Ares Express (46 page)

“What the hell are those?” asked young Thwayte Engineer in a very adult voice.

“Those are a thing I and all of I'se people hoped never never to see,” Child'a'grace said gently. “Those are moon-warriors, fallen to earth. Their presence can mean only one thing: our world is under attack. We are at war, they have come to defend us.”

On which cue the entire phalanx, fifty by fifty, took a ground-shaking step forward.

“I'm not so sure about the defend bit,” said Anhinga nervously.

A metallic click, audible through the armoured glass. Like the Skandavas in the collaged caves of Attaganda, each of the machines cocked its four arms. Blades flashed in readiness.

“And where is Taal exactly?” Psalli asked.

“Exactly on the far side of them,” Romereaux said.

“Full reverse!” Child'a'grace suddenly commanded, swirling away from the window to Bedzo's side. The old patriarch grinned toothlessly. At long last, his beloved train was his again. Let the man who still has a drop of juice in him get his hand on the drive rod, not that arrogant, prudish stick of a son of his. No Engineer in his heart.

“Ha ha!” Bedzo said and, with a pulse of his mind, the tokamaks blazed and the boiler seethed, the cranks pumped and the wheels turned and, with gathering speed,
Catherine of Tharsis
backed away from the army blockade.

In their high glass tower, the Beige Controllers read the new reports from Thrench Regional and decided it might just be best to call it a day and all go home.

Out in the green fields, Harx's occupation force noticed a change in their parameters and clicked into advance mode. A thousand metal hooves churned
up the summer grazing. Bedzo put a clear two kilometres between the train and the advancing troopers, then stopped. The big train waited.

“Now!” Child'a'grace shouted, and everyone in the cab saw the years and chapatti dust fall from her and she was again the Child of Grace, the bright, vivacious, dotty and energetic woman who had sold her freedom for marriage to a train. “Full steam ahead!”

“Wa!” Bedzo shouted. Hydrogen raved into helium. Every piston exploded superheated steam. The abused drive shafts kicked again, the journel bearings shrieked. The wheels spun as tons of sand was poured on to the track, found purchase, bit. Three thousand tons of Class 88 fusion hauler leaped forward like a speed-dog from a trap, wreathed in steam like a Shandastria geyser elemental. At the sight of their target stopping, the robot soldiers had broken into a heavy trot. Now as it bore down on them, whistles shrieking, they stopped, tried to turn, scatter, flee. Too late, too slow.
Catherine of Tharsis
bowled them over like pins. Amputated limbs; gnashing, severed insect-heads were strewn hither and yon. A rain of blades embedded themselves in the soft green turf.

“There's one on our port fairing!” Psalli shouted, peering out of a shunting oriole. “He's climbing up!”

Grandfather Bedzo rolled and farted under the coronet of his cyberhat. A twitch of the corner of his mouth, a blast of steam from the overheat release valve sent it spinning half a hundred metres. The old man rocked and laughed as the mutineers put the rout beneath their wheels.

“I see her, I see her!” Miriamme Traction called from the forward observation balcony, Sweetness's former vantage. “She's waving a flare!” But even before Child'a'grace could call full stop, Bedzo was already applying the brakes. These striplings today understood nothing, respected nothing. Understood nothing because they respected nothing. Had no pride. Bedzo Trine Cirrus Minor Asiim Engineer 10th had been Engineer of Engineers. He would bring his train in so sweet, so smooth, the old lady would not even have to walk to the steps.

 

“I don't know where you popped up from, but you're going right back again,” Sweetness said to Serpio, centimetre by centimetre climbing her legs.
She clubbed him hard with the St. Catherine pyx. He cried out, lifted his hands to his bleeding head, fell heavily to the ground.

“To think, I gave up a perfectly good stainless steel kitchen for you,” Sweetness said, leaping nimbly over Serpio and sprinting for the other, unbarred door. But he was already on his feet, after her. God, he might be a Waymender, but he was fast. He dived for Sweetness, was knocked sideways with a crunching
oof
as Pharaoh came barrelling in in a sliding tackle that would have had any soccer player red carded. The two men rolled over and over in a tangle of attempted blows. Sweetness reflected casually, and inappropriately, how alike they looked.

“Out!” Pharaoh shouted. “Down and out!”

“You mean?” Sweetness winced as Pharaoh took an elbow in the ribs.

“The aperture, go on, go! Jump! I'll catch up.”

They fell to it again. Sweetness hit the door catch, pelted down the short curving corridor and almost knocked down a very tall, very big woman dressed in purple cycle gear. Big muscles too. Sweetness jumped back. The big woman blocked her escape. She smiled, beckoned with her hand,
give, here.

“Uh uh,” Sweetness said and pulled out her beanie gun. Sianne Dandeever grinned like a skull and took a step forward.

“This will hurt, you know,” Sweetness said, and shot her point blank. Sianne Dandeever's hand moved like a snake striking. She caught the bean bag in midair. She tossed it, caught it in her palm, smiled. Then she dived and brought Sweetness, beanie gun, canister and all down in a crunching tackle.

“Get off me, you big fat lesbian dyke!” Sweetness shouted and looked for something to bite but the big woman's big hands were forcing her fingers open. Then she heard a noise like wind-rotor blades slicing air, a soft-edge whistling, glimpsed, past the big body crushing the wind out of her, something back-flipping fast down the corridor. The willy-willy demon whirled past, something caught Harx's lieutenant a hefty whack on the back of the head, sending the big woman sprawling.

Skerry rolled out of her tumbling sequence as Sianne Dandeever shook the impact of grip-soled left foot out of her head and came up slugging. A
savatte
kick under the jaw sent her straight down again. Skerry cuffed her wrist to ankle with plastic wire grips.

Sweetness scrambled up, backed away, beanie gun levelled.

“I'll have that,” Skerry said, advancing toward Sweetness.

“You will not.”

“Look, I've had a difficult day. Just hand it over.”

“Get away.”

“I'm the government.”

“You would say that.”

“Don't make me take it off you. I can. I will.”

Sweetness shook her head. Skerry saw her finger twitch on the firing stud of the beanie-gun.

“I think I should tell you, I'd not just catch that, I'd throw it right back at you as well.”

“Oh yeah?” Sweetness said, swinging the beanie-gun a millimetre and firing at the pressure-seal emergency door switch she could see and she knew Skerry could not. Skerry caught a fistful of air as the metal semicircles slammed together in her face.

“Balls!” she muttered. She called up Seskinore. “The girl's got the thing and she's making a run for it. There's still a chance.”

The bloody show must bloody go on.

 

“Please deposit three million dollars for the next ten minutes of personalised weather,” the computer voice at Grand Valley Regional Weather said without the least flicker of irony. Weill lifted the telephone receiver away from his ear, looked at Seskinore.

Seskinore, listening on the monitor, shook his head and cut his throat with a terminating finger. Weill hung up without a word. Together, they watched the apocalypse dissolve into the early afternoon sunlight. Pursued, pursuer and pursuer-of-pursuer were now so far away down the long tunnel of Grand Valley only the airborne cathedral was visible, a wobbling orange oval. Rather like a flying dog-biscuit, Weill thought inconsequentially.

“The mission is a complete and unqualified lemon,” Seskinore said ringingly. His fancies of summer seasons, charabanc picnics, celebrity bingo,
maybe even once again doing the cruise trains, had evaporated like the cloud saints and angels. He was now and forever an unfunny comic with weak material in a too-small suit.

“No it isn't!” Skerry roared on the comline. “Get Mishcon in here, I'm going after the girl.”

“Such a pro,” Weill said, admiringly.

 

There comes a time in running, Sweetness discovered, when it is very easy to forget just why you are running, where to and who from. It is just running, pure and purposeless and absolutely chemical, and therefore very very silly and very very dangerous. She willed herself to stop, think, think girl. Think. Down and out, he had said. Back to the aperture. Aperture. Where had that been? Where was she now? Sweetness looked around for landmarks. Few and featureless in these circular corridors. Some cathedral this. No shrines of the saints, no centavo-a-candle angelic light-'em-ups. No swinging censers, no hand-hammered carillons, no statues with scary eyes that followed you around the place, suspicious of sin. No bells, few smells now that that weird perfume Pharaoh had complained about seemed to have dispersed. Not even piles of leaflets or self-sew purple habit kits or whatever mail-order paraphernalia the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family needed to conduct its business with God. The single piece of religious engineering she'd come across she'd climbed all over with her size sevens. She'd seen more spiritual tat in an arcade game.

Refreshed by her brief exercise in cynicism, Sweetness peered at the outer corridor wall. It sloped very slightly inward from top to bottom. Southern hemisphere. Any down ramp around her would do. She slipped back into running mode. Anything that got in her way, stuck a face round a corner, looked vaguely in her direction, she roared at. The things fled, shrieking thinly. There was obviously very much more going on here than she knew about; the angel-thing she had glimpsed through the shattered dome, the seeming plague of mass hysteria, the fit girl in the green leotard. All of them were up there, behind her somewhere, with the big hard woman and Pharaoh and that Serpio, and, ultimately, Harx himself. Don't think about it, Sweetness Octave. You've got what you came for. You get in, you get it, you get out. The rest will sort itself.

Her traingirl sense stopped her in midstride. Here. She skipped back a step. The tunnel looked the same as all the others in this forsaken burg, but ripples in her water insisted: here, yes, really. She rounded a dog's leg and saw sky. A lot of sky. Into which she was meant to jump with little more than her trust in the home-brew parafoil on her back. And she had done the Point of Worst Personal Threat bit. The Feisty and Resourceful (But Cute With It) Heroine was into narrative
terra incognita
. She edged up to the lip. Crosswinds buffeted her; the cathedral started and swayed as if taking evasive action. She could still hear gunfire from overhead. She crept forward, took a peek at the ground. Seen worse. Risked higher. Still far enough and hard enough to kill you dead dead dead.

“Why is there never a Plan B?” she pleaded with the Laws of Universal Narratology as she secured the Catherine bottle in a breast pocket of her track jacket and braced herself against the side. Wind whipped her hair into her eyes. She tried to comb the greasy, stinky, sticky stuff out of her eyes, lost her balance as the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family seemed to drop out from underneath her and fell into the void.

“Aaaagh!” she cried, staring at a plan view of the undulating drumlin country of Canton Thrench. Then her hands found the rip cord, thirty square metres unfolded above her and she was jerked up into the air. “Oooh,” said Sweetness Asiim Engineer, flying. Pharaoh had given her verbal instructions in the control of the parafoil but they had been strictly just-in-case. Sweetness shifted her weight in the harness, pulled on the guys to scoop air into the left winglet and went spiralling up the side of the cathedral.

The sound of gunfire grew louder and closer. Maybe not that way.

She spilled lift, slid downward and forward. She slid out from underneath the belly of the cathedral into clear air. Grand Valley opened before her.

“Weee!” she whooped. Beneath her feet the Grand Valley trunk line was four streaks of silver meeting in a wink of light at the vanishing point. There was a loco on those tracks. A deadheader, no train, but putting out a lot of steam. Someone was really whipping the tokamaks down there. The funnel configuration identified it as a Class 88. Black and silver livery, Bethlehem Ares. Sweetness peered closer. Those patterns on the roof, and that finial on the tender: a roaring Iron Lion? And, at the limits of vision, covering the
boiler cap with her wings, was that a figurehead of a silver angel, proud-breasted?

“Pharaoh, look, look, it's
Catherine of Tharsis
, I know it, I'd know that old train anywhere, we're safe!”

Pharaoh. What had happened to him? She scooped deeply into the wind, bought altitude to rise level with the hole in the hull At the outward edge of her turn, she had seen other aircraft in full pursuit of Harx; one a small, minnow-like racing yacht, the other a big grampus, a heavy lifter. They seemed to be occupying the full attention of the gunners who were spraying black arcs of tracer indiscriminately toward them.

Pharaoh was standing in the gaping rent, looking down at the ground beneath him, fingering his harness. As Sweetness swooped past him, he waved.

“Pharaoh, they've come back for me!” she shouted. “
Catherine of Tharsis
. I knew they wouldn't give me up. They're down there, we're safe! Come on!”

Hand on rip-cord, Pharaoh stepped into the air. In the same instant, a dark mass leaped from the shadows in the corridor and seized him around the waist. Serpio. The airfoil opened but the combined weight of two bodies was too much for Vertical Boy engineering. Air boomed, seams tore, the wing folded up in the middle, failed. Locked together in a final, ludicrous embrace, Serpio and Pharaoh plunged down in a fluttering, tearing death spiral to the meadowlands of Thrench below.