Iron Gods

by Andrew Bannister

  Then there was yet another siren, and voice: ‘Task One. Duration, one minute.’

  The screen lit up. Information scrolled, and she almost laughed. Basic maths, barely more than counting on her fingers. She tapped the answer and waited, counting the seconds under her breath.

  She had reached sixty-four when the siren sounded. She frowned – she was usually more accurate than that – and then gasped. The boy at the station next to her had collapsed; simply folded at the knees and dropped to the floor. She heard, almost felt, the crack of his forehead hitting the base of the workstation. A guard appeared, and dragged him away. She guessed he had been chip-stunned.

  Out of the corner of her eye she caught movement. Across the hall, a couple of others were being removed – and now the siren again. ‘Task Two. Duration, one minute.’

  This task was just a little harder. At the end of it, a few more were removed.

  At the end of the first twenty tasks, the allowed time stepped up to two minutes. Then five, and later ten. There were no visible clocks – even the time display function on the desk screen was blanked out – but Seldyan kept a running guestimate of the elapsed time in her head. By the time she had reached five hours, well over half the workstations were unoccupied.

  There had been no food and no water, it was if anything even colder, and her bladder was painfully full.

  Then, at last, it looked as though there might be relief. A different siren, and although it was the same voice, this time it was a different message:

  ‘Break! Five minutes. Facilities are at the north end of the hall.’

  Facilities! But where was north? Seldyan looked round and saw crowds already gathering around three – only three! – openings in the far wall.

  She knew not one in ten would get done in five minutes. She breathed out and forced herself to think. There must be something.

  Then she thought of it. She turned and ran, away from the waiting crowds, towards the opposite end of the hall. To where they had taken the ones who had collapsed, when they failed tasks.

  When she reached it there was only one opening, but it was a wide one and – she grinned – on the other side of it a row of doors stretched down a broad corridor. The corridor was noticeably warmer than the hall. Some doors were marked as Med rooms and a few with labels she didn’t understand, but then there was one with a symbol no one could mistake. She gave a little jump of triumph and reached out a hand to the push plate.

  A blast of agony crowbarred every muscle in her body. The spasm threw her across the corridor, and she heard rather than felt the crack of her head against the opposite wall.

  There was a moment of blank. Then she opened her eyes and saw a face close to hers. It was grinning.

  She gathered saliva and spat at the face. It pulled back sharply, but the grin was still there. The lips parted and formed words.

  ‘You’re a clever one, for sure, when you’re not being dumb. Clever is good, and right now clever is going back to a workstation and passing some more tests.’

  She nodded towards the door behind him. ‘Not before I go in there.’

  The guard laughed. ‘Okay. But be quick, or I’ll hit your chip again.’

  She was quick. When she had finished she walked out past the guard, who didn’t acknowledge her, and back into the hall – but not to her original workstation. ‘A workstation’, the guard had said, not ‘your workstation’. So she chose one as close as possible to the entrance from the corridor; close to the facilities and with a hint of second-hand warmth leaking towards it.

  As she walked up to the station the siren sounded, and there was another task, and then another. The first few were solo but after that their rapidly thinning numbers were divided into teams of five or six, and then the tasks were suddenly much more elaborate and there was a need for leadership and organization.

  It seemed natural to her. After a while it seemed that it was natural for the others too. She began to forget that she was weak with hunger and thirst and shivering with cold. The team was the thing … and then, quite unexpectedly, there was a final-sounding siren, and no more tasks.

  She felt almost sorry. She looked round her team – her team, yes, that was right – and saw four tired faces. They had been weeded down quite quickly; just her, Merish, Kot, Lyste and Hufsza had been left after five tasks. She had only known Merish before, but she knew all of them now. She gave them a smile. ‘Whatever it was, I think we did it.’

  They nodded, and then she looked away from them and scanned round the hall. It was almost empty. She could count only five teams – twenty-five people, out of what? Three hundred? More?

  She turned to Merish. ‘So few …’

  He nodded. ‘Yeah. We got Sorted.’

  She was going to ask what he meant when suddenly her tiredness and hunger caught up with her. Her eyes began to close just as her legs softened. She felt herself falling.

  She had woken next to Merish. It was an unusual privilege, but not one she felt like questioning. She was content to lie quietly, watching him in the half-light of the sleeping cell.

  She had never known full darkness.

  Even in sleep he looked tired, and somehow watchful. If she reached out and touched him, she was sure he would be fully awake in a second.

  There hadn’t been much, between her collapsing in the hall and ending up here. She had eaten and drunk, as much as she could manage with a dry throat and lips that felt like ropes, but mainly she had let herself be moved around.

  Merish had told her to sleep, but she had been too wired. So in the end he had given up.

  ‘You must have heard of Sorting?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Well, that was what just happened. They surprise you, they stress you out, you’re too cold, you’re hungry, and you have to perform.’ He propped himself up on an elbow. ‘You performed.’

  ‘I know I did. We all did.’

  ‘No.’ He lay back. ‘Most of us got through it. You performed. You led. You made the five of us a team, and we came out top.’ He put his hand on her shoulder. ‘You’re stuck with that job now. I’ll try to make it easy.’

  She was getting sleepy. ‘What happened to the rest?’

  His answer took a while and she didn’t like any of it. Apparently it depended on how soon they failed. The soonest were sent to forced manual labour. If they were really dumb, their organs would be harvested, provided they were worth more than what the Hive could get for the labour. Or, if they were good-looking, people would pay for that too.

  She stared at him. ‘I don’t understand.’ Then something about his face made her mind clear, and she had a fleeting mental picture of him, curled up, surrounded by a group of boys. She waved the thought away with her hand. ‘Okay, never mind. What about the rest of us?’

  ‘We get hired out for specialist stuff. The cleverer, the more specialist.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  There was a soft snort, and she realized he had almost laughed. ‘I keep my ears open. Don’t you? Also, I’m good at hacking into things.’

  She stared for a long time at the dim view of the ceiling. Then she shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘No what?’

  ‘Just no.’

  He reached out, touched her shoulder. ‘Seldyan? We don’t get to say no. Not to anything. They use Sorting to make the best into teams. That’s what happened today. Now go to sleep.’

  She closed her eyes. She had no intention of sleeping; she was going to hold on to her flaming anger. She would never let it die.

  Somehow, she slept. But the last image she saw was of the boy at the workstation near her, who had been first to collapse. She had glanced at him quickly enough to see his face before his eyes closed. It had been a mixture of vacancy and fear – the fear of someone completely uncomprehending. He hadn’t been especially good-looking as far as she could remember. Presumably he was being – harvested. Maybe right now.

  Her sleep was uneasy and full of vacant
faces. When she woke she found her arms locked round Merish, and his eyes open and watching her.

  A deep thrumming note that sounded in her chest brought Seldyan back to the present, and a voice that seemed to come from everywhere said, ‘Alert.’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Don’t know.’ Merish was frowning at the displays. ‘Something the ship wasn’t expecting. It might be nothing; the things it was expecting are thousands of years out of date, remember.’

  Ten minutes later the five of them were staring at the display, and it obviously wasn’t nothing. It looked a bit like an eyebrow, if an eyebrow were half a million kilometres across and glowing angrily.

  It was Kot who eventually broke the silence. ‘That looks wrong,’ she said.

  They all turned to Merish who was hunched over a display tank. Symbols floated in front of him, fuzzing and changing. He pursed his lips. ‘It does look wrong, and it doesn’t belong; you and the ship are both right. It’s plasma plus other stuff: lumps of iron and nickel and silicates and a big heap of trans-uranium elements.’ He straightened up. ‘If you smashed up a medium-sized planet, I mean really smashed it up so the biggest piece was a hundred metres across, irradiated the living fuck out of it and then smeared it out over a few hundred thousand klicks, you’d get something that looked like that thing.’

  Seldyan felt her stomach flip. She looked round at shocked faces. ‘Smashed up? Oh shit. A destroyed planet? Merish, an inhabited, destroyed planet?’

  ‘I so hope not.’ He glared at the tank, then blew out his cheeks. ‘No. Can’t be. Everything local is accounted for.’

  ‘Right.’ She stared at the image for a moment. ‘Is it safe to approach?’

  He shrugged. ‘It depends how. In the ship we could fly straight through it. Unshielded, I wouldn’t like to get within half a million klicks of the middle of it. It’s seriously hot, Seldyan.’

  ‘Okay, so let’s not.’ She sat back, feeling her heart slowing to normal.

  Kot cleared her throat. ‘That’s not so easy. That thing is in the same system as Oblong, and Web City.’

  ‘Oh.’ Seldyan chewed her lip. ‘How close is it?’

  Kot looked down. ‘About half a million klicks. Sorry, Seldyan.’

  ‘I think you’d better save your regrets for the locals, if they’re still around.’ Seldyan watched the display for a while, trying to imagine what it must be like to live close to something like that. Then she stood up. ‘Guys, I’m going to rest. You should too, if you can. Whatever we find, I’ve a feeling we’re going to be busy.’

  She had decided not to take the captain’s quarters, opting instead for the close, safe, simple confines of a steward’s cabin. For one thing, Hefs had indulged some rather extravagant tastes; his suite was on a scale and in a style she just couldn’t engage with. But more important, there were – associations.

  She had been acting, with Hefs – that had been obvious even to him in the end – but many people, she assumed, could act in that way, probably better and for longer than she could. The thing she kept concealed from almost everyone, sometimes even including herself, was that the ability to act like that was in itself an act; another layer down.

  How could you act what you had never experienced?

  She didn’t know, and mostly didn’t really care, what the others assumed passed between her and Merish, but she was always glad when she felt him slip in beside her.

  Sometimes there was intimacy, although never more than the intimacy of gently questing fingers and soft kisses, but not this time, at least not at first. Merish knew her moods better than she did; she heard the door, felt the sleeping pad squash a little and then his arm found its way over her. She pressed herself into him and they lay still together.

  They were quiet for a while. Then she felt him move, rolling away from her and on to his back. She rolled over to face him and said, ‘Talk to me.’

  ‘Okay. I think you’re scared.’

  She frowned up at the half-darkness. ‘Merish, I think you’re the only person in the Spin who could say that to me and stay unbruised.’

  ‘I expect so. I still think you’re scared. I know it’s not for you because it never is. So, talk about it.’

  She nodded. ‘Okay. So, what was the average life span in the Hive?’

  ‘Exactly? I don’t know. Roughly, around seventy standard. Why?’

  ‘And in Web City?’

  The pad wobbled; he had shaken his head. ‘No idea.’

  ‘Yeah, I thought so. And that’s before they shared their space with a radioactive smear.’ She stared up at nothing for a moment, then took a breath. ‘Merish? What if we bust out for nothing? What if everything, everywhere, is shit? All the time?’

  She heard the pause in his breathing. Then his arm curled over her again. ‘What, everything?’

  She thought she was going to resist him, but then she discovered she wasn’t.

  It did help, for a while. But when he had sighed and turned over to sleep she stayed awake, staring wide-eyed at the darkness and wondering what it was concealing.

  Counterweight Park, Basin City

  VESS LOOKED AROUND carefully – he seemed to be alone – and lowered his bare feet into the water. The current was slow and the surface glass-smooth; if he patted it with his feet so, he could leave regular footprints that flowed away in a steadily spreading line that was consumed by its own ripples by the time it was a dozen of its own wobbly paces away.

  He had first played this private game the day he had arrived on the level. He had repeated it only a handful of times since.

  The Board of the Harbour Company usually met every seventeen days, thereby achieving three anachronisms in one go because there was no longer a Harbour Company, it wasn’t a Board and seventeen days had been the length of the refilling cycle of the oldest of the balancing reservoirs that fed the boat lifts from the Ground to the Middle level. This meant an influx of goods into the import bonds every seventeen days which in turn was a good reason for a commercial Board to meet, a thousand years ago.

  Now the Board was responsible for the management of the Spin Inside, a shrinking, beleaguered collection of planets eking out an existence in the shadow of growing neighbours. And, of course, for its main asset. The Hive.

  The old boat lift still chugged round its now pointless cycle. Every seventeen days a hundred or so gigalitres of water gurgled down winding channels from the mountains behind the city, over a control weir and into the huge ladle-shaped Great Basin. The Basin was suspended on three colossal chains from a stubby counterpoise arm. Eventually the mounting weight of water would trip the catches and send the whole thing swaying slowly downwards, raising the boat lift like a giant counterweight until it docked with the First Middle Dock. Which was usually empty of shipping, having lost its function a thousand years ago just like nearly everything else.

  Vess was sitting just upstream from the weir. He enjoyed watching the old system. There was something inevitable about it, which meant that as long as it went on working it wasn’t his problem. He sometimes thought he would have liked to meet whoever designed it.

  Anachronistic name or not, the out-of-date Board of the non-existent Harbour Company was still the senior body for the Inside. It provided the top stratum of Federation management from a position that was unelected and ungoverned and completely unchallenged, and a missing cruise ship would be the least of its worries, if Sunskimmer had really been no more than a cruise ship.

  Vess paddled a few more footprints and looked up towards the Lay Palace. It was an astonishing thing.

  Six thousand years before, the then-Chairman of the Board had summoned the best architect in the Spin and told her to construct a floating palace in the Basin. It had to be the largest building in the City of its day, it had to float freely within the Basin without tethering and it must not change the length of the cycle of the Basin by more than a second.

  The result was – he allowed himself the word once more
– truly astonishing. Presumably with posterity in mind the architect had delivered seventeen storeys of tapering ziggurat, rising from a wide shallow base to a peak nearly a hundred metres above the surface of the water. By virtue of the area of its base it was the largest building in the City at the time, and the same broad base kept it floating in the centre of the reservoir thanks to surface tension. Once every seventeen days it grounded briefly, and mathematicians, statisticians and the occasional specialist in gambling theory had written papers about the scatter of its resting points.

  Vess always thought it was a shame that the Lay Palace had gone down in history as a sort of failure. Everything about it was perfect except that it had changed the seventeen-day cycle by one and three tenths seconds, and the architect had achieved the other sort of posterity by being duly and unpleasantly executed.

  Which was quite likely to be his fate too, as much as he was trying not to think about it. But phlegmatism had always been one of his assessed traits.

  His musing had distracted him and the line of watery footprints was ragged. He forced himself to correct his rhythm. There; better.

  But it was time to go. He swung his feet out of the water and stood, picking up his shoes. He would put them on when his feet had dried. For the moment he carried them, walking carefully so his wet feet did not slip on the slick polished stones of the Basin edge. It was a hundred metres or so to the nearest of the slim articulated bridges that led to the Lay Palace; by the time he got to it he was dry enough to put on his shoes. When he had straightened up, he half turned and looked over his shoulder. Another line of footprints, dark against the light stone but fading as he looked. This time they were heading towards him.

  Clo Fiffithiss was waiting for him at the other end of the bridge. It lifted a foreclaw in greeting.

  ‘Hello! Ready for the bloody circus?’

  Vess raised his eyebrows. ‘One day you could try to be really discouraging.’

  ‘Rubbish, human. You know I’m supporting you.’