Ares Express dru-2

by Ian McDonald

  “The old train-witch has hightailed it.”

  Skerry was beginning to have a bad feeling about this.

  “She’s what?”

  “Gone. Scarpered. Skedaddled. Flown the coop. Split the joint. Sker.”

  “What?”

  “There’s something else.”

  Skerry’s stomach spasmed.

  “What kind of something else?”

  “He’s moving.”

  “He’s not supposed to move.”

  “I’m getting readings; he’s cast off from the dock and is under acceleration.”

  Skerry swore. The calculations were all based on a stationary target. The margins were tight, hideously tight. Maimingly tight.

  “Are we tracking him?”

  “I’m setting up a radar lock now. That’s us. We’re locked on, provided he doesn’t make any sudden course changes. And, ah, Sker…”

  “What now?”

  “You know I said there was something else?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, there’s another something else after that one.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Ground-to-orbit tracking at Molesworth has picked up a number of objects de-orbiting into atmospheric entry configurations.”

  “A number, what number?”

  “A big number.”

  “How big a number?”

  “Five thousand, in the first wave.”

  “First wave? How many waves are there?”

  “Four that Molesworth knows of.”

  “Twenty thousand, that’s a big number. Does Molesworth know what they are?”

  “Nothing on sensors, but, um, how should I put his? That other moon we used to have…”

  “Oh, Mother of all Grace…”

  “I don’t know how he’s done it, but he’s got into the planetary defence systems. He’s dropping soldiers all over the day side of the planet.”

  Now Weill spoke in her ear.

  “Thirty seconds. First positions.”

  Skerry felt the dirigible shift altitude as Mishcondereya steered by radar through the cloud of unknowing. The fans swivelled into braking configuration, whirred, slowed to a safe-distancing thrum. Mishcondereya was parked directly over the Cathedral of the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family, matching its ponderous progress through the fog that would soon boil into angels and demons. Skerry tried to send her circus sense out into the churning mist, feeling for her unseen target, asking clues, hints, graces. Give me a sign, what does it look like? Give me a break, one little break.

  “Ready, Bladnoch?” Weill said.

  “Ready.”

  “Ready, Mishcon?”

  “Ready.”

  “Ready, Skerry?”

  “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

  She buckled the bungees together around her ankles, strapped the isokinetic punch around her left wrist. The charge light glowed. She would blow a pure and perfect circle out of the hull, dive head first through, blow free the bungee couplings, roll and come up slugging. Simple. Pity there wouldn’t be anyone there to see her greatest stunt.

  The show goes on.

  “Cue Armageddon,” Seskinore said. The green jump light went on. And, as it did every time, though she doubted it, every time, the fear went. Vanished. She was filled with a clear, cold certainty. It was easy. It was all so easy.

  “Dying is easy, comedy is hard!” Skerry yelled, and dived head first out of the airship into the fog.

  “Never!” Naon Sextus Solstice-Rising Asiim Engineer 11th thundered. His fist met the gleaming mahogany of the conference table. Tea glasses jumped, startled off their thick bottoms. “Never never never!” A double pound, doubly emphatic.

  The gathered heads, without-portfolios and diverse uninviteds of the Domieties of Catherine of Tharsis turned their attention to the other end of the table where Child’a’grace sat, hands folded meekly in her lap, the natural leader of the rebel alliance.

  She said, mildly, “But husband, it is your own mother.”

  Naon Sextus’s mouth worked. For a terrible moment everyone thought all propriety would be undone and he would address his wife directly. He caught his words, turned to Marya Stuard, his lieutenant and interpreter.

  “Inform my wife that she is correct, it is my mother, and Taal Chordant Joy-of-May Asiim Engineer 10th is an Engineer of Engineers, and were she here, she would tell you no different from what I am telling you: we have never, never, never failed to deliver a contract. She would say, leave me there.”

  The assembly pondered the self-orbiting logic. The Confab Chamber was steadily filling; word had passed up and down the train that the thing that had simmered four long years between Naon Engineer and his wife was at last coming to a head. Ringside seats at a full-blown domestic! Spectators packed the railed off Gentles and Relatives areas at each end of the carriage. The Bassareenis had turned out en famille. They were particularly keen to watch the snooty Engineers publicly disgrace themselves.

  “But it was the red telephone,” Romereaux said. The conference room had a simple polarity. Stop the Trainers! at one end, The Mail Must Get Throughers at the other, undecideds down each side and baying bloodsports fans behind the studded brass railings. Amongst the nonaligned, mostly Tractions, a couple of new generation Deep-Fusion folk and the oldest Bassareenis, heads nodded, agreements muttered. A red telephone, yes, the red phone, starkest emergencies, Aid from Beyond Comprehension, in a time of Extreme Direness, only direst direness, Taal Chordant, of course she knows, wouldn’t have unless, worse than worst.

  “Red telephones can be ignored,” Naon Engineer countered. There was a collective intake of breath. Heresy. Ignore a red telephone? Foolish. Worse than foolish. Reckless. Perilous. A dangerous precedent could be set. Taal Engineer was no grazeherd crying, “Leopard leopard leopard.” The collected heads turned back to Child’a’grace. She waited with an icon-like grace and stillness for the room to match her serenity. The very way she held herself in her council chair made everyone check his or her posture and sit up a little straighter.

  “Husband, your mother, saints be kind to her, is being well aware of the Formas, of years more so even than you,” Child’a’grace said. That’s right, the nodding heads agreed, Yezzir. “Not for nothing would she imperil the economic well-being of this train and those who live upon her. Not for nothing, say I again, but for one thing and one thing only, and that is family. Wherefore this red phone, unless she has found our child, your daughter, Sweetness Octave?”

  A smattering of applause swelled into a small ovation. Many Tractions, Deep-Fusioneers and Bassareenis bore generations of low-grade resentment at being the driven, never the driver. Smelling mutiny, Marya Stuard rose from her green buttoned-leather seat. The room fell silent.

  “Economic well-being. Shall we explore this idea for a few moments? The economic well-being of this train and all who live upon her. That, I believe, was your expression, Child’a’grace. I’m very glad you used it because it clarifies our thinking upon this subject. For, despite our many Domieties and mysteries, ultimately, this train is one nation, mobile, indivisible. We are all on the same track together, headed for the same destination, carrying a common cargo. What we are discussing here is not an Engineer affair. It is not even a Stuard and Deep Fusion affair. It is all of us, Tractions, Bassareeenis, all the people of Catherine of Tharsis. That is why it warms me to see representatives here from all our peoples and ages. Our economic well-being, my friends. And that cannot be the responsibility of just one family, or one individual out of one family.”

  She looked around the captive faces.

  “I agree with my friend, Child’a’grace, that Taal Chordant would only have used the emergency communication system on another’s behalf, and I feel the loss of young Sweetness Octave as deeply as any of you, but consider again those words ‘economic well-being.’ Sweetness Octave had a choice. She made it, she left the train. Such is her right. But her choice took away our choice. We live with the economi
c and social consequences of her exercise of freedom. I don’t need to regale you with the economic implications of marriage contracts—we all have our diverse nuptial customs—let alone the social. Suffice to say what you have all by now experienced: that the real damage was done to the name of Catherine of Tharsis, and that name is our economic well-being. We are Catherine of Tharsis, four centuries of history beneath her wheels, named after Our Blessed Lady herself. We should be heading up the Ares Express. There should be Prelates and Nabobs in our Excelsior class lounges, not half a forest and a festering factory full of bugs. But it is work—the only work we can get. Oh yes. I won’t bore you with how hard I and my family argued to get even this. So low has our stock sunk. So low. But it’s money. It pays the track fees and the water rates and the insurance and the mortgage and puts a little food in our mouths. It’s economic well-being. And now, you would throw every deadline and timetable and delivery date down the jakes for the person—mark this well—who got us into this state in the first place. Not enough for her to do it once. She would have you do it again. She doesn’t know, doesn’t care. Whatever you’re doing, I don’t care, stop it. Come and get me. I’ve had enough. I’m bored with life out there. I want to come back. Remember, she chose to leave us. She chose to walk away without a thought; without a thought for us, and now she wants to walk back again.”

  Marya Stuard looked long at the sombre faces around the table. She had given them the back of her hand, the hard slapping of truth. Time now for the drop of honey. The table would be hers.

  “I’m not saying, leave her,” Marya Stuard said, and could almost hear the tension go out of her audience’s muscles like a chemical sigh. She afforded a little smile. “What I am saying is just, not now. When we’ve delivered. When we’ve our next contract, then, and she’ll always be welcome back among us—we are one nation on a rail. But not now. Not now.”

  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.”

 
28

  Trainpeople 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.”