‘Yeah, I get that. You don’t like playing with others, do you?’
‘Nobody else around, then you’ve less chance of getting killed over somebody else’s stupid shit.’
‘Or have someone dragging your arse out of your own stupid shit. But my question?’
‘Is it relevant to anything? See, I can’t think of a single good reason to tell you.’
‘You want and need our trust,’ I said.
He leaned back and studied me a bit more closely.
‘This a price?’ he asked. I shrugged. ‘Okay. I had an automated program that I could plug into the ship’s systems. It would crack the security and remote-pilot the ship to… somewhere else.’
So he’d been working with others. That made sense.
‘How’d you get in? Because you didn’t do it in the camp — the security’s far too high for EVA.’
‘Maybe if I’d had the best stealth stuff, but yeah, the camp was more trouble than it was worth. Just outside the camp’s security perimeter I had another craft match acceleration and trajectory.’
‘Okay. Difficult flying but okay. So how’d you get on board?’
‘I compressed-gas-squirted ship to ship,’ he told me.
‘Bollocks.’ Space was extremely big; it only needed the slightest variation in speed and he would have missed. The maths alone involved in something like that was staggering. The margins for error were tiny. He shrugged again, giving the impression that he didn’t care whether I believed him or not.
‘Spacesuit set up for stealth. I had the maths on a program in my internal systems.’
‘What distance?’
‘Fifteen thousand metres.’
‘The slightest miscalculation,’ I said. I had absently picked up one of a pair of punch daggers and was toying with it. It looked like it was made from black glass. It had some kind of channel leading to the point of the blade.
‘So I didn’t miscalculate. Don’t touch that; it injects a pretty virulent neural toxin.’
For fuck’s sake, I thought, who was this guy? There was no doubt about it — if he played with us then he’d be an asset.
‘Are these glass?’ I asked.
‘Dayside obsidian, volcanic glass from Lalande 2. Sharp as glass but comparable to steel in toughness. Now put it down.’
I put the punch dagger down.
‘So how’d you get in?’ For obvious reasons airlocks, along with the engine room and then the bridge, tended to be the highest-security areas of a ship. On most military and high-security ships you couldn’t access the airlocks externally. I’d only been able to use the airlock on the Santa Maria during the mutiny because it was a civilian ship and I had a hacker as good as Vicar backing me up.
‘I spent seven hours stuck to the hull of the ship drilling through it. I nearly froze to death. I sent through a modified snake with a lock burner on the end. The lock burner had a pretty sophisticated spoof program added to it. The spoof program was probably the biggest outlay. It told the ship’s systems that the airlock was still closed. The snake was flush with the drill hole. I just kept on adding sealant around the crack while feeding it through.’
‘You’re not supposed to be able to do that,’ I said. What he’d just told me had huge ramifications for spacecraft security.
‘You guys did it to that star liner back in the twenties, didn’t you?’ He was right: the SAS had attached a vacuum-proofed cargo module to a sensor blind spot on a hijacked luxury system cruiser and cut through the hull to deal with a group of so-called post-human terrorists. I’d studied it in Hereford while I was training. It was one of the few successful boarding actions in space warfare history. Normally the speeds and distances involved were too great. Ships got destroyed before they were boarded or they surrendered. Surrender hadn’t been an option fighting Them.
‘Different circumstances. The ship was docked when they attached the container; also ship security was much more rudimentary then.’
‘So what? You thinking of robbing a ship?’
‘No, I just like knowing how to do things.’
Again he seemed to be studying me. Finally he nodded.
‘Yeah, me too. We done bonding?’
I nodded. ‘Unless you want to let me play with your guns.’
‘Go away. I’m busy.’
The whole trip had been subdued. That happens when people are sure they’re going to die. You either get subdued or overcompensate, but even Mudge couldn’t be bothered with overcompensation.
On the seventh night we had some drinks and some forced conversation. Bar last-minute checks we were as ready as we were ever going to get. Nobody had wanted to hear me play my trumpet. They backed up their opinions on the matter with threats of violence. I didn’t think this was fair. I was sure I was improving.
Mudge confused me by presenting each of us with little animatronic action figures of Major Rolleston, the Grey Lady or Vincent Cronin. I got Rolleston.
‘What the fuck’s this?’ I asked. It was grotesque.
‘Voodoo?’ Pagan asked, laughing.
‘Let’s just remember how big these people are, shall we?’ Mudge told us. ‘This is how the children of Earth look at them, not fucking scary at all.’
‘This is weird,’ I said. Cat was nodding.
Morag held up her little Grey Lady. ‘I don’t know. I think I feel some voodoo coming on,’ she said.
Pagan couldn’t wait to go back to his compartment and trance in with Nuiko, who was with us as a nearly silent holographic ghost whose arms were her crab-like servitors. I wanted her to join us and relax but instead she was the perfect host. She had just as much to lose as the rest of us, except that she would be waiting on her own in the dark. If I was honest with myself, which apparently I didn’t like being, then I would have to admit that Nuiko still made me nervous. It wasn’t just that I’d never managed to have what I would describe as a conversation with her, but that for some reason she reminded me of the Grey Lady. Maybe it was the quiet. Maybe it was the averted eyes.
I wondered how Pagan had managed to break through the polite and distant reserve that she wore as armour. But time can be made to do strange things in sense environments. Perhaps he’d been courting her for months instead of days. I wished him well but worried about the wrench of having to leave her to go and die. Maybe I should have tried to be a bit more optimistic.
Likewise Mudge was in a hurry to disappear into his compartment with the white-noise generator and Merle. He didn’t even get too fucked up, for Mudge. His choice of drug was some low-key euphoric and he only managed a bottle and a half of vodka. He still managed to fall off the catwalk into the crates. I guess appearances have to be maintained.
This left Cat, Morag, so much accompanying awkwardness it seemed to have its own palpable presence in the hold, and myself. Cat sipped from a beer as she peeled the last of the medgel from her wounded back. Occasionally she’d look between Morag and me, smile and shake her head.
Morag didn’t say much and still wouldn’t meet my eyes. In fact some of the time I think she was having a sub-vocal conversation with someone else. Though I couldn’t think who.
‘Well, as much fun as this is, I’m going to get some rack time,’ Cat announced. I’d no idea why she didn’t just say sleep, which would have been more economical. ‘Try and keep it down.’
‘You too,’ I said inanely.
She glanced back at me before disappearing into her compartment. That left Morag. I felt nervous and uncomfortable. I couldn’t read Morag’s expression.
‘I’ve been talking to God a lot,’ Morag said after the silence had stretched on for so long I had considered fleeing back to my compartment.
God, I had forgotten all about him. No, I hadn’t. I’d ignored him, pretended I’d had no time because his problems were so big that I could barely understand him. Talking to God had become too complicated, too difficult. Another friend I’d let down. Tried to hide from. Was he even a friend? I’d had a part, however minor, in his creation, his birth.