Engineman

by Eric Brown

  As Caroline finished her starter, she said, “By the way, I remembered those photos of Susan I told you about.”

  Mirren smiled. He’d rather she hadn’t. He wondered if she was intentionally trying to make him feel guilty.

  She took a stack of a dozen pix from the pocket of her jacket and slid them across to him. He pushed his plate away, went through the snaps one by one.

  They showed an anonymous, tall, tanned and blonde Australian girl in her early twenties, smiling in all the shots: in one she was wearing the uniform of the KVO Martian division, in another a ski-suit, Another pix showed her on a beach with someone who was, presumably, her boyfriend.

  Mirren recalled the baby he’d left in Sydney.

  He tried to feel something, some vestige of the love he must once have felt, or failing that some paternal feelings—but he felt nothing, he admitted; not even guilt.

  He returned the pictures to Caroline, who had been watching him closely. “You don’t want to keep one?”

  He tried to seem enthusiastic as he selected a picture: Susan, skiing on Mars.

  “I heard from her last night, Ralph. She’s visiting me in just over a month. She asked if I was in contact with you.”

  Mirren could not help but feel that Susan would be bitterly disappointed when she finally met him. “A month? That’s great. We’ll go out somewhere together.”

  Caroline smiled unsurely, pushed her plate to one side. “Ralph, I lied yesterday when I said I didn’t come to Paris intending to look you up.”

  Mirren felt something heavy plummet within him. Please, he wanted to tell her, don’t let me hurt you again.

  He avoided her gaze.

  She went on, “After my husband died... I got to thinking about us. We never gave it a chance—you never gave it a chance. I decided to come here and see what you were doing. Look, I don’t mean I necessarily want us to get back together, but...” She shook her head.

  There was a long silence.

  “You’re not the man I married, Ralph. You’ve changed a lot, lost something. That might have been the flux... I believe what you told me yesterday, about the flux. I know you aren’t to blame. The very fact that you’ve had no-one since leaving...”

  Mirren picked though his meal. He didn’t want her sympathy, her spurious attention on the rebound from her dead irrigation scientist.

  “What do you feel about it?”

  He looked up. “About what?”

  “What do you think?” She sounded exasperated. “Us!”

  Carrie, he wanted to tell her, I’m dying and I’ve been promised the chance to flux again... Instead he just shook his head, folding and refolding his napkin and avoiding her stare.

  “I don’t mean we should get back together again, okay? But there’s no reason why we can’t meet occasionally, get to know each other again. No commitment, just friendship?” She reached across the table and took his hand. “I need someone, Ralph, and for chrissake so do you.”

  He wanted to tell her that he needed no-one. “I see no reason why we can’t meet socially,” he said awkwardly. He saw the pity in her eyes and it burdened him.

  They finished the meal in silence.

  When Mirren next looked up, Caroline was staring across the dance-floor towards the bar. Her expression hovered between suspicion and alarm.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she smiled brightly. “Have you finished? I feel like a long walk.”

  She paid quickly, inserting her card in the table-top slot before he had the chance to argue. “Come on.”

  Her haste to be away surprised him. “How about another drink?” The alcohol was nicely dulling his senses.

  “No, let’s get out of here. Follow me.”

  She stood and side-stepped from the booth. She took his arm in what would seem to observers like an amorous embrace: she almost dragged him around the edge of the dance-floor towards the main exit. Then, without warning, she steered him quickly through a pair of black-painted fire-doors. He was surprised by her strength.

  “What-?”

  “Run!” They were in a dim corridor. Mirren ran. Caroline, ahead of him, burst through a second pair of fire-doors. They emerged in a darkened alley.

  “Where’s your flier?”

  “Ah... in the central dome. I came by taxi.”

  “Shit!”

  “What is it?”

  She pulled him by his arm and ran along the cobbled alleyway. “You were being targeted. A dozen street thugs. They were watching you.”

  Mirren felt a hot flush of disbelief, then fear. “Me?”

  “What did that off-worlder character really want, Ralph?”

  Behind them, an explosion shattered the quiet night, echoing deafeningly between the narrow alley walls. Mirren looked over his shoulder. A hole gaped in the brick wall of the night-club. Six thugs leapt through. They knelt amid the tumble of bricks and aimed their weapons. Caroline dragged him to the ground. He heard the air shriek as projectiles sliced overhead, tracer indicating their vector. Caroline pulled a small pistol from her jacket and returned fire. She pulled Mirren upright and hissed, “Run. Turn left at the end!”

  She was kneeling, her pistol held in both hands at arm’s length, spitting fire. The thugs took cover behind the fallen masonry. Mirren ran, turned the corner and leaned against the wall, panting with a combination of exhaustion and fear. Caroline joined him, tearing round the corner as if all the hounds of hell were on her heels. “Christ, Ralph. You know how to make enemies. These jokers mean business.”

  The alley terminated in a T-junction with a wider street. Twenty metres to the right was an intersecting main road, full of bright light and pedestrians. To the left, the street descended into shadows and a tangle of alien greenery.

  “This way,” Caroline said. They sprinted into that section of the street taken over by the alien jungle, Mirren anticipating the lancing pain of bullets between his shoulder blades at any second. Their footfalls no longer rang on the metalled surface; vegetation provided a treacherous carpet underfoot, and overhead the night sky was hidden by a canopy of leaves and vines. A quiet calm closed in around them, reassuring Mirren that the thugs would give themselves away by the sound of their pursuit. At the same time, now that his initial shock at the attack had worn off, it came to him how close he had been to death—and that without Caroline the thugs would have killed him with ease.

  If he was being attacked because of his involvement with Hunter... then what about the rest of his team? Dan and Fekete and the others?

  Caroline was jogging ahead of him, her breath coming easily. Her whole attitude cried out resolve and Mirren almost wept with gratitude.

  She pulled up, placed a hand on his arm for him to hush. She looked back the way they had come, a tunnel forced through the jungle by those who had passed this way before them. Then Mirren saw their footprints in the slime that covered the street, indicating their whereabouts like so many tell-tale arrows. Caroline noticed his panic and smiled. “Do exactly as I say, Ralph. Find the shop-fronts and backtrack fifty paces. Then stop and wait for me?”

  “Where you going?”

  “I’ll be with you in one minute.”

  He forced his way through the tangle of vines and creepers, barbed brambles catching his hair and flying suit. In the semi-darkness he collided with the wall of the shop-front, and looked back. Caroline was forcing a path through the undergrowth up ahead, creating a decoy trail.

  He headed back down the street, squeezing between the brick wall and the vegetation that had adhered to it for years. He counted out approximately fifty paces, then halted and waited for Caroline. He felt vulnerable without her, an easy target. A tangle of foliage closed around him. There was no sound of the thugs; the only noise was the churring of some insect nearby, and the pounding of his heart. The air was humid, rank, and he was soaked in sweat. He told himself that it would be too much to hope for that the thugs had given up their pursuit. He thought of Dan, Fekete, and
the others, and he hoped in desperation that the thugs—if they were indeed going after his team—were doing so one by one, and that he was number one on their hit list.

  He had to survive in order to warn the others.

  Someone grabbed his elbow. His heart lurched and he almost shouted out.

  “Ralph!” Caroline hissed. “Follow me!”

  She pushed him into the darkened doorway of what had once been a chemist’s shop, a cubicle of space that the jungle had not invaded. Caroline forced the door and stepped through. Mirren followed her into the gloom of the interior. The only illumination was a shaft of moonlight falling through a high window overhead. Caroline indicated a door and they crossed to it, their footsteps cracking glass. They passed through a back room and Caroline led the way to a low window. She kicked glass shards from the rotting frame and high-stepped through with pantomime care. Mirren followed her actions like a shadow. The street outside was a replica of the one they’d left. They fought their way through the obstructing vegetation and crossed the street to a facade of shop-fronts opposite, found a gaping door and entered. They hurried through the fusty, rat-infested building and once more came out into a jungle-choked thoroughfare. Again they cut across the street, through the undergrowth, and climbed through the window of a derelict boutique.

  There was a gaping hole in the dividing wall. They passed through it into another abandoned shop. A series of doorways gave access along the entire row. Mirren followed Caroline at a jog. It was obvious by the degree of light entering the succeeding rooms from outside that they were leaving the over-run district behind them. They entered a boarded-up mini-market and Caroline crouched against the wall, sitting on her heels. Mirren joined her. “What now?”

  “We wait. We might’ve lost them for a while if they followed my track along the street.”

  “And if not?”

  Caroline just shook her head. She turned to look at him. “They’re connected, aren’t they? That Hunter guy and all this. What the hell’s going on, Ralph?”

  He shook his head. “I honestly don’t know.”

  “You aren’t telling the truth, Ralph.”

  Mirren was taken by the sudden need to confide in Caroline; he’d told no-one about what was happening, and he thought that by doing so he might, himself, come to some understanding. He was about to tell Caroline about Hunter’s offer when the deafening crump of an explosion devastated the silence.

  “Christ, they really mean to finish you off.” For the first time, Mirren heard fear in her voice.

  She stood and moved to the boarded-up window, prised back a plank and peered through. A lighted shop-front plunged a beam of illumination into their bolt-hole. Caroline crept back to his side. “They’ve got a guy posted across the street,” she reported calmly.

  His pulse surged. “They know we’re here?”

  “I think they’ve got the whole area staked out.” She thought for a second. “Okay, this way.” She all but dragged him down an aisle between emptied food racks and old freezer units. They entered a storeroom. Caroline looked around, then crawled through an air-conditioning duct in the far wall. She reached back for Mirren and he scraped himself through head first. She helped him to his feet and he stood, panting. Her expression was grim. “Look,” she said.

  Mirren could do little else but look. A metre before his eyes was a curving silver surface. It took him seconds to realise that it was the outer membrane of the dome which enclosed the cultural heritage of central Paris, effectively blocking their flight.

  Caroline stood with both feet on the curve of the dome, her back braced against the wall. She edged along, foot over foot, came to the end of the building and peered down the street, then returned to Mirren, fast. Her eyes were wide with alarm. “There’s about a dozen of the bastards coming down the street.” She banged a heel against the silvered surface of the dome. “I could always blast our way through—but they’d soon find the hole and we’d be trapped in there.”

  Then she saw the inspection hatch five metres to the left. She moved towards it, feet crossing, and Mirren hurriedly followed. The hatch was an oval doorway set into the base of the dome, secured by a finger-print access lock. Without ceremony, Caroline aimed at the lock mechanism and fired once. The pistol spat and the lock disintegrated. She looked left and right to ensure they were unobserved and hauled the hatch open. She crawled through and Mirren ducked in after her, closing the hatch behind him.

  The gap between the outer and inner membrane was less than one metre thick, a confined area of supporting girders and air treatment units. Mirren stood awkwardly, his belly and face pressed against the grime-encrusted plastex. It was suffocatingly hot and pitch black; the inner membrane was darkened in its nighttime phase, and the silver outer membrane admitted no light. Further up, where the artificial starfield began, the backwash of the individual halogens provided erratic illumination. The surface of the inner dome was patterned with regular, indented toe-holds allowing the inspectors and engineers to climb between the two great curving planes.

  Caroline clutched his arm. “Up there, Ralph,” she ordered. “I’ll try to shoot a hole through the inner dome. With luck they’ll think we went straight through.”

  Mirren climbed, finding the indents with difficulty. He pushed his way up, his progress impeded by loose hanks of wiring and the pipes of the air-conditioning which kept the precincts within the dome at a pleasant seventy degrees. He paused when he was a couple of lengths above Caroline and peered down. He could just make out her dark shape, spread-eagled between the planes. He heard two sharp shots. Caroline cursed aloud, tried again. Mirren was thankful that the outer membrane was silvered, so they were unobserved. He wondered how long it would be before the thugs noticed the damaged lock of the hatch.

  He looked down, saw Caroline moving towards him up the recessed toe-holds. He felt her hand on his leg. “No good, Ralph. The stuff’s reinforced.”

  “Christ!” Mirren yelled. “We’re trapped in here!”

  “Just keep climbing.”

  The confined space became suddenly claustrophobic. The heat seemed to increase by twenty degrees. “Where to?”

  She thumped his legs. “Just let me do the thinking, will you? Climb!”

  As he moved further up the inside of the dome, the gap became narrower, as if the planes of reinforced plastex converged at the apex. Each step became an effort, the toe-holds harder to find, and his fingers ached from supporting his weight when his feet slipped. They entered the region of the starfield. Mirren tried to keep his mind from the terrible thought of being discovered like this by identifying the constellations. He calculated in which quarter of the city they were positioned, and the degree of their elevation, and then recalled the star-charts he’d studied years ago. He recognised Arneb in Lepus. Ahead was Rigel in Orion and beyond it Hatysa, a close-packed nebulosity. He recalled a time, fifteen years ago, when he’d vacationed on Brimscombe, Rigel II... Then he laughed aloud at the absurdity of his present situation. Behind him, Caroline grunted. “What’s so funny, Ralph?”

  He called, “I always thought I’d die between the stars...”

  She hit the sole of his boot with her fist. “Very funny. Now will you hurry up?”

  He climbed. His concentration on the stars was shattered when he heard a sound below him—the opening of a hatch. They’d finally found the shattered lock. He screwed himself round, peered down. Caroline was on her belly, reaching out. To her left, a circular hatch hung open, admitting a shaft of light and affording a view of the rooftops twenty metres below.

  “Caroline?”

  “Not this one, Ralph. Keep climbing.”

  As he did so, he noticed the outline of a hatch to his left. They were spaced at regular intervals beside the toe-holds, positioned to give access to the cables which connected the ersatz stars. He recalled seeing fliers hovering beneath the dome’s inner surface, off-loading replacement parts and tools to mechanics inside. What he’d give for a friendly, passing f
lier right now...

  He peered back at Caroline. She’d opened another hatch, letting it swing on its hinges as she poked her head over the side. She looked up at him. “Damn!”

  “Caroline? What the hell...?”

  “Your flier’s somewhere down there, right?”

  A light pressure of elation filled his chest at the thought—quickly chased by despair. “But how the hell do we get down!” he yelled.

  “Leave that to me,” Caroline said. “Keep climbing, Ralph. Hurry up!”