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 chang
ed 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 mathematical 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 someone’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 crow
nlike 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.’
The Revelation Space Collection Page 129
