Chasm City

  That, of course, was not what they had found.

  Oliveira had sent Lago in first, to find the fuel they needed to get back, and Lago had quickly realised that he was not in any human ship. When the helper grubs had brought him to Travelling Fearlessly’s chamber, things had gone poorly. Travelling Fearlessly had only been trying to help the creature by pointing out that he did not need to use his spacesuit; that they both breathed the same air. But perhaps the way he had done this—by having helper grubs eat the man’s suit away—had, in hindsight, not been ideal. Lago had become upset and had begun to hurt the helper grubs with the cutting torch. As the fire burned the helpers, Travelling Fearlessly drank in their agonised secretions as if the pain was his own.

  It was unpleasant, but he had no choice but to dismantle Lago. Lago, of course, hadn’t taken to that very enthusiastically either, but by then it was too late. The helper grubs had detached most of his extremities and the more interesting components from inside Lago, learning how the various bits of him worked and fitted together, before dissolving his central nervous system into the secretion. Travelling Fearlessly had ingested as many of Lago’s memories as he could make sense of. He had learned how to make the same kinds of sounds as Lago, and how to impart meaning to those sounds, and—copying Lago—he had made a mouth for himself. Other grubs had copied Lago’s sensory organs, or even incorporated bits of him into themselves.

  Now, having come to a greater understanding, Travelling Fearlessly understood why Lago had not taken well to his first view of the maggot-ridden chamber. He felt sorry for what he had been forced to do to Lago and tried to make amends by using as much of Lago’s memory and component parts as he could.

  He was sure the humans would appreciate this gesture.

  “After Lago came, it was very lonely again,” the mouth said. “Much lonelier than before.”

  “You didn’t grasp loneliness until you ate him, you fucking stupid maggot.”

  “That is . . . possible.”

  “All right—listen to me carefully. You’ve explained to me that you feel pain. Good. I needed to know that. You presumably have a well-developed instinct for self-preservation, too, or you wouldn’t have survived until now. Well, I have a harbourmaker with me. If you don’t understand the concept, look it up in Lago’s memory. I’m sure he knew.”

  There was a pause while the maggot shifted uncomfortably; red fluid sloshing around like seawater under a beached whale. Harbourmakers were nuclear warheads; equipment carried by the Flotilla to assist in the development of Journey’s End.

  “I understand.”

  “Good. Perhaps you can use that gravity trick to stop it from working, but I’m willing to bet that you can’t generate arbitrarily strong fields that easily, or you’d have used something similar to immobilise Lago when he started giving you difficulties.”

  “I told you too much.”

  “Yes, you probably did. But I still want to know more. About this ship, mainly. You were engaged in a war, weren’t you? You may not have been winning it, but my guess is you wouldn’t have survived until now without weapons of some description.”

  “We don’t have weapons.” The grub’s mouth looked af fronted. “Only armouring skein.”

  “Armouring skein?” Sky thought about it for a few moments, trying to get his head into the grub’s mode of thinking. “Some kind of projected force technology, is that it? You can put up some kind of field around this ship?”

  “We could, once. But the necessary parts were damaged when the fifth void warren was destroyed. Now only a partial skein can be created. It’s no use at all against an adept enemy like the grub eaters. They see the holes.”

  “All right, listen to me. Do you sense the two small machines approaching us?”

  “Yes. Are they also friends of Lago?”

  “Not quite.” Well, the shuttle crews might be, he thought—but they were very unlikely to be friends of Sky Haussmann, and that was all that really mattered. “I want you to use your skein against those machines—or I use the harbourmaker against you. Is that clear?”

  The grub seemed to understand. “You want me to destroy them?”

  “Yes. Or I’ll destroy you.”

  “You wouldn’t do that. It would kill you.”

  “You don’t understand,” Sky said amicably. “I’m not Lago; I don’t think like him, and I certainly don’t act like him.”

  He selected one of the nearer grubs and unloaded part of the machine-gun’s clip into the creature. The slugs punched thumb-sized holes in the creature’s pale-pink integument. He watched the red stuff drain out and then heard an awful shrill cry come from some part of the creature. Except he was wrong about that, now that he paid attention. The shrill cry was coming from the large grub; not the one that he had shot.

  He watched the injured one collapse down into the sea of red, until only part of it was showing. Several other helper grubs undulated towards it and began to prod it with their feelers.

  Gradually, the keening sound of anguish died down to a low moan.

  “You hurt me.”

  “I was just making a point,” Sky said. “When Lago hurt you, he hurt you indiscriminately because he was scared. I’m not scared. I hurt you because I want you to know exactly what I’m capable of.”

  A couple of helper grubs were thrashing their way ashore only metres from where Sky and Norquinco were standing.

  “No,” Sky said. “Don’t come any closer or I’ll shoot another one—and don’t try any funny tricks with gravity, or I’ll make the harbourmaker go off.”

  The grubs halted, their fronds waving hysterically.

  The yellow light—the light that bathed the whole chamber—died for a second. Sky was not expecting darkness. For an instant the terror of it was total. He had forgotten that the grubs controlled the light. In darkness, they could do almost anything. He imagined them emerging from the red lake, dragging him into it by his heels. He imagined being eaten by them, the way Lago had been. There might come a point where he could no longer tell the harbourmaker to go off; could no longer erase his own agony.

  Perhaps he should do it now.

  But the yellow light returned.

  “I did as you asked,” Travelling Fearlessly said. “It was hard. It took all our power to push the skein out to that distance.”

  “Did it work?”

  “There are two more out there—smaller void warrens.”

  The shuttles. “Yes. But they won’t be here for a little while. Then you can do the same trick again.” He called Gomez. “What happened?”

  “The probes just blew up, Sky—like they’d hit something.”

  “Nuclear?”

  “No. They weren’t carrying harbourmakers.”

  “Good. Stay where you are.”

  “Sky—what the hell is going on inside there?”

  “You don’t want to know, Gomez—you really don’t want to know.”

  He had to strain to pick out the next question. “Did you find—what was his name? Lago?”

  “Oh yes, we found Lago. Didn’t we, Lago?”

  Now Norquinco was speaking. “Sky. Listen. We should go now. We don’t have to kill the other people. We don’t want to start a war between the ships.” He raised his voice, his helmet speaker booming out across the red lake. “You can protect us in other ways, can’t you? You could move us; move this whole ship—this whole void warren, to safety? Out of the range of the shuttles?”

  “No,” Sky said. “I want those shuttles destroyed. If they want a war between the ships, they’ll get one. We’ll see how long they last.”

  “For God’s sake, Sky.” Norquinco reached out to him, as if to grasp him. Sky stepped away and lost his footing on the chamber’s hard and slick surface. Suddenly he was toppling over; falling backwards into the red brine. He landed on his backpack, half submerged in the shallows. The red liquid sloshed across his faceplate with strange eagerness, as if seeking a way into his suit. Out of the corner of his ey
e he saw two helper grubs undulating towards him. Sky thrashed, but he could not get a grip on any surface to lift himself out, let alone stand up.

  “Norquinco. Get me out.”

  Norquinco moved cautiously to the edge of the red lake. “Maybe I should leave you there, Sky. Maybe that would be the best thing for all of us.”

  “Get me out, you bastard.”

  “I didn’t come here to do any evil, Sky. I came here to help the Santiago—and maybe the rest of the Flotilla.”

  “I have the harbourmaker.”

  “But I don’t think you have the courage to let it off.”

  The grubs had reached him now—two and then a third he had not seen approaching. They were poking and prodding him with differently shaped clusters of appendages, exploring his suit. He thrashed, but the red fluid seemed to be thickening, conspiring to hold him prisoner.

  “Get me out, Norquinco. That’s your last warning . . .”

  Norquinco still stood over him, but he had not come any closer to the edge. “You’re sick, Sky. I’ve always suspected it, but I never saw it until now. I really don’t know what you’re capable of.”

  Then something he had not been expecting happened. He had stopped thrashing because it was almost too much effort, and now he was being lifted out of the red fluid, the fluid itself seeming to elevate him, while the grubs pushed him gently. Shivering with fear, he found himself on the shore. The last traces of the red fluid raced off him.

  For a moment, wordlessly, he stared at Travelling Fearlessly, knowing that the grub sensed his attention.

  “You believe me, don’t you. You won’t kill me. You know what it would mean.”

  “I don’t want to kill you,” Travelling Fearlessly said. “Because then I’d be lonely again, like I was before you came.”

  He understood, and the understanding itself was vile. It still cherished his company even after he had inflicted pain on it; even after he had murdered part of it. The thing was so desperately lonely that it even desired the presence of its torturer. He thought of a small child screaming in absolute darkness, betrayed by a friend that had never properly existed, and—while at the same time hating it absolutely for its weakness—did at least understand.

  And that made his hatred all the more intense.

  He had to kill another grub before he persuaded Travelling Fearlessly to destroy the two approaching shuttles, and this time it was not just the murder of the grub that agonised the creature. Generating the skein seemed to pain it as well, as if the grub could sense the ship’s damage.

  But by then it was over. He could have stayed; could have kept torturing the grub until it told him all it knew. He could have forced the grub to show him how the ship moved, and found out whether it was capable of taking them to Journey’s End quicker than the Santiago. He could even have considered bringing some of the Santiago’s crew here, aboard the void warren—living in its endless tunnels, forcing the grubs to adjust the air mix and temperature until it suited human tastes. How many could the alien ship have supported—dozens, or hundreds? Perhaps even the momios, if they were woken? Maybe some of them would have had to be fed to the helper grubs to keep them happy, but he could have lived with that.

  But he decided, instead, to destroy the ship.

  It was simpler by far; it freed him from negotiating with the grub; freed him from the sense of revulsion he felt when he recognised its loneliness. It also freed him from running the risk of the void warren ever falling into the hands of the other Flotilla vessels.

  “Let us leave,” he told Travelling Fearlessly. “Clear a route right to the surface, near where we came in.”

  He heard sonorous clangs as passageways were rerouted; airlocks opening and shutting. A breeze caressed the red water.

  “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.