Engineman

by Eric Brown

Something between desperation and an insane belief in the woman behind him spurred him on. He hauled himself past the imitation stars, his flying suit ripped and soaked in sweat. Below, he heard Caroline trying the hatches one by one.

  Then he heard an animal cry, as if from far away, and the first tracer illuminated the gloom like orange lightning. He was thankful they that they were high enough to be out of sight of their pursuers, and the curve of the dome made a direct shot impossible. Then more orange tracer lit the darkness. More shouts as more thugs entered the inspection hatch and gave chase. Caroline cried out, “Ralph, stop!”

  He’d already done so, in fright and desperation. He clung to the indents, awaiting the coup de grace as tracer and bullets filled the space with light and a ceaseless, deafening rattle. He turned his head as Caroline called to him again. She was no longer below him on the track of toe-holds. He caught sight of her to the right, clinging onto the rim of an open hatch and peering through. Her expression, illuminated from below, was joyous.

  “Ralph!” she shouted.

  He backtracked, edged down indent by indent, until he was beside her. He reached out, gripped the edge of the hatch and hauled himself across to her. The yells of their pursuers echoed in the confines.

  Caroline stared into his eyes. “Jump, Ralph!” she cried. “Jump!”

  Central Paris waited forty metres below.

  “I’ll kill myself!” he screamed.

  She laughed. “Look, Ralph. Look straight down!”

  Mirren hauled himself to the rim and peered over. His heart almost missed a beat. They were directly above the inflated mylar bubble of the Gastrodome.

  “Jump! Your flier’s down there somewhere. I’ll cover you.”

  He manoeuvred himself so that his legs hung through the hatch.

  Caroline turned onto her back and loosed off a fusillade of fire down the incline. “For chrissake, jump!”

  She scrambled up beside him and hung her legs through the gap. Mirren looked at her. “What about you?”

  She smiled, reached out and pushed him.

  He plummeted feet first with a sudden cry of alarm.

  He was aware of the cool rush of the air after the glasshouse humidity, and the sudden noise of traffic. He was falling belly first, spread-eagled. The great bauble of the Gastrodome accelerated towards him, its size increasing by the second. He steeled himself for the impact and when it came, taking him by surprise, it was like hitting the slack membrane of a trampoline. The mylar surface gave, accepting him, and he rolled over and over in a constant, moving depression down the side of the dome. He saw brief flashes of amazed expressions on the faces of the diners inside, then longer glimpses of the starfield above.

  He fell the last five metres as the curve of the dome became sheer, landing on his knees in the tilled soil of an extraterrestrial flower exhibition.

  He looked up. Caroline had jumped and was rolling down the dome. Seconds later she landed awkwardly beside him with a pained curse. She picked herself up, grabbed Mirren and sprinted through a dense plantation of miniature trees. Overhead, the thugs jumped from the inspection hatch one by one, like paratroopers tumbling from a plane. The first thug landed, perhaps thirty metres away, righted himself and looked around. Caroline dragged Mirren after her as they tore through the undergrowth.

  They were on the periphery of the alien garden surrounding the Gastrodome. Before them was the iron fencing which separated the garden from a lighted avenue. Across the avenue was a possible way of escape: the darkened entrance of an alley between two tall buildings. Caroline vaulted the fence and Mirren followed, startling a group of passing tourists, and sprinted across the street and into the alley. As he ran after Caroline down the cobbled thoroughfare he realised he was limping. As they came to the end of the alley and paused before continuing into the busy street, he worried that their physical appearance might soon attract attention. Caroline’s jacket and leggings and his flying suit were ripped and stained with mud and leaf mould.

  “Where to now?” Caroline hissed, looking back along the thoroughfare. “Where’s your flier?”

  “This way.”

  They plunged into the crowded sidewalk, attracting stares and comments from passers-by. At the thought that the thugs might have posted lookouts, Mirren broke into a run.

  They slowed as they passed the imposing facade of the Nationale Bibliothèque. They turned the corner into a deserted street. His flier was where he’d left it. He looked up and down the sidewalk. There was no one in sight. The hatch swung open on identifying his palm-print and Caroline scrambled inside. Mirren slumped into the driving seat, slammed the hatch shut and keyed the command to opaque the windows. The sense of relief filled him with an insane, light-headed elation.

  Caroline sat with her head against the rest, eyes closed, breathing deeply.

  Mirren gained his breath, adrenalised with a mixture of joy at having survived so far and a retrospective dread at how close they had been to death. The physical strain of the last hour was catching up with him, creating cramps in his legs and a stabbing pain in his solar plexus.

  Caroline turned in her seat. Tears streaked her cheeks. She embraced Mirren, and he held her to him, feeling her warmth. They embraced for what seemed an age, silent in the aftermath of the chase.

  “Where are you staying?” he whispered at last.

  “The Excelsior, St Etienne. Come back with me. I don’t know what’s going on, but you can’t go back to your own apartment-”

  “I need to warn Dan and the others.”

  She stared at him with wide eyes. “Ralph, what’s happening? You know, don’t you?”

  “I suspect,” he answered. He hesitated. “Hunter wants us to push a ‘ship. Me and my team. I suppose those bastards—or rather the people who hired them -don’t want us to succeed.”

  Caroline was shaking her head. “So that’s why...” she began. “I never had any chance against the flux, did I?”

  Mirren felt emotion welling in his chest. He wanted to tell her not to blame him, that his motivations were no longer in his control, that he was craving the flux and would stop at nothing to get it. More than that he wanted to tell her not to make him choose between her and the flux.

  “Take me to the Excelsior, Ralph.”

  She sat rigid and stared straight ahead.

  Mirren fired the engines, crawled his flier from the kerb and along the street at walking pace, heading for the nearest vehicle exit.

  Even at this early hour of the morning, there was still a line of vehicles, roadsters and fliers, waiting to be checked out. To his relief he saw no loiterers around the arched exit—just a bored gendarme perfunctorily glancing at proffered identity cards. When his turn arrived, Mirren showed his card and the official waved him through. He accelerated from the dome and into the skies of Paris, forced back into his seat with the thrust of his ascent.

  He banked the flier’ into the western aerial lane, heading for St Etienne. They made the journey in silence; Mirren could not find the words to explain, to excuse himself. His inability to plead his case increased as the silence lengthened. He sighted the Excelsior hotel and decelerated, coming to rest gently on the landing stage. He thought Caroline intended to climb out without saying a word. She opened the passenger hatch, turned to him and said, “Ralph, go to the police, okay? You needn’t tell them about the ‘ship, just the attack. They’ll give you protection. Failing that, I can give you the name of a private security firm.

  “I’ll go to the police,” he lied.

  Caroline smiled sadly. “I meant what I said earlier, about us. Even if it’s only friendship...”

  Mirren nodded.

  “Take care, Ralph.”

  He watched her climb from the flier and run across the roof to the downchute cupola. He found himself sitting, gripping the wheel, wishing that he’d told her that the last thing he had wanted was to cause her pain. He stirred himself, engaged the vertical thrusters and banked rapidly away from the hotel, the
lights of St Etienne falling away beneath him.

  He headed north east, a sudden lethargy sweeping over him. At one point he caught himself considering making for his apartment... Then he knew that Caroline was right: he couldn’t go back there. The thugs would surely have the block under surveillance on the off-chance that he was fool enough to return.

  He brought his flier down in a lighted district a kilometre from Dan’s Agency. He parked in the street next to a public vid-screen, climbed out and stepped into the booth. He keyed in Dan’s code and waited as the call rang out, sensitive to the fact of every wasted second.

  A minute, then two, passed without reply. He tried Dan’s mobile, but again there was no answer. He stared at his flier, then along the empty street. He left the booth and made his way towards the Rue Bresson on foot, his pace increasing as he thought of Dan and the events of the night. He would wait in the street until Dan returned from wherever he was, and hope against hope that the thugs had not turned their attentions to the detective.

  He turned onto a tree-lined boulevard and crossed the street diagonally, heading for the Rue- Bresson two blocks further on. He was leaving a well-lighted district for the run-down area of Bondy. As he stepped onto the sidewalk beneath a line of linden trees, he was suddenly aware of footsteps behind him. He closed his eyes. He knew he’d been a fool. To survive death as he had, only to walk into it quietly on a darkened street...

  It began to rain, a fine, tropical drizzle. He increased his pace. He was being paranoid, perhaps—the events of the past few hours lending him to easy fright. He chanced a glance over his shoulder. A rain-coated figure trailed him by a matter of metres.

  He began to run. “Mirren!” his pursuer called. He heard footsteps, closing in on him. He turned and lashed out, and the figure launched itself at him and bundled him to the ground. His assailant drew something from his pocket and applied it to Mirren’s chest, and he felt an electric jolt lance through his entire body.

  He had no idea how long he was out. When he came to his senses he was still on the sidewalk, his mind a confusion of chaotic thoughts. Why had his pursuer not killed him on the spot? Unless he planned to torture him for information he thought he possessed... But why, then, had they tried to kill him earlier?

  A roadster drew up, its tyres zipping on the wet road. A rear door swung open and his assailant bundled him inside. The door slammed shut. Mirren made out a dark figure in the rear seat beside him as the vehicle started up and drove off at speed.

  * * * *

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Mercedes raced through the rain-slicked Paris streets.

  When Dan released him from the painful bear-hug, Mirren sank back into the padded upholstery and closed his eyes, disbelief and relief sweeping through him. He laughed aloud. “Christ, Dan. If you only knew what I’ve been through...”

  “You? Fernandez, Ralph! What about me?”

  “They came after you?”

  Dan nodded. “But thanks to these gentlemen...” He indicated the two men in the front of the car. Mirren recognised Hunter’s bodyguards. “They got me out minutes before my place was trashed by an air-to-ground missile.” Dan hesitated. “You heard about the others?”

  Mirren stared at him, shaking his head.

  “Jan was shot dead last night. They fixed Caspar’s flier sometime yesterday. He didn’t stand a chance. They got Christiana the same way a couple of days ago.”

  Mirren watched the buildings blur by outside.

  “How the hell did you get away from the Blue Shift?” Dan asked.

  “You heard about it?”

  “Heard about it? It was all over Paris in minutes. A vid-cast gave your description. I thought they’d got you.”

  Something caught in Mirren’s throat. “I was with a security guard from Orly. I wouldn’t have made it without her.”

  “Hunter stationed his men around my place in case you got away and decided to look me up. Thank Fernandez you didn’t go back to your apartment. The bastards have it pretty well covered.”

  Mirren started. “What about Bobby?”

  “Don’t worry. He’s safe.”

  Mirren let out a long breath. “So much for Hunter’s assurance that this caper wouldn’t be dangerous.”

  He noticed the bodyguards, in front, exchange a look and then turn their attention back to the road.

  They were moving at speed along the Boulevard St Michel towards the Seine. “Where are we going?”

  Dan turned to him, the great bush of his hair catching the light from the street-lamps outside. “We’re meeting Hunter, Ralph. We’re due to phase out in a little under three hours.”

  Mirren stared through the rain-beaded window at the passing city. After the adrenalin-charged last few hours, this news came as less of a surprise than an inevitability—a just reward for the rigours and hardships undergone. Mirren considered the flux, and the aches and pains of his body seemed to drain away, or rather lose significance beside the fact that soon he would be transcending such petty concerns as he mind-pushed the smallship through the nada-continuum.

  He took Dan’s arm in sudden panic. “Look, don’t breathe a word to Hunter about the Heine’s, okay? I don’t want him to think I can’t push.”

  Dan reassured him. “I won’t say a thing, Ralph.”

  The Mercedes braked suddenly. They were on a cobbled plaza on the Left Bank. The bodyguards climbed out, withdrawing semi-automatic rifles from beneath their jackets. They slammed the front doors, stood beside the roadster and scanned the parking lot before opening the rear doors for Mirren and Dan.

  They hurried across the cobbles to a boat-house beside the river. Over the water, Notre-Dame loomed magnificent and gothic against the deep blue light of dawn, its towers and spires dilapidated by years of neglect. The first bodyguard opened a small door in the side of the boathouse and they slipped inside, while the second brought up the rear and locked the door behind them. An ancient bulb snapped on, its sulphurous light revealing rotting wooden rowing-boats and the first bodyguard, hauling open a trap-door in the floor. They descended a flight of steep, narrow stairs until it seemed they were below the level of the river, then hurried for a hundred metres along a concrete corridor dank and dripping with foul-smelling water, their way patchily illuminated by a torch in the possession of the bodyguard behind them. Mirren followed Dan’s bulking figure up a flight of steps identical to the first, then through another trap-door. They were in what might have been a wine-cellar or a tomb, its ancient stones scabbed with mould.

  They were escorted through arched vaults and up a worn stone staircase, through a heavy timber door into a room that stank of mildewed velvet and damp paper. They passed cardboard cartons full of vestments and old hymn books, then through a door into a chapel.

  Mirren slowed his pace and walked like a man in a daze from the side chapel and into the main body of the cathedral—where once the pious had congregated to worship, but which was filled now with technicians and scientists tending to the object of their devotion.

  The silver smallship squatted in the vaulted nave, poised on its ram-jets with its nose in the air. It seemed larger than the average smallship—certainly larger than the ‘ship the Disciples used as their Church—its bulk emphasised by the confining stonework. Around the ‘ship, in recesses and niches between crypts and sarcophagi, technicians in casual dress supervised terminals and monitors. There were perhaps twenty men and women in the cathedral, going about their business oblivious of those who would soon be pushing the smallship. For the first time, Mirren was made aware of the scale and professionalism of the enterprise,

  “How the hell did they get that thing in here?” Mirren asked.

  “Bit-by bit, Ralph. Then they rebuilt it in situ. Quite a beauty, isn’t it?”

  They walked towards the smallship and paused beneath its rearing nose-cone. A nameplate spanned the curve beneath the delta viewscreen: The Sublime, the Infinite—the name that believing Enginemen gave to the nada-contin
uum. As they stared up at the ‘ship, the first light of dawn poured through a stained-glass window, laying a prismatic effect along its flank.

  “What do you think of the hangar?”

  “Magnificent,” Mirren said. “Does the Pope know?”

  Dan laughed. “Hunter bought the place when the Catholic church was having its sale of the century to finance the cathedral on Mars. It suited his purposes right down to the ground: big enough, secluded—once a place of religious observance. I was talking to Hunter earlier. Did you know he was a believer?”

  “A Catholic?” Mirren was surprised; like most orthodox religions these days, Catholicism was in decline.

  Dan smiled. “No, Ralph. He’s a Disciple.”

  Before Mirren could register his surprise, a bodyguard approached. “Mr Hunter would like to see you. If you’d care to come this way.”