‘You can leave now,’ the grub told him. ‘I’m sorry that we had a disagreement. Will you come back soon?’
‘Count on it,’ Sky said.
Later, they pulled away in the shuttle. Gomez still had no idea what had happened; no idea why the approaching forces had simply blown up.
‘What did you find in there?’ he asked. ‘Did anything that Oliveira said make sense, or was he just insane?’
‘I think he was insane,’ Sky said. Norquinco made no comment; they had barely spoken at all since the incident by the lake. Perhaps Norquinco thought it would slip from his memory if it was not remarked upon — an understandable lapse of nerve in a tense situation. But Sky kept replaying the fall in his mind; remembering the red tide fingering his faceplate; wondering how many molecules of it had actually slipped through.
‘What about the medical supplies — did you find anything? And did you get any idea what happened to her hull?’
‘We found out a few things,’ Sky said. ‘Just get us away from here, will you? Max thrust.’
‘But what about the propulsion section? I need to look at the containment; need to see if we can get that antimatter…’
‘Just do it, Gomez.’ He offered a comforting lie. ‘We’ll come back for the antimatter another time. She isn’t going anywhere.’
The void warren pulled away from them. Gomez looped them around to her intact side, then kicked in the shuttle’s thrusters. Once they had moved two or three hundred metres from her, it was impossible to tell that she was anything other than what she seemed to be. For a fleeting instant Sky thought of her again as the Caleuche: the ghost ship. They had been so wrong; so utterly wrong. But no one could blame them for that — the truth, after all, had been far stranger.
There would be trouble, of course, when they returned to the Flotilla. One of the other ships had sent their own shuttles here, which meant that Sky would probably face recrimination; perhaps even some kind of tribunal. But he had planned for that, knowing that, with shrewdness, he could use the moment to his advantage. The trail of evidence he had created with Norquinco’s help would, when revealed, point to Ramirez as having orchestrated the expedition to the Caleuche, with Constanza part of the conspiracy. Sky would be revealed as none other than an unwitting stooge of his Captain’s megalomaniac schemes. Ramirez would be removed from the Captaincy; perhaps even executed. Constanza would certainly be punished. There would, needless to say, be very little doubt in anyone’s minds as to who should succeed Ramirez in the Captaincy.
Sky waited another minute or so, not daring to leave it longer than that in case Travelling Fearlessly suspected what was going to happen and tried to prevent it in some way. Then he made the harbourmaker go off. The nuclear flash was bright and clean and holy, and when the sphere of plasma had spread itself thin, like a flower whose bloom turned from blue-white to interstellar black, there was nothing left at all.
‘What did you just do?’ Gomez said.
Sky smiled. ‘Put something out of its misery.’
‘I should have killed him,’ Zebra said, as the inspection robot neared the surface.
‘I know how it feels,’ I said. ‘But we probably wouldn’t have been able to walk out if you had.’ She had aimed for his body, but it had never been very obvious where Ferris ended and his wheelchair began. Her shot had only damaged his support machinery. He had moaned, and when he’d tried to compose a sentence the inner workings of the chair had rattled and scraped before delivering a scrambled sequence of piped sounds. I suspected it would take a lot more than one ill-judged shot to kill a four-hundred-year-old man whose blood was almost certainly supersaturated with Dream Fuel.
‘So what good did that little jaunt do?’ she asked.
‘I’ve been asking myself the same question,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘All we know now is a little more about the means of production. Gideon’s still down there, and so’s Ferris. Nothing’s changed.’
‘It will,’ I said.
‘Meaning what?’
‘That was just a scouting expedition. When all this is over, I’m going back there.’
‘He’ll be expecting us next time,’ Zebra said. ‘We won’t be able to breeze in so easily.’
‘We?’ Quirrenbach said. ‘Then you’re already committed to this return trip, Taryn?’
‘Yes. And do me a favour. Call me Zebra from now on, will you?’
‘I’d listen to her if I were you, Quirrenbach.’ I felt the inspection robot begin to tilt over back to the horizontal as we approached the chamber where I hoped Chanterelle would still be waiting. ‘And yes, we’re going back, and no, it won’t be so easy the second time.’
‘What do you hope to achieve?’
‘As someone close to me once said, there’s something down there that needs to be put out of its misery.’
‘You’d kill Gideon, is that it?’
‘Rather than live with the idea of it suffering, yes.’
‘But the Dream Fuel…’
‘The city will just have to learn to live without it. And whatever other services it owes to Gideon. You heard what Ferris said. The remains of Gideon’s ship are still down there, still altering the chemistry of the gases in the chasm.’
‘But Gideon isn’t in the ship now,’ Zebra said. ‘You don’t think he’s still influencing it, do you?’
‘He’d better not be,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘If you killed him, and the chasm stopped supplying the city with the resources it needs… can you honestly imagine what would happen?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And it would probably make the plague look like a minor inconvenience. But I’d still do it.’
Chanterelle was waiting for us when we arrived. She opened the exit hatch nervously, studying us for a fraction of a second before deciding that we were the ones who had gone down. She put aside her weapon and helped us out, each groaning at the relief of no longer being inside the pipe. The air in the chamber was far from fresh, but I gulped in exultant lungfuls.
‘Well?’ Chanterelle said. ‘Was it worth it? Did you get close to Gideon?’
‘Close enough.’ I said.
Just then something buried in Zebra’s clothes began to chime, like a muffled bell. She handed me her gun and then fished out one of the clumsy, antique-looking phones which were the height of modernity in Chasm City.
‘Must have been trying to reach me the whole time we were coming up the tube,’ she said, flipping open the viewscreen.
‘Who is it?’ I asked.
‘Pransky,’ Zebra said, pushing the phone against her ear, while I told Chanterelle that the man was a private investigator who was peripherally involved in all that had happened since my arrival. Zebra spoke to him in a low voice, one hand cupped round her mouth to muffle the conversation. I couldn’t hear anything that Pransky was saying, and only a half of what Zebra said — but it was more than enough to get the gist of the conversation.
Someone, presumably one of Pransky’s contacts, had been murdered. Pransky was at the crime scene even as he spoke, and from the way Zebra was talking to him, he sounded agitated; like it was the last place in the world he wanted to be.
‘Have you…’ She was probably about to ask him if he’d alerted the authorities, before realising that where Pransky was, there was no such thing as law; even less than in the Canopy.
‘No, wait. No one has to know about this until we get there. Stay tight.’ And with that, Zebra cuffed the phone shut, returning it to her pocket.
‘What’s up?’ I asked.
‘Someone’s killed her,’ Zebra said.
Chanterelle looked at her. ‘Killed who?’
‘The fat woman. Dominika. She’s history.’
