Ares Express (31 page)

Grandmother Taal fumed inwardly at this sullen brattishness. If they had been trainpeople, little Engineers, even good-for-nothing Bassareenis, she would have had their very lugs…Not even her dear, wayward granddaughter, whom she permitted liberties allowed to no others aboard
Catherine of Tharsis
, would have behaved like that in the face of adversity. She found she was clenching her fists, sucking in her lower lip and chewing it, frowning hard enough to spark a tic of headache from her pineal gland. Too much. Like a superheated boiler venting, her patience blew in a great calliope whistle.

“United Artists, you call yourselves? I've seen more unity in a truckload of Cathrinist pelerines. Professionals: I will tell you professional; professional is, even when your son has not spoken to his wife for four years, the lading bills are made up, the contracts are docketed and sealed, the trucks end in the right yards and always, always, the train leaves on time. Three whistles, and you are left behind. You would all be walking, if you were trainfolk. You think you are so clever, so funny, that you are the hope of the world. My granddaughter is funnier than you when she is not even trying, and I have more hope in her than I have in you. Heroes! Bah. I break wind at you. If you are all that stands between my daughter and rescue, if you are our last best
hope for bringing down Devastation Harx and his machinations, then dress me in purple and call me catamite. I squat and ease on you all.”

After a long, cool pause, Weill drawled, “Hey, lady, dying is easy, comedy is hard.”

Bladnoch, who of all had seemed most ashamed at Taal's frustrated outburst, suddenly propped himself up on his forearm, squinted through the near-opaque window glass into the darkness.

“Many a true word, Weill,” he said, and no one could mishear the tone of fear in his low, soft voice. “Lights, down.”

The golden glow ebbed from the leatherette carriage.

“What is it?” Skerry demanded, rushing to the window.

“I rather think we're going to have to wing this one,” Bladnoch said, as the dark Banninger night was shockingly lit by beams of lilac light.

a
rms and legs wrapped around cables, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th sailed beneath the brilliant stars of the moonring. Shortly after full night a thermal from off the Banninger Escarpment had lifted the flying cathedral into higher, chillier air. The thrill of the view had faded with the light; within minutes Sweetness was noticing her teeth chattering, her breath steaming, her limbs shivering. She could not feel the rope under her fingers. Soon, the cold numb would spread to fingers. Shortly after that, she would lose her grip and fall, like a flash-frozen bird caught in an updraft. Numb limbs dissenting, she hauled herself up, step by step, toward the canopy. She had noticed early that this was a ladder to nowhere, an emergency egress shaken loose by the Dust Brothers' bombing. The escape hatch above it remained sternly dogged. But there might be another way in, a vent, a shelter among the heat-exchange vanes, some warm spot to which she could cling and curl for this night which she knew was going to be one of the longest in her life. There were inspection gantries over there, cables and pipeworks. If she could make her way along them to one of the blast holes, she could work her way inside. Industrial grade if. She already hurt like the devil's nipple clamps. By morning? No option, you hurt, Glorious Honey-Bun. And she was tired and wet through and thirsty and those foil-packet trail dinners wouldn't fill a hole in your tooth. Go on, then. Take that big scream. Or quit moaning and come
on
. You expect an adventure to be easy? Hand over hand over hand will do it. Hand over hand over hand.

Hand over hand over hand, she made it to the escape hatch. Teeth gritted with effort, she beat at it with a fist, pulled off a boot and whacked at the hatch dog.

“Let me in! Mother'a'mercy, there's a girl out here!”

If she could scarcely hear herself over the whirr of propellers and the
moan of the high wind in the cathedral's gingerbread, what chance a passing purple person? Surely someone in the cycle pods must have noticed there was a girl hanging from a rope ladder? She hauled herself around on the ladder. The nearest pod hung like an overripe fig from a single strut, abandoned, its gear-trains and drive chains gnashes of oily teeth. The only other she could even glimpse was three quarters occluded by a rudder array, and that part she could see was awash with ballast water. Twenty metres to her starboard was a thermal dump stack. She could feel the warmth from the fans gently wash her face. Twenty metres. Twenty light-years. If she could just get to those u-bars. She started to swing the ladder. It let out a hitherto unsuspected ominous creak. She glanced. In her mad leap for rescue, she had failed to notice that one of the ropes had been cut half-through by shrapnel.

Real Big Adventure Stuff. Get that pendulum swinging…

Her first reach missed by a fingernail. She ignored the sound of stretching, snapping cord fibres and threw her whole weight into the next swing. She reached; her finger locked around the hand-hold. She let go the ladder. Her momentum almost tore her free.

Trust that trainfolk upper body strength…

Her right hand seized the next rung. Sweetness hung, crucified, a kilometre and gaining above the yellow-windowed manses of Banninger Canton's geometric farms.

Easy. Peasy. Wee buns.

Thirty monkey-walks brought her to the heat-dump fans, amongst which she nestled, ripping loose communications cables and wrapping them around her waist, thighs and wrists. A survey of her situation told her this was as far as Sweetness Asiim Engineer was going under this air-borne basilica. She tightened her cocoon and tried to shake water out of her hair. Warmer now, warm enough to drive off the now wracking shivers and dry out her clothes, warm enough for her brain to be alerted to another peril.

The airship was ascending slowly but steadily, and without any indication of reaching its ceiling. Long before anoxia shrivelled her brain in her skull like a pickled pig testicle, it would have loosened her grip, blurred her sense, made her altitude drunk enough to make that big step look not just appealing, but necessary. Already she was feeling cosy-dozy, comforted by
memories of hiding from parental wrath among warm, cranny-laden machinery. She slung extra loops of cable around her shoulder, knotted them and tried to keep herself awake.

Shock
. Where what who? The sky…the stars…it hurts. Oh my God. Her slim snake hips had slipped through their cinch, the loop of cable had locked under her small but perfectly pert breasts. Her feet kicked at two kilometres of empty space.
Thanks, tits.
But as she wiggled the noose down over her pelvis, she became aware that here was a second way to die. Hanging would do it every bit as well as falling.

Stay awake
! she berated herself.
Look at the world: You ain't ever seen it from this angle before.

She had to admit she had a grandstand seat on night across the earth. From this height she could appreciate the roundness of the world: a little last perfect blue clung to the eastern horizon; Sweetness calculated that the cathedral was headed southwest. Morningwards. The teeming cantons of Grand Valley lay that way, sunning themselves under the ancient lights of World-roof. The ship would need repair. The great vertical engineering cities that clung to the piers as Sweetness clung to heat had once assembled Sailships and starcrossers. A gas-filled bag of faith was little to them. That lay in the future. This gently sloping scarp country over which she flew was not without interest. Sweetness reckoned she could see two hundred kilometres in every direction: to the west and south towns and cities clung silvery on the horizon like patches of glowing moth-dust, flowing into each other with filigree tendrils of powder-soft lights. From a hundred kilometres out to immediately beneath Sweetness's feet scattered dots of farmsteads clustered around the agglomerations of the rural towns which in turn gathered around the larger market centres. Sweetness tried to draw patterns on them, terrestrial constellations, and with a sudden revelation, saw it whole: hexagons upon hexagons upon hexagons, from steading to city. Her sudden insight into human geometry stunned her for whole minutes, then she caught two long glints of silver moonslight streaking straight across the dark land. A railroad. She leaned forward in her harness. There! Tiny and wan as a lonely firefly, a scattering of sparks tore across the night. A train!

Perhaps her train.

The unbidden thought was like a flash-freezing of the spleen.

My train. My people. I could wave and cheer and shout. I could send down flares, I could throw lightning, I could explode whole stars and they still wouldn't know it was me. They wouldn't even look up from the track and drive levers. Do they even think about me?

Taal did. Great Taal, mother of grandmothers. Taal would have heard her, noticed her, received her message. But Taal was in Molesworth and she was up here on the way to Grand Valley with no way of telling a soul living or astral.

Sweetness watched the train out of sight among the other scintilla of the scarp land, then settled back in her harness and did not look at the ground again.

This time, she caught herself just as she was dropping off with a convulsive judder.

Dropping off!

She decided she would look at the stars. There was nothing to make her feel track-sick in those original patterns of light in the darkness. On the long night runs she had learned the names of the major constellations from her mother, but most of the night sky was just lights to her, patternless and magical. Sweetness knew the Cup, and the Dogs, and the Hunting Cat, but the nomenclature seemed tenuous and arbitrary. The Cup could as easily be the Diaphragm; the Hunting Cat, the Bouquet of Oddly Shaped Lilies. Who had these men been, whose particular visions became imprinted on the night sky? Sweetness amused herself down toward midnight by drawing up new constellations and naming them. That wasp-waisted configuration could be the Hornet, or, if you extended it to those three bright stars up there, the Nasty Vase. Just beneath it lay the Angular Banjo, to the left of it, hovering on the dawnward horizon, the Banyan. That band of silver; fainter, softer, broader than the moonring, was the Great Southern Railroad, that tight collection of eleven stars the Sunshine Express. Just visible under the rim of the canopy, the Really Little Church, at eleven o'clock to it, Snortus the Hog. Rolling along the upper rim of the moonring, the Hoop and Stick, behind it, in zodiacal procession, the Typewriter, the Star-Goat, Zelda the Cheap Woman, the Yawning Man, the Open Newspaper; the Five Tickets, the Pram, the Safety Pin, the Letter B, the Big Slipper, the Wishbone.

As she was about to set to work naming the southern constellations, a star fell out of the Letter B, transforming it into a P. It burned brief and bright to the east, a streak of swift fading silver light. While it ebbed from her eyeballs, three more plummeted out of moonring in close formation. They kindled and burned on the southern horizon. Then all three legs of Marco the Three-Legged Pig came off and blazed across the night like a firework display.

While Sweetness gaped, half-wondering if the Powers and Dominions had taken offence at her renaming them, the moonring blazed lilac. The band around the world was a loom of lasers: beams flickered and duelled, parried, stabbed, cut. Sweetness cried out in astonishment as the sky burned, almost let slip her hold on the heat-exchanger. Stars burst, bright enough to light the land beneath like day. Others hurtled on mad trajectories across the orbital marches to die in searing light, slashed apart by scythes of lilac light. Fleets and squadrons moved in from the outer constellations toward the edge of the affray: crimson struck back at lilac. A hundred novas burned on Sweetness's retinas. Stars fell from heaven by the legion, scoring the sky as if fingernails had left love-scratches in the bowl of night to the
ur
-light beyond. By the lights of any and every of her world's plethora of religions, this was the big one. God the Panarchic, the Ekaterina Angelography, the Seven Sanctas, the Thrones and Dominions, the Orders Lofty and Lesser together with the Rider on the Many-Headed Beast had come out slugging. From the point of view of a runaway traingirl lashed to the bottom of a limping airship-basilica somewhere over central Canton Banninger, God looked on the ropes.

We're in big trouble
, Sweetness thought, face lit by the heat-death of falling angels.
What's happening, why, who's doing it?
The questions answered themselves the instant she shaped them.
That man, up there, just a fistful of metres above your head
. But was this the big one, the Angels and Devastation Harx, duking it out,
mano a mano
, or was he merely testing the limits of his powers?

Crimson strove against the lilac. Beam by beam, duel by duel, angel by angel, crimson was failing. Sweetness's carefully constructed constellations were unravelling as reinforcements were de-mothballed from centuries of cyber-sleep, powered up their altitude jets and rolled into attack orbits. Waves of crimson and lilac crashed against each other, surged back and forth
across the moonring like the rather cheap rippling sand tank sculpture Uncle Mort had got, together with a dose, from that maintenance woman in Llangonedd Junction, and was meant to be relaxing but made Sweetness feel bilious. Stars fell like sparks from a wheel foundry, scattered across the nightside of the planet. It was an oddly soothing sight, war in heaven, until Sweetness realised the only reason she was not free-floating atoms in a cloud of superheated helium was because of the very weapon Devastation Harx was using to gain access to the battle systems.

He cuts down angels like grass in the city park, and you're going against him with nothing more than a stick of sunblock, the bottom of a tube of glue, two thirds of a posh frock and a half-eaten romantic novel?

He who fights the tiger has no eye for the mosquito on his neck, she reminded herself, which was like something Cadmon, or, for that matter, Uncle Neon, might have said.

Yeah, until the mosquito bites.

High in the planetary approaches, inconceivable forces marched and countermarched, outflanked and ambushed, attacked and were thrown back. The Banninger sky still burned with the corpses of angels, but the lilac assault had been halted. The western horizon was lit by hundreds of puff-ball novas, sparkling like corroboree whizz-bangs: Harx's orbital partacs, Sweetness guessed. The picket of lilac beams faltered, then failed. Crimson rushed through in ten, twenty, fifty places, invading like cancer. The lilac rallied but Devastation Harx's intervention was at an end. The lilac was forced back on itself, inward, like a black hole collapsing under its own weight. Like an imploding star, it was merely overture to explosion. A single starburst, brilliant as the sun, lit the night hemisphere. Sweetness blinked afterimages out of her eyes as the nova turned the sky white, then faded. Something big had gone up, up there. A stardock, a Skywheel transfer station; maybe an orhab. There were people on those big cylinders. No legs and four arms and way too long and snooty people because they disdained coming down to earth, but still people. They probably never even knew they were dying.