‘You’ll be in deep shit for this,’ she said.
‘What, going after my father when he’s in danger? I don’t think so. A mild reprimand at the very worst, I think.’ He nodded again. ‘The helmet, Constanza.’
She grimaced and pulled the helmet from her head. Sky settled it over his own, not bothering to ask her for the fabric underlayer. The helmet was a little small for him, but there was no time to adjust it now. He flipped down the monocle, gratified when it lit up with the view that the gun was seeing. The image was all shades of grey- green, overlaid by cross-hairs, range-finder numerics and weapons-status summaries. None of that meant anything to him, but when he looked at Constanza he saw her nose stand out as a white smudge of heat. Infra-red; that was all he needed to know.
He lowered himself into the shaft, aware that Constanza was following him at a discreet distance.
There were no shouts now, but there were still voices. They were quiet, but there was nothing calm about them. He could hear his father quite distinctly now; there was something not quite right about the way he was talking.
He reached the nexus which connected the sleeper berths of this node. They radiated out in ten directions, but only one of the connecting doors was open. That was where the voices were coming from. He pointed the gun ahead of him and moved towards the berth, down the normally dark, pipe-lined corridor which led to it. Now the corridor shone in sickly shades of grey-green. He was scared, he realised. Fear had always been there, but it was only now that he had the gun and had climbed down that he had time to pay attention to it. Fear was a nearly unfamiliar thing to him, but not completely so. He remembered his first real taste of it, alone in the nursery, betrayed and deserted. Now he watched his own shadow trace phantom shapes along the wall, and for a fleeting moment wished that Clown were with him now to offer guidance and friendship. The idea of returning to the nursery was suddenly very tempting. It was a world unsullied by rumours of ghost ships or sabotage, of present and real hardships.
He crept round a dogleg in the corridor and there was the berth ahead of him: the large, machine-filled support chamber for a single sleeper. It was like a dedicated burial room in a church, reeking of antiquity and reverence. The room had been cold until recently and much of it was still olive-green or black in his vision.
From behind he heard Constanza speak. ‘Give me the gun, Sky, and no one will know you took it.’
‘I’ll give it back when the danger’s passed.’
‘We don’t even know what the danger is yet. Perhaps someone’s gun just went off by accident.’
‘And the sleeper berth just happened to be malfunctioning, as well? Yeah, right.’
He entered the sleeper berth and took in the tableau that greeted him. The three security guards were there, as was his father — blobs of pale-green shading to white.
‘Constanza,’ one of them said. ‘I thought you were supposed to cover… shit. It isn’t you, is it?’
‘No. It’s me. Sky Haussmann.’ He flipped up the monocle, the room gloomier than it had been a moment ago.
‘And where’s Constanza?’
‘I took her helmet and gun, entirely against her wishes.’ He looked behind him, hoping that Constanza had heard this attempt at exonerating her. ‘She did put up a fight, believe me.’
The berth was one of ten in a ring, each fed by its own corridor from the node. The room had probably been entered only one or two times since the Flotilla’s launch. The sleeper support systems were as delicate and complex as the antimatter engines; just as likely to go horribly wrong if tampered with by anything other than expert hands. Like buried pharaohs, the sleepers had not expected their places of slumber to be violated until they reached what passed for the afterlife — arrival around 61 Cygni-A. It felt a little wrong just to be here at all.
But not half as wrong as it felt to see his father.
Titus Haussmann was lying on the floor, his upper body cradled by one of the security guards. His chest was covered in a dark, cloying fluid that Sky knew was blood. There were canyonlike gashes in his uniform, in which the blood was pooling thickly, gurgling disgustingly with each laboured breath.
‘Dad…’ Sky said.
‘It’s all right,’ one of the guards answered. ‘There’s a medical team on their way.’
Which, Sky thought — given the general state of medical expertise aboard the Santiago — was about as useful as saying there were priests coming. Or undertakers.
He looked at the sleeper casket; the long, plinth-like, machine-encrusted cryo-coffin which filled much of the room. The upper half of it was cracked wide open, huge jagged fractures like shattered glass. Sharp bits of it formed a haphazard glass mosaic on the floor. It was exactly as if something inside the casket had forced its way out.
And there was something inside it.
The passenger was dead, or nearly dead; that much was obvious. At first glance the man looked normal enough apart from the bullet wounds: a naked human being invaded by monitoring wires, blood-shunts and catheters. He was younger than most of them, Sky thought — excellent fanatic fodder, in other words. But with his bald head and masklike lack of facial muscle tone, the man could have passed for a thousand other sleepers.
Except that his forearm had come off.
It was lying on the floor, in fact — a limp, glove-like thing, ending in flaps of ragged skin. But there was no bone or meat showing from the end, and very little blood had leaked from the severed limb. The stump was wrong as well. The man’s skin and bone stopped a few inches below his elbow, and then it was all tapering metal prosthesis: a complex, blood-lathered, glittering obscenity which ended not in steel fingers but in a vicious assemblage of blades.
Sky imagined how it must have happened.
The man had woken inside his casket, probably following a plan laid down before the Flotilla had left Mercury. He must have intended to wake up unobserved, smash his way to freedom and then set about inflicting stealthy harm on the ship, in precisely the way that might have happened on the Islamabad, if Constanza’s theory was correct. A lone man could certainly do great damage, if he was not obliged to allow for his own survival.
But his revival had not gone unnoticed. He must have been in the process of waking when the security team had entered the berth. Perhaps Sky’s father had been leaning over the casket, examining it, when the man had cracked it open with his forearm weapon. It would have been very easy for him to stab Titus then, even if the other squad members were doing their best to put magazine-loads of bullets into him. Drugged with pain-nullifying revival chemicals, he had probably barely noticed the shots eating into him.
They had stopped him, maybe even killed him, but not before he had inflicted extreme harm on Titus. Sky knelt down next to his father. Titus’s eyes were still open, but they seemed not quite to focus.
‘Dad? It’s me. Sky. Try and hang on, will you? The medics are coming. It’ll be all right.’
One of the guards touched his shoulder. ‘He’s strong, Sky. He had to go in first, you know. That was his way.’
‘Is his way, you mean.’
‘Of course. He’ll pull through.’
Sky started to say something, the words assembling in his head, but suddenly the passenger was moving; at first with dreamlike slowness then with terrifying speed. For a yawning instant it was not something he was prepared to believe; the man’s injuries were simply too severe for him to be capable of movement, let alone movement that was swift and violent.
The passenger rolled from the casket, the movement lithe and animal-like, and then the man was standing, and with one elegant scythe-like sweep of his arm he cut one of the guards open across the throat, the guard collapsing to his knees with blood fountaining from the wound. The passenger paused, holding his weapon-arm in front of him, and then the complex cluster of knives whirred and clicked, one blade retracting while another slotted into place, gleaming with pure-blue surgical brilliance. The passenger studied this process with what looked like quiet fascination.
He stepped forward, towards Sky.
Sky still had Constanza’s gun, but the fear was so intense that he could not even hold the weapon up to threaten the passenger. The passenger looked at him, the muscles beneath the flesh rippling strangely, as if dozens of orchestrated maggots were crawling over the bones of his skull. The rippling halted, and for a moment the face staring back at Sky was a crude approximation of his own. Then the rippling resumed and the face was no longer one Sky recognised.
