Terminal World

by Alastair Reynolds

  Quillon wondered what it meant to be ‘clients’ of Swarm, and suspected the answer was not going to be one he much cared for. The four of them were now being shepherded away from the Skullboys and the smoking, meat-spattered carnivorgs. Their hands were still bound. Two of Curtana’s men lingered behind at the scene of the shooting, with Curtana and the other three escorting Quillon’s party. Guns were present and visible. If they weren’t exactly being marched at gunpoint, there was a definite sense that they had no option but to comply with their new hosts. They were no longer about to be fed to machines, so Quillon could not deny that their immediate prospects had improved. As to how temporary that improvement might be, he dared not venture an opinion. He knew precisely nothing of Swarm, and had no idea what it meant to be under its jurisdiction.

  ‘Who are these people?’ he whispered to Meroka, blood still seeping from his mashed nose. ‘What is Swarm? I’ve never heard of it.’

  ‘That’s because it doesn’t usually come this close to Spearpoint.’

  ‘Until now.’

  He was avoiding eye contact with her, not wanting her to see what was normally hidden behind his spectacles.

  ‘Lot of things changed last night.’

  ‘So it would seem. I’ll ask again: what is Swarm?’

  ‘Swarm is ... Swarm. History ain’t your strong point, is it?’

  ‘Medicine was enough for me. What did I miss?’

  ‘Long time back - we’re talking centuries here, lot of centuries - Swarm was the military arm of Spearpoint. Kind of its eyes and hands, letting it see and reach much further than it does now. Swarm could get halfway around the world and back, bringing supplies and news. Then some shit happened - something about an expedition gone wrong - and there was a split. Bad blood ever since. We don’t talk about them and they hate our fucking guts.’

  ‘How do they treat their prisoners, exactly?’

  ‘We don’t take prisoners,’ Curtana said loftily, for she must have overheard. ‘We take ballast instead. It’s a subtly different concept. I’m sure your companion will be happy to explain.’

  ‘I don’t think that’ll be necessary.’

  ‘Do any of you need medical attention?’ Curtana said, glancing at his nose. ‘We have a surgeon aboard Painted Lady.’

  ‘I’ll mend.’

  ‘Your companion seems able enough, judging by her tongue. What about the mother and daughter?’

  ‘I don’t know. We haven’t been travelling together for very long.’

  ‘That wasn’t my question.’

  ‘I don’t know. They were being held prisoner by Skullboys. The Skullboys were ambushed and we did what we could to rescue the two of them.’

  ‘Do they speak?’

  ‘Why don’t you ask them?’

  ‘Please don’t try my patience, Mister ...’ She ended the sentence on a rising lilt, inviting him to continue.

  ‘Quillon.’

  ‘Also a citizen of Spearpoint,’ Curtana observed. ‘Although there’s something odd about you. And you’d be?’

  ‘Meroka.’

  ‘What are you doing outside Spearpoint?’

  ‘Counting my fucking blessings. What do you think?’

  ‘Then you’re not unaware of recent developments.’

  ‘It would be hard for anyone not to have noticed,’ Quillon replied. ‘Not if they’ve an ounce of humanity. There are thirty million people suffering in Spearpoint now, dying a slow and painful death through zone sickness.’

  ‘And it hasn’t occurred to you that there might be even more people dying a slow and painful death beyond Spearpoint? Sorry, I forgot: they don’t actually count, do they? They’re not real people at all, since they have the misfortune not to live in your precious city.’

  ‘Please don’t put words in my mouth,’ Quillon said. ‘I’m against needless suffering wherever it happens. But let’s not pretend this hasn’t happened before. People out here are tough and adaptable: they’ve had to be, to get by all this time. The zone shift, as bad as it is, is just one more thing they’ll eventually get used to.’

  ‘Plus or minus a few million graves, I suppose.’

  ‘All I’m saying is, you can’t expect Spearpoint to adapt as readily. It’s a delicate mechanism, like an expensive watch.’

  ‘In other words, something that was just waiting to fall apart and stop working. Something too complicated, too fussy, too interdependent for its own good.’ Curtana strode on, eating up the ground with her long legs. She wore riding pants and brown leather boots laced to the knee. She was tall and elegant and fiercely composed, the polar opposite of Meroka. ‘Face it, Mister Quillon - it was a catastrophe waiting to happen. The wonder is that it didn’t happen much sooner.’

  ‘And I suppose Swarm’s utterly unaffected by the zone shift?’

  ‘Mobility and flexibility have always served us well. It’s nothing we need be ashamed of.’

  At that moment there was a short burst of shooting, a single concentrated volley with no return fire. Quillon slowed his pace involuntarily. The shooting had come from behind them, from the place where they had left the Skullboys in the hands of Curtana’s other two officers.

  It had sounded very much like an execution.

  ‘What will happen to us?’ Quillon asked. ‘I’m still short on specifics when it comes to what it means to fall under Swarm jurisdiction.’

  ‘You’ll be taken back to Swarm at the earliest convenience. There, your usefulness will be assessed. We’re an inclusive society - despite what you may have heard - and we believe in giving newcomers a chance to prove their worth.’ Curtana’s tone became stern, almost as if she was addressing children. ‘But we’re not gifted with limitless patience. We’re well off by Outzone standards, but that doesn’t mean we can afford to go throwing our resources around.’ She gave Quillon a long, appraising glance, as if that was the first time she had paid real attention to him. ‘You’re obviously an educated man, so I’ve little doubt that we’ll find something for you to do. Of course, you’ll be accorded all the usual rights of a Spearpoint citizen, which is to say you’ll be assumed to be a spy, saboteur or seditionist until proven otherwise.’

  ‘No holding on to old grudges, then,’ he said.

  They walked on into the roar of the engines, until the grey shape of Curtana’s ship began to emerge from the night, hovering just above the ground. Her engines were angled up, propeller blades directed to provide downward thrust to counteract the static lift from her rigid envelope. Quillon was not at all surprised to see an airship, for he had spotted enough of them during the day, even if they had never been more than distant dots foraging just above the horizon.

  ‘Nice blimp,’ Meroka said. ‘You steal it from the Skullboys?’

  Curtana said nothing, but Quillon sensed that she was only ever one provocation away from doing something they might all regret. He willed Meroka to keep her mouth shut.

  That Painted Lady was a military craft would have been obvious to even a casual observer, for the airship’s form was both purposeful and vicious. Her envelope was a slender cigar, spined with anti-fouling devices, barbed and bayoneted with jagged slicing edges, ramming spikes and retractile cutters. Her stiff fabric - reinforced here and there with aluminium sheeting - had been patched and repaired so many times that the vessel’s scars suggested to Quillon not so much vulnerability as the stubborn resilience of a very hardy organism, something that had evolved the ability to shrug off wounds that would have ended lesser creatures.

  Beneath the envelope, her single gondola was plated with angled metal sheets, lending her a chiselled, formidable look, as if she was expected to serve double-duty as an icebreaker. Her few full-sized windows were protected by armoured shutters. Elsewhere, visibility was provided by cowled slits and swivelling periscope stations. Ball turrets were stationed beneath the front of the gondola, under the belly, at either side and at the rear, each sprouting the twin pipe-entwined barrels of air-cooled rotary machine guns. Anothe
r turret poked through the envelope to afford protection from above. She had wings, braced out from the side of her envelope on adjustable-tension cables, the wings able to flex to provide both positive and negative lift, in much the same way that angels modified their own flying surfaces.

  Her propulsion outriggers - jutting from the gondola fore and aft, with two piston engines on each side - were edged to function as blades in the event of close action, ready perhaps to slice through another vessel’s envelope, wing-struts, control rigging or even crew. She was grey and blue-green metal-shades, save for a pink stencilled butterfly sprayed onto the envelope, the butterfly’s faded, bullet-riddled shape already eaten into by rectangular patch repairs. She had no number or other means of identification; nothing to mark her higher allegiance to Swarm.

  Two armoured and uniformed airmen were waiting on the ground, guarding the lowered ramp leading into the gondola’s belly, the ramp flexing and scuffing against the ground as Painted Lady struggled to hold position. Curtana raised a hand and the airmen saluted back in the same fashion. ‘Keep right behind me,’ she told Quillon, ignoring the other three captives. ‘The updraught from those engines is enough to suck you right into the blades if you step anywhere under them. Trust me, I’ve seen it happen. Took all week to scrape the mess off the envelope.’

  The inside of the gondola, the limited part that he was allowed to see, was all unpainted utilitarian metal, engineered for maximum lightness. The interior struts were perforated; the floor a metal grid over a service trough containing various pipes and amenities. There were storage lockers, rifle, crossbow and sword racks, shelves of battle-hardened instruments, stencilled instruction panels with terse, admonitory warnings in old-fashioned, angular stencilled script about such and such a procedure and how vital it was that Action A be performed before Action B, with dire consequences for deviation. There were curtained alcoves and doored-off compartments. There were speaking tubes and periscopes and complex, optical-looking devices whose function Quillon couldn’t even begin to guess at. All of this he was ushered past with maximum haste, until they reached a small, empty room at the back of the gondola, where it began to taper down to a fishtail steering vane. There was nothing in the room except two long benches, converging together at the room’s narrow end, and only the narrowest slits of windows along either tapering wall. Some kind of gaslight burned in an armoured lamp, recessed into the ceiling. Their hands were untied. Meroka and Quillon took the bench on one side, Kalis and Nimcha the other.

  ‘Your coats, please,’ Curtana said. ‘And that bag of yours, Mister Quillon.’

  ‘We’ll freeze,’ Quillon said. The metal skin of the airship was icy to the touch.

  ‘I’ll send down warm clothes and blankets. The bag, please. Now.’

  ‘I’ll be wanting my coat back,’ Meroka said, as Quillon handed over the medical bag.

  ‘Everything you owned is now the property of Swarm, so get used to the idea. In return you’ll be protected and well looked after.’

  ‘Until you decide we’re spies after all,’ Quillon said, passing her the medical bag.

  ‘We’re not savages,’ Curtana said. ‘Many of our clients go on to become useful, productive citizens of Swarm.’

  ‘Unlike those men you had shot back there.’

  Curtana opened her mouth to speak, and for a moment he thought she was going to defend herself, pointing out that she had not ordered an execution. ‘They resisted disarmament,’ she said, voicing what could only have been a supposition, since she had not spoken to the other officer since ordering him to disarm and release the Skullboys. ‘What you need to understand - and understand fast - is that you’re not in Spearpoint now. We’ve always made our own law out here, and that isn’t going to change any time soon.’

  Curtana left, closing the door on them. It was heavy, with a small grilled window in the top half. Quillon had no doubt that this compartment was routinely used for prisoner storage. The walls might be thin enough to let in the cold, but they were likely strong enough to contain unarmed men. Not that he had the least intention of trying to escape anyway.

  The airship loitered long enough for the other members of the landing party to return, and then they were aloft, the engines no longer fighting against the envelope, but providing forward momentum instead. The metal walls vibrated, the angle of the floor tilting as the craft nosed steeply into the sky.

  ‘At least you knew about Swarm,’ he said to Meroka.

  ‘I wasn’t planning on coming into range of it. Fray likes to keep track of its movements, as far as he’s able. Normally it stays much further west. He’d have known if it was this close to Spearpoint before we left.’ Quillon noticed that she was holding the Testament, the small black book he had leafed through in Horsetown, while Meroka was out of the room.

  ‘What is Swarm, exactly?’

  ‘You’ll see soon enough, if that’s where they’re taking us.’

  ‘At least it’s a form of civilisation.’

  ‘They aren’t going to open their arms to us, Cutter. Maybe to the woman and the girl, seeing as they obviously aren’t from Spearpoint. But you and me?’ She paused, staring at him intently. ‘You’ve got weird fucking eyes, anyone ever tell you that?’

  Quillon turned to look at Kalis and Nimcha again. They were huddling into each other, the shaven-headed mother with her arms around the straggle-haired daughter, still barefoot, still clothed in little more than rags.

  ‘Might I examine your daughter?’ he asked Kalis.

  The woman tugged the girl closer to her, flashing warning eyes at Quillon.

  He raised a hand gently. ‘We all know what happened back there, Kalis.’

  ‘Do we?’ Meroka asked.

  ‘When the vorg was about to kill Meroka, you said something to Nimcha. It sounded very much like “do it” to me. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. What could you have been asking her to do? After all, she’s just a girl. She had nothing on her she could have used. But even when you said it, I felt something.’ He glanced at the grilled window, making sure they were not being observed. He doubted that eavesdropping was a possibility; the noise of the airship was much too loud for that. ‘It wasn’t a zone shift, or even a tremor,’ Quillon continued, ‘but it felt as if something was trying to happen.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Meroka asked, her tone insistent. Quillon rose from his bench. He steadied himself with one hand against the perforated strut spanning the ceiling. Before she could flinch away, he stroked the other hand across Kalis’s mark.

  ‘I was right about this, wasn’t I?’ he asked her. ‘It’s self-inflicted. You made this mark yourself, or got someone to do it for you, to make people think you were the tectomancer. It’s a good effort, I’ll give you that, and it was obviously enough to convince the Skullboys. But it’s not a true birthmark. It’s a tattoo, and it wasn’t done long ago.’

  ‘You don’t know anything,’ Kalis said.

  ‘And all that business since we met, that way you have of talking - the stilted, mad-woman things you keep coming out with? You’re not mad at all. Or at least no madder than anyone would be if they’d been locked up, with a high likelihood of either being fed to the vorgs or burned alive. That would push anyone over the edge, if they were already insane to begin with. But you weren’t. You were wise and resourceful enough to know that there was only one way to protect your daughter. You had to divert attention from her. You had to become the tectomancer, so no one would think it was Nimcha.’

  ‘You feeling all right?’ Meroka asked. ‘Maybe you should have taken some of those meds, before they took that bag away.’

  ‘I’m fine, thank you.’ He smiled tightly. ‘A little bruised around the edges, but otherwise in adequate command of my faculties. Might I look at Nimcha, Kalis? I promise no one else will learn of this. You’ve nothing to lose, since I’m already certain of the truth.’

  ‘The truth of what?’ Meroka asked.

  Kalis offered no resi
stance when he stroked his hand through the filthy mass of Nimcha’s hair, parting it just enough to see the scarlet mark showing through the skin. Meroka had left the bench and was looking over his shoulder.

  ‘It’s quite real,’ he said, glancing again at the grilled window. ‘This is pure pigmentation. I don’t think it’s tattoo, a scar or brand-mark. It could be a stain of some kind, but then it would have had to have been done when she was shaved, and yet it hasn’t faded in all the time it’s taken her hair to grow this long.’

  ‘We talked about this,’ Meroka said. ‘Whether or not tectomancers are real, she isn’t one.’

  ‘We’re talking about the daughter now.’

  ‘It’s still fake.’

  ‘It isn’t. Is it?’ Quillon asked Kalis. ‘You know perfectly well that it isn’t. She’s had this since she was born, hasn’t she? And you’ve always known how dangerous it was, how that mark alone could get her killed, regardless of any actual power that came with it. If the rumour got around that one of you had the mark, then at least you could deflect attention onto yourself. And if Nimcha’s powers really did manifest themselves, and drew attention to her, you’d be able to claim they originated with you.’

  ‘If you speak of this,’ Kalis said, ‘I will kill you.’

  ‘I’m not going to speak of it to anyone. But so far you haven’t managed to keep the secret very well, have you?’ Feeling he had spoken too harshly, he added, ‘Look, Kalis, I can’t imagine what you’ve gone through to protect your daughter this far. Even when you were in that cage, you didn’t let anyone know that she was the one they really wanted. That must have taken all the love a mother could give.’ Quillon shook his head. ‘No, I won’t speak of it. None of us will. Right, Meroka?’

  ‘Nothing to speak of,’ she said.

  ‘Good,’ Quillon said. ‘That makes everything a lot simpler. But I’m serious, Meroka - it has to stay our little secret. They can’t find out about her.’

  ‘They?’ Meroka asked.