The second large ship—the one to which our elevator was headed—was very different from the shuttle. At first glance it looked just like a random pile of floating junk which had somehow agreed to drift together. It looked barely capable of keeping itself in one piece while stationary, let alone moving.
“I’m going down in that thing?”
“The good ship Strelnikov,” said the first Mendicant. “Cheer up. It’s a lot safer than it looks.”
“Or is it a lot less safe than it looks?” asked the other one. “I always forget, Brother.”
“Me too. Why don’t I check.”
He reached into his tunic for something. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t the wooden cosh that he came out with. It looked to have been formed from the handle of a gardening tool, equipped with a leather strap at the narrow end and a few interesting scratches and stains at the other. The other Mendicant held me from behind while his friend gave me a few bruises to be going away with, concentrating his efforts on my face. There wasn’t much I could do about it—they had the advantage on me in zero gravity, and they were built more like wrestlers than monks. I don’t think the one with the cosh actually broke anything, but when he was done, my face felt like a large, overripe fruit. I could hardly see out of one eye and my mouth was swimming with blood and little chips of shattered enamel.
“What was all that about?” I asked, my voice moronically slurred. “A leaving present from Brother Alexei,” said the first Mendicant. “Nothing too serious, Mister Mirabel. Just a reminder not to interfere in our business ever again.” I spat out a crimson sphere of blood, observing the way it retained its globular shape as it crossed from one side of the elevator to the other. “You won’t be getting a donation,” I said.
They debated whether to rough me up some more, then decided that it would be best if I didn’t run the risk of any neurological damage. Maybe they were a little scared of Sister Duscha. I tried to show some gratitude, but my heart just wasn’t in it.
I got a good close look at the Strelnikov as the elevator approached it, and the view hadn’t got much better. The thing was roughly brick-shaped, about two hundred metres from end to end. Dozens of control, habitation and propulsion modules had been lashed together to make her, embedded in an intestinal explosion of snaking fuel lines and gizzard-like tanks. Here and there were what looked like the remains of hull plating; a few ragged-edged plates like the last traces of flesh on a maggot-ridden corpse. Parts of the ship appeared to have been glued back on, covered in cauls of glistening epoxy; other parts were still being welded back in place by repair teams deep inside the ship’s ill-defined surface. Gases were venting steadily from six or seven places, but no one seemed particularly bothered by that.
I told myself that the ship could have looked a lot worse and it still wouldn’t have mattered. The route down to the Glitter Band—the conglomeration of habitats in low orbit around Yellowstone—was a typical workhorse run. There were a dozen similar operations around Sky’s Edge. There was no need for any hefty acceleration at any point in the journey, which meant that, with modest maintenance, ships could ply the same routes for centuries on end, toiling up and down the gravity well until some final, fatal systems failure turned them into macabre pieces of drifting space sculpture. There were few essential overheads, so while such routes would always have a couple of prestigious operators running luxurious shuttles on high-burn trajectories, there would also be a series of steadily more ramshackle operations, each cutting more costs than the last. At the very bottom of the heap would be chemical-rocket or ion-drive scows making painfully slow transfers between different orbits—and while the slowboat I had been assigned wasn’t quite that bad, it was most definitely not at the luxury end of the scale.
But, slow as the ship was, it still represented the fastest route down to the Glitter Band. The high-burn shuttles made that run more swiftly, but no high-burners came anywhere near Idlewild. It didn’t take an economics theorist to understand why: most of Idlewild’s clients barely had the funds to cover their own revival, let alone an expensive shortcut to Chasm City. I’d first have had to travel to the parking swarm, and then negotiate a slot on a high-burner, with no guarantee that one was available until a later flight. Amelia had advised against that, saying that there were not nearly so many high-burners operating as before—before what, I didn’t have a chance to ask—and that the time-saving compared to getting straight on the slow shuttle would have been marginal at best.
Eventually the elevator reached the connecting passage to the Strelnikov, and my Mendicant friends bade me farewell. They were all smiles now, as if the bruises on my face were just another psychosomatic manifestation of the Haussmann virus and nothing they were responsible for.
“Best of luck, Mister Mirabel.” The Mendicant with the cosh gave me a cheery wave.
“Thanks. I’ll send a postcard. Or maybe I’ll come back and let you know how I got on.”
“That would be nice.”
I spat out a final coagulating globule. “Don’t count on it.”
A few other prospective immigrants were being manhandled aboard ahead of me, mumbling drowsily in unfamiliar languages. Inside, we were shunted through a disorientating maze of narrow crawlways until we reached a hub somewhere deep in the Strelnikov’s bowels. There we were assigned accommodation cubicles for the journey down to the Glitter Band.
By the time I got to mine I was weary and aching; feeling like an animal that had come off second best in a fight and had crawled back to its den to lick its wounds. I was glad of the privacy of the cubicle. It wasn’t fragrantly clean, but it wasn’t filthy either: just some yellowing hybrid of the two. There was no artificial gravity on the Strelnikov —for which I was grateful; it wouldn’t have been prudent to spin her or accelerate her too hard—so the cubicle came outfitted with a zero-gee bunk bed and various nourishment and sanitary facilities designed with the same lack of gravity in mind. There was a general network console which looked like it should have been lovingly preserved in a museum of cybernetics, and there were stained and faded warning notices stuck to every available surface appertaining to what could and couldn’t be done in the ship, and how to get out of it as quickly as possible if something went wrong. Periodically, a thick-accented voice came over a Tannoy system with announcements concerning delays to the departure, but eventually the voice said that we had cast off from Idlewild, engaged drive and were on our way down. The departure had been so soft I hadn’t noticed it.
I picked at the shards of tooth in my mouth, mapped the painful extremities of the bruises the Mendicants had given me, and gradually fell asleep.
TEN
On the day that the passenger was to awake—and nothing would ever be the same after that—Sky and his two closest associates were riding a service train along the Santiago’s spine, rumbling down one of the narrow access tunnels which threaded the ship from nose to tail. The train moved at a few lumbering kilometres per hour, stopping now and then to allow its crew to off-load stores, or to wait for another train to clear the tunnel section ahead. As usual Sky’s companions were passing the time with tall stories and boasts, while Sky played devil’s advocate, unable to share fully in their fun but more than willing to ruin it if he saw an opportunity.
“Viglietti told me something yesterday,” Norquinco said, raising his voice to be heard above the roar of the train’s passage. “He said he didn’t believe it himself, but he knew other people that did. It was about the Flotilla, actually.”
“Astonish us,” Sky said.
“Simple question: how many ships were there originally, before the Islamabad went up?”
“Five, of course,” Gomez said.
“Ah, but what if that’s wrong? What if there were six, originally? One blew up—we know that—but what if the other one’s still out there?”
“Wouldn’t we have seen it?”
“Not if it’s dead; just a haunted husk of a ship trailing behind us.”
“Very convenient,” Sky said. “It wouldn’t happen to have a name by any chance, would it?”
“As a matter of fact…”
“I knew it.”
“They say it’s called the Caleuche.”
Sky sighed, knowing it was going to be one of those journeys again. There had been a time—many years ago, now—when the three of them had viewed the ship’s train network as a source of amusement and carefully controlled danger; a place for hazardous games and make-believe; ghost stories and challenges. There were disused tunnels branching off from the main routes, leading, so it was rumoured, to hidden cargo bays or secret caches of stowaway sleepers, smuggled aboard by rival governments at the last moment. There were places where he and his friends had dared each other to ride on the outsides of the trains, grazing their backs against the speeding walls of the tunnels. Older now, he looked back on those games with wry bewilderment, half proud that they had taken those risks, half horrified that they had come so close to what would obviously have been gruesome death.
It was a lifetime ago. They were serious now; doing their bit for the ship. Everyone had to pull their weight in these lean new times, and Sky and his companions were regularly assigned the work of escorting supplies to and from the workers in the spine and the engine section. Usually they had to help unload the stuff and manhandle it through crawlways and down access shafts to wherever it was needed, so the work was far from the soft option it might have appeared. Sky seldom finished a shift without some fresh cuts and bruises, and all the effort had given him a set of muscles he had never expected to gain.
They were an unlikely trio. Gomez was working his way towards a job in the engine section, in the hallowed priesthood of the propulsion team. Now and then he would get to ride the train all the way there and even talk with some of the whispering engine techs, trying to impress them with his knowledge of containment physics and the other arcana of antimatter propulsion theory. Sky had watched some of those exchanges and had observed the way Gomez’s questions and replies were not always swatted ruthlessly down by the techs. Sometimes they were even moderately impressed, implying that Gomez would one day be allowed to graduate to their soft-spoken priesthood.
Norquinco was a different creature entirely. He had a capacity to become completely and obsessively lost in a problem; overwhelmingly able to be fascinated by anything, provided it was sufficiently complex and layered. He was an assiduous keeper of lists, deeply enamoured of serial numbers and classifications. His favourite realm of study, unsurprisingly, was the hideous complexity of the Santiago’s nervous system; the computer networks which veined the ship and which had been altered, rerouted and written over like a palimpsest countless times since the launch; most recently after the blackout. Most sane adults quailed at attempting to understand more than a tiny sub-set of that complexity, but Norquinco was actually drawn to the entirety, perversely thrilled by something that most people saw as bordering on the pathological.
Because of that, he frightened people. The techs who worked on the network problems had well-trodden solution pathways for most glitches, and the last thing they needed was someone showing them how to do things fractionally more efficiently. Jokingly, they said it would put them out of work—but that was just a polite way of saying that Norquinco made them uneasy. So he rode with Sky and Gomez, out of harm’s way.
“The Caleuche,” Sky said, repeating the name. “And I suppose there’s some significance in that name?”
“Enough,” Norquinco said, reading Sky’s expression of deep contempt. “The island where my ancestors came from had a lot of ghost stories. The Caleuche was one of them.” Norquinco was speaking earnestly now, all trace of his usual nervousness gone.
“And I suppose you’re going to enlighten us about her.”
“She was a ghost ship.”
“Funny, I’d never have guessed.”
Gomez thumped him. “Look, shut up and let Norquinco get on with it, all right?”
Norquinco nodded. “They used to hear her; sending accordion music out across the sea at night. Sometimes she would even put into port, or take sailors from other ships. The dead aboard her were having a party that never stopped. Her crew were wizards; brujos. They cloaked the Caleuche in a cloud that followed her around everywhere. Now and then people saw her, but they could never get close to her. She would sink under the waves, or turn into a rock.”
“Ah,” Sky said, “so this ship which people couldn’t see very clearly—because it was covered in a cloud—also had the ability to turn into an old rock when they got closer? That’s remarkable, Norquinco; proof of magic if ever I heard it.”
“I’m not saying there was ever an actual ghost ship,” Norquinco said testily. “Then. But now, who knows? Perhaps the myth concerned one that was yet to come.”
“It gets better, it really does.”
“Listen,” Gomez said. “Forget the Caleuche; forget the ghost ship bollocks. Norquinco’s right—in a sense. It could have happened, couldn’t it? There could easily have been a sixth ship, and the knowledge of it might have become confused with time.”
“If you say so. You could also argue that the whole thing was a tissue of lies made up by the terminally bored crew of a generation ship to minutely enrich the mythic fabric of their lives. If you so wished.” Sky paused as the train swerved into a different tunnel, rattling against its induction rails, gravity rising as it moved a little closer to the skin.
“Ah, I know what your problem is,” Norquinco said, with half a smile. “It’s your old man, isn’t it? You don’t want to believe any of this because of who your father is. You can’t stand the idea of him not knowing about something so significant.”
“Maybe he does know, has that ever occurred to you?”
“So you admit the ship could be real.”
“No, actually…”
But Gomez interrupted him, obviously warming to the subject. “As a matter of fact, I don’t find it hard to believe that there was once a sixth ship. Launching six rather than five wouldn’t have been much more effort, would it? After that—after the ships had got up to cruising speed—there could have been some disaster… some tragic event, deliberate or otherwise, which left the sixth ship essentially dead. Coasting, but derelict, with its crew all killed, probably its momios as well. There must have been enough residual power to keep the remaining antimatter in containment, of course, but that wouldn’t have taken much.”
“What,” Sky said, “and we just forgot about it?”
“If the other ships had also played a part in the destruction of the sixth, it wouldn’t have been difficult to edit the data records of the entire Flotilla to remove any reference to the crime itself, or even the fact the victim had ever existed. That generation of crew could have sworn not to pass on the knowledge of the crime to their descendants, our parents.”
Gomez nodded enthusiastically. “So by now all we’d have been left with is a few rumours; half-forgotten truths mixed up in myth.”
“Exactly what we do have,” Norquinco said.
Sky shook his head, knowing it was futile to argue any further.
The train came to a halt in one of the loading bays which serviced this part of the spine. The three of them got out carefully, crunching their sticky-soled shoes onto the flooring for traction. There was scarcely any feeling of gravity now since they were so close to the axis of rotation. Objects still fell towards the floor, but with a certain reluctance, and it was easy to hurt your head against the ceiling if you took too ambitious a stride.
There were many such bays, each servicing a cluster of momios. There were six sleeper modules attached around this part of the spine, each of which held ten individual cryogenic berths. The trains reached no closer, and almost all equipment and supplies had to be manhandled from this point, via laddered shafts and winding crawlways. There were freight elevators and handler robots, but neither were used very often. Robots in particular needed diligent programming and main
tenance, and even the simplest task had to be spelled out to them as if they were particularly slow-witted children. Usually, it was quicker just to do it yourself. That was why there were so many techs, usually leaning against the pallets looking bored, smoking homemade cigarettes or tapping styluses against clipboards, doing their best to look semi-occupied despite the fact that nothing was actually happen-ing. The techs generally wore blue overalls flashed with section decals, but the overalls were usually ripped or amended in some fashion, exposing crudely tattooed skin. Sky knew all of them by face, of course—on a ship with only one hundred and fifty warm human beings, it was difficult not to. But he had only a vague idea what their names were, and next to none about the kinds of lives the techs lived when they were not working. Off-duty techs tended to keep to their own parts of the Santiago, and they tended to socialise amongst themselves, even to the extent of producing their offspring. They spoke their own patois, drenched in carefully guarded jargon.
But something was slightly different now.
No one was lazing around or trying to look busy. In fact, there were hardly any techs in the room at all, and the few that were here looked edgy, as if waiting for an alarm to go off.
“What’s the matter?” Sky said.
But the man who stepped gingerly from behind the nearest tower of equipment pallets was not a tech. He brushed his hand across the chrome shoulder of a crouched handler robot as if looking for support, sweat blistering on his forehead.
“Dad?” Sky said. “What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same question, unless this is one of your chores.”
“Of course it is. I told you we work the trains now and then, didn’t I?”
Titus looked distracted. “Yes… yes, you did. I forgot. Sky, help these men unload the goods, and then get you and your friends away from here, will you?”
Sky looked at his father. “I don’t understand.”
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