Terminal World (45 page)

‘You make it sound like a youthful indulgence we’ll grow out of sooner or later.’

‘You will, if you get the chance.’ Quillon sat down next to the table. ‘May we talk? There’s something I think you ought to know.’

‘A medical matter?’

‘Not exactly.’ Quillon opened the bag and slid out the blue volume. ‘Commander Spatha gave me this book. It’s blank.’ He riffled the empty pages. ‘The idea was for me to substitute it for the one under the table, while you weren’t looking. I was to sneak the original book out of the room in my medical bag and give it to Spatha.’

Ricasso blinked, but in all other respects did a good job of maintaining his composure. ‘Whatever for?’

‘I thought you’d know. Spatha told me the original book contains laboratory notes on the vorg serum programme. He thought that by exposing your lack of progress to date, he could undermine your authority.’

‘Spatha’s right,’ Ricasso said. He went to the table and pulled out the original book. ‘These are laboratory notes.’

The book was dense with numbers and formulae and cryptic annotation, recorded in different inks and with different degrees of neatness. Some parts were sober and methodical. Others were frantic scrawls, scratched out late at night by a man on the verge of exhaustion. There were hundreds of pages, all nearly filled with handwriting. There were even things that looked like abandoned puzzles, cross-hatched drawings with dots filling in some of the squares. Quillon couldn’t help wondering if they had something to do with the chequer game, as if Ricasso was working through theoretical puzzles in the margins, as a distraction from his main work.

‘But they can’t damage me,’ Ricasso said. ‘For a start, look at the dates. This is work I finished more than two years ago. My current notes stay down in the laboratory. And even if these were current, do you honestly think anyone else would be able to make sense of them? This isn’t work tidied up for public presentation. These notes are only required to mean something to me, and half the time even I can’t figure them out!’

‘Spatha’s no fool. He must have thought he could get something out of it.’

‘Maybe he can. But even if he somehow manages to understand all these notes, what use will it be to him? All he’ll be able to show is that, more than two years ago, I hit a slow patch. So what? I still know more at the end than I did at the beginning.’

‘He didn’t go into any more detail than what I’ve told you,’ Quillon said. ‘I was told to extract the book, or he’d make life difficult for Nimcha and me.’

‘And did he tell you not to mention it to anyone?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then I’m at a loss. Why didn’t you just take the book? You’ve had any number of chances, and if I’d caught you, I’d have understood that you were acting under coercion. I’d have had to throw you off the ship, of course, but we’d have still parted as friends.’

‘I thought about it,’ Quillon said. ‘But then I decided the book must be a test, so that Spatha could see how much control he had over me. What you’ve just told me makes me even more certain I was right. If I’d taken it, and not said a word to you, he’d only have asked me to do something else, probably something bigger and more dangerous.’

‘Almost certainly.’

‘So my choice was either go along with him indefinitely, or take the chance of speaking to you now. I decided to take the chance.’

‘Even with the threat to Nimcha and yourself?’

‘If the leader of Swarm can’t protect us, who can?’

Ricasso smiled sadly. ‘If only it were that simple. I can’t just arrest Spatha - he’ll have made sure there were no witnesses to his blackmail, and I’m afraid your word naturally carries less weight than if you were one of us. He knows this, which is why he would have felt free to be so brazen in his threats. Think about it, Doctor: if he cared about you knowing his identity, he could have easily concealed it, or contacted you some other way.’

‘If you can’t arrest him, can you remove his power in some way?’

‘Not at such a delicate time. There are twenty captains - at least - on his side, and probably as many again ready to turn against me if they sense that my leadership is crumbling. Under such circumstances, I can’t be seen to be trying to silence my critics, or marginalise my enemies. It’ll make me look desperate.’ Ricasso rolled his eyes in mock frustration. ‘I know the bastards’ names, of course - captains and ships, and whether the crews are loyal to me or the captains. But that doesn’t help me when I have nothing on Spatha except your testimony.’

Quillon felt a dizzy sense of falling, as if he had misjudged the number of steps on a staircase, his foot encountering air when it expected solid ground. He had hoped to be able to confide in Ricasso and have the weight of all his problems removed. No more lies, no more evasions. But instead he felt he had gained nothing.

‘If you can’t protect Nimcha, then perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything.’

‘No, because in telling me you’ve lost nothing.’ Ricasso passed Quillon the real logbook, taking the blank one in return. ‘Spatha doesn’t need to know we had this conversation, does he? You can give him my notes, exactly as if you’d gone ahead with his plan. He’ll think his persuasion worked, and that’ll buy Nimcha a little more time.’

‘But what about you?’

‘I told you, the book’s useless. Best of luck to him trying to find something in it to hang me with.’

‘You might not see it again.’

‘Good riddance, in that case. It’s old work, and I’ve moved on.’

Quillon slipped the real book into his medical bag. It was not quite the same as the fake - a slightly different, more turquoise shade of blue, a fussier binding, the edges more dog-eared - but it still fitted easily inside. ‘If you’re sure,’ he said, closing the bag.

‘Spatha wants to play games, he’s come to the right man.’

Quillon nodded at the chequerboard. ‘I noticed.’

There was, now that he paid it proper attention, something not quite right about Ricasso’s chequerboard. It was actually two boards connected together in the middle, but which did not match properly. The squares on one board were larger, so that the cells did not line up neatly. And yet Ricasso’s chequer pieces spanned the divide, with the black markers arrayed in winding, spidery formations across both boards, like straggling birds at the edge of a denser flock.

‘It’s not a game, Doctor,’ Ricasso said. ‘It’s the very stuff of life and death.’

‘The cellular grid,’ Quillon said, suddenly recalling something Gambeson had told him. ‘Gambeson was talking about the zones, and he said that the cellular grid didn’t have enough resolution. Is this something to do with that?’

‘There’s a lot you and I could talk about,’ Ricasso said. ‘Unfortunately, by my watches I make it time for the vote.’

 

The show-of-flags was in progress. The winter sun did its best to sparkle on the long, fluttering banners of coloured emblems, as the fleet delivered its collective opinion on Ricasso’s decision.

Quillon was with Ricasso, Curtana, Agraffe and Gambeson. They were on the balcony, watching the display. Everyone was dressed against the cold, the Swarmers wearing their best uniform coats for the occasion. Ricasso swept binoculars from ship to ship, reading the banners as they were lowered down beneath each gondola. They were strung from a stiff wire that whipped back in the wind, the flags arrowing towards the airships’ tails. He held his binoculars in spotless white gloves, struggling to work the focus wheel as he switched from a close ship to a distant one. Every now and then there was a glint from the observation deck or balcony of some other ship. Conscious that binoculars might very well be trained on him, Quillon kept his goggles on and his hat jammed on tight. His hands were thrust deep into fur-lined pockets. By now word of his existence must have reached all of Swarm, and he was certain there had been a degree of informed speculation about what exactly he was. But until there was an official statement on the matter, he was determined to conceal his appearance. He wanted a cigarette very badly, but didn’t think it would be good manners to light up except when he was alone.

‘It’s not normally this serious,’ Ricasso muttered. ‘I come out here and survey the flags, but I don’t normally care what they’re actually telling me. I just nod a lot and look interested. It’s not usually been an issue.’

Quillon couldn’t make head or tail of the coloured banners. No two seemed alike, but he had yet to detect any specific consternation in his hosts. There was a lot of ceremony here, many layers of impenetrable tradition. Swarm used heliographs for routine signalling between ships, but clearly all serving officers were required to maintain a working familiarity not only with the flags, but with several different systems of flags. Each ship appeared to employ entirely different protocols. No one was in the least bit fazed.

‘Assent from
Clouded
Yellow
,’ Agraffe murmured, as if his voice stood a chance of being heard above the steady drone of station-keeping engines. ‘Assent from
Silverheath
and
Gatekeeper
.’

Curtana, who was scanning a different part of the formation, said, ‘Provisional assent from
Argus
. Conditional abstention from
Ruby Tiger
.’

Ricasso made a sound like man being kicked in the testicles.

‘It’s not a vote against you,’ Curtana said. ‘She’s always been on your side until now. They just want more information about what we’re going to do for fuel after we’ve delivered the medicines. Actually, I wouldn’t mind some reassurance about that myself.’

‘We’ll cross that bridge,’ Ricasso answered.

‘Steal it from the Spearpointers, you mean? They’re no better off than we are,’ Gambeson said.

‘Assent from
Ghost Moth
,’ Agraffe said.

‘Ghost Moth? You’ve misread the flags.’

‘I don’t think so. Of course, there’s always that saying about giving someone enough rope to hang themselves.’

Curtana wasn’t going to let it drop. ‘If we burn all our fuel just getting to Spearpoint, we’ll be sitting targets for Skullboys. We already know they’ve massed around Spearpoint’s base, and they’re not going anywhere.’

‘We’ll manage,’ Ricasso said.

‘I’ve seen the charts,’ Agraffe commented. ‘Even with the winds at our backs, it’s looking dicey.’ His attention flicked sideways. ‘Assent from
The Vapourer,
by the way.’

Ricasso nodded. ‘That’s good. She’s got influence.’

It went on like this, banner after banner, ship after ship. By the time of reckoning, about three dozen ships had voted against Ricasso’s proposal, with another dozen or so abstentions. Though some of the known dissenters had cast negative votes, by and large the divisions had not fallen along predictable schisms. Some of Ricasso’s staunchest allies had problems with the idea of giving assistance to Spearpoint. Some of his severest critics supported the idea because it promised the likelihood of engaging with Skullboys along the way and reinforcing Swarm’s moral superiority over the despised city-dwellers. Others, like
Ghost Moth
, were cynically supportive of the plan precisely because they saw it as doomed to failure, and therefore the surest route to undermining confidence in Ricasso. Every conceivable streak of chicanery and guile was present and accounted for.

But there was also a sizeable majority who supported Ricasso for no other reason than that they thought it was the right thing to do. Many ships had articulated quibbles or reservations with the precise terms of the proposal. Yet there was a solid block of consensus - a good hundred ships - that were ready and willing to go ahead with the medicine run. From what he knew of the man, Quillon believed there had been times when Ricasso would have regarded anything less than absolute unanimity as a crushing blow against his authority. Now he appeared to take it as a welcome reassurance that he still had an effective mandate to govern. The dissenters were not numerous enough to stop the medicine run from happening.

When the others had filtered indoors, Quillon remained outside to smoke a cigarette. Already there were signs of Swarm mobilising. The banners had been retracted and engines were being pushed harder, in readiness for the long flight to Spearpoint. Rather than leave behind a protecting force to guard what were fairly limited fuel stocks, and to prevent those stocks from falling into enemy hands, the depot was to be destroyed. Guns were being trained on the towers: it was useful target practice. Incendiary bombs were being dropped on the storage tanks. Swarm would not be passing this way again.

A door opened behind him. He felt the warmth on the back of his neck and steeled in readiness for another meeting with Commander Spatha. Perhaps he had come to collect the blue book, expecting Quillon to have done his bidding by now. But when he glanced to his side it was Meroka who had joined him. She was wearing one of the Swarmers’ high-altitude coats, almost lost in it with only the top half of her head protruding above the fur-lined collar.

‘Heard we’re moving on, Cutter.’

‘So it seems.’

‘Also heard you had something to do with this.’

He answered carefully. ‘I ... stated my position. I don’t doubt that they’d have come to the same conclusion sooner or later. Doctor Gambeson was already of the same mind as me, and I don’t think Curtana needed much persuading.’

‘And you know what’s waiting for you in Spearpoint?’

‘Nothing good.’

‘What I figured as well.’ She was silent for a while, her attention seemingly caught by one of the fires burning below. Towers of black smoke, folded into brainlike convolutions, rose from the flames. ‘I still have problems with what you are, Cutter,’ she added.

‘Entirely understandable.’

‘But I’ll say one thing. You pushing for this ... knowing what your fate is likely to be ... that takes some balls.’

‘Then I infer you approve of the decision?’