moaned before slipping back into unconsciousness. I stripped him naked and then arranged the web of biomonitors across his body. The inputs adhered automatically to his skin, adjusting themselves minutely. Some would burrow neatly beneath his skin, worming towards internal organs.
A series of lights flicked to green across the fascia of the casket, signifying that the unit had accepted Norquinco. The lid closed.
I studied the main status panel.
Programmed sleep time was another four years. By then the Santiago would have already made orbit around Journey’s End and it would be time for the sleepers to warm and step onto their new Eden.
Four years suited my plans, too.
Satisfied, I readied myself for the difficult task of lugging the other passenger back to the spine corridor. First, however, I had to dress the barely warm corpse in the clothes I had just taken from Norquinco.
When I reached the spine I positioned the man ten metres ahead of the train, which was still straining against its obstruction, filling the air with the smell of burning armatures. Then I found a heavy, long-handled wrench from a recessed stores locker. I used the wrench to pulp the man’s face into unrecognisability, feeling the bones crack like lacquer beneath each blow. Then I went back to the train and delivered a series of swiping strikes to the jammed toolkit, until it sprang free.
The train, no longer obstructed, began to pick up speed immediately. I had to run ahead of it to avoid being pulped against the wall. I stepped gingerly over the dead man and then retired to a safety alcove, watching with detached fascination as the string of freight pods gathered speed. It hit the man and snowploughed him along, mangling him in the process.
Finally, some distance down the corridor, the train came to a standstill.
I crept behind it. I had been through this before, half an hour earlier, and had been mildly surprised when I had found that Norquinco was only knocked out. That had, of course, been a blessing in disguise… but now there was to be no disappointment. The train had done its work creditably. Now, rather than the crushed toolkit, what made it stop was some sluggishly responding safety-mode… but it had been much too late to save the passenger.
I lifted my sleeve and spoke into my comms bracelet. ‘Sky Haussmann here. I’m afraid there’s been a terrible, terrible accident. ’
That had all been four months ago; a regrettable coda to our relationship, but Norquinco had, ultimately, not let me down. I assumed so, at least — and would know for sure in a few moments.
On the main viewscreen was a view looking down the spine of the Santiago from a vantage point a few metres above the hull. It was an exercise in vanishing points, crisp perspectives that would have thrilled a Renaissance artist. The sixteen sleeper rings containing the dead marched away, diminishing in size, foreshortened towards ellipses.
And now the first and closest of them began to move, kicked loose by a series of pyrotechnic charges studded around the ring. The ring uncoupled from the hull and drifted lazily away from it, tipping slowly to one side as it moved. Umbilicals stretched between ship and ring to breaking point and then snapped cleanly, whiplashing back. Frozen gases trapped in severed pipes erupted in crystal clouds. Somewhere, alarms began to sound. I heard them only dimly, though they seemed to be causing considerable consternation amongst my crew.
Behind the first ring, the second was breaking loose as well. The third trembled and shucked itself loose from its moorings. All along the spine the pattern was repeated. I had arranged it well. I had thought to have all the rings blow their separation charges at once, so that they would drift away in clean, parallel lines, but there was no poetry in that. It pleased me instead to stagger the releases, so that the rings seemed to follow each other, as if obeying some buried migratory instinct.
‘Do you see what I’m doing?’ I asked.
‘I see it well enough,’ the other Captain said. ‘And it sickens me.’
‘They’re dead, you fool! What do they care now, if they’re buried in space or carried with us to Journey’s End?’
‘They’re human beings. They deserve to be treated with dignity, even if they’re dead. You can’t just throw them overboard.’
‘Ah, but I can, and I have. Besides — the sleepers hardly matter. What they mass is inconsequential compared to the mass of the machines that accompany them. We have a real advantage now. That’s why we’ll stay in cruise mode longer than you.’
‘One quarter of your sleepers isn’t much of an edge, Haussmann. ’ The other Captain had obviously been doing his homework. The kind of calculations I had run could not have been far from his own thoughts. ‘What kind of lead does that give you over us when you make orbit around Journey’s End? A few weeks at best?’
‘It’ll be enough,’ I said. ‘Enough to select the plum landing sites and get our people down there and dug in.’
‘If you have anyone left. You killed a lot of those dead, didn’t you? Oh, we know what kind of losses you should have run, Haussmann. Your death-rate should not have been much higher than our own. We had intelligence, remember? But we’ve only lost one hundred and twenty sleepers ourselves. The same goes for the other ships. How did you become so careless, Haussmann? Was it that you wanted them to die?’
‘Don’t be silly. If it suited my purposes to have them die, why wouldn’t I have killed more of them?’
‘And try and settle a planet with a handful of survivors? Don’t you know anything about genetics, Haussmann? Or incest?’
I started to say that I had thought of that as well, but what was the point of letting the bastard know all my plans? If his intelligence was as good as he claimed, let him find these things out for himself.
‘I’ll cross that bridge when I reach it,’ I said.
Zamudio was the one who finally gave the others a temporary edge — even if it probably wasn’t in quite the way he would have planned. But the Palestine’s Captain must have thought he stood a very good chance of damping his antimatter flow, or else he would not have tried stopping his engine.
The explosion had been as hard and radiantly white as I remembered from the day in the nursery when the Islamabad had gone up.
But the next day, something unexpected happened.
In the instants before Zamudio’s ship had blown up, it had still been transmitting technical data to its two allies, both locked in the same deceleration burn that Zamudio had tried unsuccessfully to abort. I could guess that much myself, even though I was not directly privy to that flow of information. That was the other odd thing. The rest of the Flotilla had become grudgingly united against me. I hadn’t really expected that, but in hindsight I should have realised that it would happen. I had given the bastards a common enemy. In a way, it was to my credit. There was only one of me, yet I had raised such fear in the other Captains that they had thought it best to amalgamate against me, despite all that had happened between them.
And now this — Zamudio clawing back from the grave.
‘That technical data was more useful than he realised,’ Armesto said.
‘It didn’t do Zamudio much good,’ I said.
By now there was an appreciable redshift between my ship and the other two Flotilla craft, beginning to fall behind me as they decelerated. But the communications software effortlessly removed all distortion, save for the increasing timelag which accompanied the break-up of the Flotilla.
‘No,’ Armesto said. ‘But in their sacrifice they gave us something tremendously valuable. Shall I explain?’
‘If it pleases you,’ I said, with what I hoped was a convincing show of boredom.
But rather than being bored, I was actually a little scared.
Armesto told me about the technical data, squirted across from the Palestine until the last nanosecond before it detonated. It concerned the attempts that had been made to shut down the flow of antimatter. It had always been known that the procedure was almost bound to be fatal, but until then the precise failure mode had been unclear, glimpsed only fleetingly in computer simulations. There had been speculation that if the failure mode could be understood sufficiently well, it might even be possible to counteract it by subtle manipulation of the fuel- flow. It was nothing that could be tested in advance. Now, however, a kind of test had been made for them. The
