Chasm City

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 annexe 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 muscles 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 co-ordinate 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 octogenarian 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…”

“Really, sir?”

“Not literally, you damn fool! What would a man weigh, one ten millionth of the mass of one our ships? What kind of bloody edge would that have been?”

“Not much of one, sir.”

“I don’t damn well think so, no. The trouble with you, Titus, is you take everything I say too damn literally… like a bloody amanuensis hanging off my every word, quill poised above parchment…”

“I’m not Titus, sir. Titus was my father.”

“What?” For a moment Balcazar glared at him, his eyes yellow with suspicion. “Oh, never mind, damn you!”

But this was actually one of Balcazar’s better days. There had been no outright lapses into surrealism. He could be very much worse: as poetically oblique as any sphinx, when the mood seized him. Perhaps there had once been a context in which even his maddest statement might have meant something, but to Sky they sounded only like premature deathbed ramblings. That was no problem of his. Balcazar seldom invited any kind of riposte when he was in soliloquy mode. If Sky had really back-answered him—or even dared to question some minute, trifling detail in Balcazar’s stream-of-consciousness—the shock of it would probably have given him multiple organ failure, even with the relaxant Rengo had administered.

How utterly convenient that would have been, Sky thought.

After a few minutes, he said, “I suppose you can tell me what this is all about now, sir.”

“Of course, Titus. Of course.”

And as placidly as if they were two old friends catching up on lost times over a couple of pisco sours, the Captain told him that they were heading to a conclave of senior Flotilla crew. It was to be the first in many years, precipitated by the unexpected arrival of another update from Sol system. A message from home, in other words, containing elaborate technical blueprints. It was the kind of exterior event which was still sufficient to push the Flotilla towards some kind of unity, even in the midst of the cold war. It was the same kind of gift which might have annihilated the Islamabad, when Sky was very young. Even now, no one was entirely sure whether Khan had chosen to sip from that poisoned chalice, or whether the accident had just happened then out of a sense of malign cosmic caprice. Now there was a promise of another squeeze in engine efficiency, if only they would make certain trifling changes to the magnetic confinement topology; all very safe, the message said—tested endlessly back home, with mock-ups of the Flotilla’s engines; the potential for error was really negligible provided certain basic precautions were taken…

But at the same time, another message had arrived.

Don’t do it, said the other message. They’re trying to trick you.

It hardly mattered that the other message offered no plausible reason why such trickery might be attempted. The doubt that it brought was enough to lend this conclave an entirely new frisson of tension.

Eventually they were within visual range of the Palestine, where the conclave would be held. A whole swarm of shuttle taxis was converging on her from the other three ships, carrying senior ships’ officers. The choice of the meeting place had been arrived at in haste, but that did not mean the process had been devoid of difficulty. Yet the Palestine was the obvious choice. In any war, Sky thought, cold or otherwise, it was always to the mutual benefit of all participants to agree on a neutral ground, whether it be for negotiation, exchange of spies or—if all else failed—early demonstration of new weapons—and the Palestine was the ship that had assumed that role.

“Do you think this is really a trick, sir?” Sky asked, when Balcazar had finished one of his coughing sessions. “I mean, why would they do that?”

“Why would they bloody do what?”

“Try and kill us, sir, by transmitting erroneous technical data? There’d be no gain for them back home. It’s a wonder they even bother sending us anything.”

“Precisely.” Balcazar spat the word, as if its obviousness was beneath contempt. “There’d be no gain in sending us something useful, either—and it would be a lot more work than sending us something dangerous. Can’t you see that, you little fool? God help all of us if one of your generation ever assumes command…” He trailed off.

Sky waited for him to finish coughing, then wheezing. “But there must still be a motivation…”

“Pure malice.”

He was treading very thin ice now, but he soldiered on. “The malice could just as easily lie in the message warning us not to implement the change.”

“Oh, and you’re willing to risk four thousand lives to put that little bit of schoolboy speculation to the test, are you?”

“It’s not my job to take such a decision, sir. I’m just saying I don’t envy you the responsibility.”

“And what would you know about responsibility anyway, you insolent little prick?”

Little now, Sky thought. But one day… perhaps one day not too far from this one, all that might change. Thinking it best not to reply, he flew the taxi on in silence, broken only by the old man’s cardiovascular labours.

But he thought deeply. It was something that Balcazar had said; that remark about it being better to bury the dead in space, rather than carry them to the destination world. It made a kind of sense, when he thought about it.

Every kilogramme that the ship carried was another kilogramme that had to be decelerated down from interstellar cruise speed. The ships massed close on a million tonnes—ten million times the mass of a man, as Balcazar had said. The simple laws of Newtonian physics told Sky that decreasing the mass of a ship by that amount would bring a proportional increase in the rate at which the ship could decelerate, assuming the same engine efficiency.

An improvement of one part in ten million was hardly spectacular… but who said you had to make do with the mass of just one man?

Sky thought about all the dead passengers the Santiago was carrying: the sleepers who were medically beyond any kind of revival. Only human sentimentality would argue that they needed to be brought to Journey’s End. And for that matter, the huge and heavy machinery that supported them could be ditched as well. He thought about it some more, and began to think that it would not be impossible to shave off tonnes from the ship’s mass. Put like that, it almost sounded compelling. The improvement would still be much less than one part in a thousand. Still—who was to say more sleepers would not be lost in the years to come? A thousand things could go wrong.

It was a risky business, being frozen.

“Maybe we should all just wait and see, Titus,” the Captain said, jolting him from his thoughts. “That wouldn’t be such a bad approach to take, would it?”

“Wait and see, sir?”

“Yes.” There was a cold clarity to the Captain now, but Sky knew that it could go as easily as it came. “Wait and see what they do about it, I mean. They’ll have received the message as well, you realise. They’ll have debated what to do about it as well, of course—but they won’t have been able to talk it over with any of us.”

The Captain sounded lucid enough, but Sky was having trouble following him. Doing his best to conceal the fact, he said, “It’s a long time since you’ve mentioned them, isn’t it?”

“Of course. One doesn’t go around blabbing, Titus—you of all people would know that. Loose lips sink ships, that sort of thing. Or get them discovered.”

“Discovered, sir?”

“Well, we know damn well that our friends on the other three don’t even seem to know about them. We’ve had spies penetrate right to the highest echelons on the other ships, and there’s been no word about them at all.”

“Could we know for sure, though, sir?”

“Oh, I think so, Titus.”

“You do, sir?”

“Of course. You keep your ear to the ground on the Santiago, don’t you? You know that the crew are at least familiar with the rumour of the sixth ship, even if most of them don’t give it any credence.”

Sky masked his surprise as well as he was able. “The sixth ship’s just a myth to most of them, sir.”

“And that’s the way we’ll keep it. We, on the other hand, know better.”

Sky thought to himself: so it’s real. After all this time, the damned thing really exists. At the very least in Balcazar’s mind. But the Captain also seemed to be talking as if Titus had been in on the secret himself. Since the sixth ship constituted a possible security issue—no matter how little might have been known about that—it was entirely possible that he had been. And Titus had died before he could pass that particular item of knowledge to his successor.

Sky thought of Norquinco, his friend from the time when he had ridden the trains. He remembered well how Norquinco had been utterly convinced of the reality of the sixth ship. Gomez, too, had needed little convincing. It had been a year or so since he had spoken to either, but Sky imagined the two of them here now, nodding silently, enjoying the way he was forced to calmly accept this truth; this thing that he had so vehemently argued against. He had hardly given the matter any thought since that conversation on the train, but now he racked his brains, trying to remember what Norquinco had told them.

“Most of the crew who buy into the rumour at all,” he said, “assume that the sixth ship is dead; just drifting behind us.”

“Which only shows that there’s a grain of truth underlying the rumour. She’s dark, of course—no lights, no strong evidence of human presence at all—but all of that could be subterfuge. Her crew could still be alive, running her quietly. We can’t guess their psychology, of course, and we still don’t know what really happened.”

“It would be good to know. Especially now.” Sky paused and took what he knew to be a major risk. “Given the current gravity of the situation, with this technical message from back home, is there anything else I need to know about the sixth ship—anything which might help us make the right choice?”

To his relief, the Captain shook his head without rancour.

“You’ve seen all that I have, Titus. We really don’t know anything more. I’m afraid those rumours encapsulate as much knowledge as we really have.”

“An expedition would settle the matter.”

“As you never tire of telling me. But consider the risks: yes, she’s just within range of one our shuttles. About half a light-second behind us the last time we took an accurate radar fix, although she must have been a lot closer once. It would be simpler still if we could refuel when we got there. But what if they don’t want visitors? They’ve maintained the illusion of non-existence for more than a generation. They might not be willing to give that up without a fight.”

“Unless they’re dead. Some of the crew think we attacked them, and then erased them from the historical record.”

The Captain shrugged. “Perhaps that’s what happened. If you could erase a crime like that, you would, wouldn’t you? Some of them might have survived, though, and chosen to lie low, so they can spring a surprise on us later in the voyage.”

“You think this message from back home might be enough to make them break their cover?”

“Perhaps. If it encourages them to fiddle with their antimatter engine, and the message really is a trap…”

“They’ll light up half the sky.”

The Captain chuckled, a wet cruel sound, and that seemed to be the cue for him to doze off properly. The rest of the journey passed without incident, but Sky’s mind was racing anyway, trying to digest what he had learned. Every time he said the words they were like a casual slap against his cheek; punishment for his own presumption in doubting Norquinco and the other believers. The sixth ship existed. The sixth damned ship existed…

And that, potentially, could change anything.