Shooting the Rift - eARC

by Alex Stewart

  “Are there many of those?” I asked, without thinking, most of my attention still on the arrivals and departures going on around us. From here I could see about thirty cradles, roughly two thirds of them occupied; as I watched, a ship broke free of its girderwork nest and fell upwards, disappearing through the cloud layer in a matter of moments, while another couple drifted over the harbor like bright metal soap bubbles, descending slowly towards their assigned berths.

  “A few.” Clio seemed disconcerted by the question. “But you know how it is in the Guild. Here today, gone tomorrow. None of them really lasted.”

  “Lucky you,” I said, and her eyes narrowed. “My mother hoarded embarrassing stories about me. Which she trotted out at every opportunity. They lasted a lot longer than I’d have liked.”

  Her face cleared. “No, I meant . . . Never mind.” She pointed at a fast-moving sled, peeling off from the traffic lane to head in our direction, apparently happy to change the subject. “Is that our ride?”

  “It is,” I confirmed, after meshing briefly with the onboard processor. It seemed manual piloting was prohibited in the docking area, which, considering the number of ships, vehicles and drones in the air, seemed more than sensible. It wasn’t much to look at, a basic utility model, sprayed gray beneath the grime, but at least it was enclosed. It drifted into the platform, and popped the passenger door on the side facing us. “Where to?”

  “Let me.” Clio scrambled in, already meshing with the AI, feeding it a destination as she settled herself on the padded bench seat in the rear. I followed, a little more carefully.

  “Seems like you know the city well,” I said, as the door closed, sealing us in with the smell of wet hair and damp clothing.

  “About as well as I know anywhere dirtside,” she agreed. “You can’t do much trade in this part of the Sphere without passing through Numarkut a lot.”

  “I guess not,” I agreed. The rifts would see to that, funneling trade through the nexus they created there; an economic advantage which guaranteed the system’s independence, as well as its prosperity. I knew the Commonwealth had made innumerable diplomatic overtures over the last few centuries, attempting to convince the authorities there to abandon its neutrality and join us, just as the League, and probably a few other local powers, had too: but the Numarkuteers had steadfastly resisted all blandishments. And who could blame them? Why become a client state, and watch the bulk of their wealth drain down the nearest rift?

  Of course some states were more belligerent than others, but Numarkut was as safe from invasion as it was possible to be: not from the size of its Navy, which was essentially non-existent (customs cutters like Plubek’s were about as close to a warship as the system possessed), but from the size of everyone else’s. Numarkut was too important to the economies of all the regional powers for any of them to stand idly by while one of their neighbors attempted to seize it, and anyone foolish enough to try would be on the wrong end of the gun ports of every other state in the vicinity. Even the League or the Commonwealth would be hopelessly outgunned by such an alliance, let alone the small fry. So, despite the envy of everyone surrounding them, Numarkut sat comfortably at the center of the local rift network, getting steadily richer and more corrupt, to the great satisfaction of its citizens.

  “Hang on,” Clio warned, as the cab lifted away from the cradle. “These things can get a little rough to ride in sometimes.” As if to underline her words, it banked abruptly, and dived for the traffic lane nearest the ground, where most of the passenger vehicles were congregated. With the greater part of my attention still on the novel sight of the Stacked Deck’s outer hull, I was taken by surprise, and fell heavily against her. “Oof.”

  “Sorry.” I scrambled back to my half of the seat. “I see what you mean.”

  “I did warn you.” She grinned, amused at my discomfiture, and regained her own balance with an easy shrug. Maintaining it seemed to involve sitting close enough for our thighs to touch, which I must admit I had no objection to; after half a lifetime of fending off Carenza, and all too many like her, it felt pleasant to be with a woman who seemed to like me for who I was, not just what I looked like.

  “Lucky we didn’t take that lift with Rolf and Lena,” I said. She nodded again. “You weren’t really joking about cracking a rib, were you?”

  “Not entirely,” Clio agreed, settling back against the upholstery.

  The cab continued to slalom its way between the towering cradles, surrounded by traffic, and I found myself glancing up at the starships balanced above us. Somehow they seemed a lot bulkier from this angle, looming over us in a manner I couldn’t help but find vaguely threatening.

  “So you should,” Clio agreed, when I spoke the thought aloud. “If the gravitics go off, the cradles would just collapse. We’d be squished like a bug.” Which, I must admit, hadn’t occurred to me, but was kind of obvious when you came to think about it. Starships were big, and correspondingly heavy. Far too much so to be held aloft by an assemblage of girders, however solid they might appear.

  “But Sarah’s powering them down,” I said, faintly uneasy. Gravitics were like everything else in everyday usage: reliable enough to be used without thinking, but needing maintenance now and again to stay that way. Of course the Stacked Deck wasn’t about to plummet to the ground, but even so, the image was a worrying one.

  “Not ours. The cradle’s.” Clio meshed into the cab’s primitive node, nudging the flight instructions. The little sled began to rise, out of the main stream of the traffic, twisting back and forth as it evaded the heavier commercial vehicles in the higher lanes—which threw Clio and me together again, in a fashion I must admit to finding far from unpleasant. She pointed out of the window. “See?”

  “Right.” I peered through the murk at the nearest cradle, which was unoccupied, a circle of leaden sky visible through the hole in the loading platform into which a ship would nestle. Ground crew, in garish visibility jackets, were working on platforms and gantries beneath the wide, flat ring, no doubt grateful for the shelter it afforded from the never-ending rain. It was hard to be sure as we swept past, but several of them seemed to be working on gravitic coils embedded in the structure of the tower. “So those units hold the ships in place.”

  “That’s right.” Clio nodded, then grinned, in the mischievous fashion with which I was becoming so familiar. “Unless their power fails, of course.”

  “Of course.” But that wouldn’t happen. All the port’s power systems would be multiply redundant, to prevent just such a catastrophe from occurring.

  Override limits reached. Resuming standard course, the sled’s AI grumbled, in what could fancifully be taken as an aggrieved tone.

  Clio sighed. “Don’t you sometimes wish you could just take manual control? We’d be there in half the time.”

  “Say no more.” I don’t honestly know where the impulse to show off came from; but I liked the girl, and I suppose I wanted to impress her. It was trivially easy for me to mesh with the guidance system, penetrate it with my sneakware, and override the flight controls while leaving the simple device convinced it was still following the parameters programmed into it. “What would you like to do?”

  “I don’t know. Something exciting.” Clio shrugged.

  “Something exciting, coming up.” I fed power into the gravitics, pointing the nose skyward. The cab shot up and out of the traffic lanes, the collision avoidance system getting a real workout in the process, which added a few jolts and lurches to our progress.

  Clio squealed. “What the hell do you think you’re playing at? You’ll get us killed!”

  “No, I won’t,” I assured her. She seemed to believe me, too, God knows why, leaning forward eagerly in her seat as the idea sunk in that I was in full control of the hurtling cab.

  “Prove it. Shoot the cradle.”

  For a second or so I wondered what she meant, and then I registered the circle of sky visible beyond the platform I’d been staring at. The idea was i
rresistible.

  “Brilliant.” I aimed for the center of the bullseye, and we shot up and through the thick steel ring in a long, smooth parabola, topping out about a hundred feet above it: which was still below the tops of the hulls of the ships in the occupied cradles. Glancing back, I saw several of the maintenance workers shouting and gesticulating in our general direction: I wasn’t entirely sure what they were saying, but somehow I doubted that they were complimenting me on my flying ability.

  Clio had noticed them too. “Uh oh. We could be in trouble.”

  “Don’t think so.” I took us around the nearest freighter, out of their eyeline. “We’d have been past so quick they won’t have got a good look at us.” This vessel looked a little different to the Stacked Deck, its hull less smooth: small metallic blisters ran around it, every thirty degrees, with a larger one on the top. They looked uncannily like the emitters of a warship’s offensive graviton beams, although I couldn’t for the life of me imagine why a warship would be docked at a commercial starport. Its beacon was transmitting a clear ident, though; the Eddie Fitz, non-Guild, registered to a shipping company on Downholm. A League world, a couple of rifts away from Numarkut.

  “What about our nav system, though?” Clio fretted. “If Traffic Control mesh in . . .”

  “They’ll find we’re pootling along in the designated passenger lane,” I assured her. “It’s not the first time I’ve done this sort of thing, you know.” Which was sort of true—we didn’t have automated traffic control on Avalon, as the aristocracy felt the odd fatal accident was a small price to pay to avoid the inconvenience of having their movements recorded and restricted, and what was good enough for them bloody well ought to be good enough for the rest of us, but I’d redacted the memories of a fair few trips Mother would have disapproved of from the family runabout’s diagnostic systems over the years.

  Right about then, though, I was more interested in the Eddie Fitz. There wouldn’t be anything about her in the hoard of data I’d purloined from Plubek, as she’d have arrived through one of the rifts leading into the League, but the beacon might be informative. I ran quickly through the class and registry details, probing more deeply than the public datacast, to access the additional information she’d passed on to the Harbormaster’s office. Former transport for the League fleet auxiliary, mothballed about twelve years ago, sold on to the Toniden Line after a decade or so, and refitted as a civilian freighter. Modifying the hull after stripping out the armament would have been hideously expensive, so the housings had just been left in situ. Of course they’d make balancing the grav field around the hull while shooting a rift a bit more tricky, but nothing a halfway decent bit of ‘ware couldn’t handle, especially with a competent engineer riding herd on it. She seemed to be on a regular run, with three visits to Numarkut recorded in the last six months, but I didn’t have time to worm any more out of the system: we were already moving away from the cradle at a rapid clip, and the beacon’s power was low, only intended to guide drones and cargo sleds to the right platform once they were in its immediate vicinity.

  “If you say so,” Clio said, a little dubiously, then glanced at me with a sparkle of mischief in her eyes. “But I guess if you’re wrong we’re already in trouble, so . . . how fast can you get us to that drink?”

  “This fast,” I said, overriding the limiter on the power plant, and pinning us back in our seat with another surge of acceleration.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  In which a small change of plan leads to an unexpected party.

  The city of Dullingham lived up to its name just as much as the landing field had. As soon as we crossed the city limits I returned control of the cab to its onboard systems, which remained blissfully unaware that they’d ever been tampered with, and sat back to enjoy the sights, only to discover that there weren’t any.

  All right, that was a little unfair. According to the city guide I was able to access through the cab’s node, Dullingham possessed parks, a cathedral, a municipal art gallery housing several notable works by a renowned Numarkut artist I’d never heard of before, and a botanical garden containing specimens of flora from a dozen different worlds, all of them colorful, and hardly any of which were lethally toxic. Not to mention theatres, music halls, and a fun fair, if your recreational tastes were a little less refined. But the part we were traversing was universally damp and cheerless.

  Which, I suppose, was only to be expected. This close to the docks they exerted their own kind of gravitational attraction, pulling in services and utility zones, while the majority of residential areas and their associated amenities drifted to the opposite side of the river dividing the city. Most of the buildings around us were warehouses, ancient and weather-stained, some of them probably dating back as far as the first settlement. Generations of addition and refurbishment had kept them structurally sound, while a few newer structures, like fresh dentures in a gum full of rotting teeth, gave mute testament to those which had given up the battle with the passing of the years. (Or, more prosaically, had proven cheaper to knock down and replace than to keep on repairing.)

  “Why did you do that?” Clio asked, as I disengaged from the node, and the cab dropped back to the officially sanctioned pace of an arthritic slug. With good reason, I must admit, the roads between the warehouses being full of big, heavy cargo sleds with a lot of inertia, drone lifters buzzing up and down between the curbside and the higher levels, and people milling around between them, either contributing to the general bustle, or getting somewhere far away from it as quickly as possible. Dusk was coming on by now, accelerated by the looming clouds and the high walls all around us, and lamps were beginning to kindle, spilling puddles of sticky yellow light, which wavered slightly every time a fast-moving cargo sled in the upper traffic lane sent the supporting drones bobbing in the backwash of its passing, across the street below.

  “Too much chance of bumping into something,” I said, a little regretfully, as our high-speed dash across the landing field had been quite exhilarating. “Besides, if those cradlejacks did get a look at us, we want to look like a sled that’s behaving itself in front of all these people.”

  “Good point.” She leaned forward a little, to look out of the window on my side of the cab. “Besides, we’re almost there. Don’t want to make too big an entrance.”

  “Quite,” I agreed. Even though Guilders seemed to have a fairly flexible relationship with local law enforcement, I was pretty sure entering a tavern without getting out of the sled first would be frowned upon.

  The cab hummed round a corner, and most of the commercial traffic disappeared; only a few short-term storage facilities seemed to be on this street, and, beyond the next intersection, a mixture of residential and commercial properties began: low-rent housing for the small army of workers required to keep the dockyard and its cargo handling facilities running smoothly, and the ancillary businesses which would inevitably spring up around them, in an effort to siphon off a portion of their wages. Chief among them, of course, were bars and bordellos, the latter easily distinguished by the number of scantily-clad men and women lounging around in the lobby, eyeing up every passerby with bright smiles and dead eyes. Most were heavily made-up, in an effort to disguise the accelerated aging endemic to their vocation, but without much success. There were a surprising number of transgeners among them too: Aunt Jenny had been right about the popularity of tails, although in this context I found the tweak, and the reasons for its choice I tried hard not to think about, quite profoundly disturbing.

  “Anything you like?” Clio asked, and I felt my face flame scarlet.

  “Of course not,” I said, and she glanced across at me, looking faintly confused: only then did I realize she’d been scanning the diners and food stalls lining the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. “I mean, I ate before we came out. Thanks.”

  “Maybe later.” She grinned, picking up on the subtext of the exchange. “I said I’d buy you a drink, Si, not a hooker.”

&n
bsp; “Good,” I said, a bit too vehemently, and she snickered quietly, greatly amused by my evident confusion. “Kind as the offer would be, I’m afraid I’d have to turn it down.”

  “Not the sort of thing an Avalonian gentleman does?” she teased.

  “Definitely not,” I agreed, relieved that she found the whole thing so amusing. “Avalonian ladies, on the other hand . . .” Tinkie had never made any secret of her escapades while on leave, many of which seemed to have involved paid participants, although whether she’d been entirely truthful, or embroidering these accounts because my disapproval amused her so much, I had no idea. The thought of my sister was a poignant one, not least because we’d parted on such bad terms, and I found myself casting about for something to banish the sudden sensation of loss which threatened to overwhelm me. “Let’s walk from here.”

  “Good idea,” Clio said, instructing the cab to pull over.

  We disembarked on a damp and crowded sidewalk, the sled rising and pulling away in search of fresh customers as soon as the door closed behind us. I debated with my conscience about whether I should mesh back in briefly to inflate the fare, to compensate for the additional wear and tear I’d inflicted on the little vehicle’s systems, but for once I won: no point in leaving any anomalous traces of meddling which might lead to trouble later on.

  For a mercy, the persistent drizzle we’d set out in had moderated to a thin Scotch mist, hazing the air between the hovering lights, and the garish illumination spilling from food emporia, tavern, and brothel alike. If there was any other kind of business on the street I didn’t see it, although I suppose some of the rooms on the upper floors could easily have been offices of some kind rather than the apartments I assumed at the time.

  The first thing which struck me, apart from the noise, was the smell: damp air, of course, but intermingled with the odors of sizzling meat and fish from the open-air stalls, and spicier aromas from the more permanent premises. Ozone, from the power plants of the sleds and drones hurrying by, and the sickly sweet smell of too many people in too little space who haven’t had a chance to dry out yet.