Something, Sky had resolved, would have to be done about it.
‘We’ll be accompanying him, of course,’ the first of the aides whispered. The man, Valdivia, looked enough like the other one for him and Rengo to have been brothers. They both had close-cropped white hair and worry lines corrugated into their foreheads.
‘Impossible,’ Sky said. ‘There’s only a two-seat shuttle available.’ He indicated the nearest craft, parked on its transport pallet. Other, larger ships were parked around the two-seater, but all had components missing or access panels folded open. It was part of the general deterioration of services; throughout the ship, things that had been meant to last the mission were failing prematurely. The problem would not have been so severe if parts and expertise could have been swapped between the Flotilla vessels, but that was unthinkable in the current diplomatic climate.
‘How long would it take to patch together one of those larger ones?’ Valdivia said.
‘Half a day at the earliest,’ Sky said.
Balcazar must have heard part of that, because he murmured, ‘There won’t be any damned delay, Haussmann.’
‘You see?’
Rengo sprang forward. ‘Then, Captain, may I?’
It was a ritual they had gone through many times before. With a long-suffering sigh, Balcazar allowed the medic to undo his side-buttoned tunic, revealing the gleaming expanse of the medical tabard. The machine whirred and wheezed like a piece of clapped-out air purification equipment. There were dozens of windows set into it, some showing readouts or dials, others pulsing fluid lines. Rengo extended a probe from his handheld device and plugged it into various apertures, nodding or shaking his head slowly as numbers and graphs flowed across the device’s screen.
‘Something amiss?’ Sky said.
‘As soon as he gets back, I want him down in medical for a complete overhaul,’ Rengo said.
‘Pulse is a bit on the thready side,’ Valdivia said.
‘It’ll hold. I’ll up his relaxant.’ Rengo punched controls on his handset. ‘He’ll be a bit drowsy on the way over, Sky. Just don’t let the bastards on the other ship get him worked up, all right? Bring him back here on medical grounds if there’s any sign of tension.’
‘I’ll be sure to.’ Sky helped the already dozy Captain towards the two-seat shuttle. It was a lie that the larger ships were not ready, of course, but of those present only Sky had the technical knowledge to catch himself out.
Departure was uneventful. They cleared the access tunnel, unlatched and curved away from the Santiago, stabs of thrust pushing the shuttle towards their destination, the Palestine. The Captain sat before him, his reflection in the cockpit window resembling the formal portrait of some octagenarian despot from another century. Sky had expected him to nod off, but he seemed awake enough. He had the habit of delivering portentous utterances every few minutes, interspersed between fusillades of coughs.
‘Khan was a reckless bloody fool, you know… should never have been left in command after the upheavals of ’15… if I’d damn well had my way, beggar would have been frozen for the rest of the trip, or thrown into space… losing his mass would have given them just the kind of decelerational edge they were looking for in the first place…’
‘Really, sir?’
‘Not literally, you damn fool! What would a man weigh, one ten millionth of the mass of one our ships? What kind of bloody edge would that have been?’
‘Not much of one, sir.’
‘I don’t damn well think so, no. The trouble with you, Titus, is you take everything I say too damn literally… like a bloody amanuensis hanging off my every word, quill poised above parchment…’
‘I’m not Titus, sir. Titus was my father.’
‘What?’ For a moment Balcazar glared at him, his eyes yellow with suspicion. ‘Oh, never mind, damn you!’
But this was actually one of Balcazar’s better days. There had been no outright lapses into surrealism. He could be very much worse: as poetically oblique as any sphinx, when the mood seized him. Perhaps there had once been a context in which even his maddest statement might have meant something, but to Sky they sounded only like premature deathbed ramblings. That was no problem of his. Balcazar seldom invited any kind of riposte when he was in soliloquy mode. If Sky had really back-answered him — or even dared to question some minute, trifling detail in Balcazar’s stream-of-consciousness — the shock of it would probably have given him multiple organ failure, even with the relaxant Rengo had administered.
How utterly convenient that would have been, Sky thought.
After a few minutes, he said, ‘I suppose you can tell me what this is all about now, sir.’
‘Of course, Titus. Of course.’
And as placidly as if they were two old friends catching up on lost times over a couple of pisco sours, the Captain told him that they were heading to a conclave of senior Flotilla crew. It was to be the first in many years, precipitated by the unexpected arrival of another update from Sol system. A message from home, in other words, containing elaborate technical blueprints. It was the kind of exterior event which was still sufficient to push the Flotilla towards some kind of unity, even in the midst of the cold war. It was the same kind of gift which might have annihilated the Islamabad, when Sky was very young. Even now, no one was entirely sure whether Khan had chosen to sip from that poisoned chalice, or whether the accident had just happened then out of a sense of malign cosmic caprice. Now there was a promise of another squeeze in engine efficiency, if only they would make certain trifling changes to the magnetic confinement topology; all very safe, the message said — tested endlessly back home, with mock-ups of the Flotilla’s engines; the potential for error was really negligible provided certain basic precautions were taken…
But at the same time, another message had arrived.
Don’t do it, said the other message. They’re trying to trick you.
It hardly mattered that the other message offered no plausible reason why such trickery might be attempted. The doubt that it brought was enough to lend this conclave an entirely new frisson of tension.
Eventually they were within visual range of the Palestine, where the conclave would be held. A whole swarm of shuttle taxis was converging on her from the other three ships, carrying senior ships’ officers. The choice of the meeting place had been arrived at in haste, but that did not mean the process had been devoid of difficulty. Yet the Palestine was the obvious choice. In any war, Sky thought, cold or otherwise, it was always to the mutual benefit of all participants to agree on a neutral ground, whether it be for negotiation, exchange of spies or — if all else failed — early demonstration of new weapons — and the Palestine was the ship that had assumed that role.
‘Do you think this is really a trick, sir?’ Sky asked, when Balcazar had finished one of his coughing sessions. ‘I mean, why would they do that?’
‘Why would they bloody do what?’
‘Try and kill us, sir, by transmitting erroneous technical data? There’d be no gain for them back home. It’s a wonder they even bother sending us anything.’
‘Precisely.’ Balcazar spat the word, as if its obviousness was beneath contempt. ‘There’d be no gain in sending us something useful, either — and it would be a lot more work than sending us something dangerous. Can’t you see that, you little fool? God help all of us if one of your generation ever assumes command…’ He trailed off.
Sky waited for him to finish coughing, then wheezing. ‘But there must still be a motivation…’
‘Pure malice.’
He was treading very thin ice now, but he soldiered on. ‘The malice could just as easily lie in the message warning us not to implement the change.’