It looked like journey’s end.
‘You too. Norquinco — check the…’ But even as he said it, Sky directed his torch back up the shaft they had come down, and he could see how the previously taut line was now beginning to drift, as if it had length to spare. It must have been severed somewhere further up the shaft.
‘Let’s get out now,’ Norquinco said. ‘We haven’t come very far — we can still find our, um, way back.’
‘Through solid hull? That line didn’t cut itself.’
‘Gomez has cutting equipment on the shuttle. He can get us out if he knows where we are.’
Sky thought about it. Everything that Norquinco said was correct, and any right-thinking person would now be doing their utmost to get back to the surface. Part of him wanted to do that as well. But another, stronger part was even more determined to understand what this ship — if it was a ship — actually meant. It was alien; he felt utterly sure of that now — and that meant it was the first evidence of alien intelligence any human being had ever witnessed. And — staggering though the odds were — it had latched itself onto his Flotilla, finding the slow, frail arks in the immensity of space. Yet it had chosen not to contact them, instead shadowing them for decades.
What would he find inside it? The supplies he had hoped to find aboard the Caleuche — even the unused antimatter — might be insignificant prizes compared to what really lay here, waiting to be exploited. Somehow or other this ship had matched velocities with the Flotilla, achieving eight per cent of lightspeed — and something made him certain that the alien ship had not found that in any way difficult; that achieving this speed had probably been trivially simple. Somewhere inside this worm-ridden solid black hull there had to be recognisable mechanisms which had pushed her up to her current speed, and which he might be able to exploit — not necessarily understand, he admitted that — but certainly exploit.
And perhaps, much more than that.
He had to go deeper. Anything less than that would be failure. ‘We’re carrying on,’ he told Norquinco. ‘For another hour. We’ll see what we find in that time, and we’ll be careful not to get lost. We still have the inertial compasses, don’t we?’
‘I don’t like it, Sky.’
‘Then think about what you might learn. Think of how this ship might work — its data networks; its protocols; the very paradigms underpinning her design. They might be exquisitely alien; as far beyond our modes of thinking as — I don’t know — a strand of DNA is beyond a single-chain polymer. It would take a special kind of mind to even begin to grasp some of the principles which might be at play. A mind of unusual calibre. Don’t tell me you aren’t the slightest bit curious, Norquinco.’
‘I hope you burn in hell, Sky Haussmann.’
‘I’ll take that as a yes.’
The inspection robot shunted itself into another branch of the pipe, just like the one where Quirrenbach had found it back on the surface. The hammering of the suction pads slowed, quietened and stopped, the machine ticking quietly to itself. We were in complete darkness and silence except for distant, thunder-like sounds of superheated steam roaring through remote parts of the pipe network. I touched the hot metal of the pipe with the tip of my finger and felt the faintest of tremors. I hoped that it didn’t mean there was a wall of scalding, thousand-atmosphere steam slamming towards us.
‘It’s still not too late to turn back,’ Quirrenbach said.
‘Where’s your sense of curiosity?’ I said, feeling like Sky Haussmann goading Norquinco forwards.
‘About eight kilometres above us, I think.’
That was when someone slid back a panel on the side of the pipe and looked at all three of us as if we were a consignment of excrement someone had sent down from Chasm City.
‘I know you,’ the man said, nodding at Quirrenbach. Then he nodded once at me and once at Zebra. ‘I don’t know you. And I certainly don’t know you.’
‘And I don’t know you from shit,’ I said, getting my own word in before the man who had opened the pipe could get the edge over me. I was already heaving myself out of the robot, relishing the chance to stretch my legs for the first time in hours. ‘Now show me where I can get a drink.’
‘Who are you?’
‘The man asking you for a fucking drink. What’s wrong? Did someone seal up your ears with pig shit?’
He seemed to get the message. I’d gambled that the man wouldn’t be a major player in whatever operation was going on down here and that a large part of his job description would consist of taking abuse from visiting thugs a little higher up the food chain.
‘Hey, no offence, man.’
‘Ratko, this is Tanner Mirabel,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘And this is… Zebra. I phoned through to say we were on our way down to see Gideon.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘And if you didn’t get the message, that’s your fucking problem, not mine.’
Quirrenbach appeared impressed enough to want to join in. ‘That’s fucking right. And get the fucking man the… get the man the fucking drink he asked for.’ He wiped a sleeve across his parched lips. ‘And get me one too, Ratko, you, er, fucking little cocksucker.’
‘Cocksucker? That’s good, Quirrenbach. Really good.’ The man patted him on the back. ‘Keep on taking the assertiveness lessons — they’re really paying off.’ Then he looked at me with what was almost an expression of sympathy, a professional-to-professional thing. ‘All right. Follow me.’
We followed Ratko out of the pipe room. His expression was difficult to read, since his eyes were hidden behind grey goggles sprouting various delicate sensory devices. He wore a coat patterned like Vadim’s, but of shorter cut, its patches a little less rough and more lustrous.
‘So, friends,’ Ratko said. ‘What brings you down here?’
‘Call it a quality inspection,’ I said.
‘No one’s complaining about quality that I hear of.’
‘Then maybe you haven’t been listening too well,’ Zebra said. ‘The shit’s getting harder and harder to track down.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, really,’ I said. ‘It’s not just the Fuel shortage. There’s a problem with purity. Zebra and I supply Fuel to a portfolio of clients all the way up to the Rust Belt. And we’re getting complaints. ’ I tried to sound menacingly reasonable. ‘Now — that could mean a problem somewhere in the chain of supply between here and the Belt — there are a lot of weak links in that chain, and believe me, I’m investigating them all. But it could also mean the basic product is getting degraded. Cut, watered, whatever you want to call it. That’s why we’re making this a personal visit, with Mister Quirrenbach’s assistance. We need to see that there’s still such a thing as high-quality Dream Fuel being manufactured in the first place. If there isn’t, someone’s been lying to someone else and there’s going to be more shit hitting the fan than in a Force Ten shitstorm. Either way, it’s bad news for someone.’
‘Hey, listen,’ Ratko said, holding up his hands. ‘Everyone knows there are problems at source level. But only Gideon can help you with the why.’
I threw out a line. ‘I hear he enjoys his privacy.’
‘He doesn’t have much choice, does he?’
I laughed, trying to make it sound as convincing as possible, without understanding what I was laughing at. But the way the man with the goggles had said it, he obviously thought he had made a joke of some kind.
‘No, I guess not.’ I changed the tone of my voice, now that he and I had established some shaky grounds for mutual respect. ‘Well, let’s put our relationship on a more friendly footing, shall we? You can put my doubts about the immediate quality of the product to rest by providing me with — how shall we say — a small commercial sample?’