‘There, I’ve said it. No going back now. You’ll have to hear the rest of it.’
Maybe he was losing it faster than the machines had indicated, Sky thought. Slipping swiftly down into the lightless trench of dementia, his bloodstream poisoned, his brain grasping for oxygen.
‘I am your son.’
‘No. No; you’re not. I should know, Sky. I pulled you out of that sleeper berth.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You were one of them — one of our momios; one of our sleepers.’
Sky nodded, accepting this truth instantly. On some level he knew that the normal reaction would have been disbelief, perhaps even anger, but he felt none of that; only a deep and calming sense of rightness.
‘How old was I?’
‘Barely a child, only a few days old when you were frozen. There were only a few others as young as you.’
He listened to his father — not his father — as he explained that Lucretia Haussmann — the woman Sky thought of as his mother — had given birth to a baby aboard the ship, but that the child, a boy, had died within hours. Distraught, Titus had kept the truth from Lucretia for hours, then days, stretching his ingenuity to the limit while she was kept as sedated as possible. Titus feared the truth would kill her if she found out; maybe not physically, but he worried that it would crush her spirit. She was one of the most loved women on the ship. Her loss would affect them all: a poison that might sour the general mood of the crew. They were a tiny community, after all. They all knew each other. The loss of a child would be a dreadful thing to bear.
So Titus conceived a terrible plan, one he would regret almost as soon as he had brought it to fruition. But by then it was much too late.
He stole a child from the sleepers. Children, it turned out, were far more tolerant of revival than adults — it was something to do with the ratio of body volume to surface — and there had been no serious problems in warming the selected child. He had picked one of the young ones, one that would pass as his dead son. He did not have to be too meticulous. Lucretia had not seen her own baby long enough to tell that any deception had taken place.
He put the dead child in its place, cooled the berth down again and then asked for forgiveness. By the time the dead child was discovered, he would be long dead himself. It would be a dreadful thing for the parents to wake to, but at least they would also be waking to a new world, with time enough to try for another child. It would not be the same for them as it would have been for Lucretia. And if it was… well, without this crime, things might deteriorate on the ship to the point where it never reached its destination. That was an extreme case, but it was not beyond the bounds of possibility. He had to believe that. Had to believe that in some way what he had done was for the greater good of them all.
A crime of love.
Of course, Titus could have accomplished none of this without help, but only a handful of his closest friends had ever known the truth, and they had all been good associates who had never again spoken of the matter. They were all dead now, Titus said.
That was why it was so necessary that he tell Sky now.
‘You understand?’ Titus asked. ‘When I always told you you were precious… ? That was the literal truth. You were the only immortal amongst us. That was why I raised you in isolation at first; why you spent so much time alone, in the nursery, away from the other children. Partly I wanted to shield you from infections — you were no less vulnerable than the other children, and you’re no less vulnerable now, as an adult. Mainly it was so that I could know for myself. I had to study your developmental curve. It’s slower for those who have had the treatment, Sky, and it keeps on flattening as you get older. You’re twenty now, but you could pass for a tall young man barely into his teens. By the time you’re thirty or forty, people will speak of you as someone with uncommonly youthful looks. But they won’t begin to guess the truth — not until you’re much, much older.’
‘I’m immortal?’
‘Yes. It changes everything, doesn’t it.’
Sky Haussmann rather had to admit that it did.
Later, when his father had fallen into one of the abyssal dreamless sleeps that was like an inevitable foreshadowing of his death, Sky visited the saboteur. The Chimeric prisoner lay on exactly the same kind of bed as his father, attended by machines, but there the similarities ended. The machines were observing the man, but he was strong enough not to need their direct assistance. Too strong, in fact — even after they had dug a magazine- load of slugs out of him. He was attached to the bed with plastic bonds, a broad hoop across his waist and legs, two smaller hoops anchoring his upper arms. He could move one forearm enough to touch his face, while the other arm, of course, had ended only in the weapon he had used to stab Titus. Even the weapon was gone now, the cyborg’s forearm ending in a neatly sewn stump. They had searched him for other kinds of weapon, but he carried no other concealed devices, except for the implants his masters had used to shape him to their goals.
In a way, the faction that had sent the infiltrator had been spectacularly unimaginative, Sky thought. They had placed too much emphasis on him being able to sabotage the ship, when a nice, easily transferred virus would have been just as effective. It might not have directly harmed the sleepers, but their chances of making it anywhere without a living crew would have been vanishingly small.
Which was not to say that the Chimeric might not still have its uses.
It was strange, infinitely so, to know that one was suddenly immortal. Sky did not concern himself with trifling matters of definition. It was true enough that he was not invulnerable, but with care and forethought he could minimise the risks to himself.
He took a step back from the killer’s bed. They thought they had the better of the saboteur, but one could never be entirely sure. Even though the monitors said the man was in a sleep at least as deep as his father’s, it paid not to take chances. They were engineered to deceive, these things. They could do inhuman tricks with their heartrate and neural activity. That one unbound forearm could have grabbed Sky by the throat and squeezed him until he died, or pulled him so close that the man could have eaten his face off.
Sky found a medical kit on the wall. He flipped it open, studied the neatly racked implements inside and then pulled out a scalpel, glistening with blue sterility in the room’s subdued lighting. He turned it this way and that, admiring the way the blade vanished as he turned it edge on.
It was a fine weapon, he thought; a thing of excellence.
With it he moved towards the saboteur.
SIXTEEN
‘He’s coming round,’ a voice said, crystallising my sluggish thoughts towards consciousness.
One of the things you learned as a soldier — at least on Sky’s Edge — was that not everyone who shot you necessarily wanted to kill you. At least not immediately. There were reasons for this, not all of them to do with the usual mechanics of hostage-taking. Memories could be trawled from captured soldiers without the crudities of torture — all it required was the kind of neural-imaging technology which Ultras could supply, at a price, and for there to be something worth learning in the first place. Intelligence, in other words — the kind of operational knowledge which soldiers must know if they are to have any value at all.
But it had never happened to me. I had been shot at, and hit, but on all the occasions when it happened, no one had been intending that I live, for even the relatively short length of time that it would take to winnow my memories. I had never been captured by the enemy, and so had never had the dubious pleasure of waking to find myself in anything other than safe hands.
Now, though, I was learning exactly how it felt.
‘Mister Mirabel? Are you awake?’ Someone wiped something soft and cold across my face. I opened my eyes and squinted against light, which was painfully bright after my period of unconsciousness.
‘Where am I?’
‘Somewhere safe.’
I looked around blearily. I was in a chair at the high end of a long sloping room. On either side of me the
