Sky watched the bodies of the men tumble into space.
Valdivia and Rengo had died by the simplest means of execution available aboard a spacecraft: asphyxiation in an airlock, followed by ejection into the vacuum. The trial into the old man’s death had taken up two years of shiptime; grindingly slow as appeals were lodged, discrepancies found in Sky’s account. But the appeals had failed and Sky had managed to explain the discrepancies to almost everyone’s satisfaction. Now a retinue of senior ship’s officers crowded around the adjacent portholes, straining for a glimpse into the darkness. They had already heard the dying men thumping on the door of the airlock as the air was sucked from the chamber.
Yes, it was a harsh punishment, he reflected — more so, given the already overstretched medical expertise aboard the ship. But such crimes could not be taken lightly. It hardly mattered that these men had not meant to kill Balcazar with their negligence — although that lack of intention itself was open to doubt. No; aboard a ship negligence was itself scarcely less a crime than mutiny. It would have been negligent, too, not to make examples of these men.
‘You murdered them,’ Constanza said, quietly enough so that only he heard it. ‘You may have convinced the others, but not me. I know you too well for that, Sky.’
‘You don’t know me at all,’ he said, his voice a hiss.
‘Oh, but I do. I’ve known you since you were a child.’ She smiled exaggeratedly, as if the two of them were sharing an amusing piece of smalltalk. ‘You were never normal, Sky. You were always more interested in twisted things like Sleek than real people. Or monsters like the infiltrator. You’ve kept him alive, haven’t you?’
‘Kept who alive?’ he said, his expression as strained as Constanza’s.
‘The infiltrator.’ She looked at him with narrow, suspicious eyes. ‘If it even happened that way. Where is he, anyway? There are a hundred places you could hide something like that aboard the Santiago. One day I’ll find out, you know, put an end to whatever sadistic little experiment you’re running. The same way I’ll eventually prove that you framed Valdivia and Rengo. You’ll get your punishment.’
Sky smiled, thinking of the torture chamber where he kept Sleek and the Chimeric. The dolphin was several degrees less sane than he had ever been: an engine of pure hate that existed only to inflict pain on the Chimeric. Sky had conditioned Sleek to blame the Chimeric for his confinement, and now the dolphin had assumed the role of Devil against the God that Sky had become in the Chimeric’s eyes. It had been much easier to shape the Chimeric that way, giving him a figure to fear and despise as well as one to revere. Slowly but surely, the Chimeric was approaching the ideal Sky had always had in mind. By the time the Chimeric was needed — and that would not be for years to come — the work would be done.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said.
A hand rested on his shoulder. It was Ramirez, the leader of the executive council, the shipwide body with the power to elect someone to the vacant Captaincy. Ramirez, they were saying, was very likely to be Balcazar’s successor.
‘Monopolising him again, Constanza?’ the man said.
‘We were just going over old times,’ she answered. ‘Nothing that can’t wait, I assure you.’
‘He did us proud, don’t you think, Constanza? Other men might have been tempted to give those fellows the benefit of the doubt, but not our Sky.’
‘Not him, no,’ Constanza said, before turning away.
‘There’s no room for doubt in the Flotilla,’ Sky said, watching the two bodies dwindle. He nodded to the Captain, lying in state in his own cooled casket. ‘If there’s one lesson that dear old man taught me, it’s never to give any house room to uncertainty.’
‘That dear old man?’ Ramirez sounded amused. ‘Balcazar, you mean?’
‘He was like a father to me. We’ll never see his like again. If he were alive, these men would be lucky to get away with anything as painless as asphyxiation. Balcazar would have seen a painful death as the only valid form of deterrence.’ Sky looked at him intently. ‘You do agree, don’t you, sir?’
‘I… wouldn’t pretend to know.’ Ramirez seemed slightly taken aback, but he blinked and continued speaking, ‘I had no great insights into Balcazar’s mind, Haussmann. Word is, he wasn’t at his very sharpest towards the end. But I suppose you’d know all about that, having been his favourite.’ Again that hand on his shoulder. ‘And that means something to some of us. We trusted Balcazar’s judgement, just as he trusted Titus, your father. I’ll be frank: your name has been bandied about… what would you think to…’
‘The Captaincy?’ No sense in beating about the bush. ‘It’s a bit premature, isn’t it? Besides — someone with your own excellent record and depth of experience…’
‘A year ago, I might have agreed. I will probably take over, yes — but I’m not a young man, and I doubt that it’ll be very long before questions are being asked about my likely successor.’
‘You have years ahead of you, sir.’
‘Oh, I may live to see Journey’s End, but I’ll be in no position to oversee the difficult early years of the settlement. Even you will no longer be a young man when that happens, Haussmann… but you will be much younger than some of us. Importantly, I see you have nerve as well as vision…’ Ramirez glanced at Sky oddly. ‘Something’s troubling you, isn’t it?’
Sky was watching the dots of the executed men dissolve into darkness, like two tiny spots of cream dropped into the blackest coffee imaginable. The ship was not under thrust, of course — it had been drifting for Sky’s entire life — which meant that the men were taking an eternity to fall away.
‘Nothing, sir. I was just thinking. Now that those two men have been ejected, and we don’t have to carry them with us any more, we’ll be able to decelerate just that little bit harder when it comes time to initiate the slow-down burn. That means we can stay in cruise mode a little longer, at our current speed. It means we’ll reach our destination sooner. Which means those men have, in some small, barely sufficient way, paid us back for their crimes.’
‘You do come out with the oddest things, Haussmann.’ Ramirez tapped him on the nose and leaned closer. There had never been any danger of the other officers overhearing the conversation, but now he was whispering. ‘Word of advice. I wasn’t joking when I said your name had been bandied about — but you aren’t the only candidate, and one wrong word from you could have a disastrous effect on your chances. Am I making myself clear?’
‘Crystal, sir.’
‘Good. Then watch your step, keep your head about you at all times, and you may be in with a chance.’
Sky nodded. He imagined that Ramirez expected him to feel grateful for this titbit of confidentiality, but what Sky actually felt — and did his level best to hide — was unmitigated contempt. As if the wishes of Ramirez and his cronies in any way influenced him! As if they actually had any say in whether he became Captain or not. The poor, blind fools.
‘He’s nothing,’ Sky breathed. ‘But I’ve got to let him feel he is useful to us.’
‘Of course,’ Clown said, for Clown had never been far away. ‘It’s what I would do.’
TWENTY-FIVE
After the episode had happened, I walked around the concourse until I found a tent where I could rent the use of a telephone for a few minutes. Everyone relied on phones now that the city’s original elegantly swift data networks had stopped working. It was something of a comedown for a society whose machines had once elevated the art of communication into an effortless form of near-telepathy, but the phones had become a minor fashion accessory in their own right. The poor didn’t have them and so the rich flaunted them, the larger and more conspicuous the better. The phone I rented looked like a crude, military-hardened walkie-talkie: a bulky black handheld unit with a popup two-d screen and a matrix of scuffed push-buttons marked with Canasian characters.