We had begun to descend the heights from which we had once been standing. The Commercial District was surrounded by water and interspersed with rivers and canals. This meant that the most effective way to get the heart of the commercial district was to find a boat and take it right into the centre. From the centre we could get a vehicle which we could use on the large roads that spanned the grounds and the airs of the Commercial District. And from the very heights of the city’s skyline we could access the freeway which would take us into the Centre for Administration.
We were moving slowly down the bright steps. The suns shone with a bright intensity and the water beneath us sparkled. We were nearly at the bottom of the huge staircase and it had taken all of our remaining strength to get to this point. We all longed for the security and safety of the boat. Even if it was just an illusion.
‘Are we nearly at the bottom yet?’ groaned Abigail to Harris. None of us bothered with an answer. We were too tired to waste our breath. She was of course equally as able to see the floor as we were. It was also very annoying that her whining voice could be giving away our position to whomever may be here.
The floor was now in sight. Aeniah, ahead as always, was already at the bottom of the stairs. I arrived a few seconds afterwards. Sean had whizzed off in the direction of the city in order to do some reconnaissance. But he had been gone for a while. I wondered what kind of trouble he might have managed to get himself into. A moment later and I was second guessing this fear. Knowing Sean he was probably marvelling at some unknown lost piece of architecture.
By now we had stepped onto a white and red bricked terrace which ran alongside the water. The terrace functioned as a way for people to moor up their small watercraft. In the distance a huge bridge could be seen that crossed the expanse of water. But the interlink tramway was not a main route, it was designed to be a quaint tourist way of getting about, and so it did not end at the bridge but by the water.
The bridge was far too far away for us to traverse. We also did not have a vehicle so it was not as though there was any real benefit to walking all the way over there. As I was musing Sean had returned from his quick scout out of the area.
'According to a quick run of the place there are no infected on this terrace. However intermittent range sensors reveal a huge amount of motion within the Commercial District itself. This motion was detected with thermal imaging and so I am reasonably confident that there is a large quantity of infected over there.' Sean finished his first report. There was clearly more to report but he waited patiently for the questions that Aeniah would inevitably ask him.
Sure enough he had not waited for the wrong reasons. Aeniah piped up, 'so how many have you detected, and where are they concentrated?’
'My sensors are not accurate enough from this distance to determine an answer to either of those questions. And before you accuse me of being an obsolete dishwasher, might I remind you that it was your infinite wisdom that requested this particular drone for me to inhabit. If you had at least kept the body that I was manufactured with then this would be a very different situation.' He finished with an air of indignation.
Aeniah ignored the attack. 'So then how about a boat, did you find us one of them.’
'I did one better,’ Sean replied with an air of confidence. 'I found a hopper.’
'A hopper?' I asked.
'A hopper is like the hovercraft that you always wanted as a kid. However hoppers are designed only for crossing water. They do not fly. In fact they are not very fast by comparison to most vehicles of the period, but they are totally silent.' Aeniah finished, her voice oozing superiority. 'So then Sean, where is our luxurious transport.’
'Not far, just keep going straight on, you can't miss it.'
He was right. After just a couple of minutes walking we found the hopper. The hopper was shaped like an oval. In the centre was a seat with a wheel and around it's edges were red fabric seats. The hopper was a silvery colour, coated in a grey dust.
Aeniah jumped from the terrace onto the hopper. It bobbed and swayed with the impact and Aeniah almost staggered overboard. I stifled a laugh, but she heard it anyway and turned round, staring at me evilly.
She sat on the seat with the wheel and rammed something into the side of it. The hopper rose, without any noise at all, about six inches from the water.
'Hurry up will you and get on board. I know you guys are tired, but we don’t have all day. No dithering now. Oh, and Sean, scout ahead of the hopper when we are moving and tell us which parts of the city we really don't want to get close to.'
'Of course sir,' he replied deferentially.
We each leapt onto the hopper. Now that it was active the vehicle did not bob and sway with the water but remained perfectly upright. If anything at all occurred it was just the faintest hint of a slight hum as the engine worked to correct the hopper's balance.
Aeniah forced an unyielding handle forward and the hopper lurched suddenly forward and then relaxed to a static speed. Aeniah was quite correct in her assertion that hoppers were not fast, the thing seemed designed with comfort in mind and not exhilaration. A promotional sign on the side of the vessel had said 'stable in all weather.’ This seemed indeed to be the case. Though there was no wind there was a little bit of swell along the water. At the speed that we were going it did not seem as though the waves were having any effect as we continued heading straight and true.
We were now in the middle of the expanse of water. Sean had advised us to make several course corrections to avoid the infected. We had considered taking the small city spanning waterways to get to the city's centre but this had proved too dangerous. Instead the plan was now to take the main river into the city and then divert ourselves to the location that we wished.
The Ascension Social Transport Initiative, according to Sean, was located along the Commercial District's Grand Concourse. This was something, Sean assured me, that I would have to see to believe.
Sean seemed to have everything under control. Aeniah was guiding the boat along the green and blue water with expert precision. It was as though this was something that she had done a hundred times before. She even hummed along with Sean on occasions. Abigail and Harris both seemed to be enjoying themselves. In fact it seemed that everyone was enjoying themselves thoroughly. Perhaps it was the chance to rest, perhaps it was being so far away from the enemy. But in all reality it was where we were that was the cause for our levity. The suns were shining. We were looking onto the beautiful expanse of a city sent down from the heavens. Even though it had not been looked after for centuries and we knew that lurking within those mammoth temples was an unprecedented danger, we seemed to find the place alluring in a way that I could not describe. Ascension seemed to have that quality. It was a place of such magnificence that even though there was danger everywhere, and even though much of it was damaged, it could still pull you in. It could still captivate you. This station, this act of hubris, was the most incredible place imaginable, and if you weren't careful it would suck you in and throw you out just like it did to all the others.
The hopper was banking right now, a small amount of spray showered our faces and the sides dug into the water. Aeniah, in her usual cavalier manner, had turned much too sharply. But she pretended as though she had not noticed. There was something quite noticeable about the Commercial District and that was that it was much hotter than the rest of Ascension, comfortable, but definitely a lot hotter.
The great sweeping towers of Ascension were coming into view now. The mist still hung above the heights of the scrapers but the blur of haze running along the surface of the district was gradually reducing.
Aeniah began to reduce the power to the thrusters. We had slowed to the pace of a crawl as we sidled down the main river. Immense structures rose to our sides. The buildings each jutted out onto the water, or else had light brick walkways running between themselves and the water. I imagined what these superb walkways would have looked like back when Ascensio
n was a reality. In imagining I thought I saw the shadows of the former shoppers, and workers, running along the streets.
Every hundred meters or so the river branched into a fork. Though we continued straight along to our destination it became clear that the streets and roads visible to our sides were not in great condition. Refuse lay scattered everywhere. Most of it was so old that it no longer contained any discernible colour. There was a thick layer of dust coating the surfaces of the stone and marble pavements. Shadows ran along the side alleys. We began to feel uncomfortable again. In a last ditch effort to conceal ourselves further Aeniah had cut out the engine and was using only moments of thrust at a time to get us to our destination.
Any conversation that we had was done in hushed whispers. We had limited our conversations to the trivial, refusing to acknowledge the dangerous situation that we had placed ourselves in. Perhaps taking the bridge would have been a better option. Perhaps we should have sent in a larger party or a smaller one, or split ourselves into groups to increase our efficiency. But none of this was spoken about, it remained fully conversed in the silence.
Our conversations had rapidly centred upon the need for food. Whilst the water around us was in plentiful supply and our suits drained additional moisture from the air, Aeniah and I had had no food for several days and it was beginning to show.
‘Look Aeniah, we need food, whether or not it is unsafe. If we don't get some soon we may not be able to even finish our journey before we pass out.’ I finished in an air of desperation.
‘Fine,’ Aeniah hissed, ‘Sean where can we get food from?’
‘On Ascension, and within much of the United World, food was not bought and exchanged, instead particle synthesis devices would produce consumable food-stuffs. Any apartment building or place of residence would have such a device. I would not advise trying to find food in the restaurants; as these establishments typically served food in the traditional sense and so their stores were perishable.’ Sean seemed to tire of his history lesson, perhaps perceiving that due to hunger we were not really in a position to care. Or more likely it was because he had heard my sighing with impatience. Whatever was the case, Sean floated higher in the air, distancing himself from us.
‘So which ones are the apartment buildings?’ I asked.
Aeniah held her hand over her wrist. I realised, and was not sure why I had not earlier, that Aeniah was not wearing an Eternis Systems suit. Or at least the device that she was holding in her hand was not part of the standard issue. After a moment or so a three dimensional holo resolved above her hand. The image it produced was of the city but from a top down perspective. She manipulated the image with her hands and the view descended into the city. The buildings rose up as the camera panned down at a reducing angle. Two blue pins dropped down from nothingness and onto the maps. The holo spun and retracted showing a green line between the buildings that we were closest to us and the building that we needed to be in. Our destination had a square of floating text above it which stated, Chorus Heights. On the next line the text read, search field: residential buildings. I estimated from what I could see of the map that we were very close. Aeniah guided the hopper left and along one of the smaller tributaries of the main river. We were still nowhere near the centre of the Commercial District. This, I assumed, was a good thing. There should be less infected in the outskirts of the city.
The building was soon visible. It was a huge, slightly curved, white stone skyscraper that ascended into a sharp apex. The nearest face of the building was concave and within this cavity stood a huge sculpture of a young lady, dress flowing, with her hands lifting themselves towards the sky. The young lady stretched upwards and almost touched the apex of the tower. The building reached into the sky and its tip seemed to be lodged among the clouds.
This face of the building lay directly in the path of the water, which curved around it on either side, in effect causing the building to become a peninsular. The young lady stood triumphantly above us now and I wondered whether she had ever managed to touch that which she reached. I loved the optimism, but hated the reality.
The Chorus Heights apartment building had a jetty situated directly ahead of us. We were approaching the confusing entrance at a very slow speed. I saw the huge shadowy silhouettes of the large liners that were berthed there. Pleasure cruisers became visible shortly afterwards, their very shapes designed to capture and entertain their covetous viewers, like sculptures of glass formed by the wind and resting amongst the deadly blues of the sea.
The prow of the hopper crossed timidly into the entrance of the oversized jetty. I wondered if it was made out of real wood. Regardless, we all felt a little out of place sitting in the obviously inexpensive hopper as we slid through a harbour of opulence. The very air seemed to ooze a moisture of red wealth. The hopper continued to make almost no noise as Aeniah selected a free berth that was suitably close to Chorus Heights and the jetty’s exit at the same time.
We moored up in almost no time. ‘Abigail, Harris, you two are to stay here with the hopper and keep it secure, I want you to make very sure that we still have the same way out that we came in. George, you're with me, I need your eyes and your fire power. Sean, I want you to try and interface with Chorus Heights' surveillance system. There should be an interface around the back of the building. I want you to retrieve all the information that you can about the rest of the Commercial District. That is if you can get in. Everybody be sure to use comms only in the case of emergencies, such as an engagement with the enemy.’ Aeniah, in her usual manner, turned to me and issued the order, ‘with me!’