Chasm City rs-2

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Where’s her kid?” I asked.

  “Her kid?” he said, as if I had used some piece of obscure street argot.

  “Tom. Her helper. He can’t be far away. He might have seen something. He might also be in danger.”

  Pransky clicked his tongue. “I didn’t see any ‘kid’. There was more than enough to occupy my mind. Whoever did this was…” He trailed off, but I could imagine what his mind was dealing with.

  “It can’t be local talent,” Zebra said, in the silence which followed. “No one local would waste a resource like Dominika.”

  “You said the people after me weren’t local.”

  “What people?” Chanterelle said.

  “A man and a woman,” Zebra answered. “They paid a visit to Dominika, trying to trace Tanner. They definitely weren’t from the city. An odd couple, as far as I can tell.”

  I said, “You think they came back and killed Dominika?”

  “I’d say they’re fairly near the top of possible suspects, Tanner. And you still have no idea who they might be?”

  I shrugged. “I’m a popular man, evidently.”

  Pransky coughed. “Maybe we should, um…” He gestured with one grey hand towards the inner chamber of the tent.

  We stepped through, into the part of the tent where Dominika performed her operations.

  Dominika was floating on her back, half a metre above her surgical couch, suspended in that position by the steam-powered, articulated-boom suspended harness which encased her lower half. The harness’s pneumatics were still hissing, gentle fingers of vapour rising towards the ceiling. Top-heavy, she had canted back to an angle where her hips floated higher than her shoulders. The head of someone thinner than Dominika would probably have lolled to one side, but the rolls of fat around her neck kept her face pointed at the ceiling, and her eyes were wide open, glazed white, her jaw hanging slackly open.

  Snakes covered her body.

  The largest of them were dead, draped across her girth like patterned scarves, their inanimate bodies reaching to the bed. There was no doubting that they were dead; they’d been slit along the belly with a knife, and their blood had painted ribbons on the couch. Smaller snakes were still alive, coiled across her belly, or the couch, although they hardly moved even when I approached them, which I did with exquisite caution.

  I thought of the snake sellers I had seen in the Mulch. That was where these animals had come from, purchased solely to provide detail to this tableau.

  “I told you you wouldn’t like it,” Pransky said, his voice cutting through the stunned silence of our party. “I’ve seen some sick things in my time, believe me, but this must be…”

  “There’s a method to it,” I said, softly. “It’s not as sick as it seems.”

  “You must be insane.” Pransky had said it, but I had no doubt that the sentiment was felt by the others present. It was hard to blame them for that, but I knew what I was saying was right.

  “What do you mean?” Zebra asked. “A method—”

  “It’s meant as a message,” I said, moving around the levitating corpse so that I could get a better look at her face. “A kind of calling-card. A message to me, actually.”

  I touched Dominika’s face, the slight pressure of my hand making her head turn to one side, so that the others could see the neat wound bored into the middle of her forehead.

  “Because,” I said, voicing what I knew to be the truth for the first time, “Tanner Mirabel did it.”

  Somewhere near my sixtieth birthday—though I had long since ceased to mark the passage of time (what was the point, when you were immortal?) and had doctored ship’s records to obscure the details of my own past—I knew that the time had come to make my move. The choice of time was not really mine, forced upon me by the mechanics of our crossing, but I could still let the moment pass if I wished, forgetting about the plans which had occupied my mind so thoroughly for half my life. My preparations had been meticulous, and had I chosen to abandon them, my plans would never have come to light. For a moment I allowed myself the bittersweet pleasure of balancing vastly opposed futures: one in which I was triumphant; one in which I submitted meekly to the greater good of the Flotilla, even if that meant hardship for my own people. And for the tiniest of moments I hesitated.

  “On my mark,” said Old Man Armesto of the Brazilia.

  “Deceleration burn ignition in, twenty seconds.”

  “Agreed,” I said, from the vantage point of my command seat, poised high in the bridge. Two other voices echoed me with tiny timelags; the Captains of the Baghdad and the Palestine.

  Journey’s End lay close ahead, its star the brighter of the 61 Cygni pair, a bloodshot lantern in the night. Against all the odds, against all the predictions, the Flotilla had crossed interstellar space successfully. The fact that one ship had been destroyed did not taint that victory in the slightest degree. The planners who had launched the fleet had always known that there would be losses. And those losses, of course, had not been confined solely to that ship. Many of the momio sleepers would never see their destination. But that, too, had not been unexpected.

  It was, in short, a triumph, however one looked at it.

  But the crossing was not yet finished; the Flotilla still at cruise velocity. Though only the tiniest of distances remained to be crossed, it was the most significant part of the journey. That, at least, was not something the planners had ever guessed. They had never predicted the depth of disharmony that would creep into the enterprise over time.

  “Ten seconds,” said Armesto. “Good luck to all of us. Good luck and Godspeed. It’ll be a damned close race now.”

  Not as close as you think, I thought.

  The remaining seconds counted down, and then—not quite synchronously—three suns blazed in the night where an instant before there had been only stars. For the first time in a century and a half the engines of the Flotilla were burning again—wolfing down matter and antimatter and spewing out pure energy, beginning to whittle down the eight per cent of light velocity which the Flotilla still had.

  Had I chosen otherwise, I would have heard the great structural skeleton of the Santiago creak as the ship adjusted itself to the stress of deceleration. The burn itself would have been a low, distant rumble, felt rather than heard, but no less exhilarating for that. But I had made my decision; nothing had changed.

  “We have indications of clean burns across the board…” said the other Captain, before a note of hesitation entered his voice. “Santiago; we have no indication that you have initiated your burn… are you experiencing technical difficulties, Sky?”

  “No,” I said, calmly and crisply. “No difficulties at this moment.”

  “Then why haven’t you initiated your burn!” It was less a question than a scream of indignation.

  “Because we’re not going to.” I smiled to myself; the cat was well and truly out of the bag. The crux point had been passed; one possible future selected and another discarded. “Sorry, Captain, but we’ve decided to stay in cruise mode a little longer.”

  “That’s madness!” I swore I could hear Armesto’s spittle spraying against the microphone like surf. “We have intelligence, Haussmann—good intelligence. We know damn well that you haven’t made any engine modifications that we haven’t made as well. You have no means of reaching Journey’s End ahead of us! You have to initiate burn now and follow the rest of us…”

  I toyed with the armrest of my seat. “Or what, exactly?”

  “Or we’ll…”

  “Do nothing. We all know it’s fatal to turn off those engines once they’re burning antimatter.” That was true. Any antimatter engine was ferociously unstable, designed to keep burning until it had exhausted all its reactant, supplied from the magnetic-confinement reservoir. The whispering engine techs had a technical name for the particular magnetohydrodynamic instability which prevented the flow from being curtailed without leakage, but all that mattered was the consequence: the fuel for the dec
eleration phase had to be stored in a completely separate reservoir from that which had boosted the ship up to cruise speed. And now that the other three ships had initiated burn, they were more or less committed to it.

  By not following them, I had betrayed a terrible trust.

  “This is Zamudio of the Palestine,” said another voice. “We have stable flow here, green lights across the board… we’re going to attempt a mid-burn shutdown before Haussmann falls too far ahead of us. We may never get as good a chance as this.”

  “For God’s sake, don’t do it!” said Armesto. “Our own simulations say a shutdown has only a thirty per cent chance of…”

  “Our sims say it’s better than that… marginally.”

  “Hold on, please. We’re sending you our technical data… don’t make a move until you’ve seen it, Zamudio.”

  They debated the matter for the next hour, tossing simulations back and forth, arguing about the interpretation. They thought that their conversations were private, of course, but my agents had long ago placed bugs on the other ships, just as I assumed they had bugged my own. I listened, quietly amused, as the arguments grew more frantic and rancorous. It was no small matter, to risk an anti-matter detonation after a century and a half of travel. Under ordinary circumstances they would have extended their debate for months, perhaps even years, weighing the significance of every small gain against every possible death. But all the while they were slowing down, with the Santiago pulling triumphantly ahead of them, and every instant that they delayed made that distance worse.

  “We’ve talked enough,” Zamudio said. “We’re initiating shutdown.”

  “Please, no,” Armesto said. “At least let us think about it for a day, will you?”

  “And let that bastard creep ahead of us? Sorry, but we’re already committed to a shutdown.” Zamudio’s voice became businesslike as he read status variables aloud. “Damping thrust in five seconds… bottle topology looks stable… constricting fuel flow… three… two… one…”

  What followed was only a howl of static. One of the new suns had suddenly turned nova, out-shining its brethren. It was a white rose, edged in purple which shaded to black. I stared at it wordlessly, marvelling at the hellfire. A whole ship gone in an eyeblink, just the way Titus had told me the Islamabad had died. There was something cleansing about that white light… something bordering on the pious. I watched as it faded. A breath of hot ions slammed into my own ship, a ghost of what had been the Palestine, and for a moment the status displays across the bridge quavered and ran with static, but the ships of the Flotilla were now so far apart that the demise of one could not harm the others.

  When comms returned, I heard the voice of the other Captain speaking. “You bastard, Haussmann,” Armesto said. “You did that.”

  “Because I was cleverer than any of you?”

  “Because you lied to us, you piece of shit!” Now I recognised the voice of Omdurman. “Titus was worth a million of you, Haussmann… I knew your father. Compared to him you’re just… nothing. Dirt. And you know what the worst of it is? You’ve killed your own people as well.”

  “I don’t think I’d be quite that stupid,” I said.

  “Oh, don’t count on it,” Armesto said. “I told you our intelligence was good, Haussmann. We know your ship like our own.”

  “We have intelligence too,” Omdurman said. “You haven’t got any damned tricks up your sleeve. You’ll have to start slowing down or you’ll overshoot our destination; come to dead-stop in inter-stellar space.”

  “It’s not going to happen like that,” I said.

  This was nothing like the way I had planned it, but sometimes you just had to abandon the precise letter of the plan, following instead the broad outline; hearing the grand shape of a symphony rather than the individual notes. With Norquinco’s assistance I had made some modifications to my command seat. I flipped up a cover set into the black leather of the armrest, unfolding a flat, button-studded console which I placed across my lap. My fingers skated across the matrix of buttons, bringing up a map. It was the cactus-like schematic of the ship’s spine, showing the sleepers and their corporeal status.

  Over the years, I had worked very diligently to separate the wheat from the chaff.

  I had made sure that as many of the dead as possible were collected together in their own sleeper rings, studded along the spine. It had been laborious work at first, for the sleepers died not according to my neatly devised plans but in ways that were annoyingly random. At first, anyway. Then I had begun to get the magic touch. I needed only to wish that certain momios would die and it seemed to happen. Of course, there were rituals that needed to be performed for the magic to work properly. I had to visit them, touch their caskets. Sometimes (though it seemed to me that I worked unconsciously) I would make tiny adjustments to the settings of their support systems. It was not that I deliberately set out to harm them… but in some way that I could not quite fathom, my handiwork was always sufficient to bring about that end. In truth, it was magic.

  And it had served me powerfully. The dead and the living were now quite separated. One whole row of sleeper rings—sixteen of them, holding one hundred and sixty caskets—was now occupied solely by the demised. Half of another row; another eighty-six dead. A quarter of the sleepers were gone now.

  I tapped the sequence of commands which I had long ago committed to memory. Norquinco had given me that sequence, after years of covert work. It had been a stroke of genius, recruiting him to the cause. According to all the technical manuals, and the best expert advice, what I was about to do should not have been possible, prevented by a slew of safety interlocks. Over the years, as he had slowly worked his way through the hierarchy of the audit team, Norquinco had found ways around every supposedly watertight failsafe, concealing his labours by stealth and cunning.

  And with the work Norquinco had grown in confidence. At first, I had been surprised by this transformation, until I realised that it had always been inevitable, once the man had been ensconced into the audit team. Norquinco had been forced to go through the motions of functioning in a normal human environment, rather than his usual studied isolation. As he had risen to a position of seniority in the team, Norquinco had moulded himself to the role with worrying adaptability. There came a point when I no longer had to intervene in Norquinco’s promotions.

  But I’d never really forgiven him for his betrayal aboard the Caleuche.

  We met only periodically; each time I noticed an incremental increase in Norquinco’s cockiness. At first, it had been easy to dismiss. The work was proceeding apace, Norquinco’s reports detailing each layer of safeguards which he had breached. I had demanded demonstrations to show that the work had really been done, and Norquinco had obliged. I had had no doubt that the task would be completed to my satisfaction by the time I needed it.

  But there had been a glitch.

  Four months earlier, after the last layer of safeguard machinery had been bypassed, the work, to all intents and purposes, was complete. And suddenly I understood why Norquinco had been so obliging.

  “The technical term for the arrangement I am about to propose,” Norquinco said, “is, I believe, blackmail.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  We had met alone along the spine corridor, near node seven, during one of our inspection tours. “Oh, I’m very serious, Sky. You realise that now, don’t you?”

  “I’m getting the picture.” I looked along the corridor. I thought I could see a pulsing orange glow somewhere down it. “What exactly is it you want, Norquinco?”

  “Influence, Sky. The audit squad isn’t enough now. It’s a dead-end job for computer geeks. Technical work just doesn’t interest me any more. I’ve been aboard an alien spacecraft. That changes one’s expectations. I want something more challenging. You promised me glories when we were aboard the Caleuche; I haven’t forgotten. Now I want some of that power and responsibility.”

  I chose my words carefully. “There�
��s a world of difference between hacking some software and running a ship, Norquinco.”

  “Oh, don’t patronise me. I do realise that, you arrogant bastard. That’s what I said about wanting a challenge. And don’t think I want your job either—not yet, anyway. I’ll let the law of natural succession work for me there. No; I want a senior officer’s position—one echelon below you will do nicely. A cushy position with excellent prospects for when we make landfall. I’ll carve up a little fiefdom for myself on Journey’s End, I think.”

  “I think you’re reaching, Norquinco.”

  “Reaching? Yes, of course I’m reaching. Otherwise blackmail wouldn’t have to come into it.”

  The orange glow down the corridor had grown closer, accompanied by a faint rumbling. “Getting you onto the audit team was one thing, Norquinco. You at least had the right background. But there’s no way I can get you into any officer’s position—no matter how many strings I pull.”

  “That’s not my problem. You’re always telling me how clever you are, Sky. Now all you have to do is use some of that cleverness; use your skill and judgement to find a way to get me into an officer’s uniform.”

  “Some things just aren’t possible.”

  “Not for you, Sky. Not for you. Or are you going to disappoint me?”

  “If I can’t find a way…”

  “Then everyone else will find out about your little plan for the sleepers. Not to mention what happened with Ramirez. Or Balcazar, for that matter. And I haven’t even mentioned the grub.”

  “You’ll be implicated too.”

  “I’ll say I was only following orders. It was only recently that I realised what you had in mind.”

  “You knew all along.”

  “But no one will know that, will they?”

  I was about to answer, but the noise of the approaching freight transport would have forced me to raise my voice. The string of pods was rumbling towards us along its rail, returning from the engine section. Wordlessly, the two of us walked backwards until we had reached one of the recesses which allowed us to stand aside as the train slid by. The trains, like much else on the Santiago, were old and not particularly well cared-for. They functioned, but much non-essential equipment had been removed from them for use elsewhere, or not fixed when it malfunctioned.