‘You’ve forgotten something,’ I said, enjoying the moment.
Armesto must have been confident that nothing had been forgotten, beginning to think that the chase was winnable.
How wrong he was.
‘I don’t think I have.’
‘He’s right,’ came the voice of Omdurman on the Baghdad, similarly faint. ‘You’ve used up all your options, Haussmann. You don’t have another edge.’
‘Except this one,’ I said.
I tapped commands into my seat command console. Felt, subliminally, the hidden layers of ship subsystems bend to my will. On the main screen, looking along the spine, was a view very similar to the one I had seen when I had detached the sixteen rings of the dead.
But it was different now.
Rings were leaving all along the spine, around all six faces. There was still a harmony to it — I was too much of a perfectionist for anything else — but it was no longer an ordered line of rings. Now, every other ring amongst the eighty remaining was detaching. Forty rings broke away from the spine of the Santiago…
‘Dear God,’ said Armesto, when he must have seen what was happening. ‘Dear God, Haussmann… No! You can’t do that!’
‘Too late,’ I said. ‘I’m already doing it.’
‘Those are living people!’
I smiled. ‘Not any more.’
And then I turned my attention back to the view, before the glory of what I had done had passed. Truly, it was beautiful to watch. Cruel, too — I admitted that. But what was beauty without a little cruelty at its heart?
Now I knew I’d win.
We took the Zephyr to the behemoth terminal, the train hauled by the same huge, dragonlike locomotive that had brought Quirrenbach and me into the city only a few days earlier.
Using what little reserves of currency I had left, I bought a fake identity from one of the marketeers, a name and a cursory credit-history just about robust enough to get me off the planet and — if I was lucky — into Refuge. I had come in as Tanner Mirabel, but I did not dare try and use that name again. Normally it would have been a matter of reflex for me to pull a false name out of the air and slip into that disguise, but now something made me hesitate when selecting my new identity.
In the end, when the marketeer was about to lose his patience, I said, ‘Make me Schuyler Haussmann.’
The name meant almost nothing to him, not even the surname worthy of comment. I said the name to myself a few times, becoming sufficiently familiar with it that I would act with the right start of recognition if my name came over a public address system, or if someone whispered it across a crowded room. Afterwards, we booked ourselves onto the next available behemoth making the haul up from Yellowstone.
‘I’m coming, of course,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘If you’re serious about protecting Reivich, I’m the only way you’re going to get anywhere near him.’
‘What if I’m not serious?’
‘You mean what if you might still be planning to kill him?’
I nodded. ‘You’ve got to admit, it’s still a possibility.’
Quirrenbach shrugged. ‘Then I’ll simply do what I was always meant to do. Take you out at the earliest opportunity. Of course, my reading of the situation is that it won’t come to that — but don’t imagine for a moment that I wouldn’t do it.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’
Zebra said, ‘You need me, of course. I’m also a line to Reivich, even if I was never as close to him as Quirrenbach.’
‘It might be dangerous, Zebra.’
‘What, and visiting Gideon wasn’t?’
‘Fair point. And I’ll admit I’m grateful for any help I can get.’
‘Then you’ll want me as well,’ Chanterelle said. ‘After all, I’m the only one of us here who really knows how to hunt someone down.’
‘Your gaming skills aren’t in question,’ I said. ‘But it won’t be like a hunt. If I know Tanner — and I’m afraid I may know him as well as he knows himself — he won’t be following any rulebook.’
‘Then we’ll just have to play dirty before he does, won’t we.’
For the first time in ages I laughed a laugh that wasn’t totally insincere.
‘I’m sure we can rise to the occasion.’
Quirrenbach, Zebra, Chanterelle and I lifted an hour later; the behemoth making one arcing swoop over Chasm City before lofting itself into the lowering clouds, twisted like phantasms by the collision between Yellowstone’s relentless winds and the belching updraft of the chasm itself. I looked down and the city looked tiny and toylike, the Mulch and the Canopy hardly separated at all, compressed into one tangled and intricate urban layer.
‘Are you all right?’ Zebra said to me, returning to our table with drinks.
I turned away from the window. ‘Why?’
‘Because you almost look like you miss the place.’
When the journey was almost over; when the success of what I had planned was becoming apparent — when, openly, they were beginning to talk of me as a hero — I visited my two prisoners.
In all the years, no one had ever located the chamber deep inside Santiago, though some — Constanza in particular — had come close to guessing that it must exist. But the chamber drew only parsimoniously from the ship’s power and life-support systems grid, and even Constanza’s undoubted skill and persistence had not been sufficient to bring its location to light. Which was good, for although the situation was less critical now, there had been long years in which the chamber’s discovery would have ruined me. Now, however, my situation was secure; I had enough allies to weather minor scandals, and I had dealt effectively with most of those who stood against me.
Technically, of course, there were three prisoners, although Sleek did not really fit into the latter category. His presence had merely been useful to me, and — irrespective of how he viewed it — I did not view his incarceration as a genuine punishment. As ever upon my arrival he flexed within his tank, but lately he only moved sluggishly, his small dark eye only dimly registering my presence. I wondered how much of his earlier life he remembered, confined in a tank that was oceanically vast compared to the one where he had been for the last fifty years.
‘We’re nearly there, aren’t we?’
I turned around, surprised after all this time to hear the croak of Constanza’s voice.
‘Very nearly,’ I answered. ‘I’ve just seen Journey’s End with my own eyes, you know — as a fully formed world, not just a bright star. It’s really quite wonderful to see it, Constanza.’
‘How long has it been?’ She tried to look at me, straining against her constraints. She was tied to a stretcher which had been cranked to an angle of forty-five degrees.
‘Since I brought you here? I don’t know — four, five months?’ I shrugged, as if the matter had barely occupied my thoughts. ‘It doesn’t really matter, does it?’
‘What did you tell the rest of the crew, Sky?’
I smiled. ‘I didn’t need to tell them anything. I made it look as if you’d committed suicide by jumping out of one of the airlocks. No need to provide a body that way. I just let the others draw their own conclusions.’
‘They’ll figure out what happened one day.’
‘Oh, I doubt it. I’ve given them a world, Constanza. They want to canonise me, not crucify me. I don’t see that changing for a very long time.’
She had always been problematic, of course. I had discredited her after the Caleuche incident, bringing to light a trail of faked evidence which placed her in the same conspiratorial frame as Captain Ramirez. That was the end of her career in security. She had been lucky to avoid execution or imprisonment, especially in the desperate days that had followed the detachment of the sleeper modules. But Constanza had never ceased to give me cause for concern, even when she had been demoted to menial work. The crew as a whole were willing to accept that the detachment had been a desperate but necessary act; a conclusion I pushed them towards, via propaganda and lies concerning the other ships’ intentions. I did not even think of it as a crime myself. Constanza thought otherwise, and spent her last years of liberty trying to unravel the labyrinth of misinformation I had recently woven around myself. She was always probing into the Caleuche incident; protesting that Ramirez had been innocent, and she insisted on wild speculation about the manner in which Old Man Balcazar had really died; that his two medics had been wrongfully executed. At times, she even raised doubts about the way Titus Haussmann had died.