Ares Express (48 page)

“Why don't you just tell me how?”

“You're the heroine, you're supposed to work it out for yourself. All the clues are there.”

“How about a starter?”

Little Pretty One pondered this gracefully for a moment, finger to lips.

“Okay. What's outside?”

“Bit of rail, lot of dead grass, couple of dead birds, lot of red dirt red rock red sky red hills red clouds…”

Sweetness stopped, mid-litany, kicked in the diaphragm by fierce understanding. She flung open the cubby door, slamming Little Pretty One against the wall, burned precious oxygen hurtling along the corridors and up the steel staircases to the starboard track-observation oriole. The howling cold of the great red desert was starting to penetrate the turret, making her fingers thick and stupid as she fumbled with the opticon.

“Come on, come on.”

She swept the objective across the featureless terrain, left, right, in, out.

There.

“Oh yes!” She punched the air.

Far off across the redscape, foot wreathed in carbon dioxide mists, the sole vertical in all this monstrous horizontality, was the lone steel pole of a signal light.

 

Skerry and Mishcondereya stared.

“Did you see what he just did?” Skerry asked.

“I can show you the replay on video if you want,” Mishcondereya said. “I think that kind of proves we lost that one.”

“What happens next?”

“I'll tell you what happens next,” Mishcondereya said, directing Skerry's attention to Harx's predatory, hovering cathedral as it slowly turned on its central axis toward them. She pulled back on the altitude stick, simultaneously floored the drive stirrups. The air yacht bucked like a rodeo llama, shot straight up at forty-five degrees at an acceleration that pressed Skerry deep into her seat upholstery. Mishcondereya commed up Bladnoch, who had taken aboard the rest of United Artists and was waiting with them ten kays up valley in UA2.

“UA2, UA2, execute Plan Curtain Down, repeat, Plan Curtain Down. Harx has control of reality-shaping weapons. Get the hell as far away as fast as you can.” Mishcondereya banked fiercely, levelled off just under Worldroof, opened the fans as far as they would go. “Tell you something. I can't wait to read the reviews in the morning.”

 

As she trudged across the frosty dead regolith in her five layers of underwear and radiation-proof suit, Sweetness amused herself by trying to fit all this into being a story. That she still was, was patently evident. You didn't volunteer to go out the emergency anti-radiation lock wrapped up in borrowed socks, T-shirts and a double layer of baking foil if the laws of narrative weren't still playing a prominent role in your life. Obviously, she was beyond the False Denouement-Microanticlimax, but was it the Third Act Last-Minute Reversal of Fortunes, or was this ultimate Point of No Return, where things get as bad as they possibly can, and then everything rolls over into the Final Scene?

Out here, in this isolating, airless, dizzyingly featureless place, where all you could hear was the sound of your own breathing and the tap of the (strictly rationed) respirator, the expression Point of No Return carried too much additional significance.

What on earth had made people look at this place and think, yeah, we could turn that into a nice habitable little planet?

God, but her feet were cold. And her hands. She flapped her arms, trying to beat heat into them. The suit might be thermal foil, but all it seemed to do was reflect the little external heat from the tiny, wan sun.

Was that really the same sun?

Still less than halfway to the gantry. Her family had thought her head blasted by the interworld transition, like Grandfather Bedzo, but they had no better explanation for the incontrovertible existence of a Transpolaris Traction signal light out in the desert.

Sweetness paused to haul up her arms, hoick up her crotch. The radiation-proof suit was also gas-tight, but it came only in sizes large and extra-large, and she was terrified of tripping over a fold of foil that had drooped around her ankles, ripping the fabric on one of those nasty wind-sharpened stones and dying alone out here in the cold with blood coming out of her ears and eyes.

The one good thing about the Point of No Return, she decided, was that anything after it was an anticlimax, so things could not get any worse than this and they would all be home and happy soon.

Caution abandoned, she ran the last few metres over the ragged rocks to the signal tower, rested her palm against it, took ten, fifteen deep breaths. The libation. You always give him something. She unhooked the flask of mint tea from the Velcro chest patch, uncapped it, poured. The liquid flashed to vapour before it hit the ground.

“Uncle Neon.”

“Sweetness, child!” said the godlike voice in her head, a little startled, as if disturbed from private contemplation. “What a pleasant surprise! How is everyone, what's the news, it's been a while since I last heard of all your doings and undoings. Or has it? Is that a new outfit you're wearing? I must say, it does nothing for you. Wasted your money there.”

“Uncle, I haven't time to explain. I need you to send a message.”

“Not a foretelling? You don't want to know about the baby Sle's going to have with that Cussite girl he hasn't married yet?”

“Uncle, just send a message, back home.”

A pause. Sweetness could imagine the discourses running through her poor mad uncle's eotemporal brain: why can't the child take it herself; back home, where is that, why is that? where is this place I find myself, am I indeed dead, has this all been dreams arcing through my head from that final lightning, am I in heaven or hell or somewhere not quite either?

“What is this message?” Uncle Neon asked.

“It's not so much a what, as a who,” Sweetness said, unVelcroing the
canopic jar and, with ice-numb fingers, fumbling off the lid. “See?” She held the mirror up to the three eyes of the signal lights like an ancient scroll.

“I most certainly do,” said Uncle Neon. “One moment…”

When she rolled it up again, the mirror was empty of any image of Sweetness Asiim Engineer. As she stomped back toward the cordillera-like mass of
Catherine of Tharsis
, Sweetness turned to hold the roll of plastic film out to the rising wind, like a spinnaker.

“Look for me in mirrors,” had been Little Pretty One's final whisper before Uncle Neon launched her back down the link that Sweetness alone and always had been able to exploit to bring her to this other world.

She let go of the mirror. The wind caught it and whipped it away like a sail, around and around and over and over, tumbling away, a blink of light, on the eternal gales.

 

It took ten minutes of concentrated rubbing by Romereaux before sensation returned to her feet and hands and then that was pins and needles that had her hopping in agony around the bridge, oohing and aahing.

“You're wasting our air,” sour Ricardo said.

“Look, I went out there,” Sweetness said, dancing up and down on her points. “Anyway, help's coming.”

“Aye, and when?”

Not in the first hour, the hour of confident expectation.

“She's got a lot to do,” Sweetness explained.

Nor in the second hour, the hour of settling down patiently.

“Maybe he put up more of a fight than she expected,” was Sweetness's rationalisation.

Nor the third hour either, which, when your air is strictly budgeted, is the hour of creeping doubt.

“There're all those cybersoldiers, remember,” Sweetness said let's-not-be-selfishly.

But the help did not come in the fourth hour, nor the fifth hour, nor the sixth hour, when the air is hot and foul and so heavy with carbon dioxide all you can do is sit with your back against the cooling bulkhead and count things over and over and over again.

“Help?” Ricardo croaked.

“I don't know,” Sweetness said. “I don't know at all.”

Then the cry came from the window, a little, oxygen-choked croak.

“Out there,” Grandmother Taal stammered. Everyone crawled to the window, heaved themselves up over the sill.

Something like a very small dust-devil was moving across the Big Red, cutting straight across the dirt and red rocks as if possessed of a volition and a destination. It was heading straight for
Catherine of Tharsis
. Sweetness felt a silly, oxygen-wasting laugh bubble inside her, a laugh she could not keep down, that boiled out of her like her offering tea flashing to vapour as she poured it out.

A bit of help indeed.

The whirlwind rushed up to the side of the train, mounted the boarding ramp, spun along the walkways and stairways until it came to the pressure outlock. Then everyone on the bridge heard a hammering on the lock door.

“Open, in the name of Beelzebub!”

T
he pressure-lock door closed behind the strange little man. He had long white hair tied back at his shoulders with a gold ring and long mustachios which he kept sharply waxed. His eyes were deep and darkly bright. He wore a long desert duster coat and a big-brimmed hat with a ludicrously jaunty feather in its band. On his back was a complex pack of many devices and power cables, including a handy-looking field-inducer tucked into the pocket of his coat and a whirring object that looked like a small sewing machine. He carried around him a translucent bubble of force that seemed to hold his own atmosphere. He twisted a setting ring on the field inducer. The bubble popped audibly. The oxygen-starved people of
Catherine of Tharsis
smelled purple heathers and autumn seaside. To them, the little man looked a little blurred at the edge, slightly out of focus, like a television picture on the edge of a transmission footprint. They thought it was their foggy minds. Sweetness knew better. The traveller was on the extreme edge of his probability locus. He took a step forward out of the lock, removed his gloves, banged them together, kicked the dust off his battered desert boots, sniffed, grimaced.

“It mings a bit in here.”

He sought Sweetness, doffed his hat and bowed in the formal Old Deuteronomy way to her.

“My dear, Dr. Alimantando, multiversal engineer and transtemporal tourist at your service. I have been expressly purposed by Our Lady of Tharsis herself with the task of taking you anywhere in the multiverse you wish to go.”

“Home would be good,” Sweetness said. “Home would be very good.”

“Tokamaks ready?” asked Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.

“Ready,” came Romereaux's voice from the gosport.

“Traction engaged?”

“Traction set,” Ricardo called up from the transmission tunnel.

“Timewinder ready?”

“Ready, aye ready,” came the voice of the doctor from the arcane bowels of systems engineering. “Hooked up and running sweet as a child's top.”

“Then let's go home,” Sweetness Engineer said, and moved her hand to the great brass drive bar. Her fingers opened to grasp it. And froze. Suddenly, sitting there in the Engineer's chair, navigation sphere under her left hand like an orb, the sceptre of the drive control waiting for the touch of her right, she could not do it. It was everything. Everything. The years, the days, the nights, the dreams, the anger, the frustration, the investment of hope and joy, the aspired to, the wished for, the painfully desired, the loved thing, the completing thing, and now it lay under her palm and she could not do it. Should not do it.

Girls don't drive.

She licked her lips, looked to her mother on her right side.

“Go on, my child.”

What if she did it and, after all, it was nothing? The train moves, the train stops. The train moves again, stops again. What if that was all there was to it, what if that was the secret the Engineer men kept from their women? That's all there is. Nothing special.

She looked at Grandmother Taal on her left.

“I'll give you such a slap,” she said tetchily.

Sweetness grinned, seized the bar and pushed it forward. And it was precisely as special as she wanted it to be. And that, she understood, was all the secret of the Engineers. Tokamaks flared, water flashed to agonised steam, thundered down pipes, turned cranks, turned wheels within wheels about wheels that drove a belt looped around the spindle of the machine that looked like a small sewing machine. Inside, vincular dimensions spun. The doctor rubbed his hands with glee and watched his fiendish little device, nested among the brute force heavy metal engineering.

Wheels spun. The big train inched forward. Laughing, Sweetness pushed the drive rod up, up.
Catherine of Tharsis
began to roll, not along the snatch of track, through alternative universes. White light seemed to break around the cab window, they were in the middle of a cavalry charge of six-legged monsters ridden by four-armed green creatures with fangs and swords. Flash. Now a dry and delicate desert place, in the distance, a city of crystal windows and fragile towers. A swarm of silver locusts parted around the speeding train.

Sweetness pushed the handle up, up. Flash. Tall metal tripods stalked a landscape of green canals and hive cities. Flash flash. A parade ground in a great spire-capped city, filled with creatures like mushrooms. Flash. A howling red desert, a lone spaceship standing on its tail, an object like an animate ice-yacht sailing away, a human infant cradled at its heart. Flash. More cavalry, grim-faced riders on outsize ferrets leaping a barbed-wire barricade. A sterile red desert, an archaeologist in a transparent spacesuit, and in the sky, a malevolent red moon. A landscape littered with massive terraforming machinery. A single red crater with a smiley face drawn on it. Flash flash flash. Sweetness drove the timewinder up, up, up. A forest of clattering plastic windmills. A big rocket with a big red star on its tail. The universes were coming so fast now she was afforded no more than a glimpse before bursting through into the next. But a trend was apparent, they were moving from uninhabited, inhospitable worlds to her own little green world.

Green hills, an endless glass roof, an orange air-borne cathedral.

Sweetness jerked back the drive bar, overshot by a few dimensions into a smoking battlefield swarming with killing machines, reversed up universe by universe.

“We're back!”

She pulled out the gosport, whistled down to systems.

“Doctor!” No answer. “Doctor!” Still no answer. A third time: “Doctor!” As she had expected, the probability of his existence in this space of this time in this universe had dropped to zero.

Sweetness slumped back in the Engineer's chair. Doors were opened, windows thrown wide. Grand Valley's air smelled sweet as Isidy wine. Sweetness drank it down, touched a playful finger to the drive bar, shivered in private delight as the trainpeople came up from their stations and section to
celebrate their return. Romereaux offered a hand to Sweetness,
come on, you've earned it
. She shook her head, looked at the navigation ball under her left hand. A world in her palm. Anywhere you like.

“I hate to disturb things,” came Ricardo Traction's maithering voice, “but we've still got a cathedral on the roof.”

“And there's an awful lot of robots headed our way,” Thwayte added.

The party froze.

“Oh my God!” Sweetness moaned. “Is there no end to this story?”

As she gave the curse, she knew where she was in the universal narrative—the Unexpected Resurgence of the Villain—and what she must do to resolve it and bring her story to a conclusion. By her right hand was the evacuation alarm. She punched the bright red toadstool, hard. Yellow flashing lights leaped to life, sirens yammered.

“Are you deaf?” Sweetness shouted at the startled, pale faces. “Get out! This is an evacuation, get off the train, go on, everybody off, get back to the tender!”

“My daughter…” Child'a'grace began.

“Don't argue, I know what I'm doing. Get back to the tender, I'm going to sort this thing with Harx once and for all.”

Such talk clears bridges. Ricardo and Thwayte pulled Bedzo plug-free from the cyberhat and wheeled the comatose old gent to the escape hatch. Child'a'grace and Miriamme Traction scooped up Grandmother Taal, who was for staying with her wayward granddaughter. Romereaux was last to clear the battle zone. He looked back, as he knew he must, as Sweetness hoped he would.

“What about you?”

“I'll be all right,” Sweetness said. The door sealed. She glanced up at the thumb-nail monitors. She saw Romereaux close the hatch to the tender. The rest of
Catherine of Tharsis
was empty. The exterior eyes told her the metal men were getting uncomfortably close. Looking up, the roof cameras told her what she hoped; the sudden return to this universe had jammed parts of the complex undersurface of Harx's flying cathedral against
Catherine of Tharsis
's corporate gingerbread.

“Gotcha,” Sweetness hissed as she hit the buttons for the preignition
sequence. “Let's go play trains.” She punched the red
tokamak overheat
plate, gently eased the drive bar forward. Train and parasitic cathedral began to roll.

The sudden lurch sent Devastation Harx reeling against Sianne Dandeever. He pushed her away, flipped open his uplinker. The screen spat random numbers at him. Heaven was rebelling. That damn train with that bloody girl was back. Devastation Harx had a ball-shrivelling suspicion that something else had paved the way for her. Something else harrowing his heaven. Harx snapped the treacherous machine shut—should never have trusted it—tried to think what to do. Don't get flustered. Gods may be capricious, but they're never flustered.

His whole world lurched again, began ponderously to move.

“Get everybody off,” he ordered Sianne Dandeever. This was the end game now. Poor reward for the faithfulness of his faithful to risk them all on a final play of death or glory. “Abandon ship.”

“Sir.”

“Sound the alarms.”

They were picking up speed. Soon it would be too late for all of them.

Sianne broke open the sealed box and pulled down the lever. As the bells rang and Harx felt his airship tremble to hundreds of pairs of running feet, Sianne said, “Sir, with respect, I'm not leaving you. Whatever happens, I will be true.”

Which was as profound a profession of love as Devastation Harx had ever heard.

“Would you look at those purple boys go,” said Weill, watching the evacuation of the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family on the opticon from UA2's stand-off position twenty kilometres east. “Here, Bladdy, take us in for a closer look, you don't see this every day.”

“What about the reality-shaping weapon?” Seskinore warned, wringing his red, veiny hands.

“You think he'd be abandoning ship if he still had it?”

“If he were about to use it, he would,” Seskinore countered, but Bladnoch was already pushing the stick. On Weill's monitor, purple-clad bodies
tumbled down chutes, scrambled down wire ladders, slid down ropes, dropped in inflatable escape spheres, jumped, fell, ran through the advancing soldiery as the tottering, creaking lighter-than-air cathedral was dragged along by the slowly accelerating train.

“Wo, that is premier league chaos. Train-cathedral steel cage match, with fighting robots. Get the finger out, Blad, I don't want to miss any of this.”

Instead of the mildly stimulating vibration of slightly unsynched engines, Weill's groin felt instead the sensation of the fans powering down.

“Blad, I said get it on, what the hell is up?”

“That,” Bladnoch said, pointing up the western approaches of the valley where a disc of light, bright as the sun, was swooping toward them through the air.

One eye on the tacho. One eye on the tokamak monitors. A third eye…No third eye. Just trust. Sweetness edged the power bar forward. Too much acceleration and the wedged cathedral might tear loose. Too little and those steel flatfoots might catch up. Four legs, four arms. Nightmares. Thirty, forty. Keep it going. Fifty. Fifty-five. That's a crawl. A crawl. You've got to get them a safe distance. Sixty. Seventy. That's enough.

“Sorry folks,” she said to her friends and family and pulled the lever that blew the bolts coupling tender to train. The rearviews showed them falling behind. The wave of galloping soldiers broke around it, reformed. It was her now. On her own, with just the water and hydrogen in the tanks.

She prayed the Train Gods she had worked it out right.

A drilling, banging on the roof. Sweetness cringed, another deafening rattle. She flicked up the ceiling-eyes, found herself looking up the multiple barrels of a Gatling, with Devastation Harx behind the triggers. He loosed off another stream of bullets. The camera went blind.

“Right,” she said, teeth gritted, and pushed the drive bar forward. And went blind too. Light. Primal light, pure white, seared the cab. Sweetness cried out in pain, blinked away the after-images. There was something divine going on in the rearview cameras. The swathe of light scythed across the cavalry charge. Wherever it touched, it paralysed. Cybersoldiers froze in mid-step, arms uplifted, locked rigid. Ten passes, and the battlefield was a sculpture
garden. The light flashed over Sweetness again, hovered for a moment. She squinted up through the glare at the flying disc of light. A vana, a skymirror, stooped down from the moonring to earth. Through the painful white, Sweetness thought she saw an image in the great mirror. A woman, with long dark hair. Her image.