Hot and Steamy (15 page)

Victor looked lovingly at Hella, and Zoe couldn't help herself—even now, in the midst of all her pain and sorrow, the mechanic's heart went out to him.

“After the accident,” he said, “when Hella lay dying, I captured her soul in that special battery. I couldn't tell if my experiment had worked, not until . . . not until last night, when I transferred her into the automaton. I couldn't wait any longer, you see. Her energy was fading, but now . . . now Hella and I can finish our lives together.”

The machine put her hand in his. “As we should have.”

Victor gazed lovingly at her. “I know she's not much to look at now, but once I've applied my artificial skin. . . .”

“What about
our
dream?” Zoe asked. “A world without fear and death and drudgery?”

“I've conquered death,” Victor said, a sheepish grin spreading across his face. “I think the rest can wait a little while longer.”

 

The steamer-cab pulled up outside the Chapman-Challenger mansion, in one of the city's less-fashionable districts, and let Zoe out. She stared up at the crumbling stone and sagging Victorian roofline.

It's good to be home.

“So the prodigal mechanic returns,” Armstrong said, appearing in the mansion's door. He grabbed a pair of Zoe's bags from the cab's trunk and hefted them toward the front door. “I was beginning to wonder whether you'd ever grace us with your presence again.”

Zoe punched him in the shoulder. “Nice to see you, too, y–you big lug!”

Armstrong grinned at Zoe as Kit Chapman-Challenger strode out the entryway; she held the door open for her mechanic.

“I hope you had a nice rest,” Kit said, “'cause I've booked us passage on a freighter to the Congo, day after tomorrow. An archaeobiologist's work is never done!”

“Give the kid a break, Kitty! She just got home.”

“No,” Zoe said. “I need to work. Working would be good right now.” It would take a long time for the heartache to disappear completely, but, surrounded by her friends, the sorrow was already beginning to fade.

The three of them walked together into the mansion's foyer. Armstrong put the bags down next to the stairs that led to Zoe's room and workshop.

“You'll be happy to know you made out like a bandit while you were away, working for Von Lang,” Kit said. “I drive a very hard bargain—if I do say so myself. Not only did you receive a great salary, but you also get a cut of any patents resulting from the work you did with him. And the small stipend I get for representing you will get us all the way to Africa—and back, hopefully.”

“That's great, CC. Really great.”

Armstrong put one beefy arm around Zoe's shoulder. “What's the matter, kid? Did the project not work out the way Von Lang planned?”

“No, things worked out exactly the way he planned. Just not the way
I
planned.”

Kit arched one eyebrow. “Why? What happened?”

Zoe took a deep breath and put one arm around Armstrong's shoulder and the other around Kit's. “Well, I helped Victor Von Lang piece together his heart's desire, and, at the same time, managed to break my own heart.”

“That sounds like it calls for a drink,” Armstrong suggested, heading for the liquor cabinet.

Zoe sighed. “You can say that again. And Ray. . . ?”

“Yeah?”

“Make mine a double.”

T
o be an ambassador meant to face outsiders, and Tia was well prepared for it. There was the overpowered, heavy, high-caliber pistol ever strapped to her right thigh. Sure, it was filigreed with brass and polished wood inlay, a gunsmith's masterpiece, but it was still able to stop many threats in their tracks. A similarly crafted-but-functional blade swung from her hip. And then there was the flamethrower strapped to her back.

This was not so much for threats, but for contraband and outside material forbidden in the Abyssal City.

Today she'd taken the elevators up the edges of the ravine that split the ground all the way down to the hot, steamy streets a mile below. Overhead, tall, wrought-iron arches and glass ceilings spanned the top of the ravine, keeping life-giving air capped in. Up here, near the great airlocks, the air bit at her skin: cold and low enough on oxygen that you sometimes had to stop and pant to catch your breath.

“Ambassador?” the Port Specialist asked, his long red robes swirling around the pair of emergency air tanks he wore on his back, his eyes hidden behind the silvered orbs of his rubber facemask. His voice was muffled and distant. “Are you ready?”

“Proceed,” Tia ordered.

Today they examined the long, segmented iron parts of a train that hissed inside the outer bays. The skin of the mechanical transporter cracked and, shifted, readjusting itself to pressurized air. From the platform she stood on, she surveyed the entire length of the quarantined contraption.

It had thundered in, unannounced, on one of the many rails that crisscrossed the rocky, airless void of the planetary crust.

It was a possible threat.

“Time of arrival,” the Port Specialist intoned, and turned his back to her to grab the long levered handles of an Interface set into the wall. He pulled the right handles, pushed in the right pins, and created a card containing that data.

“Length,” Tia called out. She bent her eyes to a small device mounted on the rim of a greening railing. “One quarter of a mile. One main motor unit. Three cabs. No markings. Black outer paint.”

Behind her the Port Specialist clicked and clacked the information into more cards.

A photograph was taken, and the plate shaved down to the same size as the cards and added.

A phonograph was etched into wax of the sound of the idling motor that filled the cavernous bay.

All this information was then put into a canister, which was put into a vacuum tube, which was then sucked into the city's pipes. “The profile of the visiting machine has been submitted,” intoned the Port Specialist.

“We wait for Society's judgment,” replied Tia, and pulled up a chair. She sat and looked at the train, wondering what was inside.

 

The reply came back up the tube fifteen minutes later. The Port Specialist retrieved the card.

“What does Society say?” Tia asked.

“There is a seventy percent threat level,” the Port Specialist said.

“Time to send them on their way,” Tia said. “I will help you vent the bay.”

But the Port Specialist was shaking his head. “The threat level is high, but the command on the card is to allow the visitors into the sandbox. Full containment protocol.”

Tia groaned. “This is the worst possible timing. I had a party I was supposed to attend.”

The Port Specialist shrugged and checked the straps on his air mask. He tightened them, as if imagining the possible danger of the train to be in the air around him, right this moment. “And I have a family to attend,” he said. “But we have a higher duty right now.”

“I was going to be introduced to my cardmate,” Tia said. The first step on a young woman's life outside her family home. The great machine had found the person best suited for her to spend the rest of her life with.

It would disappoint her family and her friends that she would be stuck in lockdown in the sandbox with some foreign people waiting to make sure they cleared quarantine.

The Port Specialist handed her the orders. “Verify the orders,” he said.

Tia looked down at the markings, familiar with the patterns and colors after a lifetime of reading in Society Code.

A large chance of danger.

But they were to welcome in this threat.

“Hand me an air mask and a spare bottle,” Tia sighed.

The Port Specialist did so, and Tia buckled them on. She checked the silvered glasses on the eyeholes and patted down her body armor. She put in earplugs, pulled on leather gloves, and then connected a long hose to the base of her special gas mask.

“Hello?” she said. “This is Tia.”

The sounds and sights of what she saw would be communicated back through, and monitored by Port Control, with the aid of a significant part of Society's processing power. Crankshafts and machinery deep in the lower levels of the city, powered by the steam created from pipes below even that, would apply the city's hundreds of years of algorithms and calculations to her situation and determine what she would do next.

And Port Control, really someone sitting in a darkened room in front of a series of flashing lights, would relay that to her.

“This is Port Control, you are clear to engage,” came the somewhat muffled reply from the speaking hose.

Tia walked up to the train, stopping occasionally to yank the bulk of the hose along with her, and rapped on the side of the steel door.

Pneumatics hissed and the door scraped open. Tia's hand was on the butt of her gun as a man, clad in full rubber outer gear and wearing a mask much like hers stepped forward, a piece of parchment held out before him.

He had a gun on his waist, and his hand on it as well. They approached each other like crabs, cautiously scuttling forward.

Tia snatched the parchment, and they retreated away from each other. She read the parchment by holding it up where she could both read it, one handed, and keep an eye on the other man.

Manifest: three passengers.

Passenger one and two, loyal and vetted citizens of a chasm town two stops up along the track. Affiliation: Chasm Confederation.

Passenger three was an unknown who had ridden down the track from places unknown. Affiliation: unknown.

Tia reported this all back to Port Control.

“Go ahead and let them in,” Port Control said.

Tia nervously waved her assent at the man in rubber, and he turned around and waved the passengers out of the car.

The first two, a husband and wife team with matching gold-plated lifemate cards dangling from their necks, were diplomats. They carried briefcases full of paper network protocols, and rode up and down the rail to pass on packets of information between the cities and towns. They stepped down, the tips of the tails of their bright red diplomat suits dragging on the ground slightly as they walked past.

Tia bowed to them, somewhat clumsily in her gear.

“What is the threat level?” the male diplomat asked.

“Sandbox,” Tia told him.

With a sigh they walked around her toward the air-lock leading out.

The third passenger stepped down.

He had long hair cut to just above his ears and dark eyes partially hidden by wire-rimmed glasses. He pulled a giant trunk with wheels mounted on the corners. A leather-bound notebook dangled from a gold chain looped around his neck, as did a mechanical pen.

With a cautious step forward, he bowed, and then straightened. “My name is Riun,” he announced.

He went to walk around her and follow the diplomats, but then realized he'd let go of his wheeled trunk. He awkwardly turned back for it.

Tia smiled beneath the heavy mask.

 

The sandbox was a hall that could seat two hundred. The center was dominated by several long tables, while the periphery had cots that folded out from the wall.

By the far end, clear one-way mirrors allowed observers to view the sandbox.

Overhead, large metal balconies allowed Society's Reporters to look down on the sandbox and constantly file new cards with the machinery of Society, updating the computing machine that ruled them all with all the moves the quarantined made.

Every fifteen minutes the reporters would change shifts, to prevent contamination.

As the diplomats huddled together in the far side of the room, not interested in company, Tia removed her cumbersome protective gear and joined Riun at the table.

“Your city is strict about outside influence,” Riun observed, looking around the sandbox.

“There are murals on the lower alleyways,” Tia said. “Some of the cityfolk believe that during the Ascendance Wars the city's programs, during the great Downshifting, became somewhat paranoid of outside infection.”

“The Ascendance Wars?” Riun asked, looking puzzled.

Tia stared at him. How much of an outsider was he? Suddenly she thought about the warning, and wondered if maybe Rium was something far more dangerous than she realized.

Should she even be talking to him?

But the machine hadn't flagged Riun to be separately sandboxed. Nor had Tia been handed any warnings to shun him.

“Were you schooled in your city's history?” she asked.

He smiled. “Of course. But I am not schooled in yours.”

“The great thinking cities of the world tried to reach for the stars, but fought among each other to reach them first and over control of the skies. The fighting grew so perilous and killed so many people that the machines that ran the cities decided to Downshift. They would only use mechanical technology, slow thought, to run the systems of their cities. The city used to use ‘quantum chips' but now only uses steam and gears and cards.”

Riun chuckled. “Always different stories.”

“What?”