Chasm City

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.

Amerikano.

Quirrenbach tapped a few keys, and I heard a series of distant thumps. Moments later, the whole pipe thrummed as if sounding a monstrously low note. “That’s the steam flow being rerouted along another network, for inspection mode.”

He pressed a button and the thick green glass whisked aside, revealing a mass of bronze machinery, nearly filling the bore of the pipe. At either end it was all pistons and accordioned sections, festooned with pipes and metal whiskers, servo-motors and black suction pads. It was difficult to tell whether it was ancient—something from the Amerikano period—or much more recent, cobbled together since the plague. Either way, it didn’t look very reliable. But in the middle of the machine was a skeletal space equipped with two large padded seats and some rudimentary controls. It made a wheeler look like an exercise in spaciousness.

“Start talking,” I said.

“It’s an inspection robot,” Quirrenbach said. “A machine for wriggling along the pipe, checking for leaks, weak spots, that kind of thing. Now it’s… well, you figure it out.”

“A transportation system.” I studied it myself, wondering what were the chances of riding it and surviving. “Clever, I’ll give you that. Well—how long will it take to go where it goes?”

“I’ve ridden it once,” Quirrenbach said. “It wasn’t any picnic.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“An hour or two to get down below the mist layer. Same time to come back. I don’t advise that you spend too long when you get there.”

“Fine. I’m not planning to. Will I pass for someone in the know if I take this thing down?”

He eyed me over. “Only people in the know arrive via this route. With Vadim’s coat you’ll pass for a supplier, or at least someone in the loop—provided you don’t open your mouth too much. Just tell whoever meets you that you’ve come to see Gideon.”

“Sounds like it couldn’t be easier.”

“Oh, you’ll manage. A monkey could run the machine. Sorry. No offence intended.” Quirrenbach smiled quickly and nervously. “Look, it’s easy. You won’t have any trouble telling when you’ve arrived.”

“No,” I said. “Especially as you’re coming along for the ride.”

“Bad move, Tanner. Bad move.” Quirrenbach started looking around for moral support.

“Tanner’s right,” Zebra said, shrugging. “It would make a kind of sense.”

“But I’ve never been close to Gideon. They won’t necessarily take me any more seriously than they take Tanner. What am I supposed to say when they ask why we’re there?”

Zebra glared at him. “Improvise, you spineless little shit. Say you heard some rumours about Gideon’s health, and you wanted to check them out for yourself. Say there are stories about the quality of the final product reaching the streets. It’ll work. It’s the same kind of story that got my sister close to Gideon, after all.”

“You’ve no idea whether she got close at all.”

“Well, just do your best, Quirrenbach—I’m sure Tanner will be there to give you all the moral support you need.”

“I’m not doing it.”

Zebra waved her gun towards him. “Want a rethink?”

He looked down the barrel of the gun, then at Zebra, his lips pursed. “Damn you as well, Taryn. Consider your bridges well and truly burned, as far as our professional relationship is concerned.”

“Just get in the machine, will you?”

I turned to Zebra and Chanterelle. “Take care. I don’t think you’ll be in any danger here, but keep an eye out in any case. I expect to be back within a few hours. Can you wait that long?” Zebra nodded. “I could, but I’m not planning to. There’s enough room in that thing for three of us, if Chanterelle can hold the fort back here.” Chanterelle shrugged. “Can’t say I’m exactly looking forward to spending a few hours up here on my own, but I think I’d rather be here than down there. I guess this is one you owe to your sister?”

Zebra nodded. “She’d have done the same for me, I think.”

“Way to go. I just hope the trip’s worth it.”

I spoke to Chanterelle now. “Don’t put yourself in any more danger than necessary. We can find our own way out of here if we have to, so if anything happens… you know where the car’s parked.”

“Don’t worry about me, Tanner. Just take care of yourself.”

“It’s a habit of mine.” I slapped Quirrenbach on the shoulder, with all the hearty bonhomie I’d have liked to have felt. “Well, are you ready? You never know. You might be inspired on the way down; something even more depressing than normal.”

He looked at me grimly. “Let’s get this over with, Tanner.”

Despite what Zebra had said, there was barely room for two people in the inspection robot, and it was a painful squeeze to accommodate a third. But Zebra’s articulation was not fully human, and she had an uncanny ability to fold herself into what space remained, even if the process caused her some discomfort.

“I hope to God this isn’t going to take too long,” she said.

“Start her up,” I told Quirrenbach.

“Tanner, there’s still…”

“Just start the fucking thing up,” Zebra said. “Or the only composing you’ll be doing is decomposing.”

That did the trick; Quirrenbach pressed a button and the machine rumbled into life. It clunked its way along the pipe, moving like a slow mechanical centipede. The machine’s front and back moved jerkily, the suction grips hammering the wall, but the part where we were seated travelled relatively smoothly. Though there was no steam in the tunnel now, the metal sides were hot to the touch and the air was like a steady belch from the depths of hell. It was cramped and dark except for the weak illumination from the basic controls placed in front of our seats. The pipeline walls were smooth as glacial ice, polished that way by the monstrous pressures of the steam. Though the pipe had started out horizontally, it soon began to curve, gently at first, and then to something that was not far off vertical. My seat was now a deeply uncomfortable harness from which I was hanging, constantly aware of the kilometres of pipe that fell away below me and the fact that all that was stopping me dropping into those depths was the suction pressure of the cups arrayed around the inspection robot.

“We’re heading for the cracking station, aren’t we?” Zebra said, raising her voice above the machine’s hammering progress. “That’s where they make it, isn’t it?”

“Makes a kind of sense,” I said, thinking about the station. That was where all the pipes came from: the city’s great taproots. The station nestled deep in the chasm, lost under the perpetual mist layer. It was where titanic conversion machines sucked in the hot, raw gaseous poison rising from the chasm’s depths. “It’s out of the way of any jurisdiction, and the people who crew it must have the kinds of advanced chemical tools they’d need to synthesise something like Dream Fuel.”

“You think everyone who works down there is in on the secret?”

“No; probably just a small clique of workers producing the drug, unknown to anyone else in the station. Isn’t that the case, Quirrenbach?”

“I told you,” he said, adjusting a control so that our rate of progress increased, the hammering becoming a harsh tattoo. “I was never allowed close to the source.”

“So how much do you know, exactly? You must know something about the synthesis process.”

“Why would it interest you if I did?”

“Because it doesn’t make much sense to me,” I said. “The plague made a lot of things stop working. Implants—complicated ones, anyway. Sub-cellular nano robots; medichines—whatever you want to call them. That was bad news for the postmortals, wasn’t it? Their therapies usually needed some intervention by those little machines. Now they had to make do without.”

“And?”

“Suddenly something else shows up which almost does the job just as well. Better, in some ways. Dream Fuel’s childishly easy to administer—it doesn’t even need to be tailored to the person it’s being used on. It heals injuries and it restores memories.” I thought back to the man I’d seen thrashing on the ground, desperate for a tiny drop of the scarlet stuff even though the plague had already subsumed half his body. “It even confers protection from the plague for people who haven’t discarded their machines. It’s almost too good to be true, Quirrenbach.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning I’m wondering how something that useful ended up being invented by criminals. It would be hard enough to imagine it being created before the plague, even when the city still had the means to create wonderful new technologies. Now? There are parts of the Mulch where they haven’t even got steam power. And while there might be a few high-tech enclaves in the Canopy, they’re more interested in playing games than developing miracle cures. But that seems to be exactly what they’ve ended up with—even if the supply is currently a little tight.”

“It didn’t exist before the plague,” Zebra said.

“Too much of a coincidence,” I said. “Which makes me wonder if they might both have the same origin.”

“Don’t flatter yourself that you’re the first to have had that thought.”

“No, I wouldn’t dream of it.” I scraped sweat from my brow, already feeling like I’d been in a sauna for an hour. “But you have to admit the point is valid.”

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t profess any great interest in the matter.”

“Not even when the fate of the city might depend on it?”

“Except it wouldn’t, would it? A few thousand postmortals, ten at the most. Dream Fuel may be a precious substance to those who’ve acquired a dependence on it, but for the majority it’s of no con-sequence whatsoever. Let them die; see if I care. In a few centuries everything that’s happened here will be little more than a historical footnote. I, meanwhile, have considerably larger and more ambitious fish to fry.” Quirrenbach adjusted some more controls, tapping a gauge here and there.

“But then I’m an artist. All this is mere diversion. You, on the other hand… I confess I really don’t understand you, Tanner. Yes, you may now have some obligation to Taryn, but your interest in Dream Fuel was apparent from the moment we searched Vadim’s cabin. By your own admission you came here to murder Argent Reivich, not to sort out a minor supply shortage in our sordid little drugs industry.”

“Things became a little more complicated, that’s all.”

“And?”

“There’s something about Dream Fuel, Quirrenbach. Something that makes me think I’ve seen it before.”

But there was a way in. Sky, Norquinco and Gomez located it by undocking and scouting around the ship for another thirty minutes, until they found the hole that Oliveira and Lago must have used to get inside. It was only a few tens of metres from where Oliveira’s shuttle was parked; near the point where the spine connected to the rest of the ship. It was so small that Sky had missed it completely on the first pass, lost as it was amongst the blisterlike protuberances on the ship’s ruined side.

“I think we should go back,” Gomez said.

“We’re going in.”

“Didn’t you listen to a word of what Oliveira said to us? And doesn’t it worry you in the slightest that this ship appears to be made of something strange? That it looks like a crude attempt at copying one of our ships?”

“It worries me, yes. It also makes me even more determined to get inside.”

“Lago went inside as well.”

“Well, I guess we’ll just have to keep a look-out for him, won’t we?” Sky was ready now. He had not bothered removing his helmet since the last time he had gone through the airlock.

“I also want to see what’s inside,” Norquinco said.

“One of us at least should stay aboard the shuttle,” Gomez said. “If the ship that swept us with the radar gets here in the next few hours, it would be good to have someone ready to do something about it.”

“Fine,” said Sky. “You just volunteered for the job.”

“I didn’t mean…”

“I don’t care what you meant. Just accept it. If Norquinco and I run into anything that needs your input, you’ll be the first to know.”

They left the shuttle, using thruster harnesses to cross the short distance to the Caleuche’s hull. When they landed near the hole it was like touching down on a softly yielding mattress. They stood up, gripped to the ship by the adhesive soles of their shoes.

There was an obvious and vital question that Sky had almost managed not to ask himself, but now it must be dealt with. There was no way in his experience that the hull of a ship could be transmuted to this sponge-like state. Metal simply did not do that by itself—even if it had been exposed to the glare of an antimatter explosion. No; whatever had happened here was far beyond his experience. It was as if the ghost ship’s hull had been replaced, atom by atom, by some new and disturbingly pliant substance which replicated the old details in only the broadest terms. There was shape and texture and colour, but no function, like a crude cast of the original ship. Was he even standing on the Caleuche, or was that just another flawed assumption?

Sky and Norquinco walked to the lip of the hole, poking the muzzles of their guns into the gloom. The lip was ragged and scorched with heat marks and had the puckered, wrinkled look of a half-closed mouth. A metre or two below the surface, however, the wall of the hole was lined with a thick, fibrous mass which glistened gently as their torchlight skittered across it. Sky thought he re-cognised that mass; it was a matrix of extruded diamond fibres embedded in epoxy, a quick-drying paste that could be used to repair hull punctures. Oliveira had probably located a weak spot on the Caleuche —he must have taken the time to make a density map before selecting this point—and had then used something to cut through, a laser torch or even the exhaust of his shuttle. Once he had bored the shaft, he had lined it with the spray-on sealant from his shuttle’s emergency kit, presum-ably to prevent it collapsing shut.

“We’ll go in this way,” Sky said. “Oliveira must have found the most promising entry point; there’s no sense in duplicating his effort when we’ve so little time to spare.”

They checked that the inertial compasses built into their suits were functioning accurately, defining their current position as a zero point. The Caleuche was neither spinning nor tumbling, so the compasses would prevent them getting lost once they were inside, but even if the compasses proved unreliable, they would be able to retrace their way to the wound in the hull, deploying a line as they went.

Sky halted in his thoughts, wondering why he had just thought of the hole in the hull as a wound?

They went in, Sky first. The hole led into a rough-walled tunnel which cut straight into the hull, threading down for ten or twelve metres. Normally by this point—had the ship been the Santiago —they would have passed right through the hull’s outer integument and would be passing through a series of narrow service cavities, squeezing between the multitude of data-lines, power cables and refrigerant pipes; perhaps even one of the train tunnels. There were, Sky knew, points where the hull was more or less solid for several metres, but he was reasonably sure this was not one of them.

Now the sides of the shaft, or tunnel, or however he preferred to think of it, had become harder and more glossy—less like elephant hide and more like insect chitin. He shone his torch light ahead into the gloom, the beam sliding off the shining black surface. Then—just when it looked like it would end abruptly—the shaft jogged violently to the right. Fully suited, with the additional bulk of the thruster harness, it was an effort to squeeze round the bend—but at least the smooth-sided shaft would not snag his suit or rip away any vital component. He looked back and saw Norquinco following him, the other man’s slightly larger bulk making the exercise even less easy.

But now the shaft widened out, and after it intersected with another the going became even easier. Periodically Sky stopped and asked Norquinco to ensure that the line was spooling out properly and that the line was still taut, but the inertial compasses were still functioning properly, recording their movements relative to the entry point.

He tried the radio. “Gomez? Can you read me?”

“Loud and clear. What have you found?”

“Nothing. Yet. But I think we can say with some confidence that this isn’t the Caleuche. Norquinco and I must be twenty metres into the hull, and we’re still moving through what feels like solid material.”

Gomez waited for a few moments before answering. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“No, not if we keep on assuming this is a ship like our own. I don’t think it is. I think it’s some-thing else—something we definitely weren’t expecting.”

“Do you think it came from home—that it’s something they sent out after we left?”

“No. They’ve only had a century, Gomez. I don’t think that’s enough time to come up with some-thing like this.” They slithered deeper. “It doesn’t feel like anything human. It doesn’t even feel like we’re inside a machine.”

“But whatever it is, it just happens to look exactly like one of our own ships from the outside.”

“Yes—until you get close. My guess is it altered its shape to mimic us; some kind of protective camouflage. Which worked, didn’t it? Titus… my father… he always thought there was another Flotilla ship trailing us. That was disturbing, but it could be explained by some event which had happened in the past. If he’d known there was an alien ship following us, it would have changed everything.”

“What could he have done about it?”

“I don’t know. Alert the other ships, perhaps. He would have assumed it meant us harm.”

“Maybe he was right.”

“I don’t know. It’s been out here an awfully long time. It hasn’t done much in all those years.”

Something happened then—a noise that they felt, rather than heard, like the sonorous clang of a very large bell. They were floating through vacuum so the reverberation must have been transmitted through the hull.

“Gomez—what the hell was that?”

His voice came through weakly. “I don’t know—nothing happened here. But you’re suddenly a lot fainter.”

After we had been descending for nearly two hours, I saw something below, far down the vertical pipeline.

It was a faint golden glow, but it was coming closer.

I thought about the episode I had just had. I could still taste Sky’s fear as he entered the Caleuche; hard and metallic like the taste of a bullet. It seemed very much like the fear I was feeling myself. We were both descending into darkness; both of us seeking answers—or rewards—but also knowing that we were placing ourselves in great danger, with very little idea of what lay ahead. The way the episode resonated with my present experience was chilling. Sky had gone beyond simply infecting my mind with images. Now he seemed to be steering me, shaping my actions to commemorate his own ancient deeds; like a puppeteer whose strings stretched across three centuries of history. I clenched my fist, expecting that the episode would have caused blood to gush from my hand.

But my palm was perfectly dry.

The inspection robot continued its clunking descent. Nothing that Quirrenbach had done lately had made the machine move any faster. It was unbearably hot now and I reckoned none of us would have survived more than three or four hours before dying of heat exhaustion.

But it was getting lighter.

I soon saw why. Below us, but coming closer now, was a section of pipeline walled in filthy glass. Quirrenbach made the machine rotate so that none of us were easily visible by the time the robot began to descend through the transparent section. I still had a good view of the dark chamber we were moving through, a cavernous room infested with looming curved machinery: huge stovelike pressure vessels connected by networks of shiny intestinal tubing and festooned with slender catwalks. Rows of mighty turbines stretched away across the floor like sleeping dinosaurs.

We had reached the cracking station.

I looked around, wondering at the silent vastness.

“There doesn’t seem to be anyone on duty,” Zebra said.

“Is this normal?” I asked.

“Yes,” Quirrenbach said. “This part of the operation more or less runs itself. But I’d hated to have picked the one day when there was someone on duty who noticed the three of us coming down.”

Many dozens of pipes, much like the one I was descending, reached to the ceiling, a wide circular sheet of glass spoked by dark metal supports, and then rammed through it. Beyond it was only a stained soot-grey fog, for the cracking station lay deep in the chasm and was usually covered by the mist. Only when the fog parted momentarily, cleaved open by the chaotic thermals which spiralled up the chasm’s side, could I see the immense sheer walls of planetary rock rising above. Far, far above was the antenna-like extension of the stalk, where Sybilline had taken me to watch the mist jumpers. That had been only a couple of days ago, but it felt like an eternity.

We were far beneath the city now.

The inspection robot continued its descent. I had expected that we would stop somewhere near the floor of the cracking chamber, but Quirrenbach carried us slowly below the turbine floor, into darkness again. Perhaps there was another chamber to the cracking station, below the one we had passed through. I managed to cling to this idea for a while… until I knew that we had descended much too far for that to be the case.

The pipe we were in reached completely through the cracking station.

We were going deeper still. The pipe made a few jogging changes of direction, almost threading sideways at one point, and then we were descending again. It was so hot now that it was an effort to stay awake. My mouth was so dry that just thinking of drinking a glass of cold water was too much like mental torture. Somehow I stayed conscious, however—knowing I would need clarity of mind when I arrived wherever the robot was taking me.

Another thirty or forty minutes, then I saw another light below me.

It looked like journey’s end.

“You too. Norquinco—check the…” But even as he said it, Sky directed his torch back up the shaft they had come down, and he could see how the previously taut line was now beginning to drift, as if it had length to spare. It must have been severed somewhere further up the shaft.

“Let’s get out now,” Norquinco said. “We haven’t come very far—we can still find our, um, way back.”

“Through solid hull? That line didn’t cut itself.”

“Gomez has cutting equipment on the shuttle. He can get us out if he knows where we are.”

Sky thought about it. Everything that Norquinco said was correct, and any right-thinking person would now be doing their utmost to get back to the surface. Part of him wanted to do that as well. But another, stronger part was even more determined to understand what this ship—if it was a ship—actually meant. It was alien; he felt utterly sure of that now—and that meant it was the first evidence of alien intelligence any human being had ever witnessed. And—staggering though the odds were—it had latched itself onto his Flotilla, finding the slow, frail arks in the immensity of space. Yet it had chosen not to contact them, instead shadowing them for decades.

What would he find inside it? The supplies he had hoped to find aboard the Caleuche —even the unused antimatter—might be insignificant prizes compared to what really lay here, waiting to be exploited. Somehow or other this ship had matched velocities with the Flotilla, achieving eight per cent of lightspeed—and something made him certain that the alien ship had not found that in any-way difficult; that achieving this speed had probably been trivially simple. Somewhere inside this worm-ridden solid black hull there had to be recognisable mechanisms which had pushed her up to her current speed, and which he might be able to exploit—not necessarily understand, he admitted that—but certainly exploit.

And perhaps, much more than that.

He had to go deeper. Anything less than that would be failure. “We’re carrying on,” he told Norquinco. “For another hour. We’ll see what we find in that time, and we’ll be careful not to get lost. We still have the inertial compasses, don’t we?”

“I don’t like it, Sky.”

“Then think about what you might learn. Think of how this ship might work—its data networks; its protocols; the very paradigms underpinning her design. They might be exquisitely alien; as far beyond our modes of thinking as—I don’t know—a strand of DNA is beyond a single-chain polymer. It would take a special kind of mind to even begin to grasp some of the principles which might be at play. A mind of unusual calibre. Don’t tell me you aren’t the slightest bit curious, Norquinco.”

“I hope you burn in hell, Sky Haussmann.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

The inspection robot shunted itself into another branch of the pipe, just like the one where Quirrenbach had found it back on the surface. The hammering of the suction pads slowed, quietened and stopped, the machine ticking quietly to itself. We were in complete darkness and silence except for distant, thunder-like sounds of superheated steam roaring through remote parts of the pipe network. I touched the hot metal of the pipe with the tip of my finger and felt the faintest of tremors. I hoped that it didn’t mean there was a wall of scalding, thousand-atmosphere steam slamming towards us.

“It’s still not too late to turn back,” Quirrenbach said.

“Where’s your sense of curiosity?” I said, feeling like Sky Haussmann goading Norquinco forwards.

“About eight kilometres above us, I think.”

That was when someone slid back a panel on the side of the pipe and looked at all three of us as if we were a consignment of excrement someone had sent down from Chasm City.

“I know you,” the man said, nodding at Quirrenbach. Then he nodded once at me and once at Zebra. “I don’t know you. And I certainly don’t know you.”

“And I don’t know you from shit,” I said, getting my own word in before the man who had opened the pipe could get the edge over me. I was already heaving myself out of the robot, relishing the chance to stretch my legs for the first time in hours. “Now show me where I can get a drink.”

“Who are you?”

“The man asking you for a fucking drink. What’s wrong? Did someone seal up your ears with pig shit?”

He seemed to get the message. I’d gambled that the man wouldn’t be a major player in whatever operation was going on down here and that a large part of his job description would consist of taking abuse from visiting thugs a little higher up the food chain.

“Hey, no offence, man.”

“Ratko, this is Tanner Mirabel,” Quirrenbach said. “And this is… Zebra. I phoned through to say we were on our way down to see Gideon.”

“Yeah,” I said. “And if you didn’t get the message, that’s your fucking problem, not mine.”

Quirrenbach appeared impressed enough to want to join in. “That’s fucking right. And get the fucking man the… get the man the fucking drink he asked for.” He wiped a sleeve across his parched lips. “And get me one too, Ratko, you, er, fucking little cocksucker.”

“Cocksucker? That’s good, Quirrenbach. Really good.” The man patted him on the back. “Keep on taking the assertiveness lessons—they’re really paying off.” Then he looked at me with what was almost an expression of sympathy, a professional-to-professional thing. “All right. Follow me.”

We followed Ratko out of the pipe room. His expression was difficult to read, since his eyes were hidden behind grey goggles sprouting various delicate sensory devices. He wore a coat patterned like Vadim’s, but of shorter cut, its patches a little less rough and more lustrous.

“So, friends,” Ratko said. “What brings you down here?”

“Call it a quality inspection,” I said.

“No one’s complaining about quality, that I hear of.”

“Then maybe you haven’t been listening too well,” Zebra said. “The shit’s getting harder and harder to track down.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really,” I said. “It’s not just the Fuel shortage. There’s a problem with purity. Zebra and I supply Fuel to a portfolio of clients all the way up to the Rust Belt. And we’re getting complaints.” I tried to sound menacingly reasonable. “Now—that could mean a problem somewhere in the chain of supply between here and the Belt—there are a lot of weak links in that chain, and believe me, I’m investigating them all. But it could also mean the basic product is getting degraded. Cut, watered, whatever you want to call it. That’s why we’re making this a personal visit, with Mister Quirrenbach’s assistance. We need to see that there’s still such a thing as high-quality Dream Fuel being manufactured in the first place. If there isn’t, someone’s been lying to someone else and there’s going to be more shit hitting the fan than in a Force Ten shitstorm. Either way, it’s bad news for someone.”

“Hey, listen,” Ratko said, holding up his hands. “Everyone knows there are problems at source level. But only Gideon can help you with the why.”

I threw out a line. “I hear he enjoys his privacy.”

“He doesn’t have much choice, does he?”

I laughed, trying to make it sound as convincing as possible, without understanding what I was laughing at. But the way the man with the goggles had said it, he obviously thought he had made a joke of some kind.

“No, I guess not.” I changed the tone of my voice, now that he and I had established some shaky grounds for mutual respect. “Well, let’s put our relationship on a more friendly footing, shall we? You can put my doubts about the immediate quality of the product to rest by providing me with—how shall we say—a small commercial sample?”

“What’s wrong?” Ratko said, reaching into his coat and handing me a small, dark-red vial. “Got high on your own supply once too often?”

I took the vial, Zebra passing me her wedding-gun. I knew I had to do it; that only Fuel would enable me to unlock the final secrets of my past.

“You know how it is,” I said.

Sky and Norquinco pushed onwards, always keeping a wary eye on the inertial compasses. The shaft branched and twisted, but the head-up displays on their helmets always showed their positions relative to the shuttle, together with the route they had so far followed, so there was no real possibility of getting lost, even if they might encounter obstructions on the way out. The route they had taken led more or less to the middle of the ship, and now they were heading roughly forward, towards where the command sphere should be. They had been carrying on for perhaps five minutes when there was another bell-like reverberation, as if the entire hull had been struck like a gong. It seemed fractionally stronger this time.

“That’s it,” Norquinco said. “Now we’re going back.”

“No, we’re not. We lost the line already, and we already have to cut ourselves out. Now it just means we have some more to cut through.”

Reluctantly now, Norquinco followed him. But something was changing. Their suit sensors were beginning to pick up traces of nitrogen and oxygen instead of hard vacuum. It was as if air were slowly building up inside the shaft; as if the two clangs they had heard had been part of some immense alien airlock.

“There’s light ahead,” Sky said when the air pressure had reached one atmosphere and begun climbing beyond it.

“Light?”

“Sickly yellow light. I’m not imagining it. It’s like it’s coming from the walls themselves.”

He turned off his torch light, ordering Norquinco to do likewise. For a moment they were in near darkness. Sky shivered, feeling again the old, never-entirely-vanquished terror of darkness which the nursery had instilled in him. But then his eyes began to adjust to the ambient illumination and it was almost as if they still had the torches on. Better, in fact, for the pale yellow light reached far ahead of them, revealing the tract of the tunnel for tens of metres.

“Sky? There’s something else.”

“What?”

“I suddenly feel like I’m crawling downhill.”

He wanted to laugh; wanted to put Norquinco down, but he felt it too. Something was definitely pressing his body against one side of the shaft. It was soft now, but as he crawled further (and now it really was a kind of crawling), it increased in strength, until he felt almost as if he was back aboard the Santiago, with her spin-generated artificial gravity. But the alien ship had been neither spinning nor accelerating.

“Gomez?”

The answer, when it came, was incredibly faint. “Yes. Where are you?”

“Deep. We’re somewhere near the command sphere.”

“I don’t think so, Sky.”

“That’s what our inertial compasses say.”

“Then they must be wrong. Your radio emissions are coming from halfway down the spine.”

For the second time he felt terror, but now it had nothing to do with the absence of light. They had not been crawling for anywhere near the length of time needed to get that far down the ship. Had the hull somehow reshaped itself while they were inside, ferrying them helpfully along? The radio emissions must be correct, he thought—Gomez must have a reasonably accurate fix on their positions from signal triangulation, even though the mass of the intervening hull made his estimate imprecise. But that meant the inertial compasses had been lying almost as soon as they entered the ship. And now they were moving through some kind of static gravitational field; something intrinsic to the hull rather than an illusion created by acceleration or rotation. It appeared able to tug them in arbitrary ways depending on the geometry of the shaft. No wonder the inertial compasses had given false readings. Gravity and inertia were so subtly entwined that you could hardly bend one without bending the other.

“They must have complete control of the Higgs field,” Norquinco said, wonderingly. “It’s a pity Gomez isn’t here. He’d have a theory by now.”

The Higgs field, Norquinco reminded Sky, was something that was believed to pervade all space; all matter. Mass and inertia were not actually intrinsic properties of the fundamental particles at all, but were simply effects of the drag imposed on them as they interacted with the Higgs field—like the drag imposed on a celebrity trying to cross a room full of admirers. Norquinco seemed to think that the builders of the ship had found a way to let the celebrity slip through unmolested—or to impede its progress even further. It was as if the builders could turn up or turn down the density of admirers, and restrict or enhance their ability to pester the celebrity. That was, he knew, a hopelessly crude way of imagining something that Gomez—and perhaps even Norquinco—might be able to begin to glimpse without layers of metaphor, seeing straight to the glistening mathe-matical heart of it, but for Sky it was sufficient. The builders could manipulate gravity and inertia as easily as they manipulated the sickly yellow light, and perhaps without giving it much more thought.

Which meant, of course, that his hunch had been right. If there was something aboard this ship which could teach him that technique, imagine what it could do for the Flotilla—or for the Santiago, anyway. They had been trying to shed mass for years, so that they could delay their deceleration to the last possible moment. What if they could just turn the Santiago’s mass off, like a light switch? They could enter Swan’s system at eight per cent of the speed of light and come to a dead stand-still in orbit around Journey’s End, cutting their speed in an instant. Even if nothing that dramatic was possible, any reduction in the ship’s inertia—even if it were only a few per cent—would have been welcome.

The external air pressure was now well above one and a half atmospheres, although it was climbing less quickly now. It was warm, heavy with moisture and some other trace gases which, while harmless, would not have been present in the same ratios in the air Sky normally breathed. Gravity reached a plateau of half a gee; it occasionally ducked below that value, but it was never higher. And the sickly yellow light was now bright enough to read by. Now and then they had to crawl across an indentation in the floor of the shaft which was full of thick, dark liquid. There were traces of it everywhere: a bloodlike red smear sliming every surface.

“Sky? This is Gomez.”

“Speak up. I can hardly hear you.”

“Sky; listen to me. We’ll have company within five hours. There are two shuttles approaching us. They know we’re here. I risked a radar bounce off them to get a distance fix.”

Fine; by now he would probably have done the same thing himself. “Leave it at that. Don’t speak to them or do anything that would let them identify us as having come from the Santiago.”

“Just get out of there, will you? We can still make a run for it now.”

“Norquinco and I aren’t done yet.”

“Sky, I don’t think you realise—”

He broke off the link, more interested in what lay ahead. Something was coming towards them, moving down the same shaft. It transported itself with grublike oscillations of its fattened pink-white body, like a maggot.

“Norquinco?” he said, bringing his gun to the fore and pointing it down the shaft, “I think some-one’s come to welcome us aboard.” He wondered how frightened he sounded.

“I can’t see anything. No; wait—now I can. Oh.”

The creature was only the size of an arm; not really large enough to do either of them any physical harm. It lacked any obviously dangerous organs; no jaws that Sky could see. At the front was only a crownlike frill: translucent tendrils which waved ahead of the creature. Even if they had been venomous, he was still safe in his suit. The creature appeared to have neither eyes nor manipulative limbs. He repeated these reassuring observations to himself, examined his state of mind and was slightly disappointed to find that he was still just as frightened as before.

But the maggot did not seem particularly frightened by the newcomers. It simply halted and waved its ghostly tendrils in their direction. The thing’s pale pink segmented body blushed a deeper shade of red, and then an arterial red secretion oozed from between the segments, forming a fresh scarlet puddle beneath it. Then the puddle extended tendrils of its own, creeping forward as if running downhill. Sky felt his sense of what was vertical shift dizzyingly, as if there had been a local change in the direction of gravity. The red fluid trickled towards them like a scarlet tide, and then it was flowing up and around their suits. For a moment Sky felt that he had been turned upside down, and he was falling. The red veil passed over his faceplate, as if seeking a way into his suit. Then it passed.

Gravity returned to normal. Breathing hard, still terrified, he watched the puddle of red return to the maggot and then seep back into the creature. The maggot was red for a moment, then the blush slowly faded back to pink.

Then the maggot did something very odd, not turning itself in the shaft, but reversing itself; the tendrils retracting into the body at one end and popping out the other. The creature undulated back into the shaft’s yellow depths. It was as if nothing at all had happened.

Then a voice spoke to them. It boomed through the walls at Godlike volume, and it sounded too deep to be human.

“It’s good to have some company,” it said, in Portuguese.

“Who are you?” Sky said.

“Lago. Come and see me, please; it isn’t very far now.”

“And what if we choose to leave you?”

“I’ll be sad, but I won’t stop you.”

The reverberations of the Godlike voice died down, all as it had been before the maggot had arrived. The two of them were breathing hard, as if they had just been sprinting. Long moments passed before Norquinco spoke. “We’re going back to the shuttle. Now.”

“No. We’re going onwards, just as we told Lago we would.”

Norquinco gripped Sky’s arm. “No! This is insanity. Did you just erase what happened from your short-term memory?”

“We were invited further into the ship by something which could already have killed us if it had that in mind.”

“Something which called itself Lago. Even though Oliveira…”

“Didn’t actually say that Lago was dead.” Sky fought to hold the fear from his voice. “Just that something had happened to him. Personally, I’m interested in finding out what that something was. And also anything else this ship, or whatever it is, might be able to tell us.”

“Fine. Then go ahead. I’m going back.”

“No. You’re staying here, coming with me.”

Norquinco hesitated before answering. “You can’t force me.”

“No, but I can certainly make it worth your while.” Now it was Sky’s turn to place his hand on the other man’s arm. “Use your imagination, Norquinco. There must be things here that could shatter every paradigm we’ve ever recognised. At the very least there must be things here that can get us to Journey’s End ahead of the other ships, perhaps even give us a tactical advantage when they arrive behind us and start contesting territorial rights.”

“You’re aboard an alien spacecraft and all you can think of is petty human issues like squabbles over land rights?”

“Believe me, those things won’t seem so petty in a few years.” He grasped Norquinco’s arm even tighter, feeling the layers of suit fabric compress beneath his grip. “Think, man! Everything could stem from this one moment. Our whole history could be shaped by what happens here and now. We aren’t small players, Norquinco; we’re colossi. Grasp that, just for a instant. And start thinking of the kinds of rewards that come to men who make history happen. Men like us.” He thought back to the Santiago; of the hidden room where he kept the Chimeric infiltrator. “I’ve already made longterm plans, Norquinco. My safety is guaranteed on Journey’s End, even if events turn against us. If that should happen, I’d also arrange for your own safety, your own security. And if things didn’t turn against us, I could make you a very powerful man indeed.”

“And if I should turn around now, and go back to the shuttle?”

“I wouldn’t hold it against you,” Sky said softly. “This is a terrifying place, after all. But I wouldn’t guarantee you any sanctuary in the years that lie ahead.”

Norquinco dislodged Sky’s grip from his arm, looking away until he had found his answer. “All right. We go on. But we don’t spend more than an hour in this place.”

Sky nodded, though the gesture was wasted. “I’m pleased, Norquinco. I knew you were a man who’d see sense.”

They advanced. The going became easier now, as if the shaft was always sloping downwards—it hardly required any effort at all to slither down it. Sky thought of the way the red fluid had moved around him. The local control of gravity was so precise that the fluid had looked alive, flowing like a vastly accelerated slime mould. The creatures that had built the ship had learned to do far more than alter the Higgs field. They could play it like a piano.

Whatever they are, he thought—whether they were all like the maggot—they had to be millions of years in advance of humanity. The Flotilla must seem inexpressibly primitive to them. Perhaps they had not even been sure it was the product of intelligent thinking at all. And yet it had interested them.

The shaft opened out into a huge, smooth-walled cavern. They had emerged a little way up the side of one of its scalloped walls, but the place was so thick with cloying vapour that it was difficult to see the other side. The chamber was bathed in foetid yellow light and the floor was hidden beneath an enormous lake of red fluid which must have been many metres deep. There were dozens of maggots in the lake, some of them almost completely submerged. Many of them were of slightly different sizes and shapes to the one they had seen so far. Some were much larger than a man, and their end-tendrils included specialised appendages and, perhaps, sensory organs. One in particular was looking at Sky and Norquinco now, with a single human-looking eye on the end of a stalk. But by far the largest maggot sat in the middle of the lake, its pale pink body rising metres from the water; tens of metres long. It turned the end of its body towards them, a small crown of tendrils waving frondlike in the air.

There was a mouth beneath the frond; absurdly small against the size of the maggot. It was human in shape, fringed in red, and when it spoke—emitting an immense, booming voice—it formed human sound shapes.

“Hello,” it said. “I’m Lago.”

I held the vial up to the light for a moment before slipping it into the breach. The way the red fluid twinkled, the way it flowed sluggishly one moment and then with blinding speed the next… it re-minded me far too much of the red lake at the heart of the Caleuche. Except that there never was a Caleuche, was there? Just something much stranger, to which the ghost ship myth had attached it-self like a parasite. And hadn’t that memory of Sky’s always been there, at the back of my mind? I had recognised Dream Fuel from almost the moment I saw it.

There was enough in that red lake to drown in, I thought.

I slammed the wedding gun against my neck and pushed the Fuel into my carotid artery. There was no rush; no hallucinogenic transition. Fuel was not a drug in that sense; it acted globally across the brain rather than hitting any single region. It wanted only to arrest cellular decay and to repair recent damage; bringing memories back into focus and re-establishing connective pathways that had recently been broken. It seemed to tap into a recent map of what had been, as if the body carried a lingering field which changed more slowly than the cellular patterns themselves. That was why Fuel was able to fix both injuries and memories just as easily, without the drug itself knowing anything about physiology or neuro-anatomy.

“Quality shit,” Ratko said. “I only use the best myself, man.”

“Then you’re saying that not everything that comes out of here is as good?” Zebra asked.

“Hey, like I said. One for Gideon.”

Ratko led the three of us along a series of twisting, makeshift tunnels. They had been equipped with lights and a rudimentary floor, but they were more or less bored through solid rock. It was as if the complex had been tunnelled back into the chasm wall. “I keep hearing rumours,” I said. “About Gideon’s health. Some people think that’s why he’s letting the cheap stuff hit the streets. Because he’s too ill to manage his own lines of supply.” I hoped I had not said anything which would betray my ignorance of the true situation. But Ratko just said, “Gideon’s still producing. That’s all that matters right now.”

“I won’t know until I see him, will I?”

“He’s not a pretty sight, I hope you realise.”

I smiled. “Word gets around.”