‘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 élite 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.’
ELEVEN
I woke up shivering; trying to extricate myself from the coils of the Haussmann dream. The dream’s after-image was disturbingly vivid; I could still feel myself there with Sky, watching his wounded father being taken away. I examined my hand in the dim light of the sleeping cubicle, the blood at the centre of my right palm black and cloying like a spot of tar.
Sister Duscha had told me this was a mild strain, but I was obviously nowhere near getting over it on my own. There was no way I could have delayed chasing Reivich, but Duscha’s suggestion that I spend another week or so in Idlewild having the virus flushed out by professionals suddenly seemed infinitely preferable to weathering it on my own. And while the strain might have been weak compared to some, there was no guarantee that it had reached its worst.
Now I felt a familiar and not very welcome feeling: nausea. I wasn’t at all used to zero-gravity, and the Mendicants hadn’t given me drugs to make the trip any more bearable. I thought about it for a few minutes, debating whether it was worth leaving my cubicle, or whether I should just lie low and accept the discomfort until we reached the Glitter Band. Eventually my stomach won and I decided to make my way to the ship’s communal core. One of the instruction labels in the cabin told me I’d be able to buy something to kill the worst of the sickness.
Just getting to the commons was more adventure than I really needed. It was a wide, furnished and pressurised sphere somewhere near the front of the ship, where food, drugs and entertainment were available, but it was only accessible through a warren of claustrophobic one-way crawlways which snaked around and through the engine components. The instructions in my cubicle advised against tardiness during crawls through certain parts of the ship, leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions about the state of the internal nuclear shielding in those areas.
On my way there I thought about the dream.