‘He didn’t cry out, gasp for air, anything like that?’ said Rengo.
‘No,’ Sky said. ‘Not a peep.’ He made a show of looking distraught, but was careful not to overdo it. After all, with Balcazar out of the way, the path to the Captaincy was suddenly much clearer than it had been before, as if a complicated maze had suddenly revealed itself to have a very simple route to its heart. He knew that; they knew it too — and it would have been even more suspicious if he had not tempered his grief with the merest hint of pleasure at his considerable good fortune.
‘I’ll bet those bastards on the Palestine poisoned him,’ Valdivia said. ‘I always was against him going over, you know.’
‘It was certainly a stressful meeting,’ Sky said.
‘That was probably all it took,’ Rengo said, scratching at the raw pink skin under his eye. ‘There’s no need to blame it on the others. He just couldn’t take the stress.’
‘There’s nothing I could have done, then?’
The other medic was examining the prosthetic web across Balcazar’s chest, strapped on beneath the side-buttoned tunic which the men had now opened. Valdivia prodded the device doubtfully. ‘This should have given off an alarm. You didn’t hear one, I take it?’
‘As I said, not a peep.’
‘Damn thing must have broken down again. Listen, Sky,’ Valdivia said. ‘If a word of this gets out, we’re absolutely done for. That damn web was always breaking down, but the way Rengo and I have been over-stretched recently…’ He blew out air and shook his head in disbelief at the hours he had been working. ‘Well, I’m not saying we didn’t repair it, but obviously we couldn’t spend all our time nursing Balcazar to the exclusion of everyone else. I know they’ve got gear on the Brazilia better than this clapped-out rubbish, but what good does it do us?’
‘Very little,’ Sky said, nodding keenly. ‘Other people would have died if you had devoted too much attention to the old man. I understand perfectly.’
‘I hope you do, Sky — because there’s going to be one hell of a shitstorm once news of his death leaks out.’ Valdivia looked at the Captain again, but if he was hoping for a miraculous recovery, there was no sign of it. ‘We’re going to come under examination for the quality of our medical support. You’re going to be grilled about the way you handled the trip over to the Palestine. Ramirez and those other council bastards are going to try and say we screwed up. They’re going to try and say you were negligent. Trust me; I’ve seen it all before.’
‘We all know it wasn’t our fault,’ Sky said. He looked down at the Captain, the snail-trail of dried saliva still adorning his epaulette. ‘He was a good man; he served us well, long after he should have retired. But he was old.’
‘Yes, and he would have died in a year or so, no matter what happened. But try explaining that to the ship.’
‘We’ll just have to watch our backs, then.’
‘Sky… you won’t say a word, will you? About what we’ve told you?’
Someone was banging on the airlock, trying to get into the taxi. Sky ignored the commotion. ‘What do you want me to say, exactly?’
The medic drew in a breath. ‘You have to say the web gave you a warning. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t act on it. You couldn’t have — you didn’t have the resources or the expertise, and you were a long way from the ship.’
Sky nodded, as if all this was perfectly reasonably and exactly what he would have suggested. ‘Just so long as I never imply that the prosthetic web never actually worked in the first place?’
The two medics glanced at each other. ‘Yes,’ said the first. ‘That’s exactly it. No one will blame you, Sky. They’ll see that you did everything you could have done.’
The Captain, now that Sky thought about it, looked very peaceful now. His eyes were shut — one of the medics had fingered down his eyelids to give the man some semblance of dignity in death. It was, as Clown had said, entirely possible to imagine that the man was dreaming of his boyhood. Never mind that the man’s childhood, aboard the ship, had been every bit as sterile and claustrophobic as Sky’s own.
The knocking on the airlock had not stopped. ‘I’d better let that fellow in,’ Sky said.
‘Sky…’ the first medic said imploringly.
He put a hand on the man’s forearm. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
Sky composed himself and palmed the door control. Behind, there were at least twenty people all wanting to be first into the cabin. They were all trying to get a look at the dead Captain, professing concern while secretly hoping this was not another false alarm. Balcazar had been in the distasteful habit of almost dying for several years now.
‘Dear God,’ said one of them, a woman from Propulsion Concepts. ‘It’s true, isn’t it… what in heaven’s name happened?’
One of the medics started to speak, but Sky was faster. ‘His prosthetic web malfunctioned,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘You heard me. I was watching Balcazar the whole time. He was fine until his web started making an alarm sound. I opened his tunic and looked at the diagnostic readout. It said he was having a coronary.’
‘No…’ one of the medics said, but he might as well have been addressing an empty room.
‘And you’re sure he wasn’t having one?’ the woman said.
‘Hardly. He was talking to me at the time, quite lucidly. No sign of discomfort, just annoyance. Then the web told me it was going to attempt defibrillation. Needless to say, he became quite agitated at that point.’
‘And what happened then?’
‘I started to try and remove the web, but with all the lines running into him, I realised it was going to be impossible in the seconds I had before the defib began. I had no choice but to get away from Balcazar. I might have been killed myself had I been touching him.’
‘He’s lying!’ the medic said.
‘Ignore him,’ Sky said placidly. ‘He’s bound to say that, isn’t he? I’m not saying this was deliberate…’ He allowed the word to linger, so that it would at least have time to settle in people’s imaginations before he moved on. ‘I’m not saying this was deliberate, just a terrible mistake due to overwork. Look at the two of them. These two men are close to nervous exhaustion. It’s no wonder they started making mistakes. We shouldn’t blame them too much for that.’
There. When the conversation was replayed in people’s memories, what would stick out would not be Sky trying to weasel out of accepting the blame himself, but Sky being magnanimous in victory; even compassionate. They would see that and applaud, while at the same time conceding that some blame should still be apportioned to the sleepwalking medics. They would see no harm in that, Sky thought. A great and respected old man had died under regrettable circumstances. It was only right and proper that there should be some recrimination.
He had covered himself well.
An autopsy would establish that the Captain had indeed died from heart failure, although neither the autopsy nor the memory readout from the prosthetic web would ever quite elucidate the precise chronology of his death.
‘You did very well,’ Clown said.
True; but Clown deserved some credit as well. It was Clown who had told him to unbutton the tunic when Balcazar was asleep, and Clown who had shown him how to access the web’s private functions so that he could program it to deliver the defibrillating pulse even though the Captain was as well as he had ever been lately. Clown had been clever, even if on some level Sky knew that this knowledge had always been his. But Clown had dredged it from his memory, and for that he was thankful.
‘I think we make a good team,’ Sky said, under his breath.