‘Woah,’ was about all I could manage, staring ahead.
I’d visited the back lines of a World War; I’d explored the uncharted jungles of Peru. I’d even seen versions of myself from two alternate realities - not to mention killed one of them by mistake. If I had to describe my mental fortitude, I’d call it pretty robust - especially after witnessing the kaleidoscope of aliens that was the market’s demographic. But I’d never before seen anything with such scale.
Locked in suspension by two rows of colossal docking clamps was a frigate, one which must have run to at least a kilometre in length. It was rectangular, and as old and industrial as the hanger in which it was docked. Only the tip - what I imagined was the cockpit - was in any way round. It looked sort of like an egg that had been sharpened at one end. The whole thing somewhat resembled an arrow. Tiny, round windows ran along its length in rows, the way portholes run along the side of a cruise ship. You could have flown a fighter jet through any one of its twelve engine boosters, they were so wide. There were a great, great many gun turrets.
Offline, it rested like an ancient archeological find.
‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ asked Pierre. He nodded as way of indication for me to keep walking. I guess the hanger wasn’t a particularly pedestrian-friendly part of the port. I wonder if anywhere was. ‘That’s the Roaming Havoc. Bit of a relic, that one. Four hundred years old or thereabouts. First saw action during the sixteenth Glardon war, I think. Last I heard it was owned by the Skrelliks. Nasty lot. Wouldn’t think twice about burning a whole planet to ash if it meant they could swoop down and grab the wedding ring off one charred grandma.’
I looked up and saw tiny specks wandering about on top of the spacecraft. They looked like engineers. There were more hurrying about beneath the ship’s undercarriage, too. As we followed the gangway around it, I started to recognise them as androids similar if not identical to the one who was having his clamp replaced back in the market. They were plugging massive cables into the ship - cables which looked like thick, ribbed worms. Who knows what they were for. Could have been for refuelling. Could have been for extracting the shit.
‘What do you think they’re doing here?’ I asked, as a crane carried a shipping container over our heads.
‘Probably just picking up supplies,’ replied Pierre. ‘Not many places the Skrelliks can dock without their ship getting impounded within five minutes. Don’t worry, they won’t be looking to make trouble. Not much of it, anyway. One of the best things about a port full of criminals is they know everyone else can give as good as they get. This way.’
He led me down a new gangway towards another industrial set of doors. Enormous white letters were painted on the concrete wall around them. Gang signs had been sprayed over the top of them in yellow and red paint. I looked over my shoulder in time to see a shimmering, black ship shaped like a manta ray come gliding into an open bay. I watched it disappear from sight as the doors before us opened with the same reluctant, clanging groan as the ones before.
Pierre stopped me before we could step through.
‘Do you still have the spare key?’ he asked.
‘Sure.’ I fished it out from the depths of my pocket. ‘Needed it to get here, didn’t I?’
Pierre grabbed my arm before I could pull the key out. I jerked back from him, surprised.
‘Don’t let anyone see it,’ he whispered. I let the key drop back to the bottom of my pocket. ‘Where we’re going, people would kill for one of those keys. They’re worth more than your life, or mine. It’s a way off this goddamn station and into whatever world, whatever life they can imagine. Keep hold of it. We might need it later to buy our own tickets out of here.’
‘Can’t we just use one of the keys ourselves?’
Pierre shook his head. ‘Not if I don’t know where we’re going,’ he added with a shrug. ‘Could end up anywhere. Can I ask you a question?’
‘Sure.’
‘Why didn’t you use that key to get home? Why did you need to call me?’
I sighed. This was a little embarrassing.
‘I was jumping from universe to universe, trying to do just that. Get home. I kept getting it wrong. Very wrong. And then I had a horrible thought… What if I think I’m in the right world, and I set up a life there… I get attached to the place… only to find out that it’s no more my world than all the rest? There’s only one person I know who can take me back home for sure, and that’s you.’
Pierre smiled. ‘And how do you know I’m the right me, eh?’
‘I guess I don’t,’ I replied, laughing nervously. ‘But I trust my gut. You’re the same Pierre I knew. Besides, the bartender told me the payphone automatically works out which universe you’re trying to call. All you need is the phone number as well as a rough time and date - the dimensional quantiser fills in the rest. Apparently.’
‘Thumb prick test?’
‘Yes…?’
Pierre turned my hand over and looked at the three tiny dots on my right thumb.
‘Yeah, thought as much. They’ve got you on file now. Good thing I came when I did.’
‘What do you mean, they?’
‘The gangsters who run this port, of course. The Na’riim. Little lost human, far from home? You’re prime ransom material, you idiot. There’s probably a bounty hunter out looking for you right this minute. Come on. We’d better get a move on before you’re bundled into a sack.’
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
Pierre stopped in the doorway and smiled.
‘To go see the Na’riim, of course.’
Chapter Three
The stench was unbearable. It was the smell of mould growing in the damp, of dodgy meat turning rancid, of a hundred thousand overdue showers. Worst of all, it was the smell of ruin and neglect.
Pierre was leading me through a favela slum of sorts, and if I’d thought the market was as bad as Port Iridium could get, I couldn’t have been more wrong. At least the market had been organised, albeit in a mad and scattered sort of way. And whether smiling or frowning, the customers of the market had been in an ever-shifting ebb and flow of motion. The slums, they were… static. Static like a corpse festering on the side of a road.
There was barely a path left to walk down, and that path was unhygienic, to say the least. Corrugated shacks and tents with holes torn in their fabric were piled up over one another in a bid to make more room. Crates and storage containers had been stacked up sometimes three storeys high. The only light came from the metal trash barrels that had been set alight every twenty metres or so along the narrow path. Their flames flickered in oranges, greens and blues, casting grotesque shadow puppets across the graffiti on the high walls.
Curious, greedy and sometimes fearful eyes watched us pass from the darkness. Some of them belonged to humans, or a close enough species that to the observer it made no difference. They wore ragged cloaks over their bodies and engine oil in their hair. Others were all matter of shapes, colours and sizes. Something with a head like an elk’s was cowering behind one of the fire barrels, holding out its four-fingered hands to catch the heat. Another alien kept to the cold shadows; the glistening of her dark eyes and black scales were all that told me she was even there. But one thing united them. They were all without a home.
‘What are we doing here?’ I asked Pierre, trying not to move my lips. A couple of the vagrants were following us along the path - slowly, and keeping a safe distance, but following all the same. ‘And who are these people?’
My stomach tied itself into a knot. Nobody else was coming or going this way. Despite the crowd building up all around us, we were very much alone.
‘We’re going to see the Na’riim, like I said,’ replied Pierre. He was smiling at the aliens around us but he too kept his voice to a whisper. ‘And these poor ladies and gentlemen - not to mention non-gendered asexual reproducers, of course,’ he added, nodding towards what looked to me like a rose flower in a spacesuit, ‘are the various unfortunates
left behind by the lovely state of Port Iridium. Some came here to score big and ended up losing it all, including their ride home. Others were brought here as workers or slaves… or worse. They’ve no way off this hunk of junk. They’re stuck here.’
‘Well that’s awful,’ I said, out the side of my mouth. ‘But isn’t there another way in to meet these… Na’riim people? Like, one that’s a little less secluded? And a little more sanitary?’
‘Oh sure,’ replied Pierre, ‘we could go in through the front. That would mean taking a shuttle up to the command deck and explaining to a squadron of faceless mercenaries why we, over everyone else in this damn port, should be granted a private audience with their boss. Great idea. If we were lucky we’d be kicked off the space station. If not, we’d be airlocked out.’
He waved at a pair of twins peeking out from behind a stack of engine parts. I assume they were twins because their faces were identical - both azure and heart-shaped, both a little translucent, both with the black iris-less eyes of an eel - but perhaps I’m just showing my ignorance. They promptly vanished without waving back.
‘No, I think trying the backdoor might be a softer, safer approach,’ he continued. ‘Especially once they hear how little we want… and what we’re willing to offer in return. There, just up ahead. That’s what we’re looking for.’
I looked down the path before us and saw nothing… nothing but a giant crack in the wall through which trash had spilled. It took me a second to put the pieces together. This was where the bad smell was coming from - or most of it, at least.
‘Oh, come on. We’re not going in there, are we?’
‘Oh yes we are. On the other side of that wall is the trash compactor for the Na’riim quarters. It’s way past optimal capacity, always is. Can’t jettison it all into space - there’s too much rubbish floating underneath the station already. There’s probably a mountain of it in there. We’ll climb up it no problem, and hey presto - we’re inside.’
‘And how do you know all this, exactly?’
Pierre scratched the back of his neck. ‘I may have come here for a short spell with some colleagues of mine, not too long ago,’ he replied. ‘There was some trouble in the casino, and… we may have been brought in to see the leader of the Na’riim as a result.’
‘And you were brought in via the trash heap?’
‘No, but we left that way. Not entirely by our own choosing, I should add.’
‘Good grief. And we want to go see these people, do we?’
‘Not at all. We want to see the person they’re protecting.’
I glanced over my shoulder at the slum behind us. We’d drawn quite the crowd. More than a dozen sets of eyes watched us deliberate, and now they were filled with more a morbid hope than the fear I’d witnessed earlier. I wasn’t sure which was worse. I noticed that the fishy twins were back, hiding behind that same stack of engine parts, and I couldn’t help but wonder if their parents were around. Or maybe they were fully grown. Who knows?
‘Need I remind you, George, that this universe is rewriting itself from the ground up?’ whispered Pierre. ‘Pretty soon, smelling like a trash bag is going to be the least of your worries. You wish you could help them, right? Me too. But we can’t. Not if they’re erased from reality, that’s for sure.’
‘And climbing up a mountain of waste is going to stop that from happening, is it?’
‘In a roundabout sort of eventual way, yes.’
I nodded and sighed. I didn’t think we stood all that much better a chance walking back through the throngs of unwashed hopefuls anyway. The buttons on Pierre’s uniform were very shiny.
‘Lead the way,’ I said. ‘But if I get killed smelling like a used nappy, I’m going to be pissed.’
What followed was not the proudest, most dignified moment of my life.
The Na’riim, it transpired, were not a particularly environmentally-conscious bunch. There I’d been expecting separate piles for perishables, glass, plastics and paper, but no. It was just as Pierre had described. Everything - and I mean everything - had been thrown together into one enormous pit, until the waste had amassed into a miniature Mount Fuji, almost as tall as it was wide.
I saw some weird stuff in there. Weird stuff. I still can’t decide whether some of the instruments dumped in there were designed for pain or pleasure. There was a metal prosthetic wing, large enough for an albatross. A bookcase (why anyone would have cause to throw such a lovely thing away, I have no idea). A large, circular, chrome device that reminded me of a sea mine. This last one kept beeping. Pierre told me to keep away from it.
Not that I can be sure, but I think I saw a dead body in there too. I definitely saw a tentacle sticking out from amongst the detritus, but given the population of Port Iridium it was hard to tell if it belonged to a patron or somebody’s unwanted lunch.
Could have been both.
‘So what’s the plan now?’ I asked, once Pierre and I had squeezed through the crack in the wall and started stomping through the rubbish. I was trying not to breathe through my nose, but opening my mouth was just as bad. The smell had a taste. ‘I’m guessing there isn’t a door we’re supposed to knock on?’
Pierre pointed up towards the top of the trash mountain. The room itself - more of a cavern, really - was walled entirely by thick metal, through which strips of anaemic and white electric light shined. The ceiling was no different - just solid blocks of industrial steel and iron bolted together. Each block had a smaller, darker square in its centre, criss-crossed by a fine grate.
It took me a second to realise what Pierre was pointing at. High up, only a few inches above the mountain’s peak, was a steel block that stood out from all the rest. If I squinted I could make out a fine line running down its middle. No grate darkened its centre. Unlike the rest, this panel was not a panel, but a door.
‘There’s a control panel just to the left of it,’ said Pierre, once it was clear I’d caught up. ‘For emergencies, that sort of thing. If this place weren’t full of trash you’d be able to see a maintenance ladder on the far wall leading up there. Or you would if it hadn’t rusted off. I’m guessing it was there so engineers could shut everything down and get back out if the crushing process kicked off while they were going about their checks.’
‘Which would make sense back when Port Iridium was actually a mining station,’ I replied, swatting a fly away from my face. ‘But by the sounds of things the Na’riim use it as a prison as much as they do a tip. You sure they wouldn’t have had the buttons disabled?’
Pierre was unusually quiet for a moment.
‘Well there’s only one way to find out,’ he said, stomping up the slope of the mountain like an indignant explorer.
I tried to sigh without drawing breath and failed. Coughing and gagging, I followed Pierre through the groove he’d left carved in the trash behind him.
Gaining perspective, I realised I was wrong to describe it as a mountain. It was no more a mountain than it was a pyramid, or a tower, or even a hill. What it was, was a ramp. It started as only a few sodden inches where we’d passed through the crack and rose steadily to the point where it could lap the bottom of the door on the opposite side, nearly one hundred metres higher. It looked like the aftermath of a particularly rotten avalanche.
It wasn’t an easy climb. With each step my shoes would plunge so deep into the muck that I could feel the trash tickling the inside of my trousers. I’d fall and scratch my palms against charred scraps of plastic. At one point Pierre slipped on a pile of papers that had melded into a wet mush, and a globule of it splattered against the side of my face. I didn’t bring it up. I just shivered, wiped it off and carried on.
When I was about halfway up, an entire section of the slope crumbled away. Again I was reminded of an avalanche crashing down a mountainside, demolishing the trees in its way. A terrible rumbling accompanied it. I stood there, frozen, my arms stretched out wide for balance, sure that the ground beneath my own feet would give way.
‘Er… Pierre?’ I said, nervously resuming my trek after him. ‘Do you feel that?’
‘Just keep climbing,’ he replied, out of breath.
I hurried after him. ‘You bloody idiot!’ I shouted. ‘You told me they never bother to empty the trash. Now look what’s going to happen. We’re going to get crushed!’
‘Nobody’s getting crushed,’ snapped Pierre, scampering up towards the door. He was pulling away from me. ‘Just hurry up and, er… don’t look down.’
What did he expect me to do?
The walls weren’t closing in, and neither were the floor and ceiling. Everything around us looked very static, in fact - even the ramp, save for a few pieces of scrap that tumbled down as a result of the vibrations. But there was something about those grates in each of the panels that perturbed me - the way the trash around them twitched and danced away as if blown by a summer breeze…
I felt a drop of sweat trickle down the inside of my arm.
‘This isn’t a trash compactor, you moron,’ I shouted. ‘It’s a goddamn furnace!’
Fire roared out from the grates on the panels closest to the ground. The air in the room immediately jumped by five, maybe ten degrees. The trash nearest the grates curled to a flaming crisp before disintegrating into ash.
‘Okay, maybe this wasn’t my smartest idea,’ yelled Pierre from near the top of the slope. ‘Run!’
Considering that I was closer to its top than its bottom, and more importantly the bottom was where all the flames were, I had no choice but to climb further up the very mountain which was beginning to set alight. Pierre was up at the door now. One hand was holding onto the broken, rusty ladder, the other was beckoning for me to hurry. But the faster I tried to climb, the deeper my feet sunk into the trash and the quicker I seemed to slip.
Fire burst from the second tier of grates. The temperature leapt another half-dozen degrees.
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