The Revelation Space Collection (181 page)

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 antimatter 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, outshining 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 interstellar 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?