He positioned the shuttle over a docking port and let the grapples whip away and bury themselves silently in the Caleuche’s hull. Then the shuttle began to pull itself in, like a spider ascending a strand of cobweb. The grapples did not appear to have anchored themselves firmly — they began to give, like hooks in flesh — but they would hold for now. Even if the shuttle broke loose from its mooring while they were inside the larger ship, the shuttle’s autopilot would prevent it from drifting away.
Still suited up, they moved to the airlock again and cycled through to vacuum. Sky’s positioning had been excellent; their own docking seal was exactly aligned with the ship’s, with the manual controls set to one side in a recessed panel. Sky knew from his experience on the Santiago that the airlocks were well designed; even if no one had opened it in years, the manual opening controls should still function perfectly.
It was simple. There was a lever you turned by hand, and that would crank aside the outer door. Once inside the exchange chamber, there would be a more comprehensive panel with pressure gauges and controls to allow the space to be flooded with air from within the ship. If there was no pressure on the other side, the door would allow him to pass even more easily.
He reached out his gloved hand, ready to grasp the lever. But as soon as his fingers closed around the metal he knew something was wrong.
It didn’t feel like metal at all.
It felt like meat.
Even as he was registering that, another part of his mind had sent the signal to his hand to apply the twisting motion that would begin to crank the door aside. But the lever was incapable of being rotated. Instead, it just deformed in his hand, stretching as if made out of jelly. He looked closer, nearly pressing his faceplate against the panel. Now that he could see it properly, it was obvious why the lever would never work: it blended in to the rest of the panel. In fact, all the controls were like that; merging seamlessly with the background. He looked at the door, carefully now. There was no seam between it and its frame — only a smooth continuation.
It was as if the Caleuche was made of grey dough.
The cable-car had become just another vessel on the brown ooze of the Mulch river. Quirrenbach was using the car’s arms to propel it along against the sluggish flow, reaching out on either side to brush against the overhanging slums. He had obviously done it many times before.
‘We’re approaching the edge of the dome,’ Zebra said, pointing ahead and up.
She was right. One of the merged domes of the Mosquito Net came down here, with the slums scraping against its filthy brown surface. It was hard to believe that overhanging, sloped ceiling had ever been transparent.
‘The inner or outer edge?’ I said.
‘The inner,’ Zebra said. ‘Which means…’
‘I know what it means,’ I said, before she could answer. ‘Quirrenbach’s taking us towards the chasm.’
THIRTY-FIVE
The canyon grew darker as we approached the Net, the overhanging structures more precariously stacked above us until they arched over forming a rough-hewn tunnel dripping unspeakable fluids. Hardly anyone lived here, even given the squalid population pressure of the Mulch.
Quirrenbach took us underground; powerful lights glared from the front of the cable-car. Occasionally I saw rats moving in the gloom, but no sign of any people; human or pig. The rats had reached the city aboard Ultra ships — genetically engineered to serve aboard the ships as cleaning systems. But a few had escaped centuries ago, shrugging off their gloss of servitude, reverting to feral type. They scampered away from the bright ellipses cast by the cable-car’s lights, or swam quickly through the brown water trailing V-shaped wakes.
‘What is it you want, Tanner?’ Quirrenbach said.
‘Answers.’
‘Is that all? Or are you after your own private supply of Dream Fuel? Go on. You can tell me. We’re old friends, after all.’
‘Just drive,’ I said.
Quirrenbach pushed us forward, the tunnel branching and bifurcating. We were in a very old part of the city now. Decrepit as this underground warren seemed, it might not have changed very much since the plague.
‘Is this really necessary?’ I said.
‘There are other ways in,’ he said. ‘But only a few people know about this one. It’s discreet, and it’ll make you seem like someone with a right to get to the heart of the action.’
Presently he brought the car to a halt. I hadn’t realised it, but Quirrenbach had steered it over a tongue of dry ground which rose out of the water near one stained and dilapidated wall, festooned in grey mould.
‘We have to get out here,’ he said.
‘Don’t even think about trying anything,’ I said. ‘Or you’ll become an interesting new addition to the decor down here.’
But I allowed him to lead us out anyway, leaving the cable-car parked on the mudspit. There were deep grooves in the ground where the skids of other cars had created impressions. Evidently we were not the first to use this landing place.
‘Follow me,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘It isn’t far.’
‘Do you come here often?’
Now there was a note of honesty in his voice. ‘Not if I can help it. I’m not a big player in the Dream Fuel operation, Tanner. Not a very large cog. I’d be a dead man if some people knew I was even bringing you this far. Can we make this a discreet visit?’
‘That depends. I told you I wanted some answers.’
He had reached something in the wall. ‘There’s no way I can take you close to the centre of things, Tanner — start understanding that, will you? It just isn’t possible. It’s best if you go in alone. And don’t even think about causing trouble. You’d need more than a few guns for that.’
‘So what are you taking us to?’
But instead of answering, he yanked at something hidden in the slime-covered grime of the wall, hauling aside a sliding panel. It was almost above our heads; a rectangular hole two metres long.
Wary of tricks — like Quirrenbach using the hole as an escape route — I went first. Then I helped Quirrenbach up, and then Chanterelle. Zebra came last, casting a wary eye behind her. But no one had followed us, and the only eyes watching us depart belonged to the tunnel’s rats.
Inside, we crawled, crouching, along a low, square steel-lined tunnel for what seemed like hundreds of metres, but which was probably only a few dozen. I had lost all sense of direction now, but part of my mind insisted that we had all along been approaching closer and closer to the edge of the chasm. It was possible that we were beyond the fringe of the Mosquito Net now. Above us, beyond only a few metres of bedrock, might have been poisonous atmosphere.
But eventually, just when my back was beginning to ache with something that went beyond discomfort into real, paralysing pain, we emerged into a much larger chamber. It was dark at first, but Quirrenbach turned on a matrix of ancient lights stapled to the ceiling.
Something ran from one end of the chamber to the other, emerging from one wall and vanishing into the other. It was a dull silver tube, three or four metres wide, like a pipeline. Jutting from it on one side, at an oblique angle, was what looked like a branch of the same tube: exactly the same diameter, but terminating in a smooth metal end-cap.
‘You recognise this, of course,’ Quirrenbach said, indicating the longer part of the pipe.
‘Not exactly,’ I said. I had expected one of the others to say something, but no one seemed any wiser than me.
‘Well, you’ve seen it many times.’ Then he walked up to the pipe. ‘It’s part of the city’s atmospheric supply system. There are hundreds of pipes like this, reaching down into the chasm, down into the cracking station. Some carry air. Some carry water. Some carry superheated steam.’ He knuckled the pipe, and now I noticed that there
