Terminal World (48 page)

‘I’m just wondering how long we’d be able to last if conditions changed, and we had to fall back on antizonals.’

‘Two days at the most,’ Ricasso said. ‘That’s assuming we never push the engines to maximum power, which of course would always be an option. Is that acceptable to you, given what you know of our drug supplies?’

‘Acceptable, I suppose,’ Quillon answered cautiously. ‘Which, to be clear, doesn’t mean the same as “embrace unquestioningly”.’ He felt Doctor Gambeson’s phantom presence at his side. While the man himself was not well enough to voice an opinion, Quillon knew that the onus had fallen on him instead.

‘I’m not saying we should rush into this,’ Ricasso said. ‘Equally, I see no rational alternative. The Bane’s retreat offers us a short cut to our objective - what airship captain wouldn’t leap at a short cut?’

‘Um, me for one,’ Curtana said.

‘Yes, my dear. Articulate your reservations. Deep inside I know you’d be bitterly disappointed if we turned away now.’ He clenched his fist. ‘Just think! We could well be the first organisms to enter the Bane in more than five thousand years.’

‘You’re really selling it to me now,’ Agraffe said, to a murmur of amused agreement from some of other captains. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the medicine run. But at least that was a calculated risk.’

‘The benefits outweigh the risk,’ Ricasso said. ‘For one thing, we can be reasonably sure we aren’t going to encounter any Skullboys in the Bane. Or anyone else, for that matter. And we won’t be stopping unless we’re forced to. We’ll keep the main body of Swarm at cruising speed for the entire duration of the passage. The scout ships may occasionally run faster, but we’ll avoid overtaxing the engines.’

‘If we’re really going to do this,’ Curtana said, sighing, ‘then
Painted Lady
should lead the way.’

‘Is she ready?’

‘Ready enough.’

‘Excellent,’ Ricasso replied. ‘Six airships will proceed Swarm in arrowhead formation -
Painted Lady
first, two behind her, and three behind them. With no ship more than five leagues from another, we’ll still establish accurate readings across a ten-league-wide track - more than enough to ensure Swarm’s safe passage. Two further escort craft will flank Swarm, and a final one will follow behind, continuing to make readings, and also watching for anyone attempting to follow us.’

Curtana shook her head. ‘They won’t, take it from me.’

‘Then the trailing ship will have all the more time to take measurements,’ Ricasso said. He had, Quillon was beginning to realise, a maddening ability to twist any seeming disadvantage in his favour.

‘Don’t expect a majority show-of-flags on this,’ Agraffe said. ‘There were waverers last time. There’ll be even more now.’

‘There’ll be no need for a show-of-flags, my boy.’ Ricasso looked almost apologetic at his own cleverness. ‘I covered this eventuality in my last proposal, the one for which I secured a hundred-ship mandate.’

‘Ninety-eight, but who’s going to quibble?’ Curtana asked.

‘The point is - and this is not mere constitutional hair-splitting - I expressly requested permission to vary the course en route as I saw fit, subject to improved intelligence on boundary shifts, weather patterns and the locations of enemy forces. I now have precisely that improved intelligence.’

‘You won’t get away with that,’ Curtana said.

‘No, you won’t,’ Agraffe agreed. ‘That clause specifically forbids you from crossing any zone boundaries without a new show-of-flags.’

Ricasso looked at him, his expression one of stupefied incomprehension. ‘But I won’t be crossing any zone boundaries, will I? Unless you mean the
old
boundaries on the
old
maps - but since when have we let them concern us?’

Under her breath Curtana said, ‘You sly old fox.’ But there was nothing remotely affectionate or approving in her voice.

‘He may have a point,’ one of the other captains said.′ Constitutionally speaking, that is.’

‘Look,’ Ricasso said, striking a conciliatory tone. ‘Once people understand that the boundary has moved - that what we’ll be flying over is simply barren land that has yet to be reclaimed by living things - they’ll put aside their anxieties.’

‘The same way I can feel all my anxieties just melting away as we speak,’ said Curtana acidly.

 

She spoke to Quillon privately afterwards. ‘You’re probably surprised that I didn’t put up more of a fight.’

‘I think you had the intelligence to see the sense in crossing the Bane, even if you didn’t like the way Ricasso forced us into it.’

‘Very tactful of you.’

‘I just hope I didn’t cast the deciding vote.’

‘I didn’t see much voting going on, Doctor - or did I miss something?’

‘You know what I mean. Ordinarily it would have been Gambeson Ricasso leaned on for medical advice. But in that room it was just me. He must have known I’d endorse almost anything that gets Serum-15 to Spearpoint even marginally quicker.’

‘You feel manipulated.’

‘I feel like there’s something going on that I can’t quite work out.’ Curtana’s expression was rueful. ‘I’ve had that feeling about Ricasso since I was able to count my fingers.’

‘No one in their right mind would willingly go into the Bane unless there was an excellent reason, right?’

‘Nobody,’ Curtana said. ‘But as you say, no one “in their right mind” - that’s the clincher.’

‘I don’t think he’s mad. I don’t think he’s even
slightly
mad.’

‘I hear a but.’

‘The amount of time he must have spent down with those vorgs, pursuing his magic serum - at the very least, it betokens a certain ... monomania. A willingness to chase his obsessions beyond the point where any reasonable person would have turned back. I’m just wondering how that obsessiveness might relate to the Bane.’

‘I guess we’ll find out. I’m not planning to mutiny. Not yet, anyway.’

‘At least it gets you out of Swarm again. You may not have liked the idea of crossing the Bane, but you liked the idea of someone else leading the mission even less.’

‘My father would have done it. Doesn’t mean I’m living in his shadow, incidentally, or trying to live up to his achievements. Any more than he was trying to live up to his father’s, or his father’s before that. It’s the ship, Quillon. She demands it of us, makes us rise to the occasion. If I backed out now, I’d be letting down
Painted Lady
more than anyone else.’

‘I’d like to be aboard, if that isn’t a problem.’

‘I was planning on insisting on that anyway. You know about zone transitions, and their effects on human and animal physiology. Gambeson’s staff can deal with the routine sick and injured aboard
Purple Emperor,
and you’ll always be within heliograph range should your opinion be needed. Will Ricasso miss you in his laboratory?’

‘Almost certainly, but I think I’ll be of greater value aboard
Painted Lady.
If Gambeson is feeling a little stronger, he can return to his work in the laboratory.’

‘Fine - I’ll leave you to argue the fine points with Ricasso. I’m afraid you’ll be the only medical man on the ship - think you can handle it?’

‘I’ll do my best.’

‘Good. I’m running a tight ship - we’ll be down to the bones, operationally speaking. There’ll be no one aboard who doesn’t need to be.’

‘What about Commander Spatha?’

‘He’ll be enjoying the crossing from a different vantage point. You have my word.’

‘In which case I think Kalis and Nimcha should travel with us, aboard
Painted Lady.’

She frowned slightly. ‘Wouldn’t
Purple Emperor
be safer? That way they’ll have advance warning if we run into a zone boundary; we’ll have almost none at all.’

‘It’s not the zones I’m concerned about,’ Quillon said.

The Bane was a scuffed margin on the horizon, pale as the foaming, breakered edge of an ocean. As the sun sank, the ebbing light stained the hulls of the airships in fiery shades of brass and copper, catching the hard edges of longitudinal ridges, navigation vanes and stabilising fins. Lights had begun to come on in some of the gondolas and along the pennanted bridges, ladders and ropeways that spanned the gaps between the ships. He watched figures move behind the lit windows, or cross from ship to ship on errands, and detected nothing out of the ordinary - no sense of crisis or disharmony. The picture was one of grand order and continuity, conveying a sense of stolid civic permanence - something that had been around for many centuries and might last even longer. And yet as he watched from the balcony Quillon grasped with renewed force how utterly transient and vulnerable this aerial squadron actually was. The darkening skies were empty of visible enemies for now, but that did not mean they would be untroubled before they reached the questionable sanctuary of Spearpoint. Each and every ship in Swarm was a perilously delicate thing, and the whole was no stronger than any of its constituents.

By now news of Ricasso’s intentions had reached the entire fleet. His plan was to make the turn towards the Bane in the early hours of the morning and to cross the zone’s former boundary by sunrise. That would give his navigators several hours to assess the nature of the terrain and evaluate its tectomorphic stability. If it was decided that the zone was unstable, then Swarm could still return to the other side of the former boundary without losing too much headway. There had been no show-of-flags, and as yet any disquiet about the decision was simmering rather than overt. Quillon found this lack of obvious dissent more troubling than he had expected.

Never mind; he would soon be free of the main body of Swarm.

It suited him well to be assigned to
Painted Lady
. She would be travelling with more instruments, fuel and weaponry aboard than she normally carried, and the trade-off for that was that she was, perforce, obliged to carry fewer rations and therefore fewer crew. Because of this, Curtana had been at liberty to draw up a rota that excluded anyone she didn’t want aboard.

Quillon still had unfinished business in Ricasso’s laboratory. He had conducted sufficient tests on the concentrated Serum-15 to know that it could be prepared for use as a general, broad-spectrum antizonal with no serious side effects. But it was not simply a question of diluting it, sucking it into hypodermics and then injecting away. The secretion had to be refined; other reagents had to be mixed into it at trace dosages, and at every stage the quantities involved had to be measured precisely. Looking weeks or months into the future - long after Swarm’s presumed arrival at Spearpoint - Quillon could envisage the development of a method of batch production that would enable medical-grade serum to be produced in useful quantities. But he was not at that point yet, and until he was the preparation of the end-stage serum was intensely laborious, involving several steps where a small error would spoil that entire sample. More than once, he cursed Ricasso for tormenting the vorgs into going beyond Serum-15, when Serum-16 was all but useless except as a stepping stone. Of course Ricasso had his sights set on something better than a mere antizonal, but the social utility of Serum- 15 - a cheap, potentially mass-producible substitute for Morphax-55 - was beyond calculation. Perhaps with time the vorgs could be goaded into making more of the stuff. But for now there was no hope of that, and Swarm would have to make do with what it already had.

Recognising this, Ricasso and Quillon had agreed that the unprocessed Serum-15 was too valuable to be stored in one place, even aboard an airship as well defended as
Purple Emperor.
Quillon had therefore divided the flasks up into quantities that could be crated and hidden elsewhere in the fleet, in the trusted care of captains sympathetic to Ricasso’s cause. It was a matter of debate whether or not one of those ships would be
Painted Lady.
Trust was not the issue there; of course Curtana would protect the drugs as best she could. But if the Bane contained trouble,
Painted Lady
would be the first ship to encounter it, and so there was a very real risk of losing not only the dirigible but her irreplaceable cargo. Weighed against that were two other factors. Knowing Curtana,
Painted Lady
would be amongst the first ships to reach Spearpoint - she would not have it any other way - and would therefore be best placed to provide early dispensation of the drug. The medicines could be transferred between ships later, but who knew what complications might ensue once the fleet had cleared the Bane? Better to have at least some Serum-15 aboard her now, Curtana argued, in case Swarm became dispersed or weather conditions prohibited ship-to-ship transfers. And as Quillon pointed out, it would not be too difficult to continue the processing work aboard the smaller ship, if he equipped himself with the necessary potions and glassware before they set off for the Bane.

It was finally decided that
Painted Lady
would carry both processed serum, which would need only a single-stage dilution before it was ready for human use, and a quantity of the unrefined material. Quillon would continue his processing work, and by the time they reached Spearpoint, there was every expectation that the unrefined serum would be completely processed. It was risky, certainly, but so were the alternatives.

But once he was aboard
Painted Lady
and she had pulled away from Swarm, he’d be stuck there for the duration without access to any chemical or piece of tubing he’d neglected to bring along for the trip. It was imperative, therefore, that he neglect nothing that would be required. Alone in Ricasso’s laboratory, observed by the crouching steel-and-offal forms of the vorgs, he emptied his medical bag to the bottom of its black guts, spread its contents on the bench and began to refill it with the systematic care of a surgeon putting organs back into a patient. Next to the bag was also a wooden, straw-filled crate that would contain the larger glass and ceramic items and any drug-filled vessels too bulky or fragile for the bag. Curtana had provided him with a list of the crew, and because he had already tested each of them individually and had access to their medical histories, he knew their precise antizonal tolerances and therefore the drugs that would serve no purpose aboard
Painted Lady,
other than to add dead weight.