Tanner’s perspective.
The creature stirred in the alcove, uncoiling itself with languid patience, as if — in some simple loop of its tiny brain — it understood that its prey was not going anywhere in a hurry.
The juvenile was not a large hamadryad; it must have been birthed from its tree-mother in the last five years, judging by the roseate hue of its photovoltaic hood, furled around its head like the wings of a resting bat. They lost that colour as they neared maturity, since it was only fully grown hamadryads which were long enough to reach the tree-tops and unfurl their hoods. If the creature was allowed to grow, in a year or two the roseate shade would darken to a spangled black: a dark quilt studded with the iridophore-like photovoltaic cells.
The coiled thing lowered itself to the floor, like a bundle of stiff rope tossed from a ship to the quayside. For a moment it rested, its photovoltaic hood opening and closing softly and slowly, like the gills of a fish. It was very large indeed, now that he could see it more closely.
He had seen hamadryads dozens of times in the wild, but never closely, and never in their entirety; only a glimpse between trees from a safe distance. Even though he had never been near one without possessing a weapon which could easily kill it, there had never been an encounter which was not without a little fear. He understood. It was natural, really: the human fear of snakes, a phobia written into the genes by millions of years of prudent evolution. The hamadryad was not a snake, and its ancestors did not remotely resemble anything which had ever lived on Earth. But it looked like a snake; it moved like a snake. That was all that mattered.
He screamed.
FORTY
‘You may have let me down in the end,’ I said, mouthing a silent message to Norquinco, who was far beyond any means of hearing me, ‘but I can’t deny that you did an exemplary job.’
Clown smiled at that.
‘Armesto, Omdurman? I hope you’re watching this. I hope you can see what I am about to do. I want it to be clear. Crystal clear. Do you understand?’
Armesto’s voice came though after the timelag, as if halfway to the nearest quasar. It was faint because the other ships had sloughed all non-essential communications arrays: hundreds of tonnes of redundant hardware.
‘You’ve burned all your bridges, son. There’s nothing left for you to do now, Sky. Not unless you manage to persuade any more of your viables to cross the River Styx.’
I smiled at the classical reference. ‘You still don’t seriously think I murdered some of those dead, do you?’
‘No more than I think you murdered Balcazar.’ Armesto was silent for a few moments; silence broken only by static; cracks and pops of interstellar noise. ‘Make of it what you want, Haussmann…’
My bridge officers looked awkwardly at him when Armesto mentioned the old man, but none of them were going to do more than that. Most of them must have already had their suspicions. They were all loyal to me now; I had bought their loyalty, promoting non-achievers to positions of prominence in the crew hierarchy, just as dear Norquinco had tried to blackmail me into doing. They were weak, for the most part, but that did not concern me. With the layers of automation Norquinco had bypassed, I could practically run the Santiago myself.
Perhaps it would come to that soon.
‘You’ve forgotten something,’ I said, enjoying the moment.
Armesto must have been confident that nothing had been forgotten, beginning to think that the chase was winnable.
How wrong he was.
‘I don’t think I have.’
‘He’s right,’ came the voice of Omdurman on the Baghdad, similarly faint. ‘You’ve used up all your options, Haussmann. You don’t have another edge.’
‘Except this one,’ I said.
I tapped commands into my seat command console. Felt, subliminally, the hidden layers of ship subsystems bend to my will. On the main screen, looking along the spine, was a view very similar to the one I had seen when I had detached the sixteen rings of the dead.
But it was different now.
Rings were leaving all along the spine, around all six faces. There was still a harmony to it — I was too much of a perfectionist for anything else — but it was no longer an ordered line of rings. Now, every other ring amongst the eighty remaining was detaching. Forty rings broke away from the spine of the Santiago…
‘Dear God,’ said Armesto, when he must have seen what was happening. ‘Dear God, Haussmann… No! You can’t do that!’
‘Too late,’ I said. ‘I’m already doing it.’
‘Those are living people!’
I smiled. ‘Not any more.’
And then I turned my attention back to the view, before the glory of what I had done had passed. Truly, it was beautiful to watch. Cruel, too — I admitted that. But what was beauty without a little cruelty at its heart?
Now I knew I’d win.
We took the Zephyr to the behemoth terminal, the train hauled by the same huge, dragonlike locomotive that had brought Quirrenbach and me into the city only a few days earlier.
Using what little reserves of currency I had left, I bought a fake identity from one of the marketeers, a name and a cursory credit-history just about robust enough to get me off the planet and — if I was lucky — into Refuge. I had come in as Tanner Mirabel, but I did not dare try and use that name again. Normally it would have been a matter of reflex for me to pull a false name out of the air and slip into that disguise, but now something made me hesitate when selecting my new identity.
In the end, when the marketeer was about to lose his patience, I said, ‘Make me Schuyler Haussmann.’
The name meant almost nothing to him, not even the surname worthy of comment. I said the name to myself a few times, becoming sufficiently familiar with it that I would act with the right start of recognition if my name came over a public address system, or if someone whispered it across a crowded room. Afterwards, we booked ourselves onto the next available behemoth making the haul up from Yellowstone.
‘I’m coming, of course,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘If you’re serious about protecting Reivich, I’m the only way you’re going to get anywhere near him.’
‘What if I’m not serious?’
‘You mean what if you might still be planning to kill him?’
I nodded. ‘You’ve got to admit, it’s still a possibility.’
Quirrenbach shrugged. ‘Then I’ll simply do what I was always meant to do. Take you out at the earliest opportunity. Of course, my reading of the situation is that it won’t come to that — but don’t imagine for a moment that I wouldn’t do it.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’
Zebra said, ‘You need me, of course. I’m also a line to Reivich, even if I was never as close to him as Quirrenbach.’
‘It might be dangerous, Zebra.’
‘What, and visiting Gideon wasn’t?’
‘Fair point. And I’ll admit I’m grateful for any help I can get.’
‘Then you’ll want me as well,’ Chanterelle said. ‘After all, I’m the only one of us here who really knows how to hunt someone down.’
‘Your gaming skills aren’t in question,’ I said. ‘But it won’t be like a hunt. If I know Tanner — and I’m afraid I may know him as well as he knows himself — he won’t be following any rulebook.’
‘Then we’ll just have to play dirty before he does, won’t we.’
For the first time in ages I laughed a laugh that wasn’t totally insincere.
‘I’m sure we can rise to the occasion.’
Quirrenbach, Zebra, Chanterelle and I lifted an hour later; the behemoth making one arcing swoop over Chasm City before lofting itself into the lowering clouds, twisted like phantasms by the collision between Yellowstone’s relentless winds and the belching updraft of the chasm itself. I looked down and the city looked tiny and toylike, the Mulch and the Canopy hardly separated at all, compressed into one tangled and intricate urban layer.
‘Are you all right?’ Zebra said t
o me, returning to our table with drinks.
I turned away from the window. ‘Why?’
‘Because you almost look like you miss the place.’
When the journey was almost over; when the success of what I had planned was becoming apparent — when, openly, they were beginning to talk of me as a hero — I visited my two prisoners.
In all the years, no one had ever located the chamber deep inside Santiago, though some — Constanza in particular — had come close to guessing that it must exist. But the chamber drew only parsimoniously from the ship’s power and life-support systems grid, and even Constanza’s undoubted skill and persistence had not been sufficient to bring its location to light. Which was good, for although the situation was less critical now, there had been long years in which the chamber’s discovery would have ruined me. Now, however, my situation was secure; I had enough allies to weather minor scandals, and I had dealt effectively with most of those who stood against me.
Technically, of course, there were three prisoners, although Sleek did not really fit into the latter category. His presence had merely been useful to me, and — irrespective of how he viewed it — I did not view his incarceration as a genuine punishment. As ever upon my arrival he flexed within his tank, but lately he only moved sluggishly, his small dark eye only dimly registering my presence. I wondered how much of his earlier life he remembered, confined in a tank that was oceanically vast compared to the one where he had been for the last fifty years.
‘We’re nearly there, aren’t we?’
I turned around, surprised after all this time to hear the croak of Constanza’s voice.
‘Very nearly,’ I answered. ‘I’ve just seen Journey’s End with my own eyes, you know — as a fully formed world, not just a bright star. It’s really quite wonderful to see it, Constanza.’
‘How long has it been?’ She tried to look at me, straining against her constraints. She was tied to a stretcher which had been cranked to an angle of forty-five degrees.
‘Since I brought you here? I don’t know — four, five months?’ I shrugged, as if the matter had barely occupied my thoughts. ‘It doesn’t really matter, does it?’
‘What did you tell the rest of the crew, Sky?’
I smiled. ‘I didn’t need to tell them anything. I made it look as if you’d committed suicide by jumping out of one of the airlocks. No need to provide a body that way. I just let the others draw their own conclusions.’
‘They’ll figure out what happened one day.’
‘Oh, I doubt it. I’ve given them a world, Constanza. They want to canonise me, not crucify me. I don’t see that changing for a very long time.’
She had always been problematic, of course. I had discredited her after the Caleuche incident, bringing to light a trail of faked evidence which placed her in the same conspiratorial frame as Captain Ramirez. That was the end of her career in security. She had been lucky to avoid execution or imprisonment, especially in the desperate days that had followed the detachment of the sleeper modules. But Constanza had never ceased to give me cause for concern, even when she had been demoted to menial work. The crew as a whole were willing to accept that the detachment had been a desperate but necessary act; a conclusion I pushed them towards, via propaganda and lies concerning the other ships’ intentions. I did not even think of it as a crime myself. Constanza thought otherwise, and spent her last years of liberty trying to unravel the labyrinth of misinformation I had recently woven around myself. She was always probing into the Caleuche incident; protesting that Ramirez had been innocent, and she insisted on wild speculation about the manner in which Old Man Balcazar had really died; that his two medics had been wrongfully executed. At times, she even raised doubts about the way Titus Haussmann had died.
Finally, I decided I had to silence her. Faking her suicide required only a little preparation, as did bringing her to the torture chamber unseen by anyone else. She had spent most of that time drugged and restrained, of course, but I had allowed her little windows of lucidity now and again.
It was good to have someone to talk to.
‘Why did you keep him alive for so long?’ Constanza said.
I looked at her, marvelling at how aged she had become. I remembered when we had both stood against the glass of the large dolphin tank; near-equals.
‘The Chimeric? I knew he’d come in useful, that’s all.’
‘To torture?’
‘No. Oh, I saw that he was punished for what he’d done, but that was only the start of it. Here. Why don’t you take a better look at him, Constanza?’ I adjusted the angle of her stretcher, until she faced the infiltrator. He was completely mine now, and did not require restraining at all. Nonetheless — for my peace of mind — I kept him chained to the wall.
‘He looks like you,’ Constanza said wonderingly.
‘He has twenty additional facial muscles,’ I said, with paternal pride. ‘They can pull the flesh of his skin into any configuration he wants, and hold it there. And he hasn’t aged much since I brought him here. I think he can still pass for me.’ I rubbed my face, feeling the rough texture of the cosmetics I wore to offset my unnatural youthfulness. ‘And he’ll do anything — anything — that I ask of him. Won’t you, Sky?’
‘Yes,’ the Chimeric answered.
‘What are you planning? To use him as a decoy?’
‘If it comes to that,’ I said. ‘Which, frankly, I doubt.’
‘But he only has one arm. They’ll never mistake him for you.’
I wheeled Constanza back into the position she had been in upon my arrival. ‘That’s not an insurmountable problem, believe me.’ I paused and produced a huge, long-needled syringe from the kit of medical instruments I kept next to the God-Box, the device I had used to smash and remake the infiltrator’s mind.
Constanza saw the syringe. ‘That’s for me, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ I said, moving over to the dolphin tank. ‘It’s for Sleek. Dear old Sleek, who has served me so loyally over the years.’
‘You’re going to kill him?’
‘Oh, I’m sure he’d regard it as a mercy by now.’ I unlatched the top of his tank, wrinkling my nose at the appalling smell of the brackish water in which he lay. Sleek flexed again, and I put a calming hand across his dorsal region. His skin, once as smooth and glossy as polished stone, was now like concrete.
I injected him, pushing the needle through an inch of fat. He moved again, almost thrashing, and then became stiller. I looked at his eye, but it looked as expressionless as ever.
‘He’s dead, I think.’
‘I thought you’d come to kill me,’ Constanza said, unable to keep the nervous relief from her voice.
I smiled. ‘With a syringe like that? You must be joking. No; this one’s for you.’
I picked up another one; smaller this time.
Journey’s End, I thought, gripping the support strut in the Santiago’s free-fall observation blister. It was an apt name. The world hung below me now, like a green paper lantern lit by a dimming candle. Swan, 61 Cygni-A, was not a bright sun, and even though the world was in a tight orbit around the dwarf, daylight here was not the same thing that Clown had shown me in pictures of Earth. It was a sullen, paltry kind of illumination. The star’s spectrum was acutely red, even though it still looked white to the naked eye. But none of this was surprising. Even before the Flotilla had left home, a century and a half earlier, they had known how much energy the world would receive in its orbit.
Deep in Santiago’s cargo hold, too light to have ever been worth sacrificing, was a thing of diaphanous beauty. Teams were preparing it even now. They had extracted it from the starship, anchored it to an orbital transfer tug and towed it beyond the planet’s gravitational field, out to the Lagrange point between Journey’s End and Swan. There, stationed by minute adjustments of ion-thust, the thing would float for centuries. That at least was the plan.
I looked away from the limb of the planet, towards interstellar space.
The other two ships, the Brazilia and the Baghdad, were still out there. Current estimates placed their arrival three months in the future, but there was an inevitable margin of error.
No matter.
The first wave of shuttle flights had already made several return trips to and from the surface, and many transponder-equipped cargo packages had already been dropped, ready to be found in a few months’ time. A shuttle was descending now, its deltoid shape dark against a tongue of equatorial landmass which the geography section was calling the Peninsula. Doubtless, I thought, they would come up with something less literal given a few more weeks. Five more flights would be all it took to get all the remaining colonists down to the surface. Another five would suffice to transport all the crew and the heavy equipment which could not be dropped via cargo packages. The Santiago would remain in orbit, a skeletal hulk denuded of anything remotely useful.
The shuttle’s thrusters fired briefly, kicking it onto an atmospheric insertion course. I watched it dwindle until it was out of sight. A few minutes later, near the horizon, I thought I saw the glint of re-entry fire as it touched air. It would not be long before it was on the ground. A preliminary landing camp had already been established, near the southern tip of the Peninsula. Nueva Santiago, we were thinking of calling it — but again, it was early days.
And now Swan’s Pupil was opening.
It was too far away to see, of course, but the angstrom-thin plastic structure was being unfurled at the Lagrange point.
The placement was almost perfect.
A torch beam seemed to fall on the sombre world below, casting an ellipsoidal region of brightness. The beam moved, hunting — reshaping. When they had adjusted it properly, it would double the solar illumination falling on the Peninsula region.
There was life down there, I knew. I wondered how it would adjust to the change in ambient light, and found it hard to stir up much enthusiasm.
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