‘This isn’t your ship any more,’ Spatha said.
Someone bent double and vomited. Forcing his mind to work, Quillon opened his bag. Knowing there was no time for anything but the most crude of calculations regarding dosage, he fumbled a dozen or so pills into his own trembling hands. ‘Take these,’ he said, passing them to Meroka. ‘One each for everyone here. Half a pill for Nimcha. I mean it, Kalis. She may be able to bring on the zone changes, she may even have some resistance to their effects, but that resistance isn’t perfect.’
Spatha lowered the revolver. ‘You’ll still answer for this, Ricasso. You brought this on us.’
Ricasso took a pill from Meroka. ‘It’s my fault now, is it? I thought you were blaming it on Quillon.’
‘You gave him the opportunity to do the sabotage he always intended,’ Spatha replied.
‘If Quillon meant to sabotage us, there are a thousand other ways he could have gone about it.’ Ricasso closed his eyes as the antizonal took effect. ‘Well done, Doctor. I can feel the worst of it lifting already. Will she hold the zone where it is, or let things snap back?’
‘I don’t know,’ Quillon said.
Spatha waved the revolver at the remaining airmen. ‘Get into the service spaces. Find the vorgs, before the zone rebounds.’
Quillon looked at Nimcha. The severity of her convulsions was easing, Kalis holding her tightly, comforting her daughter as she came through the worst of her nightmare of possession.
‘I am sorry,’ Kalis said. ‘She could not help it.’
‘Don’t apologise,’ Quillon answered. ‘She may very well have saved Swarm.’
Footsteps - heavy, multiple footsteps - pounded in their direction. Quillon and the others looked past the dead woman, down the length of the room to the wide, balconied corridor beyond. Despite the loss of propulsion, firesap burners were still alight. At least a dozen uniformed men and women were marching towards Spatha and his gathering. They had weapons drawn, glinting orange and brassy in the firesap light, and none of the party appeared touched by the zone storm. At the front, marching with a look of iron determination on his face, was the red-bearded Agraffe.
‘Did you speak to Curtana?’ Ricasso asked, as Agraffe neared.
‘I did. The fleet’s still ours, Spatha. The rest of your supporters were too spineless to show their faces.’
‘This man is under administrative restraint,’ Spatha said. ‘Captain Agraffe - I require you to submit to emergency rule under my authority.’
‘Require all you like. I’m still answering to Ricasso.’
Spatha carried on speaking as if Agraffe had not answered him at all. ‘You will submit to my rule. You will instruct your men ... whoever’s with you ... to coordinate with security personnel in tracking down the remaining vorgs. We may not have much time.’
‘One of us certainly doesn’t.’ Agraffe levelled his own service revolver towards Spatha. ‘Surrender your weapon. You’re under arrest for attempted mutiny.’
Spatha gave a hollow laugh. ‘That’s an extraordinary claim. I hope you have something suitably extraordinary to back it up.’
‘Did you speak to Curtana?’ Ricasso asked again.
‘I did, and I retrieved what she asked me to. It’s in safe hands now.’ Agraffe nodded at Quillon. ‘I’ve also been told to escort Doctor Quillon and the rest of his party to Painted Lady. They can be on their way within the hour.’ Agraffe glanced at Nimcha, concern in his eyes. ‘Will she be all right?’
‘She won’t be any worse off aboard Painted Lady,’ Quillon said. ‘And now that her true nature’s more widely known, that may be the safest place for her. I’d like to see what we can salvage from the laboratory first, though.’
‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ Agraffe said.
Nimcha made a mewling, nonverbal moan. Her eyelids began to flutter. Quillon felt it then: the zone receding, returning to something like its old position, if not snapping into exactly the same shape. Consciously or otherwise, Nimcha had done what needed to be done.
From somewhere outside, an engine coughed and spluttered and then roared back into life. Then another.
‘She timed it well,’ Ricasso said, unable to hide his delight at the phenomenon he had just experienced. ‘Brought it just long enough to sow some confusion, but not long enough to effect permanent transcriptional errors. We’ll just have to hope it was enough to kill the vorgs for good.’
‘They were only just clinging on to life,’ Meroka said. ‘Which is what made them such snake-mean sons of bitches in the first place. My guess is they’re rotting away as we speak. Best find them, though, if you don’t want the place stinking like a Horsetown whorehouse by sun-up.’
‘There’ll be due process,’ Spatha said, as he surrendered his weapon. ‘Criminal neglect still took place here. Align yourself with Ricasso, you’re only prolonging the inevitable.’
Ricasso smiled briefly. ‘We’ll see.’
A little while later they were on their way to Painted Lady, riding one of Ricasso’s personal ferries. It was still dark, with the light from the gondolas the only illumination in any direction. Swarm was on the move again, with all but a handful of engines having been successfully restarted, and with few indications that the zone storm - squall, tremor, however one wanted to term it - had caused any serious harm. As for Quillon and his fellow passengers, things could have been much worse. The physiological correlatives of the zone transition were now almost entirely past, save for the lingering influence of the antizonal medicine. Quillon had done his best, but no doctor in the world could have made an accurate allowance for the zone snapping back so quickly. Now his head buzzed like a recently struck bell, but it was not merely due to the after-effects of the pill. He was also working through the implications of what had just happened, his thoughts a ringing, throbbing dissonance of political cause and effect, like a rowdy argument going on between the two hemispheres of his brain.
‘Spatha’s right,’ Quillon told Agraffe, as the little craft ducked and bobbed its way between the looming black envelopes. ‘They can lock him up and throw away the key - kill him, for that matter - but the damage is already done. The unavoidable truth is that the vorgs escaped, killed at least two of your citizens, possibly more, and none of that would have happened if Ricasso hadn’t brought them aboard.’
‘It was a calculated risk,’ Agraffe said. ‘Ricasso knew that the potential rewards made it worthwhile.’
They had left Ricasso aboard Purple Emperor, where he was best placed to restore order, marshal his supporters and quench Spatha’s stillborn rebellion. With Nimcha and Kalis also on their way to Curtana’s ship, Quillon was glad to put the night’s business behind him. But he could not rid himself of the feeling that Agraffe, Ricasso and the others were too confident of ultimate success.
‘If he’d got anywhere with the all-purpose serum, they might see his argument,’ Quillon said doubtfully. ‘As it is, his existing work hasn’t been successful enough to justify the risks he’s taken. This incident can only damage Ricasso in the long term.’
‘It was deliberate sabotage, Doctor. That’s an entirely different matter.’
‘Can’t prove it, though,’ Meroka said.
‘She’s right,’ Quillon said. ‘Spatha was brazen, but only because there were no other witnesses. Unless you include the vorgs.’
‘And if there had been another witness?’ Agraffe asked. ‘Someone who saw what happened down there, how you were threatened and forced to open the cage?’
‘That would be something. Unfortunately I was alone.’ He paused, seeing something in Agraffe’s eyes. ‘Wasn’t I?’
‘Of course.’
‘But there’s “alone” and there’s “alone”. What was Ricasso asking you, when you arrived with all your men? Something about speaking to Curtana, and then you said something about something being in safe hands?’
Agraffe sighed slightly, then allowed himself a thin smile. ‘Evidence,’ he said. ‘Evidence that - p
rovided it was retrieved and put into safe keeping - will almost certainly give Ricasso all the backing he needs.’
Quillon closed his eyes, reviewing the time he had spent in Ricasso’s laboratory. Thinking back to how something had been different the first time, when Ricasso had given him the first tour. Different in the sense of something not being there at all, when on later occasions it had been present.
He recalled the regular mechanical click of some piece of apparatus. He had taken it to be a form of clock or recording instrument, and that had made perfect sense. But he did not remember it making any sound the first time they had gone down there.
‘I was being photographed, wasn’t I? That’s what Ricasso wanted you to safeguard. But you didn’t know about it and Curtana did. She told you where to look, what to recover.’
‘You shouldn’t feel badly about it, Doctor.’
‘I shouldn’t feel badly about being spied on?’
‘Ricasso trusted you enough to leave you alone in his toy room. He just didn’t trust you completely. But being almost trusted is still better than not being trusted at all, wouldn’t you say?’
‘My experience, you take what trust you can get away with,’ Meroka said. ‘Ninety per cent, eighty, still a fuck of an advance on zero.’
‘Thank you,’ Quillon said, giving her a sarcastic smile. ‘That’s clarified things enormously.’
‘Always ready to help, Cutter.’
‘Look on it as a positive development,’ Agraffe said. ‘If Ricasso hadn’t spied on you, you’d have no way of defending yourself. Now we can prove that Spatha was down there.’
‘The plates show him, do they?’
‘They’ll need to be developed, which will take time. This isn’t Neon Heights. But if he was in that room for more than thirty seconds, he’ll have been caught.’
Quillon decided to let go of his anger, his sense of having been violated. He could either carry it with him all the way to the other side of the Bane, or discard it now.
‘You think it’ll be enough?’
‘Spatha with a gun pointed at you, and then one of the vorgs breaks out? Yes, I think that might do the trick.’
‘What will they do to him? You mentioned arrest. You didn’t tell me what the sentence might be.’
‘It’ll be the death penalty,’ Agraffe said. ‘The only question is, which one.’
‘And they say civilisation ends at Horsetown.’
‘Don’t judge us, Doctor. Just because your city doesn’t have a death penalty doesn’t mean it doesn’t kill people. It just does it behind its back, and takes its slow, sweet time over it. The people who don’t fit in, the ones it can’t make work for itself, it sucks them in, grinds them down and spits them out. At least we’re clean and fast out here in Swarm. Well, fast, anyway.’
‘Spatha wasn’t acting in self-interest. He was concerned about Swarm’s survival.’
‘Go back and defend him, if it matters so much to you. Where I’m sitting, self-interest and Swarm’s survival add up to the same thing.’
‘Fucker had it coming,’ Meroka said. ‘You saw how he hurt the kid.’
Nimcha was asleep in her mother’s arms. Even Kalis looked on the edge of exhaustion, as if she had borne part of her daughter’s torments herself.
‘He is a bad man,’ Kalis said. ‘He should die. But quickly. I will draw the knife, if this is allowed.’
‘Well, first things first,’ Agraffe said with a hasty smile. ‘Due process and all that. There’ll still be a trial, with all the trimmings. And now that this has brought matters to a head, Ricasso will want to see a real binding show of loyalty from the dissenters. If they’re not ready to - how did Spatha put it? - submit to his authority, I wouldn’t be surprised if Ricasso invites them to take their ships and head for the other side of the Earth.’
‘He’d do that? He’d split Swarm?’
‘More like amputate the part of it that isn’t healthy. Any other time, Ricasso’d rather cut his own arm off than lose one good ship. But now? We’re actually going to help the Spearpointers.’ Agraffe grinned at the very idea, a proposition so utterly at odds with the natural order of things that the only rational response was hilarity. ‘If that isn’t a sign that we’ve begun a new chapter, I don’t know what is.’
‘We’ve a way to go yet.’
‘Swarm’s come through harder crossings than this. Granted, we’ll have Skullboys to deal with when we get near Spearpoint. But until then? I don’t know what all the fuss is about. It’s just dead landscape. The only thing we’re likely to die of is boredom.’
They were coming up on Painted Lady. She loomed out of the darkness, looking astonishingly, absurdly small after the cavernous, gilded luxury of Purple Emperor. Quillon’s heart tensed at the thought of making any prolonged crossing in that metal bucket of a gondola, for all her armour and equipment. But the Bane would be a crossing like nothing attempted in recorded history.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Meroka said, as they readied to disembark. ‘Piece of piss, right?’
‘Yes,’ Quillon said, ruminating on the words. ‘A piece of piss. Exactly the sentiment I was searching for.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Come the morning, what had been a pale line on the horizon had transformed into a broad swathe, coming nearer with each watch.
‘I can’t tell you how weird this feels,’ Curtana said, when the other officers had left the dining table. ‘We’re actually steering for the damned thing, at full cruise power. I’ve spent most of my adult life doing everything possible to keep away from it.’
‘How are the instruments?’ Quillon asked, finishing the last drop of coffee. It was as black as crude firesap and preternaturally strong, as if all the coffee he’d tasted in his life before that point had been diluted.
‘All readings are absolutely normal, for this zone. Ordinarily we’d be seeing strong signs of transition by now, as we get closer to the boundary. Mechanical systems would be starting to fail - engines overheating, clocks and gauges jamming up, just like when Nimcha did her trick. You’d be doling out the antizonals and even then it wouldn’t be enough to stop us feeling ill.’
‘Then that’s a good sign. Ricasso was right to extrapolate from those earlier readings.’
The zone disturbance initiated by Nimcha’s fit had been more of a tremor than a squall or storm. Back in Neon Heights it would have been a seven-day wonder, with the Boundary Commission likely needing to make only trifling alterations to their maps. So it was here. More widespread changes could not be ruled out beyond the limit of Swarm’s instruments, but the conditions the fleet was moving through now were in no measurable way changed from those before Nimcha had brought the disturbance. All of Swarm had felt it, both on a physiological and mechanical level, but the tremor had been too short-lived to cause lasting damage. A few engines would need to be overhauled, and a few airmen would require additional medication to deal with the after-effects, but in all other respects Swarm was left unscathed.
They had been lucky: incredibly so. And for better or worse, Ricasso had finally got his demonstration of Nimcha’s powers.
‘Doing this still makes me uneasy,’ Curtana said. ‘It’s not just me, either. Of course, none of the other officers are letting anything show.’
‘Perhaps when we’ve crossed the former boundary, and things still haven’t changed, they’ll begin to adjust to it,’ Quillon said.
‘Let me show you something. It won’t take long and I could use some fresh air anyway.’
Outside on Painted Lady’s balcony Quillon breathed in the cool and humid morning air, letting it flood his lungs. Coils of vapour loitered over the dark, densely vegetated landscape below. It was one of the thickest tracts of woodland they had crossed since being rescued near Spearpoint, proof not only that the city’s reach was limited, but that the effects of the cooling world were not yet uniform.
The drone of the engines was steady and reassuring, like a mother’s heart
beat. They were the only engines to be heard. After so long in Swarm, it was strange to have empty sky in all directions.
‘Notice anything different?’ Curtana asked.
Quillon surveyed the landscape, the monotonous canopy reaching away in all directions, uninterrupted by anything except the approaching margin of the Bane.
‘I’m no botanist,’ he said. ‘If there is some change in the vegetation, you’ll have to point it out to me.’
Curtana pulled a speaking tube from the gondola’s wall. ‘Engines. Immediate dead stop for two minutes. Resume normal cruise speed thereafter.’
Painted Lady’s motors sputtered to a halt. Robbed of power, the airship began to slow down abruptly as wind resistance overcame her momentum. Quillon reached to steady himself as the gondola seemed to tip forwards. With the engines shut off, the only sound was a faint creaking from the rigging lines supporting the propulsion struts.
‘Listen,’ Curtana said, in little more than a whisper. ‘All the birds and animals down there, you’d think they’d be at their loudest now. It’s morning, after all.’
‘I’m not hearing much.’
‘That’s because there’s nothing to hear.’
‘Nothing at all?’
‘Only trees and plants.’ Curtana was leaning over the railing with a cavalier disregard for her own safety. ‘We call it the Deadening. It’s marked on most of the maps, a pink margin around the red line of the Bane. This is where nature starts giving up. If we put you down in that forest right now, you’d find a mausoleum, a green crypt. You’d be the only thing down there with a nervous system. Animals - birds, insects, mammals - they just can’t survive. Their cells don’t work properly any more - it’s like the machinery inside them becomes too complicated to function, falls apart like a broken toy. Metabolic pathways suddenly become metabolic blocks. Plants survive, more or less - they’re slower and hardier, and not as complicated inside. But as you go deeper and deeper into the Deadening, even the toughest of them find it hard going. Eventually plant life stops altogether. You’ve got some basic life forms on the fringe of the Bane, clinging on to existence - single-celled organisms and simple bacterial colonies. Then there’s nothing. Absolute sterility. This is a lush paradise compared to what’s ahead.’