Iron Gods

by Andrew Bannister

  It was the howl of air racing out of something very fast.

  Seldyan looked up and felt her eyes widen. The vaulted roof was splitting into segments like the skin of a fruit. If she had needed confirmation, here it was; they had made it to the last cell after all, and now the Planter had activated its ultimate defence. When the fire can’t be contained, sod the biomass – save the structure. The whole thing was opening itself to vacuum.

  She held on.

  A hurricane gripped her. Shrieking winds hauled her body off the ground. A vortex of plants, burning tree fragments and even the soil itself was flicking up towards the void. The force on her arms was massive – but manageable.

  Then she saw one of Merish’s hands grasp at the soil, and flail, and fly loose. The other, still buried, was shaking. As she watched, the hooked fingers began to uncurl.

  Her muscles made the decision before her brain could intervene. She undid the fingers of her right hand, yanked it out of the soil and flung it out and back just as Merish yelped and lost his grip completely.

  She caught his shoulder then lost it, his upper arm then lost it, and finally felt his hand close on hers. She gripped back as hard as she could, and gritted her teeth as his mass tried to tear her in half. Her shoulders were close to dislocating and her fingers screamed at her.

  She ignored them. It’s just pain, she told herself. This time it’s pain you’re choosing. Take it.

  She took it.

  They were buffeted by a storm of shattered timber and smouldering leaves, and she shut her eyes and got ready to be battered to death. Then, at last, the pull lessened and she opened her eyes.

  A cloud of ice crystals fogged the view, forming a swirling vortex that followed the clashing debris out through the open roof. When it had gone, so had the last of the air. Without the vac tab she would have had about twenty seconds; with it, maybe three minutes. It was enough, if the hurried plan they had made in the plantation worked out.

  As the wind had died the Planter’s grav had reasserted itself. They dropped to the ground fairly gently with Merish on top in the total silence of a vacuum. He let go of her hand and rolled off, and she gingerly uncurled her buried fingers from the mesh.

  Letting go managed to hurt even more than holding on. She squeezed her hand shut, and fascinatedly watched a drop of blood boil away into the vacuum.

  She shook herself. Merish was gesturing towards the end wall and she saw his platform, somehow still sitting obediently on the ground. There were several questions she had no time to ask him, and no breath either; they ran. Merish hauled the platform upright, jumped on and gestured to Seldyan. She climbed on behind and locked her arms round his waist.

  Even with two aboard the platform was very, very fast in a vacuum. They were at the end wall in twenty seconds – Merish’s remaining power cell had obviously taken far less of a hammering than hers – and standing in front of an oddly old-fashioned-looking gas-tight door with a control wheel in its middle. She looked at it and mouthed, ‘Fully manual?’

  He nodded. They gripped the rim of the wheel and turned. It resisted, gave and rotated through a whole turn before taking up the load. Another full turn and it stopped with a sound that Seldyan felt as clang even if she couldn’t hear it, and the door swung open.

  They bundled past it into the airlock. The door shut behind them, and there was the ice-crystal kiss of air freezing as it expanded into a vacuum.

  There was an indicator patch on the wall. Seldyan watched it, feeling her heart beginning to pump against her ribs. She was fighting the urge to try to breathe, as while the patch was red breathing would be a bad idea: even the vac tab couldn’t stave off the effects of thin cold air on starved lung tissue. She had to wait until the lock thought its own atmosphere was warm enough and thick enough.

  Green. There. It was okay to breathe.

  It still hurt though. The chill rasped at nerves she had never noticed before. She rode it out and then looked at Merish.

  ‘Thanks.’

  He nodded, reaching out to take her hand. She winced, but let him turn it over and gently uncurl her fist. It was filthy with soil, but the deep cuts at the bases of her fingers had stained it a glistening purple.

  He looked sharply at her. ‘Oh, shit …’

  She shrugged. ‘It was that or let go. There’ll be meds in the shuttle. I assume the shuttle is our next stop?’

  ‘Yes. The other three should be in the next lock along. Sorry, Seldyan.’

  ‘Don’t be.’ She grinned, and it felt good. ‘Because you know what we’re going to do next? With your help, technical maestro, we’re going to borrow a shitload of money.’

  He smiled slowly. ‘I can do that,’ he said.

  Hive, Juvenile Unit

  SELDYAN’S CHILDHOOD HAD seemed normal as far as she could remember. The Hive had been – everything. She remembered food and sleep, and adults that were tall and remote and occasionally forbidding and mostly irrelevant.

  But then, she supposed, most childhoods probably did seem normal until something arose to challenge the seeming. Her challenge had come late. It hadn’t been when she was four, when she had been taken out of class one day and hurried to a room she had never seen before, and she had been told to take off her shift and curl over, and something sharp had pressed against her back near the top of her bottom and then it had hurt so horribly, and she had howled until her throat hurt as much as her back but she couldn’t move because they were holding her.

  They had let her rest for the afternoon, and with the evening bowl they had given her something that made her sleep. When she woke the next day she felt almost all right, just a bit sore. When she got to class she heard someone say she had been chipped. It was a new word, and she remembered it.

  It hadn’t been when she was just beginning to bud and the Supervisor had wangled her a single room instead of a dormitory space, and had visited her on the very first night just when she was feeling so lucky. She had known men were different, obviously, but she hadn’t known it could be that sore. She had tolerated his fumbling and grunting and his mess for two weeks. Then one day while they were all chanting a lesson, there was a sharp pop overhead and one of the light globes became a spray of glassy shards. A big one landed on the surface in front of her; she managed to snatch it and conceal it up the sleeve of her shift. It cut her a little but she didn’t care.

  Later, it cut the Supervisor much better.

  She expected to be punished but for once nothing happened. She never saw the Supervisor again. She supposed he couldn’t be a supervisor without what she had cut from him.

  She had never seen so much blood.

  No. The challenge to her seeming had come later, when she was fifteen. Someone had smuggled in a book, an actual old-fashioned book such as she had heard of but never seen. It had a screen, and buttons to advance the pages, and it used two words that she had never heard, but whose meaning became clear very quickly as she read on, oblivious to risk.

  The risk became reality. They found her and took her away, and this time she was truly punished, oh yes, punished until she wished her body didn’t belong to her. Until she knew in intimate close focus, one at a time and several times over, what that chip could do. But she remembered the words, and what they meant.

  Mother, and father.

  A little while afterwards they moved her out of the dormitory and into one of the Villages and she learned another word she wasn’t supposed to know.

  It was slave.

  Three Quarter Circle Plains

  HIS FEET KNEW the way and his nose knew the air, but it still took him a long time to retrace his steps. He could feel the changing ground, the way that the jagged rocks of the peak became the smooth worn surface of the lower path. He could feel the change from rock to moss, and from moss to grass if he strayed from the path. The sound of falling water guided him down the sharp-edged little river valleys, and he learned with wonder how dense and detailed the soundscape could be. Even the slightest t
urn of his head changed it, telling him that here the water poured over a boulder and there the bed broadened and slowed. The air, too. Not only did it become thicker as he descended – how much thicker he could hardly believe – but the scent! Rock had a smell. Wet rock smelled different to dry rock, and one rock smelled different to another. Not knowing the real names of any of the rocks, he gave them his own names according to their smell. Saltstone, Bitterstone and Sulphur Rock.

  Smell guided him to food, too. At first he dared not leave the path but as his hunger and his confidence grew he began to make short side-trips to follow the scents of berries and toadstools.

  Somehow, despite his blindness, Belbis didn’t quite starve.

  Even the times of day changed. Day and night had no meaning for him, except that night was a bad time to sleep because he would wake up cold and damp. Instead he marked his own daily cycle, and again gave it his own names. Mouse Quiet, for example, that was the time at the end of the night when the night-seeing hunters had finished but the day dwellers were still sleepy or asleep. If he stood very still and listened very hard he could hear the diffident little rustles of the smallest creatures taking advantage of the lull to – well, what? Scavenge, he supposed, or dig a burrow. Perhaps just to breathe without having their tiny breath triangulated by death in the air.

  Mouse Quiet was followed by Dew Time, and he usually walked as briskly as he could through that to fight off the cold and to keep dry until the time he named Sun Greet.

  His feet were telling him he was near the outskirts of Three Quarter Circle town when his ears and nose alerted him to something. At first he wasn’t sure what it was. He stopped and thought.

  The sun felt directly above him and an onshore wind was in his face. At this hour the harbour should have been busy no matter the state of the tide. He should have been able to smell the oily reek of the rendering vats with its undertone of burning peat. There should have been the click of ropes against masts and the distant grinding breath of the old steam engines that ran the hauling winches. Especially there should have been the cries of the merchants.

  Instead there was quiet. No, that wasn’t right; instead, there was the absence of familiar noises. They had been replaced by an odd undertow, almost at the limit of his hearing. And the air did smell, but that was wrong too.

  Without thinking about it he found he had broken into a run. Senses he had developed on the downward journey mined the unconscious knowledge of half his lifetime – there were familiar cobbles beneath his feet. From here, downhill two hundred paces, until the cross-shore wind struck his right cheek, and then to the right, and he would be at the Prater House. They would look after him there, and when he had told the Klerikers what had happened they would be able to explain it to him. They would know what to do.

  Meanwhile his nose sought the smells that should have been there, and his ears the cries, and then he felt his pace faltering. And now there were cries and there was smoke, yes. But the cries were angry and the smoke smelled of wood and tar and something worse, something that made his gorge rise, and as he came to a halt in front of what should be the Prater House he felt a hot wind on his cheeks. Suddenly his mind supplied an image of burning buildings.

  Now the cries were coming quickly closer, and had become focused as if the men had something to shout about.

  ‘Another blood-sucking priest!’

  ‘Didn’t we get them all then?’

  ‘Guess this one’s been a-wandering …’

  He turned in panic, but hands seized him.

  ‘Drag him in front of the Merchants.’

  ‘To hell with that. Who put them over us? They’re as bad as the fucking priests. Hang him up with the rest of the black bastards!’

  ‘No! Wait …’

  Someone pushed him to the ground, and there was the warm damp breath of stump spirits in his face. One breath, two breaths, three, and he knew he was being inspected.

  ‘Young. Grey robes. Oh sweet shit, let it be him …’

  ‘If it’s him he’ll be scarred.’ Another voice.

  ‘They have potions to stop that.’

  ‘Or witchery …’

  ‘Just bloody look, will you?’

  Hands took his robes and dragged them upwards, and he felt the hot wind on his thighs.

  ‘Well now …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s him. It’s the Idiot.’

  Voices roared around him. Through the roar he sensed the warmth of a face close to his, and more stump brew. The voice was harsh and hoarse.

  ‘What did you do?’ Hands took his robe and he felt himself lifted and thrust back so that the back of his head struck the cobbles. Red-green stars fizzed across his darkness and he felt the breath whistling out of him as if it would never return. ‘What – did – you – DO?’

  It was so hard to make words. For the whole of his life Belbis had treasured the thought that if he could only find the right words, someone would understand him, just for once. He made a supreme effort, expelling each word on a gust of breath. ‘Counted Gods. Wrong number.’

  There was a pause, while the roaring voices went on roaring. Then came a sound like a grunt of disgust and the hands let go of his robe.

  Then the first blows landed. The blows became kicks from men who grunted with effort, loud enough to be heard over the crowd noise. He covered his head and began to cry. It hurt to breathe, and through his tears he realized that the clicks he heard within himself were his own ribs breaking.

  After a long time he felt himself lifted and thrown. He landed on a hard slick surface and immediately began to slide. He cried out and the pain in his sides would have made him sick, if the smell hadn’t already. They had thrown him into one of the gut-ramps.

  Now he had no sense of distance but his speed seemed terrifying. The ramps weren’t straight; he slammed round corners and through sharp-edged sumps. Once he held out his arms to try to slow himself. One of them caught against something and for a moment he slowed, but then he felt his elbow twist through an impossible angle.

  There was an audible snap.

  Belbis screamed. He tumbled down the smooth stone channels, slick with blubber and wet with the blood that was never allowed to set, screaming with every appalling crash of his broken ribs and his shattered arm, until the only thing left to him apart from the pain was the hope that he would soon drop into the vile waters of the harbour and be killed and eaten with the other entrails.

  He did not get his wish. He felt the ramp steepen, he almost smiled, but then he crashed horribly into something, legs first – and there were more clicks and then more pain – and then the merciless hands seized him again and he was dragged upwards and dropped on to a hard surface – the quayside, he guessed, with his waning senses.

  ‘Hold him.’

  The hands took him, careless of his shattered arm and of his howls of agony. He felt his sandals being removed and thought, why? – and then unspeakable incandescent pain shot across his heels.

  At last, the world faded.

  Chastern System, Spin Inside

  CAPTAIN HEFS LEANED on the rail of the observation gallery above the forward sun deck of the liner Sunskimmer, scoped some of the more presentable guests – without being intrusive, obviously – and decided that he didn’t have the worst job in the sector. One of the better-looking females, who at least looked human-compatible, seemed to have noticed him. He straightened up and sucked in his belly.

  They were skirting a medium-sized yellow star called Chastern, roughly halfway across the Inside. They were about a minute out from the first wisps of the corona and the blinds above the sun decks were fully opened, heavily dimmed by very strong fields. Without them, seventy mainly naked people would have been cooked alive just before they died of radiation poisoning. With them, they were merely getting the fastest and most expensive suntan in the Spin.

  The female was definitely looking at him. She was dark-skinned with short silver hair, and she looked young and at
hletic. He sucked in his gut a little more and focused his eyes carefully on the middle distance as if thinking important things. The sort of things thought by captains.

  After all, he was hardly an insignificant captain, as he often told himself. He was in command of a spaceship nearly a kilometre from end to end. He liked the word ‘command’ – even if in actual fact the whole vast ship could be run by a crew of one.

  Sunskimmer had not always been called Sunskimmer, and she had not started life as a liner. She had originally been a Main Battle Unit called Flamejob, a proper fighting spaceship built ten thousand years ago for long-term charter to mostly private armies. When she was a mere five thousand years old she had been decommissioned, and her original battle-smart AI largely disabled. Since then she had led a varied but mainly uneventful life cruising around the safe bits of the Spin with cargoes of wealthy passengers. The decommissioning had not affected her engines; very large and very fast, she was one of the few remaining ships in private hands with enough power to get this far down the gravity well of a star without being sucked the rest of the way, and enough shields that she was unlikely to melt. She was ideally suited to the new fad of deep-well sunbathing.

  Captain Hefs thought it was a stupid pastime, but it was a living – quite a good one – and he did quite enjoy some of the opportunities it presented.

  There was no doubt about it. The woman was looking at him. He flagged a servitor and, doing his best to look as if he was passing on a command decision, told it to steal some candid close-ups and tag them to the young woman’s ID and suite number. He was quite aware of his own slightly chubby limitations, but confidence and position still did the trick far more often than he would have thought likely. There was a Dinner tonight. He hadn’t finalized his table plan yet.

  Well, he probably had now.

  Captain’s Dinners were held every fifth day in what had been the upper forward weapons pod, when the old ship still had weapons. Sunskimmer was shaped like two rough cones joined back to back by a short fat tube. The rear cone was all engine. When she was in fighting trim the front cone would have been all weapons, but now it was where you put the people. On one side of the cone there were the sun decks. On the other, a half-globe stuck out of the cone as if it had crashed into it. It had been where the business end of the major energy weapons pointed out through a set of insectoid-looking bulbous blisters. Now, the blisters had been turned into viewing galleries and the biggest of them had been fitted out as a restaurant, with tables on floating platforms that moved around each other in a slow dance to make sure everyone got the best from the view.