There was a distinct bulge in the silver tube. When Credit Card rewound the reconstruction the bulge shot backwards towards Acturus.
Credit Card froze the image and scaled up, showing the silver weave in finer detail. He stopped when the bulge filled most of the tank.
'It's like something inside is pushing out the walls,' said Blondie.
Ming looked at Dogface who shrugged back. 'Do a cutaway,' she said.
A geometric section of the bulge vanished leaving a neat cross-section. The core was a black sphere under the silver threads.
'Something inside, pushing out the walls,' said Dogface looking at Blondie.
'What is it?' asked Blondie.
'Black signifies no available data,' said Credit Card.
'This is just a representation,' said Ming. 'You can't have a real object distorting a carrier wave like that.'
'You can't get a real object through a carrier wave at all,' said Lambada.
'It's not a real object,' said Credit Card. 'It's got to be some kind of harmonics effect within the pattern of the carrier wave itself.'
'Something came out of the Stunnel gateway,' said Blondie.
'Doesn't mean it was real,' said Credit Card. 'Not really real anyway.'
'Tell that to the President,' said Dogface.
'I've never seen this kind of effect on a carrier wave before,' said Lambada.
'No one ever initiated a tunnel over interstellar distances before,' said Credit Card. 'Who knows what kind of effect you're going to get over forty light years?'
'Distance isn't relevant,' said Lambada, 'the tunnels are trans-bloody-dimensional. All that matters is harmonizing the gravitic geometry at either end.'
'What if the physical distance created a distortion in the carrier wave and you got a gravitic anomaly?' said Credit Card.
'There's a standard function curve for calculating that,' said Lambada. 'I was with Verhoevan when he did the fine tuning, we took account of that.'
'Verhoevan is now a sticky patch of disassociated chemicals along with half the establishment,' said Dogface. 'Let's run the simulation at one-tenth speed and see what happens.'
'You want to stay with the anomaly?' asked Credit Card.
'What do you think?' said Dogface.
The simulation ran forward, the woven strands of the Stunnel carrier wave rippled over the curve of the bulge. It looked to Blondie like a bowling ball falling down a stocking leg.
'Gravitic anomaly my arse,' muttered Lambada.
'It's accelerating,' said Credit Card.
'Getting up a good head of steam,' said Dogface.
'Acturus Station coming up,' said Credit Card.
'Slow it down,' said Ming.
In slow motion the bulge hit the bell end of the Stunnel gateway. The carrier wave seemed to push the bulge out into the station but whatever caused it wasn't showing up in the real world.
'That's when the telemetry and video links went down,' said Ming. 'If you look at the way the carrier wave snaps back into place, notice the power surges running up the main cables.'
'Causing a shut-down in the subsidiary circuits,' said Credit Card. 'Whatever caused the anomaly must dissipate directly into the station.'
'No one's planning to reinitiate the Stunnel in the near future, are they?' asked Lambada.
'Not that I know of,' said Ming.
'That's a relief.'
'What's wrong with you?' Dogface asked Blondie.
'Didn't you see it?' said Blondie. 'It went out the other side of the station.' The others looked at him. They hadn't got it yet. 'It's got into the system.'
The Stop
Benny sat upright in the kitchen bed and turned the book over in her hands. Her skin felt raw against the rough linen of the nightdress. 'You've got good skin,' said the skinny girl with outsized breasts as Benny scrubbed off the remains of the blue stuff. Underneath her skin was pale almost translucent, her tan gone except where it had been covered by the remains of her jumpsuit. It looked weird in the bathroom mirror, one arm brown, the other pale and unblemished, brown legs above the knee. It looked constructed. As if Benny had been patched up with random spare parts. Zamina had lent her the nightdress and given her the book. Pale vellum bound in leather, handwriting on about half the pages.
The book was important, Benny was sure of that, but the writing while in roman script was impossible to decipher. Not a language that she knew. 'I was carrying this?' she asked Zamina.
'It was in your pocket.'
Zamina was using a wooden spoon to shovel brown stuff from a white cardboard container into a cast-iron wok. The container had a stylized picture of a cow printed on the sides. The brown stuff sizzled as it hit hot metal.
The other girl, the thin-faced one, leaned against the kitchen door. Roberta, her name was. 'We figured you were a maintenance engineer,' she said, 'but you're not, are you?'
'No, I'm a traveller,' said Benny.
Zamina pulled out a green glass bottle from the top cabinet and uncorked it. Benny caught a whiff of strong spice, garlic and coriander. 'She thought you were a catfood monster,' said Zamina as she stirred in the sauce.
'Got any money?' said Roberta.
Benny could smell it, behind the grease stink of the frying meat, behind the spice and cheap perfume. It was a patina of grime laid down over years on the surfaces of the apartment and the pinched faces of these young girls, giving their eyes a brittle brightness. A hard smell, atomized out of the walls and floors, the smell of despair and broken dreams. Benny knew it well from cheap hostels and ratty billets on hundreds of worlds, from relocation camps and shanty towns. Poor man's funk, flop sweat, the smell of poverty.
Zamina pulled another cardboard container from the cabinet. This one had an onion printed on it. Cheap food - both girls had pinprick sores at the comer of their mouths, borderline malnutrition, vitamin deficiency. Poverty was a slow way to die.
'No,' said Benny, 'but I've got skills.'
Roberta grinned. 'Know anything about moneypens?'
Circle Line
The Doctor was lighter than he looked, lighter than he should have been given his strength. Even so Kadiatu was glad when she could dump him in a seat on the next Circle Line train out of Athinai. The Doctor lolled back in the seat, opened his mouth as if to speak and then shut it again. At least he'd stopped singing.
A concession stand whirred down the central aisle selling cups of hot Turkish. 'Another damn fine cup of coffee!' was painted along its side. Kadiatu bought one with the temporary moneypen Francine had given her. It was black and sweet and helped clear her head. She looked over at the Doctor. His arms and ankles were crossed, the red-handled umbrella tucked protectively under one elbow, his hat slipped down to cover his eyes. He looked content, like a man getting his first proper rest for years. He was not what Kadiatu had expected at all.
When she was young Kadiatu had lived with her mother and father on the outskirts of Makeni in a big mud-brick bungalow. Her parents had kept some altered goats and chickens in the compound to supplement their service pensions. Most of the time father would sit out on the verandah, thinking and watching the world go by. People would pass by on their way to the river, sometimes they'd stop for a gossip or to trade. Sometimes other people would come, walking up the dusty track from the station, men and women with lined faces and haunted eyes. Often they would stay up all night talking to father - conversations full of pain and longing. One day Francine came, landing her VTOL right in the middle of the road, bringing the children running out of school.
In the rainy season when the rain rattled off the corrugated iron roof Kadiatu would sit with her father and listen to his stories. Many of them were about the first grandfather and his adventures with the Shirl, back in the old days when the family lived on an island in the north. The Shirl was like Mr Spider, facing danger with guile and cunning always outsmarting his enemies. When Kadiatu grew up she wanted to be like the Shirl but her father said no, only the Shirl was like the S
hirl.
So Kadiatu grew up with stories about the metal giants, the wicked machines and the spiders that could think. Later in the vast history archive under Stone Mountain, by the Cayley plains on Lunar, she learnt that every last story' was true. In themne the language of her parents, Shirl was the word for medicine man, for magician, for doctor.
There was a disturbance at the end of the carriage. A man was shouting something in a hoarse voice. A wave of unease swept down the length of the train. 'What's happening?' called a woman opposite Kadiatu. A man lurched to his feet and started down the aisle towards them, naked distress on his face. 'They've killed the President,' he said, 'somebody blew up the President' The Doctor muttered something in his sleep.
3: Bad Acid Macho
Pluto Ninety-Five
It was infinity that did it for Mariko, watching that insane vanishing point explode as they hit another station. Crouching low to minimise air resistance as the board skated down the friction field. Naran hooting behind her, one arm wrapped around her waist, the other keeping the noisebox on his shoulder as they rushed towards the gateway. Then winding up through the rhythm of the music, letting the beat be her ladder as they hit the gateway. The transition blast blew her brains out her ears. Nothing else, not sex, not wacca, could get close to that.
They picked up the tail on the other side of Van Der Voek Station, a dusty no-place where a low-cost housing project had been abandoned. Naran banged her on the shoulder and she looked round. Behind them a black wedge of shadow eclipsed the vanishing point. It didn't look solid enough to be a train; besides, no one ran trains on the P-95 and a board was faster in the abstract nonsense that passed for velocity in a tunnel. The shadow was gaining on them, or at least it was getting larger.
Mariko downloaded a traffic update as they coasted through the next station. She scaled up through a mantra to get into the next gateway and flipped down her visor for a look. An implant would have been better, but subdermal accessories were passe, far too common amongst artisans and the great unwashed. Getting one would be a sign of commitment though. Perhaps a modified optic with a discreet little plug under the hairline. Something she could accidentally reveal at parties, that would cause a stir, might even start a trend. The traffic update showed nothing on this stretch of the P-95 but that didn't surprise Mariko; you needed a transponder to be marked and she didn't think the shadow behind her had one.
Distance was impossible to judge in a tunnel but Mariko was sure that the shadow was gaming on them. She knew that some of the classier security firms like Ninja Mechanixs had trained free surfers, there were also rumours that the military had souped-up machines. Trains that could outpace anything in the system, with exclusion shielding so that if you and it emerged at the same time, it would be there and you'd be paintwork.
Mariko risked another look. Free boarding relies on absolute self-control and already she could feel herself drifting off line, losing the complicated harmonics of the music.
The shadow was almost upon them. Deep in its core Mariko thought she saw two red lights like staring eyes. It was time, she decided, to get real.
As they came out of the next gateway Mariko shifted her weight to the left and bore down hard. Naran followed her lead and the board swerved across the friction field. They dismounted before it hit the platform barrier and flipped. Mariko caught it on the second turn.
'Where are we?' asked Naran.
Mariko looked around. It was another ghost station. Minimal life support kept the temperature just above freezing; their breaths steamed in the cold air. On one of the walls an unfinished STS sign had the station name on the centre plate.
'Buchanan Station,' read Mariko.
'Any connections?'
'No.'
'What now then?'
A breeze rushed through the station, stirring the dust.
'We get off the platform,' said Mariko.
As they ran for the exit the breeze grew into a great rush of air. Clouds of dust whipped and spiralled around them as they dived through the archway into the short connecting corridors between the platforms.
'That's no train,' wailed Naran.
Mariko grabbed Naran's jacket and roughly pushed him ahead of her. Looking back she saw it come into the station The gateway was spiked open by a cone of blackness, two red lights planted either side of the needle-sharp nose. It reminded Mariko of something created on a kid's graphic program, a rough representation of a train made up of basic 3D shapes - a cylinder tipped by two cones. It looked hypothetical, imagined rather than engineered, with no surface detail on its glossy black skin. When it stopped Mariko noticed that its base was half a metre above the friction field.
Vertical lines of bright yellow light appeared at regular intervals along the cylinder body, where the doors would be on a real train. Then with a hiss they split open.
'Run,' screamed Mariko.
There was an access ramp at right angles to the corridor leading up into the unfinished heart of the station. Mariko dropped the board as they went scrambling up the slope; it clattered on to the concrete before sliding down to the level ground. The ramp went up for another twelve metres before levelling off into a corridor vanishing into darkness.
Naran hit the dead end first, Mariko heard a thump and then a groan. She found him lying on his back clutching his nose. The corridor terminated in a wall of solid rock. Mariko felt it with her hands. There were long grooves etched horizontally across its face. Mariko guessed that they'd been made by the laser-tunneller before it was turned off.
Naran sat up. 'What now?' he asked.
'Did you see any turn-offs?'
'No,' said Naran. 'I think I've broken my nose.'
'Then we wait here until it goes away.'
'Did you see it?'
'Yes.'
'What was it?'
Mariko looked down the corridor. The down ramp at the end was a rectangle of muted light.
'A ghost train.'
Naran snorted and started his nose bleeding again. 'Assuming it does go,' he said, 'how do we get out of here?'
'There's bound to be a communications relay point on the station somewhere, we patch into that and call for help.'
There was a noise from the platforms below.
'What was that?' asked Naran.
'Shut up, Naran.'
They heard a muttering and then a harsh metallic squeal.
'That's feedback,' said Naran. 'Someone's using the PA.'
The squeal tailed off, there was a noise like someone coughing down an amplifier.
'My fellow citizens.' The voice echoed up the ramp.
Naran's face had gone blank with fear.
'The station of the nation is the question.'
'It's the President,' said Naran.
'Ask not what your nation can do for you,' boomed the voice, 'but rather what can you do for your nation.'
Light exploded up the ramp and came boiling down the corridor towards them. Mariko saw her board caught up in the wave of light, whirling towards them like a leaf in a storm. Naran was screaming as the light picked them up and transfixed them to the wall. The board banged into the space between them and stuck upright. It was hard to see in the intensity, but through slitted eyes Mariko made out the silhouetted figure of a man coming towards them. He came on at a brisk pace, walking with an assured authority that was somehow horribly familiar. There was something wrong about the man's lower face; it bulged outwards as if his mouth had been stuffed with a dinner plate.
The man stopped directly in front of Naran and Mariko and put his hands on his hips. Then he leaned forward, face thrust ahead to inspect them. There was enough light reflected from the dull surface of the wall for Mariko to see his face. It really was the President, only someone seemed to have shoved a loudspeaker down the famous bull neck. The famous green eyes peered over the distorted rim of his lips at Mariko and Naran. There was a click from deep inside the speaker and then an electrical hum.
'Attention!'
The volume made Mariko's teeth rattle.
'All of those unwilling to volunteer for transmogrification - take one step backwards.'
Mariko squirmed against the unyielding concrete of the wall.
'Excellent,' said the President, 'that's what I like to see.' He stretched out both hands and plunged them into their chests Mariko looked down and saw his index finger sinking into the flesh between her breasts as if it were putty. She felt the knuckle scrape against a rib as it was pushed in.
I feel no pain, Mariko said to herself, I must be in shock She said it again and again, a mantra against madness as she felt the fingers scrabbling about like rats in her chest cavity She saw the President set his shoulders and push.
Then there was pain.
Lunarversity
The Doctor dreamt of Ace running under the brilliant blue sky of Heaven. In his dream her eyes were the colour of amber, slotted like a cheetah's, and her hair flew behind her like a mane. Not a cat, thought the Doctor and the words rang in his dream ears, never that self-absorbed. You were always a wolf to me, proud and headstrong, tireless and loyal. Out on the open plain Ace threw back her head and howled. The sound floated over the ranked graves of the planet, full of pain and betrayal.
He woke up with a blinding headache.
His sensory impressions were garbled by the pain. He was under something soft and heavy. There was someone sleeping next to him, there was a sensation of a confined space, perhaps a small room and his nose was cold. He tried opening his eyes, shadows, blurred images on the ceiling above, more pain. He closed his eyes again.
His mouth tasted of aniseed.
He'd been drinking which was unusual. He'd had a taste for wine once, at least wine of a good vintage; then a taste for beer; then he seemed to remember giving it up in favour of cricket.
The Doctor elevated his primary heart rate and managed to crank up his kidney action a bit. It wasn't easy; kidneys were not something he'd had a lot of practice with. That took care of the toxins in his blood but he suspected there were still some ethanol molecules cruising round his cerebellum and distracting his neurons. Complex little hydrocarbons wearing black bomber jackets and slinging cans of high-explosive deodorant at his defenceless braincells.