bothered by that.
I told myself that the ship could have looked a lot worse and it still wouldn’t have mattered. The route down to the Glitter Band — the conglomeration of habitats in low orbit around Yellowstone — was a typical workhorse run. There were a dozen similar operations around Sky’s Edge. There was no need for any hefty acceleration at any point in the journey, which meant that, with modest maintenance, ships could ply the same routes for centuries on end, toiling up and down the gravity well until some final, fatal systems failure turned them into macabre pieces of drifting space sculpture. There were few essential overheads, so while such routes would always have a couple of prestigious operators running luxurious shuttles on high-burn trajectories, there would also be a series of steadily more ramshackle operations, each cutting more costs than the last. At the very bottom of the heap would be chemical-rocket or ion-drive scows making painfully slow transfers between different orbits — and while the slowboat I had been assigned wasn’t quite that bad, it was most definitely not at the luxury end of the scale.
But, slow as the ship was, it still represented the fastest route down to the Glitter Band. The high-burn shuttles made that run more swiftly, but no high-burners came anywhere near Idlewild. It didn’t take an economics theorist to understand why: most of Idlewild’s clients barely had the funds to cover their own revival, let alone an expensive shortcut to Chasm City. I’d first have had to travel to the parking swarm, and then negotiate a slot on a high-burner, with no guarantee that one was available until a later flight. Amelia had advised against that, saying that there were not nearly so many high-burners operating as before — before what, I didn’t have a chance to ask — and that the time-saving compared to getting straight on the slow shuttle would have been marginal at best.
Eventually the elevator reached the connecting passage to the Strelnikov, and my Mendicant friends bade me farewell. They were all smiles now, as if the bruises on my face were just another psychosomatic manifestation of the Haussmann virus and nothing they were responsible for.
‘Best of luck, Mister Mirabel.’ The Mendicant with the cosh gave me a cheery wave.
‘Thanks. I’ll send a postcard. Or maybe I’ll come back and let you know how I got on.’
‘That would be nice.’
I spat out a final coagulating globule. ‘Don’t count on it.’
A few other prospective immigrants were being manhandled aboard ahead of me, mumbling drowsily in unfamiliar languages. Inside, we were shunted through a disorientating maze of narrow crawlways until we reached a hub somewhere deep in the Strelnikov’s bowels. There we were assigned accommodation cubicles for the journey down to the Glitter Band.
By the time I got to mine I was weary and aching; feeling like an animal that had come off second best in a fight and had crawled back to its den to lick its wounds. I was glad of the privacy of the cubicle. It wasn’t fragrantly clean, but it wasn’t filthy either: just some yellowing hybrid of the two. There was no artificial gravity on the Strelnikov — for which I was grateful; it wouldn’t have been prudent to spin her or accelerate her too hard — so the cubicle came outfitted with a zero-gee bunk bed and various nourishment and sanitary facilities designed with the same lack of gravity in mind. There was a general network console which looked like it should have been lovingly preserved in a museum of cybernetics, and there were stained and faded warning notices stuck to every available surface appertaining to what could and couldn’t be done in the ship, and how to get out of it as quickly as possible if something went wrong. Periodically, a thick-accented voice came over a Tannoy system with announcements concerning delays to the departure, but eventually the voice said that we had cast off from Idlewild, engaged drive and were on our way down. The departure had been so soft I hadn’t noticed it.
I picked at the shards of tooth in my mouth, mapped the painful extremities of the bruises the Mendicants had given me, and gradually fell asleep.
TEN
On the day that the passenger was to awake — and nothing would ever be the same after that — Sky and his two closest associates were riding a service train along the Santiago’s spine, rumbling down one of the narrow access tunnels which threaded the ship from nose to tail. The train moved at a few lumbering kilometres per hour, stopping now and then to allow its crew to off-load stores, or to wait for another train to clear the tunnel section ahead. As usual Sky’s companions were passing the time with tall stories and boasts, while Sky played devil’s advocate, unable to share fully in their fun but more than willing to ruin it if he saw an opportunity.
‘Viglietti told me something yesterday,’ Norquinco said, raising his voice to be heard above the roar of the train’s passage. ‘He said he didn’t believe it himself, but he knew other people that did. It was about the Flotilla, actually.’
‘Astonish us,’ Sky said.
‘Simple question: how many ships were there originally, before the Islamabad went up?’
‘Five, of course,’ Gomez said.
‘Ah, but what if that’s wrong? What if there were six, originally? One blew up — we know that — but what if the other one’s still out there?’
‘Wouldn’t we have seen it?’
‘Not if it’s dead; just a haunted husk of a ship trailing behind us.’
‘Very convenient,’ Sky said. ‘It wouldn’t happen to have a name by any chance, would it?’
‘As a matter of fact…’
‘I knew it.’
‘They say it’s called the Caleuche.’
Sky sighed, knowing it was going to be one of those journeys again. There had been a time — many years ago, now — when the three of them had viewed the ship’s train network as a source of amusement and carefully controlled danger; a place for hazardous games and make-believe; ghost stories and challenges. There were disused tunnels branching off from the main routes, leading, so it was rumoured, to hidden cargo bays or secret caches of stowaway sleepers, smuggled aboard by rival governments at the last moment. There were places where he and his friends had dared each other to ride on the outsides of the trains, grazing their backs against the speeding walls of the tunnels. Older now, he looked back on those games with wry bewilderment, half proud that they had taken those risks, half horrified that they had come so close to what would obviously have been gruesome death.
It was a lifetime ago. They were serious now; doing their bit for the ship. Everyone had to pull their weight in these lean new times, and Sky and his companions were regularly assigned the work of escorting supplies to and from the workers in the spine and the engine section. Usually they had to help unload the stuff and manhandle it through crawlways and down access shafts to wherever it was needed, so the work was far from the soft option it might have appeared. Sky seldom finished a shift without some fresh cuts and bruises, and all the effort had given him a set of muscles he had never expected to gain.
They were an unlikely trio. Gomez was working his way towards a job in the engine section, in the hallowed priesthood of the propulsion team. Now and then he would get to ride the train all the way there and even talk with some of the whispering engine techs, trying to impress them with his knowledge of containment physics and the other arcana of antimatter propulsion theory. Sky had watched some of those exchanges and had observed the way Gomez’s questions and replies were not always swatted ruthlessly down by the techs. Sometimes they were even moderately impressed, implying that Gomez would one day be allowed to graduate to their soft-spoken priesthood.
Norquinco was a different creature entirely. He had a capacity to become completely and obsessively lost in a problem; overwhelmingly able to be fascinated by anything, provided it was sufficiently complex and layered. He was an assiduous keeper of lists, deeply enamoured of serial numbers and classifications. His favourite realm of study, unsurprisingly, was the hideous complexity of the Santiago’s nervous system; the computer networks which veined the ship and which had been altered, rerouted and written over like a palimpsest countless times since the launch; most recently after the blackout. Most sane adults quailed at attempting to understand more than a tiny sub-set of that complexity, but Norquinco was actually drawn to the entirety, perversely thrilled by something that most people saw as bordering on the pathological.
Because of that, he frightened people. The techs who worked on the network problems had well-trodden
