Terminal World (40 page)

‘Is it one of ours?’

‘Of course,’ Agraffe said, mildly affronted. ‘It’s not on fire.’

 

The new ship was
Brimstone
, and
Brimstone
brought news. She had caught up with Swarm, having returned to the earlier rendezvous point a day after the other ships had departed. A tethered balloon had been left in the crater, loaded with a coded message informing
Brimstone
of Swarm’s intentions.

Like the other returning scouts, she had seen close action. Her envelope, gondola and control surfaces were peppered with bullet and shell holes. Half her empennage had been torn bloodily away. She was down one engine, and had been forced to thrash the others to stand a chance of making this rendezvous. Injury and sickness had depleted her crew, taking her captain and senior officer, as well as many hands. Months of work would be required to return
Brimstone
to operable condition, assuming she was not retired and recycled and her name attached to some newer, if not markedly superior, craft.

None of that was of any particular consequence, however, compared to the information she conveyed.

The intelligence was twofold. Partly it concerned improved data on the new zone patterns.
Brimstone
had surveyed change boundaries across several thousand leagues and had detected that the habitable zones now pushed some way - possibly all the way - into what had once been the Bane. Much was still unknown, the global charts largely useless, but it was a start on remapping the world. Across Swarm, cartographers were busy inking in the new boundaries: solid where they were certain, dashed where they were questionable, a series of dots where they were little more than conjecture. Hatched lines and inked shades indicated the probable conditions within each zone, annotated with symbolic summaries of what would and wouldn’t work.

More crucially,
Brimstone
had intercepted a semaphore transmission. Far to the east of Swarm’s present position, at least one signalling chain had resumed - or perhaps never entirely ceased - transmission. The guilds on Radial Nine were keeping the Skullboys at bay, at least for now. A number of repeating stations had been lost, but when atmospheric conditions were favourable, messages could be leapfrogged across twice the usual distance. The towers were therefore not sending at anything like their usual rate, but they were working, and something like news - albeit scrappy and disjointed - was flowing along the chain. The direction of transmission was almost entirely away from Spearpoint, to an even greater extent than before the storm. Even if that news had been indecipherable, it would have confirmed that someone was still alive, someone very desirous of communicating with the outside world.

But the news was decipherable, and the news was not good. Spearpoint was in agony, just as Quillon had suspected. The only saving grace was that it hadn’t died yet.

Across the structure, the old zones had shifted convulsively, making a mockery of the old districts, the old certainties. It was pointless now to speak of any difference between Neon Heights and Steamtown. Steamtown’s zone had swelled and now encompassed a much greater volume of Spearpoint, both up and down. The former zones of Neon Heights and Circuit City had shrunk, and what had been the Celestial Levels was now distended, stretched to the point of rupture, its frayed extremities reaching much further down. Horsetown had fractured, meaning that there was no longer a low-technology moat surrounding Spearpoint; no longer any effective barrier to mechanised incursion. Already there were reports of Skullboys massing around the base, and beginning to launch raids onto the low-lying ledges, one or two turns up the spiral. By the same token, angels - or creatures very like angels - had been reported descending beneath the old limit of the Celestial Levels. They were pushing into zones that, ordinarily, would have proven lethal. They weren’t dying, yet.

But the city was dark and almost without power, amenities and transportation. Systems that had been highly tuned to one zone no longer functioned. For all that the angels were descending, the Celestial Levels were devoid of light and the flickering indicators of ceaseless, soul-catching computation. Electrical generators lay silent and smoking in the former Neon Heights, the trains and slot-cars and funiculars deathly inert. The steam stations lower down were still theoretically viable, but there was no ready supply of wood to feed them, and their workforces had been decimated by crippling zone sickness. Against this background, the civil contingency schemes stood little chance of being implemented according to plan. Even if there were stockpiles of antizonals secreted around Spearpoint, it was all but impossible to organise their efficient distribution and dispensation. The very people who were supposed to coordinate the effort were themselves victims of the storm, and the hospitals and clinics where the drugs were meant to be doled out in orderly fashion were now little more than dank, terror-filled asylums, crammed with panicked, dying or hallucinating citizens, the staff and patients all but indistinguishable from each other. Unsurprisingly, those precious stockpiles of drugs were being pilfered enthusiastically. There was no central authority operating in any of the former zones, no effective police force or martial law. In this power void, criminal elements were seizing what they could, and leveraging themselves into positions of local influence, however tenuous and short-lived it might prove. They were intercepting antizonals and fuel. No one dared guess how long Spearpoint had before the drugs ran out, and zone sickness took its inevitable toll. Spearpoint might endure for weeks, maybe - depending on certain barely known variables - months. It was almost certainly not going to see out the winter.

Sooner or later Radial Nine would succumb. Sooner or later there would be no one capable of transmitting from any of the sender stations in Spearpoint. Until such a time arrived, there was only one rational thing left to do. It might be pointless, it might be in vain, it might be a shout into uncaring silence, it might be an abnegation of centuries of proud independence. Still it had to be done.

Spearpoint was doing the one thing it had never done in its existence. It was asking for help.

 

Later that day, while the refuelling operation was still underway, Quillon was called to Ricasso’s stateroom. He had been asking after Meroka, gladdened to hear that her progress was continuing, disappointed that she still did not wish to speak to him. It was earlier than they usually met and he wondered exactly what Ricasso wanted to discuss. Even as he ruminated over the possibilities, sifting through the many questions he meant to ask Ricasso, he felt a stirring tingle of disquiet. Nothing about the atmosphere in the stateroom seemed calculated to dispel his unease. Ricasso stood at his usual window, but there was a tension emanating from his portly figure that Quillon had not detected before. He conjectured that
Brimstone
must have brought some other news, something so utterly, viciously demoralising that it could only be shared at this level, between people already bound by one secret. Then he saw that the room also contained Curtana, Agraffe, Doctor Gambeson and Commander Spatha, and also a seated Meroka - who did not look at all happy about having to be within ten spans of him - and he began to suspect that
Brimstone
had very little to do with his problems.

‘Sit down, Doctor,’ Ricasso said, failing to turn from the window. It was nearing dusk and the ships were still gathering around their feeding points, the operation even more fraught than it had been during the hours of clear daylight. Worse, a milk-white fog was curling in from the north-west, pushing exploratory fingertips over the surrounding hills. It would be on them soon. That probably accounted for some of Ricasso’s mood, but not all of it.

‘Is something the matter?’ Quillon asked, sinking into his customary seat. The furnishings had not been altered, but the chair felt noticeably less accommodating than before.

‘Tell him,’ Curtana said.

‘We know about the girl,’ Doctor Gambeson said. ‘We know about the mark on her head, and we know what it means.’

‘A tectomancer,’ Ricasso said, drawling the word out syllable by syllable.

‘Can we take it as a given,’ Gambeson went on, ‘that this was the matter you were so keen for us not to discover, Doctor? So much so that you placed your own life at risk, by revealing your own nature, in the hope that it would distract us?’

‘I don’t know anything about the girl,’ Quillon said.

Spatha walked around to where he was seated and leaned in until his breath was warm in Quillon’s face. ‘Let’s skip this part, shall we? The bit where you feign ignorance, until you realise how futile it’s going to be? You examined the mother and the girl, Quillon. You can’t have missed that mark, or failed to realise its significance.’

‘He saw the mark,’ Meroka said, speaking for the first time since Quillon had entered. ‘He just didn’t take it as seriously as you stupid dumb fucks are taking it.’

Something like a smile twitched across Spatha’s face. ‘Then why did he hide it from us?’

‘Because he knew how you’d react.’ Despite her bandages, Meroka sat with her arms folded across her chest, looking as if she was ready to pick a fight - and continue it, and probably win it—with anyone in the room foolish enough to make eye contact with her. ‘I took a bullet for you idiots, all right? I helped defend your piece-of-shit blimp. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think you’re all a bunch of superstitious, hypocritical fuckheads. You’ve got your guns and your clever gyroscopes, but you’re still only one scary little birthmark away from wetting yourselves. Me and Cutter, we don’t have much to say to each other right now. But I’ll give the lying, treacherous bastard this much: he knows you better than you know yourselves. Reason he protected that girl wasn’t because he believes in all that witchery hokum. He did it because he knew you wouldn’t be able to stop yourselves, and he didn’t like to think what you’d do to her.’

‘Oh, we’re a bit more educated than that.’ Curtana said. ‘And incidentally, they’re dirigibles, not blimps.’

‘Whatever you say, little Miss Sky-Princess. But I’ll tell you one thing. Where I’m sitting, I’m seeing a lot of scared, fidgety Swarmers.’

At last, and with imperial slowness, Ricasso turned from the window. ‘I take it you’re not a believer, Meroka?’

‘Are you?’

‘I don’t believe.’ He paused theatrically. ‘In anything. I question. I
doubt.
I doubt and I doubt consistently and systematically. It’s called thinking scientifically.’

‘I hope you understand what the fuck that means,’ Meroka said, ‘because I sure don’t.’

‘I wouldn’t expect you to, my dear. The world isn’t exactly conducive to scientific thinking. Not in its present condition. But it’s changing, and so must we. Those of us who can, anyway.’

‘Still doesn’t answer my question about tectomancers,’ Meroka said.

‘Whether the girl is a tectomancer or not,’ Spatha said, ‘she cannot remain in Swarm. She’ll be a destabilising element.’

‘I thought I was the destabilising element,’ Quillon said. ‘Or are you planning to throw all three of us overboard now?’

‘Tell them, Cutter.’ Meroka said. ‘Tell them she’s harmless, that they don’t have anything to fear.’

‘It’s not about whether she’s harmless or not,’ Spatha said.

Quillon glanced at Ricasso, his mind spinning as he tried to correlate everything he had learned about the man so far. Fragments of conversations, impressions of the personality beneath the bluster and political effrontery, swirled in and out of focus. Ricasso was worried about Nimcha’s effects on Swarm, but he was also a man driven by curiosity, a man who would not easily let a puzzle slip through his fingers. Quillon hoped so, anyway. He was putting more than just his own fate in Ricasso’s hands.

‘She’s not harmless,’ he said. ‘She’s anything but.’

‘Cutter,’ Meroka hissed. ‘Think very carefully about where you’re going with this.’

‘I’m telling the truth. I’m sorry, Meroka, but there’s no other way. They have to know what they’re dealing with here. They have to know that she’s an instrument of change. That doesn’t mean she’s evil, or even a force for destruction. But she isn’t the girl she looks like. She’s something bigger than any of us, bigger than Swarm or Spearpoint. I don’t think there’s anything more important in the world right now than Nimcha. And they have to know that now.’

Ricasso took a deep breath. ‘For once, Doctor, I don’t think you’re holding anything back.’

‘I’m not.’

‘The question is, why didn’t you tell us all this when you came aboard?’

Quillon looked around at his other hosts. Curtana was studying him with something between loathing and fascinated admiration. Agraffe appeared to be finding the whole thing slightly comical; he looked like a man trying hard not to laugh. Spatha was stony-faced and implacable. Meroka was still turning the full bore of her hate onto him. If they had been alone in the room, he suspected she would have made a concerted effort to rip his windpipe out.

‘The best thing would have been if you never discovered Nimcha’s nature. That’s how I was hoping it was going to work out. Kalis, Meroka and I did our best to make sure you didn’t find out, but it was a losing battle. Kalis’s courage ... we couldn’t betray that. Not unless there was no possible alternative. Unfortunately, I think we’ve just reached that stage. If I let you believe she’s just a girl with an interesting birthmark, someone who looks like a tectomancer but isn’t, you’ll have every reason to get rid of her.’

‘There’s no reason she couldn’t have remained aboard,’ Curtana said. ‘No one outside this room knows about her now. They wouldn’t have to know in the future.’

‘But it’s like me,’ Quillon said. ‘I know my own nature isn’t the best-kept secret in Swarm. Despite your best efforts, the scuttlebutt was all over
Painted Lady
when we docked. Now there must be thousands who know something of what I am. If you can’t keep me secret, what hope is there for Nimcha?’