In the Mouth of the Whale (27 page)

‘Then why are we still talking when we could be walking?’ the man said, and led us across the courtyard to a passage on the far side that plunged between two high walls and was so narrow that we had to go single file. The Horse pinged me again, telling me that it might be better to return to the marshal and seek his help in winkling out the criminal who had the information we needed.

Our guide said, ‘I can’t stop you talking amongst yourselves, but I hope we trust each other enough that we can all speak openly.’

‘You are cloaked,’ I said. ‘That’s hardly open.’

‘We are all cloaked, my friend. You make surveillance avert its gaze, which works as long as no one notices the hole you make in the world. I, on the other hand, make it believe I’m someone else. If you’re wondering why my security is so much better than yours, the answer is simple. T is the centre of the war, everything passes through it at some point, and we fish its waters and sometimes make a useful catch. The once proud and mighty race of which your servant is a downgraded descendant forgot more than we’ll ever know.’

‘It isn’t Ghost technology, then.’

‘We have a little of everything,’ the guide said, and led us out of the passage and across a wide boulevard, threading through the crowd with a deftness that made it hard to keep up with him, dodging into another passage, telling us that it wasn’t far now, deflecting my questions about his master with skilful vagueness.

‘He’s a unique man, as you’ll see soon enough,’ he said. ‘I’m not surprised you’re eager to meet him, but you’ll have to contain your curiosity. It doesn’t do to speak of him here.’

‘Then he can’t be as powerful as I thought.’

‘We’re on his turf now. That’s why we don’t speak of him. Any more than we speak of the air we breathe.’

We crossed a string of small courtyards, emerged at the upper level of a fighting arena, and followed a broad ramp that spiralled down, past levels where small, lightly tweaked animals – rats and cats, bantams and dinopterids – scuffled in little combat pits, to darker levels where heavily armed animals fought each other, animals fought Quicks, and Quicks tweaked in various disgusting ways fought each other. The place had once been tricked out with all kinds of lux, but it was shabby and faded now. Stretches of the ramp’s illuminated floor were dim or flickering, or even dead; the rails around the combat pits were greasy and scratched; the walls of the pits were scabbed with old blood, and the patter of the pitmen was tired and jaded.

We paused at the rail of a pit where a man-sized dinopterid was kicking at the belly of another, its hooked spurs slashing and slashing, harrying its hapless opponent backwards until it reeled into the wall and collapsed. The languid applause of the sparse audience distracted the victorious dinopterid for a moment. It looked all around, panting, beak agape and its scarlet throat pulsing, then it shook itself from crest to tail, and stooped over its dying opponent and pecked out its eyes.

Our guide licked his lips and told me that I could have plenty of fun here after my meeting, and I could have no better guide than him.

‘I am here on business,’ I said.

‘And this is
my
business. Officers and armigers like to think they know all about form and bet accordingly, but I have inside information. I can give you infallible tips, and only take a small cut of your winnings.’

‘Some other time,’ I said, shooting a glance at the Horse when he started to speak.

We went down and down, passing other pits, passing cabanas and platform bars, emerging above a pair of big pits at the bottom of the spiral, their rims ringed with platforms and walkways. Both were lighted but only one was in use, and people crowded around it. Crossing spotlights shone on the two mechas that stood at either end. They were roughly man-shaped, standing about ten metres tall and possessing two pairs of arms equipped with buzzsaws and all kinds of cutting-edge weapons, and on the right-hand shoulder of each a Quick jockey sat in a crash cage. A woman strolled around the base of the pit, extolling the combat virtues of the two machines while they brandished their weaponry and shot sizzling lightning at their feet. Then white vapour billowed up and the two mechas, controlled by their jockeys, stamped towards each other and engaged five-metre-long chainsaws like swords, clashing in ponderous close-quarter strike and counterstrike that sent gouts of sparks fountaining to either side. The first bot stepped back and swept its chainsaw in a low arc and slashed chunks from one of its rival’s legs, and then we descended past the rim of the pit and saw no more.

Our guide touched a blank wall and a camouflaged door shimmered into existence and we entered a warm and humid service sub-basement. A maze of corridors and chambers where food and drink and drugs were synthesised in compact manufactories, sewage was processed, and all kinds of machines were repaired and maintained. We saw only a little of this; our guide ushered us into a compartment of a low, jointed vehicle equipped with a dozen pairs of stumpy legs, its canopy closed over us, opaque to visible light and the additional senses of my security, and it set off in a kind of lurching run that buffeted us from side to side in the padded compartment, turning right and left at what seemed like random intervals, skittering down long slopes and climbing steep grades.

The Horse touched my security with his, told me that he was memorising every twist and turn of this silly diversionary tactic, in case we needed to track down our guide’s master at a later date.

‘I have no intention of coming here again,’ I said.

‘You might have to, if he turns out to be untrustworthy. And I’d say the chance of that is about even.’

At last the vehicle slowed from a mad gallop to a lurching trot. Our guide hunched around and told us to prepare ourselves to meet his master. ‘Let him ask questions. Don’t ask any yourself. And answer truthfully – he’ll know if you don’t.’

‘I seek only the truth,’ I said.

‘Don’t we all,’ the guide said, and with a quick, complicated gesture dismissed the canopy of the vehicle.

And yelped as a burly figure seemingly made out of shimmering glass plucked him from his seat and dumped him on the floor of the low and dark chamber where we had stopped. Another figure shimmered through the near dark, and stepped close and revealed her face. It was Prem Singleton, peeking out of her camo shell as if leaning through a window hung in the air.

‘You’re late,’ she said.

9

As soon as Ori and the rest of the recruits had boarded the freshly spawned pelagic station
The Eye of the Righteous
, they were assembled on the hangar deck and addressed by the station’s commander, Barba Tenkiller, who told them that from this moment forward they would dedicate their lives to the one true task: hunting for every kind of enemy intrusion.

‘Every day, the world’s orbit carries it a little closer to enemy territory. Every day, the enemy gets bolder. They’ve been testing the security net and dropping probes into the atmosphere for more than twenty years now. The probes keep falling, they won’t stop falling, and they’re going to be falling faster and faster. It’s our job to deal with them, and anything else the enemy sends against us. There aren’t many stations and the world is very large, so we have our work cut out. But we will do our very best. I will make sure of it. If you show any sign of slacking or doubt, you will be swiftly and surely punished. If you fail a second time, you’ll get the long drop.’

Commander Tenkiller was the oldest True that Ori had ever seen. She wasn’t much taller than a Quick, with broad shoulders and wide hips and a plain, frank, deeply lined face. Her white hair was thready and sparse, showing a scalp freckled with the scars of carcinomas killed by viral treatment. She wore a starburst on the breast of her black tunic and unlike the other Trues she was neither armed nor caged in an exoskeleton. Later, Ori would learn that she’d served ten years on picket duty in Cthuga’s oceans of air, working her way up from trooper to commander. Her heart had given out while slogging against the pull of the gas giant’s gravity, and had been replaced with a synthetic one. Most of her arteries had been replaced too, and her bones had been reinforced with fullerene scaffolding spun
in situ
by tweaked bacteria. But despite the toll on her health she had re-upped for three straight tours of duty, and at last she had been rewarded with her own command.

She said now that she was a member of a cult who believed in the one true God, Who had created the universe and quickened human beings and given them the ability to choose between good and evil.

‘I know you Quicks don’t believe in anything much, except perhaps that the so-called Mind that hides away in the heart of the world will one day rise up and save you from your well-deserved servitude. Let me tell you that my God is far stronger. He created the universe and everything in it, including your petty little Mind. He is everywhere at once, and sees everything, and He’s on the side of the righteous. Get right with Him, and you won’t have to fear that you won’t defeat the enemy. They think they’ve made themselves into a god, and maybe they have, but my God shits on them just like He shits on the Mind. We’re going to pray to Him now. We’ll pray together twice a day. It will strengthen your gestalt and it will give a few moments of quiet reflection. Use it to build your belief that you are on the side of everything that’s right.’

Commander Tenkiller clasped her hands against her breast and closed her eyes and intoned a prayer to her God, invoking His swift and merciless justice, asking Him to smite his enemies and strengthen his soldiers. The True troopers, officers and pilots and the Quick flight technicians and Ori and the other recruits imitated her. Hands clasped, eyes closed, Ori felt her passenger move forward, felt it recoil when she opened her eyes at the end of the prayer.

The commander told the recruits to strip down, it was time they were inducted. The troopers stood by while pilots and technicians shaved off the recruits’ hair and dusted their naked scalps with white powder. Then Commander Tenkiller moved amongst them, using a pigment stick to mark the forehead of each of them with a red circle with a dot in its centre.

‘Now you’re marked with the eye, and you’re one with each other and with the station,’ Commander Tenkiller said, when she had finished. ‘Get to your quarters, and get to work.’

That was their first day aboard their new home, after days riding inside the spartan hold of an argosy out from the Whale, a long voyage that spanned a quarter of Cthuga’s fat globe, all the way to the mother station that had spawned
The Eye of the Righteous
. The mother station rode the permanent gales above the tops of the clouds where high pressure and temperature drove complex carbon-sulphur cycles of synthesis and dissolution. It was a vast irregular raft hung beneath a tall cluster of hot-hydrogen balloons; boom arms radiated in every direction from its edges, like a snowflake or a squashed spider, and from the boom arms vast trawl nets ten kilometres wide were shot down into the clouds. The nets – called dew catchers for some obscure reason – were spun and maintained by tiny machines, and the threads of their fine but diamond-tough mesh were coated with tags which reacted with and bound to specific compounds. When enough tags were saturated, the nets were reeled in and fed through the try works along the edges of the station’s raft, where the bound organic compounds were stripped and sorted and processed and dispatched to batteries of makers that spun and assembled new stations which were launched into Cthuga’s unceasing rivers of air.

The Eye of the Righteous
was the newest of more than six hundred pelagic stations responsible for patrolling the entirety of the outer atmospheric layer of the gas giant, some eighty billion square kilometres. It carried a pod of predators, and three pods of combat drones that acted as both scouts and lures for enemy activity. An elite cadre of Trues piloted the predators; Ori and the other new recruits were tasked with flying drones, and performing every kind of routine maintenance work besides.

Ori didn’t mind the induction ceremony. She’d had worse hazings when she’d transferred from one part of the Whale to the other, and her humiliation was shared by the other recruits. It was far less troubling than what had happened between her and Commissar Doctor Wilm Pentangel in the garden at the top of his train. She’d heard of such things, but she’d always discounted them as fables. The kind of stories Quicks liked to tell each other, delighting in visceral horrors that made their own situation seem almost homely. Ritual murders. Consumption of the flesh of Quicks. A ceremony involving a table with a hole in its centre, large enough to accommodate the top of the head of the Quick victim, which was surgically opened so Trues could dine on her living brain. Ori’s possession by Commissar Doctor Pentangel was less horrific but more sordid than these fairy stories. The awful desperate grappling and the penetration of her body. The corruption of the act of love. She knew that she was property, like all Quicks. An asset rather than a person. A working unit without rights. But no other True had ever used her with such brutal intimacy. It was as if he had stained her soul. She had been the victim, and yet it was she who felt ashamed.

Worst of all, she couldn’t escape him. He’d forced her to become a spy, making daily reports that the device implanted by his philosopher-soldiers encrypted and sent via the military net. She hated this duty and was permanently scared of being discovered, but she had no choice. She had been warned that if she failed to make a report by the appointed time, the device would induce crippling headaches that, according to the philosopher-soldiers, would grow increasingly worse until they killed her.