Chasm City

TEN

On the day that the passenger was to awake—and nothing would ever be the same after that—Sky and his two closest associates were riding a service train along the Santiago’s spine, rumbling down one of the narrow access tunnels which threaded the ship from nose to tail. The train moved at a few lumbering kilometres per hour, stopping now and then to allow its crew to off-load stores, or to wait for another train to clear the tunnel section ahead. As usual Sky’s companions were passing the time with tall stories and boasts, while Sky played devil’s advocate, unable to share fully in their fun but more than willing to ruin it if he saw an opportunity.

“Viglietti told me something yesterday,” Norquinco said, raising his voice to be heard above the roar of the train’s passage. “He said he didn’t believe it himself, but he knew other people that did. It was about the Flotilla, actually.”

“Astonish us,” Sky said.

“Simple question: how many ships were there originally, before the Islamabad went up?”

“Five, of course,” Gomez said.

“Ah, but what if that’s wrong? What if there were six, originally? One blew up—we know that—but what if the other one’s still out there?”

“Wouldn’t we have seen it?”

“Not if it’s dead; just a haunted husk of a ship trailing behind us.”

“Very convenient,” Sky said. “It wouldn’t happen to have a name by any chance, would it?”

“As a matter of fact…”

“I knew it.”

“They say it’s called the Caleuche.”

Sky sighed, knowing it was going to be one of those journeys again. There had been a time—many years ago, now—when the three of them had viewed the ship’s train network as a source of amusement and carefully controlled danger; a place for hazardous games and make-believe; ghost stories and challenges. There were disused tunnels branching off from the main routes, leading, so it was rumoured, to hidden cargo bays or secret caches of stowaway sleepers, smuggled aboard by rival governments at the last moment. There were places where he and his friends had dared each other to ride on the outsides of the trains, grazing their backs against the speeding walls of the tunnels. Older now, he looked back on those games with wry bewilderment, half proud that they had taken those risks, half horrified that they had come so close to what would obviously have been gruesome death.

It was a lifetime ago. They were serious now; doing their bit for the ship. Everyone had to pull their weight in these lean new times, and Sky and his companions were regularly assigned the work of escorting supplies to and from the workers in the spine and the engine section. Usually they had to help unload the stuff and manhandle it through crawlways and down access shafts to wherever it was needed, so the work was far from the soft option it might have appeared. Sky seldom finished a shift without some fresh cuts and bruises, and all the effort had given him a set of muscles he had never expected to gain.

They were an unlikely trio. Gomez was working his way towards a job in the engine section, in the hallowed priesthood of the propulsion team. Now and then he would get to ride the train all the way there and even talk with some of the whispering engine techs, trying to impress them with his knowledge of containment physics and the other arcana of antimatter propulsion theory. Sky had watched some of those exchanges and had observed the way Gomez’s questions and replies were not always swatted ruthlessly down by the techs. Sometimes they were even moderately impressed, implying that Gomez would one day be allowed to graduate to their soft-spoken priesthood.

Norquinco was a different creature entirely. He had a capacity to become completely and obsessively lost in a problem; overwhelmingly able to be fascinated by anything, provided it was sufficiently complex and layered. He was an assiduous keeper of lists, deeply enamoured of serial numbers and classifications. His favourite realm of study, unsurprisingly, was the hideous complexity of the Santiago’s nervous system; the computer networks which veined the ship and which had been altered, rerouted and written over like a palimpsest countless times since the launch; most recently after the blackout. Most sane adults quailed at attempting to understand more than a tiny sub-set of that complexity, but Norquinco was actually drawn to the entirety, perversely thrilled by something that most people saw as bordering on the pathological.

Because of that, he frightened people. The techs who worked on the network problems had well-trodden solution pathways for most glitches, and the last thing they needed was someone showing them how to do things fractionally more efficiently. Jokingly, they said it would put them out of work—but that was just a polite way of saying that Norquinco made them uneasy. So he rode with Sky and Gomez, out of harm’s way.

“The Caleuche,” Sky said, repeating the name. “And I suppose there’s some significance in that name?”

“Enough,” Norquinco said, reading Sky’s expression of deep contempt. “The island where my ancestors came from had a lot of ghost stories. The Caleuche was one of them.” Norquinco was speaking earnestly now, all trace of his usual nervousness gone.

“And I suppose you’re going to enlighten us about her.”

“She was a ghost ship.”

“Funny, I’d never have guessed.”

Gomez thumped him. “Look, shut up and let Norquinco get on with it, all right?”

Norquinco nodded. “They used to hear her; sending accordion music out across the sea at night. Sometimes she would even put into port, or take sailors from other ships. The dead aboard her were having a party that never stopped. Her crew were wizards; brujos. They cloaked the Caleuche in a cloud that followed her around everywhere. Now and then people saw her, but they could never get close to her. She would sink under the waves, or turn into a rock.”

“Ah,” Sky said, “so this ship which people couldn’t see very clearly—because it was covered in a cloud—also had the ability to turn into an old rock when they got closer? That’s remarkable, Norquinco; proof of magic if ever I heard it.”

“I’m not saying there was ever an actual ghost ship,” Norquinco said testily. “Then. But now, who knows? Perhaps the myth concerned one that was yet to come.”

“It gets better, it really does.”

“Listen,” Gomez said. “Forget the Caleuche; forget the ghost ship bollocks. Norquinco’s right—in a sense. It could have happened, couldn’t it? There could easily have been a sixth ship, and the knowledge of it might have become confused with time.”

“If you say so. You could also argue that the whole thing was a tissue of lies made up by the terminally bored crew of a generation ship to minutely enrich the mythic fabric of their lives. If you so wished.” Sky paused as the train swerved into a different tunnel, rattling against its induction rails, gravity rising as it moved a little closer to the skin.

“Ah, I know what your problem is,” Norquinco said, with half a smile. “It’s your old man, isn’t it? You don’t want to believe any of this because of who your father is. You can’t stand the idea of him not knowing about something so significant.”

“Maybe he does know, has that ever occurred to you?”

“So you admit the ship could be real.”

“No, actually…”

But Gomez interrupted him, obviously warming to the subject. “As a matter of fact, I don’t find it hard to believe that there was once a sixth ship. Launching six rather than five wouldn’t have been much more effort, would it? After that—after the ships had got up to cruising speed—there could have been some disaster… some tragic event, deliberate or otherwise, which left the sixth ship essentially dead. Coasting, but derelict, with its crew all killed, probably its momios as well. There must have been enough residual power to keep the remaining antimatter in containment, of course, but that wouldn’t have taken much.”

“What,” Sky said, “and we just forgot about it?”

“If the other ships had also played a part in the destruction of the sixth, it wouldn’t have been difficult to edit the data records of the entire Flotilla to remove any reference to the crime itself, or even the fact the victim had ever existed. That generation of crew could have sworn not to pass on the knowledge of the crime to their descendants, our parents.”

Gomez nodded enthusiastically. “So by now all we’d have been left with is a few rumours; half-forgotten truths mixed up in myth.”

“Exactly what we do have,” Norquinco said.

Sky shook his head, knowing it was futile to argue any further.

The train came to a halt in one of the loading bays which serviced this part of the spine. The three of them got out carefully, crunching their sticky-soled shoes onto the flooring for traction. There was scarcely any feeling of gravity now since they were so close to the axis of rotation. Objects still fell towards the floor, but with a certain reluctance, and it was easy to hurt your head against the ceiling if you took too ambitious a stride.

There were many such bays, each servicing a cluster of momios. There were six sleeper modules attached around this part of the spine, each of which held ten individual cryogenic berths. The trains reached no closer, and almost all equipment and supplies had to be manhandled from this point, via laddered shafts and winding crawlways. There were freight elevators and handler robots, but neither were used very often. Robots in particular needed diligent programming and maintenance, and even the simplest task had to be spelled out to them as if they were particularly slow-witted children. Usually, it was quicker just to do it yourself. That was why there were so many techs, usually leaning against the pallets looking bored, smoking homemade cigarettes or tapping styluses against clipboards, doing their best to look semi-occupied despite the fact that nothing was actually happen-ing. The techs generally wore blue overalls flashed with section decals, but the overalls were usually ripped or amended in some fashion, exposing crudely tattooed skin. Sky knew all of them by face, of course—on a ship with only one hundred and fifty warm human beings, it was difficult not to. But he had only a vague idea what their names were, and next to none about the kinds of lives the techs lived when they were not working. Off-duty techs tended to keep to their own parts of the Santiago, and they tended to socialise amongst themselves, even to the extent of producing their offspring. They spoke their own patois, drenched in carefully guarded jargon.

But something was slightly different now.

No one was lazing around or trying to look busy. In fact, there were hardly any techs in the room at all, and the few that were here looked edgy, as if waiting for an alarm to go off.

“What’s the matter?” Sky said.

But the man who stepped gingerly from behind the nearest tower of equipment pallets was not a tech. He brushed his hand across the chrome shoulder of a crouched handler robot as if looking for support, sweat blistering on his forehead.

“Dad?” Sky said. “What are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same question, unless this is one of your chores.”

“Of course it is. I told you we work the trains now and then, didn’t I?”

Titus looked distracted. “Yes… yes, you did. I forgot. Sky, help these men unload the goods, and then get you and your friends away from here, will you?”

Sky looked at his father. “I don’t understand.”

“Just do it, will you?” Then Titus Haussmann turned to the nearest tech, a heavily bearded fellow with grotesquely muscled forearms folded across his chest like hams. “The same goes for you and your men, Xavier. Get all non-essential people out of here, all the way back up the spine. As a matter of fact I want the engine section evacuated while we’re at it.” He flipped up his sleeve and whispered orders into his bracelet. Recommendation, more accurately, Sky thought, but Old Man Balcazar would never fail to abide by Titus Haussmann’s advice. Then he turned to Sky again, blinking to see his son still present. “Didn’t I just tell you to get on with it, son? I wasn’t kidding.”

Norquinco and Gomez took their leave, accompanying a couple of techs to the waiting train, flipping open one of its freight covers and beginning the knuckle-grazing work of unloading supplies. They passed the boxes from hand to hand, out of the bay altogether, where they would presumably be lowered down the levels to the sleeper berths themselves.

“Dad, what is it?” Sky said.

He thought his father was going to reprimand him, but Titus simply shook his head. “I don’t know. Not yet. But there’s something not right with one of our passengers—something that has me a little worried.”

“What do you mean, not right?”

“One of the bastard momios is waking up.” He mopped his forehead. “That’s not supposed to happen. I’ve been down there, into the berth, and I still don’t understand it. But it has me worried. That’s why I want this area cleared.”

This was a marvel indeed, Sky thought. None of the passengers had ever awakened, even though a few of them had certainly died. But his father seemed less than overjoyed at the situation. Gravely concerned, more accurately.

“Why is it a problem, Dad?”

“Because they’re not meant to wake up, that’s why. If it happens at all, it must mean it was planned from day one. Before we ever left the solar system.”

“But why clear the area?”

“Because of something my father told me, Sky. Now do what I just told you and get that train unloaded and then get the hell away from here, will you?”

At that moment another train slid into the bay from the opposite direction, nosing up against the one Sky had arrived upon. Four of Titus’s security people emerged from it, three men and a woman, and began buckling on plastic armour that had been too bulky to wear during the journey. This was practically the entire operational militia for the ship, its police force and army, and even these people were not fulltime security officers. The squad moved forward to another part of the train and unracked guns: gloss-white weapons which they handled with nervous care. His father had always told him that there were no guns aboard ship, but never very convincingly.

There were, in fact, many aspects of shipboard security about which Sky wanted to know more. His father’s small, tight, highly efficient organisation fascinated him. But Sky had never been allowed to work with his father. The explanation which Titus gave for this was plausible enough: he could not claim impartiality or fairness if his son were to be given a role in the organisation, no matter how apt Sky might have been—but that did not make it any less bitter a pill to swallow. Consequently the tasks Sky was assigned were always as far away from anything remotely security-related as Titus could ensure. Nothing would or could change while Titus remained head of security, and both of them understood that.

Sky went to join his friends, helping them off-load the supplies. They were getting through the job quickly, without any of the carefully honed dawdling that usually accompanied the process. His friends were unnerved; whatever was going on here was out of the ordinary and Titus Haussmann was not a man to pretend there was a crisis where none existed.

Sky kept one eye on the security squad.

They settled fabric headsets over their shaven skulls, tapping microphones and checking communication frequencies. Then they pulled armoured helmets from the train and pushed their heads into them, adjusting drop-down overlay monocles which covered one eye. A slim black line ran from each helmet to the sight attached to the top of each gun, so that the guns could be discharged without the guard having to look in the direction of fire. They probably had infra-red or sonar overlays as well. That would be useful down in the gloomy sublevels.

When they had stopped fiddling with their equipment, the squad moved over to his father, who briefed them quickly and quietly, with the absolute minimum of fuss. Sky watched his father’s lips move; his expression one of complete calm now that he was in the presence of his own squad. Occasionally he made a taut, precise hand gesture or shook his head. He might as well have been telling them all a nursery rhyme. Even the sweat on his forehead seemed to have dried up.

Then Titus Haussmann left the squad, and went back over to the train they had arrived on and pulled his own gun from it. No armour or helmet; just the weapon. It was the same gloss-white as the others. There was a sickle-shaped magazine beneath it and a skeletal stock. His father handled it with quiet respect rather than easy familiarity: the way a man might handle a venomous snake that had just been milked.

All for a single sleepless passenger?

“Dad…” Sky said, leaving his duty again. “What is it? What is it really?”

“Nothing you need worry about,” his father said.

Titus took three of the squad with him and left the fourth behind, standing guard in the freight bay. The detachment disappeared down one of the access shafts which led to the berths, the clatter of their progress growing quieter, but never quite silencing. When he was certain that his father was out of earshot, Sky moved over to the guard who had been stationed in the bay.

“What’s going on, Constanza?”

She flipped up the monocle. “What makes you think I’m about to tell you, if your father didn’t?”

“I don’t know. A wild shot in the dark along the lines of us both having been friends at one point, I suppose.”

He had known it was her the instant the train had arrived; given the apparent severity of the situation it had been certain that she would be amongst the squad.

“I’m sorry,” Constanza said. “It’s just that we’re all a tiny bit edgy, understand?”

“Of course.” He studied her face, as beautiful and fierce as ever, wondering how it would feel to trace the line of her jaw. “I heard it was about one of the passengers waking up too early. Is that true?”

“More or less,” she said, as if through gritted teeth.

“And for that you need more firepower than I’ve ever seen before on the ship? More than I ever knew existed?”

“Your father determines how we handle individual incidents, not me.”

“But he must have said something. What is it about this one passenger?”

“Look, I don’t know, all right? Just that whatever it is, it isn’t supposed to happen. The momios aren’t meant to wake up early. That just isn’t possible, unless someone programmed their sleeper berth to make it happen. And no one would have done that unless they had a good reason.”

“I still don’t understand why anyone would want to wake up early.”

“To sabotage the mission, of course.” She lowered her voice now, and clicked her fingernails against the gun, edgily. “A single sleeper placed aboard not as a passenger, but as a time-bomb. A volunteer on a suicide mission, say—a criminal, or someone else with nothing to lose. Someone angry enough to want to kill us all. It wasn’t easy to get a slot on the Flotilla when she left Sol, remember. The Confederacion made as many enemies as friends when it built the fleet. It wouldn’t be difficult to find someone willing to die, if it allowed them to punish us.”

“It would be difficult to do, though.”

“Only if you forgot to bribe the right people.”

“I suppose you’re right. When you say time-bomb you’re not talking literally, are you?”

“No—but now that you mention it, it isn’t such an absurd idea. What if they—whoever they were—managed to plant a saboteur aboard every ship? Maybe the one aboard the Islamabad was just the first to wake. And they wouldn’t have had any warning.”

“Maybe a warning wouldn’t have helped them much, in that case.”

She clenched her teeth. “I guess we’re about to find out. On the other hand, it could just be a malfunctioning sleeper berth.”

That was when the first gunshots were heard.

Whatever was happening was taking place tens of metres beneath the loading bay, but the shots still sounded fearsomely loud. There were shouts as well. He thought he heard his father, but it was difficult to tell: the acoustics lent a metallic quality to the voices, rendering the words indistinct and blurring the differences in timbre.

“Shit,” Constanza said. For a moment she froze, then she was making for the access well. She turned and flashed wild eyes at him. “You stay here, Sky.”

“I’m coming with you. That’s my father down there.”

The shots had ceased, but there was still a lot of noise, voices mainly, raised to the point of hysteria, and what sounded like things being thrown around. Constanza checked her gun again and then stowed it over a shoulder. She walked towards the access well, preparing to lever herself into its laddered, echoing depths.

“Constanza…”

He grabbed her gun and wrestled it from her shoulder before she had time to act. Constanza turned round in fury, but he was already easing past her, not exactly pointing the gun at her, but not exactly pointing it away from her either. He had no idea how to use it, but he must have looked sufficiently purposeful. Constanza backed off now, her eyes flicking to the gun. It was still tethered to her helmet by the black flex, which was now stretched to its limit.

“Give me the head-gear,” Sky said, nodding towards her.

“You’ll be in deep shit for this,” she said.

“What, going after my father when he’s in danger? I don’t think so. A mild reprimand at the very worst, I think.” He nodded again. “The helmet, Constanza.”

She grimaced and pulled the helmet from her head. Sky settled it over his own, not bothering to ask her for the fabric underlayer. The helmet was a little small for him, but there was no time to adjust it now. He flipped down the monocle, gratified when it lit up with the view that the gun was seeing. The image was all shades of grey-green, overlaid by cross-hairs, range-finder numerics and weapons-status summaries. None of that meant anything to him, but when he looked at Constanza he saw her nose stand out as a white smudge of heat. Infra-red; that was all he needed to know.

He lowered himself into the shaft, aware that Constanza was following him at a discreet distance.

There were no shouts now, but there were still voices. They were quiet, but there was nothing calm about them. He could hear his father quite distinctly now; there was something not quite right about the way he was talking.

He reached the nexus which connected the sleeper berths of this node. They radiated out in ten directions, but only one of the connecting doors was open. That was where the voices were coming from. He pointed the gun ahead of him and moved towards the berth, down the normally dark, pipe-lined corridor which led to it. Now the corridor shone in sickly shades of grey-green. He was scared, he realised. Fear had always been there, but it was only now that he had the gun and had climbed down that he had time to pay attention to it. Fear was a nearly unfamiliar thing to him, but not completely so. He remembered his first real taste of it, alone in the nursery, betrayed and deserted. Now he watched his own shadow trace phantom shapes along the wall, and for a fleeting moment wished that Clown were with him now to offer guidance and friendship. The idea of returning to the nursery was suddenly very tempting. It was a world unsullied by rumours of ghost ships or sabotage, of present and real hardships.

He crept round a dogleg in the corridor and there was the berth ahead of him: the large, machine-filled support chamber for a single sleeper. It was like a dedicated burial room in a church, reeking of antiquity and reverence. The room had been cold until recently and much of it was still olive-green or black in his vision.

From behind he heard Constanza speak. “Give me the gun, Sky, and no one will know you took it.”

“I’ll give it back when the danger’s passed.”

“We don’t even know what the danger is yet. Perhaps someone’s gun just went off by accident.”

“And the sleeper berth just happened to be malfunctioning, as well? Yeah, right.”

He entered the sleeper berth and took ill the tableau that greeted him. The three security guards were there, as was his father—blobs of pale-green shading to white.

“Constanza,” one of them said. “I thought you were supposed to cover… shit. It isn’t you, is it?”

“No. It’s me. Sky Haussmann.” He flipped up the monocle, the room gloomier than it had been a moment ago.

“And where’s Constanza?”

“I took her helmet and gun, entirely against her wishes.” He looked behind him, hoping that Constanza had heard this attempt at exonerating her. “She did put up a fight, believe me.”

The berth was one of ten in a ring, each fed by its own corridor from the node. The room had probably been entered only one or two times since the Flotilla’s launch. The sleeper support systems were as delicate and complex as the antimatter engines; just as likely to go horribly wrong if tampered with by anything other than expert hands. Like buried pharaohs, the sleepers had not expected their places of slumber to be violated until they reached what passed for the afterlife — arrival around 61 Cygni-A. It felt a little wrong just to be here at all.

But not half as wrong as it felt to see his father.

Titus Haussmann was lying on the floor, his upper body cradled by one of the security guards. His chest was covered in a dark, cloying fluid that Sky knew was blood. There were canyonlike gashes in his uniform, in which the blood was pooling thickly, gurgling disgustingly with each laboured breath.

“Dad…” Sky said.

“It’s all right,” one of the guards answered. “There’s a medical team on their way.”

Which, Sky thought—given the general state of medical expertise aboard the Santiago —was about as useful as saying there were priests coming. Or undertakers.

He looked at the sleeper casket; the long, plinth-like, machine-encrusted cryo-coffin which filled much of the room. The upper half of it was cracked wide open, huge jagged fractures like shattered glass. Sharp bits of it formed a haphazard glass mosaic on the floor. It was exactly as if something inside the casket had forced its way out.

And there was something inside it.

The passenger was dead, or nearly dead; that much was obvious. At first glance the man looked normal enough apart from the bullet wounds: a naked human being invaded by monitoring wires, blood-shunts and catheters. He was younger than most of them, Sky thought—excellent fanatic fodder, in other words. But with his bald head and masklike lack of facial muscle tone, the man could have passed for a thousand other sleepers.

Except that his forearm had come off.

It was lying on the floor, in fact—a limp, glove-like thing, ending in flaps of ragged skin. But there was no bone or meat showing from the end, and very little blood had leaked from the severed limb. The stump was wrong as well. The man’s skin and bone stopped a few inches below his elbow, and then it was all tapering metal prosthesis: a complex, blood-lathered, glittering obscenity which ended not in steel fingers but in a vicious assemblage of blades.

Sky imagined how it must have happened.

The man had woken inside his casket, probably following a plan laid down before the Flotilla had left Mercury. He must have intended to wake up unobserved, smash his way to freedom and then set about inflicting stealthy harm on the ship, in precisely the way that might have happened on the Islamabad, if Constanza’s theory was correct. A lone man could certainly do great damage, if he was not obliged to allow for his own survival.

But his revival had not gone unnoticed. He must have been in the process of waking when the security team had entered the berth. Perhaps Sky’s father had been leaning over the casket, examining it, when the man had cracked it open with his forearm weapon. It would have been very easy for him to stab Titus then, even if the other squad members were doing their best to put magazine-loads of bullets into him. Drugged with pain-nullifying revival chemicals, he had probably barely noticed the shots eating into him.

They had stopped him, maybe even killed him, but not before he had inflicted extreme harm on Titus. Sky knelt down next to his father. Titus’s eyes were still open, but they seemed not quite to focus.

“Dad? It’s me. Sky. Try and hang on, will you? The medics are coming. It’ll be all right.”

One of the guards touched his shoulder. “He’s strong, Sky. He had to go in first, you know. That was his way.”

“Is his way, you mean.”

“Of course. He’ll pull through.”

Sky started to say something, the words assembling in his head, but suddenly the passenger was moving; at first with dreamlike slowness then with terrifying speed. For a yawning instant it was not something he was prepared to believe; the man’s injuries were simply too severe for him to be capable of movement, let alone movement that was swift and violent.

The passenger rolled from the casket, the movement lithe and animal-like, and then the man was standing, and with one elegant scythe-like sweep of his arm he cut one of the guards open across the throat, the guard collapsing to his knees with blood fountaining from the wound. The passenger paused, holding his weapon-arm in front of him, and then the complex cluster of knives whirred and clicked, one blade retracting while another slotted into place, gleaming with pure-blue surgical brilliance. The passenger studied this process with what looked like quiet fascination.

He stepped forward, towards Sky.

Sky still had Constanza’s gun, but the fear was so intense that he could not even hold the weapon up to threaten the passenger. The passenger looked at him, the muscles beneath the flesh rippling strangely, as if dozens of orchestrated maggots were crawling over the bones of his skull. The rippling halted, and for a moment the face staring back at Sky was a crude approximation of his own. Then the rippling resumed and the face was no longer one Sky recognised.

The man smiled, and pushed his clean new blade into Sky’s chest. There was a curious lack of pain, and the immediate effect was only as if the man had thumped him hard across the ribs. He fell back, winded, out of the passenger’s way.

Behind, the two uninjured guards had their guns levelled and ready to fire.

Sky, slumped down, attempted to draw his next breath. The pain was exquisite, and he felt none of the relief that the inhalation should have brought. The passenger’s knife had almost certainly punctured a lung, he decided, and the blow might well have shattered a rib in the process. But the blade appeared to have missed his heart, and he could still move his legs, so it had probably not damaged his spine.

Another moment elapsed and he wondered why the guards had yet to open fire. He could see the passenger’s back; they must have had a clear target.

Constanza, of course. She was just beyond the passenger, and if they shot at him their rounds had a high likelihood of passing right through his body and ripping through her. She could retreat, but with the connecting doors to the other berths sealed—and no chance of opening them in a hurry—the only way to go was up the ladder. And the passenger would be immediately behind her. Ordinarily, having just one arm would have hindered anyone’s ascent of a ladder, but the normal physiological rules did not seem to apply here.

“Sky…” she said. “Sky. You’ve got my gun. You’ve got a clearer line of fire than the other two. Shoot now.”

Still lying down, still struggling for breath—he could hear his lung wound gurgling like a baby—he raised the gun and aimed it in the vague direction of the passenger, who was walking calmly towards Constanza.

“Do it now, Sky.”

“I can’t.”

“Do it. It’s a question of Flotilla safety.”

“I can’t.”

“Do it!”

His hand trembling, barely able to hold the gun now, let alone aim it with any precision, he directed the muzzle in the approximate direction of the passenger’s back, then closed his eyes—though by then he was fighting a black tide of unconsciousness anyway—and squeezed the trigger.

The burst of fire was short and sharp, like a loud, deep burp. Combined with the sound of the gun’s discharge was a metallic roar: the sound of bullets ramming not into flesh but into the corridor’s armoured cladding.

The passenger halted, as if about to turn around and return for something it had forgotten, and then fell down.

Constanza, beyond, was still standing.

She advanced forward, then kicked the passenger, eliciting no visible response. Sky allowed the gun to slip from his fingers, but by then the other two guards were level with him and their weapons were trained on the passenger.

Sky struggled for the breath to speak. “Dead?”

“I don’t know,” Constanza said. “Not going anywhere in a hurry, anyway. Are you all right?”

“Can’t breathe.”

She nodded. “You’ll live. You should have shot him when I said, you know.”

“Did.”

“No, you didn’t. You fired indiscriminately and got a lucky break with a ricochet. You could have ended up killing all of us.”

“Didn’t.”

She stooped down and retrieved the gun. “Mine, I think.”

By then the medical team had arrived, clambering down the ladder. There had been no time to brief them, of course, and for a moment they dithered, unsure who to treat first. A respected and high-ranking member of the crew was severely injured before them; two other crew members had wounds that might also be life-threatening. But there was also an injured passenger, a member of that even higher elite they had spent their entire lives serving. The fact that the momio was not quite what he seemed did not immediately register with them.

One of the medics found Sky and after an initial check-up placed a breather mask over his face, flooding his ailing respiratory system with pure oxygen. He felt some of that black tide lap away.

“Help Titus,” Sky said, indicating his father. “But do what you can for the passenger as well.”

“Are you certain?” the medic said, who by then must have grasped something of what had gone on.

Sky pressed the mask to his face again before answering, his mind racing ahead to what he could do to the passenger; the labyrinthine ways in which he might inflict pain on the killer.

“Yes. I’m more than certain.”