Quirrenbach standing to one side, restrained by the other man, while I took the brunt of Vadim’s punishment.
I should have seen it then.
Quirrenbach had latched onto me, which implied that he was very good at his job; that he had singled me out amongst all the passengers on the ship — but it was not necessarily like that. Reivich might have employed half a dozen other agents to tail other passengers, all using different strategems to get close to their targets. The difference was, the others were all shadowing the wrong person, and Quirrenbach — by luck or intuition or deduction — had hit the bullseye. But there was no way he could have known for sure. In all the conversations we had had, I had still been careful enough not to give away anything which would have established my identity as Cahuella’s security man.
I tried to put myself in Quirrenbach’s position.
It must have been very tempting for him and Vadim to kill me. But they could not do that; not until they had become totally certain that I was the real assassin. If they had killed me then, they would never know for sure that they had got the man they were after — and that doubt would always shadow them.
So Quirrenbach had probably been planning to tail me for as long as it took; as long as it took to establish a pattern; that I was after a man called Reivich for some purpose unspecified. Visiting Dominika’s was an essential part of his disguise. He must not have realised that as a soldier I would lack implants and would therefore not require the good Madame’s talents. But he had taken it calmly — trusting me with his belongings while he was under the knife. Nice touch, Quirrenbach, I thought. The goods had served to reinforce his story.
Except again, in hindsight, I should have realised. The broker had complained that Quirrenbach’s experientials were bootlegged; that they were copies of originals he had handled weeks earlier. And yet Quirrenbach said he had only just arrived. If I checked the manifests of lighthuggers arriving in the last week, would I even find that a ship had come in from Grand Teton? Perhaps, or perhaps not. It depended on how fastidious Quirrenbach had been in the manufacturing of his cover. I doubted that it went very deep, since he would have had only a day or two to manufacture the whole thing from scratch.
All things considered, he hadn’t done an entirely bad job.
It was sometime after noon, when I had finished with Dominika, that the next Haussmann episode happened. I was standing with my back against the wall of Grand Central Station, idly watching a skilled puppeteer entertain a small group of children. The puppeteer worked above a miniature booth, operating a tiny model of Marco Ferris, making the delicately jointed, spacesuited figurine descend a rockface formed from a heap of crumbled masonry. Ferris was supposed to be climbing into the chasm, because there was a pile of jewels at the base of the slope guarded by a fierce, nine-headed alien monster. The children clapped and screamed as the puppeteer made the monster lunge at Ferris.
That was when my thoughts stalled and the episode inserted itself, fully-formed.
Afterwards — when I’d had time to digest what had been revealed to me — I thought about the one that had come before it. The Haussmann episodes had begun innocently enough, reiterating Sky’s life according to the facts as I knew them. But they’d begun to diverge, at first in small details and then with increasing obviousness. The references to the sixth ship didn’t belong in any orthodox history that I’d ever heard of, and nor did the fact that Sky had kept alive the assassin who had murdered, or been given the means to murder, his father. But those were minor aspects of the story compared with the idea that Sky had actually murdered Captain Balcazar. Balcazar was just a footnote in our history; one of Sky’s predecessors — but no one had ever intimated that Sky had actually killed him.
Clenching my fist, blood raining against the floor of the concourse, I began to wonder what I’d really been infected with.
‘There wasn’t anything I could do about it. He was sleeping there, not making a sound — I never suspected anything was wrong.’
The two medics examining Balcazar had come aboard the instant the ship was secure, after Sky had raised the alarm about the old man. Valdivia and Rengo had closed the airlock behind them so that they had space to work. Sky watched them intently. They both looked weary and sallow, with bags under their eyes from overwork.
‘He didn’t cry out, gasp for air, anything like that?’ said Rengo.
‘No,’ Sky said. ‘Not a peep.’ He made a show of looking distraught, but was careful not to overdo it. After all, with Balcazar out of the way, the path to the Captaincy was suddenly much clearer than it had been before, as if a complicated maze had suddenly revealed itself to have a very simple route to its heart. He knew that; they knew it too — and it would have been even more suspicious if he had not tempered his grief with the merest hint of pleasure at his considerable good fortune.
‘I’ll bet those bastards on the Palestine poisoned him,’ Valdivia said. ‘I always was against him going over, you know.’
‘It was certainly a stressful meeting,’ Sky said.
‘That was probably all it took,’ Rengo said, scratching at the raw pink skin under his eye. ‘There’s no need to blame it on the others. He just couldn’t take the stress.’
‘There’s nothing I could have done, then?’
The other medic was examining the prosthetic web across Balcazar’s chest, strapped on beneath the side- buttoned tunic which the men had now opened. Valdivia prodded the device doubtfully. ‘This should have given off an alarm. You didn’t hear one, I take it?’
‘As I said, not a peep.’
‘Damn thing must have broken down again. Listen, Sky,’ Valdivia said. ‘If a word of this gets out, we’re absolutely done for. That damn web was always breaking down, but the way Rengo and I have been over-stretched recently…’ He blew out air and shook his head in disbelief at the hours he had been working. ‘Well, I’m not saying we didn’t repair it, but obviously we couldn’t spend all our time nursing Balcazar to the exclusion of everyone else. I know they’ve got gear on the Brazilia better than this clapped-out rubbish, but what good does it do us?’
‘Very little,’ Sky said, nodding keenly. ‘Other people would have died if you had devoted too much attention to the old man. I understand perfectly.’
‘I hope you do, Sky — because there’s going to be one hell of a shitstorm once news of his death leaks out.’ Valdivia looked at the Captain again, but if he was hoping for a miraculous recovery, there was no sign of it. ‘We’re going to come under examination for the quality of our medical support. You’re going to be grilled about the way you handled the trip over to the Palestine. Ramirez and those other council bastards are going to try and say we screwed up. They’re going to try and say you were negligent. Trust me; I’ve seen it all before.’
‘We all know it wasn’t our fault,’ Sky said. He looked down at the Captain, the snail-trail of dried saliva still adorning his epaulette. ‘He was a good man; he served us well, long after he should have retired. But he was old.’
‘Yes, and he would have died in a year or so, no matter what happened. But try explaining that to the ship.’
‘We’ll just have to watch our backs, then.’
‘Sky… you won’t say a word, will you? About what we’ve told you?’
Someone was banging on the airlock, trying to get into the taxi. Sky ignored the commotion. ‘What do you want me to say, exactly?’
The medic drew in a breath. ‘You have to say the web gave you a warning. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t act on it. You couldn’t have — you didn’t have the resources or the expertise, and you were a long way from the ship.’
Sky nodded, as if all this was perfectly reasonably and exactly what he would have suggested. ‘Just so long as I never imply that the prosthetic web never actually worked in the first place?’
The two medics glanced at each other. ‘Yes,’ said the first. ‘That’s exactly it. No one will blame you, Sky. They’ll see that you did everything you could have done.’
The Captain, now that Sky thought about it, looked very peaceful now. His eyes were shut — one of the medics had fingered down his eyelids to give the man some semblance of dignity in death. It was, as Clown had said, entirely possible to imagine that the man was dreaming of his boyhood. Never mind that the man’s childhood, aboard the ship, had been every bit as sterile and claustrophobic as Sky’s own.
