the last nanosecond before it detonated. It concerned the attempts that had been made to shut down the flow of antimatter. It had always been known that the procedure was almost bound to be fatal, but until then the precise failure mode had been unclear, glimpsed only fleetingly in computer simulations. There had been speculation that if the failure mode could be understood sufficiently well, it might even be possible to counteract it by subtle manipulation of the fuel-flow. It was nothing that could be tested in advance. Now, however, a kind of test had been made for them. The telemetry from the ship had ended just after the failure mode had begun to arise, but it still probed closer into that instability regime than any carefully harnessed laboratory test or computer simulation.
And it had taught them well.
Enough information could be extracted from those numbers to guess how the failure mode must have evolved. The numbers, fed into the on-board simulations devised by the propulsion teams, hinted at a strategy for containing the imbalance. Tweak the magnetic bottle topology slightly and the injection stream could be neatly curtailed with no risk of normal-matter blowback or antimatter leakage. It was still, of course, hellishly risky.
Which did not stop them trying it.
My ship was falling ahead of the Brazilia and the Baghdad, and those latter two ships had flipped over to bring their engines forward for the deceleration phase. The bright spikes of those antimatter torches pin-pricked the minutely redshifted hemisphere of sky to the rear of the Santiago, like a pair of hot blue sibling suns. The thrust beams of the two deceleration ships were not to be underestimated as potential weapons, but neither Armesto or Omdurman would have the nerve to sweep their torches over my ship. Their argument was with me, not with the many viable colonists I still carried. Equally, I could consider igniting my own engine and dousing one of the two laggard ships with the Santiago’s exhaust - but the other vessel would almost certainly take that as a incitement to kill me, whether or not I still carried passengers. My simulations showed that I would not be able to realign my own flame before the other ship took me out in a single baptism of hellfire.
Not an option, I thought . . . and that meant I would have to live with those two enemies unless I found another way of destroying them. I was still considering the possibities when, in perfect synchrony, the two drive flames to the rear winked out.
I waited, breath held, for the twin blossoms of nuclear light which would signify that the antimatter drives had malfunctioned during shutdown.
But they never came.
Armesto and Omdurman had succeeded in quenching their flames, and now they were coasting with me, albeit with the lower velocities they had gained during the time they were decelerating.
Armesto contacted me. ‘I hope you saw what we just did, Sky. That changes everything, doesn’t it?’
‘Nowhere near as much as you’d like to think.’
‘Oh, don’t play games. You know what it means. Omdurman and I now have the ability to turn on our engines for however short a time we want. You don’t. That makes all the difference.’
I mulled this over. ‘It changes nothing. Our ships still have almost the same relative rest-mass as they did a day ago. You are still obliged to continue decelerating now if you want to make orbit around 61 Cygni-A. My ship’s lighter by the mass of the sleeper rings I ejected. That still gives me the edge over you. I’m staying in cruise mode until the last minute.’
‘You’re forgetting something,’ Armesto said. ‘We have our dead as well.’
‘It’s too late to make a difference. You’re cruising slower than me. And you said it yourself - you never sustained as many casualties as we did.’
‘We’ll find a way to make the difference, Haussmann. You’re not getting ahead of us.’
I looked at the long-range displays, which showed the vastly magnified dots of the other two ships. They were flipping over again, slowly but surely. I watched the dots elongate into thin lines, then contract again.
And then the dots were haloed by twin auras of exhaust radiation.
The two other ships were rejoining the chase.
‘It’s not over,’ Armesto said.
A day later, I watched the dead drift away from the other two ships.
It was twenty-four hours since Armesto and Omdurman had resumed the chase, demonstrating their ability to control their drive flames in a manner that was not yet within my grasp. The death of the Palestine had been a blessing in disguise for them . . . even if the better part of a thousand colonists had been killed in the process.
Now the other two ships were moving at the same relative speed as the Santiago, once again cruising towards Journey’s End. And they were trying very hard to beat me at my own game. There was a kind of inevitability to this, of course. My ship was still less massive than theirs . . . which meant they would have to shed mass if they wanted to follow the same cruise/deceleration curve as I did.
Which meant throwing their own dead into space.
There was nothing elegant about the way they did it. They must have worked overnight to smash through the same countermeasures which it had taken Norquinco nearly his entire life to circumvent . . . but they had the advantage over Norquinco in that they were not trying to complete this work in secret. Aboard the Brazilia and the Baghdad, every hand must have been turned towards that goal, working furiously. I almost envied them. So much easier when there was no need to work covertly . . . but so infinitely less elegant, too.
On the high-magnification image I watched sleeper rings peel off randomly from the two other ships, more like autumn leaves falling from a tree than anything orchestrated. The image resolution was too poor to be sure, but I suspected there were actually space-suited teams crawling around outside those ships with cutting tools and explosives. They were dislodging the sleeper rings by brute force.
‘You still can’t win,’ I told Armesto.
Armesto deigned to reply, though I’d half expected the other ships to maintain radio silence from here on in. ‘We can and we will.’
‘You said it yourself. You don’t have as many dead as us. No matter how many you throw away, it’ll never be sufficient.’
‘We’ll find a way to make it sufficient.’
Later, I guessed at what kind of strategy that might be. No matter what happened next, the ships were no more than two or three months from Journey’s End. With carefully rationed supplies, some colonists could be woken ahead of schedule. The revived momios could be kept alive on board the ship with the crew, albeit in conditions which would border on the dehumanising, but it might be sufficient. Every ten colonists that were woken meant a sleeper ring which could be ejected, and a concomitant reduction in ship’s mass, allowing a sharper deceleration profile.
It would be slow and dangerous - a
nd I expected that they would lose perhaps one in ten that they tried to revive under such sub-optimal conditions - but it might be just enough to offset the mass difference.
Enough to give them, if not an edge over me, than at least parity.
‘I know what you intend,’ I told Armesto.
‘I doubt it very much,’ the old man answered.
But I soon saw that he was right. After the initial flurry of sleeper ring ejections, there followed a pattern: one ejection every ten hours or so. That was exactly what I would have expected, ten hours to thaw every colonist in a ring. There would only be a handful of people on each ship with the expertise to do that, so they would have to work sequentially.
‘It won’t save you,’ I said.
‘I think it will, Sky . . . I think it will.’
Which was when I knew what had to be done.
THIRTY-EIGHT
‘What do you mean, you killed her?’ Zebra asked, the five of us still studying the grotesque tableau of Dominika’s death.
‘That’s not what I said,’ I answered. ‘I said Tanner Mirabel killed her.’
‘And you are?’ Chanterelle said.
‘If I told you, I’m not completely sure you’d believe me. As a matter of fact I’m having a little trouble dealing with it myself.’
Pransky, who had been listening to our exchange, raised his voice and spoke with solemn surety. ‘Dominika’s still warm. And rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet. If your whereabouts can be accounted for over the last few hours - which I suspect is strongly the case - you’re hardly a prime suspect.’
Zebra tugged at my sleeve. ‘What about the two people I said were after you, Tanner? They acted like outsiders, according to Dominika. They might have killed her for snitching about them.’
The Revelation Space Collection Page 135