Skarbo stared. Then he ran.
The moving crowd had gathered numbers as it went. The floor behind it was empty, and Skarbo’s claws skittered over the surface. He had never been good at running; this form didn’t suit it.
Then the room lit up. For a fraction of a second he could see his shadow, lancing out at a low angle for metres in front of him – and then he was blown violently forwards, and hot air was scouring his shell.
Drops of something pattered down.
He rolled to a stop and turned to look behind him.
Pathin was gone. Scraps of cloth lay at the centre of a flower of red on the floor where the old man had been.
And behind that, a ten-metre-long break in the haze of the burn field. And beyond that again, a ragged hole.
Skarbo began to walk, and then to run.
As he reached the place he hesitated, one leg over the torn threshold, as if to test its ability to bear weight – even, to be real. Then the rest of the crowd caught up with him, and he was shoved forward. Belated sirens began to wail, but they were coming from behind him.
It was logical to run.
He ran.
Skarbo woke slowly from a sleep he hadn’t realized he was having. It was quiet, and the surface beneath him was cool metal. He opened his eyes.
It was dark, and the air was moving slowly and smelled industrial – oily and burnt, with a sour undertone which was gone almost before he had noticed it. He listened for anything. At first he heard only the noises of his own body: the subliminal creak of ancient, stiff carapace and the faint surge of body fluids, usually drowned out by background noise even in the quietest place. He listened to them patiently until he was so familiar with them that he could filter them out and hear past them.
There it was. A deep, slow pulse – and now he had fixed on it, he realized it was in time with the ebb and flow of the air currents. An ebb and flow that favoured one direction very much over another.
So that was where he was – but where was everyone else? There must have been hundreds in the crowd.
Well, it wouldn’t be solved from a prone position. He lifted himself cautiously, and discovered that standing still worked.
Now, which way to go? There were senses he barely remembered having, that were all about echoes and air movements and how close things were, and they were telling him that walls on two sides were close and the ceiling was low. A tunnel, then. Or a duct.
And therefore only two choices. To where the air was coming from, or to where it was going.
In space, mechanical things created air but living things breathed it. Out loud he said to himself, ‘I choose living,’ and began to walk.
For a while he thought the duct was straight, but then he realized that he was unconsciously correcting his course in response to those senses, and always in the same direction. He was walking round a long, shallow curve, as if his environment was wrapped round something else. As he went, the echoes changed, as if the space was getting bigger. Or as if the duct was widening towards something.
Then he tripped over the first body.
He couldn’t see it, even with his optics strained to the edge, but just from the length he guessed it was male.
He shook his head and stepped over it.
A few dozen paces further on he found another. Then two together, and then a tangle of them, difficult to count in the dark, and now there was a sweet smell in the air above them as if something caught in the fabric of their clothes was very slowly seeping out.
Then the duct turned a corner and he saw light ahead. He quickened his pace, stepping high to keep his body above the bodies on the floor.
Another corner and it was light enough to see. He stopped and looked, his breathing shallow.
There were hundreds of them, and they were piled up against the wall that closed the duct. It wasn’t solid; it was made of a metal mesh with spaces big enough for a human arm to fit through. Many arms had fitted through it, and were frozen in the middle of their desperate gestures towards the other side. A few lay severed on the floor beyond. The sweet smell was very strong.
They had been trying to get out. Skarbo recognized some of them from the prison.
He was still staring at them when he felt a faint movement in the air beside him. He turned towards it, and as he did so a crisp voice said, ‘You are dead.’
The voice came from above him. He looked up, and saw something like a dull metal bar about a metre long. It was floating, almost vertical but with its top angled a little towards him, so that he felt looked at.
‘What are you?’ he asked it.
‘I am an Excrutor. You are dead.’
He felt like laughing. Instead he shook his head. ‘No. They are.’
It leaned back as if surveying the scene. ‘The procedure is successful. They are dead. Therefore you must be dead.’
Skarbo looked around at the bodies. He thought of the sweet smell. ‘Was it gas?’
‘Yes. Cyanide. Therefore you must be dead.’
Skarbo shook his head again. ‘It seems not. What are your instructions?’ And tensed.
It seemed to think for a moment. Then it swung itself horizontal, one end pointing at Skarbo. ‘Amendment: insect form renders you anomalous,’ it said. ‘This is to be corrected.’ And before he could react it had blurred through a flat arc and struck him like a club.
The blow connected with his head, hard enough to lift him off his feet. He landed on his back and rolled, thumping awkwardly into the pile of bodies at the end of the duct. His impact dislodged one of them and it flopped down next to him, one arm lying limply over his head like an embrace.
He didn’t wait for the pain. From the corner of his eye he could see the thing that called itself an Excrutor bearing down on him; another blow like that and it would be right, and he would be dead.
He reached up the pile of bodies, grabbed at a protruding leg and pulled as hard as he could.
For a moment he thought it wasn’t going to work. Then there was a little movement, and a little more, and one more desperate heave brought dead people rolling down on to him like an avalanche. More than he had thought – the weight thumped down through his shell and flattened him against the ground.
The thumping stopped, and there was quiet for a moment. Then he felt blows, rapid and repeated, transmitted down through the inert flesh and bone, and the weight on him seemed less. The Excrutor was coming for him, and it was coming fast.
He had run out of ideas. He wondered what would happen if the thing broke his shell.
The last corpse was whipped away. He turned over, flailing limbs upwards as if they would have any effect against this airborne cudgel.
He was surrounded by smashed meat. Corpses lay around him as if they had been at the centre of an explosion. The Excrutor was poised above him. It was smeared red and flecked with shreds of skin and bone. It swung back.
He closed his eyes, waited, and then opened them again.
The thing was still motionless at the top of its backswing. He watched it for a long second. Then, panting, he scrambled backwards over the ruin of flesh, his claws slipping and scrabbling on the slick surface.
The thing still didn’t move, but now he could hear a faint, harsh hum. It was getting louder.
The outline of the Excrutor blurred. Then it began to smoke.
Skarbo backed away.
The Excrutor now started to glow, climbing quickly from sullen red to a sharp yellow. Drops of molten metal fell from it and sizzled on the flesh below. Then it simply dropped, landing flat on the body that had shielded Skarbo.
There was a loud hiss and a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke. Skarbo crept forward.
The Excrutor was half buried in the charred, steaming grave it had burned for itself in the dead man’s flesh.
Skarbo sat back. He was breathing hard, and his head felt – strange. He reached up and touched the place where the blow had landed. He had expected to find himself split, to feel fluids leaking out. H
e supposed he had fluids? But there was nothing to feel; no obvious damage. Even so, he still felt strange.
‘Took a hit?’
Skarbo jumped. The voice had come from the heap of bodies. Which was moving.
An arm extended up, a corpse rolled aside, and someone stood up. She wiped an arm over her face, and grinned. ‘You should know all about burrowing into heaps of dead stuff – roach.’
There were broken teeth in the grin, and the breath stank, and as she said the word he remembered. She had called him that before. After the fight.
He breathed out. ‘Is there anyone else alive?’
‘No.’ The word left no room for doubt.
‘How did you survive?’
She shrugged. ‘Good luck and good genes. I heard you talking to the old man.’
He waited.
‘You’re interested in the Spin.’
‘Yes.’
‘Want to go there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Forget it. You might as well burrow down into that lot,’ she gestured at the heap, ‘and wait for the juices to fall into your mouth.’
He suppressed a shudder. ‘Why?’
‘What the old man said? He knew less than half of it. He came from money, roach. He knew long words. He could pay for a freighter berth, when there still were some. He knew shit about where the rest of us came from.’
‘You’re from the Spin too?’
‘Where else?’ She frowned, cleared her throat, and spat. ‘Ugh. Fucking cyanide. Not even imaginative. Yeah, I’m from the Spin. Everyone’s from it, roach. No one goes to it, not any more.’
Skarbo sighed. ‘Tell me about the Spin. And, please? My name’s Skarbo.’
She watched him for a moment. Then she spat again. ‘Okay. Skarbo. I’m Chvids. I’ll tell you about the Spin, but I won’t do it here. The management will be sending someone along soon and I don’t want to meet the sort of people they’ll send.’
Skarbo looked around. There didn’t seem to be many options. ‘Where shall we go?’
She grinned. ‘Out, would be favourite. This way won’t work, so I’d bet on that way.’ And she pointed back down the duct.
They walked back through the darkness, past the point where Skarbo had woken. The breeze became stronger, and so did the industrial smell.
For a while neither of them spoke. Then Skarbo said, ‘Why didn’t you come this way in the first place?’
He heard a soft laugh. ‘Think about it. There were hundreds of us. What happens if I’m the only one running this way? Pretty soon I won’t be the only one. It’s not the ones at the back of a crowd that get crushed. Plus, I guessed they’d gas. Better to run away from that stuff, even for me. If I lived? Then I could go back.’
Skarbo nodded. Then something occurred to him. ‘What did you do to that – thing?’
‘What? The Excrutor? Nothing. That wasn’t me. Guessing that was you, my friend.’ Another laugh. ‘One more good reason to hang out with you.’
He shook his head. ‘It wasn’t me.’
‘The hell you say.’ There was a pause. ‘Someone looks after you, Skarbo. I think I’ll stick around.’
‘You looked after me …’
‘Yeah. But those shits are dead, same as all the other shits. It’s just us.’
Skarbo said nothing.
They had passed the ragged hole back into the prison floor. A hundred metres further, and the duct widened abruptly and split into three. It was still dark, but Skarbo’s eyes had gone on adjusting, rather to his surprise. Now he had a grainy forward view, and Chvids was a swaying shape next to him. Her eyes shone faintly.
Skarbo stopped. ‘Which way?’
Chvids paused, and he saw her turning her head from side to side. ‘Not sure. I think there’s more air coming down the middle; maybe that way?’
She took a step forward, but Skarbo reached out and stopped her. ‘Wait,’ he said.
‘Why?’
He looked at her, surprised. He had known his eyes were superior to mammals’, but he hadn’t realized that his ears were too. ‘Can’t you hear it?’
‘No. What?’
‘Try, then. Just listen.’
They stood silently for a moment. Then she nodded. ‘Like a rattling?’
Skarbo felt himself grinning. ‘Like that,’ he agreed.
‘Which means what?’
Skarbo grinned wider.
Then it was on them.
‘Haaaa! Found you. Alive? Alive! Ha. Who’s this?’
Skarbo looked down at the woman, who had covered her head with her arms. ‘This is Chvids. Hello, bird.’
‘Hello yourself. Stupid!’
Skarbo blinked. ‘How so?’
‘Why didn’t you wait?’
‘Where?’
‘The other end. Stupid!’
Skarbo sighed. ‘How would I know to do that?’
‘Thought melting that flying club thing would be enough of a hint. What else would it have taken?’
‘I didn’t know that was you.’ Skarbo reached down and touched Chvids on the shoulder. ‘It’s—’ He paused. He had been going to say a friend, then just friendly. He compromised. ‘It’s not an enemy.’
She uncovered her head. ‘Really?’
‘Really.’ Skarbo hesitated. ‘At least, I don’t think so. I’ve known it for eight hundred years.’
She turned, slowly, and he saw her eyes open wide. ‘The fuck you say.’
‘Yes.’ He shrugged. ‘Bird? Where do we go?’
‘Middle way. The Chvids thing was right. Tell her I’m not a bird.’
Skarbo laughed. ‘I’m glad to see you,’ he said.
It made a creaking hiss, and snapped its beak. ‘That makes one of us. Come on. People are waiting.’
Chvids looked at it. ‘What people?’
‘People. Come on.’
Skarbo held out a claw. ‘Wait a moment,’ he said. ‘Would these people include the Orbiter?’
The Bird paused. Then it tilted its head from side to side. ‘Maybe. No sign of it, but it knows best. No other traffic either. War’s coming, Skarbo. The Warfront’s on its way. There’s a no-fly zone for two hundred klicks around the Handshake now; agreed by both rings. We look stuck.’
‘Right.’ Skarbo stared at nothing for a moment. ‘Well, we’d better think of something. Hadn’t we?’
‘I have. I only said we look stuck. Get moving.’
You couldn’t see the Ringway unless you looked closely enough, and there wasn’t any way of looking closely enough without getting close enough to be sliced in two.
It was quite a well-kept secret.
Skarbo held on to the grip in front of him. ‘How fast?’ he shouted.
The Bird swivelled its head so its beak was close to him. ‘About a thousand klicks. Feels faster, yes?’
‘Much faster.’ It did; even with little surface detail on the connected pods of the Handshake, and nothing else close by for the eyes to fasten on, there was something urgent about the way the little capsule was moving.
‘Is it fast enough?’
‘Don’t know. Hope so. Still accelerating a little.’
The Bird had certainly thought of something.
The Ringway was a circular thread-field that went right round the outside of the left-hand ring of the Handshake. A dumpy capsule big enough to hold half a dozen medium-sized humans hung off it by two rings of the same field type, one at each end, to give a sort of frictionless circular zip-wire. It only needed a small reaction motor at one end of the capsule for acceleration, and one at the other end for braking, and you had a fast, simple way of getting around the whole structure without having to bother about the internal doors – or, importantly, going through anyone’s territory; by long agreement the Ringway was neutral, all the way round.
It was also very noisy. The reaction motors were antique pulse-jets and at speed they made an angry yammering noise which set the whole capsule vibrating in sympathy. The inner, relative to the Hand
shake, half of the pod was clear, meaning you could see the thin violet line of the thread-field, seemingly dead steady in the centre of the view, with the segments of the Handshake flicking by in the background.
Chvids was grinning broadly. It exposed eroded gums. Skarbo had expected to be bothered by this, but he wasn’t. I’m getting less human, he thought. Should I care about that?
And knew that he didn’t.
He cared less and less about most things. Food, for one. On their way here The Bird had asked, suddenly: ‘When did you last eat anything?’
The question had made him think. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘A while ago.’
‘What sort of while?’
He thought harder. ‘Ah, when we got to the Orbiter, I guess.’
The Bird glared at him. ‘That’s a long while ago. It’s too early for you to be shutting down. You need fuel.’
‘I feel fine.’
‘That means nothing. Mammals feel fine while they’re freezing to death. Some insects feel fine when they’ve got a brain parasite that makes them fly round in circles.’
‘Really?’
‘No, I made it up. Ha! Obviously really. Don’t trust your body to make decisions for you, that’s what I’m saying. But, presumably, that means if nothing has gone in, then nothing’s come out?’
Skarbo stared at it, then shook his head.
Chvids tapped him on the shell. ‘Ask the bird thing if there’s any food,’ she said.
Skarbo sighed. She didn’t like talking directly to The Bird, and it in turn didn’t respond to her third-party questions.
And in any case, he knew the answer. There wasn’t any food. He wondered when she had last eaten. And, as an aside, if The Bird needed to eat at all.
Now it was speaking. He shook himself. ‘Sorry, what was that?’
It raised its voice to a near-screech to cut through the noise of the pod. ‘I said, we’re up to speed. Are you ready?’
He nodded.
‘Right. Let’s get on with it.’
Skarbo turned to Chvids and motioned her to hold tight. She nodded and clenched her fingers on the rail in front of her. Her lips were compressed.
Skarbo nodded at The Bird, which was somehow managing to hang on to the vibrating rail above the control patch. It seemed to take a breath. Then it loosened its grip and swung on the rail until it was upside down, its head level with the bottom of the patch. It glared at the patch for a moment, switching its head from side to side as if scanning. Then it made a quiet ha and stabbed its beak at the patch.
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