‘I wondered why you wanted to meet me again. It’s been a few years, Sky.’
Sky nodded. ‘Yes, and there’ve been a lot of changes. I’ve kept my eye on you, though. I’ve watched you find a niche for your skills, and I’ve seen how good you are at your job. The same goes for Gomez — but I’ve already spoken to him.’
‘What is this all about, Sky?’
‘Two things, really. I’ll come to the most urgent in a moment. First of all I want to ask you about something technical. What do you know about these modules?’
‘What I need to know, no more and no less. There are ninety-six of them spaced along the spine, ten sleepers to each.’
‘Yes. And a lot of those sleepers are dead now.’
‘I don’t follow, Sky.’
‘They’re dead mass. Not just the sleepers, but all the useless machinery which is no longer being used to support them. Add it up and it’s a sizeable fraction of the ship’s total mass.’
‘I still don’t follow.’
Sky sighed, wondering why nothing was ever as clear to other people as it was to him. ‘We don’t need that mass any more. Right now it doesn’t hurt us, but as soon as we start slowing down, it’ll prevent us braking as fast as we’d like. Shall I spell it out? That means if we want to come to a stop around 61 Cygni-A, we have to start slowing down sooner than we’d otherwise need to. On the other hand, if we could detach the modules we don’t need now, we’d be able to slow down harder and faster. That would give us a lead on the other ships. We could reach the planet months ahead of anyone else; time to pick the best landing sites and establish surface settlements.’
Norquinco thought about it. ‘That won’t be easy, Sky. There are, um, safeguards. The modules aren’t meant to be detached until we reach orbit around Journey’s End.’
‘I’m well aware of that. That’s why I’m asking you.’
‘Ah. I, um, see.’
‘Those safeguards must be electronic. That means they can eventually be bypassed, given time. You still have years in which to do it — I won’t want to detach the modules until the absolute last moment before we begin slowing down.’
‘Why wait until then?’
‘You still don’t get it, do you? This is cold war, Norquinco. We have to keep the element of surprise.’ He stared hard at the man, knowing that if he decided he could not trust Norquinco, he would soon have to kill him. But he was gambling that the problem itself would entice Norquinco.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I mean, yes, technically, I could hack those safeguards. It would be difficult — monumentally difficult — but I could do it. And it would take years. Perhaps a decade. To do the work covertly, it would have to be carried out under the camouflage of the six-monthly total system audits… that’s the only time when those deep-layer functions are even glimpsed, let alone accessed.’ His mind was racing ahead now, Sky saw. ‘And I’m not even on the squad that runs those audits.’
‘Why not? You’re clever enough, aren’t you?’
‘They say I’m not a “team player”. If they were all like me, those audits wouldn’t take half as long as they do.’
‘I can see how they’d have difficulty adjusting to your ethos,’ Sky said. ‘That’s the problem with genius, Norquinco. It’s seldom appreciated.’
Norquinco nodded, foolishly imagining that their relationship had finally traversed that hazy line between mutual usefulness and genuine friendship. ‘A prophet is without honour, et cetera. You’re right, Sky.’
‘I know,’ Sky said. ‘I’m always right.’
He opened his computer slate, shuffling through layers of data until he found the abstracted map of the sleepers. It looked like a strange species of cactus rendered in neon: a spiny, many-branched plant. The living were marked with red icons; the dead with black. For years now, Sky had been segregating the living from the dead, until several sleeper modules were filled only with dead momios. It was very tricky work because it required moving the living while they were still frozen, uncoupling their caskets and transporting them by train from one part of the spine to another while they were kept cool on reserve power. Sometimes you ended up with another dead momio.
It was all part of the plan. When the time came, and with Norquinco’s assistance, Sky would be ready.
But there was another matter he wanted to talk to Norquinco about.
‘You said there was something else, Sky.’
‘Yes. There is. Do you remember, Norquinco, when we were much younger? Before my father died? You and I and Gomez spoke about something. We called it the sixth ship, but you had another name for it.’
Norquinco looked at him suspiciously, as if certain that there must be a trap. ‘You mean the, um, Caleuche?’
Sky nodded. ‘Yes, exactly that. Remind me — what was the story behind that name again?’
Norquinco filled in more details about the myth than Sky remembered from the first time. It was as if Norquinco had done some research of his own.
But when he had finished, having told Sky about the dolphin that accompanied the ghost ship, he said, ‘It doesn’t exist, Sky. It was just a story we liked to tell each other.’
‘No. That’s what I thought, but it was real. Is real, in fact.’ Sky looked at him carefully, studying the effect his words had on Norquinco. ‘My father told me. Security have always known that it exists. They know a thing or two about it, too. It’s about half a light second behind us, and it’s about the same size and shape as the Santiago. It’s another Flotilla ship, Norquinco.’
‘Why have you waited until now to tell me, Sky?’
‘Because until now I haven’t had the means to do anything about it. Now, though… I do have the means. I want to go there, Norquinco — take a small expedition to her. But it has to be conducted in absolute secrecy. The strategic value of that ship is beyond imagining. There’ll be supplies on her. Components. Machines. Drugs. Everything we’ve had to make do without for decades. More than that, though, she’ll have antimatter on her, and she’ll probably have a functioning propulsion system. That’s why I want Gomez along. But I’ll need you as well. I don’t expect to find anyone alive on her, but we’ll have to get into her; warm her systems and bypass her security.’
Norquinco looked at him wonderingly. ‘I can do that, Sky.’
‘Good. I knew you wouldn’t let me down.’
He told Norquinco that they would leave for the ghost ship as soon as he could arrange to take a shuttle without anyone suspecting his real intention — a problem that in itself would require some careful planning. They would be gone for several days, too, and no one must notice that either. But the risk, he thought, would be worth it. That ship was sitting behind them like a lure, inviting them to plunder the riches that lay aboard her. Only Sky even knew for sure that the ghost ship existed.
‘You know,’ Clown murmured, with him again, ‘it would be a crime to ignore it.’
When Sky had left me — the episode, as usual, had occupied only an instant of actual time — I reached into my pocket for the gun, wondering as I did about the phallic significance of that gesture. Then I shrugged and did the only thing which seemed reasonable, which was to walk towards the light, and the entrance which fed back into the particular neighbourhood of the Canopy where I had been deposited.
I entered the plaza-like interior, trying to put a cocky swagger into my stride, as if by feedback it might make me feel more confident. The place was just as bustling as Escher Heights, even though it was now well beyond midnight. But the architecture was like nothing I had seen. It had been hinted at in the place where Waverly worked me over, and the geometries which passed for domestic in Zebra’s rooms. But here, that curvilinear juxtaposition of mismatched topologies, stomachlike tubes and doughy walls and ceilings had been pushed to a mind-wrenching extreme.