“Could it have been Voronoff?” I asked as we approached Grand Central Station. We had left him at the station before going down to see Gideon, but killing Dominika didn’t seem to fit in with what I knew about the man. Killing himself, perhaps, in an interesting and boredom-offsetting manner, but not a well-known figure like Dominika. “It doesn’t seem like his style to me.”
“Not him, and not Reivich either,” Quirrenbach said. “Though only you can know that for sure.”
“Reivich’s no indiscriminate killer,” I said.
“Don’t forget Dominika made enemies easily,” Zebra said. “She wasn’t exactly the best person in the city at keeping her mouth shut. Reivich could have killed her for talking about him.”
“Except we already know he isn’t in the city,” I said. “Reivich is in an orbital habitat called Refuge. That was true, wasn’t it?”
“To the best of my knowledge, Tanner, yes,” Quirrenbach said.
There was no sign of Voronoff, but that was hardly to be expected: when we’d let him go, I’d never seriously expected him to stay there. Nor had it mattered. Voronoff’s role in the whole affair was incidental at best, and if I ever did need to speak to him again, his celebrity would make it easy enough to track him down.
Dominika’s tent looked exactly as I remembered it, squatting in the middle of the bazaar. The flaps were drawn, and there were no customers in the vicinity, but there was nothing to suggest that a murder had taken place here. There was no sign of her helper trying to drag anyone into the tent, but even that absence was not especially noticeable, since the bazaar itself was remarkably subdued today. There must not have been any arriving flights; no influx of willing customers for her neural excisions.
Pransky was waiting just beyond the door, peering through a tiny gap in the material.
“You took your time getting here.” Then his funereal gaze assimilated Chanterelle, myself and Quirrenbach, and his eyes widened momentarily. “Well, well. A veritable hunting party.”
“Just let us in,” Zebra said.
Pransky held the door open and admitted us into the reception chamber where I had waited while Quirrenbach was on the slab.
“I must warn you,” he said softly. “Everything is exactly as I found it. You won’t like what you’re about to see.”
“Where’s her kid?” I asked.
“Her kid?” he said, as if I had used some piece of obscure street argot.
“Tom. Her helper. He can’t be far away. He might have seen something. He might also be in danger.”
Pransky clicked his tongue. “I didn’t see any ‘kid’. There was more than enough to occupy my mind. Whoever did this was…” He trailed off, but I could imagine what his mind was dealing with.
“It can’t be local talent,” Zebra said, in the silence which followed. “No one local would waste a resource like Dominika.”
“You said the people after me weren’t local.”
“What people?” Chanterelle said.
“A man and a woman,” Zebra answered. “They paid a visit to Dominika, trying to trace Tanner. They definitely weren’t from the city. An odd couple, as far as I can tell.”
I said, “You think they came back and killed Dominika?”
“I’d say they’re fairly near the top of possible suspects, Tanner. And you still have no idea who they might be?”
I shrugged. “I’m a popular man, evidently.”
Pransky coughed. “Maybe we should, um…” He gestured with one grey hand towards the inner chamber of the tent.
We stepped through, into the part of the tent where Dominika performed her operations.
Dominika was floating on her back, half a metre above her surgical couch, suspended in that position by the steam-powered, articulated-boom suspended harness which encased her lower half. The harness’s pneumatics were still hissing, gentle fingers of vapour rising towards the ceiling. Top-heavy, she had canted back to an angle where her hips floated higher than her shoulders. The head of someone thinner than Dominika would probably have lolled to one side, but the rolls of fat around her neck kept her face pointed at the ceiling, and her eyes were wide open, glazed white, her jaw hanging slackly open.
Snakes covered her body.
The largest of them were dead, draped across her girth like patterned scarves, their inanimate bodies reaching to the bed. There was no doubting that they were dead; they’d been slit along the belly with a knife, and their blood had painted ribbons on the couch. Smaller snakes were still alive, coiled across her belly, or the couch, although they hardly moved even when I approached them, which I did with exquisite caution.
I thought of the snake sellers I had seen in the Mulch. That was where these animals had come from, purchased solely to provide detail to this tableau.
“I told you you wouldn’t like it,” Pransky said, his voice cutting through the stunned silence of our party. “I’ve seen some sick things in my time, believe me, but this must be…”
“There’s a method to it,” I said, softly. “It’s not as sick as it seems.”
“You must be insane.” Pransky had said it, but I had no doubt that the sentiment was felt by the others present. It was hard to blame them for that, but I knew what I was saying was right.
“What do you mean?” Zebra asked. “A method—”
“It’s meant as a message,” I said, moving around the levitating corpse so that I could get a better look at her face. “A kind of calling-card. A message to me, actually.”
I touched Dominika’s face, the slight pressure of my hand making her head turn to one side, so that the others could see the neat wound bored into the middle of her forehead.
“Because,” I said, voicing what I knew to be the truth for the first time, “Tanner Mirabel did it.”
Somewhere near my sixtieth birthday—though I had long since ceased to mark the passage of time (what was the point, when you were immortal?) and had doctored ship’s records to obscure the details of my own past—I knew that the time had come to make my move. The choice of time was not really mine, forced upon me by the mechanics of our crossing, but I could still let the moment pass if I wished, forgetting about the plans which had occupied my mind so thoroughly for half my life. My preparations had been meticulous, and had I chosen to abandon them, my plans would never have come to light. For a moment I allowed myself the bittersweet pleasure of balancing vastly opposed futures: one in which I was triumphant; one in which I submitted meekly to the greater good of the Flotilla, even if that meant hardship for my own people. And for the tiniest of moments I hesitated.
“On my mark,” said Old Man Armesto of the Brazilia.
“Deceleration burn ignition in, twenty seconds.”
“Agreed,” I said, from the vantage point of my command seat, poised high in the bridge. Two other voices echoed me with tiny timelags; the Captains of the Baghdad and the Palestine.
Journey’s End lay close ahead, its star the brighter of the 61 Cygni pair, a bloodshot lantern in the night. Against all the odds, against all the predictions, the Flotilla had crossed interstellar space successfully. The fact that one ship had been destroyed did not taint that victory in the slightest degree. The planners who had launched the fleet had always known that there would be losses. And those losses, of course, had not been confined solely to that ship. Many of the momio sleepers would never see their destination. But that, too, had not been unexpected.
It was, in short, a triumph, however one looked at it.
But the crossing was not yet finished; the Flotilla still at cruise velocity. Though only the tiniest of distances remained to be crossed, it was the most significant part of the journey. That, at least, was not something the planners had ever guessed. They had never predicted the depth of disharmony that would creep into the enterprise over time.
“Ten seconds,” said Armesto. “Good luck to all of us. Good luck and Godspeed. It’ll be a damned close race now.”
Not as close as you think, I thought.
The remaining seconds counted down, and then—not quite synchronously—three suns blazed in the night where an instant before there had been only stars. For the first time in a century and a half the engines of the Flotilla were burning again—wolfing down matter and antimatter and spewing out pure energy, beginning to whittle down the eight per cent of light velocity which the Flotilla still had.
Had I chosen otherwise, I would have heard the great structural skeleton of the Santiago creak as the ship adjusted itself to the stress of deceleration. The burn itself would have been a low, distant rumble, felt rather than heard, but no less exhilarating for that. But I had made my decision; nothing had changed.
“We have indications of clean burns across the board…” said the other Captain, before a note of hesitation entered his voice. “Santiago; we have no indication that you have initiated your burn… are you experiencing technical difficulties, Sky?”
“No,” I said, calmly and crisply. “No difficulties at this moment.”
“Then why haven’t you initiated your burn!” It was less a question than a scream of indignation.
“Because we’re not going to.” I smiled to myself; the cat was well and truly out of the bag. The crux point had been passed; one possible future selected and another discarded. “Sorry, Captain, but we’ve decided to stay in cruise mode a little longer.”
“That’s madness!” I swore I could hear Armesto’s spittle spraying against the microphone like surf. “We have intelligence, Haussmann—good intelligence. We know damn well that you haven’t made any engine modifications that we haven’t made as well. You have no means of reaching Journey’s End ahead of us! You have to initiate burn now and follow the rest of us…”
I toyed with the armrest of my seat. “Or what, exactly?”
“Or we’ll…”
“Do nothing. We all know it’s fatal to turn off those engines once they’re burning antimatter.” That was true. Any antimatter engine was ferociously unstable, designed to keep burning until it had exhausted all its reactant, supplied from the magnetic-confinement reservoir. The whispering engine techs had a technical name for the particular magnetohydrodynamic instability which prevented the flow from being curtailed without leakage, but all that mattered was the consequence: the fuel for the deceleration phase had to be stored in a completely separate reservoir from that which had boosted the ship up to cruise speed. And now that the other three ships had initiated burn, they were more or less committed to it.
By not following them, I had betrayed a terrible trust.
“This is Zamudio of the Palestine,” said another voice. “We have stable flow here, green lights across the board… we’re going to attempt a mid-burn shutdown before Haussmann falls too far ahead of us. We may never get as good a chance as this.”
“For God’s sake, don’t do it!” said Armesto. “Our own simulations say a shutdown has only a thirty per cent chance of…”
“Our sims say it’s better than that… marginally.”
“Hold on, please. We’re sending you our technical data… don’t make a move until you’ve seen it, Zamudio.”
They debated the matter for the next hour, tossing simulations back and forth, arguing about the interpretation. They thought that their conversations were private, of course, but my agents had long ago placed bugs on the other ships, just as I assumed they had bugged my own. I listened, quietly amused, as the arguments grew more frantic and rancorous. It was no small matter, to risk an anti-matter detonation after a century and a half of travel. Under ordinary circumstances they would have extended their debate for months, perhaps even years, weighing the significance of every small gain against every possible death. But all the while they were slowing down, with the Santiago pulling triumphantly ahead of them, and every instant that they delayed made that distance worse.
“We’ve talked enough,” Zamudio said. “We’re initiating shutdown.”
“Please, no,” Armesto said. “At least let us think about it for a day, will you?”
“And let that bastard creep ahead of us? Sorry, but we’re already committed to a shutdown.” Zamudio’s voice became businesslike as he read status variables aloud. “Damping thrust in five seconds… bottle topology looks stable… constricting fuel flow… three… two… one…”
What followed was only a howl of static. One of the new suns had suddenly turned nova, out-shining its brethren. It was a white rose, edged in purple which shaded to black. I stared at it wordlessly, marvelling at the hellfire. A whole ship gone in an eyeblink, just the way Titus had told me the Islamabad had died. There was something cleansing about that white light… something bordering on the pious. I watched as it faded. A breath of hot ions slammed into my own ship, a ghost of what had been the Palestine, and for a moment the status displays across the bridge quavered and ran with static, but the ships of the Flotilla were now so far apart that the demise of one could not harm the others.
When comms returned, I heard the voice of the other Captain speaking. “You bastard, Haussmann,” Armesto said. “You did that.”
“Because I was cleverer than any of you?”
“Because you lied to us, you piece of shit!” Now I recognised the voice of Omdurman. “Titus was worth a million of you, Haussmann… I knew your father. Compared to him you’re just… nothing. Dirt. And you know what the worst of it is? You’ve killed your own people as well.”
“I don’t think I’d be quite that stupid,” I said.
“Oh, don’t count on it,” Armesto said. “I told you our intelligence was good, Haussmann. We know your ship like our own.”
“We have intelligence too,” Omdurman said. “You haven’t got any damned tricks up your sleeve. You’ll have to start slowing down or you’ll overshoot our destination; come to dead-stop in inter-stellar space.”
“It’s not going to happen like that,” I said.
This was nothing like the way I had planned it, but sometimes you just had to abandon the precise letter of the plan, following instead the broad outline; hearing the grand shape of a symphony rather than the individual notes. With Norquinco’s assistance I had made some modifications to my command seat. I flipped up a cover set into the black leather of the armrest, unfolding a flat, button-studded console which I placed across my lap. My fingers skated across the matrix of buttons, bringing up a map. It was the cactus-like schematic of the ship’s spine, showing the sleepers and their corporeal status.
Over the years, I had worked very diligently to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I had made sure that as many of the dead as possible were collected together in their own sleeper rings, studded along the spine. It had been laborious work at first, for the sleepers died not according to my neatly devised plans but in ways that were annoyingly random. At first, anyway. Then I had begun to get the magic touch. I needed only to wish that certain momios would die and it seemed to happen. Of course, there were rituals that needed to be performed for the magic to work properly. I had to visit them, touch their caskets. Sometimes (though it seemed to me that I worked unconsciously) I would make tiny adjustments to the settings of their support systems. It was not that I deliberately set out to harm them… but in some way that I could not quite fathom, my handiwork was always sufficient to bring about that end. In truth, it was magic.
And it had served me powerfully. The dead and the living were now quite separated. One whole row of sleeper rings—sixteen of them, holding one hundred and sixty caskets—was now occupied solely by the demised. Half of another row; another eighty-six dead. A quarter of the sleepers were gone now.
I tapped the sequence of commands which I had long ago committed to memory. Norquinco had given me that sequence, after years of covert work. It had been a stroke of genius, recruiting him to the cause. According to all the technical manuals, and the best expert advice, what I was about to do should not have been possible, prevented by a slew of safety interlocks. Over the years, as he had slowly worked his way through the hierarchy of the audit team, Norquinco had found ways around every supposedly watertight failsafe, concealing his labours by stealth and cunning.
And with the work Norquinco had grown in confidence. At first, I had been surprised by this transformation, until I realised that it had always been inevitable, once the man had been ensconced into the audit team. Norquinco had been forced to go through the motions of functioning in a normal human environment, rather than his usual studied isolation. As he had risen to a position of seniority in the team, Norquinco had moulded himself to the role with worrying adaptability. There came a point when I no longer had to intervene in Norquinco’s promotions.
But I’d never really forgiven him for his betrayal aboard the Caleuche.
We met only periodically; each time I noticed an incremental increase in Norquinco’s cockiness. At first, it had been easy to dismiss. The work was proceeding apace, Norquinco’s reports detailing each layer of safeguards which he had breached. I had demanded demonstrations to show that the work had really been done, and Norquinco had obliged. I had had no doubt that the task would be completed to my satisfaction by the time I needed it.
But there had been a glitch.
Four months earlier, after the last layer of safeguard machinery had been bypassed, the work, to all intents and purposes, was complete. And suddenly I understood why Norquinco had been so obliging.
“The technical term for the arrangement I am about to propose,” Norquinco said, “is, I believe, blackmail.”
“You’re not serious.”
We had met alone along the spine corridor, near node seven, during one of our inspection tours. “Oh, I’m very serious, Sky. You realise that now, don’t you?”
“I’m getting the picture.” I looked along the corridor. I thought I could see a pulsing orange glow somewhere down it. “What exactly is it you want, Norquinco?”
“Influence, Sky. The audit squad isn’t enough now. It’s a dead-end job for computer geeks. Technical work just doesn’t interest me any more. I’ve been aboard an alien spacecraft. That changes one’s expectations. I want something more challenging. You promised me glories when we were aboard the Caleuche; I haven’t forgotten. Now I want some of that power and responsibility.”
I chose my words carefully. “There’s a world of difference between hacking some software and running a ship, Norquinco.”
“Oh, don’t patronise me. I do realise that, you arrogant bastard. That’s what I said about wanting a challenge. And don’t think I want your job either—not yet, anyway. I’ll let the law of natural succession work for me there. No; I want a senior officer’s position—one echelon below you will do nicely. A cushy position with excellent prospects for when we make landfall. I’ll carve up a little fiefdom for myself on Journey’s End, I think.”
“I think you’re reaching, Norquinco.”
“Reaching? Yes, of course I’m reaching. Otherwise blackmail wouldn’t have to come into it.”
The orange glow down the corridor had grown closer, accompanied by a faint rumbling. “Getting you onto the audit team was one thing, Norquinco. You at least had the right background. But there’s no way I can get you into any officer’s position—no matter how many strings I pull.”
“That’s not my problem. You’re always telling me how clever you are, Sky. Now all you have to do is use some of that cleverness; use your skill and judgement to find a way to get me into an officer’s uniform.”
“Some things just aren’t possible.”
“Not for you, Sky. Not for you. Or are you going to disappoint me?”
“If I can’t find a way…”
“Then everyone else will find out about your little plan for the sleepers. Not to mention what happened with Ramirez. Or Balcazar, for that matter. And I haven’t even mentioned the grub.”
“You’ll be implicated too.”
“I’ll say I was only following orders. It was only recently that I realised what you had in mind.”
“You knew all along.”
“But no one will know that, will they?”
I was about to answer, but the noise of the approaching freight transport would have forced me to raise my voice. The string of pods was rumbling towards us along its rail, returning from the engine section. Wordlessly, the two of us walked backwards until we had reached one of the recesses which allowed us to stand aside as the train slid by. The trains, like much else on the Santiago, were old and not particularly well cared-for. They functioned, but much non-essential equipment had been removed from them for use elsewhere, or not fixed when it malfunctioned.
We stood silently shoulder to shoulder as the train neared us, filling the corridor completely except for a narrow gap either side of its blunt body. I wondered what was going through Norquinco’s mind at that exact moment. Did he seriously imagine that I would take his blackmail proposal seriously?
When the rumbling string of pods was only three or four metres away, I pushed Norquinco forward, so that he went sprawling onto the rail.
I saw the man’s body get pushed violently forward until I could no longer see it. The train continued for a few moments and then slowed down, but not with any great urgency. By rights the transport should have stopped the instant it detected an obstacle in its path, but that was undoubtedly one of the functions which had stopped working years ago.
There was a hum of labouring motors and the smell of ozone.
I squeezed out of the recess. It was difficult, and would have been impossible had the train been in motion, but there was just enough room for me to push past the string of pods until I reached the front. I hoped that my actions would not dislodge something and allow the train to continue, or I would certainly be crushed.
I reached the front, expecting to see Norquinco’s mangled remains squashed between the train and its rail.
But Norquinco was lying beside the rail. His toolkit lay crumpled under the front of the train.
I knelt down to examine the man. He had received a glancing impact to the head which had broken the skin, blood pouring out copiously, but the skull did not seem to be fractured. He was still breathing, though unconscious.
I had an idea. Norquinco was now inconvenient to me, and would have to die at some point—probably sooner rather than later—but what I had just thought of was too tempting, too poetic, to ignore. It would be dangerous, however, and I would need not to be disturbed for some time—at least thirty minutes, I judged. By then the lateness of the shipment would be all too obvious. But would anyone do anything about it immediately? I doubted it; from what I had gathered, the trains were no longer very reliable at the best of times. It made me smile. I had become emperor of this miniature state, but the one thing I had not done was make the trains run on time.
Ensuring that the toolkit was still blocking the train, I picked up Norquinco and carried him up-ship towards node six. It was hard work, but at sixty I had the physique of a thirty-year-old man and Norquinco had lost much of his youthful weight.
Six sleeper rings were connected to this node: sixty sleepers, some of them dead. I racked my memory, recalling as best as I could the ages and sexes of the passengers. There were, I felt sure, at least three amongst those sixty who could pass as Norquinco—especially if the accident was re-staged in such a way that the man’s facial features were crushed beyond recognition by the train.
I worked my way towards the skin of the ship. I was sweating and short of breath by the time I reached the berth where I judged the best candidate to lie. This was one of the frozen living, I saw, and that suited my plans excellently. With Norquinco still unconscious, I accessed the casket controls and set about warming the passenger. Normally the process would have taken several hours, but I had no interest in limiting cellular damage. No one would autopsy the corpse when it was found under the train, and there would be no reason to think that I had swapped the body.
My personal comm bracelet chimed. “Yes?”
“Captain Haussmann? Sir, we have a report of a possible technical malfunction with a train in spine corridor three, near node six. Should we send a breakdown team along to check it out?”
“No, no need for that,” I said, with what I hoped was not undue haste. “I’ll check it out myself. I’m near enough.”
“You sure about that, sir?”
“Yes, yes… no sense in wasting effort is there?”
When the passenger was warm—but now brain dead—I lifted him from the casket. Yes; he was passably close in build to Norquinco, with the same hair colour and skin tone. To the best of my knowledge, Norquinco had no romantic connections with anyone else on the Santiago —but even if he had, his lover was not going to be able to tell them apart once I was done.
I lifted Norquinco and placed him in the casket. The man was still breathing—once or twice he had even moaned before slipping back into unconsciousness. I stripped him naked and then arranged the web of biomonitors across his body. The inputs adhered automatically to his skin, adjusting themselves minutely. Some would burrow neatly beneath his skin, worming towards internal organs.
A series of lights flicked to green across the fascia of the casket, signifying that the unit had accepted Norquinco. The lid closed.
I studied the main status panel.
Programmed sleep time was another four years. By then the Santiago would have already made orbit around Journey’s End and it would be time for the sleepers to warm and step onto their new Eden.
Four years suited my plans, too.
Satisfied, I readied myself for the difficult task of lugging the other passenger back to the spine corridor. First, however, I had to dress the barely warm corpse in the clothes I had just taken from Norquinco.
When I reached the spine I positioned the man ten metres ahead of the train, which was still straining against its obstruction, filling the air with the smell of burning armatures. Then I found a heavy, long-handled wrench from a recessed stores locker. I used the wrench to pulp the man’s face into unrecognisability, feeling the bones crack like lacquer beneath each blow. Then I went back to the train and delivered a series of swiping strikes to the jammed toolkit, until it sprang free.
The train, no longer obstructed, began to pick up speed immediately. I had to run ahead of it to avoid being pulped against the wall. I stepped gingerly over the dead man and then retired to a safety alcove, watching with detached fascination as the string of freight pods gathered speed. It hit the man and snowploughed him along, mangling him in the process.
Finally, some distance down the corridor, the train came to a standstill.
I crept behind it. I had been through this before, half an hour earlier, and had been mildly surprised when I had found that Norquinco was only knocked out. That had, of course, been a blessing in disguise… but now there was to be no disappointment. The train had done its work creditably. Now, rather than the crushed toolkit, what made it stop was some sluggishly responding safety-mode… but it had been much too late to save the passenger.
I lifted my sleeve and spoke into my comms bracelet. “Sky Haussmann here. I’m afraid there’s been a terrible, terrible accident.”
That had all been four months ago; a regrettable coda to our relationship, but Norquinco had, ultimately, not let me down. I assumed so, at least—and would know for sure in a few moments.
On the main viewscreen was a view looking down the spine of the Santiago from a vantage point a few metres above the hull. It was an exercise in vanishing points, crisp perspectives that would have thrilled a Renaissance artist. The sixteen sleeper rings containing the dead marched away, diminishing in size, foreshortened towards ellipses.
And now the first and closest of them began to move, kicked loose by a series of pyrotechnic charges studded around the ring. The ring uncoupled from the hull and drifted lazily away from it, tipping slowly to one side as it moved. Umbilicals stretched between ship and ring to breaking point and then snapped cleanly, whiplashing back. Frozen gases trapped in severed pipes erupted in crystal clouds. Somewhere, alarms began to sound. I heard them only dimly, though they seemed to be causing considerable consternation amongst my crew.
Behind the first ring, the second was breaking loose as well. The third trembled and shucked itself loose from its moorings. All along the spine the pattern was repeated. I had arranged it well. I had thought to have all the rings blow their separation charges at once, so that they would drift away in clean, parallel lines, but there was no poetry in that. It pleased me instead to stagger the re-leases, so that the rings seemed to follow each other, as if obeying some buried migratory instinct.
“Do you see what I’m doing?” I asked.
“I see it well enough,” the other Captain said. “And it sickens me.”
“They’re dead, you fool! What do they care now, if they’re buried in space or carried with us to Journey’s End?”
“They’re human beings. They deserve to be treated with dignity, even if they’re dead. You can’t just throw them overboard.”
“Ah, but I can, and I have. Besides—the sleepers hardly matter. What they mass is inconsequential compared to the mass of the machines that accompany them. We have a real advantage now. That’s why we’ll stay in cruise mode longer than you.”
“One quarter of your sleepers isn’t much of an edge, Haussmann.” The other Captain had obviously been doing his homework. The kind of calculations I had run could not have been far from his own thoughts. “What kind of lead does that give you over us when you make orbit around Journey’s End? A few weeks at best?”
“It’ll be enough,” I said. “Enough to select the plum landing sites and get our people down there and dug in.”
“If you have anyone left. You killed a lot of those dead, didn’t you? Oh, we know what kind of losses you should have run, Haussmann. Your death-rate should not have been much higher than our own. We had intelligence, remember? But we’ve only lost one hundred and twenty sleepers our-selves. The same goes for the other ships. How did you become so careless, Haussmann? Was it that you wanted them to die?”
“Don’t be silly. If it suited my purposes to have them die, why wouldn’t I have killed more of them?”
“And try and settle a planet with a handful of survivors? Don’t you know anything about genetics, Haussmann? Or incest?”
I started to say that I had thought of that as well, but what was the point of letting the bastard know all my plans? If his intelligence was as good as he claimed, let him find these things out for himself.
“I’ll cross that bridge when I reach it,” I said.
Zamudio was the one who finally gave the others a temporary edge—even if it probably wasn’t in quite the way he would have planned. But the Palestine’s Captain must have thought he stood a very good chance of damping his antimatter flow, or else he would not have tried stopping his engine.
The explosion had been as hard and radiantly white as I remembered from the day in the nursery when the Islamabad had gone up.
But the next day, something unexpected happened.
In the instants before Zamudio’s ship had blown up, it had still been transmitting technical data to its two allies, both locked in the same deceleration burn that Zamudio had tried unsuccessfully to abort. I could guess that much myself, even though I was not directly privy to that flow of information. That was the other odd thing. The rest of the Flotilla had become grudgingly united against me. I hadn’t really expected that, but in hindsight I should have realised that it would happen. I had given the bastards a common enemy. In a way, it was to my credit. There was only one of me, yet I had raised such fear in the other Captains that they had thought it best to amalgam-mate against me, despite all that had happened between them.
And now this—Zamudio clawing back from the grave.
“That technical data was more useful than he realised,” Armesto said.
“It didn’t do Zamudio much good,” I said.
By now there was an appreciable redshift between my ship and the other two Flotilla craft, beginning to fall behind me as they decelerated. But the communications software effortlessly removed all distortion, save for the increasing timelag which accompanied the break-up of the Flotilla.
“No,” Armesto said. “But in their sacrifice they gave us something tremendously valuable. Shall I explain?”
“If it pleases you,” I said, with what I hoped was a convincing show of boredom.
But rather than being bored, I was actually a little scared.
Armesto told me about the technical data, squirted across from the Palestine until the last nano-second before it detonated. It concerned the attempts that had been made to shut down the flow of antimatter. It had always been known that the procedure was almost bound to be fatal, but until then the precise failure mode had been unclear, glimpsed only fleetingly in computer simulations. There had been speculation that if the failure mode could be understood sufficiently well, it might even be possible to counteract it by subtle manipulation of the fuel-flow. It was nothing that could be tested in advance. Now, however, a kind of test had been made for them. The telemetry from the ship had ended just after the failure mode had begun to arise, but it still probed closer into that instability regime than any carefully harnessed laboratory test or computer simulation.
And it had taught them well.
Enough information could be extracted from those numbers to guess how the failure mode must have evolved. The numbers, fed into the on-board simulations devised by the propulsion teams, hinted at a strategy for containing the imbalance. Tweak the magnetic bottle topology slightly and the injection stream could be neatly curtailed with no risk of normal-matter blowback or antimatter leakage. It was still, of course, hellishly risky.
Which did not stop them trying it.
My ship was falling ahead of the Brazilia and the Baghdad, and those latter two ships had flipped over to bring their engines forward for the deceleration phase. The bright spikes of those antimatter torches pinpricked the minutely redshifted hemisphere of sky to the rear of the Santiago, like a pair of hot blue sibling suns. The thrust beams of the two deceleration ships were not to be under-estimated as potential weapons, but neither Armesto or Omdurman would have the nerve to sweep their torches over my ship. Their argument was with me, not with the many viable colonists I still carried. Equally, I could consider igniting my own engine and dousing one of the two laggard ships with the Santiago’s exhaust—but the other vessel would almost certainly take that as a incitement to kill me, whether or not I still carried passengers. My simulations showed that I would not be able to realign my own flame before the other ship took me out in a single baptism of hellfire.
Not an option, I thought… and that meant I would have to live with those two enemies unless I found another way of destroying them. I was still considering the possibilities when, in perfect syn-chrony, the two drives flames to the rear winked out.
I waited, breath held, for the twin blossoms of nuclear light which would signify that the anti-matter drives had malfunctioned during shutdown.
But they never came.
Armesto and Omdurman had succeeded in quenching their flames, and now they were coasting with me, albeit with the lower velocities they had gained during the time they were decelerating.
Armesto contacted me. “I hope you saw what we just did, Sky. That changes everything, doesn’t it?”
“Nowhere near as much as you’d like to think.”
“Oh, don’t play games. You know what it means. Omdurman and I now have the ability to turn on our engines for however short a time we want. You don’t. That makes all the difference.”
I mulled this over. “It changes nothing. Our ships still have almost the same relative rest-mass as they did a day ago. You are still obliged to continue decelerating now if you want to make orbit around 61 Cygni-A. My ship’s lighter by the mass of the sleeper rings I ejected. That still gives me the edge over you. I’m staying in cruise mode until the last minute.”
“You’re forgetting something,” Armesto said. “We have our dead as well.”
“It’s too late to make a difference. You’re cruising slower than me. And you said it yourself—you never sustained as many casualties as we did.”
“We’ll find a way to make the difference, Haussmann. You’re not getting ahead of us.”
I looked at the long-range displays, which showed the vastly magnified dots of the other two ships. They were flipping over again, slowly but surely. I watched the dots elongate into thin lines, then contract again.
And then the dots were haloed by twin auras of exhaust radiation.
The two other ships were rejoining the chase.
“It’s not over,” Armesto said.
A day later, I watched the dead drift away from the other two ships.
It was twenty-four hours since Armesto and Omdurman had resumed the chase, demonstrating their ability to control their drive flames in a manner that was not yet within my grasp. The death of the Palestine had been a blessing in disguise for them… even if the better part of a thousand colonists had been killed in the process.
Now the other two ships were moving at the same relative speed as the Santiago, once again cruising towards Journey’s End. And they were trying very hard to beat me at my own game. There was a kind of inevitability to this, of course. My ship was still less massive than theirs… which meant they would have to shed mass if they wanted to follow the same cruise/deceleration curve as I did.
Which meant throwing their own dead into space.
There was nothing elegant about the way they did it. They must have worked overnight to smash through the same countermeasures which it had taken Norquinco nearly his entire life to circum-vent… but they had the advantage over Norquinco in that they were not trying to complete this work in secret. Aboard the Brazilia and the Baghdad, every hand must have been turned towards that goal, working furiously. I almost envied them. So much easier when there was no need to work covertly… but so infinitely less elegant, too.
On the high-magnification image I watched sleeper rings peel off randomly from the two other ships, more like autumn leaves falling from a tree than anything orchestrated. The image resolution was too poor to be sure, but I suspected there were actually space-suited teams crawling around out-side those ships with cutting tools and explosives. They were dislodging the sleeper rings by brute force.
“You still can’t win,” I told Armesto.
Armesto deigned to reply, though I’d half expected the other ships to maintain radio silence from here on in. “We can and we will.”
“You said it yourself. You don’t have as many dead as us. No matter how many you throw away, it’ll never be sufficient.”
“We’ll find a way to make it sufficient.”
Later, I guessed at what kind of strategy that might be. No matter what happened next, the ships were no more than two or three months from Journey’s End. With carefully rationed supplies, some colonists could be woken ahead of schedule. The revived momios could be kept alive on board the ship with the crew, albeit in conditions which would border on the dehumanising, but it might be sufficient. Every ten colonists that were woken meant a sleeper ring which could be ejected, and a concomitant reduction in ship’s mass, allowing a sharper deceleration profile.
It would be slow and dangerous—and I expected that they would lose perhaps one in ten that they tried to revive under such suboptimal conditions—but it might be just enough to offset the mass difference.
Enough to give them, if not an edge over me, then at least parity.
“I know what you intend,” I told Armesto.
“I doubt it very much,” the old man answered.
But I soon saw that he was right. After the initial flurry of sleeper ring ejections, there followed a pattern: one ejection every ten hours or so. That was exactly what I would have expected, ten hours to thaw every colonist in a ring. There would only be a handful of people on each ship with the expertise to do that, so they would have to work sequentially.
“It won’t save you,” I said.
“I think it will, Sky… I think it will.”
Which was when I knew what had to be done.