Ares Express

by Ian McDonald

  The sound of gunfire grew louder and closer. Maybe not that way.

  She spilled lift, slid downward and forward. She slid out from underneath the belly of the cathedral into clear air. Grand Valley opened before her.

  “Weee!” she whooped. Beneath her feet the Grand Valley trunk line was four streaks of silver meeting in a wink of light at the vanishing point. There was a loco on those tracks. A deadheader, no train, but putting out a lot of steam. Someone was really whipping the tokamaks down there. The funnel configuration identified it as a Class 88. Black and silver livery, Bethlehem Ares. Sweetness peered closer. Those patterns on the roof, and that finial on the tender: a roaring Iron Lion? And, at the limits of vision, covering the boiler cap with her wings, was that a figurehead of a silver angel, proud-breasted?

  “Pharaoh, look, look, it's Catherine of Tharsis, I know it, I'd know that old train anywhere, we're safe!”

  Pharaoh. What had happened to him? She scooped deeply into the wind, bought altitude to rise level with the hole in the hull At the outward edge of her turn, she had seen other aircraft in full pursuit of Harx; one a small, minnow-like racing yacht, the other a big grampus, a heavy lifter. They seemed to be occupying the full attention of the gunners who were spraying black arcs of tracer indiscriminately toward them.

  Pharaoh was standing in the gaping rent, looking down at the ground beneath him, fingering his harness. As Sweetness swooped past him, he waved.

  “Pharaoh, they've come back for me!” she shouted. “Catherine of Tharsis. I knew they wouldn't give me up. They're down there, we're safe! Come on!”

  Hand on rip-cord, Pharaoh stepped into the air. In the same instant, a dark mass leaped from the shadows in the corridor and seized him around the waist. Serpio. The airfoil opened but the combined weight of two bodies was too much for Vertical Boy engineering. Air boomed, seams tore, the wing folded up in the middle, failed. Locked together in a final, ludicrous embrace, Serpio and Pharaoh plunged down in a fluttering, tearing death spiral to the meadowlands of Thrench below.

  skerry clung to the edge of the punctured corridor, riven with sick doubts. Seconds before, she had seen the two young men fight and fall to their deaths. No purpose, no logic, no great cause served, no noble sacrifice. Just the momentary blindness of aggression. Boys and their competition. Fight, and fight to the death.

  Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.

  They would still be falling.

  Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. How we laughed.

  “Bastards!” she suddenly swore, kicking and punching at the jagged exposed metal in the hope it would tear and hurt her. The soft airframe aluminium and plastic bent under her hard hands and feet. “Bastards bastards bastards!”

  She was Skerry Scanland Ghalgorm. She could flip and swing and juggle. She could walk tightrope and walk on her hands and walk over fire. She could swing trapeze and sway-pole and do rope tricks that would make your mouth hang open in amazement. She could put both legs behind her neck. She was an entertainer. A provider of simple spectacle and wonder; a Good Night Out. She was not a secret government agent. She was not a Synodical warrior. She did kids’ parties. The Anarchs had no place, no place at all, asking her to run the End of the World, fight people, watch people fall to their deaths.

  But what of the show, Skerry Scanland Ghalgorm? Always, the show. She took a deep centring breath and called Mishcondereya on the bindi-mike.

  “Mish, I've lost her. She's got away.”

  Mishcondereya swore. Apparently the only subject her gentleladies’ finishing school taught well was Cursing and Advanced Cursing.

  “I'm going after her. I need pick-up,” Skerry said.

  After a pause clearly meant to be significant, Mishcondereya said, “It may have escaped your attention, but they'd shoot their own shadows back here.”

  “Mishcon, I need pick-up. I know we can get her, I know we can get the Catherine artifact.” She saved the Portentous Line for last, though she doubted Mishcondereya had a functioning sense of portent. “If we don't, Harx will.”

  Heavy sigh. You love it, Skerry thought. If you hadn't become a state comedian, you would have been a rich-girl terrorist. The action, the toys, the scent of men, the tang of alfresco sex, the adventure. You live it, you love it, you think. But you would think different if you had seen two boys who loved it as much as you, and for the same reasons, earn the bitter pay-off.

  “All right, I'm coming in. Give me your fix.”

  Buffeted by surface winds—Harx was taking this thing low and fast—Skerry touched her throat jewel. Seconds later, the blunt nose of the sky-yacht nudged into view beneath her. It crept up on the frantically pedalled airship until half its length underhung the much larger orange bulk, like a pilot fish pacing a shark. Skerry waited for Mishcondereya to lock engines. You get one shot at this.

  She picked her spot on the skin.

  Never a safety net, Skerry?

  Arms spread, she swallow dived into the yielding cushion of the gas bag.

  “I can take her out, one shot,” Sianne Dandeever said, rubbing her still-chafed wrists. His Holiness's rescue party could have come a little more expeditiously. She rested her hand on the heavy Sharps’ rifle's wooden stock, casually swung the sights toward the dwindling figure of Sweetness beneath her flying wing. She badly wanted to punish someone for her humiliation. The cathedral's aux-con was an architecturally incongruous glass teat at the apex of the pseudo-classical portico of the Pilgrim's Steps. From here two people could command and fight the full edifice and company.

  “You will do no such thing,” Devastation Harx retorted. “We might still need it, in which case, I want it somewhere I can find it, not spread all over Grand Valley.”

  “Do we need it?” Sianne Dandeever asked. “And if we don't, can I have a shot anyway?”

  “That we will find out very soon,” Devastation Harx said, taking an orbital uplinker from inside his jacket. Sianne Dandeever blinked at the blasphemous machine. “Oh, for goodness sake woman, even God needs good rolling stock.” In a flicker of data and twittering, the little device reported on the state of his many fronts. In ten minutes he would be out from under this accursed roof, where he could get a once-and-for-all shot at these impudent pranksters in their airships with the partacs. Waves eight and nine were entering the upper atmosphere, the first four squadrons were down, shifted into ground combat configuration and were moving into occupation positions. The global communication network was buzzing with madness and rumour. Let it. Soon and very soon it would be silenced. The more they talked, the more they watched the pretty lights in the sky, the less they would suspect his true strategy. That was the eternal secret of all gods. Keep watching the pretty lights in the sky.

  Then, one by one, he would put those pretty lights out. The infiltration of the reality shaping computers was almost complete. The simulacrum was perfect. St. Catherine herself would seem to give the command for the Artificial Intelligences to switch themselves off, then command of the multiverse would pass to its rightful users, the dirty, bustling, conniving, inquisitive, mortal humans.

  “She's getting away,” Sianne Dandeever warned.

  Harx looked up from his schemes of splendour. He should know where that irritating little girl was going, in case something did go wrong with the protocols and he needed to access the original St. Catherine program. She was almost out of sight, spiralling lower and lower.

  “Where are you going, you vexatious child?” Harx mused.

  “Go on, your Holiness, just one shot,” Sianne Dandeever.

  Then he saw the contrail of steam, the mirror steel lines, the blue and silver of a Bethlehem Ares fusion hauler.

  “Of course! So loyal! Sianne, take us down.”

  “Down it is.”

  Never a question, never a query. He should have tried to get his hand into those thigh-hugging pants.

  “We have a train to catch.”

  In contrast to her departure, Taal Chordant Joy-of-May Asiim Engineer 10th's r
eturn to Catherine of Tharsis was loud, crowded and chaotic. So many people on the bridge, all wanting her to answer their questions before they answered hers.

  “What have you done to yourself?” Her old friend Miriamme Deep-Fusion's voice cut through the babble with the one question everyone wanted answered but were too in awe of the terrible old lady to ask.

  “A form of rejuvenation I would not recommend. It is most efficacious, but the price is excessive. Now, enough enough enough. I am senior here, it is you who must answer my questions,” Grandmother Taal said, glad to feel the creak and shift of hull-plates under her square-heeled boots again. “Where is everyone? Where is my son? What has happened to the train?”

  A chorus of voices babeled answers. Grandmother Taal held up her hands for silence.

  “Mutiny?”

  The mutineers looked at each other, all except Grandfather Bedzo, deeply enmeshed in driving his train.

  “For Sweetness,” Child'a'grace said.

  “Hmph,” said Grandmother Taal. “Well, I suppose it's an exceptional circumstance and my son and that Stuard could well do with a lesson in humility, but I would not condone it as a general course of action.”

  Relief was general and unabashed. Into it, Child'a'grace asked, mildly, “So, where exactly is Sweetness Octave?”

  Grandmother Taal craned around her to peer out of the window. She pointed.

  “There, I suspect.”

  Everyone turned to witness a spectacle almost certainly unique in aviation. It was like an animated lesson in marine ecology: big fish eats littler fish eats weeniest fish. Well to the rear was a massive cargo-lift airship, vast as a cloud. Ahead of it, no less small, was what could only be described as a flying cathedral, vaguely saucer-shaped with heavy Palladian pretensions, incongruously coloured earth-orange. Squeezing out from underneath the cathedral and pushing slowly ahead was a silver trout-shaped aircraft, sleek and streamlined, and in the lead, beating courageously down the sky, was the tiny delta wing of an airfoil. Everyone could see the dark speck hanging beneath it. The whole flying circus bore down on Catherine of Tharsis like muscular theology.

  “That would be our Sweetness.”

  Pursuit was good. Challenge was good. Danger was good. Tough flying was good. Everything was good that kept out that final image of Pharaoh and Serpio, locked together, falling through the killing air. Concentrate. Not much longer. Not much further. Line up on that great big beautiful steamy train there. A few hundred metres. Then you'll be home. Then you'll be safe. Then you'll be among people who know you and your story can end and you can go back to your little cubby. Just you and Little Pretty One again.

  You can't go back, Sweetness. You're a traingirl, you supped that truth with your mother's milk. You can go everywhere, anywhere, all around the world, but never back. The tracks only lead forward.

  She navigated in over Catherine of Tharsis. Whoever had their hand on the drive bar was good, matching her speed, compensating in an instant for her wobbles and surges as she carefully spilled lift, lining up on the back of the tender. Twenty metres, ten metres. She wove from side to side of the steam plume, checking her positioning. Up there behind her, she could feel the presence of heavy aerial machinery on the back of her neck. Ignore them. If they want to blow you away, they can do it any time. Concentrate on getting down. Down. Down…

  Her toe-tips brushed the top of the tender, an eddy lifted her into the vapour trail. Moment's blindness. She fought for control, stabilised, came in again. Almost almost almost…She tugged on the guy lines simultaneously, spilling lift, and touched down at a run in the middle of the tender. Immediately, figures—people! trainpeople! her people!—came surging off the access ladder, seized her, stripped off her flying harness and carried her down.

  Sweetness babbled, recognising the faces of her bearers, trying to touch them, remember them.

  “Psalli, Romereaux, Anhinga, it's you. Thwayte, what are you doing here?”

  She was borne along a sidewalk up a companionway through a shunting turret. She could feel the train was picking up speed again. Sweetness glanced backward. The cathedral eclipsed half the sky, the little air-yacht almost crushed between the two heavyweights of earth and air. On the driving bridge the people she loved were waiting for her. Her bearers set her down and immediately Child'a'grace hugged her.

  “Your hair is needing washing, child,” she remonstrated.

  Sweetness plucked at a greasy coil, then all the tension excitement fear confusion horror exhaustion dread wonder puzzlement loneliness hunger sleeplessness vertigo love loss and death of the days since she had ridden away from the grand steaming ruptured. She burst into tears. Her family, Domiety and non-Domiety rushed in to comfort her. Thus only Ricardo Traction noticed the shadow fall over the windows.

  “Um, I hate to disturb you, but we seem to have a cathedral on the roof.”

  Everyone looked up, the world went red, and they were somewhere else entirely.

  Red. Red heaven, red earth. Red hills, red soil, red stones. Red sky, red sun, red lines of thin cloud at the close horizon. Bethlehem Ares Class 88 fusion hauler Catherine of Tharsis, pride of the fleet, stood in a half-kilometre length of neatly severed track in the middle of endless, featureless red.

  Numb silence. Utter dislocation. Then young Thwayte Engineer cried out in sudden pain, clapped hands to ears. In the same instant, everyone became aware of a hissing scream, like steam escaping from a fractured pipe. Scattered papers flew up, across the room like carrion birds and packed themselves against the bottom of the starboard catwalk door.

  “We're under vacuum!” Romereaux shouted, however impossible that seemed, and rushed to open an ancient, paint-sealed red box on the bulkhead with a fire-axe. Catherine of Tharsis was an old-school hauler, a veteran from the days of the manforming when the air was still thin and dead and Big Stuff needed shifting, and fusion-powered steam locomotives had been a useful way of getting water vapour into the primitive atmosphere. Her inner corridors and habitations had been designed to be pressure tight, however those seals might have perished with time and travel, and she still carried tubes of puncture goop in the Emergency DeePee boxes. Two blows hacked the casing off; Romereaux and Ricardo Traction wove streams of fast-drying foam goop over the bottom of the door, layer upon layer upon acetic-smelling layer until the piercing whistle dwindled to a whisper to nothing.

  “Where the hell are we?” Romereaux asked.

  A shriek aborted any offers of an answer. Mercedes Deep-Fusion stood pointing a quivery finger at Grandfather Bedzo. The aged aged man was slumped in his seat. His hands swung at his sides, bloated with pooled blood. His eyes were half-open. A thick rope of glossy drool hung from his protruding tongue to his chest. He did not seem to be breathing.

  “Is he, is he, is he?” Mercedes stammered.

  He looked anyone's definition of dead as dead could be.

  Anhinga Engineer, who had trained as a Knight of the Healing Joans, knelt by the old man, felt for pulses, tested for breath.

  “He's still alive, just about.”

  “Get him to sick bay!” Romereaux ordered.

  “We left sick bay back in Axidy, remember?” Anhinga said. Everyone slowly turned round to look at the alien world outside the windows.

  “Really, where the hell are we?” Romereaux said sombrely.

  Sweetness spoke up.

  “Okay, you're not going to like this.”

  “We don't like it anyway,” Thwayte Engineer said.

  “Well, I think we're in exactly the same place we were. We haven't moved at all. Well, not forward or backward. I think what's happened is, we've moved sideways. Across universes, if you like. Parallel worlds, all a little bit different. Harx sent us further than most. That's why poor ould Bedzo's in the state he's in. The shock of transition. We all blacked out for a moment; he was plugged into the cyberhat, what must it've been like for the whole system to go down when we made the jump?”

  “So, he's not driving us out of he
re,” Ricardo Traction said.

  “Looks like no one's driving us out of this one,” Romereaux commented unhelpfully. “There isn't even any air.”

  “Harx did this?” Grandmother Taal asked.

  “He had these mirrors could look into other universes,” Sweetness went on, aware of how frenetic this would sound in any other circumstance. “It's where he got his power from: he wanted St. Catherine so he could get more of that power by getting hold of the angels that built the world by shuffling through the multiverse until they found the best of all possible worlds.”

  “Whoa whoa whoa whoa,” Romereaux interrupted. “This goondah has sent us across the multiverse into an alternative of our world?”

  “That's what I think.”

  “We're buggered.”

  “Do you want to know how buggered?” Sweetness said.

  “Can it get any worse?”

  “I think this is an alternative world where the manforming never happened. That means, no air. Meaning, all the air we have, is in here. Eventually, we'll run out. We've already lost a lot.”

  “So, have we a plan for getting back?” the pragmatic Ricardo Traction asked. Diving through that carriage door into mutiny had been the only spontaneous thing he had ever done. Now look where it had landed him. That's what you got for allowing yourself to be whirled up in the mood of the moment.

  He led the inquiring expressions at Sweetness.

  “Hey, I'm not a vinculum physicist,” she said. Sarcasms and recriminations burned more air. “There's something I want to try, but I need to go to my cubby, right?”