Terminal World (52 page)

Spatha ran to the spot where the woman had fallen and aimed his gun at the ceiling, tracking the sound of the vorg’s slithering, scuffling motion through the panels. He fired, drilling a line of bullet holes, not stopping until he had exhausted the magazine.

Quillon knelt and examined the woman. He didn’t need a pathologist’s table to tell him she was dead. Nothing in her face except frozen incomprehension. The vorg had snatched her quickly, and whatever it had done to her had been equally swift.

He rolled the woman onto her front. Where her spine should have been, from her coccyx to the base of her neck, was a bloody trench. The vorg had cut it out of her, through fabric and skin and subcutaneous fat, ripped that articulated structure of bone and nerves right out of her, then dumped what it didn’t need. He realised then that it hadn’t been the vorg’s tail he had seen vanishing into the ceiling.

He turned around, not wanting Nimcha to see any of this.

‘Keep her back—’ he started to say.

It came then, as he had half-anticipated. A pressure in his skull, a throb that built and built until it felt as if something was trying to lay an egg inside his brain, a burning white egg that was too large to fit, that would split the bones along their sutures. His vision tunnelled. Nausea tightened his throat. He could barely keep himself from blacking out, let alone organise his thoughts.

‘What’s happening?’ Spatha asked, the effort of speaking written on his face.

‘Zone tremor,’ Quillon said.

‘We’re hundreds of leagues from the present boundary - a tremor can’t touch us at this range,’ Spatha said, his tone aiming for dismissive but betraying the frightened realisation of what he was witnessing.

‘Then it’s more than a shift. What you felt on the ground was just a hint of her abilities. She can change entire swathes of tectomorphic geography just by thinking about it.’

‘Then she ought to stop.’ He made to aim the gun at Nimcha - forgetting perhaps that it was empty, or trusting that no one else would have realised - and Kalis turned around to shield her daughter.

‘She might be the only thing that can save us!’ Ricasso bellowed. ‘The vorgs are only just alive! Push the zone too far, they won’t be able to survive at all.’

′Or us,’ Spatha said. He clicked the trigger, the gun dead in his hand. ‘Someone give me a revolver! If she pushes things in the wrong direction—’

‘She will not,’ Kalis said.

The effects of the zone transition continued to intensify. The floor of the gondola appeared to tilt and then return to the horizontal, signalling that
Purple Emperor
had lost propulsive power.

‘Nimcha,’ Quillon said, with all the forcefulness he could muster even as he felt his mind being squeezed in a vice. ‘You mustn’t make the change too strong, or it will break the engines for good. And we need those engines!’

Spatha had managed to snatch a service revolver from one of his men and was now holding the wavering barrel in Nimcha’s direction. But he wasn’t trying to fire. Either his nerve had left him, or he recognised that a zone storm might be the one thing that would hinder the vorgs, provided the shift was in the right direction.

‘Put the gun down,’ Ricasso said, with surprising tenderness. ‘It’s over, Spatha. You’re not going to win this one. You think you can take Swarm in the middle of a zone shift?’

‘This isn’t your ship any more,’ Spatha said.

Someone bent double and vomited. Forcing his mind to work, Quillon opened his bag. Knowing there was no time for anything but the most crude of calculations regarding dosage, he fumbled a dozen or so pills into his own trembling hands. ‘Take these,’ he said, passing them to Meroka. ‘One each for everyone here. Half a pill for Nimcha. I mean it, Kalis. She may be able to bring on the zone changes, she may even have some resistance to their effects, but that resistance isn’t perfect.’

Spatha lowered the revolver. ‘You’ll still answer for this, Ricasso. You brought this on us.’

Ricasso took a pill from Meroka. ‘It’s my fault now, is it? I thought you were blaming it on Quillon.’

‘You gave him the opportunity to do the sabotage he always intended,’ Spatha replied.

‘If Quillon meant to sabotage us, there are a thousand other ways he could have gone about it.’ Ricasso closed his eyes as the antizonal took effect. ‘Well done, Doctor. I can feel the worst of it lifting already. Will she hold the zone where it is, or let things snap back?’

‘I don’t know,’ Quillon said.

Spatha waved the revolver at the remaining airmen. ‘Get into the service spaces. Find the vorgs, before the zone rebounds.’

Quillon looked at Nimcha. The severity of her convulsions was easing, Kalis holding her tightly, comforting her daughter as she came through the worst of her nightmare of possession.

‘I am sorry,’ Kalis said. ‘She could not help it.’

‘Don’t apologise,’ Quillon answered. ‘She may very well have saved Swarm.’

Footsteps - heavy, multiple footsteps - pounded in their direction. Quillon and the others looked past the dead woman, down the length of the room to the wide, balconied corridor beyond. Despite the loss of propulsion, firesap burners were still alight. At least a dozen uniformed men and women were marching towards Spatha and his gathering. They had weapons drawn, glinting orange and brassy in the firesap light, and none of the party appeared touched by the zone storm. At the front, marching with a look of iron determination on his face, was the red-bearded Agraffe.

‘Did you speak to Curtana?’ Ricasso asked, as Agraffe neared.

‘I did. The fleet’s still ours, Spatha. The rest of your supporters were too spineless to show their faces.’

‘This man is under administrative restraint,’ Spatha said. ‘Captain Agraffe - I require you to submit to emergency rule under my authority.’

‘Require all you like. I’m still answering to Ricasso.’

Spatha carried on speaking as if Agraffe had not answered him at all. ‘You will submit to my rule. You will instruct your men ... whoever’s with you ... to coordinate with security personnel in tracking down the remaining vorgs. We may not have much time.’

‘One of us certainly doesn’t.’ Agraffe levelled his own service revolver towards Spatha. ‘Surrender your weapon. You’re under arrest for attempted mutiny.’

Spatha gave a hollow laugh. ‘That’s an extraordinary claim. I hope you have something suitably extraordinary to back it up.’

‘Did you speak to Curtana?’ Ricasso asked again.

‘I did, and I retrieved what she asked me to. It’s in safe hands now.’ Agraffe nodded at Quillon. ‘I’ve also been told to escort Doctor Quillon and the rest of his party to
Painted Lady.
They can be on their way within the hour.’ Agraffe glanced at Nimcha, concern in his eyes. ‘Will she be all right?’

‘She won’t be any worse off aboard
Painted Lady,’
Quillon said. ‘And now that her true nature’s more widely known, that may be the safest place for her. I’d like to see what we can salvage from the laboratory first, though.’

‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ Agraffe said.

Nimcha made a mewling, nonverbal moan. Her eyelids began to flutter. Quillon felt it then: the zone receding, returning to something like its old position, if not snapping into exactly the same shape. Consciously or otherwise, Nimcha had done what needed to be done.

From somewhere outside, an engine coughed and spluttered and then roared back into life. Then another.

‘She timed it well,’ Ricasso said, unable to hide his delight at the phenomenon he had just experienced. ‘Brought it just long enough to sow some confusion, but not long enough to effect permanent transcriptional errors. We’ll just have to hope it was enough to kill the vorgs for good.’

‘They were only just clinging on to life,’ Meroka said. ‘Which is what made them such snake-mean sons of bitches in the first place. My guess is they’re rotting away as we speak. Best find them, though, if you don’t want the place stinking like a Horsetown whorehouse by sun-up.’

‘There’ll be due process,’ Spatha said, as he surrendered his weapon. ‘Criminal neglect still took place here. Align yourself with Ricasso, you’re only prolonging the inevitable.’

Ricasso smiled briefly. ‘We’ll see.’

 

A little while later they were on their way to
Painted Lady,
riding one of Ricasso’s personal ferries. It was still dark, with the light from the gondolas the only illumination in any direction. Swarm was on the move again, with all but a handful of engines having been successfully restarted, and with few indications that the zone storm - squall, tremor, however one wanted to term it - had caused any serious harm. As for Quillon and his fellow passengers, things could have been much worse. The physiological correlatives of the zone transition were now almost entirely past, save for the lingering influence of the antizonal medicine. Quillon had done his best, but no doctor in the world could have made an accurate allowance for the zone snapping back so quickly. Now his head buzzed like a recently struck bell, but it was not merely due to the after-effects of the pill. He was also working through the implications of what had just happened, his thoughts a ringing, throbbing dissonance of political cause and effect, like a rowdy argument going on between the two hemispheres of his brain.

‘Spatha’s right,’ Quillon told Agraffe, as the little craft ducked and bobbed its way between the looming black envelopes. ‘They can lock him up and throw away the key - kill him, for that matter - but the damage is already done. The unavoidable truth is that the vorgs escaped, killed at least two of your citizens, possibly more, and none of that would have happened if Ricasso hadn’t brought them aboard.’

‘It was a calculated risk,’ Agraffe said. ‘Ricasso knew that the potential rewards made it worthwhile.’

They had left Ricasso aboard
Purple Emperor,
where he was best placed to restore order, marshal his supporters and quench Spatha’s stillborn rebellion. With Nimcha and Kalis also on their way to Curtana’s ship, Quillon was glad to put the night’s business behind him. But he could not rid himself of the feeling that Agraffe, Ricasso and the others were too confident of ultimate success.

‘If he’d got anywhere with the all-purpose serum, they might see his argument,’ Quillon said doubtfully. ‘As it is, his existing work hasn’t been successful enough to justify the risks he’s taken. This incident can only damage Ricasso in the long term.’

‘It was deliberate sabotage, Doctor. That’s an entirely different matter.’

‘Can’t prove it, though,’ Meroka said.

‘She’s right,’ Quillon said. ‘Spatha was brazen, but only because there were no other witnesses. Unless you include the vorgs.’

‘And if there had been another witness?’ Agraffe asked. ‘Someone who saw what happened down there, how you were threatened and forced to open the cage?’

‘That would be something. Unfortunately I was alone.’ He paused, seeing something in Agraffe’s eyes. ‘Wasn’t I?’

‘Of course.’

‘But there’s “alone” and there’s “alone”. What was Ricasso asking you, when you arrived with all your men? Something about speaking to Curtana, and then you said something about something being in safe hands?’

Agraffe sighed slightly, then allowed himself a thin smile. ‘Evidence,’ he said. ‘Evidence that - provided it was retrieved and put into safe keeping - will almost certainly give Ricasso all the backing he needs.’

Quillon closed his eyes, reviewing the time he had spent in Ricasso’s laboratory. Thinking back to how something had been different the first time, when Ricasso had given him the first tour. Different in the sense of something not being there at all, when on later occasions it had been present.

He recalled the regular mechanical click of some piece of apparatus. He had taken it to be a form of clock or recording instrument, and that had made perfect sense. But he did not remember it making any sound the first time they had gone down there.

‘I was being photographed, wasn’t I? That’s what Ricasso wanted you to safeguard. But you didn’t know about it and Curtana did. She told you where to look, what to recover.’

‘You shouldn’t feel badly about it, Doctor.’

‘I shouldn’t feel badly about being spied on?’

‘Ricasso trusted you enough to leave you alone in his toy room. He just didn’t trust you completely. But being almost trusted is still better than not being trusted at all, wouldn’t you say?’

‘My experience, you take what trust you can get away with,’ Meroka said. ‘Ninety per cent, eighty, still a fuck of an advance on zero.’

‘Thank you,’ Quillon said, giving her a sarcastic smile. ‘That’s clarified things enormously.’

‘Always ready to help, Cutter.’

‘Look on it as a positive development,’ Agraffe said. ‘If Ricasso hadn’t spied on you, you’d have no way of defending yourself. Now we can prove that Spatha was down there.’

‘The plates show him, do they?’

‘They’ll need to be developed, which will take time. This isn’t Neon Heights. But if he was in that room for more than thirty seconds, he’ll have been caught.’

Quillon decided to let go of his anger, his sense of having been violated. He could either carry it with him all the way to the other side of the Bane, or discard it now.

‘You think it’ll be enough?’

‘Spatha with a gun pointed at you, and then one of the vorgs breaks out? Yes, I think that might do the trick.’

‘What will they do to him? You mentioned arrest. You didn’t tell me what the sentence might be.’

‘It’ll be the death penalty,’ Agraffe said. ‘The only question is, which one.’

‘And they say civilisation ends at Horsetown.’

‘Don’t judge us, Doctor. Just because your city doesn’t have a death penalty doesn’t mean it doesn’t kill people. It just does it behind its back, and takes its slow, sweet time over it. The people who don’t fit in, the ones it can’t make work for itself, it sucks them in, grinds them down and spits them out. At least we’re clean and fast out here in Swarm. Well, fast, anyway.’