She shut her eyes and launched herself.
She dropped like a stone.
No one in the Hive ever talked openly about escape. But then, no one talked about survival either, and yet they all thought about that all the time, too.
‘Hive’ stood for ‘high value’. Hivers took that as a bitter joke.
The Hive was the biggest forced-labour colony in the Spin. It was the economic well-spring of the Inside, a space-borne city state within a state. Its million or so inhabitants were hired out to do anything at all, for anyone at all. It was slavery, on a more-than-industrial scale, and Seldyan had never known anything else.
Her stomach yawned with the acceleration and her body yelled at her to open her eyes, to flail, to save herself. She managed to ignore it, curling instead into the tightest ball she could and keeping her eyes screwed shut. Right now the best and simplest thing she could do for herself was just to fall in a straight line.
The cube’s internal monitoring, if any of it had survived Merish’s attention, would now be showing four desperate escapees falling to certain death. A straight line was the only sure way to prove it wrong. If she glided off track by more than a hundred metres or so, she was jelly.
Well, fairly sure. Her terminal speed in the thick humid atmosphere of the cube shouldn’t be too high, Merish had said, but it seemed high enough. She could feel herself tumbling, and a wind that behaved like a solid battered at her. The temptation to open her eyes was almost unbearable, but she had schooled herself to resist it.
Then something else struck at her, something that felt like being whipped with fog.
She shouted with relief. The line had been straight enough – she had hit the Feather Palms.
From their oily sap the Feather Palms provided almost half of the basic vegetable fat consumed by the Inside. Each tree was over a hundred metres tall. Their roots were shallow, and to compensate for this and to resist the high winds on their native planet they clumped together so tightly that their trunks came close to touching. Even here in this regimented environment they were planted in a hexagonal close-packed array just a metre apart. Thankfully no one had yet managed to engineer out their soft, dense, wastefully deep canopies.
At her speed soft was a matter of opinion, but deep was undeniable. Even curled up, Seldyan slowed in a series of wrenching jolts that felt as if every joint had been dislocated. Any extended limbs would certainly have been torn off. But she slowed, and eventually she felt she had lost speed enough to open her eyes and take control.
Branches were thrashing past her; she grabbed at one and lost her grip and some skin, but it had trimmed her speed to stoppable. The next one she held on to, breathing hard. Her hand hurt and her nose was full of the sickly oily smell of the palm, and she could feel her grin trying to split her face.
She waited until her breathing had got halfway back to normal. Then she hand-over-handed her way down through the remainder of the canopy until she could angle down a single branch to the main trunk. The trunk was smooth, and slender enough at this height for her to close her arms around it. She slid down for thirty metres or so until it became too thick for her to span, then took stock. The palms really were close together; if she stretched out a leg like this she could get a foothold on a neighbouring trunk. She turned her back to her own tree, braced herself against it and shunted herself down, ignoring the pain in her back.
She almost made it to ground level before her foot slipped on an oily patch.
‘Shit!’ The yelp was out before she could stop it. She hit a lot of roots with the small of her back. It knocked the breath out of her, and she lay there panting for a moment. Then, as the spasms in her diaphragm quieted, she rolled over into a crouch, looked around through the dim light – and saw nothing at all except trees, and heard nothing except a thick woody silence.
She didn’t dare try to stand. The forest floor wasn’t really a floor. The palms relied on sprawling above-ground root spreads for what little stability they had, and their vast thirst shrank the soil so that ground level became a knotted rooty obstacle course littered with loose fallen branches that were even more treacherous than the roots. The next part of the plan really had to work. Otherwise, a few years hence, she was going to be found on this exact spot, stone dead and smelling of tree oil.
She cast about carefully in the branch brash and selected a strong-looking limb about half her own height, picked it up, hefted it and then took the hardest swing she could manage at the trunk of the tree she had shinned down.
Electronic communication was out down here, for the same reason it was out up in duct-world, but hitting things was fine.
The tree rang like a musical instrument.
She listened as the sound faded away. She didn’t have to wait long; almost immediately there were three answering sounds. She nodded. All safe.
The next part was down to Merish. As had been the last, but Seldyan didn’t feel guilty about that; she and the other three had a major job to do later. If they got as far as later.
Besides, she knew herself well enough, feeling guilty wasn’t her strong suit.
She did her best to sit down on a root. It wasn’t easy, but in the end she managed a kind of perch, if she braced one foot against another root. It was miserably uncomfortable, but she didn’t care. Even uncomfortable could feel good, if it was a step away from the Hive.
I’m never going back, she thought. The word felt like a chant. Ne-ver, ne-ver, ne-ver.
A few minutes later she looked up. The woody silence had stopped being a silence – she could hear a regular knocking, about twice the speed of a heartbeat. She looked around quickly, and then nodded to herself. A few trunks away two big parallel roots formed a bridge she could just about stand on.
Beneath them was a void big enough to curl up in. That would do. She hoped the noise was Merish, but it might not be. Hiding could be good, if it was someone else.
She teetered on to the bridge, leaned against a trunk and peered cautiously round it towards where she thought the sound was coming from. When she saw it she wanted to laugh, partly out of relief that it was Merish rather than someone else, but mainly because it just looked – funny.
He was standing up, but she wasn’t sure how. He was on a platform which looked as if it was using the tree trunks like vertical monkey bars. It was grasping its way from one trunk to the next, about a metre above the rootscape, using things that looked like tree-sized lock-grip pliers. Somehow it managed to stay more or less horizontal, but some side-to-side wobble was inevitable. There was a T-shaped handle at waist height, and Merish looked as if he was having to hang on to it quite hard.
She leaned out and waved. He nodded and did something to a control on the handle. The platform slowed, coming to a stop a couple of trunks away.
She grinned at him, and then saw his expression and stopped grinning. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Tell me. No clear run, right?’
He nodded. ‘Definitely no clear run. There’s an extra shift on, fuck knows why.’
She felt herself tensing. ‘A whole extra shift? Ten bodies?’
‘Yes. I’m sorry, Sel.’
‘Why? You didn’t invite them. I’d like to know who did.’ She stared into the distance for a moment, calculating. ‘Are the main shift sorted?’
He nodded. ‘Sure. Confined in a half-exploded control room by an inexplicable series of systems failures. That bit worked okay. But there’s enough of the extra shift to cover the ways out.’
‘Are there any inside the Planter?’
‘I don’t know. There could be.’
‘We’d better assume there are then. Let’s get the others. We might need to think of another definition of exit.’ She gave the platform a jaundiced look. ‘You’re fine on that thing, for a given value of fine, but it’s only big enough to torture one at a time. What about the rest of us?’
His eyes flickered and he pointed over his shoulder.
She followed the gesture. ‘Oh …’
There was a line of four platforms behind him.
He looked embarrassed. ‘They were all I could manage. They’re slaved to this one. When they’re not hugging trees they just float. It’s pretty comfortable.’
She nodded. ‘You know, Merish, comfortable doesn’t really bother me? Freedom, now that I care about, and you’ve done your job.’ She squared her shoulders. ‘Let’s go and find the team. It’s our turn now.’
He looked away for a moment, and she saw his lips twitching.
Ten minutes later they had picked up the others and formed a wobbly line of five with Merish in the lead. Seldyan was feeling sick, partly from the uneasy jolting of the platform and partly from the pervasive smell of oil from the Feather Palms, but she still didn’t care. They were closing on the edge of the plantation and another step towards freedom, even if there were extra obstacles; reaching the edge also meant that they would soon be floating, not gripping. That was good under any circumstances, even these.
They had talked quickly about those circumstances once the five of them were together. They had a plan. It would have to do, because none of them could think of anything cleverer.
As they reached the edge of the stand of Feather Palms they split up. No one said anything.
The Planter was divided into strips a hundred metres wide. Every second one was palms; the others were mainly low-growing succulents that acted as combined moisture moderators and firebreaks. Seldyan turned her platform down the strip and gunned it so that it tilted forward and built up speed until the wind rush scoured her eyes and tried to tear her hands from the T-bar. She hugged the margin of the palms just in case it might shelter her from anyone who might be looking, but someone was bound to see her soon. Speed was the thing.
The end of the strip was rushing towards her. She held her speed as long as she dared, then reared the platform steeply backwards at the last second, threw it round a right angle that made her inner ears dance and into the narrow space between the end of the strips and the inner curtain wall of the Planter. She held on to the turn by a miracle, then leaned forward and twisted the grip to full power. There wasn’t much room; her speed built up an air dam in front of her which racketed into the end of the palm stand and bounced off the trunks with a staccato whistle that hammered at her eardrums. Then she was past the palms and hissing through the open air at the end of another low strip.
She covered the kilometre to the far corner of the Planter in just over twenty seconds, and hauled the platform to a halt. Her face felt abraded, her arms ached and her ears were ringing, and it wasn’t over yet.
She had had the furthest to go. Everyone else should be in place, but she didn’t have any way of checking because they were too far apart to communicate by hitting trees, so she would just have to assume.
That meant the time was now. She powered down the platform and it sank to the ground. Inert, it was surprisingly light. She flipped it over without much effort, examined it for a second and then ran a finger over a rectangular seam on the smooth base. The seam popped open, revealing two greyish squares covered with ominous-looking symbols in a language she couldn’t read. No user-serviceable parts inside, she thought.
‘Platforms have two cell packs,’ Merish had said, ‘but they can get by for a while on one.’
She had looked at him for a moment, and then asked, ‘Long enough?’
There had been the slightest pause before he nodded. She didn’t think anyone else had noticed.
Now she reached into the space and pulled at one of the squares. It turned out to be the square end of a cube about two hands across. As it came free there was a faint crackle. She turned it over; there was a recessed contact array hedged about with even more ominous symbols.
The wire brush she had used to scrub the surface of the duct was still hanging at her belt. She unhooked it. Then she replaced the cover and righted the platform, took the cell pack and walked towards the edge of the palm stand. Ten paces into the trees she stopped and put the cell pack down, contacts upwards. She took the wire brush and held it out, bristles downwards. She gulped, dropped it straight down towards the contacts, and was running by the time it landed.
Even with her back turned the arc was bright. There was an angry buzz, and then a wet-sounding explosion. By that point she was at the platform. She jumped on, gripped the bar and leaned the thing as far forward as she dared.
The acceleration almost tore her arms off. She allowed herself just one glance to the side – the first few palms in the stand were already on fire, set off by the electro-chemical inferno at their bases.
The whole stand of oily trees would burn. She just had to hope that the fire-front would be fast enough.
But not too fast. She tried to force the grip further, but it was at maximum. She didn’t know what the top speed of the platform was, or how long it could keep it up on only one cell pack, or if the whole mad scheme would work, or anything.
She still felt like whooping.
Then something screeched and slammed behind her, and a wall of sub-sonic noise shook the platform.
She risked a glance over her shoulder. The first firebreak had dropped. Now the first hundred flaming metres of the Planter were isolated by a thousand tonnes of mineral-fibre curtain wall. It was the next-to-last defence of the Planter, designed to isolate just about any problem.
Except for five improvised incendiary bombs all at once. She glanced again – the trees in front of the firebreak were smouldering. As she looked, flames leapt. She faced forward and gritted her teeth. Even this far ahead of the fire the air smelled of burning oil.
Slam. That was the second wall. Eight to go. She didn’t look this time; she had felt herself slowing the last time she had turned. Speed was everything. The burning smell was getting stronger.
Slam. The concussion seemed stronger too. She was losing ground. Seven to go. She could feel radiated heat on the back of her head.
Slam. It was getting harder to breathe. By now there should have been an air-wash blowing back across the Planter, driving the fire into itself, but instead the air was full of billowing oily smoke.
She remembered. They had broken the ducts. The air-wash couldn’t help, either by clearing the smoke or slowing the fire-front. She wanted to thump the controls, but she didn’t dare.
Slam. She blinked. That one had seemed quieter. For a moment she thought she must be gaining, but that couldn’t be right; the heat and the smoke were even stronger. Then she realized. It wasn’t that the firebreak had been quieter – everything else was louder. There was a thrumming roar. Now she risked another look over her shoulder, and immediately wished she hadn’t.
Where there should have been trees, there was boiling black smoke shot through with expanding bubbles of fire. It was far too close, and it was getting closer.
It wasn’t going to work after all. Then she corrected herself: it wasn’t going to work for her. She hoped the others were ahead of her. It was supposed to be impossible for Hivers to break out; four impossibles out of a possible five would be pretty good going.
Besides, she wasn’t done yet. She leaned forward as far as possible, drew her elbows into her body to streamline herself and twisted the control so hard she thought it would break, thinking that if this was what freedom felt like – then it felt good.
Better than good. Better than anything she had ever experienced.
And then she felt the platform slowing down.
She actually laughed. When she saw Merish she would tell him that ‘long enough’ was not long enough, after all. Except that now it looked like she wouldn’t be seeing Merish again.
The platform dropped to the ground and she threw herself off it and into a dead run. She had no idea how far she was ahead of the fire-front, or how far behind the last firebreak and when it would drop. All she knew was running, and trying to breathe air that was no longer proper air but smoke and soot and heat that rasped her throat and fouled her lungs. Her heart hammered and her vision began to
fade.
The screech and slam of the last firebreak were dead overhead. Her legs gave way; she dropped and rolled awkwardly, hoping it was still forward.
She came to a stop and for a second there was nothing. Then she heard the fire and knew that it was all over.
Then she felt arms on her, uncurling her.
‘Seldyan! You okay?’
She opened her eyes. It was Merish. At first she wanted to throw her arms round him and she tried to raise herself. Then she realized, and fell back. If he was here they must both have failed. She corrected herself – she had failed both of them.
‘Seldyan! Shit, will you snap out of it? You need to be ready.’
She shook her head. ‘Ready for what?’
‘What do you think? You still got your vac tab?’
It was hard to think, and besides, he was talking nonsense. She humoured him, patting the upper pocket of her coverall. ‘Yep, still there. So what?’
‘Then fucking take it!’
She opened her eyes properly and stared at him. ‘Seriously?’
‘Of course seriously! Take it now!’
Still staring at him, she fumbled the little pill out of her pocket. It was standard issue for anyone who went space-side, even Hivers. Boiling away into a vacuum, if you were exposed to it, wasn’t good. The vac tab bought you minutes.
Her brain came back to life. If she was taking a tab then that must mean …
She took it, and looked at Merish. ‘How long?’
He shrugged. ‘Should be ten seconds.’
‘Right. We’d better hold on, then.’ She rolled over, extended her hands and drove her stiffened fingers into the soil between the succulents. For a frantic moment she found nothing. Then her fingers met something and curled around it. It was the geotextile mesh that held the soil together. It should be strong enough.
She saw Merish lying down next to her, his hands pushing down as hers had. Then she heard it – louder than the crash of the firewalls, louder than the roar of the burning trees, it was a sound that had meant frozen boiling death to ten thousand generations of space-faring animals.
Iron Gods Page 2
