Perhaps I was going to die here.
But then I thought I saw movement far ahead, a milky shape which I at first assumed was the same patch of light I’d seen earlier. But this milky shape was much closer — approaching me, in fact. It was man-shaped and it was stepping towards me through the overgrowth. It shone, as if imbued with its own inner luminosity.
I smiled. I recognised the shape now. I shouldn’t have been afraid. I should have remembered that I was never truly alone; that my guide would always appear to show me the way forward.
‘You didn’t think I’d forget you, did you?’ Clown said. ‘Come on. It’s not far now.’
Clown led me on.
It had not been my imagination; not completely. There was a light ahead, gleaming through the trees like spectral fog. My allies…
By the time I reached them Clown was no longer with me. He had faded away like a retinal burn. That was the last time I ever saw him — but he had done well to bring me this far. He had been the only trusted friend of my life, even though I knew that he was just a psychological figment, a subconscious entity projected into daylight, born from memories of the tutelary persona I had known in the nursery aboard the Santiago.
What did that matter?
‘Captain Haussmann!’ called my friends through the trees. ‘You made it! We were beginning to think the others hadn’t managed…’
‘Oh, they played their parts well,’ I said. ‘I imagine they’ve been arrested by now — if they haven’t already been shot.’
‘That’s the odd thing, sir. We are hearing reports of arrests — and they’re saying they’ve recaptured you.’
‘That wouldn’t make any sense, would it?’
But it would, I thought — if the man they thought they had recaptured only looked like me; if the man only looked like me because buried beneath the supple skin of his face was an armature of twenty additional muscles which allowed him to mimic almost anyone. He would talk and act like me too, as he had been conditioned over years to do so; trained to think of me as his God; his only desire to obey me selflessly. And the missing arm? Well, that was a dead giveaway, wasn’t it? The man they had arrested looked like Sky Haussmann and was missing an arm as well.
There couldn’t be any doubt that they had recaptured me. There’d be a trial, of sorts, during which the prisoner might appear incoherent — but what more would they expect from an eighty-year-old man? He was probably going senile. The best thing would be to make some kind of example of him; something as public as possible. Something no one was going to forget in a hurry, even if it bordered on the inhumane. A crucifixion might fit the bill.
‘This way, sir.’
There was a vehicle waiting in the pool of light, a tracked surface rover. They bundled me aboard it and then we sped through the forest trail. We drove through night for what felt like hours, always further and further away from anything resembling civilisation.
Eventually they brought me to a large clearing.
‘Is this it?’ I said.
They nodded in unison. I knew the plan by then, of course. The climate was against me now. It was not a time for heroes — they preferred to redefine them as war criminals. My allies had sheltered me until now, but they had not been able to stop my arrest. It had been all they could do to spring me from the makeshift detention centre in Nueva Iquique. Now that my double had been recaptured, I would have to disappear for a little while.
Here in the jungle they had devised a means to protect me for good; no matter how the fortunes of my allies in the main settlements waxed and waned. They had buried a fully-functioning sleeper berth here, with the power supply to keep it working for many decades. They thought there was a risk involved in using it, but they also thought I was really eighty years old. I figured the risk was a lot less than they imagined. By the time I was ready to wake up — I’d give it a century at the very least — my helpers would have access to much better technology. It wouldn’t be a problem to revive me. It probably wouldn’t even be a problem to repair my arm.
All I had to do was sleep until the right time. I would be tended across the decades by my allies — just as I had tended the sleepers who rode the Santiago.
But with infinitely more devotion.
They hitched the surface rover to something buried beneath overgrowth — a metal hook — and then pulled the vehicle forward, dragging aside a camouflaged door set into the clearing’s floor, revealing steps sinking down into a well-lit, clinically clean chamber.
Helped by two of my people, I was escorted down the stairs, until I reached the waiting sleeper-casket. It had been refurbished since it had carried someone from Sol system, and it would suit my needs excellently.
‘We’d best get you under as soon as possible,’ said my aide.
I smiled and nodded at the man, and then allowed him to slip a hypodermic into my arm.
Sleep came quickly. The last thing I remembered, just before it closed over me, was that when I woke up I would need a new name. Something that no one would ever connect to Sky Haussmann — but which, nonetheless, would provide me with some tangible link to the past. Something that only I knew the meaning of.
I thought back to the Caleuche, remembering what Norquinco had told me about the ghost ship. And I thought about the poor, psychotic dolphins aboard the Santiago; of Sleek in particular; of the way his hard, leathery body had thrashed as I pushed poison into him. There had been a dolphin with the ghost ship, too, but for a moment I couldn’t remember its name, or even be certain that Norquinco had told me. I would find out when I woke, I thought.
Find out and use that name.
FORTY-ONE
Refuge was a kilometre-long blackened spindle, unrelieved by exterior lights; visible only by the way it occluded background stars and the silvery spine of the Milky Way. Very few other ships were seen coming or going, and those that we saw were just as dark and anonymous as the habitat. As we vectored in, one end of the spindle opened out in four triangular segments, like the highly adapted jaw of an eyeless marine predator. Insignificant as plankton, we drifted in.
The berthing chamber was just large enough to take a ship like ours. Docking clamps folded out, followed by concertina-like transfer tunnels, mating with the airlocks spaced around the equatorial belt of the ship’s main sphere.
Tanner’s here, I thought. From the moment we stepped into Refuge, he might be on the point of killing me and anyone who got too close to our little vendetta.
It wasn’t something I was going to forget easily.
Refuge sent armed drones into the ship, gloss-black spheroids bristling with guns and sensors which swept us for concealed arms. Of course we’d brought none with us; not even Yellowstone’s security was sloppy enough for that. By the same token, I hoped that Tanner had also come in unarmed — but I wasn’t counting on it.
With Tanner, you didn’t count on anything.
The robots betrayed a level of technology appreciably more advanced than anything I’d encountered since my revival, with the possible exception of Zebra’s furniture. Presumably unaugmented humans were not considered a serious transmission risk, but it might have been the case that we would have been denied entry if one of us had been carrying a plague-susceptible implant. Human officials moved in once the robots had completed the preliminary work, carrying significantly less brutal-looking guns, weapons which they toted with an air of embarrassed apology. They were excessively polite and I began to understand why.