Ares Express (44 page)

She stood, feeding on the ringing applause.

“There, I think that has it sorted,” she asided to Naon Engineer. It did seem so. The mutineer running dogs were dismayed, Romereaux silently seething, but Child'a'grace sat preternaturally calm. Marya Stuard felt her scalp prickle, a wash of magnetism, a subtle charisma from the Engineer woman that slowly but surely suffused the room like incense and turned every head to her.

“You're not a mother, are you?”

There was a collective gasp. It was an unspeakably low blow, it was the knife in the belly, the mallet to the testicles, the Sunday punch from which there is no coming back, the all-conquering Belly Spear which can never be used with honour. Because every sinning soul aboard
Catherine of Tharsis
knew it was true. Marya Stuard staggered, her assurance annihilated, the wind gone out of her, the fusion fires doused. She wavered. She paled. She passed her hand over her face.

She looked faint, confused, for the first time without a riposte ready to hand. Things no one in that council chamber had ever seen before and no one could rightly believe they were seeing now. She toppled, went down in her seat, fatally punctured, mouth opening and closing like a beached cod, but Child'a'grace was relentless. The long chapatti years were speaking. She turned on Naon Sextus Asiim Engineer 11th.

“And you, the flesh of your flesh and the blood of your blood, the seed of your seed and the dream of your dreams? You a father, not dry and seedless like this, this stick, this thorn, and you no different? Dollars and centavos. Dollars and centavos. The nation, the train, the nation, the train.
Catherine of Tharsis
is her people, her wealth is here, all of the people in this chamber, not what we haul behind us for others like sledge dogs. Our wealth is our people, all our people, and if one of us is missing, we are the poorer, we are impoverished, and for us to willingly sell of our own, for dollars and centavos, for security, we are lost. We are bankrupt. We deserve to steam no more. We deserve to go under the hammers at the Winter Solstice auction and take up hoes and desk jobs.”

Face like fusion reheat, Naon Sextus was on his feet. Every mouth was a round “O” of astonishment.

“Woman, you go too far! You drive me too far, too far. You are not track,
not in the blood, you know nothing, nothing, you…you…Susquavanna, you Platform.”

The silence was absolute, the shock palpable. Not at what Naon had said, terrible though it was. It was what—who—he had said it to. To his wife. Directly. Passionately. Face to face.

Child'a'grace filled the stunned vacuum with action.

“With me, now!” she cried, leaped up from the conference table and was out through the carriage door. In a thought, Romereaux was after her, then, in order of fleetness, Thwayte Engineer, his sister Anhinga, Psalli, Ricardo and Miriamme Traction and Mercedes Deep-Fusion of the asbestos gloves and the impudent calliope.

“Quick quick quick,” Romereaux shouted, beckoning them through as Naon Engineer rose from his stupor with the terrible cry of “Mutiny!” on his lips and Sle and Rother'am at the head of the mob leaped for the hatch like hunting dogs. Romereaux slammed and dogged it in their faces. It would buy seconds, that was all. Seconds were all he needed.
Tante
Mercedes's steatopygous rear was vanishing up the water tender companionway, already Sle and Rother'am were cranking away at the manual override and one of the six dogs was free. Romereaux punched his personal code into the emergency carriage release mechanism. The Engineer brothers saw what he intended and redoubled their efforts. Naon joined them, face pressed sideways into the porthole. Over the clacket of the wheels, Romereaux heard the repeated cry of “Mutiny, mutiny.” Two dogs were free, three dogs. The keypad spat out Romereaux's authorisation with a curt “code not recognised.” Romereaux cursed exotically and reentered the code, willing his fingers to be slow, steady, patient. Four dogs free, five. So slow. The sixth and final dog was beginning to unwind. Was halfway unthreaded. Was three-quarters unthreaded.

“Code accepted,” the key pad reported. A square yellow button lit up. Romereaux hit it as the sixth and final dog hit the deck, the door scissored open, Rother'am and Sle dived and the explosive bolts in the carriage couplings blew. For an instant Rother'am and Sle hung suspended. Then it was as if they were being drawn slowly back while still in midleap as clear blue sky appeared between the carriages and the rear section of the train began to slow under its gargantuan weight.

Romereaux wiggled his fingers at the receding loyalists as
Catherine of Tharsis
, unencumbered, found unheard-of speeds. A last cry of “Mutiny!” penetrated the shriek of wind and steam and was gone.

Romereaux arrived on a crowded bridge.
Catherine of Tharsis
pounded at four hundred and twenty down the beautiful straight steel line.

“Excuse me,” he asked, “but who's driving the train?”

“Don't look at me,” said Thwayte, caught up in the drama of it all and now beginning to wonder just what he had done. “I'm just a kid.”

“Don't look at me,” said his older-by-two years sister Anhinga. “Girls don't drive trains.”

“Don't look at us,” said the three Traction folk. “We're Traction.”

“So who the hell is?” Romereaux asked again, nervously observing the numbers clicking up on the tacho.

A noise, like something rusted jarring free, like years of phlegm from aggregation of the bases being gullied up in one bucket-filling gob, like relief after constipation, like the screech the prematurely buried would make when the rescuers opened the coffin lid. In a shadowy corner of the bridge, an object moved. Motors whined. Grandfather Bedzo rolled out from his alcove, caked with drool and shaking with palsies. But his cyberhat glowed with puissance. He grinned toothlessly, a terrible sight, and with a thought, threw the points at Abbermeyer Switchover and took
Catherine of Tharsis
on to the Grand Valley mainline.

“
Tante
Miriamme,” Romereaux said. “Have you got your gloves?”

“I have indeed, nevvy.” She waved them over her head.

“Then put them on and get you up there and play like buggery and let Sweetness know her family's coming for her.”

T
rainpeople have this innate sense. An evolutionary thing, really. A survival skill. Take them to a place once, and no matter how long a time until you take them back again, they can find their way round it, no problem. In the dark. In the fog in the dark. In a power-out in the fog in the dark. They get so many places, they have to remember them all, or they'd get New Merionedd mixed up with New Cosmobad, Wisdom with Lyx, Belladonna with Llangonedd, Iron Mountain with China Mountain and everyone would be hugely lost. So Sweetness convinced Pharaoh as she led him spiralling inward along the corridors and down the tunnels of the Cathedral of the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family. Maybe not convinced. Told well enough for him to follow.

“Where is it we're going?”

“To the audience chamber. The presence room, whatever he calls it. The top of the shop.”

“You're sure of that?”

“Have you been here before?”

There being no answer to that, Pharaoh trotted behind the resolute Sweetness. Two sectors starboard, he stopped again.

“Can you smell something?”

“Like what something?”

“Sort of sweet, like chocolatey, a bit perfumey floaty butterfly-ie.”

“Floaty butterfly-ie?”

Pharaoh shrugged.

Onward. He was firmly convinced they had gone around this same orbit of corridor three times now.

“What does the lid have on it again?”

“Wings.”

“And you're sure of that?”

Sweetness stopped abruptly. Her shallow temper flared.

“Yes, I'm sure of that and yes, I know exactly where it is and yes, I know exactly where we're going as well. Here.”

She banged on a closed bulkhead to a radial corridor. She jumped back, startled, as the bulkhead flew up, opening on to a corridor filled from one end to the other with Ever-Circling Spiritual Family.

“Ah,” Sweetness said.

“
Ahhh!
” the Ever-Circling Family cried, threw up their hands in horror and fled as one.

“Simple,” Sweetness said, snapping her fingers with admirable nonchalance, surveying the now empty corridor. “Come on, this way.”

“I knew I could smell something,” Pharaoh said, sniffing.

Sweetness stopped at another circular door halfway down the corridor.

“In here.”

“What's in here?”

“The way up's in here. Child'a'grace, do you have to make a question out of everything? I got the genes, you don't, that's evolution. In here.” She slapped the door release with the heel of her hand. It flew up. Sweetness found herself looking in a darkness that glittered with a thousand mirrors.

“Maybe not this one.”

There was a man reflected in those mirrors, a man of distinguished silver and good personal grooming, of fine taste in tailoring with a black cane in one hand. A man who, as she watched, turned as if scenting her, all his mirror images turning as one with him. A man who was now aiming something that looked inarguably like a gun at her.

“Run!” Sweetness yelled and dived past the door, Pharaoh a step behind her, as a tremendous explosion and shattering of glass shook the corridor.

 

“You!”

The word hung in the electric air of the mirror maze. Eyes met in the mirror; green, grey. Then Harx reached inside his immaculate jacket, pulled out a hand-held field impeller, spun and with a terrible raven cry fired at the source of the image. A boom of exploding glass: a million minute shards
rained down on Devastation Harx. In the same instant the corner of his eye saw the figure, that trainbrat, that dreadful persistent, rude little girl who would not accept her severe limitations, who would insist on trying her betters, who would absolutely not go away or take no for an answer or know when she was mastered, roll and duck for cover. He readied his gun, panting.

The gas. It's getting to you. You can't allow yourself to act this way, not over an uncouth trainbrat. But she irritated him so much. He wanted her gone, gone for good, so much. He spun, reading his mirrors for unauthorised reflections.

There.

“Yah!”

Harx spun, fired six fast, flat shots at the six standing figures that had swung into view as the mirrors revolved on their tireless waltz. The mirror maze rang to multiple detonations. Still she mocked him, now a dozen reflections away. No matter. Two-fisted, Harx aimed the field-impeller, blew the dreadful girl to hell and silica and so she would have no hiding place, each of the intervening mirrors as well. A slow snow of powdered silvering dusted Devastation Harx's shoulders.

A serene place beyond the paranoia of the combat gasses said, She's not moving. She's not even there. You're just shooting at reflections of reflections of reflections.

Selah. It was good to shoot. Good to cast off the constraints of holiness and spirituality and responsibility and guruship and blaze away with a very big gun at something that annoys you very much.

“Waaaaaah!”

Spinning like a Swavyn, impeller set on constant output, he cut a scything swathe of flying glass through his revolving mirrors.

“Come out come out come out!”

A movement. He turned. In one beautiful, oil-smooth movement, he levelled and aimed the gun at the figure in the glass. Too late he saw that it was not his Nemesis. Harx II, his otherversal counterpart, gaped at the gun, threw up his hands in supplication, denial, hope. Far far too late. The eager finger had closed the contact. A ram of gravitomagnetic force sent him raving up in a spray of subquantal shards.

Devastation Harx staggered. What man would not, who has already killed his brother, and just shot his own self? His field-impeller fell like a shriven sin to the ground. He gave a little creaking moan. He clutched at his heart. Something was torn out of him. Somewhere, he had felt himself die. In a pique of confusion and paranoia, he had killed himself.

No. That itself was paranoia. That was the combat gas, as much as that image of that taunting, grinning female, which he now knew to have been one brief glance, amplified by the vinculum circuitry of his shattered maze. The man had been a Harx, but not Harx. He had been a mirrorman, a reflection, a thing from a universe not his own. A dog soldier. And dog soldiers die.

He was glad. It had long angered him, being given orders by such a sloven.

Disgusted by his lapse of control, Devastation Harx stormed from his sanctum. There was a war to be fought, and won, and it would not be won by ecstatic, slashing violence. Control. Application. Determination. He found the corridor awash with purple: acolytes rushing hither and yon. Beyond the tumult of panicked voices, was that gunfire he heard? He seized a passing faithful, a runty, trembling boy with a pudding-bowl crop.

“Just what the hell is going on?” he thundered.

“The hell!” the little acolyte exclaimed and fled shrieking. Harx pushed his way through the milling crowd to the elevator. As the doors opened the airship lurched, sending him reeling inside. He slid the doors shut and ordered “Presence chamber” into the gosport. The elevator stayed obdurately motionless. He called again, a third time, a fourth time. The elevator crew had evidently abandoned their posts for the mass hysteria raging through the corridors.

“Must I do everything myself?” he declared to the universe in general, and began to crank the windlass.

 

At the perigee of the dive, at the uttermost straining limit of the bungee, Skerry hit the snap release, went into a forward roll and came up poised and feisty on the balls of her feet as the elastic cords snapped back up through the hole she had made with the isokinetic punch. A moment to fit nasal plugs in case of any lingering pockets of Mishcondereya's trip-gas, another to fix her
bearing on the wrist tracker, a quick tweak of the string of her leotard out of her crack, and she was ready for action.

“Okay I'm in,” she said into the throat-bindi mike. Still without a notion where she was going, what she was looking for. But in and intact. “There's a lot of noise.” There certainly was, down beneath her feet, like a party going badly wrong in a neighbour's house. She crept forward on her toes; the din neither waxed nor waned. “I guess they must be really digging your light show, Bladnoch.”

Director Seskinore came on the line.

“My dear, we have a suggestion from the head doctors in Wisdom. They suggest you go up rather than down. Some head-shrinkie theory about people and valuables.”

“Too right I'm going up. I'm not going down there for a boob job.”

She checked her wrist tracker. Its hypersonic bat-squeaks penetrated every level of this creaky, shambling edifice and sketched up a rudimentary map. On the toe-tips of her grip-sole shoes, Skerry moved out. At every turn, she chose the inward route. At every flight of steps, she chose the upward course. Sound travelled well along these curving corridors; plenty of warning of approaching feet to slip into cover: a wall closet, a low-level airco shaft, a false-ceiling panel. What is it about young people today, she thought as the purple-clad faithful rushed beneath her, that fun and dancing and drinking and sex aren't enough for them? Why do they want to be going and joining religions and dressing up all the same and getting dreadful dreadful haircuts? Each generation rejects the
mores
of the one preceding. You should know that better than most, daughter of Ghalgorm's draughty halls.

Better to avoid people altogether. The ceiling duct in which she had taken cover let into a crawlway. After a dozen metres on her belly, it branched. Her tracker advised her that the left fork led to the cathedral's service core. Skerry had always been a fan of service cores. She kicked the panel that capped the tunnel free. It fell an impressive distance between the bloated gas cells before it hit a tension net and bounced. With a grin, Skerry swung herself out on to the honeycomb mainframe beams and began to climb. Upward. But still no idea what she was looking for. The nave-like space of the service core amplified sounds, reflected and focused noises in
strange ways. The din from the panicked in the corridors washed back and forth, up and down, unnerving hellish. Skerry flinched at the sudden tattoo of gunfire, though sense told her not even a teen acolyte would be so idiotic as to fire a slug-thrower in an LTA.

“Mish?”

“What's up?”

“I heard shooting.”

“Oh, that. They're spraying bullets at anything that moves. Sooner or later they'll run out. What's with you?”

“I'm on a gantry directly under the apex of the ship. There's a solid roof above me, which the tracker says is the floor of the dome room. I'm going to try there first, once I get out of here.”

The tracker also a contained a clever little bollixer (in Weill's gaudy and expressive phrase) with enough electronic nous to jemmy the hatch from the gantry on to the corridor. The two halves of the door slid open to reveal a young, dark-haired woman dressed in improbably ramshackle battle gear pulling at the handles of an inlaid double door. Skerry froze. The girl froze. Behind her a similarly piratical youth also froze, but it was the girl that transfixed Skerry. In an instant of epiphany, she knew who that girl must be, what she was looking for behind that door, how she recognised it.

“Hey! You!”

The spell shattered. The girl drew something that looked like a cross between a crossbow and soft furnishings. Skerry did not wait for it to demonstrate its potentialities. A back flip took her out of arc behind the door. She scrambled up on to the ceiling, hung spider-fashion, peeked out at the inverted corridor. Empty. The dark-haired girl—the granddaughter, the traingirl, the one who was at the heart and root of all this mad affair, the only one apart from Harx who knew what this divine receptacle looked like—and her boyfriend were gone. But the double doors stood open.

“Let's go!” Skerry said, somersaulting to the ground.

 

Mishcondereya tacked the sky yacht hard aport and by sheer millimetres missed clipping the pin-feathers of the Winged Edsel. She swore her finest ladies-finishing-school oaths as she fought to control the skittery little
machine in the chaotic turbulence cast up as cloud boiled into phantasm and back again.

“I'd like to see what the manufacturer's manual has to say about this,” she hissed as she righted the ship and immediately pulled it into a fan-shredding climb as Cheraph PHARIGOSTER came howling up at her, fiery scourges raised. The things were no more substantial than the mist from which they were constructed but you could hardly fly through them. Necessary illusions must be maintained. “Where's he gone now, the bastard?” Radar lock had been long abandoned. Mishcondereya kept track of the labouring cathedral, sometimes invisible within the thrashing cloud of Saints and Angels, by line of sight, seat of pants, twitch of ovary and luck. She momentarily caught Harx's fortress in her peripheral vision, enveloped in the tentacles of PREMGEE, the World-Devouring Squid.

“Woo hoo!” she whooped and threw the airship into an immediate rolling dive after him. Lift bags boomed, struts complained, spars groaned. Tremendous fun.