Armwrestling the Dead

by Andrew McEwan

crisp, the men on board dressed in storm-coats.

  It was a storm-coat Schilling could use now as he manoeuvred between empty drums and streaked containers. Vents extruded from the mine’s naked flank, flaps squeaking like old hinges as the monstrosity sucked and issued gases. The walls leaned at sixty degrees.

  And inside they practised grip and hydroponics.

  iv

  Suma was in another part of the galaxy. As the afternoon waned toward evening Schilling could see no stars. The mine lip up like a circus, yellow illuminations playing tricks of shade across its manifold surfaces, clowns and performing seals at the base of its chimneys. He lay between two sheets of discarded insulation, his head resting on the carrier, staring at the gridwork of ladder-guards and platforms, the likelihood of ingress uppermost on his mind as he studied the use and position of variously shaped doors. You could tell a lot about what lay behind, he figured, by their weight and outline, whether or not they were pressure-locked or opened vertically with the input of lettered keys. The number of bolt heads in their construction and the flatness or otherwise of their improper coloration offered a variety of clues. He had merely to decipher them.

  He chose his door with care. Its plates were riveted. A man exited every forty minutes or so, suggesting rote, beyond a companionway; perhaps a refreshment area or shower facility, as the men came out lightly dressed, unburdened by hoses and crude breathing apparatus. This section of the mine dealt mainly with refinement and storage, he intuited, arguably more hazardous than extraction, but not so reliant on muscle, which meant less of a physical presence. Most of the real work went on underground.

  Schilling was at a loss to pinpoint a residential area, but probably it was to the back of the mine, well away from the loading terminals he’d passed earlier. A man had come from that direction riding a whispering motorcycle, helmeted and with a heavy pump-gun across his shoulders. Most likely Miller, he’d stopped at the rubble and raised his visor, stood on the saddle, but failed to spot the reclined trooper, who wondered briefly just how deep the hole he had dug for himself was and if he alone would fill it. That was hours ago. Now, the sky darkened, purple to black, that same trooper rose, dusted himself off, jogged for a ladder and clambered swiftly up its hardened rungs. Ruby had dumped on him once too often. He felt he had nothing to lose. His life belonged to the company; they’d paid for it. Franky was nowhere. There was no blue ocean, only a slick green one...

  The door with the rivets was open.

  A rumbling began at the foot of a gantry supporting an inoperative machine. Schilling was twenty metres in. There had been a companionway, but he’d left this as it veered into an area of voices and flowing water, continuing instead via a series of zig-zagging stairs, each of ten steps taking him inexorably upward. His way forward was blocked by the machine, whose purpose was masked by its silence. He skirted round, outside the gantry rail, and reached a second, higher level, the catwalk oily in the dim light. Another twenty metres of sagging mesh ended at a hatch with blazoned numerals and spin-lock bolts, this side and free. He stepped through, the rumbling louder, a shapeless noise without direction. If anything the light was weaker here. There was no extraneous movement. Only the air stirred at his passing.

  The mine’s eastern extreme didn’t appear to be a secure zone; no cameras or obvious detection equipment. A few glinting eyes observed him indifferently, but Schilling fell outside their threat parameters, enabling him to proceed unmolested. Fifty metres found him at another door, the mesh before it wet, acrid liquid dripping from one of several looped pipes where the ceiling had dramatically lowered. The door was dragged open from the other side by a squat Runner with a toolkit and Schilling jumped quickly through, cheeks inflated as if in consternation, boots hurrying past the man whose vacant features turned to mark his rear as he disappeared behind a fire-gutted electrics’ conduit, its blackened fibres the first hint of internal foliage, their melting a probable cause of machine hiatus. Schilling didn’t gaze over his shoulder. The conduit rose through the slatted floor and punched a hole in the false ceiling, a half metre tube of cables and fluid.

  Doors grew more frequent, crowded in passageways. Catwalks extended like rope bridges over a huge square-sided shaft, stinking air rising from its stygian depths. But he wasn’t exploring; that would have been pointless. Neither was he searching for any one place. In general he sought the residential area; but mostly, he realized, he was just headed south. South lay the more violent climes, the permanent ice. The snow roof was thickest close to the poles. It cracked less often. He shrugged. No wonder the planet wobbled. There was a cooking smell ahead. Laughter and ferns appeared round a bend and the walls shifted hue. He followed his nose.

  ‘Hey...’

  He stopped to look. A woman smiled at a man whose shirt was torn at the elbows. They turned down a passage crossing this one.

  Moistening his lips, he followed, the string-pull bag dangling from his shoulder. Schilling no longer needed his nose, but held it out in front to make doubly sure. The passage widened as others joined it, the whole gently sloping, gauzy in shades of watercolour light. The rumbling transformed into individual sounds.

  Human voices climbed out of the babble, shaping words that filtered through the tavern’s ribboned entrance. This was the last place he wanted to be, especially if a shift had just ended, but he edged his way in, stole a drink and sat in a chair by the only window. The table was free while the tavern was crowded. Schilling drank meditatively and gazed at the darkened view.

  No-one approached the table or otherwise tried to speak with him. They bustled and shoved among themselves, straining the volume, eating, casting furtive glances from behind opal fronds and breathing one another’s foam. Their glasses were full of it, their plates stacked, white bubbles on their lips and in their lungs. Schilling examined faces, taking them ten and fifteen at a time with sweeps of his head. All were Runners. He was intruding. They didn’t know what to make of him. They were a suspicious bunch, yet lacked motivation. None thought to ask. They’d get drunk and pick a fight maybe, but they wouldn’t question. As Runners went they were the worst, the dregs, the least mentally agile, their minds further addled by drugs. They lived a white foam existence. The plants about them possessed more imagination. The plants about them were not part dead.

  But the plants wouldn’t kill him.

  Schilling drained his glass and in doing so complied with an unknown etiquette.

  A man immediately occupied the chair opposite and the tavern was hushed.

  Know thine enemy, the manuals read.

  And Schilling was very much mistaken.

  v

  The veins in his neck formed ridges, short sections of a larger, mostly hidden network. The reason they stood out was to be found in Schilling’s right hand and left cerebral hemisphere, each of which played a major role, joined via flesh and nerve and sinew. Information flashed back and forth as his fingers heated, skull shrinking, wrist and elbow distorted, skin and thought redly taut. Lights reflected in the window glass. Beyond, suspended in the dark, some kilometres yet from the complex, other lights went unnoticed.

  The bout had started several minutes past.

  Sweat trickled in to his eyes. His opponent’s were aqueous pools of effort. the trooper proved extravagant with his energy, using it to lick his lips. Behind him plants green, blue, yellow and pink stretched variegated heads, those with teeth and nostrils pressing tongues and flaring apertures, not missing a scent. No-one moved below the shoulder, their bodies having locked in position at the off, stiff and cramped as the seconds mounted and the breaths quickened and the hearts twisted beneath ribs of steel and match-wood.

  On the fringes of consciousness, where the crowd had gathered like penguins on an ice floe, a newer rumbling, softer than that which had transmuted into jumbled conversation as Schilling entered the tavern, intruded now disguised as lung rasps and stomach turns, shaking ash from neglected cigarettes, jingling bottles on the
bar, creeping into gums and feet. Inside, the lights dimmed, as those outside swelled. The rumbling increased and the window cast a harsh monochrome through features contracted with effort. His opponent grunted. Schilling gained a few centimetres, measuring them in degrees as his palm was sucked to the table.

  People began to stir, alarm registering. Such was his infatuation he imagined their concern to be centred on himself, for as their champion succumbed his victory seemed increasingly laden with guarantees. After this he was ready for anything. Ruby most of all.

  Too often did Schilling rely on first impressions.

  A scream sliced through the tavern, spreading panic, those plants that were able running for the exits as the window exploded and the scream ascended in pitch, bursting the veins of the man opposite, his hand abruptly flaccid, crushed by the trooper’s into the glass-strewn table.

  Schilling was deafened. His face bled copiously. Blood ran from his ears and nose. Releasing his grip on the dead man he slid to his knees amid the carnage of leaves and flowers, mock colours mirrored in the wires drooping from the buckled ceiling. The roof of the tavern had broken open. Internally, the light was erratic, pulsing, the strobed passage of blood