Terminal World (35 page)

He was led indoors, and then through a long connecting bridge that brought them to the central gondola. The interior of the gondola was galleried and surprisingly airy, for all that the vast envelope loomed over it. It hummed with civic purpose. Staff - civil servants of various kinds, he supposed - seemed to be rushing everywhere on errands, clutching satchels and papers, conducting urgent, hushed conversations with each other as they strode the long hallways. Quillon heard the chatter of typewriters through open doors. He heard the pneumatic
whoosh
of message tubes gliding along overhead service pipes. Aside from the absence of electricity, it was not so different from a busy administrative department in Neon Heights. It was just that he was up in the air, leagues above the ground ...

After descending to one of the gondola’s lower levels they came at last to a lavish stateroom, hemmed by many smaller offices and parlours. The stateroom was half lounge and half place of business, with a long table at one end and an arrangement of settees, armchairs, coffee tables and drinks cabinets at the other. Along one side was a ceiling-high sloping window, affording a spectacular view of the surrounding ships, with only shifting, furtive glimpses of sky and ground between them. The remaining walls were lined with bookcases and framed maps and charts, some of obvious antiquity. The engine drone was no more audible than the noise of city traffic in an air-conditioned office.

Ricasso fixed drinks for his guests, then dismissed the guard. He ushered the party to the lounge chairs and bade them sit down in front of a low table. Something like a game of chequers appeared to be in progress, judging by the gridded board spread out on the table, and the many black markers placed in various formations on the grid.

‘I won’t keep you long, Curtana,’ Ricasso said. ‘I know you and Agraffe have far more pressing matters to attend to now.’

The red-headed man blushed. ‘I think I’ve told you everything useful.’

‘You were out on a scouting mission?’ Quillon asked.

‘North of the Bane,’ Agraffe said, leaning against Curtana in one of the settees. ‘Trying to re-establish contact with an old fuel supply station we haven’t used for years.’ He paused and looked momentarily worried. ‘Um, this isn’t a state secret, is it?’

‘You can speak freely in front of Doctor Quillon,’ Ricasso said. ‘If he learns anything we’d rather he didn’t, we always have the option of throwing him overboard.’

‘Fuel’s a constant problem,’ Curtana said. ‘Firesap grows on trees, as the saying goes, but there aren’t as many trees as there used to be. You probably noticed this in Spearpoint. Great swathes of forest are dying back. It’s the climate change, we think. The world’s cooling. No one knows why.’

‘Our atmosphere isn’t stable,’ Ricasso said, sounding like a man about to veer off on one of his pet theories. ‘I’ve done the calculations. It’s like a bucket with a leak in it. Someone filled it to the brim a long time ago, and now it’s draining out. Earth’s gravity simply isn’t strong enough to retain a warm, breathable atmosphere over thousands of years. The atmosphere’s thinning, and as a consequence it can’t trap heat so efficiently.’

‘I don’t think anyone in Spearpoint believes that the cold spell is going to continue,’ Quillon said.

‘Even as their wood supply chains extend further and further from the city? Even as the lights go out? Yes, we have our intelligence, Doctor. We may not like Spearpoint, but we know what it’s up to.’

‘We rely on ground stations for our fuel,’ Agraffe said. ‘Not just the fuel, either. Also the sungas we use in our lifting cells, and the explosives we use in our weapons, and the food we eat. There’s a limit to what you can manufacture and recycle up in the air, so we’ve always had to maintain good relations with surface facilities.’

‘Dirt-rats,’ Quillon said.

‘Even dirt-rats have their uses,’ Curtana replied.

‘Things have been getting worse during the last few years,’ Agraffe went on. ‘Stations that we used to rely on aren’t there any more. Partly it’s due to the dying back of the forests, meaning that the raw materials just aren’t as easy to come by. But that’s not the only reason. The cold’s hitting the Skullboys as well, so they’ve been forced to become more aggressive. It used to be that we kept to our territories and they kept to theirs. But now we’re coming into conflict almost every time we send out a ship. A number of our old ground facilities have fallen under Skullboy control. They’ve started to take the fight to the air now. They don’t have our expertise, but what they do have is strength in numbers, and the willingness to die.’

‘Desperate times,’ Ricasso said. ‘And that was before the storm came to stir things around even more, as if we didn’t have enough to deal with. It’s all verging on the auspicious, wouldn’t you say?’

‘If I were superstitious,’ Curtana replied.

‘We’ve endured crises before,’ Agraffe said. ‘There’s no reason why we can’t get through this one.’

‘The boundless optimism of the young,’ Ricasso said, smiling fondly. ‘I envy you that, I really do. But this isn’t just some temporary bottleneck we’ll pass on through and emerge the other side leaner and stronger. The world is changing. It’s never done that before, at least not within Swarm’s history.’

‘What will you do?’ Quillon asked.

‘While the semaphore lines are down, we have to rely on scouts for long-range intelligence. There’s a resupply facility to the north of the Bane - that’s what Agraffe was verifying for us. It was mothballed, but according to Agraffe is still serviceable. More importantly, there’s a stockpile of useful fuel, so we can land and replenish very quickly. Two, three days, if the pumps work and the firesap’s still good. Equally importantly, the Skullboys don’t know about it.’

‘It’s not a long-term solution,’ Agraffe said, ‘but it should stave off our worries for another twelve months to a year, depending on the volume and quality of the fuel in the storage silos. We didn’t have time to do more than a few simple tests.’

‘We’re waiting for one more scout to come in,’ Ricasso said.
‘Brimstone
is late, but we’ll give her one more day. Then we move, heading for Agraffe’s fuel concentration depot. We’ll take a different route so we don’t run into the same marauding parties that caused Agraffe so much difficulty on his return. If
Brimstone
is still operable, she’ll have to maintain independent action until the semaphore lines are working again. Then she can re-establish contact with the main fleet. We don’t do this lightly - Swarm never abandons one of its own unless there’s no alternative. In this case there is none. Our tanks are running perilously low. We must have that fuel.’

‘I don’t doubt the severity of the situation,’ Quillon said.

‘I suppose it will be a matter of concern to you, to be taken even further from Spearpoint?’ Ricasso asked.

‘My relationship with Spearpoint isn’t as straightforward as you might think.’ Quillon reached up and touched the goggles, glancing at Curtana for confirmation. ‘May I?’

‘Go ahead,’ she said. ‘He’s going to find out sooner or later, no matter what you do.’

He removed the goggles, waited for his eyes to adjust to the brightness of the stateroom, and looked at Ricasso and Agraffe in turn. ‘It’s quite a long story,’ he said. ‘And the eyes aren’t the end of it. I am ... anatomically distinct.’

‘Some kind of hybrid,’ Ricasso said, pausing only to refill his glass, as if he needed extra sustenance to deal with the apparition sitting before him.

‘Yes. But I’m slowly reverting to full angel physiology. Very soon these simple disguises won’t suffice. I already look ... odd. I’m only going to look odder.’

Agraffe said, ‘I can understand why you’d feel a little ambivalent about returning to Spearpoint.’

‘It’s my home. But they were also trying to kill me. You’ll appreciate me being slightly ... conflicted.’

‘People? Ordinary human beings?’ Ricasso asked.

‘Angels. Not that ordinary human beings wouldn’t have a go if they knew what I was.’

Curtana bristled. ‘Not all of us.’

‘No, you’ve been most hospitable, given the alternatives. I’m grateful.’

‘We managed to keep him a secret from most of the crew,’ Curtana told Ricasso. ‘They’re good airmen, for the most part - they wouldn’t be working under me if they weren’t - but that doesn’t mean they’d be ready to accept Quillon. They’re superstitious, and ... well.’ She looked into her lap. ‘No one much likes the angels.’

‘I can understand angels being disliked in Neon Heights, or anywhere in Spearpoint that isn’t part of the Celestial Levels,’ Quillon said. ‘But why should Swarm’s citizens care either way? Aren’t angels just another kind of Spearpointer?’

‘It goes deeper than that,’ Curtana said. ‘There’s bad blood between us and Spearpoint. But there’s extra-strong bad blood between us and the angels.’

‘Meroka said Swarm used to be Spearpoint’s military arm,’ Quillon said.

Ricasso looked equivocal. ‘More than that. Back then Swarm was Spearpoint. You couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. What you call Spearpoint was just Swarm’s fixed focus. But administratively, politically, culturally, the city was diffuse. Its influence was much more widespread than it is now. It had true satellite communities, daughter-cities, spread halfway across the world, bound by the same laws and statutes, the same civil rights.’

‘And then all that changed,’ Agraffe said, sounding like a man warming to the topic. ‘There was a zone storm, a big one. Maybe not as big as the one we’ve just experienced, but big enough. The map shifted. Once things had settled down, we surveyed the changed boundaries and reported back to Spearpoint.’

‘There are places we can’t go,’ Ricasso said. ‘Zones where nothing works. Not just machinery, but basic biological processes. The Bane’s the largest of them, but there are others. After the storm, it appeared that a navigable path had opened up into part of the Bane. We called it the Salient: it was a projection of the existing zone into what had once been dead space. We could live in it, and more importantly, our ships and instruments could function there. It was possible for a ship to travel into the Salient and report back.’

‘But Spearpoint wanted more than that,’ Curtana said. ‘They had intelligence - very shaky, dubious intelligence - that there was something important inside the Bane. It had been hidden until now, but with the Salient pushing as deep into the Bane as it did, there was a possibility of reaching it.’

‘There were tensions between Spearpoint and some of its satellite communities,’ Ricasso said. ‘They wanted more autonomy. Spearpoint - under the influence of the Celestial Levels - wanted to strengthen its authority. After the zone shift, there were fears that one of these dissident states might try to stake its own claim on whatever was in the Bane, thereby altering the power balance across much of the planet. That, needless to say, couldn’t be tolerated. And so Spearpoint - or rather the angels - decided that it was going to commit much more than just a small survey mission to the Salient. Fully half of Swarm was organised into a taskforce. We weren’t just going to stake a claim; we were going to occupy, and hold, for as long as it took.’

‘What happened?’ Quillon asked.

‘Swarm’s captains had serious qualms,’ Curtana said. ‘They were worried that the storm might not have played out completely. If the zones underwent another adjustment, there’d be a chance that the Salient might collapse, or disconnect from its mother-zone.’

‘Marooning the fleet,’ Quillon said.

‘It would have been a death sentence,’ Ricasso replied. ‘A slow one, but a death sentence all the same. It’s no wonder the captains wanted reassurance.’

‘They got it, too,’ Agraffe said. ‘They were assured that the best analysts in the Celestial Levels had run computer simulations which showed that the Salient was stable. On that understanding, they agreed to the expedition. But they’d been lied to. The angels had decided that the Salient had to be explored at all costs, even if that meant placing Swarm in jeopardy.’

Quillon could see where things were heading. ‘It collapsed, didn’t it.’

‘Swarm was deep inside when the zones resettled,’ Curtana answered. ‘They were cut off; didn’t have a hope. Even then, we were so naive that we didn’t immediately assume there’d been any deception. What was left of Swarm regrouped. We couldn’t do anything for the ships lost in the Salient. They were beyond help; beyond heliograph signalling range. The only thing left to them was death from zone sickness. But then, slowly, the truth began to emerge. The simulations that had been suppressed because they didn’t show the results Spearpoint wanted. The voices that had been silenced or discredited. Our betrayal.’

‘As far as we were concerned, it was tantamount to a declaration of war,’ Ricasso said. ‘So we took it as such. Spearpoint had abandoned us, so we abandoned it in return. We withdrew from protection duties. One by one its satellite communities broke away from control. Over time, they all withered. Now they’re not even remembered. And we claimed the skies for our own.’

‘I can’t speak for Spearpoint,’ Quillon said, ‘but I’m sorry this happened.’

‘Justice has been served,’ Agraffe replied loftily. ‘It’s just a shame that we had to wait so long.’

‘That’s a pretty harsh judgement, considering no one alive in Spearpoint was responsible for the crime.’

‘Collective responsibility doesn’t end with death of any single citizen,’ Curtana said. ‘It goes on. The city betrayed us. The city still remembers, even as it tried to forget.’ She shrugged. ‘Now ... it’s getting a taste of its own medicine.’

‘Surely you can’t wish death by zone sickness on anyone.’

‘Why shouldn’t I? They brought it on us. And they wanted you dead, Doctor. Don’t tell me your sympathies lie with Spearpoint now, after it forced you into exile.’

‘They’re good people,’ he told her. ‘Most of them.’

‘Sometimes bad things happen to good people,’ Ricasso said. ‘That’s just the way things are. You can’t lose sleep over it, Doctor. I’d have thought a medical man would appreciate that more than anyone.’