“Follow me,” Quirrenbach said. “It isn’t far.”
“Do you come here often?”
Now there was a note of honesty in his voice. “Not if I can help it. I’m not a big player in the Dream Fuel operation, Tanner. Not a very large cog. I’d be a dead man if some people knew I was even bringing you this far. Can we make this a discreet visit?”
“That depends. I told you I wanted some answers.”
He had reached something in the wall. “There’s no way I can take you close to the centre of things, Tanner—start understanding that, will you? It just isn’t possible. It’s best if you go in alone. And don’t even think about causing trouble. You’d need more than a few guns for that.”
“So what are you taking us to?”
But instead of answering, he yanked at something hidden in the slime-covered grime of the wall, hauling aside a sliding panel. It was almost above our heads; a rectangular hole two metres long.
Wary of tricks—like Quirrenbach using the hole as an escape route—I went first. Then I helped Quirrenbach up, and then Chanterelle. Zebra came last, casting a wary eye behind her. But no one had followed us, and the only eyes watching us depart belonged to the tunnel’s rats.
Inside, we crawled, crouching, along a low, square steel-lined tunnel for what seemed like hundreds of metres, but which was probably only a few dozen. I had lost all sense of direction now, but part of my mind insisted that we had all along been approaching closer and closer to the edge of the chasm. It was possible that we were beyond the fringe of the Mosquito Net now. Above us, beyond only a few metres of bedrock, might have been poisonous atmosphere.
But eventually, just when my back was beginning to ache with something that went beyond discomfort into real, paralysing pain, we emerged into a much larger chamber. It was dark at first, but Quirrenbach turned on a matrix of ancient lights stapled to the ceiling.
Something ran from one end of the chamber to the other, emerging from one wall and vanishing into the other. It was a dull silver tube, three or four metres wide, like a pipeline. Jutting from it on one side, at an oblique angle, was what looked like a branch of the same tube: exactly the same diameter, but terminating in a smooth metal end-cap.
“You recognise this, of course,” Quirrenbach said, indicating the longer part of the pipe.
“Not exactly,” I said. I had expected one of the others to say something, but no one seemed any wiser than me.
“Well, you’ve seen it many times.” Then he walked up to the pipe. “It’s part of the city’s atmospheric supply system. There are hundreds of pipes like this, reaching down into the chasm, down into the cracking station. Some carry air. Some carry water. Some carry superheated steam.” He knuckled the pipe, and now I noticed that there was an oval panel in the part which jutted out, more or less the same size as the panel which he had found in the wall. “This one normally carries steam.”
“What is it carrying now?”
“A few thousand atmospheres. Nothing to worry about.”
Quirrenbach placed his hands on the panel and slid it aside. It moved smoothly, revealing a curve of dark green glass, framed by clean silver metal inset with controls. They were marked with a very old style of writing; words which were almost but not quite Norte.
Amerikano.
Quirrenbach tapped a few keys, and I heard a series of distant thumps. Moments later, the whole pipe thrummed as if sounding a monstrously low note. “That’s the steam flow being rerouted along another network, for inspection mode.”
He pressed a button and the thick green glass whisked aside, revealing a mass of bronze machinery, nearly filling the bore of the pipe. At either end it was all pistons and accor dioned sections, festooned with pipes and metal whiskers, servo-motors and black suction pads. It was difficult to tell whether it was ancient—something from the Amerikano period—or much more recent, cobbled together since the plague. Either way, it didn’t look very reliable. But in the middle of the machine was a skeletal space equipped with two large padded seats and some rudimentary controls. It made a wheeler look like an exercise in spaciousness.
“Start talking,” I said.
“It’s an inspection robot,” Quirrenbach said. “A machine for wriggling along the pipe, checking for leaks, weak spots, that kind of thing. Now it’s . . . well, you figure it out.”
“A transportation system.” I studied it myself, wondering what were the chances of riding it and surviving. “Clever, I’ll give you that. Well—how long will it take to go where it goes?”
“I’ve ridden it once,” Quirrenbach said. “It wasn’t any picnic.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“An hour or two to get down below the mist layer. Same time to come back. I don’t advise that you spend too long when you get there.”
“Fine. I’m not planning to. Will I pass for someone in the know if I take this thing down?”
He eyed me over. “Only people in the know arrive via this route. With Vadim’s coat you’ll pass for a supplier, or at least someone in the loop—provided you don’t open your mouth too much. Just tell whoever meets you that you’ve come to see Gideon.”
“Sounds like it couldn’t be easier.”
“Oh, you’ll manage. A monkey could run the machine. Sorry. No offence intended.” Quirrenbach smiled quickly and nervously. “Look, it’s easy. You won’t have any trouble telling when you’ve arrived.”
“No,” I said. “Especially as you’re coming along for the ride.”
“Bad move, Tanner. Bad move.” Quirrenbach started looking around for moral support.
“Tanner’s right,” Zebra said, shrugging. “It would make a kind of sense.”
“But I’ve never been close to Gideon. They won’t necessarily take me any more seriously than they take Tanner. What am I supposed to say when they ask why we’re there?”
Zebra glared at him. “Improvise, you spineless little shit. Say you heard some rumours about Gideon’s health, and you wanted to check them out for yourself. Say there are stories about the quality of the final product reaching the streets. It’ll work. It’s the same kind of story that got my sister close to Gideon, after all.”
“You’ve no idea whether she got close at all.”
“Well, just do your best, Quirrenbach—I’m sure Tanner will be there to give you all the moral support you need.”
“I’m not doing it.”
Zebra waved her gun towards him. “Want a rethink?”
He looked down the barrel of the gun, then at Zebra, his lips pursed. “Damn you as well, Taryn. Consider your bridges well and truly burned, as far as our professional relationship is concerned.”
“Just get in the machine, will you?”
I turned to Zebra and Chanterelle. “Take care. I don’t think you’ll be in any danger here, but keep an eye out in any case. I expect to be back within a few hours. Can you wait that long?”
Zebra nodded. “I could, but I’m not planning to. There’s enough room in that thing for three of us, if Chanterelle can hold the fort back here.”
Chanterelle shrugged. “Can’t say I’m exactly looking forward to spending a few hours up here on my own, but I think I’d rather be here than down there. I guess this is one you owe to your sister?”
Zebra nodded. “She’d have done the same for me, I think.”
“Way to go. I just hope the trip’s worth it.”
I spoke to Chanterelle now. “Don’t put yourself in any more danger than necessary. We can find our own way out of here if we have to, so if anything happens . . . you know where the car’s parked.”
“Don’t worry about me, Tanner. Just take care of yourself.”
“It’s a habit of mine.” I slapped Quirrenbach on the shoulder, with all the hearty bonhomie I’d have liked to have felt. “Well, are you ready? You never know. You might be inspired on the way down; something even more depressing than normal.”
He looked at me grimly. “Let’s get this o
ver with, Tanner.”
Despite what Zebra had said, there was barely room for two people in the inspection robot, and it was a painful squeeze to accommodate a third. But Zebra’s articulation was not fully human, and she had an uncanny ability to fold herself into what space remained, even if the process caused her some discomfort.
“I hope to God this isn’t going to take too long,” she said.
“Start her up,” I told Quirrenbach.
“Tanner, there’s still . . .”
“Just start the fucking thing up,” Zebra said. “Or the only composing you’ll be doing is decomposing.”
That did the trick; Quirrenbach pressed a button and the machine rumbled into life. It clunked its way along the pipe, moving like a slow mechanical centipede. The machine’s front and back moved jerkily, the suction grips hammering the wall, but the part where we were seated travelled relatively smoothly. Though there was no steam in the tunnel now, the metal sides were hot to the touch and the air was like a steady belch from the depths of hell. It was cramped and dark except for the weak illumination from the basic controls placed in front of our seats. The pipeline walls were smooth as glacial ice, polished that way by the monstrous pressures of the steam. Though the pipe had started out horizontally, it soon began to curve, gently at first, and then to something that was not far off vertical. My seat was now a deeply uncomfortable harness from which I was hanging, constantly aware of the kilometres of pipe that fell away below me and the fact that all that was stopping me dropping into those depths was the suction pressure of the cups arrayed around the inspection robot.
“We’re heading for the cracking station, aren’t we?” Zebra said, raising her voice above the machine’s hammering progress. “That’s where they make it, isn’t it?”
“Makes a kind of sense,” I said, thinking about the station. That was where all the pipes came from: the city’s great tap-roots. The station nestled deep in the chasm, lost under the perpetual mist layer. It was where titanic conversion machines sucked in the hot, raw gaseous poison rising from the chasm’s depths. “It’s out of the way of any jurisdiction, and the people who crew it must have the kinds of advanced chemical tools they’d need to synthesise something like Dream Fuel.”
“You think everyone who works down there is in on the secret?”
“No; probably just a small clique of workers producing the drug, unknown to anyone else in the station. Isn’t that the case, Quirrenbach?”
“I told you,” he said, adjusting a control so that our rate of progress increased, the hammering becoming a harsh tattoo. “I was never allowed close to the source.”
“So how much do you know, exactly? You must know something about the synthesis process.”
“Why would it interest you if I did?”
“Because it doesn’t make much sense to me,” I said. “The plague made a lot of things stop working. Implants—complicated ones, anyway. Sub-cellular nano robots; medichines—whatever you want to call them. That was bad news for the postmortals, wasn’t it? Their therapies usually needed some intervention by those little machines. Now they had to make do without.”
“And?”
“Suddenly something else shows up which almost does the job just as well. Better, in some ways. Dream Fuel’s childishly easy to administer—it doesn’t even need to be tailored to the person it’s being used on. It heals injuries and it restores memories.” I thought back to the man I’d seen thrashing on the ground, desperate for a tiny drop of the scarlet stuff even though the plague had already subsumed half his body. “It even confers protection from the plague for people who haven’t discarded their machines. It’s almost too good to be true, Quirrenbach.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning I’m wondering how something that useful ended up being invented by criminals. It would be hard enough to imagine it being created before the plague, even when the city still had the means to create wonderful new technologies. Now? There are parts of the Mulch where they haven’t even got steam power. And while there might be a few high-tech enclaves in the Canopy, they’re more interested in playing games than developing miracle cures. But that seems to be exactly what they’ve ended up with—even if the supply is currently a little tight.”
“It didn’t exist before the plague,” Zebra said.
“Too much of a coincidence,” I said. “Which makes me wonder if they might both have the same origin.”
“Don’t flatter yourself that you’re the first to have had that thought.”
“No, I wouldn’t dream of it.” I scraped sweat from my brow, already feeling like I’d been in a sauna for an hour. “But you have to admit the point is valid.”
“I wouldn’t know. I don’t profess any great interest in the matter.”
“Not even when the fate of the city might depend on it?”
“Except it wouldn’t, would it? A few thousand postmortals, ten at the most. Dream Fuel may be a precious substance to those who’ve acquired a dependence on it, but for the majority it’s of no consequence whatsoever. Let them die; see if I care. In a few centuries everything that’s happened here will be little more than a historical footnote. I, meanwhile, have considerably larger and more ambitious fish to fry.” Quirrenbach adjusted some more controls, tapping a gauge here and there. “But then I’m an artist. All this is mere diversion. You, on the other hand . . . I confess I really don’t understand you, Tanner. Yes, you may now have some obligation to Taryn, but your interest in Dream Fuel was apparent from the moment we searched Vadim’s cabin. By your own admission you came here to murder Argent Reivich, not to sort out a minor supply shortage in our sordid little drugs industry.”
“Things became a little more complicated, that’s all.”
“And?”
“There’s something about Dream Fuel, Quirrenbach. Something that makes me think I’ve seen it before.”
But there was a way in. Sky, Norquinco and Gomez located it by undocking and scouting around the ship for another thirty minutes, until they found the hole that Oliveira and Lago must have used to get inside. It was only a few tens of metres from where Oliveira’s shuttle was parked; near the point where the spine connected to the rest of the ship. It was so small that Sky had missed it completely on the first pass, lost as it was amongst the blisterlike protuberances on the ship’s ruined side.
“I think we should go back,” Gomez said.
“We’re going in.”
“Didn’t you listen to a word of what Oliveira said to us? And doesn’t it worry you in the slightest that this ship appears to be made of something strange? That it looks like a crude attempt at copying one of our ships?”
“It worries me, yes. It also makes me even more determined to get inside.”
“Lago went inside as well.”
“Well, I guess we’ll just have to keep a look-out for him, won’t we?” Sky was ready now. He had not bothered removing his helmet since the last time he had gone through the airlock.
“I also want to see what’s inside,” Norquinco said.
“One of us at least should stay aboard the shuttle,” Gomez said. “If the ship that swept us with the radar gets here in the next few hours, it would be good to have someone ready to do something about it.”
“Fine,” said Sky. “You just volunteered for the job.”
“I didn’t mean . . .”
“I don’t care what you meant. Just accept it. If Norquinco and I run into anything that needs your input, you’ll be the first to know.”
They left the shuttle, using thruster harnesses to cross the short distance to the Caleuche’s hull. When they landed near the hole it was like touching down on a softly yielding mattress. They stood up, gripped to the ship by the adhesive soles of their shoes.
There was an obvious and vital question that Sky had almost managed not to ask himself, but now it must be dealt with. There was no way in his experience that the hull of a ship could be transmuted to this sponge-like state. Metal sim
ply did not do that by itself—even if it had been exposed to the glare of an antimatter explosion. No; whatever had happened here was far beyond his experience. It was as if the ghost ship’s hull had been replaced, atom by atom, by some new and disturbingly pliant substance which replicated the old details in only the broadest terms. There was shape and texture and colour, but no function, like a crude cast of the original ship. Was he even standing on the Caleuche, or was that just another flawed assumption?
Sky and Norquinco walked to the lip of the hole, poking the muzzles of their guns into the gloom. The lip was ragged and scorched with heat marks and had the puckered, wrinkled look of a half-closed mouth. A metre or two below the surface, however, the wall of the hole was lined with a thick, fibrous mass which glistened gently as their torchlight skittered across it. Sky thought he recognised that mass; it was a matrix of extruded diamond fibres embedded in epoxy, a quick-drying paste that could be used to repair hull punctures. Oliveira had probably located a weak spot on the Caleuche—he must have taken the time to make a density map before selecting this point—and had then used something to cut through, a laser torch or even the exhaust of his shuttle. Once he had bored the shaft, he had lined it with the spray-on sealant from his shuttle’s emergency kit, presumably to prevent it collapsing shut.
“We’ll go in this way,” Sky said. “Oliveira must have found the most promising entry point; there’s no sense in duplicating his effort when we’ve so little time to spare.”
They checked that the inertial compasses built into their suits were functioning accurately, defining their current position as a zero point. The Caleuche was neither spinning nor tumbling, so the compasses would prevent them getting lost once they were inside, but even if the compasses proved unreliable, they would be able to retrace their way to the wound in the hull, deploying a line as they went.
Sky halted in his thoughts, wondering why he had just thought of the hole in the hull as a wound?
They went in, Sky first. The hole led into a rough-walled tunnel which cut straight into the hull, threading down for ten or twelve metres. Normally by this point—had the ship been the Santiago—they would have passed right through the hull’s outer integument and would be passing through a series of narrow service cavities, squeezing between the multitude of data-lines, power cables and refrigerant pipes; perhaps even one of the train tunnels. There were, Sky knew, points where the hull was more or less solid for several metres, but he was reasonably sure this was not one of them.