‘What’s wrong?’ Ratko said, reaching into his coat and handing me a small, dark-red vial. ‘Got high on your own supply once too often?’
I took the vial, Zebra passing me her wedding-gun. I knew I had to do it; that only Fuel would enable me to unlock the final secrets of my past.
‘You know how it is,’ I said.
Sky and Norquinco pushed onwards, always keeping a wary eye on the inertial compasses. The shaft branched and twisted, but the head-up displays on their helmets always showed their positions relative to the shuttle, together with the route they had so far followed, so there was no real possibility of getting lost, even if they might encounter obstructions on the way out. The route they had taken led more or less to the middle of the ship, and now they were heading roughly forward, towards where the command sphere should be. They had been carrying on for perhaps five minutes when there was another bell-like reverberation, as if the entire hull had been struck like a gong. It seemed fractionally stronger this time.
‘That’s it,’ Norquinco said. ‘Now we’re going back.’
‘No, we’re not. We lost the line already, and we already have to cut ourselves out. Now it just means we have some more to cut through.’
Reluctantly now, Norquinco followed him. But something was changing. Their suit sensors were beginning to pick up traces of nitrogen and oxygen instead of hard vacuum. It was as if air were slowly building up inside the shaft; as if the two clangs they had heard had been part of some immense alien airlock.
‘There’s light ahead,’ Sky said when the air pressure had reached one atmosphere and begun climbing beyond it.
‘Light?’
‘Sickly yellow light. I’m not imagining it. It’s like it’s coming from the walls themselves.’
He turned off his torch light, ordering Norquinco to do likewise. For a moment they were in near darkness. Sky shivered, feeling again the old, never-entirely-vanquished terror of darkness which the nursery had instilled in him. But then his eyes began to adjust to the ambient illumination and it was almost as if they still had the torches on. Better, in fact, for the pale yellow light reached far ahead of them, revealing the tract of the tunnel for tens of metres.
‘Sky? There’s something else.’
‘What?’
‘I suddenly feel like I’m crawling downhill.’
He wanted to laugh; wanted to put Norquinco down, but he felt it too. Something was definitely pressing his body against one side of the shaft. It was soft now, but as he crawled further (and now it really was a kind of crawling), it increased in strength, until he felt almost as if he was back aboard the Santiago, with her spin-generated artificial gravity. But the alien ship had been neither spinning nor accelerating.
‘Gomez?’
The answer, when it came, was incredibly faint. ‘Yes. Where are you?’
‘Deep. We’re somewhere near the command sphere.’
‘I don’t think so, Sky.’
‘That’s what our inertial compasses say.’
‘Then they must be wrong. Your radio emissions are coming from halfway down the spine.’
For the second time he felt terror, but now it had nothing to do with the absence of light. They had not been crawling for anywhere near the length of time needed to get that far down the ship. Had the hull somehow reshaped itself while they were inside, ferrying them helpfully along? The radio emissions must be correct, he thought — Gomez must have a reasonably accurate fix on their positions from signal triangulation, even though the mass of the intervening hull made his estimate imprecise. But that meant the inertial compasses had been lying almost as soon as they entered the ship. And now they were moving through some kind of static gravitational field; something intrinsic to the hull rather than an illusion created by acceleration or rotation. It appeared able to tug them in arbitrary ways depending on the geometry of the shaft. No wonder the inertial compasses had given false readings. Gravity and inertia were so subtly entwined that you could hardly bend one without bending the other.
‘They must have complete control of the Higgs field,’ Norquinco said, wonderingly. ‘It’s a pity Gomez isn’t here. He’d have a theory by now.’
The Higgs field, Norquinco reminded Sky, was something that was believed to pervade all space; all matter. Mass and inertia were not actually intrinsic properties of the fundamental particles at all, but were simply effects of the drag imposed on them as they interacted with the Higgs field — like the drag imposed on a celebrity trying to cross a room full of admirers. Norquinco seemed to think that the builders of the ship had found a way to let the celebrity slip through unmolested — or to impede its progress even further. It was as if the builders could turn up or turn down the density of admirers, and restrict or enhance their ability to pester the celebrity. That was, he knew, a hopelessly crude way of imagining something that Gomez — and perhaps even Norquinco — might be able to begin to glimpse without layers of metaphor, seeing straight to the glistening mathematical heart of it, but for Sky it was sufficient. The builders could manipulate gravity and inertia as easily as they manipulated the sickly yellow light, and perhaps without giving it much more thought.
Which meant, of course, that his hunch had been right. If there was something aboard this ship which could teach him that technique, imagine what it could do for the Flotilla — or for the Santiago, anyway. They had been trying to shed mass for years, so that they could delay their deceleration to the last possible moment. What if they could just turn the Santiago’s mass off, like a light switch? They could enter Swan’s system at eight per cent of the speed of light and come to a dead stand-still in orbit around Journey’s End, cutting their speed in an instant. Even if nothing that dramatic was possible, any reduction in the ship’s inertia — even if it were only a few per cent — would have been welcome.
The external air pressure was now well above one and a half atmospheres, although it was climbing less quickly now. It was warm, heavy with moisture and some other trace gases which, while harmless, would not have been present in the same ratios in the air Sky normally breathed. Gravity reached a plateau of half a gee; it occasionally ducked below that value, but it was never higher. And the sickly yellow light was now bright enough to read by. Now and then they had to crawl across an indentation in the floor of the shaft which was full of thick, dark liquid. There were traces of it everywhere: a bloodlike red smear sliming every surface.
‘Sky? This is Gomez.’
‘Speak up. I can hardly hear you.’
‘Sky; listen to me. We’ll have company within five hours. There are two shuttles approaching us. They know we’re here. I risked a radar bounce off them to get a distance fix.’
Fine; by now he would probably have done the same thing himself. ‘Leave it at that. Don’t speak to them or do anything that would let them identify us as having come from the Santiago.’
‘Just get out of there, will you? We can still make a run for it now.’
‘Norquinco and I aren’t done yet.’
‘Sky, I don’t think you realise—’
He broke off the link, more interested in what lay ahead. Something was coming towards them, moving down the same shaft. It transported itself with grublike oscillations of its fattened pink-white body, like a maggot.
‘Norquinco?’ he said, bringing his gun to the fore and pointing it down the shaft, ‘I think someone’s come to welcome us aboard.’ He wondered how frightened he sounded.
‘I can’t see anything. No; wait — now I can. Oh.’
The creature was only the size of an arm; not really large enough to do either of them any physical harm. It lacked any obviously dangerous organs; no jaws that Sky could see. At the front was only a crownlike frilclass="underline" translucent tendrils which waved ahead of the creature. Even if they had been venomous, he was still safe in his suit. The creature appeared to have neither eyes nor manipulative limbs. He repeated these reassuring observations to himself, examined his state of mind and was slightly disappointed to find that he was still just as frightened as before.