‘Fair point. And I’ll admit I’m grateful for any help I can get.’
‘Then you’ll want me as well,’ Chanterelle said. ‘After all, I’m the only one of us here who really knows how to hunt someone down.’
‘Your gaming skills aren’t in question,’ I said. ‘But it won’t be like a hunt. If I know Tanner — and I’m afraid I may know him as well as he knows himself — he won’t be following any rulebook.’
‘Then we’ll just have to play dirty before he does, won’t we.’
For the first time in ages I laughed a laugh that wasn’t totally insincere.
‘I’m sure we can rise to the occasion.’
Quirrenbach, Zebra, Chanterelle and I lifted an hour later; the behemoth making one arcing swoop over Chasm City before lofting itself into the lowering clouds, twisted like phantasms by the collision between Yellowstone’s relentless winds and the belching updraft of the chasm itself. I looked down and the city looked tiny and toylike, the Mulch and the Canopy hardly separated at all, compressed into one tangled and intricate urban layer.
‘Are you all right?’ Zebra said to me, returning to our table with drinks.
I turned away from the window. ‘Why?’
‘Because you almost look like you miss the place.’
When the journey was almost over; when the success of what I had planned was becoming apparent — when, openly, they were beginning to talk of me as a hero — I visited my two prisoners.
In all the years, no one had ever located the chamber deep inside Santiago, though some — Constanza in particular — had come close to guessing that it must exist. But the chamber drew only parsimoniously from the ship’s power and life-support systems grid, and even Constanza’s undoubted skill and persistence had not been sufficient to bring its location to light. Which was good, for although the situation was less critical now, there had been long years in which the chamber’s discovery would have ruined me. Now, however, my situation was secure; I had enough allies to weather minor scandals, and I had dealt effectively with most of those who stood against me.
Technically, of course, there were three prisoners, although Sleek did not really fit into the latter category. His presence had merely been useful to me, and — irrespective of how he viewed it — I did not view his incarceration as a genuine punishment. As ever upon my arrival he flexed within his tank, but lately he only moved sluggishly, his small dark eye only dimly registering my presence. I wondered how much of his earlier life he remembered, confined in a tank that was oceanically vast compared to the one where he had been for the last fifty years.
‘We’re nearly there, aren’t we?’
I turned around, surprised after all this time to hear the croak of Constanza’s voice.
‘Very nearly,’ I answered. ‘I’ve just seen Journey’s End with my own eyes, you know — as a fully formed world, not just a bright star. It’s really quite wonderful to see it, Constanza.’
‘How long has it been?’ She tried to look at me, straining against her constraints. She was tied to a stretcher which had been cranked to an angle of forty-five degrees.
‘Since I brought you here? I don’t know — four, five months?’ I shrugged, as if the matter had barely occupied my thoughts. ‘It doesn’t really matter, does it?’
‘What did you tell the rest of the crew, Sky?’
I smiled. ‘I didn’t need to tell them anything. I made it look as if you’d committed suicide by jumping out of one of the airlocks. No need to provide a body that way. I just let the others draw their own conclusions.’
‘They’ll figure out what happened one day.’
‘Oh, I doubt it. I’ve given them a world, Constanza. They want to canonise me, not crucify me. I don’t see that changing for a very long time.’
She had always been problematic, of course. I had discredited her after the Caleuche incident, bringing to light a trail of faked evidence which placed her in the same conspiratorial frame as Captain Ramirez. That was the end of her career in security. She had been lucky to avoid execution or imprisonment, especially in the desperate days that had followed the detachment of the sleeper modules. But Constanza had never ceased to give me cause for concern, even when she had been demoted to menial work. The crew as a whole were willing to accept that the detachment had been a desperate but necessary act; a conclusion I pushed them towards, via propaganda and lies concerning the other ships’ intentions. I did not even think of it as a crime myself. Constanza thought otherwise, and spent her last years of liberty trying to unravel the labyrinth of misinformation I had recently woven around myself. She was always probing into the Caleuche incident; protesting that Ramirez had been innocent, and she insisted on wild speculation about the manner in which Old Man Balcazar had really died; that his two medics had been wrongfully executed. At times, she even raised doubts about the way Titus Haussmann had died.
Finally, I decided I had to silence her. Faking her suicide required only a little preparation, as did bringing her to the torture chamber unseen by anyone else. She had spent most of that time drugged and restrained, of course, but I had allowed her little windows of lucidity now and again.
It was good to have someone to talk to.
‘Why did you keep him alive for so long?’ Constanza said.
I looked at her, marvelling at how aged she had become. I remembered when we had both stood against the glass of the large dolphin tank; near-equals.
‘The Chimeric? I knew he’d come in useful, that’s all.’
‘To torture?’
‘No. Oh, I saw that he was punished for what he’d done, but that was only the start of it. Here. Why don’t you take a better look at him, Constanza?’ I adjusted the angle of her stretcher, until she faced the infiltrator. He was completely mine now, and did not require restraining at all. Nonetheless — for my peace of mind — I kept him chained to the wall.
‘He looks like you,’ Constanza said wonderingly.
‘He has twenty additional facial muscles,’ I said, with paternal pride. ‘They can pull the flesh of his skin into any configuration he wants, and hold it there. And he hasn’t aged much since I brought him here. I think he can still pass for me.’ I rubbed my face, feeling the rough texture of the cosmetics I wore to offset my unnatural youthfulness. ‘And he’ll do anything — anything — that I ask of him. Won’t you, Sky?’
‘Yes,’ the Chimeric answered.
‘What are you planning? To use him as a decoy?’
‘If it comes to that,’ I said. ‘Which, frankly, I doubt.’
‘But he only has one arm. They’ll never mistake him for you.’
I wheeled Constanza back into the position she had been in upon my arrival. ‘That’s not an insurmountable problem, believe me.’ I paused and produced a huge, long-needled syringe from the kit of medical instruments I kept next to the God-Box, the device I had used to smash and remake the infiltrator’s mind.
Constanza saw the syringe. ‘That’s for me, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ I said, moving over to the dolphin tank. ‘It’s for Sleek. Dear old Sleek, who has served me so loyally over the years.’
‘You’re going to kill him?’
‘Oh, I’m sure he’d regard it as a mercy by now.’ I unlatched the top of his tank, wrinkling my nose at the appalling smell of the brackish water in which he lay. Sleek flexed again, and I put a calming hand across his dorsal region. His skin, once as smooth and glossy as polished stone, was now like concrete.
I injected him, pushing the needle through an inch of fat. He moved again, almost thrashing, and then became stiller. I looked at his eye, but it looked as expressionless as ever.
‘He’s dead, I think.’
‘I thought you’d come to kill me,’ Constanza said, unable to keep the nervous relief from her voice.
I smiled. ‘With a syringe like that? You must be joking. No; this one’s for you.’
I picked up another one; smaller this time.
Journey’s End, I thought, gripping the support strut in the Santiago’s free-fall observation blister. It was an apt name. The world hung below me now, like a green paper lantern lit by a dimming candle. Swan, 61 Cygni-A, was not a bright sun, and even though the world was in a tight orbit around the dwarf, daylight here was not the
