Xavier blinked hard, requesting a higher magnification zoom. The image swelled, wobbled and then sharpened.
‘Dear God,’ he whispered. ‘What the hell have you done to my ship?’
Something awful had happened to his beloved Storm Bird since the last time he had seen it. Whole parts were gone, ripped clean away. The hull looked as if it had seen its last service some time during the Belle Époque, not a couple of months ago. He wondered where Antoinette had taken it — straight into the heart of Lascaille’s Shroud, perhaps? Either that or she had had a serious run-in with well-armed banshees.
‘It’s not your ship, Xavier. I just pay you to look after it now and then. If I want to trash it, that’s entirely my business.’
‘Shit.’ He had forgotten that the suit-to-ship comm channel was still open. ‘I didn’t mean…’
‘It’s a lot worse than it looks, Xave. Trust me on that.’
The salvage tug detached at the last minute, executed a needlessly complex pirouette and then was gone, curving away to its home on the other side of Carousel New Copenhagen. Xavier had already calculated how much the salvage tug was going to cost in the end. It didn’t matter who ultimately picked up that tab. It was going to be one hell of a sting, whether it was him or Antoinette, since their businesses were so intertwined. They were well into the red at the favour bank, and it was going to take about a year of retroactive favours before they groped their way back into the black…
But things could have been worse. Three days ago he had more or less given up hope of ever seeing Antoinette again. It was depressing how quickly the elation at finding her alive had degenerated into his usual nagging worries about insolvency. Dumping that hauler certainly hadn’t helped…
Xavier grinned. But hell, it had been worth it.
When she had announced her approach Xavier had suited up, gone out on to the carousel’s skin and hired a skeletal thruster trike. He gunned the trike across the fifteen kilometres to Storm Bird, then orbited it around the ship, satisfying himself that the damage looked every bit as bad up close as he had first thought it was. None of it would cripple the ship for good; it was all technically fixable — but it would cost money to put right.
He swung around, bringing the trike forwards so that he was ahead of Storm Bird. Against the dark hull he saw the two bright parallel slits of the cabin windows. Antoinette was a tiny silhouetted figure in the uppermost cabin, the small bridge that she only used during delicate docking/undocking procedures. She was reaching up to work controls above her head, a clipboard tucked under one arm. She looked so small and vulnerable that all his anger drained out of him in an instant. Instead of worrying about the damage, he should have been rejoicing that the ship had kept her alive all this time.
‘You’re right; it’s superficial,’ he said. ‘We’ll get it fixed easily enough. Do you have enough thruster control to do a hard docking?’
‘Just point me to the bay, Xave.’
He nodded and flipped the trike over, arcing away from Storm Bird. ‘Follow me in, then.’
Carousel New Copenhagen loomed larger again. Xavier led Storm Bird around the rim, tapping the trike’s thrusters until he had matched rotation with the carousel, sustaining the pseudo-orbit with a steady rumble of power from the trike’s belly. They passed over a complex of smaller bays, repair wells lit up with golden or blue lights and the periodic flashes of welding tools. A rim train snaked past, overtaking them, and then he saw Storm Bird’s shadow blot out his own. He looked back and behind. The freighter was coming in nice and steadily, although it looked as large as an iceberg.
The huge shadow slid and dipped, flowing over the hemispherical gouge in the rim known locally as Lyle’s Crater, the impact point where the rogue trader’s chemical-drive scow had collided with the carousel while trying to evade the authorities. It was the only serious damage that the carousel had sustained during wartime, and while it could have been repaired easily enough, it now made far more money as a tourist attraction than it would ever have had it been reclaimed and returned to normal use. People came in shuttles from all around the Rust Belt to gape at the damage and hear stories of the deaths and heroics that had followed the incident. Even now, Xavier saw a party of ghouls being led out on to the skin by a tourist guide, all of them hanging by harnesses from a network of lines spidering across the underside of the rim. Since he knew several people who had died during the accident, Xavier felt only contempt for the ghouls.
His repair well was a little further around the rim. It was the second largest on the carousel and it still looked as if it would be an impossibly tight fit, even allowing for all the bits of Storm Bird that Antoinette had helpfully removed…
The iceberg-sized ship came to a halt relative to the carousel and then tipped up, nose down to the rim. Through the gouts of vapour coming from the carousel’s industrial vents and the ship’s own popping micro-gee verniers, Xavier saw a loom of red lasers embrace Storm Bird, marking her position and velocity with angstrom precision. Still applying a half-gee of thrust from its main motors, Storm Bird began to push itself into its allocated slot in the rim. Xavier held station, wanting to close his eyes, for this was the part that he dreaded.
The ship nosed in at a speed of no more than four or five centimetres per‘ second. Xavier waited until the nose had vanished into the carousel, still leaving three-quarters of the ship out in space, and then guided his trike alongside, slipping ahead of Storm Bird. He parked the trike on a ledge, disembarked and authorised the trike to return to the place where he had hired it. He watched the skeletal thing buzz away, streaking back out into open space.
He did close his eyes now, hating the final docking procedure, and only opened them again after he had felt the rapid thunder of the docking latches, transmitted through the fabric of the repair bay to his feet. Below Storm Bird, pressure doors began to close. If she was going to be stuck here for a while, and it looked as if she would, they might even consider pumping the chamber so that Xavier’s repair monkeys could work without suits. But that was something to worry about later.
Xavier made sure that the pressurised connecting walkways were aligned with and clamped to Storm Bird’s main locks, guiding them manually. Then he made his way to an airlock, passing out of the repair bay. He was in a hurry, so did not bother removing more than his gloves and helmet. He could feel his heart in his chest, knocking like an air pump that needed a new armature.
Xavier walked down the connecting tube to the airlock closest to the flight deck. Lights were pulsing at the end of the tube, indicating that the lock was already being cycled.
Antoinette was coming through.
Xavier stooped and placed his helmet and gloves on the floor. He started running down the tube, slowly at first and then with increasing energy. The airlock door was irising open with glorious slowness, condensation heaving out of it in thick white clouds. The corridor dilated ahead of him, time crawling the way it did when two lovers were running towards each other in a bad holo-romance.
The door opened. Antoinette was standing there, suited-up but for her helmet, which she cradled beneath one arm. Her blunt-cut blonde hair was dishevelled and plastered across her forehead with grease and filth, her skin was sallow and there were dark bags under her eyes. Her eyes were tired, bloodshot slits. Even from where Xavier was standing, she smelt as if she hadn’t been near a shower in weeks.
He didn’t care. He thought she still looked pretty great. He pulled her towards him, the tabards of their suits clanging together. Somehow he managed to kiss her.
‘I’m glad you’re home,’ Xavier said.
‘Glad to be home,’ Antoinette replied.
‘Did you…?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I managed it.’
He said nothing for several moments, desperately wishing not to trivialise what she had done, fully aware of how important it had been to her and that nothing must spoil that triumph. She had been through enough pain already; the last thing he wan
ted to do was add to it.
‘I’m proud of you.’
‘Hey. I’m proud of me. You bloody well should be.’
‘Count on it. I take it there were a few difficulties, though?’
‘Let’s just say I had to get into Tangerine’s atmosphere a bit faster than I’d planned.’
‘Zombies?’
‘Zombies and spiders.’
‘Hey, two for the price of one. But I don’t imagine that’s quite how you saw it. And how the hell did you get back if there were spiders out there?’
She sighed. ‘It’s a long story, Xave. Some strange shit happened around that gas giant and I’m still not quite sure what to make of it.’
‘So tell me.’
I will. After we’ve eaten.‘
‘Eaten?’
‘Yeah.’ Antoinette Bax grinned, revealing filthy teeth. ‘I’m hungry, Xave. And thirsty. Really thirsty. Have you ever had anyone drink you under a table?’
Xavier Liu considered her question. ‘I don’t think so, no.’
‘Well, now’s your big chance.’
They undressed, made love, lay together for an hour, showered, dressed — Antoinette wearing her best plum-coloured jacket — went out, ate well and then got royally drunk. Antoinette enjoyed nearly every minute of it. She enjoyed every instant of the lovemaking; that wasn’t the problem. It was good to be clean, too — really clean, rather than the kind of grudging clean that was the best she could manage on the ship — and it was good to be back in some kind of gravity, even if it was only half a gee and even if it was centrifugal. No, the problem was that wherever she looked, whatever was happening around her, she couldn’t help thinking that none of it was going to last.
The spiders were going to win the war. They would take over the entire system, the Rust Belt included. They might not turn everyone into hive-mind conscripts — they had more or less promised that that was the last thing they intended — but you could guarantee things were going to be different. Yellowstone had not exactly been a barrel of laughs under the last brief spider occupation. It was difficult to see where the daughter of a space pilot, with a single damaged, creaking ship to her name, was going to be able to fit in.
But hell, she thought, cajoling herself into a state of forced bonhomie, it wasn’t going to happen tonight, was it?
They travelled by rim train. She wanted to eat at the bar under Lyle’s Crater where the beer was great, but Xavier told her it would be heaving at this time of day and they were much better off going somewhere else. She shrugged, accepting his judgement, and was mildly puzzled when they arrived at Xavier’s choice — a bar halfway around the rim called Robotnik’s — and found the place nearly empty. When Antoinette synchronised her watch with Yellowstone Local Time she understood why: it was two hours past thirteen, in the middle of the afternoon. It was the graveyard shift on Carousel New Copenhagen, which saw most of its serious partying during the hours of Chasm City ‘night’.
‘We wouldn’t have had any trouble getting into Lyle’s,’ she told him.
‘I don’t really like that place.’
‘Ah.’
‘Too many damned animals. When you work with monkeys all day… or not, as the case may be… being served by machines begins to seem like a bloody good idea.’
She nodded at him over the top of her menu. ‘Fair enough.’
The gimmick at Robotnik’s was that the staff were all servitors. It was one of the few places in the carousel, barring the heavy-industrial repair shops, where you saw any kind of machines doing manual labour. Even then the machines were ancient and clapped-out, the kind of cheap, rugged servitors that had always been immune to the plague, and which could still be manufactured despite the system’s much reduced industrial capability in the wake of the plague and the war. There was a certain antique charm to them, Antoinette supposed, but by the time she had watched one limping machine drop their beers four times between the bar and their table, the charm had begun to wear a little thin.
‘You don’t actually like this place, do you?’ she asked later. ‘It’s just that you like Lyle’s even less.’
‘You ask me, there’s something a tiny bit sick about that place, turning a major civic catastrophe into a bloody tourist attraction.’
‘Dad would probably have agreed with you.’
Xavier grunted something unintelligible. ‘So what happened with the spiders, anyway?’
Antoinette began picking the label off her beer bottle, just the way she had all those years ago when her father had first mentioned his preferred mode of burial. ‘I don’t really know.’
Xavier wiped foam from his lip. ‘Have a wild stab in the dark.’
‘I got into trouble. It was all going nicely — I was making a slow, controlled approach to Tangerine Dream — and then wham.’ She picked up a beer mat and stabbed a finger at it by way of explanation. ‘I’ve got a zombie ship dead ahead of me, about to hit the atmosphere itself. I painted it with my radar by mistake and got a bunch of attitude from the zombie pilot.’
‘But she didn’t chuck a missile at you by way of thanks?’
‘No. She must have been all out, or she didn’t want to make things worse by revealing her position with a tube launch. See, the reason she was doing the big dive — the same as me — was that she had a spider ship chasing her.’
‘That wasn’t good,’ Xavier said.
‘No, not good at all. That’s why I had to get into the atmosphere so quickly. Fuck the safeguards, let’s get down there. Beast obliged, but there was a lot of damage on the way in.’
‘If it was that or get captured by the spiders, I’d say you did the right thing. I take it you waited down there until the spiders had passed on?’
‘Not exactly, no.’
‘Antoinette…’ Xavier chided.
‘Hey, listen. Once I’d buried my father, that was the last place I wanted to hang around. And Beast wasn’t enjoying it one bit. The ship wanted out as much as I did. Problem is, we got tokamak failure on the up and out.’
‘You were dead meat.’
‘We should have been,’ Antoinette said, nodding. ‘Especially as the spiders were still nearby.’
Xavier leant back in his chair and swigged an inch of beer. Now that he had her safe, now that he knew how things had turned out, he was obviously enjoying hearing the story. ‘So what happened — did you get the tokamak to reboot?’
‘Later, yes, when we were back in empty space. It lasted long enough to get me back to Yellowstone, but I needed the tugs for the slow-down.’
‘So you managed to reach escape velocity, or were you still able to insert into orbit?’
‘Neither, Xave. We were falling back to the planet. So I did the only thing I could, which was ask for help.’ She finished her own beer, watching his reaction.
‘Help?’
‘From the spiders.’
‘No shit? You had the nerve — the balls — to do that?’
‘I’m not sure about the balls, Xave. But yes, I guess I had the nerve.’ She grinned. ‘Hell, what else was I going to do? Sit there and die? From my point of view, with a fuck of a lot of cloud coming up real fast, being conscripted into a hive mind suddenly didn’t seem like the worst thing in the world.’
‘I still can’t believe… even after that dream you’ve been replaying?’
‘I figured that had to be propaganda. The truth couldn’t be quite that bad.’
‘But maybe nearly as bad.’
‘When you’re about to die, Xave, you take what you can get.’
He pointed the open neck of the beer bottle at her. ‘But…’
She read his mind. ‘I’m still here, yeah. I’m glad you noticed.’
‘What happened?’
‘They saved me.’ She said it again, almost having to reassure herself that it had really happened. ‘The spiders saved me. Sent down some kind of drone missile, or tug, or whatever it was. The thing clamped on to the hull and gave me a shove — a big
shove — all the way out of Tangerine Dream’s gravity well. Next thing I knew I was falling back to Yellowstone. Had to get the tokamak up and running, but at least now I had more than a few minutes to do it in.’
‘And the spiders… they left?’
She nodded vigorously. ‘Their main guy, this old geezer, he spoke to me just before they sent the drone. Gave me one hell of a warning, I admit. Said if we ever crossed paths again — like, ever — he’d kill me. I think he meant it, too.’
‘I suppose you have to count yourself lucky. I mean, not everyone gets let off with a warning where the spiders are concerned.’
‘I guess so, Xave.’
‘This old man — the spider — anyone we’d have heard of?’
She shook her head. ‘Said his name was Clavain, that’s all. Didn’t mean shit to me.’
‘Not the Clavain, obviously?’
She stopped fiddling with the beer mat and looked at him. ‘And who would the Clavain be, Xave?’
He looked at her as if she was faintly stupid, or at the very least worryingly forgetful. ‘History, Antoinette, that boring stuff about the past. You know — before the Melding Plague, all that jazz?’
‘I wasn’t born then, Xave. It’s not even of academic interest to me.’ She held her bottle up to the light. ‘I need another one. What are the chances of getting it in the next hour, do you think?’
Xavier clicked a finger at the nearest servitor. The machine spun around, stiffened itself, took a step in their direction and fell over.
But when she was back at their place, Antoinette began to wonder. In the evening, when she had blasted away the worst effects of the beer, leaving her head clear but ringingly delicate, she squirrelled herself into Xavier’s office, powered up the museum-piece terminal and set about querying the carousel’s data hub for information on Clavain. She had to admit that she was curious now, but even if she had been curious during the journey home from the gas giant she would have had to wait until now to access any extensive systemwide archives. It would have been too risky to send a query from Storm Bird, and the ship’s own memories were not the most compendious.
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