“According to Tanner she stopped working for you some time ago.” Chanterelle smiled. “Frankly, I’m not surprised.”
“Thanks,” Zebra said, guardedly. “I’m not sure why you trust me, though. I mean, I definitely wouldn’t.”
“Tanner said I should. Tanner and I have had a few points of disagreement, but I’m prepared to take his word on this one. Can I trust you, Zebra?”
She smiled. “You’re not exactly spoilt for choice, are you?” Then added, “Well, Tanner—what happens now?”
“Exactly what Quirrenbach had in mind all along,” I said. “A trip to Refuge.”
“You’re joking, aren’t you? It has to be a trap.”
“It’s also the only way I’ll ever end this. Reivich knew that as well, didn’t he?”
Quirrenbach said nothing for a few moments, as if uncertain of whether he had won, or had in fact lost beyond all hope of redemption. Then, weakly, he said, “We’ll need to go to the spaceport, then.”
“Eventually, yes.” Now it was my turn to play games. “But there’s somewhere I want to go first, Quirrenbach. Somewhere closer. And I think you know how to take me there.”
I pulled out the vial of Dream Fuel which Zebra had given me; spent now. “Ring any bells?”
I hadn’t known for certain that Quirrenbach would be any closer to the Dream Fuel production centre than Vadim, but it was a reasonable guess. Vadim had carried supplies of the drug, but his little empire of extortion was restricted to the Rust Belt and its orbital environs. Only Quirrenbach moved freely between Chasm City and space, and the chances were therefore good that Quirrenbach brought the vials up with him on a recent visit.
Which meant Quirrenbach might know where the source was.
“Well?” I said. “Am I warm?”
“You don’t know what you’re getting into, Tanner. No idea at all.”
“You just let me worry about that. You worry about taking us there.”
“Taking us where?” Chanterelle asked.
I turned to her. “I made a deal with Zebra that I’d continue the investigations her sister was making when she vanished.”
Chanterelle looked at Zebra. “What happened?”
Zebra spoke quietly. “My sister asked one too many awkward questions about Dream Fuel. Gideon’s goons got to her, and I’ve wanted to know why ever since. She wasn’t even trying to close them down, just to find out more about the source.”
“It most certainly won’t be what you’re expecting,” Quirrenbach said, looking at me beseechingly. We were brachiating away from Grand Central Station, where we’d dropped off Voronoff and the heavies. “For pity’s sake, Tanner. See sense. There’s no need for you to embark on some personal crusade, especially given that you’re an outsider. You have no need—or right, for that matter—to meddle in our affairs.”
“He doesn’t need one,” Zebra said.
“Oh, spare me the righteous indignation. You use the substance yourself, Zebra.”
She nodded. “And so do a few thousand other people, Quirrenbach. Largely because we haven’t got much of a choice.”
“There’s always a choice,” he said. “So the world looks a little bleaker without implants? Fine; learn to live with it. And if you don’t like that, there’s always the hermetic approach.”
Zebra shook her head. “Without implants we start dying of old age; most of us anyway. With them we’ve got to live half a life cowering inside machines. Sorry, but that’s not what I call much of a choice. Not when there’s a third way.”
“Then you have precisely no moral grounds for objecting to the existence of Dream Fuel.”
“I’m not objecting, you tedious little man. I just want to know why the stuff isn’t easier to get hold of, when we need it so badly. Every month it gets harder to find; every month I end up paying Gideon—whoever he might be—a little more for his precious elixir.”
“Such is the nature of supply and demand.”
“Shall I hit him for you?” Chanterelle said brightly. “It’d be no trouble at all.”
“That’s very generous of you,” Zebra said, evidently pleased that she and Chanterelle had found some common ground. “But I think we want him conscious for the time being.”
I nodded. “At least until he gets us to the manufacturing centre. Chanterelle? Are you still sure you want to come with us?”
“I’d have stayed at the station if I wasn’t, Tanner.”
“I know. But it’ll be dangerous. We might not all walk out of this.”
“He’s right,” Quirrenbach said, who must still have hoped that I could be talked out of this. “I’d give the matter some serious thought if I were you. Wouldn’t it make more sense to come back later, with a properly prepared squad; even something vaguely resembling a plan?”
“What, and miss having your undivided attention?” I said. “It’s a big city, Quirrenbach, and an even bigger Rust Belt. Who’s to say I’d ever see you again if we agreed to postpone this little trip?”
He snuffled. “Well, you still can’t force me to take you there.”
I smiled. “You’d be surprised. I could force you to do just about anything if I wanted to. It’s really just a matter of nerves and pressure points.”
“You’d torture me, is that it?”
“Let’s just say I’d apply some very convincing arguments.”
“You bastard, Mirabel.”
“Just drive, will you?”
“And watch where you’re driving,” Zebra said. “You’re taking us way too low, Quirrenbach.”
She was right. We were skirting the Mulch now, skimming only a hundred or so metres above the tops of the highest slums—and the ride consisted of sickening undulations due to the lack of threads at this altitude.
“I know what I’m doing,” Quirrenbach said. “So just shut up and enjoy the ride.”
Suddenly we were skimming down a slum canyon, descending a single long thread that vanished into murky, caramel-brown water at the canyon’s end. Fires burned in the ramshackle structures either side of us and steam-powered boats huffed and puffed out of our way as the cable-car approached the waterline.
“I was right, wasn’t I,” I said to Quirrenbach. “You and Vadim were a team, weren’t you?”
“I think the relationship might be better characterised as one of master and slave, Tanner.” He worked the controls with quite some skill, retarding our descent the instant before we hit the muddy water. “That act of Vadim’s—the big, stupid thug? It wasn’t an act.”
“Did I kill him?”
He rubbed at one of his own bruises. “Nothing Dream Fuel couldn’t fix, in the end.”
I nodded. “That’s more or less what I thought. So what is it, Quirrenbach? You must know. Is it something they synthesise?”
“That depends what you mean by synthesise,” he said.
* * *
“So he went mad,” Sky said. “He got stuck here and knew there was no way he could get back home safely. There isn’t any mystery to that.”
“Do you think Lago was real?” asked Gomez.
“Maybe. It doesn’t really matter. We still have to go in, don’t we? If we find the man, we’ll know that much is true. Look,” Sky did his best to sound reasonable, “what if he killed Lago? They might have had some argument, after all. Maybe it was killing his friend that drove him insane.”
“Assuming, of course, that he was insane,” Gomez said. “And not simply a perfectly rational man who’d had to confront something terrible.”
They decoupled from Oliveira’s shuttle a few minutes later, leaving the dead man inside as they had found him. Cautiously, with gentle taps of thrusters, they flew around to the undamaged side of the Flotilla ship.
“The damage is confined totally to the other side,” Gomez said. “It doesn’t look like the kind of hull scorching the Santiago sustained when the Islamabad blew up, but the geometric extent is similar, wouldn’t you say?”
Sky nodded, remembering
his mother’s shadow burned into the side of the hull. Whatever had happened to the Caleuche had been shockingly different, but it was clearly symptomatic of damage of some sort.
“I don’t see how there can be a connection,” he said.
There was a chime from the console—one of the automated warning systems Norquinco had rigged up. Sky glanced towards the other man. “What is it? Do we have a problem?”
“Not a technical one, but, um, still a problem. Someone’s just scanned us with a phased-array.”
“Where did it originate from? The Flotilla?”
“That direction, but not precisely. I think it must be another shuttle, Sky—making a similar approach to the one we used.”
“Probably following our thrust trail,” Gomez said. “Well—how long have we got?”
“I can’t tell you, not without bouncing a radar beam off them as well. Could be a day; could be six hours.”
“Shit. Well, let’s get in and see what we can find.”
They had moved around to the undamaged side of the command sphere now and were casting around for a suitable docking port. Sky did not want to try and land inside the Caleuche, but there were still plenty of surface points where the shuttle could have anchored itself for a quick crew transfer. Normally the larger ship would have responded to the shuttle’s approach by activating one of the ports; guidance lights would have begun to shine and the port would have extended restraining clamps to guide the shuttle home the last few metres. If there had been any power left at all inside her, those docking mechanisms should still have woken up, even after decades of inactivity. But though the shuttle chirped its approach signal, nothing happened.
“All right,” Sky said. “We’ll do what Oliveira did: use the grapples.”
He positioned the shuttle over a docking port and let the grapples whip away and bury themselves silently in the Caleuche’s hull. Then the shuttle began to pull itself in, like a spider ascending a strand of cobweb. The grapples did not appear to have anchored themselves firmly—they began to give, like hooks in flesh—but they would hold for now. Even if the shuttle broke loose from its mooring while they were inside the larger ship, the shuttle’s autopilot would prevent it from drifting away.
Still suited up, they moved to the airlock again and cycled through to vacuum. Sky’s positioning had been excellent; their own docking seal was exactly aligned with the ship’s, with the manual controls set to one side in a recessed panel. Sky knew from his experience on the Santiago that the airlocks were well designed; even if no one had opened it in years, the manual opening controls should still function perfectly.
It was simple. There was a lever you turned by hand, and that would crank aside the outer door. Once inside the exchange chamber, there would be a more comprehensive panel with pressure gauges and controls to allow the space to be flooded with air from within the ship. If there was no pressure on the other side, the door would allow him to pass even more easily.
He reached out his gloved hand, ready to grasp the lever. But as soon as his fingers closed around the metal he knew something was wrong.
It didn’t feel like metal at all.
It felt like meat.
Even as he was registering that, another part of his mind had sent the signal to his hand to apply the twisting motion that would begin to crank the door aside. But the lever was incapable of being rotated. Instead, it just deformed in his hand, stretching as if made out of jelly. He looked closer, nearly pressing his faceplate against the panel. Now that he could see it properly, it was obvious why the lever would never work: it blended in to the rest of the panel. In fact, all the controls were like that; merging seamlessly with the background. He looked at the door, carefully now. There was no seam between it and its frame—only a smooth continuation.
It was as if the Caleuche was made of grey dough.
The cable-car had become just another vessel on the brown ooze of the Mulch river. Quirrenbach was using the car’s arms to propel it along against the sluggish flow, reaching out on either side to brush against the overhanging slums. He had obviously done it many times before.
“We’re approaching the edge of the dome,” Zebra said, pointing ahead and up.
She was right. One of the merged domes of the Mosquito Net came down here, with the slums scraping against its filthy brown surface. It was hard to believe that overhanging, sloped ceiling had ever been transparent.
“The inner or outer edge?” I said.
“The inner,” Zebra said. “Which means…”
“I know what it means,” I said, before she could answer. “Quirrenbach’s taking us towards the chasm.”
THIRTY-FIVE
The canyon grew darker as we approached the Net, the overhanging structures more precariously stacked above us until they arched over forming a rough-hewn tunnel dripping unspeakable fluids. Hardly anyone lived here, even given the squalid population pressure of the Mulch.
Quirrenbach took us underground; powerful lights glared from the front of the cable-car. Occasionally I saw rats moving in the gloom, but no sign of any people; human or pig. The rats had reached the city aboard Ultra ships—genetically engineered to serve aboard the ships as cleaning systems. But a few had escaped centuries ago, shrugging off their gloss of servitude, reverting to feral type. They scampered away from the bright ellipses cast by the cable-car’s lights, or swam quickly through the brown water trailing V-shaped wakes.
“What is it you want, Tanner?” Quirrenbach said.
“Answers.”
“Is that all? Or are you after your own private supply of Dream Fuel? Go on. You can tell me. We’re old friends, after all.”
“Just drive,” I said.
Quirrenbach pushed us forward, the tunnel branching and bifurcating. We were in a very old part of the city now. Decrepit as this underground warren seemed, it might not have changed very much since the plague.
“Is this really necessary?” I said.
“There are other ways in,” he said. “But only a few people know about this one. It’s discreet, and it’ll make you seem like someone with a right to get to the heart of the action.”
Presently he brought the car to a halt. I hadn’t realised it, but Quirrenbach had steered it over a tongue of dry ground which rose out of the water near one stained and dilapidated wall, festooned in grey mould.
“We have to get out here,” he said.
“Don’t even think about trying anything,” I said. “Or you’ll become an interesting new addition to the decor down here.”
But I allowed him to lead us out anyway, leaving the cable-car parked on the mudspit. There were deep grooves in the ground where the skids of other cars had created impressions. Evidently we were not the first to use this landing place.
“Follow me,” Quirrenbach said. “It isn’t far.”
“Do you come here often?”
Now there was a note of honesty in his voice. “Not if I can help it. I’m not a big player in the Dream Fuel operation, Tanner. Not a very large cog. I’d be a dead man if some people knew I was even bringing you this far. Can we make this a discreet visit?”
“That depends. I told you I wanted some answers.”
He had reached something in the wall. “There’s no way I can take you close to the centre of things, Tanner—start understanding that, will you? It just isn’t possible. It’s best if you go in alone. And don’t even think about causing trouble. You’d need more than a few guns for that.”
“So what are you taking us to?”
But instead of answering, he yanked at something hidden in the slime-covered grime of the wall, hauling aside a sliding panel. It was almost above our heads; a rectangular hole two metres long.
Wary of tricks—like Quirrenbach using the hole as an escape route—I went first. Then I helped Quirrenbach up, and then Chanterelle. Zebra came last, casting a wary eye behind her. But no one had followed us, and the only eyes watching us depart belonged to the tunnel’s rats.
Inside, we crawled, crouching, along a low, square steel-lined tunnel for what seemed like hundreds of metres, but which was probably only a few dozen. I had lost all sense of direction now, but part of my mind insisted that we had all along been approaching closer and closer to the edge of the chasm. It was possible that we were beyond the fringe of the Mosquito Net now. Above us, beyond only a few metres of bedrock, might have been poisonous atmosphere.
But eventually, just when my back was beginning to ache with something that went beyond discomfort into real, paralysing pain, we emerged into a much larger chamber. It was dark at first, but Quirrenbach turned on a matrix of ancient lights stapled to the ceiling.
Something ran from one end of the chamber to the other, emerging from one wall and vanishing into the other. It was a dull silver tube, three or four metres wide, like a pipeline. Jutting from it on one side, at an oblique angle, was what looked like a branch of the same tube: exactly the same diameter, but terminating in a smooth metal end-cap.
“You recognise this, of course,” Quirrenbach said, indicating the longer part of the pipe.
“Not exactly,” I said. I had expected one of the others to say something, but no one seemed any wiser than me.
“Well, you’ve seen it many times.” Then he walked up to the pipe. “It’s part of the city’s atmospheric supply system. There are hundreds of pipes like this, reaching down into the chasm, down into the cracking station. Some carry air. Some carry water. Some carry superheated steam.” He knuckled the pipe, and now I noticed that there was an oval panel in the part which jutted out, more or less the same size as the panel which he had found in the wall. “This one normally carries steam.”
“What is it carrying now?”
“A few thousand atmospheres. Nothing to worry about.”
Quirrenbach placed his hands on the panel and slid it aside. It moved smoothly, revealing a curve of dark green glass, framed by clean silver metal inset with controls. They were marked with a very old style of writing; words which were almost but not quite Norte.
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