Terminal World (47 page)

Quillon kept his head down. It was easy to stay busy the whole day, and had he not needed sleep, he could have occupied himself through the night watches as well. He helped out with the sick and injured aboard
Purple Emperor,
taking on more responsibility now that Gambeson was bedridden. He worked for hours at a stretch in Ricasso’s laboratory, as often as not alone, although Ricasso would drop by when he was able, scrutinising Quillon’s notes, double-checking the concentrations and reagents involved in the testing and refinement of the Serum-15. Quillon now had his own key, another token of Ricasso’s trust. It sat heavy in his bag and travelled with him at all times.

When he wasn’t in the laboratory or the sickbay, he busied himself reading. He had spent a little time in Gambeson’s private library before, going in to retrieve some reference text or other, but now he felt justified in spending hours in there. The collection - much too bulky to be taken aboard
Painted Lady
- was a palace of leather-bound enchantments. Apart from containing the compendious shipboard notes of every surgeon who had ever served on Curtana’s vessel, it held numerous texts and treatises on illness, deformity and the healing arts. Many of these books and scrolls were not even written in an extant or translatable language, but their illustrations were still of lingering academic interest. One ancient volume, which almost fell apart upon examination, contained holographic plates of startling beauty. As Quillon gently touched the pages, a succession of neural slices flickered past, captioned with a slanting cursive text. The book was one of those rare and precious artefacts that appeared largely immune to zone changes, suggesting that its underlying technology was organic rather than mechanical. He felt the weight of centuries in its dust, and when he turned to the frontispiece the date printed there - in recognisable, though slightly odd, numerals - was a thousand years ahead of the present. The book had not fallen from the future, Quillon knew. It had survived from an era that used another calendar entirely, before the clock was reset to zero.

More than anything - and he felt mildly guilty that Gambeson’s illness had been a contributing factor - Quillon was grateful to be busy. It kept his mind off Commander Spatha, and him away from the parts of the gondola where he was likely to meet the man. He’d had no contact with him since their last encounter and Quillon was beginning to believe that Spatha had lost interest in him after the incident with the book.

Even as he thought this, however, another part of his mind recognised that he was engaged in quiet self-delusion.

On the morning of the third day he was asked to come to the stateroom. When he arrived he found Meroka already there, sitting on one of the low chairs next to a coffee table. She was scratching idly at her bandaged shoulder. The only other person in the room was Ricasso, who was turning from the window as Quillon came in.

Meroka looked up. ‘Man wouldn’t say a word to me until you arrived, Cutter.’

‘Is something the matter?’ Quillon asked.

‘Not necessarily,’ Ricasso answered. ‘I need your help with something-both of you - and I thought it best to wait until you were both present. It’s about Spearpoint. We’ve received some new intelligence.’

‘I wasn’t expecting any more news until we got nearer,’ Quillon said.

‘Nor was I. But I reckoned without the Skullboys. That ship we captured, the night before our departure from the fuel depot?’

‘I didn’t think there were any prisoners,’ Quillon said.

‘There weren’t. But we did take her with all documents still intact. Some of them have proved most ... illuminating. For ones so given to barbarism, the Skullboys are remarkably diligent log-keepers. Before she joined the pack we encountered, the
Lacerator
had been acting independently. They’d been listening to the signals on Radial Nine, the same semaphore line that
Brimstone
reported as still being operational.’

‘I thought the Skullboys were trying to disrupt those lines, not listen in on them,’ Meroka said.

‘One ship couldn’t have taken on a signal station,’ Ricasso said. ‘In any case, they’re as interested as we are in the state of the city. They listened in on the semaphore transmissions for much longer than
Brimstone
was able to.’ He nodded at the brown-covered intelligence transcripts on the coffee table. ‘This is what we got. It’s taken until now to decode the Skullboy logs, and there are still some passages we can’t decipher, but there’s enough to be going on with. If it’s accurate, it gives us a much clearer picture of the condition of the city than we’ve had so far. Nothing in it actively contradicts anything we learned from
Brimstone,
but it does put things into a new light.’ He gestured invitingly. ‘Open the documents. Read the transcripts. You have unlimited clearance. All I ask is that, as Spearpointers, you be alert for anything that doesn’t ring true. We’ve no other way of deciding if the Skullboy intelligence is reliable.’

Quillon had joined Meroka at the table. He opened one of the dossiers and examined one of the pale pink, tissue-thin transcript papers inside.

‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

‘They’re Skullboys,’ Ricasso answered. ‘I’d like you pay particular attention to one name in particular, if at all possible - it keeps coming up. If this man isn’t responsible for these transmissions going out in the first place, he’s clearly a player of some importance in post-disaster Spearpoint.’

‘Tulwar,’ Meroka said, frowning hard, as if she was certain she must have made a mistake. ‘Here’s his name. And again.’ She shuffled the papers. ‘Here again. He’s all over this like a rash.’

‘You know this man?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Tulwar helped us to get out of Spearpoint,’ Quillon said, spotting the name for himself on another of the transcript sheets. The sentence read:
Tulwar continues to urge all citizens to use existing antizonal stocks responsibly.
A little further down:
Tulwar reports that supplies are holding and there is no need for further panic. Further still: Tulwar has indicated that mob law and punishment beatings will not be tolerated. While looting, the theft of rationed supplies and the breaking of curfew cannot be allowed to go unpunished, miscreants must and will be exposed to the full measure o the Emergency Law.

‘This doesn’t make any sense,’ Meroka said, shaking her head. ‘I mean, why Tulwar?’

‘You mean,’ Quillon said, ‘why not Fray?’

‘I suppose it could be someone else with the same name,’ Ricasso put in doubtfully.

‘No, it’s our Tulwar,’ said Meroka. ‘I’m pretty sure of that.’

‘Brimstone
’s intelligence did say something about criminal elements moving into the power vacuum,’ Quillon said. ‘I suppose Tulwar would have to be considered a criminal element by anyone’s definition. But then again, so would you and I.’

‘Tulwar was just a cog in Fray’s machine,’ Meroka said.

‘A cog with ambitions, maybe. He already had a network in place: you saw how easy it was for him to arrange for us to be shipped down to Horsetown with the frozen corpses. He’d have been in a fairly advantageous position when the orthodox authority crumbled.’

‘So would Fray.’

Quillon scanned the handful of papers for any mention of Fray, but the name didn’t leap out at him.

‘He doesn’t seem to be mentioned at all.’

‘This Fray was another contact?’ Ricasso asked.

‘More than that - he was a friend to both of us. Tulwar got me out of Spearpoint, but it was Fray who made it happen. I’d known him for years. He wasn’t a paragon of virtue, but he wasn’t a bad man either.’ He looked at Meroka, hoping she would say it before he did.

‘You don’t think he made it.’

‘We both saw the storm hit Spearpoint, and we know what
Brimstone
told us about the change in the zones. It hurt Neon Heights more than it hurt Steamtown. From Tulwar’s position that change might almost have been beneficial.’

‘Enough to go from being a fairly prominent player in the Steamtown underworld to the most powerful man in Spearpoint?’

‘The most powerful man in the part of Spearpoint still capable of communicating with the outside world,’ Quillon said. ‘For all we know, Fray’s still alive; he just can’t get a message out. We’re only seeing a small part of the picture here.’

‘But it seems to be a vaguely plausible part?’ Ricasso asked.

‘If you take it as a given that Tulwar’s expanded his influence,’ Quillon said, ‘then yes, I suppose it does.’

‘I agree with Cutter,’ Meroka said.

Ricasso nodded, a cold gleam of satisfaction in his eyes. ‘That’s what I was hoping. I wasn’t counting on either of you actually knowing this man, but that’s a bonus. My main concern was that all this might turn out to be a Skullboy fabrication, for whatever reasons they might have had. I can’t rule that out even now, but the fact that they mention this Tulwar gentleman so many times—’

‘It’s real,’ Quillon said. ‘The only doubt in my mind is about what we’re not being told. But it doesn’t change anything, does it?’ He tapped a finger against one of the sheets. ‘Looting. Riots. Ration shortages. Medical supplies going astray. All this tells us is that the situation is just as grave as we anticipated. Maybe worse. They really do need that Serum- 15.’

‘And we’ll deliver it,’ Ricasso said. ‘As soon as we possibly can. Maybe sooner.’

 

Quillon found out what Ricasso meant by his remark later that day, when he was called to the stateroom again. This time there were at least a dozen captains present, as well as Curtana, Agraffe, Meroka and, of course, Ricasso himself, who stood with hands on hips and his proud belly pressing against the enormous chart table, around which the gathering had assembled. He was staring at his audience with a look of pugnacious defiance, eyes flashing from one person to the next, alert to the merest hint of dissent.

‘This is our existing course,’ Ricasso said, dragging a fat thumbnail along the map. ‘Skirting the edge of the Bane, but spending another three days of flight actually getting further from Spearpoint by the hour, before we clear the southern extremity, pick up the prevailing winds and begin to make easterly progress.’

Curtana, who must have sensed something of what was afoot, said, ‘And your point is, exactly? We talked this over at length. We’re committed to it. Now is emphatically not the time to go changing our minds about the right approach.’

‘And you’re quite right about that, my dear. That is, you would be right if the information available to us had not altered. In the light of new intelligence, it behoves us to re-examine our original decision.’

She stood with hands on hips. ‘What new intelligence?’

‘We pulled recently amended charts from the
Lacerator.
The Skullboys came close enough to the Bane’s limit to detect the changes. But they found nothing, no hint of a gradient along hundreds of leagues. There’s only one reasonable conclusion to be drawn from that: the Bane has shifted, or contracted. We shouldn’t have expected it to remain the same: every other zone has undergone a boundary change, so why not the Bane?’

‘You trust these charts?’ Agraffe asked. ‘For all we know they’re bogus, made up to lead us into disaster.’

‘That’s a reasonable point. But other information extracted from the same ship has been independently verified.’

Quillon glanced at Meroka, who glanced back at him at the same moment. Her expression told him that she felt exactly the same way he did. Failing to find a glaring inconsistency or implausible detail in the semaphore logs was not the same as independent verification.

‘That’s—’ he started saying.

‘Doctor?’ Ricasso asked interestedly. ‘Your opinion, please? I’m most anxious to hear it.’

‘You know we can’t ever be certain those transcripts are authentic. But even if we were, it still wouldn’t give us any reason to presume the charts haven’t been faked.’

‘The changes the Skullboys have mapped dovetail with those measured by
Brimstone, Painted Lady, Cinnabar
and
Iron Prominent,
Doctor, so it’s highly unlikely that they’ve been completely fabricated.’

‘We don’t know how far the boundary has moved,’ Quillon said. ‘The Bane may have shrunk, or changed its shape, but that doesn’t mean we can go sailing into that territory without a care in the world. We may run into the boundary again, just a bit further in than it used to be.’

‘That’s why we’ll be paying due attention to the clocks, every second of the way,’ Ricasso said. ‘We’re not fools. We learned a hard lesson from the Salient. But even if the boundary has only retreated a little way, we’ll still save time and fuel by cutting across the edge of what used to be the Bane. Can you deny that saving time will be beneficial to Spearpoint?’

‘Of course I can’t.’

‘As I expected. We’ll send ships ahead of the main formation, mapping the gradients across a broad swathe, establishing a safe corridor. If the clocks tell us to change our course, we will. But in the meantime, we’ll shave days off our journey to Spearpoint, and avoid tangling with several known concentrations of Skullboys.’ Ricasso leaned forwards, his belly billowing up onto the edge of the table. He took a pointing stick and drew it across the edge of the tract, skirting the terrifyingly blank interior. ‘Given the urgency of our mission, and the saving in distance, we simply can’t debate this. It must be done. We’ll reach Spearpoint sooner, and since their instruments aren’t as sensitive as ours, I very much doubt that any Skullboys will come after us. As a by-product, we’ll end up compiling the first modern charts of this territory - something that we’d have to do eventually.’

‘First charts, period,’ Curtana said. ‘Unless you know better.’

Ricasso said nothing, just tapped the pointing stick against the map.

‘How long would we be in the Bane?’ Quillon asked.

‘From a standpoint of medical interest, Doctor?’