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MASON WORE AN OLD BLACK coat, creased trousers and working men’s boots. He had a full beard, and a deep gash ran from the top to the bottom of his face, held together with what had to be self-inserted stitches. He reclined with his hands folded in his lap and looked at me with a blank expression, not like we had any kind of bitter history.
“Good afternoon, Hugo,” he said quietly.
“Did you put this map in here?” I said. Which was the last thing on my mind, but somehow it pushed to the front.
He nodded.
“How did you get back aboard the ship? What happened?”
“They didn’t want me.”
There was such misery in his voice I thought it best not to start an interrogation. Strange as it might sound, in those four words, he’d already announced his intention to tell me everything. But there was one thing I had to know immediately.
“What about Ashanta?”
He drew a sharp breath. “Yes, they wanted her. And – and Steven, they wanted him too. Nothing I accused him of was true. He was never working for C&B. I know that now. I know it for a fact.”
“I see.”
“If it’s any consolation, I’m fairly sure there’s some sort of mental continuity. I felt it quite strongly.”
It started to rain and a wind blew up, hissing as it drove upwards through the ship’s decks. We began to yaw a little.
“I want to help you,” he said.
Again, I thought it safest to leave him the initiative.
“You’ve read the diaries,” he continued, “and you’ve looked at the charts. I know you’ve worked it out, Hugo. I was certain you would. I’ve been watching you from the shadows, waiting for you to put two and two together. It took you longer even to get to the diaries than I imagined it would. Thereafter, I thought you might appreciate a prod in the right direction.”
“I have worked it out,” I said.
“And?”
“The closer we get to the Trench, the faster the disease progresses. When we turn away it goes into stasis or even remission.”
“Not quite. It slows down.”
“Why didn’t you take us as far away as possible? There must be a precise location on the opposite side of the globe where it stops completely.”
“Not necessarily. In any case, I tried. I wasn’t zig-zagging for the fun of it. I couldn’t get past C&B.”
“You mean, they’re forcing us towards the Trench?”
“And now perhaps you can understand why I thought we had an infiltrator. Someone giving C&B information about the ebbs and flows of the disease. Steven would have been ideally placed.”
“If not Steven, then who was it?”
He grinned stupidly. “The answer was staring me in the face all along.”
“And?”
“No one. I expect Goulding could have enlightened me had I ever asked him. He’d probably have said C&B had known about the disease since the start. Since 1926 – or even before.”
“It seems a long time to wait to do anything about it.”
“Did Steven ever talk to you about the stars?”
“We – yes.”
He chuckled. “Quite rare, eh? God knows what’s happening. It may simply be that we live in an auspicious time.”
I leaned forward. It was time to draw a line under all the speculative stuff. “You said earlier you wanted to help me. What did you mean?”
“Without me, the Aurora’s going to drift. There’s no telling where it’ll end up. The only certainty is that C&B will send a boarding party. I may be wrong, but I think the only reason they haven’t yet is because they don’t realise how far it’s gone. Because I’ve been refuelling the engines and manning the wheel. Anyway, the disease is supposed to be dormant in you. That was Steven’s diagnosis, yes? But maybe that’s because we haven’t yet come close enough to the Trench. Perhaps if we do, it’ll activate. You’ll transform and you’ll be able to join Ashanta.”
I think I may have gasped slightly. Simple, but very brilliant, and I hadn’t even begun to see it coming. Of course it made sense.
“What’s in it for you?” I asked.
“I – I did wrong.”
“You mean, trying to take my wife?”
“More than that, I’m afraid.” He sighed. “All the time she thought she was taking Steven’s cure, she was actually taking a placebo, substituted by me. I forced Steven to resign not because I thought Wiles had a hope in hell of making it, but simply to protect Ashanta.”
I stood up. “So – so without you, she could have been here now?”
“I acted in what I thought were her best interests, and given a second chance I might even do the same thing. But I shouldn’t have deceived you both.”
I put both my hands on my head.
“I thought Steven was working for C&B,” he went on, “and in that context, it all makes objective sense. Think. Steven based his cure on antibodies from your blood. But you’re not cured. At best, it would have arrested the progress of the disease. But even that might not have been permanent. The more people took it, the more subjects C&B would have to work on. I could bear the thought of you being experimented on. Not your wife.”
“So you loved her then?”
“I can’t explain how that can be, even to myself. I hardly knew her, and yet the moment she boarded the ship, I felt we were meant to be together. I know it’s insane.”
“Maybe the drugs have something to do with it,” I said brutally.
“Let’s be honest. Ashanta would have offered C&B more scope than you. You’re simply a potential sufferer. But imagine you weren’t, and they could keep rewinding your condition using Steven’s ‘cure’. Wouldn’t that be a godsend for them? She’s better off where she is, believe me, and if we can get you to the Trench, you can join her.”
“What about you?”
“To hell with me. When they finally come for us, it’ll be too late. A good captain always goes down with his ship.”
“You said ‘if’. ‘If we can get you to the Trench’.”
He took the chart off the desk and pointed to a position about 100 degrees east of the meridian, quite a way below the Tropic of Capricorn. “We’re roughly here. The question is whether we’ve got enough fuel to get us to there.”
“Don’t you know?”
“The instruments aren’t terribly reliable any more. If we fail, I’d like to conserve the last of our energy for a general SOS. It could be that C&B have anticipated such a thing and they’ve already put out a block, but we’ve nothing to lose. If the worst comes to the worst, we’re going to need all the help we can get.”
He stood up and held out his hand. I hesitated for a few moments then shook it.
“We’ll eat at around seven thirty,” he said. “My table. Leave all the preparation to me.”
