One of the hitmen was dead in the control room. So who was that on the fleeing bike?
Yoyo?
While he was still thinking about it, he clattered down the zigzag stairs. Apart from him and possibly Yoyo none of the Guardians had survived the massacre. The remaining City Demons knew nothing about the double life of the six of them, even though they might have guessed at various things. Yoyo and he had originally brought the Demons to life as a disguise. A motorbike association aroused no suspicion, it wasn’t considered intellectual or subversive. They could meet easily, particularly in Quyu. Three more members had joined the previous year. Perhaps, Daxiong thought, as he lowered his full three hundredweight onto his motorbike, the time had come to initiate them. Strictly speaking, he no longer had that option. Whoever their opponent might have been, it was clear that the Guardians had been busted.
As he drove off he selected a number.
There was a ringing noise. It went on too long, far too long. Then he heard the boy’s voice.
‘Where were you, damn it?’ snorted Daxiong.
Lau Ye yawned and talked at the same time.
Then he asked a question.
‘Don’t ask, Ye,’ Daxiong snorted into the mobile. ‘Get Xiao-Tong and Mak over here. Right now! Go to the blast furnace and clear the control room, everything you find there, computer, displays, the lot.’
The boy stammered something which Daxiong took to mean that he didn’t know where the others were.
‘Then find them!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll explain it later. What? No, don’t take the stuff to Andromeda, and not to the workshop. Then think of something. Somewhere they won’t connect with us. Oh, and Ye—’ He swallowed. ‘You will find corpses. Brace yourselves, you hear?’
He rang off before Ye could ask any questions.
* * *
Jericho’s machine took a blow when the blond guy’s airbike collided with its chassis. Time and again he had tried to steer towards the airspace above the steelworkers’ housing estate. Every time the blond guy forced him back, stared wildly over at them and tried to take aim. The lunar landscape of the slag-fields sped along beneath them. Once again Jericho tried to turn off to the left. The blond guy speeded up and forced him in the other direction.
‘Where are you actually trying to get to?’ Yoyo’s voice rang in his ears.
‘We’re outdistancing him!’
‘You haven’t a hope out in the open! Tempt him into the plant.’
The blond guy’s airbike shot upwards and immediately plummeted back down again. Jericho saw the machine’s fish belly right above him and then dived. They wobbled along just above ground level.
‘Be careful!’ Yoyo snapped.
‘I know what I’m doing!’ Rage welled up in him, but he was actually by no means sure about what he should do. Right in front of him a huge chimney rose out of the ground.
‘To the right!’ screeched Yoyo. ‘The right!’
The blond guy drove them further down. The bike scratched along dried-up slag, started skipping, went into a violent roll, then they were around the chimney, only to find themselves in front of a hangar-sized warehouse. They were too close, far too close. No chance of avoiding it, of turning away, of avoiding a collision.
No! The warehouse door was open a crack.
Just before the threatened impact Jericho pulled the machine to the side and shot through it.
* * *
Lau Ye dashed through the gloomy concert hall of the Andromeda. He ran as fast as his lanky legs would carry him.
Don’t ask any questions. Just don’t ask.
He was used to this from Daxiong, and he had never complained. Lau Ye was a novice in the order of the City Demons: he had been the last to join and he was by far the youngest. He respected Daxiong and Yoyo, Ziyi and Maggie, Tony and Jia Wei. He also respected Ma Mak and Hui Xiao-Tong, even though they had only been admitted to the club subsequently. Subsequently in that the others had set up the association together, with Daxiong as founder and Yoyo in the role of Vice President.
But Ye wasn’t blind.
Born on the estate just after the steelworks was closed down, with no school education, but more intimately familiar with Xaxu’s peculiar qualities and those of its inhabitants, from the very start he had refused to believe that the Demons were just a bike club. Daxiong was from Quyu, too, but he was seen as operating somewhere between the worlds of the connected and the outsiders. No one doubted that he would wake up on the other side one morning, rub his eyes, drive a smart car to an air-conditioned high-rise skyscraper and pursue some well-paid job there. Yoyo, on the other hand, Maggie, Ziyi, Tony and Jia Wei belonged to Quyu about as much as a string quartet belonged in Andromeda. In the control room they’d set up a kind of Cyber Planet for the privileged, and Yoyo had packed all the super-expensive computers full of brilliant games, but she was from a different world. She went to uni. They all went to uni to study something that parents considered sensible.
Yeah. Not his.
Lau Ye’s parents didn’t pay him much attention. At the age of sixteen he might as well have been living on the Moon. His job in Daxiong’s workshop and the City Demons were all he had, and he loved being part of it. And so he didn’t ask questions, either. He didn’t ask whether the only purpose his humble self, Xiao-Tong and Mak served was to disguise a conspiratorial little student club as something fit for the slums. He didn’t ask what the other six organised at their many meetings in the control centre when he, Xiao-Tong and Mak weren’t around. Until a few days before, when Yoyo had turned up at the workshop in a complete state. That time he had asked Daxiong.
The answer had been a familiar one.
‘Don’t ask.’
‘I just want to know if there’s anything I can do.’
‘Yoyo’s got problems. Best you stay in the workshop for the time being and avoid the control centre.’
‘What kind of problems?’
‘Don’t ask.’
Don’t ask. Except that three days later that guy with the fair hair and the blue eyes had turned up, the one Daxiong had later said looked like a – what was it? Scanavian? Scandinavian! Ye had talked to the man and learned that he wanted to get into Andromeda.
‘Cool,’ he had said to Daxiong later. ‘You may have sent him on a wild goose chase. Why would you do that?’
‘Don’t—’
‘No. I’m asking.’
Daxiong had rubbed his bald head and his chin, had poked around in his ears, tugged on his fake beard and finally snarled:
‘It could be that we’re about to get an unwanted visit. Nasty people.’
‘Like the other guys that time?’
‘Exactly.’
‘And what do they want from us? I mean, what do they want from us? What have you done, you – six?’
Daxiong had looked at him for a long time.
‘If I confide something in you, little Ye, you’ll keep your trap shut and not tell anyone?’
‘Okay.’
‘Not even Mak or Xiao-Tong?’
‘O-okay.’
‘Do I have your word?’
‘Of course. Erm – what’s going on?’
‘Don’t ask.’
But even on that odd day the standard rebuff hadn’t sounded as desperate and furious as it had just now. It seemed as if the suspicions that Ye had held for a long time were being borne out. The six of them had conspiratorial rituals. His limbs quivered as he crossed the inner room, which was still in a state of complete chaos from the previous night, and barely negotiable for leftover food, bottles, cigarette ends and drug paraphernalia. Alcohol, stale smoke and piss launched a general attack on his chemoreceptors. Mak and Xiao-Tong had been together for four weeks, and had been at the same concert as him. After that they’d had one hell of a party. It was only towards morning that Ye had crept, royally zonked, to Yoyo’s ‘summer residence’. Even now his head felt like an aquarium that the water sloshed around in every time he moved, but Daxiong tr
usted him.
You’ll find corpses—
Something terrible must have happened. Ye guessed where the other two might be found. Ma Mak slept, with his parents and his brothers and sisters, in the ruin of a half-demolished house on the edge of the estate. The family shared a single room, while Hui Xiao-Tong lived alone in a cave-like shed nearby. That was where he would find them.
He staggered out into the harsh light, narrowed his eyes and ran across the vacant lot to his motorbike.
* * *
Inside the warehouse it was gloomy, a vast space, the ceiling somewhere between twenty and thirty metres high, riveted walls, steel joists. Huge racks suggested that cast steel had been stored here in the past.
Shots rang out behind them. Their echo was thrown back by walls and ceilings, acoustic ricochets.
‘Oi, watch where you’re flying,’ shouted Yoyo.
Jericho turned his head and saw the blond-haired guy catching up with him.
‘Dive!’
Their pursuer approached. Shots whipped through the hall again. Turbine wailing, they raced between the racks towards the rear wall of the warehouse, another door there, ceiling height, which was fortunately open. On the other side yawned a space even darker than this one.
Something that looked like a crane emerged from the darkness.
‘Careful!’
‘If you don’t keep your trap shut—’
‘Higher! Higher!’
Jericho obeyed. The airbike skipped away over the crane in a breakneck parabola. Suddenly it was too near the ceiling. At the last minute he swivelled the jets in the opposite direction. The machine turned at an angle, darted downwards and started spinning on its axis at fantastic speed. Circling madly they wheeled into the next hall. Jericho caught a glimpse of their pursuer, saw him just passing under the lintel and going into a controlled nosedive, then the blond guy steered his bike into theirs and rammed them from the side, but what was intended to throw them off course had the opposite effect. As if by a miracle the bike stabilised itself. Suddenly they were flying straight ahead once more, worryingly close to the wall. Jericho narrowed his eyes. This factory space seemed even bigger and higher than the one before. A line of rollers, in their hundreds, ran along the floor, clearly a kind of conveyor belt leading to a tall, looming structure. Massive and gloomy, it looked like a printing press, except that this one would have been producing books for giants.
A rolling mill, it occurred to Jericho. It was the frame for a roller, to crush iron ingots into sheets. The things you know!
Again the blond guy came down, trying to squash them against the wall. Jericho looked across at him. A triumphant grin flashed in the man’s blood-spattered face.
At that he saw red.
‘Yoyo?’
‘What?’
‘Hold on tight!’
As soon as she pressed against him, he threw the handlebars around and gave the attacking bike a mighty thump with the back of his own. Yoyo screamed. Splinters of exploding windscreen sprayed in all directions. The hitman’s bike was slung aside, his gun disappeared into the darkness. Jericho didn’t give him time to breathe, he rammed his bike again, as they hurtled side by side towards the rolling-mill.
‘And with my very warmest wishes,’ he yelled, ‘have a bit of this!’
The third blow rammed the blond guy’s rear. His bike somersaulted in the air, whirled towards the rolling mill. Jericho drew past him, saw the hitman struggling for control and balance, arms flailing, and settled into the curve. They flew just past the colossus, but instead of the ugly noise of a bike’s fatal impact they heard a sequence of loud gunshots. Somehow the guy had managed to avoid a collision and lower his bike to the floor. Like a stone on the surface of the water, it skipped over the rollers of the conveyor belt, tipped over and threw its rider off.
The next gaping portal opened up in front of them.
‘Yoyo,’ he called back. ‘How the hell do we get back out of here?’
‘We don’t.’ Her outstretched arm pointed past him into the darkness. ‘Once you’re through there, you go straight to hell.’
* * *
Xin didn’t bother about the individual biker who was helplessly trying to follow them. The guy was ridiculous. Huge, clumsy, a joke. Let him empty his magazine into the air. In time he’d wish he’d never been born.
He kept a lookout for the airbikes.
They’d disappeared.
Perplexed, he wheeled above the plant, but it was as if the sky had swallowed up the two machines. The last he had seen of them was when they flew around a complex of factory buildings behind which a single big chimney loomed.
It was there that he had lost track of them.
The grouchy whine of the bike reached him from below. He toyed with the idea of raining a few grenades down on the giant’s bald head. His index finger tapped against a spot to the side of the instrument panel, and a cover immediately slid aside just above his right knee. Behind it lay a considerable arsenal of weapons. Xin inspected the contents of the compartment on the other side. All there, hand grenades, sub-machine-gun. Gingerly, almost tenderly, his fingers slipped over the butt of the M-79 launcher with the incendiary rounds. All three airbikes were equipped with the same weapons.
Including Jericho’s.
He shoved the thought aside and glanced at the altitude gauge: 188 metres above sea level. He continued his search with reduced thrust. The sky couldn’t swallow anyone as quickly as that.
* * *
If part of the roof hadn’t been open, it would have been pitch-dark. But as it was, spears of white daylight jabbed in at an angle, carving weird details from the walls, casting lattices over walkways, steps, balconies, terraces, pipes, cables, segmented and riveted armour, massive, open bulkheads.
Jericho slowed his bike in the beam of light. Hissing softly, it hovered in the air, which was impregnated with iron, rust and the smell of rancid grease.
He threw back his head.
‘Forget it,’ called Yoyo. Her voice bounced across walls and ceilings, and was caught between the constructions. ‘It’s barred up there. We won’t get through.’
Jericho cursed and looked round. He couldn’t really tell whether this room was any bigger than the one they had flown through before, but at any rate it looked monumental, almost Wagnerian in its dimensions, a Nibelheim of the industrial age. Steel joists a metre thick ran along the ceiling; open baskets hung from them, anchored to massive hinges, so big that he could have fitted his Toyota inside any one of them. A pipe about three metres in diameter grew from the darkness of the vaulted ceiling, led downwards at an angle and finished halfway up the hall. More of the basket-like formations were distributed across the floor, and containers were stacked along the walls.
Yoyo was right. There was something hellish about the whole thing. A chilly hell. Still startled by his unexpected knowledge of the rolling mill, Jericho tried to remember the purpose of this place. Steel was heated here, in colossal containers called converters. Right in front of them gaped their skewed, round mouths, hatches leading to the heart of the volcano, great maws that would normally have glowed red and yellow with molten ore. Now they lay there, black and mysterious, three in all.
A world extinguished.
The hiss of the other airbike came across from beyond the passageway, changed, grew more distinct. It was getting closer.
‘Hey, what’s with these things?’ Yoyo leaned forward and pointed at one of the gaping entrances to the converter. ‘He won’t be able to find us in there.’
Jericho didn’t reply. The bike would fit quite easily in one of the converters, with both of them on it. The maw was big enough, the container was bulbous and several metres deep. And yet he didn’t like the idea that they might be trapped down there. He brought the machine up, towards the ceiling.
‘If only you hadn’t brought us in here,’ Yoyo complained.
‘If only you’d brought your computer with you,’ Jericho snarled back. ‘T
hen we wouldn’t be making targets of ourselves.’
Between two joists, right below the ceiling, there was a platform from which you had a vantage point over most of the hall. The converters yawned far below them, separated from one another by large armoured bulkheads. Sunbeams stroked their bike, explored its shape, let it go. With extreme concentration Jericho fiddled with the controls, and the jets produced a small amount of reverse thrust, just enough for the machine to move slowly backwards over the edge of the platform.
‘He’s coming,’ hissed Yoyo.
A beam of light crept into the hall from the neighbouring space. The blond guy had turned on the headlight. Jericho silently settled the airbike on the platform and turned off the engine. The hiss faded to a faint hum. He almost felt something like pride at his navigational abilities. The blond guy wouldn’t hear them above the noise of his own machine, and the gloom up here would swallow them up. They clung to the ceiling like a fat, lurking insect.
‘And by the way I did bring my computer,’ Yoyo whispered.
Puzzled, Jericho turned round to look at her.
‘I thought—’
‘That wasn’t my computer. I just wanted him to think it was. I wear mine on my belt.’
He raised his hand and hushed her. Far below their pursuer appeared and hovered slowly along underneath them. His bike hissed quietly, and a powerful finger of cold, white light crept around the building. Jericho leaned forwards. The blond guy was craning his head in all directions, looking at the ceiling without seeing them, peering between the containers. His gun lay heavy in his right hand.
Had he lost them?
Jericho hesitated. Highly unlikely that the man had gone looking for his pistol after the crash. The force of the collision had slung it far out into the darkness of the hall where the rolling mills were. There was only one explanation. His bike was fitted with more weapons, and if that was true of all of them, then—
On either side of the tank, he thought. That was the only place where there was room, right in front of his legs.
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