cleared.’
This was a marvel indeed, Sky thought. None of the passengers had ever awakened, even though a few of them had certainly died. But his father seemed less than overjoyed at the situation. Gravely concerned, more accurately.
‘Why is it a problem, Dad?’
‘Because they’re not meant to wake up, that’s why. If it happens at all, it must mean it was planned from day one. Before we ever left the solar system.’
‘But why clear the area?’
‘Because of something my father told me, Sky. Now do what I just told you and get that train unloaded and then get the hell away from here, will you?’
At that moment another train slid into the bay from the opposite direction, nosing up against the one Sky had arrived upon. Four of Titus’s security people emerged from it, three men and a woman, and began buckling on plastic armour that had been too bulky to wear during the journey. This was practically the entire operational militia for the ship, its police force and army, and even these people were not fulltime security officers. The squad moved forward to another part of the train and unracked guns: gloss-white weapons which they handled with nervous care. His father had always told him that there were no guns aboard ship, but never very convincingly.
There were, in fact, many aspects of shipboard security about which Sky wanted to know more. His father’s small, tight, highly efficient organisation fascinated him. But Sky had never been allowed to work with his father. The explanation which Titus gave for this was plausible enough: he could not claim impartiality or fairness if his son were to be given a role in the organisation, no matter how apt Sky might have been — but that did not make it any less bitter a pill to swallow. Consequently the tasks Sky was assigned were always as far away from anything remotely security-related as Titus could ensure. Nothing would or could change while Titus remained head of security, and both of them understood that.
Sky went to join his friends, helping them off-load the supplies. They were getting through the job quickly, without any of the carefully honed dawdling that usually accompanied the process. His friends were unnerved; whatever was going on here was out of the ordinary and Titus Haussmann was not a man to pretend there was a crisis where none existed.
Sky kept one eye on the security squad.
They settled fabric headsets over their shaven skulls, tapping microphones and checking communication frequencies. Then they pulled armoured helmets from the train and pushed their heads into them, adjusting drop- down overlay monocles which covered one eye. A slim black line ran from each helmet to the sight attached to the top of each gun, so that the guns could be discharged without the guard having to look in the direction of fire. They probably had infra-red or sonar overlays as well. That would be useful down in the gloomy sub-levels.
When they had stopped fiddling with their equipment, the squad moved over to his father, who briefed them quickly and quietly, with the absolute minimum of fuss. Sky watched his father’s lips move; his expression one of complete calm now that he was in the presence of his own squad. Occasionally he made a taut, precise hand gesture or shook his head. He might as well have been telling them all a nursery rhyme. Even the sweat on his forehead seemed to have dried up.
Then Titus Haussmann left the squad, and went back over to the train they had arrived on and pulled his own gun from it. No armour or helmet; just the weapon. It was the same gloss-white as the others. There was a sickle-shaped magazine beneath it and a skeletal stock. His father handled it with quiet respect rather than easy familiarity: the way a man might handle a venomous snake that had just been milked.
All for a single sleepless passenger?
‘Dad…’ Sky said, leaving his duty again. ‘What is it? What is it really?’
‘Nothing you need worry about,’ his father said.
Titus took three of the squad with him and left the fourth behind, standing guard in the freight bay. The detachment disappeared down one of the access shafts which led to the berths, the clatter of their progress growing quieter, but never quite silencing. When he was certain that his father was out of earshot, Sky moved over to the guard who had been stationed in the bay.
‘What’s going on, Constanza?’
She flipped up the monocle. ‘What makes you think I’m about to tell you, if your father didn’t?’
‘I don’t know. A wild shot in the dark along the lines of us both having been friends at one point, I suppose.’
He had known it was her the instant the train had arrived; given the apparent severity of the situation it had been certain that she would be amongst the squad.
‘I’m sorry,’ Constanza said. ‘It’s just that we’re all a tiny bit edgy, understand?’
‘Of course.’ He studied her face, as beautiful and fierce as ever, wondering how it would feel to trace the line of her jaw. ‘I heard it was about one of the passengers waking up too early. Is that true?’
‘More or less,’ she said, as if through gritted teeth.
‘And for that you need more firepower than I’ve ever seen before on the ship? More than I ever knew existed?’
‘Your father determines how we handle individual incidents, not me.’
‘But he must have said something. What is it about this one passenger?’
‘Look, I don’t know, all right? Just that whatever it is, it isn’t supposed to happen. The momios aren’t meant to wake up early. That just isn’t possible, unless someone programmed their sleeper berth to make it happen. And no one would have done that unless they had a good reason.’
‘I still don’t understand why anyone would want to wake up early.’
‘To sabotage the mission, of course.’ She lowered her voice now, and clicked her fingernails against the gun, edgily. ‘A single sleeper placed aboard not as a passenger, but as a time-bomb. A volunteer on a suicide mission, say — a criminal, or someone else with nothing to lose. Someone angry enough to want to kill us all. It wasn’t easy to get a slot on the Flotilla when she left Sol, remember. The Confederacion made as many enemies as friends when it built the fleet. It wouldn’t be difficult to find someone willing to die, if it allowed them to punish us.’
‘It would be difficult to do, though.’
‘Only if you forgot to bribe the right people.’
‘I suppose you’re right. When you say time-bomb you’re not talking literally, are you?’
‘No — but now that you mention it, it isn’t such an absurd idea. What if they — whoever they were — managed to plant a saboteur aboard every ship? Maybe the one aboard the Islamabad was just the first to wake. And they wouldn’t have had any warning.’
‘Maybe a warning wouldn’t have helped them much, in that case.’
She clenched her teeth. ‘I guess we’re about to find out. On the other hand, it could just be a malfunctioning sleeper berth.’
That was when the first gunshots were heard.
Whatever was happening was taking place tens of metres beneath the loading bay, but the shots still sounded fearsomely loud. There were shouts as well. He thought he heard his father, but it was difficult to tell: the acoustics lent a metallic quality to the voices, rendering the words indistinct and blurring the differences in timbre.
‘Shit,’ Constanza said. For a moment she froze, then she was making for the access well. She turned and flashed wild eyes at him. ‘You stay here, Sky.’
‘I’m coming with you. That’s my father down there.’
The shots had ceased, but there was still a lot of noise, voices mainly, raised to the point of hysteria, and what sounded like things being thrown around. Constanza checked her gun again and then stowed it over a shoulder. She walked towards the access well, preparing to lever herself into its laddered, echoing depths.
‘Constanza…’
He grabbed her gun and wrestled it from her shoulder before she had time to act. Constanza turned round in fury, but he was already easing past her, not exactly pointing the gun at her, but not exactly pointing it away from her either. He had no idea how to use it, but he must have looked sufficiently purposeful. Constanza backed off now, her eyes flicking to the gun. It was still tethered to her helmet by the black flex, which was now stretched to its limit.
‘Give me the head-gear,’ Sky said, nodding towards her.
