"And for that you need more firepower than I've ever seen before on the ship? More than I ever knew existed?"
"Your father determines how we handle individual incidents, not me."
"But he must have said something. What is it about this one passenger?"
"Look, I don't know, all right? Just that whatever it is, it isn't supposed to happen. The momios aren't meant to wake up early. That just isn't possible, unless someone programmed their sleeper berth to make it happen. And no one would have done that unless they had a good reason."
"I still don't understand why anyone would want to wake up early ."
"To sabotage the mission, of course." She lowered her voice now, and clicked her fingernails against the gun, edgily. "A single sleeper placed aboard not as a passenger, but as a time-bomb. A volunteer on a suicide mission, say-a criminal, or someone else with nothing to lose. Someone angry enough to want to kill us all. It wasn't easy to get a slot on the Flotilla when she left Sol, remember. The Confederacion made as many enemies as friends when it built the fleet. It wouldn't be difficult to find someone willing to die, if it allowed them to punish us."
"It would be difficult to do, though."
"Only if you forgot to bribe the right people."
"I suppose you're right. When you say time-bomb you're not talking literally, are you?"
"No-but now that you mention it, it isn't such an absurd idea. What if they-whoever they were-managed to plant a saboteur aboard every ship? Maybe the one aboard the Islamabad was just the first to wake. And they wouldn't have had any warning."
"Maybe a warning wouldn't have helped them much, in that case."
She clenched her teeth. "I guess we're about to find out. On the other hand, it could just be a malfunctioning sleeper berth."
That was when the first gunshots were heard.
Whatever was happening was taking place tens of metres beneath the loading bay, but the shots still sounded fearsomely loud. There were shouts as well. He thought he heard his father, but it was difficult to tell: the acoustics lent a metallic quality to the voices, rendering the words indistinct and blurring the differences in timbre.
"Shit," Constanza said. For a moment she froze, then she was making for the access well. She turned and flashed wild eyes at him. "You stay here, Sky."
"I'm coming with you. That's my father down there."
The shots had ceased, but there was still a lot of noise, voices mainly, raised to the point of hysteria, and what sounded like things being thrown around. Constanza checked her gun again and then stowed it over a shoulder. She walked towards the access well, preparing to lever herself into its laddered, echoing depths.
"Constanza . . ."
He grabbed her gun and wrestled it from her shoulder before she had time to act. Constanza turned round in fury, but he was already easing past her, not exactly pointing the gun at her, but not exactly pointing it away from her either. He had no idea how to use it, but he must have looked sufficiently purposeful. Constanza backed off now, her eyes flicking to the gun. It was still tethered to her helmet by the black flex, which was now stretched to its limit.
"Give me the head-gear," Sky said, nodding towards her.
"You'll be in deep shit for this," she said.
"What, going after my father when he's in danger? I don't think so. A mild reprimand at the very worst, I think." He nodded again. "The helmet, Constanza."
She grimaced and pulled the helmet from her head. Sky settled it over his own, not bothering to ask her for the fabric underlayer. The helmet was a little small for him, but there was no time to adjust it now. He flipped down the monocle, gratified when it lit up with the view that the gun was seeing. The image was all shades of grey-green, overlaid by cross-hairs, range-finder numerics and weapons-status summaries. None of that meant anything to him, but when he looked at Constanza he saw her nose stand out as a white smudge of heat. Infra-red; that was all he needed to know.
He lowered himself into the shaft, aware that Constanza was following him at a discreet distance.
There were no shouts now, but there were still voices. They were quiet, but there was nothing calm about them. He could hear his father quite distinctly now; there was something not quite right about the way he was talking.
He reached the nexus which connected the sleeper berths of this node. They radiated out in ten directions, but only one of the connecting doors was open. That was where the voices were coming from. He pointed the gun ahead of him and moved towards the berth, down the normally dark, pipe-lined corridor which led to it. Now the corridor shone in sickly shades of grey-green. He was scared, he realised. Fear had always been there, but it was only now that he had the gun and had climbed down that he had time to pay attention to it. Fear was a nearly unfamiliar thing to him, but not completely so. He remembered his first real taste of it, alone in the nursery, betrayed and deserted. Now he watched his own shadow trace phantom shapes along the wall, and for a fleeting moment wished that Clown were with him now to offer guidance and friendship. The idea of returning to the nursery was suddenly very tempting. It was a world unsullied by rumours of ghost ships or sabotage, of present and real hardships.
He crept round a dogleg in the corridor and there was the berth ahead of him: the large, machine-filled support chamber for a single sleeper. It was like a dedicated burial room in a church, reeking of antiquity and reverence. The room had been cold until recently and much of it was still olive-green or black in his vision.
From behind he heard Constanza speak. "Give me the gun, Sky, and no one will know you took it."
"I'll give it back when the danger's passed."
"We don't even know what the danger is yet. Perhaps someone's gun just went off by accident."
"And the sleeper berth just happened to be malfunctioning, as well? Yeah, right."
He entered the sleeper berth and took in the tableau that greeted him. The three security guards were there, as was his father-blobs of pale-green shading to white.
"Constanza," one of them said. "I thought you were supposed to cover . . . shit. It isn't you, is it?"
"No. It's me. Sky Haussmann." He flipped up the monocle, the room gloomier than it had been a moment ago.
"And where's Constanza?"
"I took her helmet and gun, entirely against her wishes." He looked behind him, hoping that Constanza had heard this attempt at exonerating her. "She did put up a fight, believe me."
The berth was one of ten in a ring, each fed by its own corridor from the node. The room had probably been entered only one or two times since the Flotilla's launch. The sleeper support systems were as delicate and complex as the antimatter engines; just as likely to go horribly wrong if tampered with by anything other than expert hands. Like buried pharaohs, the sleepers had not expected their places of slumber to be violated until they reached what passed for the afterlife-arrival around 61 Cygni-A. It felt a little wrong just to be here at all.
But not half as wrong as it felt to see his father.
Titus Haussmann was lying on the floor, his upper body cradled by one of the security guards. His chest was covered in a dark, cloying fluid that Sky knew was blood. There were canyonlike gashes in his uniform, in which the blood was pooling thickly, gurgling disgustingly with each laboured breath.
"Dad . . .'Sky said.
"It's all right," one of the guards answered. "There's a medical team on their way."
Which, Sky thought-given the general state of medical expertise aboard the Santiago -was about as useful as saying there were priests coming. Or undertakers.
He looked at the sleeper casket; the long, plinth-like, machine-encrusted cryo-coffin which filled much of the room. The upper half of it was cracked wide open, huge jagged fractures like shattered glass. Sharp bits of it formed a haphazard glass mosaic on the floor. It was exactly as if something inside the casket had forced its way out.
And there was something inside it.
The passenger was dead, or nearl
y dead; that much was obvious. At first glance the man looked normal enough apart from the bullet wounds: a naked human being invaded by monitoring wires, blood-shunts and catheters. He was younger than most of them, Sky thought-excellent fanatic fodder, in other words. But with his bald head and masklike lack of facial muscle tone, the man could have passed for a thousand other sleepers.
Except that his forearm had come off.
It was lying on the floor, in fact-a limp, glove-like thing, ending in flaps of ragged skin. But there was no bone or meat showing from the end, and very little blood had leaked from the severed limb. The stump was wrong as well. The man's skin and bone stopped a few inches below his elbow, and then it was all tapering metal prosthesis: a complex, blood-lathered, glittering obscenity which ended not in steel fingers but in a vicious assemblage of blades.
Sky imagined how it must have happened.
The man had woken inside his casket, probably following a plan laid down before the Flotilla had left Mercury. He must have intended to wake up unobserved, smash his way to freedom and then set about inflicting stealthy harm on the ship, in precisely the way that might have happened on the Islamabad , if Constanza's theory was correct. A lone man could certainly do great damage, if he was not obliged to allow for his own survival.
But his revival had not gone unnoticed. He must have been in the process of waking when the secuity team had entered the berth. Perhaps Sky's father had been leaning over the casket, examining it, when the man had cracked it open with his forearm weapon. It would have been very easy for him to stab Titus then, even if the other squad members were doing their best to put magazine-loads of bullets into him. Drugged with pain-nullifying revival chemicals, he had probably barely noticed the shots eating into him.
They had stopped him, maybe even killed him, but not before he had inflicted extreme harm on Titus. Sky knelt down next to his father. Titus's eyes were still open, but they seemed not quite to focus.
"Dad? It's me. Sky. Try and hang on, will you? The medics are coming. It'll be all right."
One of the guards touched his shoulder. "He's strong, Sky. He had to go in first, you know. That was his way."
"Is his way, you mean."
"Of course. He'll pull through."
Sky started to say something, the words assembling in his head, but suddenly the passenger was moving; at first with dreamlike slowness then with terrifying speed. For a yawning instant it was not something he was prepared to believe; the man's injuries were simply too severe for him to be capable of movement, let alone movement that was swift and violent.
The passenger rolled from the casket, the movement lithe and animal-like, and then the man was standing, and with one elegant scythe-like sweep of his arm he cut one of the guards open across the throat, the guard collapsing to his knees with blood fountaining from the wound. The passenger paused, holding his weapon-arm in front of him, and then the complex cluster of knives whirred and clicked, one blade retracting while another slotted into place, gleaming with pure-blue surgical brilliance. The passenger studied this process with what looked like quiet fascination.
He stepped forward, towards Sky.
Sky still had Constanza's gun, but the fear was so intense that he could not even hold the weapon up to threaten the passenger. The passenger looked at him, the muscles beneath the flesh rippling strangely, as if dozens of orchestrated maggots were crawling over the bones of his skull. The rippling halted, and for a moment the face staring back at Sky was a crude approximation of his own. Then the rippling resumed and the face was no longer one Sky recognised.
The man smiled, and pushed his clean new blade into Sky's chest. There was a curious lack of pain, and the immediate effect was only as if the man had thumped him hard across the ribs. He fell back, winded, out of the passenger's way.
Behind, the two uninjured guards had their guns levelled and ready to fire.
Sky, slumped down, attempted to draw his next breath. The pain was exquisite, and he felt none of the relief that the inhalation should have brought. The passenger's knife had almost certainly punctured a lung, he decided, and the blow might well have shattered a rib in the process. But the blade appeared to have missed his heart, and he could still move his legs, so it had probably not damaged his spine.
Another moment elapsed and he wondered why the guards had yet to open fire. He could see the passenger's back; they must have had a clear target.
Constanza, of course. She was just beyond the passenger, and if they shot at him their rounds had a high likelihood of passing right through his body and ripping through her. She could retreat, but with the connecting doors to the other berths sealed-and no chance of opening them in a hurry-the only way to go was up the ladder. And the passenger would be immediately behind her. Ordinarily, having just one arm would have hindered anyone's ascent of a ladder, but the normal physiological rules did not seem to apply here.
"Sky . . ." she said. "Sky. You've got my gun. You've got a clearer line of fire than the other two. Shoot now."
Still lying down, still struggling for breath-he could hear his lung wound gurgling like a baby-he raised the gun and aimed it in the vague direction of the passenger, who was walking calmly towards Constanza.
"Do it now, Sky."
"I can't."
"Do it. It's a question of Flotilla safety."
"I can't."
"Do it!"
His hand trembling, barely able to hold the gun now, let alone aim it with any precision, he directed the muzzle in the approximate direction of the passenger's back, then closed his eyes-though by then he was fighting a black tide of unconsciousness anyway-and squeezed the trigger.
The burst of fire was short and sharp, like a loud, deep burp. Combined with the sound of the gun's discharge was a metallic roar: the sound of bullets ramming not into flesh but into the corridor's armoured cladding.
The passenger halted, as if about to turn around and return for something it had forgotten, and then fell down.
Constanza, beyond, was still standing.
She advanced forward, then kicked the passenger, eliciting no visible response. Sky allowed the gun to slip from his fingers, but by then the other two guards were level with him and their weapons were trained on the passenger.
Sky struggled for the breath to speak. "Dead?"
"I don't know," Constanza said. "Not going anywhere in a hurry, anyway. Are you all right?"
"Can't breathe."
She nodded. "You'll live. You should have shot him when I said, you know."
"Did."
"No, you didn't. You fired indiscriminately and got a lucky break with a ricochet. You could have ended up killing all of us."
"Didn't."
She stooped down and retrieved the gun. "Mine, I think."
By then the medical team had arrived, clambering down the ladder. There had been no time to brief them, of course, and for a moment they dithered, unsure who to treat first. A respected and high-ranking member of the crew was severely injured before them; two other crew members had wounds that might also be life-threatening. But there was also an injured passenger, a member of that even higher elite they had spent their entire lives serving. The fact that the momio was not quite what he seemed did not immediately register with them.
One of the medics found Sky and after an initial check-up placed a breather mask over his face, flooding his ailing respiratory system with pure oxygen. He felt some of that black tide lap away.
"Help Titus," Sky said, indicating his father. "But do what you can for the passenger as well."
"Are you certain?" the medic said, who by then must have grasped something of what had gone on.
Sky pressed the mask to his face again before answering, his mind racing ahead to what he could do to the passenger; the labyrinthine ways in which he might inflict pain on the killer.
"Yes. I'm more than certain."
Chapter Eleven
I WOKE up shivering; trying to extricate myself from the co
ils of the Haussmann dream. The dream's after-image was disturbingly vivid; I could still feel myself there with Sky, watching his wounded father being taken away. I examined my hand in the dim light of the sleeping cubicle, the blood at the centre of my right palm black and cloying like a spot of tar.
Sister Duscha had told me this was a mild strain, but I was obviously nowhere near getting over it on my own. There was no way I could have delayed chasing Reivich, but Duscha's suggestion that I spend another week or so in Idlewild having the virus flushed out by professionals suddenly seemed infinitely preferable to weathering it on my own. And while the strain might have been weak compared to some, there was no guarantee that it had reached its worst.
Now I felt a familiar and not very welcome feeling: nausea. I wasn't at all used to zero-gravity, and the Mendicants hadn't given me drugs to make the trip any more bearable. I thought about it for a few minutes, debating whether it was worth leaving my cubicle, or whether I should just lie low and accept the discomfort until we reached the Glitter Band. Eventually my stomach won and I decided to make my way to the ship's communal core. One of the instruction labels in the cabin told me I'd be able to buy something to kill the worst of the sickness.
Just getting to the commons was more adventure than I really needed. It was a wide, furnished and pressurised sphere somewhere near the front of the ship, where food, drugs and entertainment were available, but it was only accessible through a warren of claustrophobic one-way crawlways which snaked around and through the engine components. The instructions in my cubicle advised against tardiness during crawls through certain parts of the ship, leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions about the state of the internal nuclear shielding in those areas.
On my way there I thought about the dream.
There was something about it that bothered me, and I kept asking myself whether what had happened in it meshed with what I already knew about Sky Haussmann. I was no expert on the man (I hadn't been, anyway) but there were certain basic facts about him which it was difficult to avoid if you had been brought up on Sky's Edge. We all knew about the way he had become frightened of the dark after the blackout aboard the Santiago , when the other ship blew up, and we all knew about the way his mother had died in the same incident. Lucretia had been a good woman, by all accounts, well loved across the Flotilla. Titus, Sky's father, was a man who was respected and feared but never truly hated. They called him the caudillo : the strong man. Everyone agreed that while Sky might have had an unusual upbringing, his parents could not really be blamed for the crimes that followed.
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