Another spiral staircase at the end of this corridor led to the carriage’s lowest level, a gray area lined with crates and black machinery and blocked by a bulkhead with two air lock doors labeled CARGO 1 and CARGO 2.
But it was the monitor between the two doors, a standard flatscreen with minimal holo capability that interested us now. It provided a monochromatic image of the carriage roof as seen from a vantage point near the junction between our supercarriage and the groove in the planetary cable. The sky in the background was a starless shade of black, with a dim glow rising from the bottom of the screen. The cable was at the periphery of the image, a straight line between us and its connection to Layabout.
The carriage was now being straddled by an insectile vessel with a shiny obsidian head three-quarters the carriage’s diameter, and six serpentine segmented limbs. Two of those legs continued to clutch the cable. Two others stood braced against the carriage roof. The final two split into a dizzying array of smaller limbs that must have served the device as fingers. The vehicle sat motionless above the junction where the carriage clutched the cable’s anterior track, as if unsure how to proceed.
The junction was a blackened smear, part of the housing that twisted away from the cable track and looked like it had melted before freezing back to solidity.
Dejah, Paakth-Doy, Skye, and I all regarded the static picture with a silence that ended when I admitted, “I have no idea what I’m looking at. That big thing’s the Stanley, right?”
Mendez nodded. “Yes, madam.”
“I think I’ve asked this already, but why in Juje’s name would it be called a Stanley?”
His shrug was a close cousin to an apology. “I have been told that it has something to do with the vehicle’s arachnid appearance, but further understanding has always eluded me. You might want to ask Jason and Jelaine, as they’ve always demonstrated a certain amusement at the word and the form that they’ve never seen fit to explain.” He shrugged, a close cousin to an apology. “I gather that it’s a private joke between them.”
I wondered if the joke could prove relevant and decided that it probably wouldn’t, right now. “Why isn’t it moving?”
“I don’t have any way of knowing. But in the absence of a critical life-and-death emergency requiring immediate action, the crew would diagnose the problem and confirm a course of action with the engineers at Layabout and Anchor Point. My supposition is that they’re still discussing the matter.”
We watched for a few more seconds, waiting for the Stanley to do something, anything. It remained motionless.
Dejah beat me to voicing suspicion. “Something’s wrong.”
There was no panic or fear in her voice, just a dread, knowing certainty. “What’s your reason?”
Dejah said, “I could understand them taking their time had they been in contact with us all along, but we’ve been cut off from all communication for a couple of hours now. Trust the word of somebody who knows from personal experience the special kind of attentiveness expected by the filthy rich: given whose elevator car this is, the people in that vehicle should be shitting bricks. They should be desperate to get through and confirm that everybody’s all right.”
I took another look at the image on the screen, finding an odd delicacy in the Stanley’s frozen posture. “Assuming Pescziuwicz told them everything they needed to know, I’m afraid it’s even more suspicious than that.”
“How?”
“When I spoke to him during dinner, he told me that Brown had informed him that a Bocaian was aboard. If the Stanley’s crew can hear our heartbeats, and they know that a Bocaian should be with us, then they can observe that all of the hearts still beating are human and determine that there’s already been at least one fatality…on a day when there’s already been one incident involving Bocaian assassins. Whatever the cause of our problem, they should consider this a life-or-death situation. They should be moving. At the very least, they should have someone rushing to an air lock to get medical workers in here.”
Paakth-Doy said, “That goes along with everything I know about the emergency protocols.”
Dejah bit her lip. “Either they can’t proceed, or they don’t dare.”
I nodded. “That’s what it looks like to me.”
We continued to watch the static image, waiting for any signs of life from the Stanley. It continued to hang in place, maintaining its position, betraying none of the dramas that may have been taking place inside.
I imagined its crew slumped at their consoles, their seats stained with insides liquefied by the Claws of God adhering to their backs. It was illogical nonsense, but the motionless Stanley was precisely that ominous.
Skye said, “Oscin just told the Bettelhines what you’ve been saying. Philip says we should get back up to the parlor and leave the professionals to their work, but he’s more frightened than he’s been letting on. Jason says we should give the Stanley a few more minutes before jumping to any conclusions. But he put special emphasis on the word ‘few.’ I think he concurs that this isn’t good.”
I almost murmured something about not working for the Bettelhines and not requiring their input. “Arturo? Do we have any way of sending somebody up there?”
Mendez said, “There’s an access ladder on the hull within reach of the air lock ascending to the elevator roof. If worse comes to worst I can suit up, but I wouldn’t want to be out there if either the carriage or that Stanley started moving again.”
“What danger would that pose?”
“The carriage? Nothing, as long as we remain above the atmosphere. That, given the proportions of most planetary atmospheres, wouldn’t happen until the last few minutes of our descent. As for the Stanley, I wouldn’t be in any real danger as long as its crew knew I was out there, but we cannot communicate with them and it would be genuinely unpleasant for me if those legs came scrambling over the side while I was still on the ladder and unable to signal them to avoid running over me. I’ll go if the Bettelhines order me to—it is, after all, my duty—but under these circumstances I’d consider it more prudent to wait a few minutes and make sure that there’s no other alternative.”
As he began cycling through the other exterior vantage points in search of another that might indicate what was delaying action on the part of the Stanley and its crew, I noticed Dejah studying me. It was not an unfriendly look, but it was a measuring one, and as she straightened up and appraised Skye (who had moved closer to me at the moment she realized Dejah was paying such close attention), I wondered just how deep she was poring, just how much she could see. “What?”
She glanced at Mendez, saw that he was engrossed in the view from the exterior monitors, and said, “You’ve changed.”
Coming from somebody as incisive as her, the observation seemed ridiculously banal. “And?”
“No, Counselor, I mean it. You used to strike me as one of the most damaged people I’d ever met. Your entire personality was one big scab. I could barely say anything to you without opening up one wound or another. But something’s changed with you, and entering a healthy if somewhat unusual relationship,” she indicated Skye, “isn’t enough to account for it. You haven’t just changed. You’ve changed.”
I didn’t have the time or the inclination to discuss the subtle psychological surgery that the AIsource had performed upon me on One One One, or any of the other experiences I’d been through since the Dip Corps lost the deed to my life. “It’s been a long time.”