Terminal World

by Alastair Reynolds

  The truck had little option but to make most of its ascent the long way around, climbing the rising ledge. The steeper connecting ramps were either blocked, collapsed or not yet secured for safe passage, and none of the funicular vehicle-lifts was operating. The truck kept under the elevated legs of the railway line for most of its journey. By the time they reached Third District, more people were about, although most of them appeared unwilling to stray too far outside the buildings. A couple of shots clanged against the elevated structure, Meroka and the other riders returning fire, but not in any obvious expectation of hitting anyone. Once, they sloshed through the run-off of a waterfall cascading down from the next ledge. Quillon spotted a dismal huddle of men, women and children trying to collect what they could, with pots and pans and any other receptacles they could manage. No matter that the water had come from somewhere else in the city, somewhere that was probably just as filthy and disease-ridden as Neon Heights. In their shoes, Quillon supposed, he would have been forced to take the same chances. It was then that he realised that getting medicine to these people wasn’t even going to be half the battle. It was going to be a tenth, or a hundredth part of it. But it was the one part that had to be in place before any other reconstruction could begin.

  At last the truck arrived in what Quillon knew to be the old Fourth District. On the face of it, the streets didn’t look any different from those they had already passed through. But the militiamen grew noticeably edgier and the driver picked his way with increased care, as if wary of booby traps and snares. Quillon, Kalis and Nimcha were encouraged to crouch as low down as they could. Quillon found his hand returning to the pocket where he had secreted the pistol. They no longer had the cover of the elevated railway line and were now easy prey for anyone taking potshots from the tall buildings on either side of the street.

  Then he saw one of his own, flitting effortlessly across the gap between two tenements. He knew immediately that the creature was an angel. Like him, it lacked fully developed wings. Like him, it had been adapted to some degree for life in the lower levels. But the manner in which it moved spoke nothing of normal human physiology. This was a creature shaped not for infiltration but for occupation, probably very similar to the ghouls that had chased them out of Neon Heights.

  Then he saw a second, ghosting across the same gap. They were pale and fast and seemed to disdain the usual constraints of gravity and momentum. They moved fluidly, like organised smoke. He caught a flash of metal and heard a shot drum against the front of the truck. The militiamen fired back, blasting away at the roofline of the nearest building. He caught another grey blur and the sputter of automatic fire. At least the angels didn’t have energy weapons, Quillon thought. Now that the prevailing zone was equivalent to Steamville, angel-level technology would be even less workable than it had been in the old Neon Heights. The infiltrators had to use rifles and machine guns, just like the defending forces. It was a level killing field, with the exception that the angels were fast and numerous.

  The driver kicked the truck into high gear, apparently deciding that any risk from snares was to be preferred above being ambushed by angels. They sped around a bend and passed along a backstreet faced on either side by drab brick tenements and zigzagging iron fire escapes. Machine-gun fire receded into the distance. The truck careered through a row of garbage cans, then twisted around onto the next street. Quillon recognised the district again - they were very near the rising wall of the next ledge, soaring up on the left like a frozen black fogbank. There, ahead, was the alley that housed the Pink Peacock. Abandoned cars had been dragged out of their slots to form a crude barricade around the entrance to the side street. The truck barely slowed as it made the turn, yawing to the right so that the crates started sliding and the passengers had to grab for anchors. There was a narrow gap between two of the cars, not quite wide enough for the truck to fit, and the heavy wheels gouged their way through, ripping away fenders and door-panels. Militiamen, unseen until now, were stationed behind the barricade. Beyond was what passed for a secure area, leading up to the Pink Peacock’s undemonstrative entrance. Quillon allowed himself a partial sigh of relief. Tulwar had kept his word.

  The truck came to a seething, simmering halt. Quillon and Meroka sprang off and helped Kalis and Nimcha down. The Pink Peacock’s front door was already open, with two of Tulwar’s men guarding it. They had the chipper look of local ne’er-do-wells who couldn’t believe their luck that the city had turned upside down and they’d come out floating on top.

  ‘Better not plan on staying in those tunnels too long,’ one of them said to Quillon. ‘We might not be here when you come out.’

  Quillon and the others went inside. The Pink Peacock had never been the brightest of places but now it was a dimensionless cavern of barely relieved gloom. There was no electricity. Illumination was offered by a number of portable gas lanterns placed on tables and shelves, turned down to little more than a flicker. Quillon sensed Kalis’s lingering consternation.

  ‘What is this place?’

  ‘Nowhere we’ll be spending any time,’ he said. ‘It’s just the easiest route into the tunnels.’

  Meroka made her way to the bar. She peered over the back of it as if looking for a drink. ‘It’s a real shame what happened to Malkin,’ she called. ‘Him abandoning the place and all.’

  ‘Shit happens,’ a militiaman said.

  ‘Yeah, that it does. Which is good, or else people like me’d be out of business.’

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  Meroka was scratching behind the bar. ‘His cash box. Where he kept his fluid assets. Figured if he didn’t want it, I’d help myself. Seeing as I was a long-term business associate. Figure some of that money belongs to me or Fray, whichever way you cut it.’

  The militiaman laughed at her patent naivety. ‘Forget it. Even if he somehow forgot to take the box - and Malkin wasn’t that stupid - that money isn’t worth dick any more. ‘Cept as something to light a fire with, or wipe your arse on. Haven’t you ever heard of hyperinflation?’

  ‘Thanks for the succinct economic analysis, dickhead.’ She gave up searching behind the bar. ‘Money’s gone anyway. Guess he wasn’t that stupid, like you say.’

  ‘No, I guess not.’

  ‘Something up?’ Quillon asked, annoyed with Meroka for delaying matters when all he wanted to do was get into the tunnels and confront whatever lay ahead.

  ‘Just thought it was worth a look, that’s all.’

  ‘If you can bear to put your mercenary instincts aside for just a few moments, we actually came here to help Nimcha, not make ourselves richer.’

  ‘I didn’t forget about them, Cutter.’ She sounded less irritated than he expected. ‘C’mon. Let’s get on with it.’ Then she bellowed, ‘Tulwar’s people - I take it none of you is coming with us?’

  ‘Do we need to?’ the militiaman asked.

  ‘Not really. I know my way through these tunnels about as well as anyone.’

  ‘Then we’ll leave you to it.’

  Meroka grabbed one of the handheld lanterns, told Quillon to grab another and led them into the windowless nook where Quillon had met

  Fray on the evening of his escape. Nothing much had changed. There was even a half-finished drink on the table. Meroka fished a set of keys from her pocket, opened the door in the back wall and ushered Quillon, Kalis and Nimcha into the claustrophobic space beyond, and then worked the lock on the interior door.

  ‘Close that one behind us,’ she told the militiaman. He kicked shut the outer door, leaving them in darkness save for the wavering, tentative glow of the gas lanterns. ‘Go forwards,’ she told the others, before shutting and locking the main door behind them.

  ‘It doesn’t smell good in here,’ Nimcha said.

  ‘You get used to it,’ Meroka said, pushing past them with her lantern held high. ‘Trust me on this. Now let’s walk on a bit. We need to let them think we’re going deeper into the tunnels, as per the plan.’


  ‘We aren’t?’ Quillon asked.

  ‘Just walk on.’

  He kept walking, bringing up the rear with Kalis and Nimcha just ahead of them.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said, when they had gone on for another minute or so.

  ‘Haven’t you figured it out yet, Cutter? This is a set-up. Tulwar’s lured us into these tunnels so he can kill us and pretend we never happened.’

  ‘Tulwar?’

  ‘Yeah, Tulwar. The guy with the steam-powered heart.’

  ‘I thought you - we - trusted him.’

  ‘We did.’

  Kalis spoke for the first time since entering the tunnel. ‘I did not like that man. But why would he want to kill us, if we are here to make the city better?’

  ‘You’ve answered your own question,’ Meroka said. ‘Tulwar likes being at the top of the food chain. It’s working out for him. Only problem is, he needs things to stay nicely fucked-up for that to continue. We come along, threaten to sprinkle fairy-dust on everything and put it back the way it used to be, that’s not exactly - pardon the expression - music to his ears.’

  ‘Tulwar could have killed us in the bathhouse, couldn’t he?’ Quillon asked.

  ‘Sure. But then he’d have risked being found out by Curtana and the others. Same thing if he’d tried killing us on the way here. Too many questions: more medicine coming in any time now, and he’s going to want to keep on Ricasso’s good side. Man needs that Serum-15. Wants to be the linchpin of the distribution operation. Got a taste for controlling the supply and demand, wouldn’t you say? Take away the disaster, you take away his living.’

  ‘That’s only a hunch, though,’ Quillon said.

  ‘Yeah. Until about five minutes ago.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Tulwar lied about Malkin. He’s not dead. Or if he is, he didn’t go the way Tulwar said.’

  ‘Maybe Tulwar got it wrong.’

  ‘Don’t think so. That stuff about the cash box? I made it up. In case you didn’t figure that out already. I was just checking for the keys behind Malkin’s bar.’

  ‘Which keys?’

  ‘The spare set. Fray gave me a bunch of keys to open the door back there, and all the others in the tunnels. I held on to it all this time. Fray had his own, which he always kept on him. But Malkin had the spare set. He knew about the tunnels, how to use them if the heat came down.’

  ‘And Malkin’s set?’

  ‘Wasn’t there.’

  ‘Aren’t you reading a lot into some missing keys?’

  ‘I know Malkin, Cutter. If those keys are missing it’s because he took them. And if he did, it’s because he wanted to get into these tunnels. Which means Tulwar was either lying, or very mistaken, and I know which one I’m putting my money on.’

  ‘All right,’ Quillon said, sighing. ‘Let’s assume you’re right about this - where does it leave us?’

  ‘In, not to put too fine a point on it, a world of shit.’

  ‘You know these tunnels well.’

  ‘Yeah. Problem is, so do a lot of people connected to Fray. Tulwar might not be able to fit into them, but that doesn’t mean he can’t draw a map for someone else.’

  ‘But we’ve locked the door behind us. Aren’t we safe now?’

  ‘Not really. Someone could have come in ahead of us, and in any case there’s another entrance: the one I took you out of, in the launderette.’

  ‘Tulwar said it wasn’t secure,’ Quillon said.

  ‘Tulwar said a lot of things. I’m starting to wonder about several of them.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I think we’ve been set up for execution, Cutter. They could change the locks and let us die in here slowly, but I don’t think that’s Tulwar’s style. He’ll want to know the job’s been done. That means he’ll have sent someone into the tunnels ahead of us.’

  ‘We must leave,’ Kalis said.

  ‘We can’t,’ Meroka said. ‘Go back the way we came in, they’ll just shoot us anyway.’

  ‘Can they get into the tunnels, if they don’t have the same keys?’ Quillon asked.

  ‘I don’t know how many sets were floating around, or what happened to Fray’s. Even without the keys, Tulwar had all night to come up with a workaround. You think the man doesn’t know a good locksmith? Someone could easily have got through those doors by now, and locked them again from the other side.’

  ‘Then you’re right,’ Quillon said. ‘We’re in trouble.’

  ‘Or we would be,’ Meroka said, ‘if I wasn’t the one leading us. I told Tulwar we were headed for the sub-shaft near the launderette entrance, so that’s where they’ll be expecting us to show up. But that’s not the only option open to us. There’s another way down to the Mire, and it doesn’t involve us going anywhere near the other sub-shaft.’

  ‘I’m hearing a “but”,’ Quillon said.

  ‘It’s not the option I’d have preferred, but when the alternative is walking into a trap, it begins to have its attractions.’ Her tone turned urgent. ‘But we need to move now, all right? We need to move and you need to trust me when I tell you I know what I’m doing. If they get impatient, Tulwar’s men may decide to meet us halfway, and that wouldn’t be good.’ She paused. ‘Oh, and there’s a catch. We’ll almost certainly be crossing into a different zone.’

  ‘We expected that,’ Quillon said.

  ‘With machines in it,’ Meroka said. ‘Mad ones.’

  ‘As in ... the Mad Machines? The ones you told me didn’t exist, except in bedtime stories?’ Quillon asked.

  ‘Yeah.’ She raised her lantern and gave her companions a grin of demonic wickedness. ‘So I guess I lied about some stuff as well.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Meroka forced a hard pace, driving the party on through the twisting black warren, passing open shafts and branching junctions without comment. If they led anywhere, Quillon supposed, they were not to places Meroka deemed presently useful. The warm, wet air carried decay on its breath. Perhaps Quillon’s nose had become more sensitive since leaving Spearpoint, but it seemed to him that the smell was more pronounced this time. More intense and more obviously redolent of death.

  He had seen Spearpoint 2 and that had changed everything about the way he visualised this tunnel system. He had known of the tunnels before his escape, but only in the vague sense that he was aware of other hidden structures, such as sewerage pipes and telecom ducts, which, rather than being cut through Spearpoint’s underlying fabric, channelled through the compacted, granite-like substrate that was all that remained of earlier building phases. If he had pictured the tunnels at all, he had imagined them branching and threading their way through Spearpoint’s solid trunk like worm tracks. But Spearpoint wasn’t solid, he now appreciated. Most of it - if it was anything at all like its broken twin - was hollow, all the way up and all the way down. There might not even be atmosphere inside it, if Ricasso was right and the vacuum integrity had withstood the centuries. The tunnels, as bewildering and labyrinthine as they were, lay solely within the walls.

  Meroka had told the party to make as little noise as possible, and while they couldn’t do anything about their breathing, Quillon and the others resisted the urge to speak. Even when they had travelled for what felt like far longer than his original journey (though that was probably his mind playing tricks) he knew better than to question Meroka about her plan. They were in her hands, totally dependent on her knowledge, and now was not the time to start having second thoughts about her abilities.

  At last, Meroka stopped and held the lantern at eye level. There was a gap in the wall with an armoured door set into it, fixed to a crudely welded frame that was itself caulked into place, rather than being drilled or screwed. Quillon couldn’t remember if he had noticed it on his first trip. He didn’t think it was the junction where Meroka had shot the rat, since that had been much closer to the launderette exit. At least, that was what his jumbled recollection told him. But that had been a night of flight and fear, and fear was no
t conducive to the laying down of accurate memories.

  ‘This is the place,’ Meroka said in a hiss-whisper. She jangled her way through the bunch of keys, nerves beginning to tell. Quillon watched as she tried various keys in the lock, none of them working the mechanism. She tried one final key and there was a reassuring - but ominously loud - clunk from the lock mechanism that seemed to echo away for infinities. It was the loudest sound they had made since locking the door back at the Pink Peacock.

  The door huffed open and Quillon felt a cool, dry gust. His lantern roared brighter, then returned to its normal glow: there was a pressure differential.

  ‘It’s a steep slope,’ Meroka said, removing the key and slipping it into the lock from the other side. ‘I’ll go first. Kalis and Nimcha - follow me, but watch your footing all the way down. Don’t want to start sliding. Cutter - lock up behind us, quietly as you can.’

  He held his lantern high and nodded.

  Meroka disappeared from view. Kalis went next, followed by Nimcha, their faces underlit by Meroka’s bobbing light as she descended ahead of them. Quillon moved to the door and surveyed the shaft. The slope was steeper than he had expected, but the floor wasn’t completely smooth. There were steps cut into it, or rather the rounded, smoothed-off traces where steps might once have been, before time softened their forms. The others were just about able to use these ghost-steps to keep themselves from sliding, but it was still treacherous. It was especially difficult for Nimcha, who had to step further than the others, relative to her size.

  Quillon eased through the door and was about to swing it gingerly shut when there was a flash and a rattle of automatic gunfire, unbearably loud in the tunnel’s confines. Bullets clanged into the door from the other side, punching thumb-sized dents all the way through the metal.