Ares Express dru-2

by Ian McDonald

  “This is it, boys!” she guldered at the top of her ample lungs to the running acolytes. “This is war!”

  It wears off, they’d warned Lutra Blaine when she ticked the box in the job centre next to “Space Service.” And quicker than you think, too. Cartwheeling off the action end of the Skywheel space elevator (no, it’s not me going arse-over-heels, it’s the stars carouselling around me; the innocent solipsism of the work-placement cosmonaut) she had yippeed in her soul of souls as the red-green-occasional-blue mottle of her world rolled up in a great disc before her like a test for colour-blindness in the eye of the Divine. So tell me Ms. Blaine, what can you read down there? Nothing but a door out of three rooms and twelve bodies Level Twenty-Seven Deep St. Berisha Project NewMarket Down, Belladonna, Greatest of the Cities of the Valley. The doctors had warned her of possible agoraphobia. It would still not have grounded her. No one got turned down for space service. Not a problem, she said. Outer space was no bigger or blacker than inner space. The tunnels of the littler moon were no less pumicey and constricting. Space, like bedrock, was just another darkness into which you cannot go.

  You do know you’ve more chance of winning the Fat Lotto every week for a year than seeing some, you know, action, the sheddle steward had said as he turned her the right way up and sent her and her canvas grip-bag sailing through the lock into the foam-padded reception bay.

  That’s okay, she had thought as she swam through the thick, fart-whiffy air, wondering who the stocky, shock-headed smiler was down at the end of the cylinder, hand held out to welcome her to Planetary Defence System Terror. Just as long as the cheques keep coming.

  The view was the one thing that had not tired. The constant vague nanogee nausea; the bloated, rodent face in the morning mirror; the unflagging, eroding energy with which Taroudant—the tousled grinner—tried to get his hand into the waistband of her draw-string Space Service baggies—most of all, this last—those she’d tired of by the end of her first shift. But her world, her home, the soil of her birth, her shelter and prison; spinning slowly like the hands of a great clock behind the watch-glass of the observation blister, she would wake from near-trance to find hours had vanished, witched out of her by the huge, slow-turning world beneath her. Twelve and a half years she had lived and crawled beneath the surface without ever once looking at its face.

  Truth be told, Taroudant notwithstanding—he occupied an ecological niche all his own—the creaky old battle station was full of creeps. Unaccountable breezes eddied in the gritty pumice tunnels. Light panels would flicker as she swam past, or switch themselves off, or, more spookily still, on, illuminating vast, irregular, lung-like hollows she was quite sure did not appear on any of the moon maps. Machines loved to click and groan theatrically; spirals of dust would spin and sparkle in the hub-chambers where tunnel systems met, and what was that lingering smell of perfume, like ashes of roses? Taroudant would have been the obvious suspect, by the unfeasible logic that if he scared her enough she’d suck him off, except that she knew he sensed them too and, more primarily, he lacked the imagination for even that rudimentary ploy. And he never smelled of anything approaching ashes, let alone of roses.

  No, ghosts there were in the old, hollow moon. That was the very idea of the place. An army of ghosts, to be resurrected from the crusty regolith in the hour of its primary’s need and thrown into final battle. She’d glimpsed the ranked processors behind their diamond viewing panes, waiting in supercool quantum chill to spin soldiers out of stone, like ice goblins in faerytales. The cold got into her bones, never really got out again, in the long, empty spaces of Planetary Defence System Terror. She floated warily past the empty templates mounted on the walls, breast-plated and beaked like insect warrior armour. Too many eyes, too many toes, too many arms that ended in too many blades, like ever-opening penknives. Slashers stabbers impalers gutters beheaders. All our warfares in the end come down to hand-to-hand. Stick a piece of sharp metal through your enemy. Simple and reliable. Like Taroudant. He came down to the hand-to-hand, in the end. Impale with a pointed weapon. Knob knob knob knob knob. Simple and reliable.

  Two people; man, woman, trying to avoid each other in a worm-eaten potato of a moonlet, two billion humans’ final defence against interplanetary attack. Oh. Forgetting of course, SERAPAMOUN, Cheraph, exalted one, genius loci, seeded so thoroughly and minutely through Terror that the whole planetoid could be said to be one great orbiting brain. The real trigger finger, silent as only the angels can be silent, patiently waiting for a word certain never to be spoken, that would transform moon-stuff into machine warriors and send them falling out of the evening sky like diamond rain in their spin-carbon reentry shells.

  Sometimes, as she hovered above the great viewing eye, Lutra Blaine wished for even a rumour of war. A blip on the sensors that watched the edges of System. A sudden rip in reality, spewing dagger-edged starfighters from some alien empire, filling all circumambient space with lambent beams of coruscating force. Skyjack and piracy on one of the big, stately Sailships. Something to set the alarms ringing and the amber lights pulse-rotating and Lutra and Taroudant hand-over-handing at flank speed along the tunnelways.

  Nah.

  So there was always the world, and it was unfailingly wonderful. The amazement that geography was actually the same as drawn in the atlas. The miracle of clouds seen from above. The revelation that weather moved and you could watch the birth, life and death of a storm. That the seas had currents, that the mountains had snowcaps and that the green of spring visibly spread south day by day. A thought unfolded the opticon arm, through its eye Lutra could look past the clouds to see the wakes of ships on her world’s small, landlocked seas. She could squint through the dazzle of sunlight from Worldroof to map the towns and tight-packed city-states of Grand Valley’s floor. She could track the progress of the great trains across the quarterspheres by the white plumes of steam lashing out behind them. She loved the trains most, cranking up the magnification on the opticon until she could make out the spider-silk threads of the tracks themselves, their junctions and switchovers, trying to guess the route this freight would take, that passenger express. The train was freedom. The iron way out. Her hormone-haunted teenage sleep had been broken at least once a night by a whistle far away through the labyrinth of stone streets and downramps between St. Berisha and Belladonna Main. Train a’leavin’. Without you, Lutra Blaine.

  “Child’a’grace, not again!” she grimaced.

  The enchantment was dispelled by a red light pulsing in the bottom left corner of the opticon. That intermittent again. She thought up a diagnostic. Her world went out of focus.

  As she suspected. The bloody thing had kicked into assembler preignition. Sixth time in as many days. Senile bunch of scrap. No way, of course, to think of an angel, a Cheraph, no less, whose physical body you inhabited more as parasite than guest. But no one could deny that after that night it had started to go quietly ga-ga. No one had explained what the hell was going on there, like no one had explained what the hell was going on that night, when all the stars started shooting at each other with lasers and all the viewing panels had sealed up tight and somewhere inside her a nasty little voice had said, there’s stuff going on here they don’t want you to see, stuff that might, just might get you killed, Lutra Blaine.

  Machines. The way they should do it: either fix the stupid machine so you don’t need any people so they can shoot away to their hearts’ content, or you scrap SERAPAMOUN and make it all people. But three; one angel, one girl and one pervo, is sure-as-eggs-is-eggs grief.

  Pain in the hole. When it kicked off you had to go down there and shut the bloody thing down manually before it went into full Generation One assembler breeding. It was only a one-touch panel, but it was picking that panel out of a grid twenty by twenty all the colours of the rainbow. First time she’d made it with 007 seconds to spare. Once the processor halls started filling with assemblers, all hungry for moonrock to turn into cybersoldier, it took three different c
odewords from three separate Anarchs to put the system back into Condition Mauve.

  “Tarou, he’s kicking off again,” she said more in hope than confidence. The first three times he’d told her she had to do it because she needed to know what to do in an emergency, the fourth time she realised that he was saying that because he hadn’t Idea One about how anything in the battle station worked.

  Sort it yourself.

  She’d worked out a way of negotiating Terror’s warren of tunnels, push with the hands in a long, gentle incline toward a point on the opposite wall way down the tube, spin one eighty halfway down so that she met the oncoming rock hands and face forward, ready for another long shallow swallow-dive. As she zigzagged toward the main soul-sphere in the zero-gee hollow at the core of the satellite where the heart of SERAPAMOUN depended, the thought niggled her, as it had each time before when the intermittent kicked off, that she should probably tell someone about this.

  Nah (as she jack-knifed from the Equatorial One into Six O’Clock Diagonal). They didn’t pay her enough for responsibility.

  One swoop past the intersection, Taroudant had left one of his tokens of intent. Grimacing, Lutra squeezed herself past the slowly revolving glob of milky jizzum.

  “This wasn’t in my job description, man!”

  This time, not even a far distant snicker, reverberating through the tunnel system. The wads she could cope with, just. The lurkings, the stealth approaches, the sudden shock of a hand slipped into her pants, the clutch of a (small) breast: not even a job creation scheme cosmonaut should have to tolerate that. And she never saw him coming. He could move fast and silent as a shadow in those endless corridors.

  Creep.

  As her hands touched gritstone for the next fist-off, a peculiar tremor ran through her palms. She seized a rung, stayed her flight. Fingertips told her unprecedented things were stirring within the pumice. What; her one-hour prelaunch neuro-induction course had not covered. Had covered very little, except how not to depressurise the station, and if in doubt, refer upward. She changed course at the next node, upward rather than inward, following the tremble she could now feel in the air around her to the nearest processor hall. Her arms cleared a swathe through a flock of foam styrene food trays, still sticky with sambhar sauce and curry ketchup, the detritus of Taroudant’s solitary dinners; she came in for a landing on the crystal porthole of the Valhalla 3 hall. Squinting down between her feet she could see at once through the hypercold the wasp-striped feed hoppers raised from their rest positions, pressed against raw rock, guzzling greedily. Shadows in the frosted diamond casting chambers. She bent closer, squinted. Steel bones and beaks. As she watched, swarms of assembler drones wove wires and smart-carbon sinews around the naked skeletons.

  “Shit shit shit shit shit,” said Lutra Blaine. There was no avoiding having to tell someone now. She kicked off.

  Something snagged the waistband of her pants.

  “Leave it out, man!” she yelled at Taroudant. “This is serious, SERAPAMOUN’s lost it big time, the whole place is going monkeyshit.”

  The fingers did not let go. The other hand seized a fistful of work shirt.

  “Tarou…”

  She slapped behind her, yelped. The back of her knuckles had connected with something harder by far than barely-post-adolescent flesh.

  A third hand snagged her right ankle.

  She began a scream. A fourth hand ended it, fingers clapped around her open mouth. Six fingers of articulated stone. Lutra Blaine kicked with her free leg, struck out with her hands. Stone arms thrust from the tunnel walls to seize and pin them. Held immobile, Lutra Blaine could only watch the opposite side of the corridor unfold like an insect’s maw into an arsenal of graspers, blades, buzz-saws. A swift, sure pass of the scalpel opened her up from pubis to sternum. Rectractors peeled back flesh and bone as the robot mandibles proceeded to patiently disembowel her.

  26

  For three days Kid Pharaoh rode the cow-catcher of Grand Trunk Rapido Hep Badda, wide-eyed and hallucinating with speed and hunger.

  In Xipotle he had jumped from the steps of the rickety-clickety stopper service across the sidings toward the gleaming behemoth of the big express. He had rolled under the grazer wagons, fragrant bovine piss leaking through the wooden slats as he pressed himself close to the track ballast, waiting for the Traction people to finish their inspection. As the boarding gantries retracted, he made his low, darting run and scramble up the slope of the cow-catcher. As Sweetness Asiim Engineer 12th had promised, he was invisible. His heart had bounded as the whistles blew and the drive shafts exploded in insane gouts of steam and the wheels fought for grip on the smooth steel. His fingers tightened their grip. Hep Badda gathered speed and swung out on to the Grand Valley mainline. On the upslope to midnight the sense of speed, of potential, of fast movement through a dimensionless, unguessed-at void thrilled him, on the downside the click of the joints and the brisk, muscular rhythm of the pistons began to hypnotise him. Pharaoh just, just, caught himself nodding off. Guillotining death winked in the moonslight; just, just, he pulled back. After that, he lashed himself to the cow-catcher irons with his belt and strips torn from his short sleeves. Crucified, he rode the steel rails. His numb, sun-scarred eyes were focused on those twin tracks of steel, forever reeling in beneath his crossed feet but never growing one centimetre shorter, always always reaching all the way to the horizon. The big luxury express had driven him against the wind so long and so hard he felt it was blowing straight through him, making a calliope of his rib cage, his skull transparent, a bowlful of gales. Wind madness.

  Three days he rode thus, between starvation and velocity, mania and enlightenment, the cold steel rail and aspiration. Out of his head. Held together by strips and straps. He would have become another cheap martyr to the rails had not the sudden shock of a something jolted him back to his claw-hold on the cow-catcher. A shift of gravity, a change of pressure, a new tone in the mantra of the wheels; something. He opened his eyes and let out a rending shriek as tracks, train, passengers and Pharaoh perched on the very prow of it all were swallowed by the gaping demon-mouth of the mainline approach to Belladonna, mightiest and least obtrusive of cities. Pharaoh howled as Hep Badda plunged down into darkness, the twin beams of the head lanterns stabbing out on either side of him. Down down down. Signal lights and speed boards loomed at Pharaoh, switchovers glinted silver, hinting at strange other ways down darkly secret side tunnels. Pharaoh became conscious of other levels above and below that interpenetrated his space. Gleams of riding lights, echoes of whistles from high overhead, sudden gasps of steam wisping out of a side tunnel; on one occasion, the lights of carriage windows glimpsed through gaps in the track beneath his feet, other journeys speeding down there in the deeper dark.

  After a timeless time in the dark, he became aware of a growing light ahead, a golden glow not from any device of Hep Badda’s, but from the tunnel itself. With a pressure gradient that wrenched the drum of his surviving ear, the rapido burst from its narrow tube into a wide subterranean boulevard. Houses and tenements carved from raw stone leaned over the tracks so steeply and closely that they met overhead in knurled concrete bosses and casement-studded fan vaultings. These were the barryvilles of Belladonna, the first diggings of the manformers when the world had no air and the radiation would roast your gear in your pants like a station vendor’s spiced nuts. Idiosyncrasies with cutting lasers had, over the centuries, deepened it into a chaotically baroque architecture, and the old vehicle out-lock had widened into the main thoroughfare into Belladonna.

  The big train brushed terrifyingly close to overhanging orioles and stone balconies: Pharaoh saw, quite clearly, a woman in a simple white shift standing reading a letter in a glassed bubble. Her face was joyful. Then she was whisked into the past. Residents bustled along the arcades that hugged the faces of the red stone buildings like a ballet dancer’s tights his piece; made their way up broad, foot-worn staircases to the hanging markets on their precarious stone pl
atforms. Elegant stone footbridges arched over the tracks. Pharaoh glimpsed children’s faces grinning down. He waved, they were gone. He had no notion how deep he was, but many tracks came together here under the vaulted ceiling: Hep Badda sprinted past a crowded local, a goggle-eyed, nocturnal creature that spent its entire life in the tunnels ways within Belladonna. The express gained on a big tanker train, drew level, prow to prow. Pharaoh glanced across, met another pair of eyes returning the regard. The two freeloaders strapped to their respective cow-catchers stared, then Hep Badda pulled away. Somewhere ahead must lie the terminus, Belladonna’s legendary Main, but squint as he might, Pharaoh could see no end to the great street, just the warm golden glow haze of ten thousand windows.

  But end it must, and did, the Barryville terminating in a sheer face of cliff pierced by a dozen tunnels. Hep Badda selected its destination, slid over the points and into constricting darkness. The lights showed nothing but curving track, but Pharaoh’s kinesic sense told him his was headed upward. Then the Grand Trunk Rapido ground around a tight turn in the tunnel, a circle of painful white opened in front of Pharaoh’s pained eyes and in a fanfare of steam and whistles he was thrust into the Minus One and second-highest level of Belladonna Main.

  Hep Badda glided in to the marble platform like an oil-drop on steel. Numb with wonder, Pharaoh gazed up, immune to the stares of the station staff. Belladonna Main filled a shaft a kilometre deep. The same constructional diamond technology that propped up Grand Valley’s roof here built the cantilevers and cables that supported the ten levels of platforms, tracks, concourses and ticketing halls that criss-crossed each other like outspread fingers in a children’s game of who-gets-to-go-first. What entranced Pharaoh was that, up there beyond the spans and spars of Level Nought, he could see dawn light glitter on the glass dome that capped the shaft-station, and through that, beyond that, the building-crusted shaft of a support pier leading his vision high, higher, highest, through the morning cumulus to the diamond glint of Worldroof.