‘And?’
‘Suddenly something else shows up which almost does the job just as well. Better, in some ways. Dream Fuel’s childishly easy to administer — it doesn’t even need to be tailored to the person it’s being used on. It heals injuries and it restores memories.’ I thought back to the man I’d seen thrashing on the ground, desperate for a tiny drop of the scarlet stuff even though the plague had already subsumed half his body. ‘It even confers protection from the plague for people who haven’t discarded their machines. It’s almost too good to be true, Quirrenbach.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Meaning I’m wondering how something that useful ended up being invented by criminals. It would be hard enough to imagine it being created before the plague, even when the city still had the means to create wonderful new technologies. Now? There are parts of the Mulch where they haven’t even got steam power. And while there might be a few high-tech enclaves in the Canopy, they’re more interested in playing games than developing miracle cures. But that seems to be exactly what they’ve ended up with — even if the supply is currently a little tight.’
‘It didn’t exist before the plague,’ Zebra said.
‘Too much of a coincidence,’ I said. ‘Which makes me wonder if they might both have the same origin.’
‘Don’t flatter yourself that you’re the first to have had that thought.’
‘No, I wouldn’t dream of it.’ I scraped sweat from my brow, already feeling like I’d been in a sauna for an hour. ‘But you have to admit the point is valid.’
‘I wouldn’t know. I don’t profess any great interest in the matter.’
‘Not even when the fate of the city might depend on it?’
‘Except it wouldn’t, would it? A few thousand postmortals, ten at the most. Dream Fuel may be a precious substance to those who’ve acquired a dependence on it, but for the majority it’s of no consequence whatsoever. Let them die; see if I care. In a few centuries everything that’s happened here will be little more than a historical footnote. I, meanwhile, have considerably larger and more ambitious fish to fry.’ Quirrenbach adjusted some more controls, tapping a gauge here and there. ‘But then I’m an artist. All this is mere diversion. You, on the other hand… I confess I really don’t understand you, Tanner. Yes, you may now have some obligation to Taryn, but your interest in Dream Fuel was apparent from the moment we searched Vadim’s cabin. By your own admission you came here to murder Argent Reivich, not to sort out a minor supply shortage in our sordid little drugs industry.’
‘Things became a little more complicated, that’s all.’
‘And?’
‘There’s something about Dream Fuel, Quirrenbach. Something that makes me think I’ve seen it before.’
But there was a way in. Sky, Norquinco and Gomez located it by undocking and scouting around the ship for another thirty minutes, until they found the hole that Oliveira and Lago must have used to get inside. It was only a few tens of metres from where Oliveira’s shuttle was parked; near the point where the spine connected to the rest of the ship. It was so small that Sky had missed it completely on the first pass, lost as it was amongst the blisterlike protuberances on the ship’s ruined side.
‘I think we should go back,’ Gomez said.
‘We’re going in.’
‘Didn’t you listen to a word of what Oliveira said to us? And doesn’t it worry you in the slightest that this ship appears to be made of something strange? That it looks like a crude attempt at copying one of our ships?’
‘It worries me, yes. It also makes me even more determined to get inside.’
‘Lago went inside as well.’
‘Well, I guess we’ll just have to keep a look-out for him, won’t we?’ Sky was ready now. He had not bothered removing his helmet since the last time he had gone through the airlock.
‘I also want to see what’s inside,’ Norquinco said.
‘One of us at least should stay aboard the shuttle,’ Gomez said. ‘If the ship that swept us with the radar gets here in the next few hours, it would be good to have someone ready to do something about it.’
‘Fine,’ said Sky. ‘You just volunteered for the job.’
‘I didn’t mean…’
‘I don’t care what you meant. Just accept it. If Norquinco and I run into anything that needs your input, you’ll be the first to know.’
They left the shuttle, using thruster harnesses to cross the short distance to the Caleuche’s hull. When they landed near the hole it was like touching down on a softly yielding mattress. They stood up, gripped to the ship by the adhesive soles of their shoes.
There was an obvious and vital question that Sky had almost managed not to ask himself, but now it must be dealt with. There was no way in his experience that the hull of a ship could be transmuted to this sponge-like state. Metal simply did not do that by itself — even if it had been exposed to the glare of an antimatter explosion. No; whatever had happened here was far beyond his experience. It was as if the ghost ship’s hull had been replaced, atom by atom, by some new and disturbingly pliant substance which replicated the old details in only the broadest terms. There was shape and texture and colour, but no function, like a crude cast of the original ship. Was he even standing on the Caleuche, or was that just another flawed assumption?
Sky and Norquinco walked to the lip of the hole, poking the muzzles of their guns into the gloom. The lip was ragged and scorched with heat marks and had the puckered, wrinkled look of a half-closed mouth. A metre or two below the surface, however, the wall of the hole was lined with a thick, fibrous mass which glistened gently as their torchlight skittered across it. Sky thought he recognised that mass; it was a matrix of extruded diamond fibres embedded in epoxy, a quick-drying paste that could be used to repair hull punctures. Oliveira had probably located a weak spot on the Caleuche — he must have taken the time to make a density map before selecting this point — and had then used something to cut through, a laser torch or even the exhaust of his shuttle. Once he had bored the shaft, he had lined it with the spray-on sealant from his shuttle’s emergency kit, presumably to prevent it collapsing shut.
‘We’ll go in this way,’ Sky said. ‘Oliveira must have found the most promising entry point; there’s no sense in duplicating his effort when we’ve so little time to spare.’
They checked that the inertial compasses built into their suits were functioning accurately, defining their current position as a zero point. The Caleuche was neither spinning nor tumbling, so the compasses would prevent them getting lost once they were inside, but even if the compasses proved unreliable, they would be able to retrace their way to the wound in the hull, deploying a line as they went.
Sky halted in his thoughts, wondering why he had just thought of the hole in the hull as a wound?
They went in, Sky first. The hole led into a rough-walled tunnel which cut straight into the hull, threading down for ten or twelve metres. Normally by this point — had the ship been the Santiago — they would have passed right through the hull’s outer integument and would be passing through a series of narrow service cavities, squeezing between the multitude of data-lines, power cables and refrigerant pipes; perhaps even one of the train tunnels. There were, Sky knew, points where the hull was more or less solid for several metres, but he was reasonably sure this was not one of them.
Now the sides of the shaft, or tunnel, or however he preferred to think of it, had become harder and more glossy — less like elephant hide and more like insect chitin. He shone his torch light ahead into the gloom, the beam sliding off the shining black surface. Then — just when it looked like it would end abruptly — the shaft jogged violently to the right. Fully suited, with the additional bulk of the thruster harness, it was an effort to squeeze round the bend — but at least the smooth-sided shaft would not snag his suit or rip away any vital component. He looked back and saw Norquinco following him, the other man’s slightly larger bulk making the exercise even less easy.
But now the shaft widened out, and after it intersected with another the going became even easier. Periodically Sky stopped and asked Norquinco to ensure that the line was spooling out properly and that the line was still taut, but the inertial compasses were still functioning properly, recording their movements relative to the entry point.
He tried the radio. ‘Gomez? Can you read me?’
‘Loud and clear. What have you found?’
‘Nothing. Yet. But I think we can say with some confidence that this isn’t the Caleuche. Norquinco and I must be twenty metres into the hull, and we’re still moving through what feels like solid material.’
