‘Best of luck, Mister Mirabel.’ The Mendicant with the cosh gave me a cheery wave.
‘Thanks. I’ll send a postcard. Or maybe I’ll come back and let you know how I got on.’
‘That would be nice.’
I spat out a final coagulating globule. ‘Don’t count on it.’
A few other prospective immigrants were being manhandled aboard ahead of me, mumbling drowsily in unfamiliar languages. Inside, we were shunted through a disorientating maze of narrow crawlways until we reached a hub somewhere deep in the Strelnikov’s bowels. There we were assigned accommodation cubicles for the journey down to the Glitter Band.
By the time I got to mine I was weary and aching; feeling like an animal that had come off second best in a fight and had crawled back to its den to lick its wounds. I was glad of the privacy of the cubicle. It wasn’t fragrantly clean, but it wasn’t filthy either: just some yellowing hybrid of the two. There was no artificial gravity on the Strelnikov - for which I was grateful; it wouldn’t have been prudent to spin her or accelerate her too hard - so the cubicle came outfitted with a zero-gee bunk bed and various nourishment and sanitary facilities designed with the same lack of gravity in mind. There was a general network console which looked like it should have been lovingly preserved in a museum of cybernetics, and there were stained and faded warning notices stuck to every available surface appertaining to what could and couldn’t be done in the ship, and how to get out of it as quickly as possible if something went wrong. Periodically, a thick-accented voice came over a Tannoy system with announcements concerning delays to the departure, but eventually the voice said that we had cast off from Idlewild, engaged drive and were on our way down. The departure had been so soft I hadn’t noticed it.
I picked at the shards of tooth in my mouth, mapped the painful extremities of the bruises the Mendicants had given me, and gradually fell asleep.
TEN
On the day that the passenger was to awake - and nothing would ever be the same after that - Sky and his two closest associates were riding a service train along the Santiago’s spine, rumbling down one of the narrow access tunnels which threaded the ship from nose to tail. The train moved at a few lumbering kilometres per hour, stopping now and then to allow its crew to off-load stores, or to wait for another train to clear the tunnel section ahead. As usual Sky’s companions were passing the time with tall stories and boasts, while Sky played devil’s advocate, unable to share fully in their fun but more than willing to ruin it if he saw an opportunity.
‘Viglietti told me something yesterday,’ Norquinco said, raising his voice to be heard above the roar of the train’s passage. ‘He said he didn’t believe it himself, but he knew other people that did. It was about the Flotilla, actually.’
‘Astonish us,’ Sky said.
‘Simple question: how many ships were there originally, before the Islamabad went up?’
‘Five, of course,’ Gomez said.
‘Ah, but what if that’s wrong? What if there were six, originally? One blew up - we know that - but what if the other one’s still out there?’
‘Wouldn’t we have seen it?’
‘Not if it’s dead; just a haunted husk of a ship trailing behind us.’
‘Very convenient,’ Sky said. ‘It wouldn’t happen to have a name by any chance, would it?’
‘As a matter of fact . . .’
‘I knew it.’
‘They say it’s called the Caleuche.’
Sky sighed, knowing it was going to be one of those journeys again. There had been a time - many years ago, now - when the three of them had viewed the ship’s train network as a source of amusement and carefully controlled danger; a place for hazardous games and make-believe; ghost stories and challenges. There were disused tunnels branching off from the main routes, leading, so it was rumoured, to hidden cargo bays or secret caches of stowaway sleepers, smuggled aboard by rival governments at the last moment. There were places where he and his friends had dared each other to ride on the outsides of the trains, grazing their backs against the speeding walls of the tunnels. Older now, he looked back on those games with wry bewilderment, half proud that they had taken those risks, half horrified that they had come so close to what would obviously have been gruesome death.
It was a lifetime ago. They were serious now; doing their bit for the ship. Everyone had to pull their weight in these lean new times, and Sky and his companions were regularly assigned the work of escorting supplies to and from the workers in the spine and the engine section. Usually they had to help unload the stuff and manhandle it through crawlways and down access shafts to wherever it was needed, so the work was far from the soft option it might have appeared. Sky seldom finished a shift without some fresh cuts and bruises, and all the effort had given him a set of muscles he had never expected to gain.
They were an unlikely trio. Gomez was working his way towards a job in the engine section, in the hallowed priesthood of the propulsion team. Now and then he would get to ride the train all the way there and even talk with some of the whispering engine techs, trying to impress them with his knowledge of containment physics and the other arcana of antimatter propulsion theory. Sky had watched some of those exchanges and had observed the way Gomez’s questions and replies were not always swatted ruthlessly down by the techs. Sometimes they were even moderately impressed, implying that Gomez would one day be allowed to graduate to their soft-spoken priesthood.
Norquinco was a different creature entirely. He had a capacity to become completely and obsessively lost in a problem; overwhelmingly able to be fascinated by anything, provided it was sufficiently complex and layered. He was an assiduous keeper of lists, deeply enamoured of serial numbers and classifications. His favourite realm of study, unsurprisingly, was the hideous complexity of the Santiago’s nervous system; the computer networks which veined the ship and which had been altered, rerouted and written over like a palimpsest countless times since the launch; most recently after the blackout. Most sane adults quailed at attempting to understand more than a tiny sub-set of that complexity, but Norquinco was actually drawn to the entirety, perversely thrilled by something that most people saw as bordering on the pathological.
Because of that, he frightened people. The techs who worked on the network problems had well-trodden solution pathways for most glitches, and the last thing they needed was someone showing them how to do things fractionally more efficiently. Jokingly, they said it would put them out of work - but that was just a polite way of saying that Norquinco made them uneasy. So he rode with Sky and Gomez, out of harm’s way.
‘The Caleuche,’ Sky said, repeating the name. ‘And I suppose there’s some significance in that name?’
‘Enough,’ Norquinco said, reading Sky’s expression of deep contempt. ‘The island where my ancestors came from had a lot of ghost stories. The Caleuche was one of them.’ Norquinco was speaking earnestly now, all trace of his usual nervousness gone.
‘And I suppose you’re going to enlighten us about her.’
‘She was a ghost ship.’
‘Funny, I’d never have guessed.’
Gomez thumped him. ‘Look, shut up and let Norquinco get on with it, all right?’
Norquinco nodded. ‘They used to hear her; sending accordion music out across the sea at night. Sometimes she would even put into port, or take sailors from other ships. The dead aboard her were having a party that never stopped. Her crew were wizards; brujos. They cloaked the Caleuche in a cloud that followed her around everywhere. Now and then people saw her, but they could never get close to her. She would sink under the waves, or turn into a rock.’
‘Ah,’ Sky said, ‘so this ship which people couldn’t see very clearly - because it was covered in a cloud - also had the ability to turn into an old rock when they got closer? That’s remarkable, Norquinco; proof of magic if ever I heard it.’
‘I’m not saying there was ever an actual ghost ship,’ Norquinco said testily. ‘Then. But now,
who knows? Perhaps the myth concerned one that was yet to come.’
‘It gets better, it really does.’
‘Listen,’ Gomez said. ‘Forget the Caleuche; forget the ghost ship bollocks. Norquinco’s right - in a sense. It could have happened, couldn’t it? There could easily have been a sixth ship, and the knowledge of it might have become confused with time.’
‘If you say so. You could also argue that the whole thing was a tissue of lies made up by the terminally bored crew of a generation ship to minutely enrich the mythic fabric of their lives. If you so wished.’ Sky paused as the train swerved into a different tunnel, rattling against its induction rails, gravity rising as it moved a little closer to the skin.
‘Ah, I know what your problem is,’ Norquinco said, with half a smile. ‘It’s your old man, isn’t it? You don’t want to believe any of this because of who your father is. You can’t stand the idea of him not knowing about something so significant.’
‘Maybe he does know, has that ever occurred to you?’
‘So you admit the ship could be real.’
‘No, actually . . .’
But Gomez interrupted him, obviously warming to the subject. ‘As a matter of fact, I don’t find it hard to believe that there was once a sixth ship. Launching six rather than five wouldn’t have been much more effort, would it? After that - after the ships had got up to cruising speed - there could have been some disaster . . . some tragic event, deliberate or otherwise, which left the sixth ship essentially dead. Coasting, but derelict, with its crew all killed, probably its momios as well. There must have been enough residual power to keep the remaining antimatter in containment, of course, but that wouldn’t have taken much.’
‘What,’ Sky said, ‘and we just forgot about it?’
‘If the other ships had also played a part in the destruction of the sixth, it wouldn’t have been difficult to edit the data records of the entire Flotilla to remove any reference to the crime itself, or even the fact the victim had ever existed. That generation of crew could have sworn not to pass on the knowledge of the crime to their descendants, our parents.’
Gomez nodded enthusiastically. ‘So by now all we’d have been left with is a few rumours; half-forgotten truths mixed up in myth.’
‘Exactly what we do have,’ Norquinco said.
Sky shook his head, knowing it was futile to argue any further.
The train came to a halt in one of the loading bays which serviced this part of the spine. The three of them got out carefully, crunching their sticky-soled shoes onto the flooring for traction. There was scarcely any feeling of gravity now since they were so close to the axis of rotation. Objects still fell towards the floor, but with a certain reluctance, and it was easy to hurt your head against the ceiling if you took too ambitious a stride.
There were many such bays, each servicing a cluster of momios. There were six sleeper modules attached around this part of the spine, each of which held ten individual cryogenic berths. The trains reached no closer, and almost all equipment and supplies had to be manhandled from this point, via laddered shafts and winding crawlways. There were freight elevators and handler robots, but neither were used very often. Robots in particular needed diligent programming and maintenance, and even the simplest task had to be spelled out to them as if they were particularly slow-witted children. Usually, it was quicker just to do it yourself. That was why there were so many techs, usually leaning against the pallets looking bored, smoking homemade cigarettes or tapping styluses against clipboards, doing their best to look semi-occupied despite the fact that nothing was actually happening. The techs generally wore blue overalls flashed with section decals, but the overalls were usually ripped or amended in some fashion, exposing crudely tattooed skin. Sky knew all of them by face, of course - on a ship with only one hundred and fifty warm human beings, it was difficult not to. But he had only a vague idea what their names were, and next to none about the kinds of lives the techs lived when they were not working. Off-duty techs tended to keep to their own parts of the Santiago, and they tended to socialise amongst themselves, even to the extent of producing their offspring. They spoke their own patois, drenched in carefully guarded jargon.
But something was slightly different now.
No one was lazing around or trying to look busy. In fact, there were hardly any techs in the room at all, and the few that were here looked edgy, as if waiting for an alarm to go off.
‘What’s the matter?’ Sky said.
But the man who stepped gingerly from behind the nearest tower of equipment pallets was not a tech. He brushed his hand across the chrome shoulder of a crouched handler robot as if looking for support, sweat blistering on his forehead.
‘Dad?’ Sky said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I could ask you the same question, unless this is one of your chores.’
‘Of course it is. I told you we work the trains now and then, didn’t I?’
Titus looked distracted. ‘Yes . . . yes, you did. I forgot. Sky, help these men unload the goods, and then you and your friends get away from here, will you?’
Sky looked at his father. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Just do it, will you?’ Then Titus Haussmann turned to the nearest tech, a heavily bearded fellow with grotesquely muscled forearms folded across his chest like hams. ‘The same goes for you and your men, Xavier. Get all non-essential people out of here, all the way back up the spine. As a matter of fact I want the engine section evacuated while we’re at it.’ He flipped up his sleeve and whispered orders into his bracelet. Recommendation, more accurately, Sky thought, but Old Man Balcazar would never fail to abide by Titus Haussmann’s advice. Then he turned to Sky again, blinking to see his son still present. ‘Didn’t I just tell you to get on with it, son? I wasn’t kidding.’
Norquinco and Gomez took their leave, accompanying a couple of techs to the waiting train, flipping open one of its freight covers and beginning the knuckle-grazing work of unloading supplies. They passed the boxes from hand to hand, out of the bay altogether, where they would presumably be lowered down the levels to the sleeper berths themselves.
‘Dad, what is it?’ Sky said.
He thought his father was going to reprimand him, but Titus simply shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Not yet. But there’s something not right with one of our passengers - something that has me a little worried.’
‘What do you mean, not right?’
‘One of the bastard momios is waking up.’ He mopped his forehead. ‘That’s not supposed to happen. I’ve been down there, into the berth, and I still don’t understand it. But it has me worried. That’s why I want this area cleared.’
This was a marvel indeed, Sky thought. None of the passengers had ever awakened, even though a few of them had certainly died. But his father seemed less than overjoyed at the situation. Gravely concerned, more accurately.
‘Why is it a problem, Dad?’
‘Because they’re not meant to wake up, that’s why. If it happens at all, it must mean it was planned from day one. Before we ever left the solar system.’
‘But why clear the area?’
‘Because of something my father told me, Sky. Now do what I just told you and get that train unloaded and then get the hell away from here, will you?’
At that moment another train slid into the bay from the opposite direction, nosing up against the one Sky had arrived upon. Four of Titus’s security people emerged from it, three men and a woman, and began buckling on plastic armour that had been too bulky to wear during the journey. This was practically the entire operational militia for the ship, its police force and army, and even these people were not fulltime security officers. The squad moved forward to another part of the train and unracked guns: gloss-white weapons which they handled with nervous care. His father had always told him that there were no guns aboard ship, but never very convincingly.
There were, in fact, many aspects of shipboard security about which Sky wanted
to know more. His father’s small, tight, highly efficient organisation fascinated him. But Sky had never been allowed to work with his father. The explanation which Titus gave for this was plausible enough: he could not claim impartiality or fairness if his son were to be given a role in the organisation, no matter how apt Sky might have been - but that did not make it any less bitter a pill to swallow. Consequently the tasks Sky was assigned were always as far away from anything remotely security-related as Titus could ensure. Nothing would or could change while Titus remained head of security, and both of them understood that.
Sky went to join his friends, helping them off-load the supplies. They were getting through the job quickly, without any of the carefully honed dawdling that usually accompanied the process. His friends were unnerved; whatever was going on here was out of the ordinary and Titus Haussmann was not a man to pretend there was a crisis where none existed.
Sky kept one eye on the security squad.
They settled fabric headsets over their shaven skulls, tapping microphones and checking communication frequencies. Then they pulled armoured helmets from the train and pushed their heads into them, adjusting drop-down overlay monocles which covered one eye. A slim black line ran from each helmet to the sight attached to the top of each gun, so that the guns could be discharged without the guard having to look in the direction of fire. They probably had infra-red or sonar overlays as well. That would be useful down in the gloomy sub-levels.
When they had stopped fiddling with their equipment, the squad moved over to his father, who briefed them quickly and quietly, with the absolute minimum of fuss. Sky watched his father’s lips move; his expression one of complete calm now that he was in the presence of his own squad. Occasionally he made a taut, precise hand gesture or shook his head. He might as well have been telling them all a nursery rhyme. Even the sweat on his forehead seemed to have dried up.
The Revelation Space Collection Page 84
