The knocking on the airlock had not stopped. ‘I’d better let that fellow in,’ Sky said.
‘Sky…’ the first medic said imploringly.
He put a hand on the man’s forearm. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
Sky composed himself and palmed the door control. Behind, there were at least twenty people all wanting to be first into the cabin. They were all trying to get a look at the dead Captain, professing concern while secretly hoping this was not another false alarm. Balcazar had been in the distasteful habit of almost dying for several years now.
‘Dear God,’ said one of them, a woman from Propulsion Concepts. ‘It’s true, isn’t it… what in heaven’s name happened?’
One of the medics started to speak, but Sky was faster. ‘His prosthetic web malfunctioned,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘You heard me. I was watching Balcazar the whole time. He was fine until his web started making an alarm sound. I opened his tunic and looked at the diagnostic readout. It said he was having a coronary.’
‘No…’ one of the medics said, but he might as well have been addressing an empty room.
‘And you’re sure he wasn’t having one?’ the woman said.
‘Hardly. He was talking to me at the time, quite lucidly. No sign of discomfort, just annoyance. Then the web told me it was going to attempt defibrillation. Needless to say, he became quite agitated at that point.’
‘And what happened then?’
‘I started to try and remove the web, but with all the lines running into him, I realised it was going to be impossible in the seconds I had before the defib began. I had no choice but to get away from Balcazar. I might have been killed myself had I been touching him.’
‘He’s lying!’ the medic said.
‘Ignore him,’ Sky said placidly. ‘He’s bound to say that, isn’t he? I’m not saying this was deliberate…’ He allowed the word to linger, so that it would at least have time to settle in people’s imaginations before he moved on. ‘I’m not saying this was deliberate, just a terrible mistake due to overwork. Look at the two of them. These two men are close to nervous exhaustion. It’s no wonder they started making mistakes. We shouldn’t blame them too much for that.’
There. When the conversation was replayed in people’s memories, what would stick out would not be Sky trying to weasel out of accepting the blame himself, but Sky being magnanimous in victory; even compassionate. They would see that and applaud, while at the same time conceding that some blame should still be apportioned to the sleepwalking medics. They would see no harm in that, Sky thought. A great and respected old man had died under regrettable circumstances. It was only right and proper that there should be some recrimination.
He had covered himself well.
An autopsy would establish that the Captain had indeed died from heart failure, although neither the autopsy nor the memory readout from the prosthetic web would ever quite elucidate the precise chronology of his death.
‘You did very well,’ Clown said.
True; but Clown deserved some credit as well. It was Clown who had told him to unbutton the tunic when Balcazar was asleep, and Clown who had shown him how to access the web’s private functions so that he could program it to deliver the defibrillating pulse even though the Captain was as well as he had ever been lately. Clown had been clever, even if on some level Sky knew that this knowledge had always been his. But Clown had dredged it from his memory, and for that he was thankful.
‘I think we make a good team,’ Sky said, under his breath.
Sky watched the bodies of the men tumble into space.
Valdivia and Rengo had died by the simplest means of execution available aboard a spacecraft: asphyxiation in an airlock, followed by ejection into the vacuum. The trial into the old man’s death had taken up two years of shiptime; grindingly slow as appeals were lodged, discrepancies found in Sky’s account. But the appeals had failed and Sky had managed to explain the discrepancies to almost everyone’s satisfaction. Now a retinue of senior ship’s officers crowded around the adjacent portholes, straining for a glimpse into the darkness. They had already heard the dying men thumping on the door of the airlock as the air was sucked from the chamber.
Yes, it was a harsh punishment, he reflected — more so, given the already overstretched medical expertise aboard the ship. But such crimes could not be taken lightly. It hardly mattered that these men had not meant to kill Balcazar with their negligence — although that lack of intention itself was open to doubt. No; aboard a ship negligence was itself scarcely less a crime than mutiny. It would have been negligent, too, not to make examples of these men.
‘You murdered them,’ Constanza said, quietly enough so that only he heard it. ‘You may have convinced the others, but not me. I know you too well for that, Sky.’
‘You don’t know me at all,’ he said, his voice a hiss.
‘Oh, but I do. I’ve known you since you were a child.’ She smiled exaggeratedly, as if the two of them were sharing an amusing piece of smalltalk. ‘You were never normal, Sky. You were always more interested in twisted things like Sleek than real people. Or monsters like the infiltrator. You’ve kept him alive, haven’t you?’
‘Kept who alive?’ he said, his expression as strained as Constanza’s.
‘The infiltrator.’ She looked at him with narrow, suspicious eyes. ‘If it even happened that way. Where is he, anyway? There are a hundred places you could hide something like that aboard the Santiago. One day I’ll find out, you know, put an end to whatever sadistic little experiment you’re running. The same way I’ll eventually prove that you framed Valdivia and Rengo. You’ll get your punishment.’
Sky smiled, thinking of the torture chamber where he kept Sleek and the Chimeric. The dolphin was several degrees less sane than he had ever been: an engine of pure hate that existed only to inflict pain on the Chimeric. Sky had conditioned Sleek to blame the Chimeric for his confinement, and now the dolphin had assumed the role of Devil against the God that Sky had become in the Chimeric’s eyes. It had been much easier to shape the Chimeric that way, giving him a figure to fear and despise as well as one to revere. Slowly but surely, the Chimeric was approaching the ideal Sky had always had in mind. By the time the Chimeric was needed — and that would not be for years to come — the work would be done.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said.
A hand rested on his shoulder. It was Ramirez, the leader of the executive council, the shipwide body with the power to elect someone to the vacant Captaincy. Ramirez, they were saying, was very likely to be Balcazar’s successor.
‘Monopolising him again, Constanza?’ the man said.
‘We were just going over old times,’ she answered. ‘Nothing that can’t wait, I assure you.’
‘He did us proud, don’t you think, Constanza? Other men might have been tempted to give those fellows the benefit of the doubt, but not our Sky.’
‘Not him, no,’ Constanza said, before turning away.
‘There’s no room for doubt in the Flotilla,’ Sky said, watching the two bodies dwindle. He nodded to the Captain, lying in state in his own cooled casket. ‘If there’s one lesson that dear old man taught me, it’s never to give any house room to uncertainty.’
‘That dear old man?’ Ramirez sounded amused. ‘Balcazar, you mean?’
‘He was like a father to me. We’ll never see his like again. If he were alive, these men would be lucky to get away with anything as painless as asphyxiation. Balcazar would have seen a painful death as the only valid form of deterrence.’ Sky looked at him intently. ‘You do agree, don’t you, sir?’
‘I… wouldn’t pretend to know.’ Ramirez seemed slightly taken aback, but he blinked and continued speaking, ‘I had no great insights into Balcazar’s mind, Haussmann. Word is, he wasn’t at his very sharpest towards the end. But I suppose you’d know all about that, having been his favourite.’ Again that hand on his shoulder. ‘And that means something to some of us. We trusted Balcazar’s judgement, just as he trusted Titus, your father. I’ll be frank: your name has been bandied about… what would you think to…’
‘The Captaincy?’ No sense in beating about the bush. ‘It’s a bit premature, isn’t it? Besides — someone with your own excellent record and depth of experience…’
‘A year ago, I might have agreed. I will probably take over, yes — but I’m not a young man, and I doubt that it’ll be very long before questions are being asked about my likely successor.’
