Terminal World

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘I don’t think it happened the way you’re thinking,’ Meroka said.

  ‘It wasn’t an accident.’

  ‘Could have been an accident made the carriage crash over - the drivers blacked out or something - then someone found them afterwards and decided to do some shooting and looting. These people stuck in here, they probably survived the crash. Don’t see no broken bones or nothing. But they’d have been suffering from the zone shift just the same as us.’

  ‘They’d have taken some kind of antizonals.’ Quillon looked dubiously at the bottle he was still holding. ‘But whatever it was it only bought them time, not the ability to function in this zone as if nothing had happened. Even if they managed to stave off unconsciousness, and somehow avoided going into seizure the way you did, they’d have been in a very poor way. No hope of getting very far from the carriage, which is probably why they stayed inside, hoping someone was going to come along and help them. Eventually zone sickness would have overwhelmed them.’

  Meroka climbed out, carrying a haul of looted goods. A part of Quillon still felt what they were doing was wrong, but he didn’t doubt that Meroka had their best interests at heart. Even the watches she had taken - he could see them glittering in her hand, the straps around her fingers - were for strictly utilitarian purposes. There was an old Spearpoint saying: you can never have too many watches. She had taken some clothes - gloves, a scarf, some kind of fur hat - and a small linen bag. ‘Some more pills and potions for you,’ she said, slinging the bag in his direction.

  ‘If they were coming this way,’ Quillon said, the bag landing at his feet like a shot carcass, ‘they’d have been bound to meet the Skullboys. Maybe they were the ones who killed the drivers.’

  ‘Skullboys aren’t that good a shot. Anyway, they didn’t have to meet ’em.’ She lowered herself down from the coach. ‘That meeting place, it’s not far if you’re in one of these steam-coaches. The Skullboys could have passed right through on the main track before these people joined it from the other road. Never had to set eyes on each other.’

  Quillon gathered up the bag, glass and porcelain receptacles chinking around inside it. ‘Maybe we ought to be moving on?’

  ‘No argument from me. Just wanted to see what we could salvage.’

  ‘We can’t bury these poor people, can we.’ A statement this time, not a question.

  Meroka shook her head. ‘Same deal as for the horses. You check those other two?’

  ‘Give me a moment.’

  ‘See if one of them has some bullets.’

  He returned to the bodies and explored their coat pockets and wrists, taking a pair of heavy company watches from each man, as well as a cased timepiece from each man’s coat pocket. The watches and timepieces were all wound and ticking, with their multiple dials showing different times.

  ‘You want me to take their coats as well?’ he asked, fearing the answer she was likely to give.

  ‘Just the clockwork, and anything that shoots or cuts.’

  The men were carrying no guns or knives, but one of them did have a heavy holster strapped to his leg. The holster was empty now, and Quillon fancied that it would have been about the right size to take the volley-gun Meroka was now sporting. Perhaps the traveller had crawled out of the overturned carriage, retrieved the company-issued weapon and returned to the rest of his family, hoping to hold out long enough for help to arrive, or for the zone to snap back to its former state. He opened the man’s coat and found a single bandolier reaching from shoulder to hip, with several rounds still in it. He unbuckled the bandolier, reckoning that the man in the coach must not have had time to look for it.

  ‘I found some bullets,’ he called.

  ‘Good,’ Meroka replied. ‘I just found something I hoped I wouldn’t.’ She reached down and scooped up an object from the ground, something that must have been there all along, unnoticed until now. At first glance Quillon thought it was a weirdly knotted stick or an animal bone, still with ropes and wires of sinew attached.

  But when he caught the evil glint of metal, he knew it was neither of those things.

  ‘Vorgs were here,’ Meroka said. ‘One of ’em, anyway. Left us a little present.’

  It was a limb, a silver-grey mechanical arm, but more like the forelimb of a wolf or dog than a human arm. It had been wrenched away from the main body at the shoulder. It was jointed halfway along and at the wrist, and beyond the wrist end was a small, simplified hand or paw - three clawed fingers and an opposed thumb, with curved nails or claws gleaming cobalt blue, as if they were made from some harder, sharper metal than the rest of it. The skeletal bones and articulation points were elegantly slender and ingeniously compact, as if they had evolved under viciously stringent selection pressures. But there was more to it than just sleek machinery. There was a nervous system attached to the arm, or the remains of one: the sinews Quillon had already noticed. There was something like musculature. These organic parts were slimy and haphazardly organised, coloured a liverish purple. It looked as if a robot had dipped its arm into the waste vat at an abattoir, ruining its steely perfection with a coating of random gobbets of meat and gristle.

  But metal and meat and gristle, Quillon now knew, was what the carnivorgs were.

  ‘Maybe there was just one,’ Meroka said, holding the arm at the shoulder joint, turning it this way and that with open revulsion. ‘Broke away from the other vorgs, maybe. Some of ’em are outcasts, but they still trail the main packs, looking for scraps and easy pickings.’

  ‘What happened to it?’

  ‘Maybe the guy in the carriage got a good shot. Maybe the vorg was already injured, or it knew it had to skedaddle before the others got here.’

  ‘You said they might be behind us,’ Quillon said. ‘That’s why we’ve been walking this way. You never said anything about running into them ahead of us.’

  ‘We haven’t. We’ve only found a part of one.’

  ‘Meaning they were here.’

  ‘One of ’em. But it could be leagues away by now, or lying dead in a ditch somewhere.’ She cast away the severed arm. ‘Not our problem now. But we shouldn’t hang around here.’

  ‘I still don’t understand. We know there was a carnivorg here, but we still don’t know who shot the drivers.’

  ‘Nobody did.’

  ‘You haven’t even looked at the wounds.’

  ‘Don’t have to. Soon as I found that a vorg had been sniffing around here, it all made sense. There was an accident. The steam-coach crashed and the men hit the ground. They were probably already dead by then, and definitely dead by the time the vorg got to them.’

  ‘What do you mean, “got to them”?’

  ‘Those holes you saw, they weren’t made by bullets. That was where the vorg drilled into their skulls. That was where it got to their brains and took what it wanted.’ Meroka tapped a finger against her own forehead. ‘Good prefrontal lobe tissue, the kind they like best. Rich in synaptic structure, all ready to be sucked out and wired into the vorg’s own nervous system.’

  ‘Are you telling me it ate their brains?’

  ‘What they do. How they survive, on the border where smart machines stop working. They could culture their own tissue, I guess ... but vorgs aren’t that smart any more, and anyway, this is quicker, easier. Meat machines.’ She stopped and looked at him with narrowed, judgemental eyes. ‘You know, for a pathologist, or whatever it was they used to call your line of work, you’re kind of squeamish around dead things.’

  Quillon gave her a tight smile, trying to fight the bile climbing up his throat. ‘That was the part of the job I never liked.’

  It was nearly dark when they made out another fire - not just smoke, now, but actual flames, flickering orange and crimson amongst a complication of solid dark shapes directly ahead of them, on the road itself. Black smoke pushed into the oppressively low ceiling of the sky.

  ‘This isn’t good,’ Meroka said.

  ‘Has anything been good since we left
Spearpoint?’

  ‘Don’t get clever with me, dickhead. I mean someone’s been ambushed. For real this time.’ Meroka was just as rattled as he was, even if she wouldn’t admit it to his face. She had the volley-gun in her hands at all times, preferring it to any of her own weapons. Now and then, even as she kept on walking, she would flinch and aim the sheath of clustered black barrels at some crouching spectre only she could see. ‘This is how Skullboys operate, when they don’t get what they want. Slash and burn.’

  ‘So perhaps we should consider giving this disaster a wide berth,’ Quillon said.

  But Meroka wanted to get closer. She wouldn’t say why, but Quillon guessed for himself. She was thinking that whoever had been ambushed, whoever had been caught and set alight, might well be the same people who were meant to take Quillon away. She had to know, because if that was the case they were going to need to change plans.

  They came closer to the fire. They could hear it now - the occasional dull thump as something exploded, the splinter and crash of something collapsing. Human voices occasionally pushing through the crackle and roar of the flames.

  Frightened voices. Cries and screams of anguish and fear.

  An icy terror, a premonition of something unspeakably wrong, settled over Quillon like a lowering shroud. ‘Maybe this is as far as we should go.’

  ‘We have to know what happened. You want to stay here, take your chances with whatever’s waiting out there, it’s your funeral.’ Meroka pushed the volley-gun ahead of her like a battering ram. ‘Me, I’d stick with the one who has the most barrels.’

  ‘Whatever’s happening here, it isn’t our problem.’

  ‘Everything’s our problem now, Cutter.’ She shot him a challenging look, as if everything rested on this one decision. ‘You coming or staying?’

  He followed her, even made an effort to walk by her side, but the fear was still there. He gripped the angel gun, comforted by it even though he had no idea whether it was still capable of firing.

  ‘Try not to shoot at the first thing that moves,’ she cautioned. ‘Might turn out to be a friend of mine.’

  Gradually his eyes began to resolve the dark, burning forms into individual shapes. It wasn’t just one thing on fire, it was a whole collection of things, strewn across the road and on either side of it, stretching far into the distance. They approached a black hump in the road, like a half-buried boulder, which turned out to be a dead horse, still armoured. Meroka kicked at the dead animal’s intricately fashioned carapace.

  ‘Skullboy,’ she said.

  ‘They did this?’

  ‘This used to be them. Weren’t you paying attention back there?’

  He realised now that the dead horse was wearing the same armour they had seen when the Skullboy caravan passed them by, half a lifetime ago, before the storm.

  ‘Someone got them.’

  ‘Give the man a gold star for observation.’

  They came upon a dismounted rider a little further on, perhaps the same one who had been on the dead horse. The man was dead, his half-skull helmet lying by his side, but there was no sign that a carnivorg had tried sucking his brains out. He had, however, been gashed across the throat with something sharp.

  ‘Can’t say they didn’t have it coming,’ Meroka said, kicking the man with her boot before walking on.

  ‘Have we seen enough? It’s the Skullboys. What more do we need to know?’

  ‘I’m hoping we might find something we can use. One of those machines, or a horse that hasn’t died.’

  The flames were warm on Quillon’s face now. Ahead was another fallen rider - this one trapped under his horse. This man was still alive, whimpering as they approached, his legs buckled and crushed beneath the massive bulk of his charge. Meroka went straight up to him and put a heel on his chest-plate, pushing down as if she meant to squeeze the last gasp of breath from his lungs.

  ‘Not looking so fucking fierce now, are you?’ he heard her say, addressing the man in a low, confidential tone, as if the two of them were friends at a dinner party. ‘You’re dying, you piece of shit. Shrivelling up like a day-old turd. Hope it’s hurting good. Bet you always wondered how being crushed under a dead horse would feel.’

  ‘Meroka,’ Quillon said, coming to her side. ‘This isn’t necessary.’

  ‘It’s very fucking necessary. Trust me on this, Cutter: I’ve seen what these bastards do to people.’

  ‘Two wrongs ...’ he started saying, then shook his head, knowing exactly how Meroka would respond to that sentiment. ‘At least let me examine him. He’s still alive, despite the zone shift. Must have a fair degree of inherited tolerance.’ The man’s mouth, where it was visible through a matted thicket of beard, was lathered with blood, spittle and foam. He had stopped whimpering, looking at them with fiercely defiant eyes.

  ‘I told you they have drugs,’ Meroka said, refusing to budge her foot.

  ‘Let me look at him. He’s going to die anyway. You don’t need to help him on his way.’

  She grunted something, but removed her heel. Quillon put down the angel gun so that he could use both hands to open his medical kit.

  ‘Do you understand me?’ he asked.

  ‘He understands you. Just won’t admit to it.’

  Quillon shrugged - he had no reason to doubt her. ‘I don’t know if you have any idea what’s happened. There’s been a zone storm. Worse than anything in recent experience. Spearpoint ... well, you can’t have missed that.’

  ‘Spearpointer,’ the trapped rider said, and then, despite his evident discomfort, managed to spit in Quillon’s face. Quillon wiped away the pink-tinged foam. ‘Fuck you, Spearpointer. Die like rest of us. Soon.’

  The man spat again, but this time it was weaker and his aim less effective. The spit splashed back onto his beard, lying there like a slug trail. The man groaned, unable to hide his pain.

  ‘How long do you think he’s been lying here?’ Quillon asked.

  ‘Long enough,’ she said, touching the fallen horse. ‘It’s cold. Couple hours at least, with him under it.’

  ‘You’re going to die,’ Quillon told the man. ‘Even if you didn’t have zone sickness, that horse has almost certainly been on you for too long. It’s cut off your circulation. Toxins have accumulated in your blood, trapped in your legs. If I were to release the pressure on you, those toxins would be released, and you’d die.’

  The man wheezed and made a kind of death-mask smile. ‘You too.’

  ‘Yes, you were saying. The thing is, I can take some of your pain away.’ Quillon could barely drag his eyes off the dying Skullboy, so his hands had to dig through the medical kit unassisted.

  ‘Don’t you go giving him no precious medicines,’ Meroka said.

  ‘I’ll give him what I see fit.’ He found a vial of granulated Morphax- 55, recognising it by its shape. ‘Open your mouth,’ he told the man.

  The Skullboy widened his lips, revealing a cave entrance of sharpened and metal-capped teeth, through which emerged a hellish, kitchen-waste stench of rotting meat and vegetables. His tongue had been split into two, the double-pronged end probing between his teeth.

  ‘I’m going to put this under your tongue,’ he said. ‘There’ll be no pain. Will you let me do that?’

  ‘Making a big mistake,’ Meroka said.

  The Skullboy lifted his tongue, inviting Quillon to administer the Morphax-55. He thought of just tipping the bottle in and hoping for the best, but that was wasteful and would risk contaminating the bottle itself. Instead he cupped his left hand and poured out what he judged to be a sufficient number of pills. He would take away the Skullboy’s pain, both from the horse and the zone sickness, and ease his passing, and feel that he had done some small measure of good, however insignificant the act was when set against the unthinkable misery playing out around him. Using the fingers of his right hand, he pinched at the pills with his thumb and forefinger until he had about half of them, as many as he could carry in one go, and transferred th
at quantity to the Skullboy’s mouth. The tongue was still elevated, flexing and questing in a vile way, but permitting him to deposit the pills. Then he went back for the rest, and was placing them when the Skullboy clamped down his teeth hard on Quillon’s fingers, the agony instant and exquisite, sharpened teeth and edged metal cutting flesh to the bone, crunching into the bone itself, threatening to sever his thumb and forefinger. Quillon let out a yelp of surprise and pain. With his right hand still trapped in the Skullboy’s mouth, he snatched at the angel gun with his left. He jammed the barrel against the Skullboy’s forehead and jerked the trigger. Nothing happened, so he tried again, with the Skullboy still biting down on his fingers. But the gun was dead. In a berserk fury he grabbed hold of the barrel instead and started hammering the grip against the Skullboy’s head, grunting with pain and exertion, knowing nothing but fury and the need to murder another human being. The gun cracked against bone, and on the fifth or sixth swing he felt something give way under the skin, the skull beginning to fracture, and at that same moment there was a bang, concussive and vast as if the world itself had just cracked open, and the Skullboy’s mouth turned slack. Quillon staggered away, blood already welling up from the wounds in his fingers, dropping the angel gun, barely able to look at what Meroka had to done to the Skullboy’s head.

  He saw enough. Meroka had emptied several barrels of the volley-gun in one go, at practically point-black range. Little remained of the Skullboy’s head except for his jaw. Brain and bone sprayed away on either side, plastered onto the road in the shape of an obscene, pinkish-grey butterfly.

  ‘Could’ve told you that was going to end in tears,’ Meroka said.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Quillon dug into his medical kit with his good hand until he found a bottle of disinfectant. He passed it to Meroka. ‘Open this for me.’