breath. Unfortunately, it was never true.’
‘What happened to change your mind?’
‘You’ll see, shortly.’
Sky spoke into his own bracelet — it offered a limited subset of the capabilities of his father’s unit — and asked the ship to connect him to Constanza. ‘You’ll never guess where I’m calling from,’ he said when her face had appeared, tiny and bright. ‘I’m going outside. ’
‘With Titus?’
‘Yes, my father’s here.’
Constanza was thirteen now, although — like Sky — she was often taken to be older. In neither case had the assumption much to do with their looks, for while Constanza at least looked no older than her true age, Sky looked substantially younger than his: small and pale and difficult to imagine being afflicted by adolescence in anything like the near future. But both were still intellectually precocious; Constanza was now working more or less fulltime within Titus’s security organisation. As was naturally the case aboard a ship with such a small living crew, her duties generally had little to do with enforcement of rules and much more to do with the overseeing of intricate safety procedures and the studying and simulating of operational scenarios. And while it was demanding work — the Santiago was a phenomenally complex thing to understand as a single entity — it was almost certainly work that had never required Constanza to leave the confines of the ship. Since she had begun working for his father, their friendship had become more tenuous — she had responsibilities Sky lacked, and moved in the adult world — but now he was about to do something that could not help but impress her; something that would elevate him in her eyes.
He waited for her answer, but when it came it was not quite what he had been expecting. ‘I’m sorry for you, Sky. I know it won’t be easy, but you have to see it, I think.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘What Titus is about to show you.’ She paused. ‘I’ve always known, Sky. Ever since it happened, the day we got back from the dolphins. But it was never something it was right to talk about. When you come back inside, you can talk to me about it, if you want.’
He seethed; the way she spoke was less like a friend than what he imagined a condescending older sister might be like. And now his father compounded it by placing a comforting hand on his forearm. ‘She’s right, Sky. I wondered if I should forewarn you, then in the end decided not to — but what Constanza has said is true. It won’t be pleasant, but the truth seldom is. And I think you’re ready for it now.’
‘Ready for what?’ he said, and then realised the link to Constanza was still open. He addressed her: ‘You knew this trip was going ahead, didn’t you?’
‘She had some idea that I’d be taking you outside,’ his father said, before the girl could defend herself. ‘That’s all. You mustn’t — can’t — blame her for that. It’s a flight outside the ship; everyone in security has to know about it, and — since we’re not crossing over to one of the other ships — the reason for it.’
‘Which is?’
‘To learn what happened to your mother.’
All the while they had been moving, but now they reached the freight bay’s sheer metal wall. A circular door in the wall whisked open to admit them, the taxi sliding off its pallet into a long, red-lit chamber not much wider than the machine itself. They waited there for a minute or so while the chamber’s air was sucked out, then the taxi moved downwards abruptly, sinking into a shaft. Sky’s father took the opportunity to lean over to adjust Sky’s belt, and then they were outside the ship — blackness below, and the gentle curve of the hull above their heads. The feeling of vertigo was quite intense, even though there was nothing below to suggest height.
They dropped. It was only for an instant, but it was nauseating enough; like the feeling Sky remembered from the rare times when he had been near the ship’s centre, where gravity dwindled almost to zero. Then the taxi’s engines kicked in, and something like weight returned. Expertly his father vectored the taxi away from the looming grey bulk of the massive ship, adjusting their course with taps of steering thrust, his fingers as delicate on the controls as a concert pianist’s.
‘I feel sick,’ Sky said.
‘Close your eyes. You’ll be fine in a moment.’
Despite the disquiet he felt about his mother’s death — and the fact that this trip had something to do with it — Sky could not completely suppress a thrill of excitement at the thought of being outside. He released the safety buckle and started clambering all around the taxi to get a better view. His father scolded him gently and told him to get back in his seat, but not with any great conviction. Then he yawed the taxi around and smiled as the great ship they had just left came into sight.
‘Well, there she is. Your home for the last ten years, Sky, and the only home I’ve ever known. I know; there’s no need to hide your feelings. She’s not exactly beautiful, is she?’
‘She’s big, though.’
‘She’d better be — she’s just about all we’ll ever have. You’re luckier than me, of course. At least you’ll see Journey’s End.’
Sky nodded, but his father’s quiet certainty that he would be dead by then could not help but make him feel sad.
He looked back to the ship.
The Santiago was two kilometres long; longer than any ship which had ever sailed any of Earth’s oceans and easily the equal of any of the largest craft which had plied the solar system in the days before the Flotilla’s departure. Her skeleton, in fact, was an old fusion-drive space freighter, retrofitted for a journey into interstellar space. With small variations, the other Flotilla ships had been converted from the same sources.
This far from any star, almost no light fell upon the ship, and she would have been invisible were it not for the light spilling from tiny windows dotted along her length. At the very front was a big sphere encircled by lights. That was the command section, where the bridge was, and where the crew spent most of their time when they were on duty. It was where the navigational and scientific instruments were kept, forever pointed towards the destination star; the one they had nicknamed Swan, but which Sky knew really had the much less poetic name 61 Cygni-A: one cool red half of a binary star system located in the random sprinkle of stars which had been given the name Cygnus in antiquity. Only towards the end of the voyage would the ship flip around to bring its tail to bear on Swan, so that it could slow itself down with exhaust thrust from the engines.
Behind the control sphere was a cylinder of the same diameter, which held the freight bay from which they had just come. Beyond that was a long, thin spine, studded with regularly spaced modules like immense dinosaur vertebrae. At the very end of the spine was the propulsion system, the intricate and fearsome engines which had once burned to accelerate the ship up to its present cruising speed, and which would burn again on some immeasurably remote day when Sky was fully grown.
Sky knew all these aspects of the ship; he had seen models and holograms of it many times, but it was something else to be seeing it for himself, from outside, for the first time. Slowly, but with grinding stateliness, the whole ship was rotating on its long axis, spinning to create the illusion of gravity on its curving decks. Sky watched it turn; watched lights heave into view and disappear ten seconds later. He could see the tiny aperture in the cargo cylinder, where the taxi had departed. It looked very small, but not perhaps as small as it should have done, given that this ship was all his world could ever be. Almost. He was young now, and he had only been allowed to explore a small fraction of the Santiago, but surely it would not be long before he knew it all intimately.
He noticed something else, too; something that the models and the holos had definitely not got right. As the ship turned, it looked darker on one side than the other.
What could that mean?
But almost as soon as the troubling inconsistency had begun to worry him, he had forgotten it; marvelling in the sheer immensity of the ship; the pin-sharp way the details held their clarity across kilometres of vacuum; trying to imagine where his favourite places in the ship mapped into this strange new view. He had never been very far down the spine, that was for certain, and even then only under Constanza’s guidance, some daredevil adventure before the adults caught them. No one had really blamed him for that, however. It was natural curiosity to want to see the dead, once their existence was known.
Of course, they were not really dead — just frozen.
The spine was a kilometre long; half the ship’s total length. In cross-section it had a hexagonal form, with six long, narrow sides. Along each of those sides were spaced sixteen sleeper modules; each a disk-shaped
