‘I don’t think so, Sky.’
‘That’s what our inertial compasses say.’
‘Then they must be wrong. Your radio emissions are coming from halfway down the spine.’
For the second time he felt terror, but now it had nothing to do with the absence of light. They had not been crawling for anywhere near the length of time needed to get that far down the ship. Had the hull somehow reshaped itself while they were inside, ferrying them helpfully along? The radio emissions must be correct, he thought — Gomez must have a reasonably accurate fix on their positions from signal triangulation, even though the mass of the intervening hull made his estimate imprecise. But that meant the inertial compasses had been lying almost as soon as they entered the ship. And now they were moving through some kind of static gravitational field; something intrinsic to the hull rather than an illusion created by acceleration or rotation. It appeared able to tug them in arbitrary ways depending on the geometry of the shaft. No wonder the inertial compasses had given false readings. Gravity and inertia were so subtly entwined that you could hardly bend one without bending the other.
‘They must have complete control of the Higgs field,’ Norquinco said, wonderingly. ‘It’s a pity Gomez isn’t here. He’d have a theory by now.’
The Higgs field, Norquinco reminded Sky, was something that was believed to pervade all space; all matter. Mass and inertia were not actually intrinsic properties of the fundamental particles at all, but were simply effects of the drag imposed on them as they interacted with the Higgs field — like the drag imposed on a celebrity trying to cross a room full of admirers. Norquinco seemed to think that the builders of the ship had found a way to let the celebrity slip through unmolested — or to impede its progress even further. It was as if the builders could turn up or turn down the density of admirers, and restrict or enhance their ability to pester the celebrity. That was, he knew, a hopelessly crude way of imagining something that Gomez — and perhaps even Norquinco — might be able to begin to glimpse without layers of metaphor, seeing straight to the glistening mathematical heart of it, but for Sky it was sufficient. The builders could manipulate gravity and inertia as easily as they manipulated the sickly yellow light, and perhaps without giving it much more thought.
Which meant, of course, that his hunch had been right. If there was something aboard this ship which could teach him that technique, imagine what it could do for the Flotilla — or for the Santiago, anyway. They had been trying to shed mass for years, so that they could delay their deceleration to the last possible moment. What if they could just turn the Santiago’s mass off, like a light switch? They could enter Swan’s system at eight per cent of the speed of light and come to a dead stand-still in orbit around Journey’s End, cutting their speed in an instant. Even if nothing that dramatic was possible, any reduction in the ship’s inertia — even if it were only a few per cent — would have been welcome.
The external air pressure was now well above one and a half atmospheres, although it was climbing less quickly now. It was warm, heavy with moisture and some other trace gases which, while harmless, would not have been present in the same ratios in the air Sky normally breathed. Gravity reached a plateau of half a gee; it occasionally ducked below that value, but it was never higher. And the sickly yellow light was now bright enough to read by. Now and then they had to crawl across an indentation in the floor of the shaft which was full of thick, dark liquid. There were traces of it everywhere: a bloodlike red smear sliming every surface.
‘Sky? This is Gomez.’
‘Speak up. I can hardly hear you.’
‘Sky; listen to me. We’ll have company within five hours. There are two shuttles approaching us. They know we’re here. I risked a radar bounce off them to get a distance fix.’
Fine; by now he would probably have done the same thing himself. ‘Leave it at that. Don’t speak to them or do anything that would let them identify us as having come from the Santiago.’
‘Just get out of there, will you? We can still make a run for it now.’
‘Norquinco and I aren’t done yet.’
‘Sky, I don’t think you realise—’
He broke off the link, more interested in what lay ahead. Something was coming towards them, moving down the same shaft. It transported itself with grublike oscillations of its fattened pink-white body, like a maggot.
‘Norquinco?’ he said, bringing his gun to the fore and pointing it down the shaft, ‘I think someone’s come to welcome us aboard.’ He wondered how frightened he sounded.
‘I can’t see anything. No; wait — now I can. Oh.’
The creature was only the size of an arm; not really large enough to do either of them any physical harm. It lacked any obviously dangerous organs; no jaws that Sky could see. At the front was only a crownlike frill: translucent tendrils which waved ahead of the creature. Even if they had been venomous, he was still safe in his suit. The creature appeared to have neither eyes nor manipulative limbs. He repeated these reassuring observations to himself, examined his state of mind and was slightly disappointed to find that he was still just as frightened as before.
But the maggot did not seem particularly frightened by the newcomers. It simply halted and waved its ghostly tendrils in their direction. The thing’s pale pink segmented body blushed a deeper shade of red, and then an arterial red secretion oozed from between the segments, forming a fresh scarlet puddle beneath it. Then the puddle extended tendrils of its own, creeping forward as if running downhill. Sky felt his sense of what was vertical shift dizzyingly, as if there had been a local change in the direction of gravity. The red fluid trickled towards them like a scarlet tide, and then it was flowing up and around their suits. For a moment Sky felt that he had been turned upside down, and he was falling. The red veil passed over his faceplate, as if seeking a way into his suit. Then it passed.
Gravity returned to normal. Breathing hard, still terrified, he watched the puddle of red return to the maggot and then seep back into the creature. The maggot was red for a moment, then the blush slowly faded back to pink.
Then the maggot did something very odd, not turning itself in the shaft, but reversing itself; the tendrils retracting into the body at one end and popping out the other. The creature undulated back into the shaft’s yellow depths. It was as if nothing at all had happened.
Then a voice spoke to them. It boomed through the walls at Godlike volume, and it sounded too deep to be human.
‘It’s good to have some company,’ it said, in Portuguese.
‘Who are you?’ Sky said.
‘Lago. Come and see me, please; it isn’t very far now.’
‘And what if we choose to leave you?’
‘I’ll be sad, but I won’t stop you.’
The reverberations of the Godlike voice died down, all as it had been before the maggot had arrived. The two of them were breathing hard, as if they had just been sprinting. Long moments passed before Norquinco spoke. ‘We’re going back to the shuttle. Now.’
‘No. We’re going onwards, just as we told Lago we would.’
Norquinco gripped Sky’s arm. ‘No! This is insanity. Did you just erase what happened from your short-term memory?’
‘We were invited further into the ship by something which could already have killed us if it had that in mind.’
‘Something which called itself Lago. Even though Oliveira…’
‘Didn’t actually say that Lago was dead.’ Sky fought to hold the fear from his voice. ‘Just that something had happened to him. Personally, I’m interested in finding out what that something was. And also anything else this ship, or whatever it is, might be able to tell us.’
‘Fine. Then go ahead. I’m going back.’
‘No. You’re staying here, coming with me.’
Norquinco hesitated before answering. ‘You can’t force me.’
‘No, but I can certainly make it worth your while.’ Now it was Sky’s turn to place his hand on the other man’s arm. ‘Use your imagination, Norquinco. There must be things here that could shatter every paradigm we’ve ever recognised. At the very least there must be things here that can get us to Journey’s End ahead of the other ships, perhaps even give us a tactical advantage when they arrive behind us and start contesting territorial rights.’
