The gunfire chased me.
I could tell from the way each shot landed a metre or so behind my heels that the person shooting at me was not lacking in skill. It would not have taxed them to kill me — they would have needed only to advance their line of fire fractionally, and I recognised that their marksmanship was more than sufficient. Instead, it suited them to play with me. They were in no hurry to execute me with a shot in the back, though it could have been achieved at any point.
I reached the building, my feet submerged in water. The structure was slab-sided; no little indentations or crannies in which I could secrete myself. The gunfire halted, but the ellipse of the spotlight remained steady, the shaft of harsh blue light making curtains of the rain between me and the cable-car.
A figure emerged from the darkness, clad in a greatcoat. At first I thought it was either the man or the woman I had spoken to earlier, but when the man emerged into the spotlight, I realised I hadn’t seen his face before. He was bald, with a jaw of almost cartoon squareness, and one of his eyes was lost behind a pulsing monocle.
‘Stand perfectly still,’ he said, ‘and you won’t be harmed.’ And his coat flapped apart to reveal a weapon, bulkier than the toy gun which the Canopy woman had carried, somehow more serious in intent. The gun consisted of a handled black rectangle, tipped with a quartet of dark nozzles. His knuckles were white around the grip, his forefinger caressing the trigger.
He fired from hip-height; something buzzed out of the gun towards me, like a laser beam. It connected with the side of the building with a fizzle of sparks. I started running, but his aim was surer the second time. I felt a stabbing pain in my thigh, and then suddenly I was no longer running. Suddenly I was doing nothing except screaming.
And then even screaming became too hard.
The medics had done very well, but no one could be expected to work miracles. The monitoring machines crowding around his father’s bed attested to that, voicing a slow and solemn liturgy of biological decline.
It was six months since the sleeper had awakened and injured Sky’s father, and it was to everyone’s credit that they had kept Titus Haussmann and his assailant alive until now. But with medical supplies and expertise stretched to breaking point, there had never really been any realistic prospect of nursing both of them back to health.
The recent series of disputes between the ships had certainly not assisted matters. The troubles had intensified a few weeks after the sleeper had awoken, when a spy had been discovered aboard the Brazilia. The security organisation had traced the agent back to the Baghdad, but the Baghdad’s administration had declared that the spy had never been born on their ship at all and had probably originated on the Santiago or the Palestine all along. Other individuals had been fingered as possible agents, and there had been cries of wrongful imprisonment and violations of Flotilla law. Normal relations had chilled to a frosty four-way standoff, and now there was almost no trade between the ships; no human traffic except for despondent diplomatic missions which always ended in failure and recrimination.
Against this backdrop, the requests for more medical supplies and knowledge to help nurse Sky’s father had been shrugged aside. It was not, they said, as if the other ships did not have crises of their own. And as head of security, Titus was not beyond suspicion of having instigated the spying incident in the first place.
Sorry, they had said. We’d like to help, we really would…
Now his father struggled to speak.
‘Schuyler…’ he said, his lips like a rip in parchment. ‘Schuyler? Is that you?’
‘I’m here, Dad. I never went away.’ He sat down on the bedside stool and studied the grey, grimacing shell that bore so little resemblance to the father he had known before the stabbing. This was not the Titus Haussmann who had been feared and loved in equal measure across the ship, and grudgingly respected throughout the Flotilla. This was not the man who had rescued him from the nursery during the blackout, nor the man who had taken his hand and escorted him to the taxi and out beyond the ship for the very first time, showing him the wonder and terror of his infinitely lonely home. This was not the caudillo who had gone into the berth ahead of his team, knowing full well that he might be walking into extreme danger. This was a faint impression of that man, like a rubbing taken off a statue. The features were there, and the proportions were accurate, but there was no depth. Rather than solidity, there was just a paper-thin layer.
‘Sky, about the prisoner.’ His father struggled to raise his head from the pillow. ‘Is he still alive?’
‘Just barely,’ Sky said. He had forced his way into the security team after his father had been injured. ‘Frankly, I don’t expect him to last much longer. His wounds were a lot worse than yours.’
‘But you managed to talk to him, anyway?’
‘We’ve got this and that out of him, yes.’ Sky sighed inwardly. He had told his father this much already, but either Titus was losing his memory or he wanted to hear it again.
‘What exactly did he tell you?’
‘Nothing we couldn’t have guessed for ourselves. We’re still not clear who put him aboard the ship, but it was almost certainly one of the factions they expected to cause some sort of trouble.’
His father raised a finger. ‘That weapon of his; the machinery built into his arm…’
‘Not as unusual as you’d think. There were apparently a lot of his kind around towards the end of the war. We were lucky they didn’t build a nuclear device into his arm — although that would have been a lot harder to hide, of course.’
‘Had he ever been human?’
‘We’ll probably never know. Some of his kind were engineered in labs. Others were adapted from prisoners or volunteers. They had brain surgery and psycho-conditioning so that they could be used as weapons of war by any interested power. They were like robots, except they were constructed largely of flesh and blood and had a limited capacity to empathise with other people, where and when it suited their operational needs. They could blend in quite convincingly, crack jokes and share in smalltalk, until they reached their target, at which point they’d flip back into mindless killer mode. Some of them had weapons grafted into them for specific jobs.’
‘There was a lot of metal in that forearm.’
‘Yes.’ Sky saw the point his father was making. ‘Too much for him to have made his way aboard without someone turning a blind eye. Which only proves that there was a conspiracy, which we as good as knew anyway.’
‘We found the only one, though.’
‘Yes.’ In the days after the attack, the other sleeping passengers had all been scanned for buried weaponry — the process had been difficult and dangerous — but nothing had been found. ‘Which shows how confident they must have been.’
‘Sky… did he say anything about why he did it, or why they made him do it?’
Sky raised an eyebrow. This line of questioning, admittedly, was new. His father had concentrated only on specifics before.
‘Well, he did mention something.’
‘Go on.’
‘It didn’t seem to make an awful lot of sense to me.’
‘Perhaps not, but I’d still like to hear it.’
‘He talked about a faction which had discovered something. He wouldn’t say who or what they were, or where they were based.’
His father’s voice was very weak now, but he still managed to ask, ‘And what exactly was it that they had discovered?’
‘Something ridiculous.’
‘Tell me what it was, Sky.’ His father paused. Sensing his thirst, Sky had the room’s robot administer a glass of water to the cracked gash of his lips.