Hotwire

by Simon Ings

  ‘C-Ledge?’

  ‘Like Dayus Ram only bigger. Dayus Ram fought the Moon’s mining machine; C-Ledge fought Jupiter’s.’

  ‘Did she defeat it?’ Rosa asked eagerly.

  ‘No. She stole from it.’

  ‘What did she steal?’

  ‘Some of its flesh,’ said Ajay. ‘It was a special sort of flesh. Datafat. Programmable. Transplantable to CNS.’ He could see he was losing her. He tried again. ‘It was magic. It gave whoever had it special powers. Special senses.’

  ‘And that’s how she turned into this?’ She looked around her. ‘Into Ma?’

  Ajay followed her gaze around the ornate, mirrored room. He suppressed a shiver. ‘I suppose so,’ he said, his voice unintentionally hushed. ‘Yes. She – evolved.’

  ‘Then what’s she doing now?’

  ‘Making new datafats,’ he said. ‘And as she stole from Jove, I’m here to steal from her.’

  ‘Steal what?’

  ‘The flesh she’s making. A body’s like a picture: worth a thousand words. If I can take a body home that’s at once Man and Massive, Rio will pay to mend my sister’s broken heart. She’ll be complete.’

  His story had moved Rosa in ways he did not expect: ‘Take me then,’ she said in abandonment, tears in her eyes. ‘I’ll let you. I’ll be your prize.’

  ‘No, no,’ he said, waving her off. ‘I’ll not take you. Leaving with me means being Rio’s guinea-pig, as I was Dayus Ram’s. I’d not wish that on you.’

  It wasn’t altogether a lie. He’d no great desire to see another child die. The pivete was sacrifice enough. Herazo was expecting cadavers at most from this caper, and that was all he would get. But in addition to his squeamishness, Ajay had another reason for choosing the corpse, Elle, over Rosa. At first glance, a dead Elle – aerial-haired, chrome-eyed – looked more what Rio needed than a live Rosa.

  But Rosa was adamant. ‘I long to leave this place!’ She laughed. ‘How long I’ve dreamed of it! And with you – what better way? You are my hammer and my chisel, sweet!’ She kissed his newly-bearded cheek. ‘Take me. I’m yours. Take me.’

  He said nothing, only smiled and felt some pity for her. ‘Let me take Elle,’ he said.

  But he took more than a cadaver, rifling Ma’s screens for information Herazo might find useful. Rosa led him back and forth through her sister’s apartment, not really knowing what it was he wanted. He seemed most interested in dark rooms lit only by monitors. He sat there for hours at a time, typing rapidly at keyboards Rosa had never learned to use, saving information to small red beads he dropped into the breast pocket of his golden suit. When he was done, they set off for the hangars.

  Rosa went first. Ajay stumbled after her, bearing Elle across his shoulders. His bare feet thudded heavily into the thick carpet. They walked for hours through ornate halls, past galleries and salons, halls and rooms upon rooms.

  ‘Mother’s mind,’ said Rosa.

  He did not doubt her. His skin was patterned, as hers was, by a thousand motes of light. Colours, symbols, rhythms, alphanumerics: Ma’s mindfire.

  They reached a moving staircase. Ajay paused to readjust the load upon his shoulders. Rosa pressed on. Ribbed steal treads chilled her feet as she boarded the staircase. She was having doubts. She wondered if she should desert the whole weird enterprise, flee this boisterous playmate, come to heel. Perhaps, now Elle was gone, Ma would deign to talk to her—

  But if she did, what would she say, faced with a daughter’s treachery? What might she do?

  With a shudder of irritation, Rosa cast aside all idea of surrender. She had already made her choice. This man was her hammer and her chisel. He was her chance. There might never be another.

  Dissatisfied with the sluggish pace of the stair they kept walking, and rose quickly to lighter levels. She was taking three steps at a time now; behind her Ajay, though taking each stair singly, moved fast with silent tread. Another half hour brought them to entirely weightless places: Mother’s hub.

  Ajay led Rosa to a gallery overlooking a disused hangar. ‘This is what I had in mind.’

  ‘Your craft?’ She frowned. ‘It wasn’t here before.’

  ‘I know it wasn’t. It was revealed to me as I explored. Maybe your Ma’s playing a game with us: but we’ve no choice but tag along, we want to leave.’ He pushed off from the viewing gallery and landed feet-first on the cockpit. Automatically, the hatch lifted for him.

  Without waiting for her, he climbed in. Rosa leapt after him, pulling Elle with her through the air. They landed in a heap against the Clipper’s flank. Rosa swung herself head-first through the hatch. She found her man at the pilot’s seat already. Active systems blinked and chirped. Screens bathed him in a cool green glow, turning his skin jet black. ‘It’s on-line?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure.’

  She reached out into the cabin with her mind, expecting voices, bird-calls, hums and mutterings. She narrowed her eyes, looking for the fractal swirls and virtual colours she was used to. But try as she might, she saw and heard nothing. The ship was as dead as the hospital. Nothing had any savour: here, all was brute and functional. The crudity of it all frightened her. ‘We’ll escape in this?’ she said.

  He turned to her. He was worried. ‘Your mother’s fashioned my ship to some purpose I can’t figure.’

  ‘How?’ He was wrong, surely. Ma here? She’d sniffed out no sign of it. ‘What’s changed?’

  ‘The systems check out okay, but look at the walls.’

  She looked at them: pearly smooth. ‘What about them?’

  ‘They’re all curved. They weren’t curved before. She’s done something to the inner hull.’

  ‘Improved it maybe.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Ajay echoed, unconvinced.

  ‘This is our best chance, yes?’

  ‘Unless you know a better way.’

  ‘If I did,’ she said, ‘I’d have left long ago.’

  ‘Bring Elle.’

  Rosa manoeuvred the corpse as gently as she could through the hatch. Ajay took hold of it, sitting it more or less upright in the navigator’s chair.

  ‘Where do I sit?’ said Rosa.

  But he was too busy addressing the ship. Foreign words spilled out his lips: secret, spacefaring argot.

  ‘What did you tell it?’ she asked, eager to learn.

  The ship awoke:

  ‘DAYUS RAM ORBITAL TRANSFER TO DOWN-WELL VEHICLE. INTERNATIONAL TRAFFIC CODE ADHERENCE MANDATORY. B STROKE TWO-FOUR-ONE-ONE-ONE-NOUGHT-THREE-SEVEN-THREE STROKE SEEBARAN AT COM. NAVIGATION CELL OFFLINE. STOP. CONFIRM.’

  ‘Confirmed,’ he said.

  ‘“Seebaran”?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Is that your name?’

  ‘Yes. Ajay Seebaran.’

  Gloves and boots melted out the pearly walls. He made to slip himself into them, looked up. ‘My thanks,’ he said.

  She looked around for a free seat. There wasn’t one. ‘Where do I go?’

  He held her gaze. ‘Home,’ he said. ‘Go home.’

  She reeled.

  ‘Quick now. No time for words. It’s best.’

  ‘But I was coming with you. We agreed.’

  ‘You simply didn’t listen, love. Now. Out.’

  He pressed a button. The hatch swung down on her. She minded it to stop. Deaf and dumb, it kept descending, cracked her head and pinned it to the locking ring like the business end of a giant nutcracker – and stopped, humming merrily.

  ‘No one’s called me “love” before,’ she sobbed, and forced her shoulders through the narrow gap. ‘I’m not leaving you!’

  ‘There’s overrides on this,’ he warned, fingering the panel before him. ‘I’ll use them, slam the hatch. Back off!’

  ‘But why?’ she pleaded. Tears of disappointment filled her eyes.

  ‘Only two will fit.’

  ‘Take me—’

  ‘You said yourself she’s better.’

  ‘Did she save you?’ Rosa breathed, ‘care for you
, feed you? Did you call her “love”?’

  ‘Just go away,’ said Ajay, stern, his patience drained. ‘This game isn’t for you. You’d not survive.’

  ‘I embrace any danger!’

  ‘For fuck’s sake . . .’ He scrambled out his seat, seized Rosa, tried to push her out. They tumbled about in the hatchway.

  ‘Let me go!’ she sobbed.

  ‘I down-well you, you’re as good as dead. There’s men would dice you, to see how you tick.’

  ‘You said yourself I’m just a girl!’

  ‘So anyone can see. But they’ll not be content. They’re ravenous, these men I’m working for.’

  ‘We’ll be each other’s guard!’ she promised.

  Ajay sighed, let go of her and raised the hatch again. It was pointless to fight her. He’d have to find some gentler way. ‘You still don’t get it, do you?’ he said. ‘Herazo’s waiting by his slab, keen to splay and stare at anything I bring him. Anything. You want that they should pin you out?’

  ‘Slab?’ she said, still hovering in the hatchway. ‘Not understood.’

  He let her go. ‘As told, you silly lab-rat. This is a hunt, for Rio’s benefit. And it’s not wives he needs, it’s flesh. Experimental flesh. You compass?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘God fuck – Elle’s pickle-bound! Now: out.’

  ‘You’d tear my sis—’

  ‘She’s meat is all. Meat’s what I came for.’

  A great coldness swept over her. ‘Have my meat, then,’ she said, ‘not hers.’

  ‘I can’t hurt you,’ he said, helpless. ‘I can’t. I won’t. I’ll not have you destroyed. You’ve been my friend.’

  ‘Friends,’ Rosa sighed. The magic word. ‘My friend, I want to leave. Survival’s nothing. If meat’s the prize I’ll leave with you.’

  ‘Your sis—’

  Her mind made up, her future chosen, she gazed at him, her angel and reluctant saviour. She wondered if he understood the murky workings of her heart. ‘Just be there with me when they splay me out.’

  ‘You still don’t understand,’ he said. ‘You’re just a girl. A Dayus Ram-made girl but just a girl. Even dead, your sister’s meat’s more valuable than yours.’

  ‘You can’t be sure—’

  ‘Well look at her!’ he exclaimed.

  Dizziness washed over her. ‘She’s prized so far above . . . ?’

  ‘Dayus Ram’s darling, so you said. Think about it for Christ’s sakes. Who of you two straddles Man and Massive best, do you suppose?’

  The rage came then, fierce like a gale: ‘Which bit of her’s so prized?’

  ‘Her mind—’

  ‘Her brain? Her head?’

  ‘—the power of her rays—’

  ‘Well then!’ Rosa said, and pulling the cutting cloth from her belt, she swung herself over the navigator’s chair. With the dispassionate weariness of a butcher Rosa hacked the golden shroud aside and chopped Elle’s neck.

  ‘Stop it!’ Ajay screamed, weaponless, unable to manoeuvre in the confined space.

  Rosa grabbed her sister’s hair in one hand, pushed her shoulder into the seat with the other, and pulled. The corpse’s skin tore like old cloth. Vessels popped and bubbled. Plates of gristle scraped and snapped.

  Tiny globes of dead, dark blood filled the air.

  ‘We take her head.’

  Rosa paused at the open hatch, watching her decapitated sister spin away among the derelict gantries. Her beautiful sister was as useless and vile now as the sack of snakes had been. The snakes were her doing, too. And were their deaths any more deserved? She had thought so once; now she was not so sure. Perhaps, thought Rosa, the pollution is in me, after all.

  She looked round for Elle’s head. It had come to rest against an air vent. Rosa steeled herself and bent down to retrieve it. Face to face with it at last, she felt nothing. Nothing at all. Not even horror.

  She picked it up by its metal hair. Why didn’t she feel anything? Where had her sister’s power gone? Was none left in the meat?

  No, none. It was dead and unmistakably corrupt. No sister any more . . .

  ‘Sit down,’ Ajay ordered.

  She stowed the head under her couch.

  Set against her knowledge of the loss, that yawning gap, that ‘never’ cycling endlessly, the sight of Elle’s remains was nothing.

  ‘Strap yourself in.’

  ‘Ajay?’

  ‘On-line me.’

  ‘OKEE-DOKE, SIR.’

  ‘Ajay, look at me.’

  The ship plugged Ajay’s eyes with silken cords. Boots and gloves enfolded him. Crash webbing spun about him, sealing him up in the bomber’s secret world.

  ‘Ajay, speak to me!’ she begged.

  But the clench-plate was already in his mouth. Wired, webbed and violated, he was his spaceship’s playmate now, and sitting next to her was miles away.

  Ajay had their escape vector off by heart to the nearest second of arc. He’d worked out the details with Herazo and committed them to memory. His plan was to return by night, ditching the craft in the Atlantic, roughly five miles due east of Parachi. Herazo had a sub waiting, to be stationed there a six-month, so he’d said. And if that failed, the gap was swimmable. Just.

  Once the ship had calculated the descent, there was nothing more he could do but wait. The most part of the journey he slept away. He did not dream. His waking hours had held so many terrors, nightmares were redundant.

  At length the Clipper neared Earth’s gravity well. Its proximity to the moon, its old enemy, made it jumpy. It kept waking him every half hour or so with a status check, a trivial malfunction, some imaginary problem or other. It was itching to fail, as usual. Every so often it plunged blunt needles into his upper arm, injecting him with imaginary endorphins. Ajay groaned: thankful that at least it wasn’t fucking up any worse: injecting him with air, perhaps. Now that would be a shitty end, after all he’d gone through. The silver bird, the girl – he looked to his left – the head.

  He looked askance at Rosa, sleeping sound. This rat-like thing, this guinea pig, this innocent – or so he’d thought – what had made her do that? What had given her the strength? For years – since Haag had kicked him out – he’d been the only thing he knew could rage so fierce. Now he had company.

  How could this little girl best him in horror?

  She wasn’t wired the way he was, for sure; had no excuse that he could see. No years of clever pills, anime play or any of the other mindfucks Haag had used to mould him.

  He felt no kinship; only fear. He wondered what to do.

  Kill her, maybe? Easy enough. She slept. The magic cloth was on her belt, easy to snatch. A simple snap of vertebrae would clear his path. No volatile lab-rat companion on his hands, just him, the beads, and – the head.

  Rosa stirred in her seat and muttered, uneasy, as though she’d mind-read him – he shivered, tried not to think that way. She was a girl, after all, just a girl, desperate to travel.

  How desperate? he wondered then. Desperate enough to kill?

  Rosa cried out. The cry was soft and terrible. Heartbroken, as if something deep inside her had broken.

  Ajay looked away, disturbed. What if she wasn’t a monster? What sort of hurt could have driven her to the killing act?

  Or was she simply other? Mother’s child? An innocent so free of fault or knowledge of what fault was, murder itself was no taboo – just one more act of an unrestrained heart!

  Ajay shivered. (The Clipper took note; it shoved a needle in him.) He thought, What if she doesn’t know what she’s done? Then – he stared at her, on edge – if that were so, then she was capable of anything. Ten times more dangerous than he’d feared. And thought of all she’d done for him could barely stay his hands from round her throat. The least he should do was disarm her. He leaned over. He could just reach her waist. His fingertips brushed the cloth, smooth and supple against his fingers. It did not harden for him. Troped to her sweat signature, he thought. A handy toy; H
erazo would be amused—

  ‘ABLATIVES SHOT!’

  A siren sounded. Rosa started from sleep.

  He leant back into his couch, scouring the screens. The Clipper’s interactive suite engulfed his hands and feet. Clench-plate and eyestalks hovered over him, ready to plug his face should full VR be necessary.

  ‘What is it?’

  The sirens died.

  ‘Ajay?’

  ‘Quiet, I’m reading.’

  The ship had begun its pre-entry sequence. Telltales buried in the underbelly ceramics were shrieking. Failsafes glowed: treelike striated graphics on the monitor above him. To his right, another screen gave out more detailed breakdowns. He typed the air: antique reactive gloves passed his orders to the ship’s central suite. Interrogative routines were dispatched to search for the cause of the commotion.

  ‘Is it bad?’

  He nodded, wide-eyed and disbelieving. The underbelly ceramics were vibrating. The readings were way outside tolerance. He said, ‘Some damage to the hull.’

  ‘What from?’

  He shrugged. ‘Fuck knows. The data only just came through.’ They were grazing the topmost wisps of atmosphere now; damage that before was undetectable was only now coming to light. ‘The tiles are loose,’ he said. He typed some more. ‘Oh Jesus Christ.’

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘We’re fucked,’ he whispered.

  Were a tile or two to shear on re-entry, the hull would bear up halfway well. But this was damage of a different order: it seemed half the port-side had been beaten with a mallet. There were suspect fractures everywhere. No way now the Clipper could down-well.

  ‘What do we do?’

  He racked his mind for some conservative solution to the problem. There wasn’t one.

  ‘IMMEDIATE ABORT!’ the ship advised.

  He typed wait, and scrolled through further screens, searching for some self-repair routine that might seal the clipper’s hull for halfway safe descent. But the damage was too great. He swallowed hard. ‘We have no choice.’

  ‘We’re going home?’

  He shook his head. ‘Too late for that. We’ve insufficient fuel. We must debark.’