"Well, get on with it," Sybilline said, standing with her hip to one side with the gun held in one hand like a chic cigarette holder. "It isn't brain surgery, you know."
She laughed.
Waverly spent the next few minutes circumnavigating my chair, emitting odd grunts which might have indicated distaste. Now and then he touched my scalp, examining it with gentle fingers. Then, seemingly satisfied, he retrieved some equipment from somewhere behind me. Whatever it was looked medical.
"What are you going to do?" I asked, trying again to get a response out of them. "You won't get far by torturing me, if that's what you've got in mind."
"You think I'm going to torture you?" Waverly had one of the medical devices in his hand now, an intricate probe-like thing fashioned from chrome and inset with blinking status lights. "It would amuse me, I admit. I'm a colossal sadist. But aside from my own self-gratification, it would serve no purpose. We've trawled your memories, so we know all that you'd tell us under pain."
"You're bluffing."
"No, we're not. Did we have to ask you your name? No, we didn't. But we knew you were called Tanner Mirabel, didn't we?"
"You know I'm telling the truth, in that case. I have nothing to offer you."
He leant closer to me, his lens clicking and whirring as it absorbed visual data across an unguessable spread of the spectrum. "We don't really know what to know, Mister Mirabel. Assuming that's really your name. It's all so very foggy in there, you see. Confused memory traces-whole swathes of your past which we just can't access. You'll understand that this does not put us in the best possible frame of mind to trust you. I mean, you accept that this is a reasonable response, don't you?"
"I've only just been revived."
"Ah, yes-and the Ice Mendicants normally do such a marvellous job, don't they? But in your case not even their artistry could restore the whole."
"Are you working for Reivich?"
"I doubt it. I've never heard of him." He glanced at Sybilline, as if seeking her opinion on the matter. She did her best to mask it, but I saw the way she pulled the facial equivalent of a shrug; a momentary widening of the eyes as if to say that she hadn't heard of Reivich either.
It looked genuine, too.
"All right," Waverly said. "I think I can do this nice and cleanly. It helps that there aren't any other implants in his head to get in the way."
"Just do it," Sybilline said. "We haven't got all damned night."
He held the surgical device against the side of my skull, so that I could feel its cold pressure against my skin. I heard a click as he pulled a trigger-
Chapter Seventeen
THE HEAD of security stood before his prisoner, studying him as a sculptor might study a roughly hewn work in progress; satisfied with the effort that had already taken place, but acutely aware of all the labour that lay ahead. Much remained to be done, but he promised himself that there would be no errors.
Sky Haussmann and the saboteur were almost alone. The torture room was in a distant and largely forgotten annex of the ship, accessible only by one of the train routes which everyone else assumed was disused. Sky had outfitted the room and its surrounding chambers himself, equipping it with pressure and heat by tapping into the ship's lymphatic system of supply lines. In principle, a detailed audit of power/air consumption might have revealed the room's existence, but, as a possible security issue, the matter would only have been referred to Sky himself. It had never happened; he doubted that it ever would.
The prisoner was splayed before him on one wall, anchored there and surrounded by machines. Neural lines plunged into the man's skull, interfacing with the control implants buried in his brain. Those implants were exceedingly crude, even by Chimeric standards, but they did their job. They were mainly webbed into the regions of the temporal lobe associated with deep religious experience. Epileptics had long reported feelings of divinity when intense electrical activity flickered across those regions; all the implants did was subject the saboteur to mild and controllable versions of the same religious impulses. It was probably how his old masters had controlled him, and how he had been able to give himself up so selflessly to their suicidal cause.
Now Sky controlled him via the same devotional channels.
"Do you know, no one ever mentions you these days," Sky said.
The saboteur offered him bloodshot crescent eyes beneath heavy lids. "What?"
"It's as if the rest of the ship has decided to quietly forget that you ever existed. How exactly does it feel, to have been erased from the public record?"
"You remember me."
"Yes." Sky nodded towards the pale aerodynamic shape which floated at the other end of the room, cased in armoured green glass. "And so does he. But that's not saying much, is it? To be remembered only by your tormentors?"
"It's better than nothing."
"They suspect, of course." He thought of Constanza, the only serious thorn in his side. "Or at least they used to, when they gave the matter any thought. After all, you did kill my father. I'd be perfectly within my moral rights to torture you, wouldn't I?"
"I didn't kill . . ."
"Oh, but you did." Sky smiled. He was standing at the lashed-up control panel which allowed him to talk to the saboteur's implants, idly fingering the chunky black knobs and glass-panelled analogue dials. He had built the machine himself, scavenging its components from across the ship, and had given it the name God-Box. That was what it was, ultimately: an instrument for placing God inside the killer's head. In the early days he had used it solely to inflict pain, but-once he had smashed the infiltrator's personality-he had begun to reconstruct it towards his own ideal, via controlled doses of neural ecstasy. At the moment only the tiniest trace of current was dribbling into the man's temporal lobe, and in this null state his feelings towards Sky bordered on agnosticism rather than awe.
"I don't remember what I did," the man said.
"No, I don't suppose you do. Shall I remind you?"
The saboteur shook his head. "Perhaps I did kill your father. But someone must have given me the means to do so. Someone must have cut my restraints and left that knife by my bed."
"It was a scalpel, an infinitely finer thing."
"You'd know, of course."
Sky turned one of the black knobs a couple of notches higher, watching as the analogue dials quivered. "Why would I have given you the means to kill my own father? I'd have had to be insane."
"He was dying anyway. You hated him for what he had done to you."
"And how would you know?"
"You told me, Sky."
That, of course, was entirely possible. It was amusing to push the man to the desperate, bowel-loosening edge of total fear, and to then relent. He could do that with the machine if he wished, or just by unwrapping some surgical tools and showing them to the prisoner.
"He didn't do anything to me to make me hate him."
"No? That's not what you said before. You were the son of immortals, after all. If Titus hadn't meddled-hadn't stolen you from them-you'd still be sleeping with the other passengers." In his subtly archaic accent he continued, "Instead you'll spend years of your life in this miserable place, growing older, risking death each day, never knowing for sure if you'll make it to Journey's End. What if Titus was wrong, too? What if you aren't immortal? It'll be years before you can be certain."
Sky turned the knob higher. "Do you think I look my age?"
"No . . ." He watched the saboteur's lower lip tremble with the first unmistakable signs of ecstasy. "But that could just be good genes."
"I'll take my chances." He pushed the current higher. "I could have tortured you, you know."
"Ahh . . . I know. Oh God, I know."
"But I chose not to. Are you feeling a reasonably intense religious experience now?"
"Yes. I feel I'm in the presence of something . . . something . . . ahhh. Jesus. I can't talk now." The man's face rippled in an inhuman manner. There were twenty additional facial musc
les anchored to his skull, capable of dramatically altering his appearance when the need arose. Sky assumed that he had transformed his face to slip aboard the ship in place of the man who should have had his sleeper berth. Now he mirrored Sky, the artificial muscles twitching involuntarily to this new configuration. "It's too beautiful."
"Are you seeing bright lights yet?"
"I can't talk."
Sky turned the knob up another few notches, until it was near the end of its range. The analogue dials were nearly all full-over. But not quite, and because they were logarithmically calibrated, that last twitch could mean the difference between a feeling of intense spirituality and a full-on vision of heaven and hell. He had never taken the prisoner to that plateau yet, and he was not entirely sure he wanted to risk it.
He stepped away from the machine and approached the saboteur. Behind him Sleek quivered in his tank, waves of anticipation running up and down the dolphin's body. The man was drooling, losing basic muscular control. His face had melted now, the muscles sagging hopelessly. Sky took the man's head in his hands and forced him to look at his own face. He could almost feel a tingling in his fingers from the current worming into the man's skull. For a moment they locked eyes, pupil to pupil, but it was too much for the saboteur. It must be like seeing God, he thought; not necessarily the most pleasant of experiences even if it was drenched in awe.
"Listen to me," he whispered. "No; don't try to speak. Just listen. I could have killed you, but I didn't. I chose to spare you. I chose to show mercy. Do you know what that makes me? Merciful. I want you to remember that, but I also want you to remember something else. I can be jealous as well, and vengeful."
Just then Sky's bracelet chimed. It was the one he had inherited from his father upon assuming command of security. He swore softly, allowed the prisoner's head to loll, and then took the call. He was careful to keep his back to the prisoner.
"Haussmann? Are you there?"
It was Old Man Balcazar. Sky smiled and did his best to look and sound crisply professional.
"It's me, Captain. How may I help?"
"Something's come up, Haussmann. Something important. I need you to escort me."
With his free hand Sky began to turn down the gain on the machine, then stopped before he dropped it too low. With the current off, the prisoner might regain the ability to speak. He kept the juice on while he spoke.
"Escort you, sir? To somewhere else in the ship?"
"No, Haussmann. Off ship. We're going over to the Palestine . I want you to come with me. Not too much to ask, is it?"
"I'll be in the taxi hangar in thirty minutes, sir."
"You'll be there in fifteen, Haussmann, and you'll have a taxi prepped and ready for departure." The Captain inserted a phlegmatic pause. "Balcazar out."
Sky stood staring at the bracelet for a few moments after the Captain's image had blanked, wondering what was afoot. With the four remaining ships locked in what was essentially a cold war, the kind of trip of which Balcazar spoke was extremely rare, usually planned days in advance with meticulous attention to detail. A full security escort would normally accompany any senior crew making the crossing to another ship, Sky himself staying behind to coordinate things. But this time Balcazar had given him only a few minutes' warning, and there had been no rumour of anything pending before the Captain's call.
Fifteen minutes-of which he had squandered at least one already. He snapped down the cuff of his tunic and started to leave the room. He was almost gone when he remembered that the prisoner was still plugged into the God-Box, his mind still bathed in electrical ecstasy.
Sleek quivered again.
Sky returned to the machine and adjusted the settings, so that the dolphin had control of the electrical current stimulation. Sleek's quivering became maniacal, the creature's body thrashing against the tight constraints of the tank, enveloping his body in a manic froth of bubbles. The implants in the dolphin's skull were able to talk to the machine now; able to make the prisoner scream in agony or gasp in the heights of joy.
With Sleek, though, it was generally the former.
He heard the old man wheezing and creaking his way across the floor of the hangar long before he saw him. The Captain's two medical aides, Valdivia and Rengo, kept a discreet distance behind their charge, slightly crouched as they walked, monitoring his life-signs on handheld readouts, their expressions of concern so profound that it looked like the old man had only minutes of life left in him. But Sky was a long way from feeling any concern over the Captain's imminent demise: they had been wearing those expressions for years, and what they constituted was only a glaze of carefully maintained professionalism. Valdivia and Rengo had to give everyone the impression that the Captain was almost on his deathbed, or else they would be forced to apply their not overly honed medical skills elsewhere.
Which was not to say that Balcazar was exactly in the prime of life, either. The old man was sustained by a chest-girdling medical device, across which his dress tunic was tightly buttoned, giving him the plump-breasted look of a well-fed rooster. The effect was exacerbated by his comb of stiff grey hair and the suspicious gleam of his dark, widely-set eyes. Balcazar was easily the oldest of the crew, his Captaincy dating back to long before Titus's time, and while it was perfectly clear that he had once had a mind like a steel trap, steering his crew through innumerable minor crises with icy skill, it was equally clear that those days were long since over; that the trap was now a rusted travesty of itself. Privately they said that his mind was nearly gone, while publicly they spoke of his infirmity and the need to hand over the reins to the younger generation; to replace him with a young or middle-aged Captain now who would be merely senior when the Flotilla arrived at its destination. Wait too long, they said, and his replacement would not have time to acquire the necessary skills before those undoubtedly difficult days were upon them.
There had been votes of censure and no confidence, and talk of forced retirement on medical grounds-nothing actually mutinous, of course-but the old bastard had stood his ground. Yet his position had never been weaker than now. His staunchest allies had themselves begun to die out. Titus Haussmann, who Sky could still not quite stop thinking of as his father, had been amongst them. Losing Titus had been a major blow for the Captain, who had long relied on the man for tactical advice and soundings regarding the true feelings of the crew. It was almost as if the Captain could not adjust to the loss of his confidant and was perfectly happy to let Sky assume Titus's role. Speedy promotion to head of security had been only part of it. When the Captain occasionally called him Titus rather than Sky, he had at first assumed the slip was an innocent mistake, but on reflection it signified something much more problematic. The Captain, as they said, was losing his marbles; events were becoming jumbled in his head, the recent past slipping in and out of clarity. It was no way to run a ship.
Something, Sky had resolved, would have to be done about it.
"We'll be accompanying him, of course," the first of the aides whispered. The man, Valdivia, looked enough like the other one for him and Rengo to have been brothers. They both had close-cropped white hair and worry lines corrugated into their foreheads.
"Impossible," Sky said. "There's only a two-seat shuttle available." He indicated the nearest craft, parked on its transport pallet. Other, larger ships were parked around the two-seater, but all had components missing or access panels folded open. It was part of the general deterioration of services; throughout the ship, things that had been meant to last the mission were failing prematurely. The problem would not have been so severe if parts and expertise could have been swapped between the Flotilla vessels, but that was unthinkable in the current diplomatic climate.
"How long would it take to patch together one of those larger ones?" Valdivia said.
"Half a day at the earliest," Sky said.
Balcazar must have heard part of that, because he murmured, "There won't be any damned delay, Haussmann."
"You see?"
>
Rengo sprang forward. "Then, Captain, may I?"
It was a ritual they had gone through many times before. With a long-suffering sigh, Balcazar allowed the medic to undo his side-buttoned tunic, revealing the gleaming expanse of the medical tabard. The machine whirred and wheezed like a piece of clapped-out air purification equipment. There were dozens of windows set into it, some showing readouts or dials, others pulsing fluid lines. Rengo extended a probe from his handheld device and plugged it into various apertures, nodding or shaking his head slowly as numbers and graphs flowed across the device's screen.
"Something amiss?" Sky said.
"As soon as he gets back, I want him down in medical for a complete overhaul," Rengo said.
"Pulse is a bit on the thready side," Valdivia said.
"It'll hold. I'll up his relaxant." Rengo punched controls on his handset. "He'll be a bit drowsy on the way over, Sky. Just don't let the bastards on the other ship get him worked up, all right? Bring him back here on medical grounds if there's any sign of tension."
"I'll be sure to." Sky helped the already dozy Captain towards the two-seat shuttle. It was a lie that the larger ships were not ready, of course, but of those present only Sky had the technical knowledge to catch himself out.
Departure was uneventful. They cleared the access tunnel, unlatched and curved away from the Santiago , stabs of thrust pushing the shuttle towards their destination, the Palestine . The Captain sat before him, his reflection in the cockpit window resembling the formal portrait of some octagenarian despot from another century. Sky had expected him to nod off, but he seemed awake enough. He had the habit of delivering portentous utterances every few minutes, interspersed between fusillades of coughs.
"Khan was a reckless bloody fool, you know . . . should never have been left in command after the upheavals of'15 . . . if I'd damn well had my way, beggar would have been frozen for the rest of the trip, or thrown into space . . . losing his mass would have given them just the kind of decelerational edge they were looking for in the first place . . ."
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