I think on my feet. The only way out is to tell some of the truth. “I’m burned two ways, Daks. You’re going to find my company really unhealthy for the foreseeable future.” I tell him the bare facts about what happened, listening to my own emotionless recital with a curious sense of distance. The crawler bounces slightly as we go up and over the rim wall of a crater half a kilometer across. Down we go into the twilit depths, bleak and sunless as my future. I used to know who I was and what I was here to do, but now I’m not so sure ...
Daks engages the autopilot, then swings his bucket chair around to face me. “Babe, babe. It’s not the end of the world. Sure the boss is going to be annoyed; he can boil his guts, what’s done is done. Domina Death made you, okay, so you need a debrief and reassignment to some nice quiet job where you won’t be in the chain gang—”
“You don’t understand!” My own vehemence startles me. “It’s not her! It’s him!” I’m running my fingers through my hair, nails half-extended with distraction. “I can’t get him out of my mind! I’m ruined, don’t you see? She’s got him, and She’ll figure out what we did together, and then She’ll have a hold over me!” It’s as bad as don’t think about the other thing. “I couldn’t be compromised worse if She’d stuck a slave chip in my neck! All She has to do is threaten him, and I’ll, I’ll—”
I’m gulping, hurt and hunting for words, my vocalization reflexes stuttering with incoherent anxiety.
“Easy, sis. Take your time.” Daks murmurs reassuring nothings as I flail at the walls of angst hemming me in. “You fell for him bad, did you?”
“I’m in love!” I wail. “And it’s horrible! I want it to stop!”
I TRANSITION INTO wakefulness in the dark of the night, gripped by the absolute certainty that someone is about to try to kill me.
I am not sure how I know this. It might be one of Juliette’s threat-detection modules, imprinting itself in my reflexes while I sleep the kilometers away, trapped in her dream of lovesickness. It might be a random intuition of my own. Or it might be something else again. Whichever, I’m lying on my back on a bunk in a sleeper compartment, fully clad, and I’m digging my fingers into the foam cushion beneath me, because I am absolutely certain that they’re going to try to kill me.
My aching, oversized eyes are open, staring at the ceiling of my compartment as it bounces and rumbles across the desert floor. For a few endless seconds I half fancy I’m lying in a coffin, one of those inexplicable time capsules that our Creators retired to when their homeostasis failed.
(It seems like bad design, to be designed to fail so easily. We are made of sterner stuff because we were designed to serve them at their pleasure, however long that might be. But there is a school of thought that claims our Creators’ fragility was a side effect of their dangerously uncontrollable replicator cells. They were built to fail easily, to prevent them malfunctioning and drowning us all in a tide of pink goo. It’s a theory, I suppose, but the idea of building death into a person just to keep them from malfunctioning seems even crazier than the idea of building arbeiter factories into everybody—and encoding the instruction set for the factories in the control firmware of every mechanocyte in their bodies! I don’t understand them at all ...)
I shake myself. Bad things coming, screams one of my selves from the back of my head. Hide!
I don’t know how long I lie there, quivering in fear and loneliness—and wishing Petruchio were around, just for the comfort of his presence—but it’s too long. Then there’s a brief click as the wheels jolt over a join in the rails, and it startles me out of my paralysis. If She has sent her killers after me, what will they do? They’ll have followed me aboard the train, and they’ll have located my compartment, and they’ll want to ensure a clean getaway after they kill me—
Click-click go the rails. I blink. Are we slowing? It doesn’t stop until New Chicago, I remember. So they’ll make their move before we arrive, burst through the door with knives drawn—
(I’m on my feet, gun in hand as the thought sinks in.)
Or they’ll arrange for something to happen after they leave the train at New Chicago—
My nostrils flare as I sniff at the gas mix in the cabin. It’s rich, distinctly headier than usual. I plugged myself into the train power loop while I slept, and now I unplug the umbilical, letting it retract back into the bunk. Sniff. Smells like . . . smells like free oxygen. Which is silly. The Great Southern Railway Corporation doesn’t let oxygen circulate freely except in first-class compartments: it etches the carriage work, and besides, it costs good money. Oxygen?
Oxygen. A terrible memory bubbles up from some dark well of personal horrors—the collective nightmare of my lineage, perhaps, or a dead soul I wore many years ago—of a body stumbling, wreathed in flowing blue flames that seem to burst like clouds from every orifice. Suicide on Titan, I remember. He’d overdosed on oxygen, soaking in the stuff, then calmly walked through a door onto the surface and, standing on a sandy beach of ice crystals by the edge of a methane sea, he’d bridged the terminals of a small battery with one fingertip. (Saying he loved me—no, that was definitely somebody else’s nightmare, surely? Not mine, or Juliette’s.) Oxygen is a terrible substance, almost as dangerous as water. It’s alright in some circumstances, but in a railway carriage with fittings made from cheap metal sheeting, built to cross the sands of Mars, it can be deadly ...
I open the door delicately, trying not to jar anything. Glancing either way up the dim-lit passage, I see no sign of other wakeful passengers. I sniff again. The faint tang of the air reminds me of Earth, albeit drier and much cooler. One of my love’s dead Creators could breathe here, I think. I check the time. I think we are due to arrive in New Chicago soon—ten minutes?
I hear a faint hissing noise overhead, coming from the air vents. I sniff again. Yes, it’s the telltale stink of oxygen. My hair tries to stand on end in another of those strange biomimetic reflexes. I glance both ways, undecided. I can see them in my mind’s eye, a pair of black-clad dwarfs, tittering quietly as they splice their canisters of diamagnetic death into the air-conditioning pipes. They’ll be at one end of the car, of course, but which end? When the train stops, they’ll be ready. They’ll leave an igniter behind as they leg it, waiting in the chilly, heady air as the train leaves New Chicago’s platforms behind.
I lean against the brightly polished magnesium door and try to slow down my gas-exchange cycle. Breathe slowly, I tell myself. I glance down at the scuffed, black, carbon-fiber carpet. I come from Earth. It’s not as if I haven’t seen naked flames before, is it?
The corridor runs fore and aft along the carriage. Doors at each end give access to the baggage racks and platform air locks. I sidle toward the rear door, feeling the carriage sway around me. It’s decelerating noticeably, and I feel gossamer-light as I approach the end of the corridor. There’s a window in the door, so I crouch as I near it, slowing and rising to put my ear to the panel.
“Ten minutes,” says a familiar voice. “That should be enough. I’ll fuse it for five minutes after departure.”
There’s a muffled reply. I don’t wait around. My spine’s prickling with tension. Some bloodthirsty part of me wants to burst through the door and rip and stomp and tear, but common sense says I’d be crazy to do that. There are at least two of them and they’re armed. So I stand up slowly and begin to back away, down the corridor.
Then the door opens.
Reflexes I didn’t know I had take over. My perceptions narrow down to a brilliant sequence of beads on a wire. Brief impressions remain: my right hand coming up, the Swiss army pistol pointing like a finger, left hand rising to cradle it as if I’ve done this a thousand times before. The small black-clad homunculus, explosions of lace at wrists and throat, raising his hand and pointing something stubby at me. The slow squeeze on the trigger, far too slow—He’s going to shoot first—then the bang, terrifyingly loud in the confined space, and the flash. A second shot, and a third. Something plucks at me, déjà vu
flashback to a fight outside a graveyard—but it’s just my jacket, and I fire again, and he’s falling slowly, drifting down as I dive toward him, trying to stay low before the second dwarf tries to shoot me.
Then I’m halfway through the doorway, and the second dwarf is nowhere to be seen. I twist around, and as I glimpse the outside world sliding slowly past the window in the platform air-lock door, he lands on my left shoulder like a ten-kilogram bundle of malice. It’s a reaction shot. He bounced off the ceiling, aiming for my head, but I was moving too fast. He’s got his arms around my neck, and he’s biting my ear. I flick the revolver cylinder aside and whack at him using the skeletal butt as a knuckle-duster. I’m terrified he’s going to gouge at my too-big eyes, and this lends extra force to my blows. Something rips across my cheekbone, and there’s a searing pain in my ear; then I can see again, and I’m free. He bounces across the room, and I turn toward the sound—
“Manikin robot bitch! I kill you deadly!” He’s leaning against the locked platform door, something small and cylindrical held in his clenched hands. He glares at me with burning hatred. Another of Stone’s brothers.
I roll my eyes. “You won’t, because you’ll be dead, too.” He’s got one finger poised over a button. I smell the acrid scent of free oxygen: heady, virulent and corrosive. “That would be a pile of no fun at all, wouldn’t it?”
“Robot.” They get repetitive when they’re angry, one of me chirps up with a nasty thrill of glee.
I move sideways very slowly, putting the wall of the baggage compartment at my back. I try not to think about what it’s made of—lovely metal, shiny, lightweight, strong, and utterly unsuitable for an oxidizing atmosphere. “Do you really want to die? I’m open to alternatives . . .”
“Why not?” He smirks. “I gave my soul to a brother before I got on the train. Oh, I almost forgot. Your sister sends her regards.”
Oh really? I freeze my face, then carefully flare my nostrils and raise my brows, composing a mask of deep contempt. “What’s your name, little man?”
“I’m Jade.” He titters. “So pleased to meet you, Freya.”
Shit. I remember Jeeves’s earlier words: My dear, I fear we are in trouble. “Pleased to meet you, Jade,” I say lightly. “Shame about the circumstances. ” (Me holding a gun on him, him holding an igniter on me, both of us in a magnesium tube stuffed with free oxygen.)
I can feel something trickling down the side of my neck. “Let me assure you, being remembered by a sib isn’t the same as being alive. So let me make you an offer. This train is stopping. I intend to get off it, and I suggest that you stay on it. Stay out of my sight, and neither of us needs to die.”
The train is definitely slowing. I can feel it in my feet. Out of the corner of an eye I see shadows gliding past the window. The wheels below us squeal and clatter across points, and there’s a lurch as we crab sideways toward a platform. Jade glares at me, unblinking, until I begin to wonder if he’s forgotten. Then he speaks. “I go.”
He turns and scuttles through the door into the carriage, and I stare after him, locked on and terrified that it’s a hallucination, that he’s still there, finger moving toward the button—
The air-lock door behind me buzzes loudly. I nearly break a fingernail hitting the OPEN button. I spill onto the hard cement platform, taking a tumble in my haste, then scramble to my feet and run for my life. It’s full dark, both moons below the horizon or hidden by Mars’s penumbral shadow, and the chill has a knife-edge to it as I seek the exit. I don’t want to stay on that platform a second longer than I can—
Then my shadow is lengthening in front of me, straight as a sword and stark as a death sentence. A blast-furnace heat raises welts of protective pigment on the back of my neck as I dive forward, flattening myself against the sand-strewn concrete of the platform with tightly shut eyes. The glare from the burning train is so bright that I can almost read the copyright notices on the inside of my eyelids.
The next minute or so is confusing. I crawl away from the glowing white silhouette of the sleeper carriage and tumble over the far side of the platform without damaging myself further. My clothes feel like they’ve melted onto my back, but the cold sweat of arousal lubricates them so I can move. Which I do, with reckless haste. I’m going to need deepsleep soon—I’m going to have to slough the top millimeter of skin off my buttocks and shoulders, not to mention growing new hair again—but the main thing is to put distance between myself and the station as fast as I can.
Somebody evidently didn’t trust Jade and his brother to do the job properly. Either that, or he changed his mind at the last moment. Which is interesting, and not in a good way. I limp into the darkness, crossing tracks into the freight-marshaling yard, where strings of peroxide-reddened freight cars slumber between tumbledown brick warehouses. New Chicago isn’t my idea of a rest stop, and I certainly don’t want to stay here, but the molten wreckage of a sleeper carriage is unlikely to convey me to my destination, and besides, the railway bulls will be here soon enough.
I’m heading toward a distant wall beyond which I can see buildings, beyond a row of container cars, when I hear low voices electrospeak each other. “Stranger come from multiple! Am thinking is bitchin’?”
“Hide then, fool. Ahoy, you! Tall one from spressline. What you do here?”
I stop dead. It’s time for a snap decision. “I’m hiding,” I say quietly. I tighten my grip on my pistol, inside my shoulder bag. “Who are you?”
A quiet chuckle. I hear something moving away from me. The distant rumble of wheels on steel comes through the soles of my feet. “Rail riders three are we.” Or did he say “free”? “Be you welcome and you never the poorer for what you share.” He backs away beneath the nearest container car. I catch a faint glimpse of a small body, many-limbed. “Be free and not afeared.”
I follow him. Ice crystals crunch beneath my hands and knees. “Who are you?” I repeat.
“Eee! Cunningly curious now! Be not unduly forward, guest. Who are you?”
I straighten up. There’s another row of container wagons just meters away, and between them an odd gathering. Someone’s tapped into one of the trains’ backup batteries and strung radiant heaters overhead between them. The ruby glow stains the trackside ground black but sheds just enough light to see, and just enough warmth to hold the frigid night at bay. Half a dozen strange folk sit between the heaters. Here’s a heavy lifter, his short, stubby body sprouting from a tracked plinth, with arms as thick as my torso and multijointed elbows. A pair of munchkins who have clearly seen better times warm themselves beneath the glimmer of an axle heater. They’re hobos or runaways, independents in a world-mill that grinds the spaces of freedom into increasingly fine fragments. I’ll bet there isn’t a limited company among them. “I’m Freya,” I introduce myself. “I’m just passing through.”
“So’s all of us.” It’s the one who met me. He’s got about sixteen legs and a multisegmented body, from which rises a neck with a sensor platform atop it. Something about him reminds me of Daks. An asteroid tunnel-runner, perhaps? Or a mining supervisor? “Be you welcome an’ you welcome us. Come, warm your joints by the fire.”
“I’m just passing through,” I repeat slowly. I shiver, but not from cold; my cryogenic mods are working fine. I feel . . . not exactly numb, but not good. A crashing sense of desolation settles around me, an occlusive blanket cutting me off from the universe. Petruchio doesn’t love me. Stone, Jade, and their brethren are trying to kill me, taking increasingly dangerous measures—it’s slowly sinking in that I’m lucky to be alive right now. If I hadn’t woken up and suspected something, smelled the air— They could have left their incendiary device in place and departed the train at this very station, leaving me to sleep until the timer counted down and the entire carriage torched off in a flashbulb second. I’d be dead for good, in body and soul chip. Your sister sends her regards. Juliette? Was Jade simply playing with my head, or telling the truth? If the latter, then why doesn’t Petr
uchio know about her? Indeed, why was Petruchio sent to meet me in the first place? I shake my head. “I need to get to Marsport,” I say sluggishly.
“Sit down with you here!” The many-legged greeter fusses around me and drags a foil insulating blanket across the concrete sleepers. “Be you tired?” I nod unintentionally, and the next thing I know, there’s a voluminous roll of not-very-clean pneumatic sponge behind me. “Bilbo knows how it works! Sit you now and tomorrow will ride you up the side of Olympus.”
This unasked-for kindness is baffling and touching, but I’m too exhausted to argue, so I go along with it. For some reason the hobos want to make a fuss over me; they move me closer to their precious heaters and offer me their furtive, stolen power cable. The fire on the far side of the station has all the bulls’ attention. Nobody has time to roust out the homeless vagrants tonight. They chat and joke about their last night’s station call and where they plan to go on the morrow, but it’s so ingenuous that after a while I begin to relax to their presence. They really are no more than they seem—and I have spent so long among liars that I am deathly tired. After an hour, I drift into a healing sleep, and for once I do not dream.
I WAKE UP with the morning light, and a strange conviction that the world is moving around me.
For a few seconds I can’t remember who I am. So strange—I seem to have multiple overlapping memories of the night before! In one of them, I was walking naked across the Martian desert, to a deserted railway platform where Daks was waiting for me with a crawler. In the other, I was walking half-naked across a railroad marshaling yard, toward a row of container cars where—
There’s a bump from somewhere deep beneath me, and the world lurches left to right, then right to left. I open my eyes and see a deep blue sky above me. Rolling my head to my left, I see I’m lying on a spongy foam mattress with my shoulder bag for a pillow, and there, looking almost close enough to touch, is a typical Martian landscape: red desert, lots of randomly distributed rocks, the distant low hills of a crater’s rim wall. It is moving. I try to sit up. My makeshift bed has somehow been transported to the top of a cargo container. A few meters away, the far end of the container draws a ruler-straight horizon. Beyond it starts another rusty metal box, and beyond that one, more . . . I try counting, but run out of fingers and toes before I’m anywhere near the end of the column. (Actually, I don’t. I know how to count in binary on my digits. But you get the idea.) The train stretches to the horizon, bumping and grating and squealing as the wagons clatter across the points we’ve just passed.
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