and the chances were therefore good that Quirrenbach brought the vials up with him on a recent visit.
Which meant Quirrenbach might know where the source was.
‘Well?’ I said. ‘Am I warm?’
‘You don’t know what you’re getting into, Tanner. No idea at all.’
‘You just let me worry about that. You worry about taking us there.’
‘Taking us where?’ Chanterelle asked.
I turned to her. ‘I made a deal with Zebra that I’d continue the investigations her sister was making when she vanished.’
Chanterelle looked at Zebra. ‘What happened?’
Zebra spoke quietly. ‘My sister asked one too many awkward questions about Dream Fuel. Gideon’s goons got to her, and I’ve wanted to know why ever since. She wasn’t even trying to close them down, just to find out more about the source.’
‘It most certainly won’t be what you’re expecting,’ Quirrenbach said, looking at me beseechingly. We were brachiating away from Grand Central Station, where we’d dropped off Voronoff and the heavies. ‘For pity’s sake, Tanner. See sense. There’s no need for you to embark on some personal crusade, especially given that you’re an outsider. You have no need — or right, for that matter — to meddle in our affairs.’
‘He doesn’t need one,’ Zebra said.
‘Oh, spare me the righteous indignation. You use the substance yourself, Zebra.’
She nodded. ‘And so do a few thousand other people, Quirrenbach. Largely because we haven’t got much of a choice.’
‘There’s always a choice,’ he said. ‘So the world looks a little bleaker without implants? Fine; learn to live with it. And if you don’t like that, there’s always the hermetic approach.’
Zebra shook her head. ‘Without implants we start dying of old age; most of us anyway. With them we’ve got to live half a life cowering inside machines. Sorry, but that’s not what I call much of a choice. Not when there’s a third way.’
‘Then you have precisely no moral grounds for objecting to the existence of Dream Fuel.’
‘I’m not objecting, you tedious little man. I just want to know why the stuff isn’t easier to get hold of, when we need it so badly. Every month it gets harder to find; every month I end up paying Gideon — whoever he might be — a little more for his precious elixir.’
‘Such is the nature of supply and demand.’
‘Shall I hit him for you?’ Chanterelle said brightly. ‘It’d be no trouble at all.’
‘That’s very generous of you,’ Zebra said, evidently pleased that she and Chanterelle had found some common ground. ‘But I think we want him conscious for the time being.’
I nodded. ‘At least until he gets us to the manufacturing centre. Chanterelle? Are you still sure you want to come with us?’
‘I’d have stayed at the station if I wasn’t, Tanner.’
‘I know. But it’ll be dangerous. We might not all walk out of this.’
‘He’s right,’ Quirrenbach said, who must still have hoped that I could be talked out of this. ‘I’d give the matter some serious thought if I were you. Wouldn’t it make more sense to come back later, with a properly prepared squad; even something vaguely resembling a plan?’
‘What, and miss having your undivided attention?’ I said. ‘It’s a big city, Quirrenbach, and an even bigger Rust Belt. Who’s to say I’d ever see you again if we agreed to postpone this little trip?’
He snuffled. ‘Well, you still can’t force me to take you there.’
I smiled. ‘You’d be surprised. I could force you to do just about anything if I wanted to. It’s really just a matter of nerves and pressure points.’
‘You’d torture me, is that it?’
‘Let’s just say I’d apply some very convincing arguments.’
‘You bastard, Mirabel.’
‘Just drive, will you?’
‘And watch where you’re driving,’ Zebra said. ‘You’re taking us way too low, Quirrenbach.’
She was right. We were skirting the Mulch now, skimming only a hundred or so metres above the tops of the highest slums — and the ride consisted of sickening undulations due to the lack of threads at this altitude.
‘I know what I’m doing,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘So just shut up and enjoy the ride.’
Suddenly we were skimming down a slum canyon, descending a single long thread that vanished into murky, caramel-brown water at the canyon’s end. Fires burned in the ramshackle structures either side of us and steam- powered boats huffed and puffed out of our way as the cable-car approached the waterline.
‘I was right, wasn’t I,’ I said to Quirrenbach. ‘You and Vadim were a team, weren’t you?’
‘I think the relationship might be better characterised as one of master and slave, Tanner.’ He worked the controls with quite some skill, retarding our descent the instant before we hit the muddy water. ‘That act of Vadim’s — the big, stupid thug? It wasn’t an act.’
‘Did I kill him?’
He rubbed at one of his own bruises. ‘Nothing Dream Fuel couldn’t fix, in the end.’
I nodded. ‘That’s more or less what I thought. So what is it, Quirrenbach? You must know. Is it something they synthesise?’
‘That depends what you mean by synthesise,’ he said.
‘So he went mad,’ Sky said. ‘He got stuck here and knew there was no way he could get back home safely. There isn’t any mystery to that.’
‘Do you think Lago was real?’ asked Gomez.
‘Maybe. It doesn’t really matter. We still have to go in, don’t we? If we find the man, we’ll know that much is true. Look,’ Sky did his best to sound reasonable, ‘what if he killed Lago? They might have had some argument, after all. Maybe it was killing his friend that drove him insane.’
‘Assuming, of course, that he was insane,’ Gomez said. ‘And not simply a perfectly rational man who’d had to confront something terrible.’
They decoupled from Oliveira’s shuttle a few minutes later, leaving the dead man inside as they had found him. Cautiously, with gentle taps of thrusters, they flew around to the undamaged side of the Flotilla ship.
‘The damage is confined totally to the other side,’ Gomez said. ‘It doesn’t look like the kind of hull scorching the Santiago sustained when the Islamabad blew up, but the geometric extent is similar, wouldn’t you say?’
Sky nodded, remembering his mother’s shadow burned into the side of the hull. Whatever had happened to the Caleuche had been shockingly different, but it was clearly symptomatic of damage of some sort.
‘I don’t see how there can be a connection,’ he said.
There was a chime from the console — one of the automated warning systems Norquinco had rigged up. Sky glanced towards the other man. ‘What is it? Do we have a problem?’
‘Not a technical one, but, um, still a problem. Someone’s just scanned us with a phased-array.’
‘Where did it originate from? The Flotilla?’
‘That direction, but not precisely. I think it must be another shuttle, Sky — making a similar approach to the one we used.’
‘Probably following our thrust trail,’ Gomez said. ‘Well — how long have we got?’
‘I can’t tell you, not without bouncing a radar beam off them as well. Could be a day; could be six hours.’
‘Shit. Well, let’s get in and see what we can find.’
They had moved around to the undamaged side of the command sphere now and were casting around for a suitable docking port. Sky did not want to try and land inside the Caleuche, but there were still plenty of surface points where the shuttle could have anchored itself for a quick crew transfer. Normally the larger ship would have responded to the shuttle’s approach by activating one of the ports; guidance lights would have begun to shine and the port would have extended restraining clamps to guide the shuttle home the last few metres. If there had been any power left at all inside her, those docking mechanisms should still have woken up, even after decades of inactivity. But though the shuttle chirped its approach signal, nothing happened.
‘All right,’ Sky said. ‘We’ll do what Oliveira did: use the grapples.’
