Ares Express (14 page)

“What it is, Ms. Engineer, is, I intend to fight a war against the angels.”

Sweetness stopped dead.

“You what?”

Devastation Harx turned to face her. He rested his hands on the ferule of his cane. Sweetness noticed that Serpio was now standing behind him.
Airship, mad-lands, big desert, three kilometres straight down
, she thought.
How can I make these into an escape plan that doesn't involve me falling to my death?

“I thought I'd made myself quite clear. I intend to engage these angels—who, as you observed, are nothing of the sort—in battle. And I intend to defeat them.”

Sweetness laughed. It was louder than she had intended, and nastier.

“Let me get this straight. There's about two hundred and fifty thousand angels up there? Like so many they make a ring round the world? That's not to mention all the ones that got left behind down here. They've got big sky mirrors and lasers and particle beams and superconducting magnets and probably loads of other stuff I can't even think of. They keep the weather going. They keep the UV from frying us like
nimki
. They keep the air in. They throw comets around. They go Bedzo and the world disappears. And
you go up against these people with an inflatable bouncy church, a mail-order department, a couple of hundred abacuses and a pile of dysfunctional cyclists in purple, and you win?”

“Yes,” Devastation Harx said in that tone of you-know-nothing-
really
-nothing adults know infuriates teenagers.

“I want a parachute, now.”

“Ms. Engineer…”

“No, you wait.” She turned to Serpio. “This was not part of the deal. The deal was we both run away from what we hate and we go and get a good life somewhere and maybe we end up together or maybe we don't but whatever, it absolutely did not say I get hijacked by some mail-order messiah in a flying mushroom and end up crisped by partacs. You know something? I think I made a mistake with you, Serpio. I think…I think you arranged all this.” The realisation was marvellous and liberating. There is a strong joy, Sweetness discovered, in understanding your own utter gullibility. “You did! You bastard! You had this all planned. You took one look at me—at us—and it all fitted into some big master plan and you called up Harx-boy here and he said, bring her on. I cannot believe I ever even thought about sleeping with you. And I did. A bit. Not now. You're not a good person. Go and put your purple on, freak-eye.”

While they were just thoughts, Sweetness had known her last two words were unforgivable. Two fingers poked clean and hard in the cataract. But she said them anyway, and whatever had begun at Great Oxus, they ended. From here on she was on her own. For a moment she thought Serpio might hit her. Devastation Harx, too, read the balled aggression in shoulders and neck and fists.

“I think it'd be better if you left us for a while,” he said. “We'll meet up with you when Ms. Engineer is in sweeter humour.”

Face twisting as it does when you are hurt badly enough to cry but damned if you will in public, Serpio turned and walked with over-deliberate casualness down the curving corridor. He stopped once, to call back.

“So you thought about sleeping with me, then?”

“Like I said, it's all one big chapter of bad mistakes.” They just kept coming out of her mouth, badder and badder and badder.

“Well, I didn't. And I'll tell you this, I wouldn't if you were the last woman in the world.”

“You would say that!” Sweetness sent her final dart cannoning round the corridor walls after him. She did not see if it struck. Her and Harx now. That was always the way he intended to play it, she realised. Play it, and me. She said, feistily, “So, how do you achieve this prodigy?”

“With the help of your invisible friend,” Devastation Harx said. “Who, as you've probably guessed, is considerably more powerful than you thought, and definitely not your Siamese twin sister. I think it's time you got to see what she's really like. This way.”

A section of ash pivoted under his palm. Sweetness stepped through the wall after Devastation Harx, and into her selves. Dozens of Sweetnesses. A multiplicity of Sweetnesses. A plethora, a myriad, a host, a horde, an infinite regress of Sweetnesses.

“Woo,” she said, immersed in mirrors.

“I did say there was a great spirituality in reflections,” fifty Devastation Harxes said at once.

For the first few minutes Sweetness took the rare opportunity to study herself from every aspect. She frowned at her eyebrows. She tugged critically at her hair. She rolled her shoulders to try to make better of her boobs. She tightened, relaxed, tightened, relaxed her ass-cheeks and seemed pleased at the result. She looked down at her foreshortened self in the floor mirrors and grinned. She waved to her selves. She made faces. She struck attitudes. She led a dozen Sweetnesses in a step-perfect dance. Then she remembered she was supposed to be feeling angry about Serpio the Bastard, and asked, “Where's the way out?”

“It's around somewhere,” Devastation Harx's voice said behind her. She spun. All she caught of him were twenty left sleeves, hands and sticks vanishing kaleidoscopically into the corners where mirrors met.

“Hey!”

“I seem to be over here.” Far off among the reflections of Sweetnesses and the reflections of mirrors, a Devastation Harx homunculus waved.

“You wait for me, right?” Sweetness ran toward the distant image. The mirrors were nested chamber within chamber. Sweetness pounded between the pivoting mirrors. Thousands of other selves fled on every side. Panels opened and closed, slid apart, slid to behind her, but always Devastation Harx
was a tiny, beckoning figure in the mirror within the next mirror within the next. She pursued, he fled without moving. A voice called her name. Her voice. She stopped dead. The walls rearranged themselves around her.

“Who?” she asked. One of her reflections did not move its lips. Sweetness went up to it. It remained motionless among the shifting selves.

“What are you doing here?”

“It's mirrors, isn't it?”

Sweetness frowned, studied the apparition.

“What happened to the rules? Rules are, you're supposed to wear…”

“What were you wearing yesterday, fashion victim? Sweetness, listen, this is not…”

“Ms. Engineer…”

The unfamiliar distracted her. Devastation Harx suddenly stood at her elbow. He turned on his side, became one dimensional, vanished into a line of silvering as a mirror panel pivoted away from her. Sweetness saw reflections of the dark, elegant man flick mirror to mirror to mirror into the infinite regress of the maze. She turned back to her familiar.

“Ell Pee.”

All the Sweetness Asiim Engineers moved their lips in perfect synch.

“Don't mess me around.”

I'm not
, said a voice behind her. Sweetness whirled.

“Where are you?”

She was alone with her seeming selves. She moved slowly. Her images moved with her. Mirror panels swung, opening brief gateways into deeper illusion.

Raise your left arm
, Little Pretty One whispered. A hundred Sweetnesses said aye. One did not. As Sweetness moved toward her twin, the panel slowly turned Little Pretty One away from her.

“No!” she shouted. It was then that she discovered that the mirrors reflected sound as well as light. Her yell focused back on her from a hundred reflecting surfaces, amplified and distorted and phase shifted so that waves of roar broke over her, sent her cowering, like the rare times when the ionospheric interceptors stooped low to practise terrain-kissing manoeuvres over the empty quarters of the pole.

As Little Pretty One turned away from her, Devastation Harx turned toward her.

“Okay. I'm not finding this funny. So, this is what happens. You stop messing around with Little Pretty One, then you get me out of here.”

“Hm,” Devastation Harx mused. “Part two, absolutely. Soon as I possibly can; frankly, my dear, you're a trying guest. No manners, at all. Part one, well, I'm afraid not. I need your alleged twin.”

Sweetness
, came softly bouncing from several directions at once, like an experiment in quantum optics. This time Sweetness was not distracted. She punched out, straight left, hard, right between the eyes. Devastation Harx's head exploded. Sweetness cried out. The mirror disintegrated into a thousand shards of herself. They fell in a tinkling crash. Blood counted down Sweetness's bunched knuckles and dropped to the floor. She sucked her fluids, tasted brass and sweetness.

“And no respect for the property, either,” Devastation Harx chided, from deep within the mirror maze.

“Where are you?” Sweetness yelled.

Here
, said a still small voice in the head. Sweetness closed her eyes, turned around until the voice seemed to speak squarely to her.

“What's going on?” she whispered.

“Help me,” Little Pretty One said. “He's trying to draw me out of you, lose me among the mirrors.”

“What? Who? Harx? Why?”

“I guess you could say, I'm not exactly who you think.”

“He said…”

“Look, are we going to argue this, or are you going to try to find me?”

“I can't even find myself, never mind you.”

Sweetness opened her eyes. She confronted herself, multiplied. A thousand Sweetnesses waltzed and turned in the maze of mirrors. She gave a hiss of exasperation, fingers knotted in her hair.

“Mother'a'mercy!”

She noticed her shirt cuffs. A shrug; the desert-dusty, sweat-ringed shirt was slipped off. Two sharp tugs tore off the sleeves. One she wrapped around her bleeding knuckles. Nine hundred and ninety-nine bare-armed bloody
Sweetnesses stared at each other. At the very left corner of the very rear rank, one stood with buttoned cuffs, finger-perfect.

“I see ya!” Bare arms raised, Sweetness bulled her way through mobs of illusions. She seized the edges of mirrors and wrestled döppelgangers aside. She crashed headlong through phalanxes of images. Always, she kept the Sweetness in yesterday's clothes square before her. Mirror by mirror, it receded, but Sweetness was faster and surer.

“Sweetness.” Among the chorus of dissimulations, Little Pretty One was like the single blue thread in a beige prayer shawl. “I've something to tell you.” Closer now, only the mirror beyond the next mirror beyond the next mirror. “I'm not your sister.” Catching up. She was catching up. “I'm not really from this world at all, well, actually, I am, but that's kind of complicated.” Sweetness charged into a decagonal chamber of mirrors. Whisper of aluminium on glass: she turned, a mirror slid across the entrance. Each mirror held the image of Little Pretty One.

“So who the hell are you, then?” Sweetness gasped. Sweat beaded juicily down her ribs. The ten Little Pretty Ones looked back at her.

“I'm Catherine of Tharsis,” they said.

“She's absolutely right, you know,” Devastation Harx said from behind her as Sweetness panted and stared, senseless with confusion.

Sweetness turned to the sound of the voice. Devastation Harx stood resting a languid hand on the top of a mirror. He twisted it toward him. The nine remaining Little Pretty Ones vanished.

“It was this one.” He unhooked a clasp. The mirror rolled up like a flapping cartoon comedy blind. Sweetness had one glimpse of Little Pretty One's mouth and eyes, open in shock, then the flying preacher squeezed the scroll of mirror into a stubby tube, screwed it into a verdigrised metal canopic jar and screwed on a top like a winged helmet. “I may not command angels, but I do command the one who commands the angels. I think that makes it a fair fight.”

She dived for him. Her clawed fingers raked through Devastation Harx like a hunting merlin sliding down the air. She hit the glass floor hard. Winded. Sweetness rolled on her back. Devastation Harx was a tiny figure silhouetted against the glowing rectangle of a daylit door. Sun glinted from his silver froggings. He pointed the copper jar at Sweetness.

“Did anyone ever tell you, Ms. Engineer, not to trust too much to appearances? Well, I have what I need, and you, I'm afraid, are quite surplus to requirements.” He took an object like a large pear with a clockwork key in the top from inside his frock coat. “Goodbye, Ms. Engineer.” He turned the big brass key. Sweetness felt the floor shift beneath her. She scrabbled for fingerholds but the glass sheets of the mirror maze floor were fitted with molecular precision. She was slipping, sliding. Sweetness snatched at mirror frames but the floor was now past thirty degrees and gravity was drawing her ever faster downward. A slit of light appeared beneath her feet, a line of white that widened into a slot of red, then opened on to a cinema screen of red desert. With a wail, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th was spat from the hatch that had opened in the belly of Devastation Harx's flying cathedral like a gobbet of drool from Grandfather Bedzo's mouth. She arced gracefully through the air.
I'm flying
, she thought, and then,
stupid stupid stupid, birds fly, girls fall, I'm not flying, I'm falling. Out of the bottom of a big airship that, the last time you looked, was way up high over red rocks. This is it, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th. This is absolutely the last…
The ground emphatically interrupted her reverie. The thud might have convinced her she was dead; the pain told her she was not. She rolled on to her back, looked up and saw the belly hatch close, three metres above her. The whole bulk of Devastation Harx's mobile empire hovered above her, as if it had somehow, most surprisingly, grown out of her navel. Sweetness blinked, pained, stunned, dazed to find herself still alive. Dust milled up around her. Sudden wind tugged at her dreads. Propellers clanged down into vertical orientation. In their translucent teats, purple people wearing skin-hugging shorts leaned to their handlebars. Grit whipped Sweetness's face. The cathedral ascended away from her, like a dream lifting from you in the morning light. It turned to the southwest. Rotors swivelled to horizontal flight. Still climbing, Devastation Harx took his leave.