Tales from the Edge: Escalation: A Maelstrom's Edge Collection

by Stephen Gaskell

  Monkey's escaped life in the fleshpits, the memory of Kalan Pleasure bleeding out through his white kimono still hot as coals, but escape from the Maelstrom seems as far away as ever. In Whitesands, the Epirians own all the firepower, guard all the exits, and a street kid isn't exactly high priority on the evac lists. Her one chance resides with Mama Bot and her motley crew; Mama Bot who once worked for the Epirians…

  "MONKEY WHERE YOU AT?" Little Billy's voice came, scared like always, into Monkey's earpiece. "Mama wants to know." Monkey, crouched way atop the steel ribs of St. Lorca Station, didn't answer. Up there close to the clear plaz roof, in a flickering middle space where the light of the station's massive vid screen met the night above, Monkey was caught in a kind of stillness, one that demanded silence. It came upon her, this stillness, when she sat alone and stared up at the sliced-open sky.

  At night the sky bled.

  You could see it during the day. The Maelstrom, a smear of blush high above the layers of jaundice Craster dust. This blush, it always made Monkey think of Kalan Pleasure. Kalan, who'd transform himself each night into the hostess—don his kimono, fling wide the shutters of The Pleasure House for the late party crowds and glare at Monkey until she made herself smile smile smile. The rouge Kalan'd pressed with a fingertip across his cheeks as evening came on, that's what the Maelstrom reminded Monkey of in the daylight.

  But at night things got clear. The Maelstrom defined itself against the black and the stars. At night there was only the future, coming on, growing ever shorter. The sky, cut open and bleeding, the wound widening a little each week. The Maelstrom at night turned Monkey's memories of Kalan into something warm, a flavour she could almost roll across her tongue. Kalan, bleeding through his kimono across the braided pattern of the Pleasure House's Meridian tribal rug. The astonishment in his face as he'd scoped Monkey standing over him, scoped the knife in her hand.

  There on her high perch, the locus of St. Lorca Station's black steel bones, the memory of Kalan bleeding tasted real good to Monkey, and the night stillness gripped her. Below, the hard ground of Craster turned and turned like it always had, days into days, like it would never stop. Above, through the clear photo-plaz roof of St. Lorca, the heavens tore themselves apart. The sky, sliced open and bleeding. Monkey could almost taste it. She knew the taste of blood.

  "Monkey!" came Billy's voice. "What you see? Mama got to know." Mama Bot, listening in but never on comms herself, always keeping Billy close, letting Billy be her voice. Securcons were eavesdropping, Mama always said. She'd been Epirian, a long time before she'd adopted Monkey, Raz and Little Billy. The Epirians would know her voice, she believed. They'd find her.

  Monkey spoke low to the mic in the collar of her optical 'flage suit, her fine internal calm broken now by her own voice.

  "Tell Mama I ain't see nothing 'cause there ain't nothing to see. Boo-Coo ain't showed up yet."

  "Just off world tools." This, from Raz. Far below, down on the station floor, Raz in her crumpled faerie wings danced for the offworlders.

  Billy's voice worried into the comms: "Boo-Coo going to miss that mag."

  "He ain't missing that train, Billy," Monkey told him, "Don't worry."

  "How you know? Maybe he got thinking 'bout Rogero getting all shot up. Maybe he got smart."

  The train took you to the shuttles. The shuttles took you to the tunnel huggers up in orbit. The tunnel huggers took you through the cybel gate, to someplace far away from Craster, far from the Edge, away from the cut in the sky and the end of the world. They took you to a new life.

  Monkey said, "Billy, would you miss that train?"

  Nigh on half-night and St. Lorca's cathedral dome swelled with human noise. The night train passengers and Epirian Securcons with their platoons of gun bots. Over and over the trains came in and went out. Maglev doors whispered open, disgorging...tourists. Meridian tribal wraps around their shoulders, expensive rugged wear boots on their feet, packs on their backs, startled sweat in the sudden dry heat. These were the people Raz worked down on the floor. For them, a night or two layover in Whitesands, gambling, whoring. Smooth sheets and air-con in the sleek needle high-rise hotels of the city's core, then on to Alkorn System's interior. Envirosuited adventure trips, hiking and low-grav boating beneath Mzakin Arches, one of the galaxy's geologic treasures—now, before the bleeding sky came and devoured it. To them, money was nothing.

  "You look like a faerie just got off shift at the tin mine," Monkey said into the mic. Raz danced like she was in water, moving ways a person shouldn't be able to, like gravity worked different for her. Lithe beggar girl in her intentionally filthy winged faerie costume. Beauty and need, a powerful combo.

  "Faeries do not dig tin," she said.

  "You say that, but you look like a faerie been working an ore digger a whole week, just got off shift, now you're all 'phined up on black tar, spazzing. You're a filthy, tin-digging, junky faerie."

  "Well you're...fat."

  Somebody'd graffitied Dom Chivo's face on the station floor, ten strides across—Dom Chivo, the epicentre of all things anti-Epirian on Craster—and this was the spot Raz had chosen. Dancing, it was in her blood. Her parents had been dancers, cut down by rotlung during a tour up in the Cowslips. And now here was Raz, dancing since she could walk, and nothing to do with it but put her hat out on the station floor, right in the middle of Dom Chivo's forehead, like some old mine beggar, and move around it while the station's night rush came on.

  "Cherry blossom in an outhouse."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "I don't know." Monkey thought about it. "It's a compliment."

  Raz down there, spinning and spinning. The flash of her smile, and Monkey smiled, too.

  That's when she spotted Boo-Coo.

  "I got him," she said into her mic, "he just came in. Told you not to worry, Billy." Boo-Coo'd entered through a side door, dressed in stolen tourists' rugged gear, a tribal wrap way too big for him. He was barely more than a kid. He walked stiffly, carefully. "I think he's drunk."

  "I would be, too," Raz said.

  "I ain't blaming him," Little Billy agreed.

  The vendors had come out to meet the tourist rush. It was through this crowd that Boo-Coo moved. Former landfarmers who'd lost their jobs in the algae pastures when the red cut had appeared in the sky and the Epirians had realized there was no future in terraforming Craster. They all had that look. Dusty, as though dust were a habit they couldn't shake, like the far off stare you got when you spent years in the wide deserts. There were miners, too. Old timers from up in the Cowslips too bent anymore to work an ore digger. They set up blankets and wheeled in small carts. They sold steaming paper cups of pareto, pouches of smokeable ragleaf, fifths of counterfeit Carnglen whiskey. They waved flyers at the tourists, pictures of naked whores with brothel addresses. They tried to sell items they'd scavenged from the abandoned sections of the city, the swank neighbourhoods, the homes of high-brow execs the Epirians had evaced long ago. But what rich tourist needed silk baby booties? What tourist needed a collection of monogrammed silver cups, or coils of copper wire, or a heap of dead electronics? It was like that, those who stepped across this planet like it barely existed, and those who were stuck here, and just kept living. Like the sky hadn't been cut open, like the blood wouldn't come down and swallow them all.

  A year. That's what Monkey'd heard. A year before the Maelstrom would fill the entire sky and Craster and everyone on it would be no more. A year for Mama Bot to get them off planet. Monkey had faith in Mama Bot. Mama Bot had serious qualies.

  Monkey pulled the hood of her optical 'flage suit down low over her face. She rose and ran along the high steel rib.

  Monkey. This was what Mama Bot had named her. Sneak and Stick. These were other names, other things she did and was good at. Her qualies.

  A long arc and down and when the girder got steep and she began to slide she swung herself underneath and hung there, just for a second, before dropping to the roof
of an info kiosk. Another quick drop and she was on the cathedral floor, down in the stale smell of human bodies and ragleaf smoke and betelbark spice, moving through the tourists and the vendors and the soldiers with their bots, a hard spit's distance now behind Boo-Coo. With the optical 'flage she was a ghost, a blur in the peripheral vision, a quick shift in the air. Nobody could quite scope her, not even the bots with their infrared eyes. She kept close; she wanted a good view.

  Boo-Coo, maybe seventeen and already bald, reminded Monkey of a baby—definitely drunk, though. Being too careful, his hands out a little like he was walking a tightrope. He aimed for the platform gate, that barrier of clear armour plaz standing between the maglev and everyone like Monkey and Billy and Raz who'd never have the clearance to board it. Beyond the barrier, the maglev waited, idling, its doors open wide.

  Boo-Coo, though, he had clearance—maybe. He was one of Mama Bot's oldest orphans, off on his own now, mostly. He worked in the utility basement of the U-Hotel, his world one of grey fluorescents, low concrete ceilings. He repaired broom bots. A servo gremlin, qualies he'd picked up from Mama.

  It was to Mama Bot Boo-Coo had brought news of a dead body in the hotel. An Epirian tourist, OD'd on the black tar 'phines the old Cowslip miners sold on the streets in the city's dead neighbourhoods. A body that by some miracle only he knew about—if Mama wanted to pay him right, hey?

  *

  "Nobody come round for him, nobody looking, I know of," Boo-Coo'd said, his gaze wide as it shifted unblinking from Monkey to Raz and back. They'd met him in the U-Hotel's janitorial basements, in a closet filled with mop-bot parts and a heap of soiled blankets Monkey supposed was Boo-Coo's bed. The body, on the floor there between them. A man, fairly young, thin. "From someplace total low-grav, look how tall," Boo-Coo said. "Probably what did him. Big grav and speed. Bad bad combo, pop your heart like an over juiced cybel tank, hey?"

  "Don't care what killed him," Monkey said, kneeling beside the tourist. Her fingers probed rubbery dead skin. The neck, the base of the skull, inside the pristine new rugged wear shirt, searching for the Percom ID chip she knew was there somewhere. She found it—she hoped—in the wrist, a hard lump beneath her thumb. "Just glad he's dead."

  Boo-Coo, his eyes moony, subterranean in the dim light of the fluorescents—he nodded gravely, like Monkey'd uttered something intensely true, claimed in the basement strangeness something righteous, something triumphant. This tourist, a man with clearance to anywhere in the galaxy he wanted to go, a man whose eyes passed over the Craster doomed like they were so much scenery, and yet here he was. And here they were, the three of them, three Craster kids whose lives had been defined by the red slice growing across the sky. Here they were, standing over him. They all smiled at each other, sharing it. Then Monkey pulled her blade from the hidden strap along her forearm.

  Two quick cuts, a hard tug. She held the chip up, pinched between thumb and forefinger. Raz made a face, all gagging tongue. Boo-Coo's eyes crossed, scoping the tiny black cube, then greedily refocused on Monkey.

  "You pay me, hey?"

  "Deal's the deal. Pay's the pay." Monkey proffered the chip.

  "Wha?"

  "You want money, Mama'll give you money, no problem. But what you going to do with money? Die in a year just like if you ain't got money?"

  "That's right," Raz said. "Money ain't real pay, you got any brains."

  Monkey gestured with the chip. "Real pay is this. You take it, you get on that train. You get on a tunnel hugger, off to some clean safe world, thousand years away from the Edge."

  "No no no—" Boo-Coo's hands up, warding off insanity—"That don't work, hey. I seen Dom Chivo's vids, what happened to Rogero. I ain't getting my noggin shot off by no half-piece Securcon."

  "Rogero didn't do it right. He had the Percom in his pocket. Mama thinks now it's got to be in your body. Like, in it. Triggered by your heat or something, to come on and signal right."

  Boo-Coo thought about it. "And that'll work? Like for real? It being in me?"

  "Mama thinks so."

  Raz, nodding emphatically. "That's what she said."

  Boo-Coo eyed the chip, thinking it over, his tongue stuffed in his lip. "But she ain't sure though?"

  "She got to see it work before she tries it herself." They stood there, framed by the reality of it, death coming either way. There was no sum in not at least trying. "It's a shot," Monkey said. Boo-Coo gave her a narrow look.

  "So how I get it in me?"

  "You swallow it." Monkey pushed the chip close to Boo-Coo's face. "Now. Mama says we got to watch. I got to see you do it."

  "But..." Boo-Coo, lacking words, gestured at the body. "It was in there."

  "Swallow it." Monkey, getting real impatient. "You on that train tonight, hey. 'Fore somebody figures out this fool tourist's dead. Swallow it."

  Boo-Coo licked his lips, gazing at Monkey and Raz, the two girls staring back, expectant and implacable, younger than he was but still girls, and him being a boy.

  "Two kinds of men." It was a thing Monkey told Raz from time to time, knowledge she'd gleaned from her time in The Pleasure House. "Idiots and cowards. Idiots you can make do things, just make 'em feel challenged and they ain't going to back down. Cowards are too smart for that, but they don't like the shame. They're the ones liable to hit you, you ain't careful."

  Boo-Coo, it turned out, was more idiot than coward. He steeled himself, stuck out his tongue. Monkey placed the little black cube atop its trembling tip. Boo-Coo swallowed, looked for a second like he might retch, then steadied. Monkey slapped his shoulder.

  "Boo, you are a steely-eyed missile man. That's clearance, hey. To the stars."

  "Real payment." Raz, in her faerie costume, always in her faerie costume, grinning. "In full."

  *

  Beads of perspiration gathered atop Boo-Coo's milky pate as he threaded through the vendors and beggars and the incoming tide of off-world tourists—Monkey, close enough to see it, a stippling of nervous moisture. Boo-Coo's back ramrod straight, glancing neither left nor right, not looking at the Securcons who watched the crowd from behind their opaque silver riot masks. He stared straight ahead at the plaz armour platform gate, beyond which the maglev sat, idling, waiting to shuttle people off to the future, its doors open and its interior clean and clinical and full of ergonomic function, so very Epirian. The gate would read the Percom ID. It would read Boo-Coo as some tourist it didn't know was dead. It would slide open for him and he would walk right on through, easy as the dry desert breeze rolling down the empty Whitesands streets. He'd be on the train and gone and free, the cut-open sky fading down the cybel tunnels behind him, nothing more than a bad memory.

  "Mama says don't get so close," came Billy's voice in Monkey's earpiece. Motion caught Monkey's eye. Three bug bots the size of rats scurried past her feet. Mama's bots, hodgepodge, pieced together from parts. Mama Bot was here then, somewhere close enough to scope Monkey, close enough to project into her bugs.

  "Tell Mama relax." Because she was Monkey. She was Sneak. She was Stick. She stepped right over an Epirian dog bot, unseen, not a foot from its Securcon handler. She could've stood up on tiptoes and kissed his riot mask. "Ain't nobody knows I'm here."

  "You there! Don't move!"

  Monkey froze. A Securcon stepped towards her. A woman in black armour, two big bots on either side of her, fat-barrelled Renshaws mounted atop their shoulders. The woman was looking at the scanner on her wrist.

  She pointed at Boo-Coo.

  "You! The skinny kid, plaid garments!" Her rifle unslung now and coming to bear, the bots' Renshaws swivelling, zeroing on Boo-Coo. "I said don't you move!"

  Securcons and their bots began converging from all over the station, emerging from the crowd, from obscure doorways behind kiosks. Overhead, a squadron of propeller bots coalesced. For an instant, Boo-Coo looked surprised. Then his shoulders sank. It looked like relief, like he'd never quite believed it to begin with, someone like him getting off Craster. His e
yes settled on where Monkey stood a few feet away. Maybe he clocked her there and maybe he didn't, her 'flage a slight wobble in the air, she imagined, the dimensions of a thin girl. He smiled a little.

  "Missile man," he said.

  Then he ran.

  The Securcon with the rifle didn't fire. Instead she lowered her gun and just shook her head.

  "Where's he think he's going?"

  All the Securcons seemed to wonder the same thing. They simply watched, their bots poised to chase but reined in as Boo-Coo sprinted for the gate. His boots were too big and his arms flailed. Wild, taking his shot, all or nothing, trying for life. A sort of crazy desperate faith that convinced Monkey, for a heartbeat, that the gate would slide open for him.

  It didn't.

  The impact came as a flat thud. Boo-Coo, splayed upright against clear plaz, etching himself like that into Monkey's memory, full stop. Then he was on the ground, a trickle of blood webbing its way across the baby-like dome of his head. The Securcons began to move in, exuding boredom, annoyance, resigned to exactly this sort of shit work. Keeping that line swept clean between the real people and the garbage.

  "Monkey!" Little Billy's voice in her ear. "What's happening?"

  None of the Securcons noticed Mama's bug bots. All three of the little critters had suctioned themselves to the barrier's plaz and clung there, patchwork metal flies. Mama, scoping the scene. The Securcons were focused on the crazy kid on the ground.

  Boo-Coo lay there, blinking. Maybe it was the Maelstrom he was looking at, up beyond the station's plaz ceiling, that bloody cut across the sky, the end of things coming down on him from the heavens. Maybe it was just the booze. It happened quick. He came up fast, swinging hard. The Securcons all took half a step back.

  The air shattered—the hard flash of a single gunshot. Thunder filled the station. Boo-Coo dropped to the ground.

  In the stunned silence that followed, Securcons looked at one another, exchanging shrugs. Gradually their silver riot masks all turned in the direction of one of the two big bots. Smoke curled from the tip of a shoulder-mounted Renshaw. Bots doing what bots did, reading a threat, neutralizing it. Above, on the station's big vid screen, a beautiful girl with cat eyes held up a bottle. She smiled into the station's shocked stillness.