administered had been designed to wear off by the time of their arrival. Some of the other senior crew members, Sky observed, were almost as infirm as his own Captain; supported by their own bio-medical rigs and fussed over by their own aides. It was quite an idiosyncratic collection of wheezing ironmongery; almost as if the machines had decided to meet and had dragged their fleshly hosts along for the ride.
They had talked mainly about the messages from home, of course. Everyone agreed that the two messages had been genuine in origin, if not necessarily guaranteed to be truthful, and that they were probably not a complex hoax perpetrated by one of the ships against the rest of the Flotilla. Each frequency component in either radio message had been subjected to a specific delay relative to its neighbour, due to the clouds of interstellar electrons lying between Sol and the Flotilla. That smearing would have been very difficult to fake convincingly, even if a transmitter could have been dropped sufficiently far behind the ships to send the message. There was never any mention of the sixth ship, and the Captain never alluded to anything connected to it. Perhaps it was truly the case that the existence of the sixth ship was only known about on the Santiago. A secret worth keeping, in other words.
‘Of course,’ said the propulsion theorist, ‘it could all be a trick.’
‘But why would anyone want to send us harmful information?’ asked Zamudio, the commander of the host ship. ‘Whatever happens to us won’t make any difference to anyone back home, so why try and hurt us?’
‘The same argument applies to any beneficial data,’ said Omdurman. ‘There’s no reason for them to send that either. Except common human decency.’
‘Damn human decency… damn it to hell,’ Balcazar said.
Sky spoke up at that point, raising his voice above that of the Captain. ‘I can think of arguments either way, actually.’ They looked at him patiently, as one might humour a child attempting to tell a joke. Hardly anyone in the room must have known who he was, beyond the fact that he was supposedly Titus Haussmann’s son. It suited him perfectly well: being underestimated was a highly satisfactory state of affairs.
He continued, ‘The organisation that launched the Flotilla might still exist in some shape and form back home, perhaps clandestinely. They’d still have an interest in helping us on our way, if only to ensure that their earlier efforts weren’t wasted. We might still be the only interstellar expedition under way; don’t forget that. We might still be the only hope anyone has of reaching another star.’
Omdurman stroked his bearded chin. ‘I suppose that’s possible. We’re like a great mosque being built: a project that will take hundreds of years and which no one will see in its entirety…’
‘Damn them… damn them all.’
Omdurman faltered, but pretended not to have heard. ‘… yet those who know they’ll die before the end is reached can still feel some satisfaction at having contributed something to the whole, even if it’s only the tiniest chip in the least significant pattern. The trouble is we know precious little about what’s really happened back home.’
Zamudio smiled. ‘And even if they did send more thorough news updates, we still wouldn’t know how much to trust them.’
‘Back to square one, in other words,’ said Armesto, from the Brazilia. He was the youngest of the Captains; not much older than Sky. Sky studied him carefully, taking the outline of a possible enemy; one that might not assume definition until years or decades hence.
‘Equally, I can think of reasons they might want to kill us,’ Sky said. He turned to Balcazar. ‘With your permisssion, of course?’
The Captain’s head jolted up, as if he had been on the point of sleep.
‘Go head, Titus, dear boy.’
‘Suppose we’re not the only game in town.’ Sky leaned forward, his elbows hard against the mahogany. ‘It’s a century since we left home. There may be faster ships on the drawing board now; maybe even on their way. Maybe there are factions that want to stop us reaching Swan so they can claim it for themselves. Granted, they could always fight us for it, but we’re four large ships and we do have nuclear armaments.’ The devices he was talking about had been put aboard for landscape engineering when they reached Journey’s End — blasting mountain passes, or scooping out natural harbours — but they were perfectly capable of being used as weapons. ‘We wouldn’t be a pushover. From their point of view, it would be a lot simpler to persuade us to destroy ourselves.’
‘So what you’re saying is, there are equally strong reasons for trusting the message as not trusting it?’
‘Yes. And the same argument applies to the second one; the one warning us from adopting the modifications.’
The propulsion theorist coughed. ‘He’s right. All we can do is assess the technical content of the message for ourselves.’
‘That won’t be easy.’
‘Then we take a massive risk.’
So it had gone on; arguments for and against trusting the messages bounced around fruitlessly. There had been suggestions that one or other party was withholding valuable knowledge — true enough, Sky thought — but no fingers had been pointed directly and the conclave had ended in a mood of unease rather than outright hostility. All the ships had agreed to continue sharing their interpretation of the messages, together with the establishment of a special pan-Flotilla expert group to examine the technical feasibility of the suggested modifications. It was agreed that no ship would act unilaterally, and there would be no attempt to implement the modifications without the express agreement of all other parties. It was even suggested that any ship that wanted to go it alone was welcome to do so, but they would have to pull away from the main body of the Flotilla, increasing their separation to four times the current distance.
‘That’s an insane proposal,’ said Zamudio. He was a tall, handsome man, much older than he seemed, who had been blinded by the flash from the Islamabad. A camera was strapped to one of his shoulders like a seadog’s parrot, tracking this way and that, seemingly of its own volition. ‘When we launched this expedition we did it in a spirit of camaraderie, not as a race to be the first to claim the prize.’
Armesto squared his jaw. ‘Then why are you so unwilling to share those supplies you’ve hoarded with the rest of us?’
‘We aren’t hoarding supplies,’ Omdurman said with little discernible conviction. ‘Any more than you’ve been withholding spare parts for our sleeper berths, as a matter of fact.’
Zamudio’s camera snapped onto him. ‘Why, that’s a ridiculous…’ He trailed off before speaking again. ‘No one’s denying that there are differences in the qualities of life on the ships. Far from it. It was always part of the plan that it should be like that. From the outset it was always intended that the ships should organise their own affairs independently of one another, if for no other reason than to ensure that not everyone made the same unforeseeable mistakes. Does that mean we all end up with the same basic standard of living aboard each ship? No; of course not. Something would be very wrong if it did. It’s inevitable that there should be subtly differing mortality rates amongst the crew; a simple reflection of the differing emphasis placed upon medical science by the ship regimes.’ He had their attention now, so he lowered his voice, gazing into the middle distance while his camera eye snapped from face to face. ‘Yes, sleeper berth fatalities will vary from ship to ship. Sabotage? I don’t think so, comforting as that thought might be.’
‘Comforting?’ someone said, as if they had misheard him.
‘Yes, exactly that. There’s nothing more comforting than paranoid conspiracy-mongering, especially where it hides a deeper problem. Forget talk of saboteurs; think instead of poor operational procedures; inadequate technical understanding… I could go on.’
‘Enough damned prattling,’ Balcazar said, in a flash of lucidity. ‘This isn’t what we came to discuss. If anyone wants to act on the damned message, let them. I’ll be more than interested in observing the results.’
But it seemed unlikely that anyone would be the first to make that move. As the Captain had implied, the natural impulse would surely be to let someone else make the first mistake. Another conclave would take place in three months, after the messages had been reviewed in greater detail. The general shipwide populace would be informed of the existence of the messages sometime after that. The accusations that had been thrown around in the conclave room were quietly forgotten. Cautiously, there was talk that the whole issue, far from heightening inter-ship tensions, might lead to a modest thawing in relations.
Now Sky sat with Balcazar in the homegoing shuttle.
‘Not long until we get back to the Santiago, sir. Why don’t you try and get some rest?’
