“I don’t know how it works with your hospital,” Fura said, “but we’ll meet any costs, within reason.”
“Flush, are you? That makes a change from the usual crews. Most them couldn’t rub two quoins together.”
“We just want the best for her. This infirmary you mentioned—is it the best?”
“Oh, yes,” Sneed said. “The very best, no question about that at all.”
*
We moved through what I supposed had once been the civic gardens, but which was now a treeless wasteland of rubbish, fires, and gangs of loitering figures, with broken statues and fountains lying crumbled or toppled all around. Further off, the walls of the rim curved up on either side of us, streets and buildings clinging to the steepening sides almost until the sides were vertical and the buildings were fixed onto precarious ledges and protrusions. There were two principal avenues, as near as I could tell, one on either side of us, and they stretched away along the main curve of the rim, gradually climbing out of sight. Spidering away from these two avenues were smaller streets and alleys, but it was only close to the avenues that there were real signs of life, with electric and neon lights clustering around squares and main intersections. Elsewhere it was so dark that the buildings and roads were lost in the black, with only an occasional light or fire to show that there was any habitation at all. I realised that since we were between the two avenues, in the lowest part of the rim, we were trudging through a similar sort of darkness, broken only by more braziers and piles of burning rubbish.
Every now and then there was a road or walkway crossing the width of the rim from one side to the other, providing a sort of short-cut between those two main avenues. We were just going under one when there was a shout from a huddle of individuals above us, and a bottle came hurtling down. It shattered on the ground, giving off a sudden rank stink.
Sneed drew out a weapon, a small blunt-barrelled pistol, and fired a warning shot.
“Watch your step, coves!”
“Sneedy?” called back a voice.
“Yes, and these good people are under the special protection of Far-Gone. Get on the wrong side of me and you’re on the wrong side of him, too, and you wouldn’t want that, would you?” By way of emphasis he let off another shot, but the party on the bridge was already dispersing, having got the intended message.
“Who were those people?” I asked.
“Ne’er do wells,” Mister Sneed answered, pocketing the weapon in the sure knowledge that he had made his point. “These are trying times, with all sorts of thievery and common lawlessness abroad. Mister Glimmery’s doing his best to stamp some sort of authority on the gaff, but it’s an uphill struggle, what with the hand he’s been dealt.”
“You mentioned Far-Gone,” Fura said. “Who or what is Far-Gone, exactly?”
“A mere indiscresence that slipped my lips.” Sneed rubbed at the tip of his nose, where there was a little pendant of mucus hanging down like the hook on the end of a cantilevered construction crane. “Think nothing of it, and please don’t mention it again in any sort of company we might soon be enjoying.”
We made our way out of the ruins of the civic gardens, through a bad-smelling pedestrian tunnel, crunched through tiles that had fallen from the roof, up a slope, skirted around another sort of market, a bit livelier than the last, and then up a sloping alley that took us closer to one of the avenues, although still a street or two from the electric and neon lights.
The infirmary was built onto a rectangle of level ground projecting out from the side. Or, I ought to say, it had been built that way. In truth it was an exceedingly odd kind of structure. It was hanging down from the ceiling like a grotesque chandelier, hardly any part of it in contact with the ground, except for some ladders, rope-bridges, chains, hoses and pipes. The top parts were suspended by hundreds of cables, some going up vertically and others reaching off at angles. It made me a little sick and giddy just to be looking at it, and even more so to think it was our destination, and Strambli’s best hope.
The building had clearly started off with foundations, entrances and so on, but for some reason the bottom five or six stories had been blasted away, leaving a ragged stump of rubble, girders and masonry, suspended above a waterlogged crater in the rectangle of ground. The only way in or out was up those ladders and rope-bridges, which fed up from the street to what would have been the sixth, seventh and eighth levels, as near as I could estimate. Whatever catastrophe had befallen the original structure, either gradual or sudden, it was only those guylines holding it up now.
There was power, at least. Lights were on in the upper parts of the building, and not all of the windows in the lower levels were dark.
“It’s a good joke they play on visitors, Trage,” Fura said, shielding the rain from her brow with her hand, as she craned back to take in the suspended building. “Showing them this stupid ruin and letting them think it’s the infirmary.”
“I wish it were a prank, Cap’n Marance, sincerely I do. But the sorry truth is this is what we’ve been reduced to. I didn’t lie, though—there’s no better infirmary anywhere in the wheel.”
Sneed led us to the base of one of the rope-bridges. Not the steepest of them—that would have been impossible to navigate, with the trolley—but it was adequately steep, and certainly long enough to put a lump in my throat.
“Now, before we go up, there’s a little formality we need to put behind us. Some crews get the wrong idea, you see, and bring guns and such unpleasant things with ’em, and we can’t be having that in our lovely hospital, can we?”
“We’re not armed,” Fura said.
“You’d be surprised how often I’ve heard that, Cap’n—no offence intended.”
Fura stepped back and stretched her arms. “Search us, if you’re not ready to take our word.”
“Give ’em the once-over, boys, and be gentle about it. Mister Glimmery won’t want his guests rough-handled.”
They did search us, and since I knew myself to be unarmed I felt under no obligation to submit to this indignity with good grace. Prozor and I were declared to be unarmed, but they found a dull blade on Fura, fixed under her chest-pack by magnetic means, and Surt turned out to be carrying a miniature crossbow-pistol in the stores pouch on her boot. Sneed took the little weapon, regarding it more with pity than objection. “That the best you got? Expecting to run into a dangerous kitten or puppy, was you?”
“I forgot I had it,” Surt said with a scowl. “It was from our last bauble run.”
Fura stuck out her jaw. “If you think it’s harmless, you can give it back to her.”
“I’ll confesticate it for now,” Sneed said, slipping it into the pocket where he had also placed Fura’s short-handled blade. “I suppose you do have to take precautions, going into baubles. I’m just happy you never needed to depend on any of ’em, or I don’t think we’d be having this conversation.”
“Aren’t you going to inspect the chest?” Fura asked, planting her hands on her hips. “She was on our last bauble run as well, and I can’t vouch for what she’s still got fixed onto her suit.”
Sneed considered her point and nodded. “Open her up, boys—we may as well take a squint. Who knows what she’s got in there? Could be a fusion lance for all we know.”
They leaned under the rain-sheet, opened the vacuum seal and inched up the lid. The men flinched back almost immediately, one of them raising a hand to his mouth, the other fanning away the bad airs.
“Be thorough about it, boys!” Sneed snapped.
“There’s a stink on her like she hasn’t washed since the Third Occupation,” protested one of his men.
“Smells rotten. Like something going all maggoty,” said the other.
“No,” contradicted the first. “It’s more like a sewer, or a toilet what’s not been emptied.”
“Maggots,” replied the other. “Rotten meat, that’s what it is. Not sewery at all. How you could say that’s sewery I don’t know.”
&nbs
p; Sneed pushed them aside and directed the tip of his nose into the opening under the lid. His shoulders moved as he rummaged around Strambli, picking at the belongings we had stuffed around her body like funerary goods. “I’m not sure which part smells worse, the cove or her laundry. Something’s definitely off, though.” He backed away, lowering the lid. “What did you say was up with your pal, Cap’n?”
“A leg wound that isn’t healing properly,” Fura answered coldly. “It hasn’t been smelling very good for a few days. That’s why we’d like her seen to as soon as possible.”
“Speed is very definitely of the effervescence,” Sneed said, moving to a chain hanging down from the infirmary and giving it a very sharp tug, just as if he were emptying a cistern.
He swivelled his eyes up and leaned back, even as his face stayed jammed into his collar like a plug hammered into a hole. Nothing happened for a minute or so, then a steel arm swung out of a window high up on the side above us, and a hook came lowering down with a basket under it. The basket was wire-framed, and about as large as a bath-tub.
“I ain’t going in that,” Surt said.
“No one’s asking you to,” Sneed said. “But if you put your helmets and assorted gubbins in the basket, that’ll take a strain off the rope-bridge. You can collect them again when you get to the top.”
“I don’t like it,” Fura murmured, loud enough for the rest of us to hear.
“He’s right about not over-loading the trolley,” I said. “We’ll have less weight to push, as well.”
We could have debated it for hours, but with a grunt of annoyance Fura reached under the trolley and began transferring suit parts into the basket. The rest of us followed, clanking our motley goods into the basket. We took off a few more bits for good measure, but there was no time to strip out of our suits completely.
Sneed waved a hand up to the window, and the hook and basket began to rise. Just before it ascended out of reach, Fura snatched back two of the squawk boxes. They were exactly small enough to be easily pilfered, unlike the heavier helmets and lungstuff systems.
Now the basket wobbled higher and higher.
“We’ll meet it at the top,” Sneed said, gesturing to his assistants. “Put your backs into it, boys. It can’t start rolling down, or we’ll never stop the blighter.”
We all joined in, with the exception of Sneed, until there was no more room for another pair of hands. It reminded me of shoving the fuel tank up the sloping shaft in the Rumbler, only there was a friend’s life at stake now, not just a bottle full of rocket fuel. So we shoved and shoved, and as the ground fell away and the angle of the bridge got steeper, and the sway of it got more pronounced, and the planks under us were occasionally rotted or missing completely, so that the trolley wheels nearly went through, I reminded myself that I was having an adventure, and that adventures were exceedingly fine things to look back on.
“What’re they doing?” Fura asked, for the basket had stopped in its ascent, still far above us, but nowhere near the window where the winch had been swung out.
“Something’s jammed,” Sneed said, as if this was a very common and unremarkable occurrence. “No need to fret—they’ll get it going again.”
“If one of those suit parts gets a scratch on it …” Fura said.
Two figures leaned out the window, fussing with the winch. It seemed thoroughly stuck.
We carried on, forcing our minds off the trouble above. The bridge steepened and steepened, swaying from side to side in an alarming and lively manner. By some miracle we got the trolley all the way to the top without it toppling or rolling back, and as we neared the underside of the infirmary, where the bridge vanished into that stumpy tangle of girders and plumbing and masonry, two infirmary staff came out and helped persuade our cargo up the final incline, into the safety of the building. That was an irony all of its own, I thought, that I now considered this suspended rubble-heap to be in any way “safe.” But it was certainly more pleasant than being on the rope-bridge.
“Show me where that winch is,” Fura said.
“It’s still a bit above us,” Sneed said. “But it’s on our way to the examining bay, in any case.”
We had come out into what would have been one of the intermediate levels of the original building, but we were still a dozen stories under the lit parts I’d seen from below. This part of the building was a shell, with its windows blown out and nothing but floors and ceilings left behind, supported by bare metal pillars.
Sneed led us closer to the middle, where there had evidently once been a courtyard or atrium, with four inner walls surrounding it. Other rope-bridges spanned this gap, criss-crossing directly or stretching at severe inclines between different floors. We were spared those, thankfully. Instead, Sneed’s boys wheeled the trolley into an elevator with trellis doors, with just enough room for Fura to get in as well. The rest of us were told to wait until the elevator came back down again.
I watched the elevator grind its way up to the higher floors, heard a distant racket of trellis doors, a rumble of wheels, then the whine of its slow descent back down to us. Sneed snorted and wiped his sleeve across the tip of his nose, making a little rope-bridge of slime all of his own.
“What’s gone on here, Mister Sneed?” I asked. “I know this world is past its best days, but it looks like we’ve arrived in the middle of a war.”
He sniffed, making a phlegmy rattle in the back of his throat. “Now, that’s a tricky one, Trage. Not a war, exactly, but a bit of a readjustment. Things got a bit out of kilter here, you see, what with the declinating trade, last year’s bank run, and a general breakdown in law and order, all most regrettable. But luckily Mister Glimmery had all the right connections to start putting things right again. The right man at the right time. Sometimes an opportunity opens, especially when things aren’t going like clockwork, and it takes a man like Mister Glimmery to step up and do what needs doing.”
“Sounds like a power grab to me,” Prozor said.
“You’re not one to mince your words, are you? Lodran, wasn’t it? You look older than these others, you don’t mind my saying.”
“Older, uglier and wiser.”
“I don’t know about that, but you’ve definitely been around the Old Sun a few more times. How long’ve you been knocking around with Cap’n Marance’s crew, Lod?”
“Long enough to know that’s my business and no one else’s,” Prozor answered.
I cared little for Sneed on first impressions, but we were on delicate ground and I had no wish to get off on a bad footing with him or his supposed master.
I forced an obliging smile and said: “You’ll have to excuse us, Mister Sneed. We’re used to keeping tight-lipped about our operation. It’s the only way to keep any sort of an edge on the other crews, but it makes us a bit suspicious of questions, and of help being volunteered when we haven’t come begging for it. But we don’t mean ill of it, and we’re grateful for any help when Greben’s concerned.”
“Crews can be a bit tacitatious, I s’pose,” Sneed said. “That Cap’n of yours doesn’t look like one for idle chit-chat, either, Trage. I’ve only seen one case of the glowy more further along than hers. How’d she end up with the tin arm?”
“She’s never said,” I answered, which was the story we’d all agreed on. “Some bad business, that’s all.”
“That’s a pretty arm, all the same. I could get a good price for that piece, if she’s thinking of selling up.”
“I’m sure the captain will take that under advisement,” I answered.
The elevator had come back. We rode the cabin up the inner wall of the atrium, with two streams of brown water racing down either side of us, splashing into the waterlogged crater below. Eventually we reached the lit and inhabited levels of the infirmary. It was an improvement, certainly, on the wind-blown emptiness of the lower levels. But only in the most marginal sense.
It smelled bad. Not as bad as Strambli’s cargo chest, but at least we could close the li
d on Strambli, whereas the infirmary’s smell was unavoidably present. The worst part of it, I think, was that someone had tried to smother the sickness smells with chemicals, which were potent enough to tickle the nose and make the eyes sting, and yet still not sufficient to fully mask the decay and sickness.
“It ain’t so bad, once you’re acclimatisated,” Sneed said. “Spewed up a bucketload, I did, the first time. Now it doesn’t bother me at all, which proves how bad your pal stinks! I’ll go and rustle up Doctor Eddralder, shall I?”
“I’ll save you the effort, Mister Sneed,” said a man with an exceedingly deep voice, coming over to us by the elevator, an umbrella in one hand, held up and open, even though we were indoors, and a set of loosely-bound papers in the other. “I am Eddralder. Which one of you is the injured party?”
“The one on the trolley,” I said, pointing to the cart. “Greben’s in that cargo chest. We had to get her across a stretch of vacuum, and she wasn’t in any condition to wear a suit.”
“I see. And you’d be the captain I was told about—Marance, wasn’t it?”
“No, that’s—” I was about to say “my sister” but caught myself. “I’m Tragen. Captain Marance came up the elevator ahead of us. Where is she, Mister Sneed?”
“She couldn’t wait to get to that winch, Trage. Pop along if you’re concerned. It’s beyond those blue curtains, all the way to end of the corridor.”
“I’ll fetch her,” Prozor said.
“See you in a minute, Lod,” Sneed said, raising a hand to his face as if he were saluting a war-bound friend.
Doctor Eddralder placed his papers down on the reception desk next to the elevator and fished a little lamp from his pocket. The examining area was just part of a much larger ward—or collection of wards, I supposed—that must have taken up a good part of this whole floor. It was a similar arrangement to below, with metal pillars rising up to the ceiling. But there was glass in the windows here, and sheeting over the missing bits, and electrical lights strung across the ceiling, as well as curtains and partitions to offer a scrap of privacy to both doctors and patients. There were beds and trolleys and various items of medical equipment, including a battery of powerful lamps that could be wheeled around.
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