‘Really, sir?’
‘Not literally, you damn fool! What would a man weigh, one ten millionth of the mass of one our ships? What kind of bloody edge would that have been?’
‘Not much of one, sir.’
‘I don’t damn well think so, no. The trouble with you, Titus, is you take everything I say too damn literally… like a bloody amanuensis hanging off my every word, quill poised above parchment…’
‘I’m not Titus, sir. Titus was my father.’
‘What?’ For a moment Balcazar glared at him, his eyes yellow with suspicion. ‘Oh, never mind, damn you!’
But this was actually one of Balcazar’s better days. There had been no outright lapses into surrealism. He could be very much worse: as poetically oblique as any sphinx, when the mood seized him. Perhaps there had once been a context in which even his maddest statement might have meant something, but to Sky they sounded only like premature deathbed ramblings. That was no problem of his. Balcazar seldom invited any kind of riposte when he was in soliloquy mode. If Sky had really back-answered him — or even dared to question some minute, trifling detail in Balcazar’s stream-of-consciousness — the shock of it would probably have given him multiple organ failure, even with the relaxant Rengo had administered.
How utterly convenient that would have been, Sky thought.
After a few minutes, he said, ‘I suppose you can tell me what this is all about now, sir.’
‘Of course, Titus. Of course.’
And as placidly as if they were two old friends catching up on lost times over a couple of pisco sours, the Captain told him that they were heading to a conclave of senior Flotilla crew. It was to be the first in many years, precipitated by the unexpected arrival of another update from Sol system. A message from home, in other words, containing elaborate technical blueprints. It was the kind of exterior event which was still sufficient to push the Flotilla towards some kind of unity, even in the midst of the cold war. It was the same kind of gift which might have annihilated the Islamabad, when Sky was very young. Even now, no one was entirely sure whether Khan had chosen to sip from that poisoned chalice, or whether the accident had just happened then out of a sense of malign cosmic caprice. Now there was a promise of another squeeze in engine efficiency, if only they would make certain trifling changes to the magnetic confinement topology; all very safe, the message said — tested endlessly back home, with mock-ups of the Flotilla’s engines; the potential for error was really negligible provided certain basic precautions were taken…
But at the same time, another message had arrived.
Don’t do it, said the other message. They’re trying to trick you.
It hardly mattered that the other message offered no plausible reason why such trickery might be attempted. The doubt that it brought was enough to lend this conclave an entirely new frisson of tension.
Eventually they were within visual range of the Palestine, where the conclave would be held. A whole swarm of shuttle taxis was converging on her from the other three ships, carrying senior ships’ officers. The choice of the meeting place had been arrived at in haste, but that did not mean the process had been devoid of difficulty. Yet the Palestine was the obvious choice. In any war, Sky thought, cold or otherwise, it was always to the mutual benefit of all participants to agree on a neutral ground, whether it be for negotiation, exchange of spies or — if all else failed — early demonstration of new weapons — and the Palestine was the ship that had assumed that role.
‘Do you think this is really a trick, sir?’ Sky asked, when Balcazar had finished one of his coughing sessions. ‘I mean, why would they do that?’
‘Why would they bloody do what?’
‘Try and kill us, sir, by transmitting erroneous technical data? There’d be no gain for them back home. It’s a wonder they even bother sending us anything.’
‘Precisely.’ Balcazar spat the word, as if its obviousness was beneath contempt. ‘There’d be no gain in sending us something useful, either — and it would be a lot more work than sending us something dangerous. Can’t you see that, you little fool? God help all of us if one of your generation ever assumes command…’ He trailed off.
Sky waited for him to finish coughing, then wheezing. ‘But there must still be a motivation…’
‘Pure malice.’
He was treading very thin ice now, but he soldiered on. ‘The malice could just as easily lie in the message warning us not to implement the change.’
‘Oh, and you’re willing to risk four thousand lives to put that little bit of schoolboy speculation to the test, are you?’
‘It’s not my job to take such a decision, sir. I’m just saying I don’t envy you the responsibility.’
‘And what would you know about responsibility anyway, you insolent little prick?’
Little now, Sky thought. But one day… perhaps one day not too far from this one, all that might change. Thinking it best not to reply, he flew the taxi on in silence, broken only by the old man’s cardiovascular labours.
But he thought deeply. It was something that Balcazar had said; that remark about it being better to bury the dead in space, rather than carry them to the destination world. It made a kind of sense, when he thought about it.
Every kilogramme that the ship carried was another kilogramme that had to be decelerated down from interstellar cruise speed. The ships massed close on a million tonnes — ten million times the mass of a man, as Balcazar had said. The simple laws of Newtonian physics told Sky that decreasing the mass of a ship by that amount would bring a proportional increase in the rate at which the ship could decelerate, assuming the same engine efficiency.
An improvement of one part in ten million was hardly spectacular… but who said you had to make do with the mass of just one man?
Sky thought about all the dead passengers the Santiago was carrying: the sleepers who were medically beyond any kind of revival. Only human sentimentality would argue that they needed to be brought to Journey’s End. And for that matter, the huge and heavy machinery that supported them could be ditched as well. He thought about it some more, and began to think that it would not be impossible to shave off tonnes from the ship’s mass. Put like that, it almost sounded compelling. The improvement would still be much less than one part in a thousand. Still — who was to say more sleepers would not be lost in the years to come? A thousand things could go wrong.
It was a risky business, being frozen.
‘Maybe we should all just wait and see, Titus,’ the Captain said, jolting him from his thoughts. ‘That wouldn’t be such a bad approach to take, would it?’
‘Wait and see, sir?’
‘Yes.’ There was a cold clarity to the Captain now, but Sky knew that it could go as easily as it came. ‘Wait and see what they do about it, I mean. They’ll have received the message as well, you realise. They’ll have debated what to do about it as well, of course — but they won’t have been able to talk it over with any of us.’
The Captain sounded lucid enough, but Sky was having trouble following him. Doing his best to conceal the fact, he said, ‘It’s a long time since you’ve mentioned them, isn’t it?’
‘Of course. One doesn’t go around blabbing, Titus — you of all people would know that. Loose lips sink ships, that sort of thing. Or get them discovered.’
‘Discovered, sir?’
‘Well, we know damn well that our friends on the other three don’t even seem to know about them. We’ve had spies penetrate right to the highest echelons on the other ships, and there’s been no word about them at all.’
‘Could we know for sure, though, sir?’
‘Oh, I think so, Titus.’
‘You do, sir?’
‘Of course. You keep your ear to the ground on the Santiago, don’t you? You know that the crew are at least familiar with the rumour of the sixth ship, even if most of them don’t give it any credence.’
Sky masked his surprise as well as he was able. ‘The sixth ship’s just a myth to most of them, sir.’
‘And that’s the way we’ll keep it. We, on the other hand, know better.’
