Chasm City

by Alastair Reynolds

  "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 régime 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 drives 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-and 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.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  "WHAT DO you mean, you killed her?" Zebra asked, the five o
f 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."

  "I don't even know who they are," I said. "At least, I can't be sure. Not about the woman, anyway, but I'm willing to hazard a guess about the man."

  "Who do you think it is?" Zebra said.

  Quirrenbach cut in, "I really don't think we should spend too long here; not unless you want to tangle with what passes for authority here. And believe me, that's not especially high on my agenda."

  "Much as it grieves me to agree with him," Chanterelle said, "he has a fairly good point, Tanner."

  "I don't think you should call me that any more," I said.

  Zebra shook her head slowly. "Who do we call you, then?"

  "Not Tanner Mirabel, anyway." I nodded at Dominika's body. "It must have been Mirabel who killed her. The man who's following me is Mirabel. He did this; not me."

  "This is insane," Chanterelle said, to general nods of agreement, although no one much looked like they were enjoying proceedings. "If you're not Tanner Mirabel, then who are you?"

  "A man called Cahuella," I said, knowing that this was only half of the truth.

  Zebra placed her hands against her hips. "And you didn't feel like telling any of us this until now?"

  "Until recently I didn't realise it."

  "No? Just slipped your mind, did it?"

  I shook my head. "I think Cahuella altered my memories-his memories-to suppress his own identity. He needed to do it temporarily, to escape from Sky's Edge. His own memories and face would have incriminated him. Except when I say 'he'," I mean 'me'," really."

  Zebra squinted at me, as if trying to tell if her earlier judgements had been fatally incorrect. "You actually believe this, don't you?"

  "It's taken me a little while to come to terms with it, believe me."

  "He's clearly snapped," Quirrenbach said. "The odd thing is, I assumed it would take rather more than the sight of one dead fat woman to push him over the edge."

  I punched him. It was quick; I allowed him no warning at all, and in any case, under the permanent threat of Chanterelle's gun, he was in no position to fight back. I watched him fall, slipping on the floor which was slick with some spilled medical fluid, one hand rising to nurse his jaw before he even hit the ground.

  Quirrenbach slipped into the shadow beneath the couch, yelping as he made contact with something.

  For a moment I wondered if he had touched a snake which had found its way to the floor. But instead, something much larger emerged from the shadow. It was Dominika's kid, Tom.

  I reached a hand out towards him. "Come here. You're safe with us."

  She had been killed by the same man who had visited her before, asking questions about me. An offworlder, yes-much like you, Tom said, casually at first, and then repeating himself in a tone that was altogether more suspicious. Not just much like Tanner-but very like him indeed.

  "It's all right," I said, putting a hand on his shoulder. "The man who killed Dominika only looked like me. It doesn't mean I'm him."

  Tom nodded his head slowly. "You no sound like him."

  "He talked differently?"

  "You talk fancy, mister. The other man-the man who look like you-he don't use so many words."

  "The strong silent type," Zebra said. Then she drew the kid away from me, wrapping her long lean limbs around him protectively. I was touched, for a moment. It was the first time I had seen any hint of compassion shown by someone from the Canopy for a Mulch-born; the first time I had seen any hint that either party regarded the other as human. Of course I knew what Zebra believed-that the game was evil-but it was another matter to see that belief acted out in a simple gesture of giving comfort. "We're sorry about Dominika," she said. "You have to believe it wasn't us."

  Tom sniffed. He was upset, but the shock of her death had yet to set in, and he was still reasonably coherent and eager to help us. At least I hoped it was because the shock had not set in; the other possibility-that he was just immunised against that kind of pain-was too unpleasant to contemplate. I could handle it in a soldier, but not in a kid.

  "Was he alone?" I asked. "I was told that two people were looking for me; a man and a woman. Do you know if this was the same man?"

  "Same guy," the kid said, turning his face away from the suspended corpse of Dominika. "And he not alone this time either. Woman with him, but she no look happy this time."

  "She looked happy the first time?" I said.

  "Not happy, but . . ." The kid faltered, and I could see that we were making unreasonable demands on his vocabulary. "She look like she comfortable with guy; like friends. He nicer then-more like you."

  It made sense. The first time he'd paid a trip to Dominika's would have been a fishing trip; gathering what information he could about the city and-hopefully-where he could find the man he wanted to kill, whether that man was me or Reivich or both of us. It might have made sense to kill Dominika there and then, but he must have suspected she could be of use to him in the future. So he had let her live, until he returned, with the snakes he must have bought in the bazaar.

  And then he had killed her in a manner which he knew would speak to me; a private code of ritual murder which opened seams into the heart of my being.

  "The woman," I said. "She was offworld too?"

  But Tom seemed no wiser than I about that.

  Using Zebra's phone, I called Lorant, the pig whose kitchen I had half-destroyed during my descent from the Canopy, an eternity ago. I told him I had a final huge favour to ask of him and his wife, which was only that they look after Tom until things quietened down. A day, I said, although in truth I plucked the figure from my head at random.

  "I look after myself," Tom said. "No want stay with pig."

  "They're good people, trust me. You'll be much safer there. If word gets out that someone witnessed Dominika being killed, the same man will come back. If he finds you, he'll kill you," I said.

  "I always got to hide?"

  "No," I said. "Only for as long as it takes for me to kill the man who did this. And believe me, I'm not planning on spending the rest of my life doing it."

  The concourse was still quiet when we left the tent, meeting the pig and his wife just beyond the cataract of greasy rain which fell endlessly down the building's overhung side, like a curtain of yellowing calico. The kid went with them, nervously at first, but then Lorant scooped him aboard and their balloon-wheeled vehicle vanished into the murk like an apparition.

  "He'll be safe, I think," I said.

  "You think he's in that much danger?" Quirrenbach said.

  "More than you can imagine. The man who killed Dominika isn't exactly overburdened with a conscience."

  "You sound like you know him."

  "I do," I said.

  Then we returned to Chanterelle's car.

  "I'm confused," Quirrenbach said, as he climbed into the vehicle's bubble of dryness and light. "I don't know who I'm dealing with any more. I feel like you've just pulled the carpet from under me."

  He was looking at me.

  "All because I found the dead woman?" Pransky said. "Or because Mirabel has started going mad?"

  "Quirrenbach," I said, "I need to know of places where someone might buy snakes; probably not far from here."

  "Did you hear an
ything of what we just said?"

  "I heard," I said. "I just don't want to talk about it right now."

  "Tanner," Zebra said, then stopped herself. "Or whoever you say you are. Does this business about your name have anything to do with what the Mixmaster told you?"

  "That wouldn't by any chance be the same one you visited with me, would it?" It was Chanterelle speaking now, and it was all I could do to nod, as if in that gesture I made my final acceptance of the truth.

  "I know some local snake sellers," Quirrenbach said, almost to ease the tension. He leant forward, over Zebra's shoulder, and fed orders into the car. It lifted smoothly, quickly spiriting us above the stench and chaos of the rain-sodden Mulch.

  "I had to know what was wrong with my eyes," I told Chanterelle. "Why they seemed to have been tampered with genetically. What the Mixmaster told me when I returned with Zebra was that the work had probably been done by Ultras, and then undone-crudely, as it happened-by someone else; someone like the Black Geneticists."

  "Go on."

  "That wasn't quite what I wanted to hear. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn't to find out that I must have been in some way complicit in the act."

  "You think you willingly did this to your eyes?"

  I nodded. "It wouldn't be without its uses. Someone with an interest in hunting, perhaps, might consider it. I can see very well in the dark now."

  "Who?" Chanterelle said.

  "Good question," Zebra echoed. "But before you answer it, what about the full-body scan you had when we visited the Mixmaster? What was the significance of that?"

  "I was looking for evidence of old injuries," I said. "Both wounds were inflicted at about the same time. I was rather hoping to find one and rather hoping not to find the other."

  "Any particular reason why?"

  "Tanner Mirabel had a foot shot off by Reivich's gunmen. The foot could have been replaced by an organic prosthesis, or a cultured copy cloned from his own cells. But either way it would need to be surgically attached to the stump. Now, maybe with the best medical skills available on Yellowstone, that kind of work could be done invisibly. But not on Sky's Edge. There'd be plenty of microscopic evidence-signs which should have easily shown up in a Mixmaster scan."