his favourite branches of mathematics. Instead, he went for a walk, feeling the reassuring touch of pure, warm shag pile scientific logic beneath his bare feet. There was little to look at except for the tiles, so he watched them pass beneath and by him as he strolled, enjoying the swirling patterns of notation on their surfaces, enjoying the regularity, and the —
Something stabbed his foot. He hopped sideways, swearing with surprise. One of the tiles was not flush with the others, and had gashed his foot. The tiles didn’t feel warm and woolly anymore but cold and hostile. His blood was scattered in scarlet drops across the offending tile, shining like rubies. As he watched, the notation joined with his blood and formed new shapes. Belatedly, he realised that the writing was not entirely topographical. It was too late now, though. All around him tiles were rising to reveal that they were in fact the top faces of cubes. All but the one that had cut him; that one grew and expanded, and he could see extra dimensionality within it, a tesseract. He tried to name its four dimensions — he felt he had to — but they came out wrong. This cube had the dimensions of height, length, width, and significance. It grew and grew until he was in its skeletal shadow, the white sky warped in its core.
Cabal awoke suddenly from a light slumber, sweating, angry, and with a phantom pain in his foot. He was angry at himself for looking and not seeing, angry at his unconscious mind’s infuriating habit of telling him things in the most obscure way possible, and angry at circumstances for putting him in this wretched situation. He could investigate the potential clue he had just perceived, but he knew that he shouldn’t.
He managed to resist his curiosity for the best part of four minutes.
It was now over two hours since the discovery of DeGarre’s disappearance and probable death. The corridors were quiet again, and the muttered conferences from his fellow passengers speculating about the night’s events had long since died away. Cabal wrapped the dressing gown around himself again and, his phantasmically injured foot still fresh in his memory, put on Meissner’s slippers.
He looked up and down the corridor, but it was silent and empty. Satisfied that he was alone for the moment, he turned his attention downwards, and started walking towards DeGarre’s cabin.
The dark red carpet marked with a black pattern was not made up of a single roll at all. Instead, the ingenious Mirkarvians had used individual squares of carpet. The practicality of being able to easily replace damaged or stained sections without the necessity of recarpeting great lengths of corridor was not lost on Cabal. Nor, now, was the significance of his dream.
Between Cabal’s eye for order and the analytical qualities of his unusual mind, it had been discovered within a few hours. A few hours, because Cabal was positive the carpeting had been perfect before. Yet now — he stopped and knelt just around the corner from DeGarre’s cabin — one square had been lifted and replaced incorrectly. Why was that? It was obvious that the pattern had been disrupted, if only one took a few moments to examine it properly. The unmistakeable conclusion was that it had been replaced in a hurry, and there had been no time to check.
The square was well tamped down, and Cabal was frustrated to find that he couldn’t lift it. A brief trip back to his cabin and he returned with his switchblade. It was the work of seconds to insert the tip of the knife beneath the square’s edge and lift it out.
Beneath was a bed of underlay. Unlike the carpet, this seemed to be continuous. Yet he could make out a neat cut running through it close to the edge of the exposed area. Cabal lifted more carpet squares and revealed that a square section of underlay, perhaps seventy centimetres along an edge, had been cut. It didn’t look to be a hurried job and, when he lifted the loose square of underlay, he saw that it had probably been done when the flooring was originally laid. A maintenance hatch lay in the area he had cleared, a ring in its surface ingeniously flush, with only a small space to insert a fingertip and flip the ring up so the hatch could be lifted. Without a second thought, Cabal did so.
He disliked extemporised activities, not least because going without preparation usually meant being unprepared. As he lowered himself into the darkness of the ducting that lay beneath the open hatch, he reflected that there were better ways to explore a mysterious dark place than without a torch and naked but for a Chinese dressing gown and a pair of slippers. Giving himself the assurance that he would not go far, he shuffled along on all fours.
The duct almost immediately reached a T-junction. He gauged that turning left would take him beneath the corridor on which DeGarre’s cabin lay, so that was the way he went. The light filtering down through the open hatch behind him dimmed sharply as he took the corner, and for the next two or three metres he crawled forwards in deep gloom. Thus, he felt, rather than saw, something unusual in the duct. The slightly flexible sheet metal became suddenly rigid and, feeling around, he realised that he had discovered yet another hatch, locked shut at its four corners by rotating catches connected to small handles. He gripped one of the handles, gave it an experimental turn, and felt a catch disengage. He did the same to one of its neighbours, and felt that side of the hatch drop slightly until it came to rest on something. He guessed that the hatch would have a lip running around its edge to prevent it simply falling through once all four catches were opened, because — unless he was very much mistaken — he had a very good idea what was on the other side of it, and dropping the hatch would be inconvenient at the very least.
He released the last catch, lifted the far edge of the hatch, and pushed it away from him so that it lay on the duct floor on the far side of the opening. Then he crawled back a little and gingerly pushed the near edge of the hatch away from him to reveal what lay beneath.
It was Mirkarvia, some four thousand feet below him, and barely visible in the early-morning darkness. A cold wind blew up through the hatch and made him shiver, suddenly very aware of how ridiculously unprepared he was. Extemporisation! Pah! He spat, mentally, on the concept. Here he was, woefully underequipped to carry out any sort of detailed investigation, without light or notebook. And cold. Very, very cold. Still, he was here now, so he should make the most of it, although he had little idea what he hoped to find. The duct didn’t run beneath DeGarre’s cabin, with a convenient hatch to give the hypothetical assassin an escape route. He felt around for anything suspicious, but there was nothing; the duct’s main function seemed to be to carry assorted cables and pipes around the ship, with ventilation possibly a secondary task. There were a couple of sturdy metal handles mounted on either side of the opening, although they struck him as more likely to be used as mounting for ladders during maintenance than as rungs to hold when engineers climbed through here.
He reached down and felt around on the outer skin of the
His knees squealing against the steel floor of the duct, he was bodily shoved forward. He tried to scramble across to the other side of the open hatchway, but a hand came down in the small of his back and pushed him forcefully down. As he fumbled, looking for some way to pull himself clear, one knee dropped over the edge of the gap, and Johannes Cabal fell out of the hatch.
CHAPTER 7
in which Cabal is in terrible danger and then has breakfast
Johannes Cabal disliked many things, despised fewer, loathed fewer still, and reserved true hatred for only a handful. Understanding how intense his personal definition of “dislike” was, however, gives some impression of how hot his hatreds ran. This is a man who had, after all, shot men dead for making him faintly peeved.
Johannes Cabal hated people trying to kill him. He hated it, and he hated them. Certainly, most people aren’t
