Terminal World (24 page)

The Skullboys pointed their rifles into the darkness. There was another shot and one of them dropped to the ground, screaming at the fist-sized hole that had just appeared in his shin.

Six people came out of the night. They were not Skullboys. They were uniformed, with black body armour over dark uniforms, five of them with helmets on their heads, carrying heavy machine guns slung from shoulder straps and gripped two-handed, with curving magazines and thick, perforated barrels.

The sixth member of the party was a woman, her helmet in one hand, a small service revolver in the other. She had very dark skin and was taller than most men Quillon had met. ‘Take out the vorgs,’ she said, her voice calm with the confidence of authority. ‘Leave that one alive for Ricasso. It’ll make his day.’

One of her party swung his machine gun and discharged it, blue-pink muzzle exhaust flaring out like a flamethrower. He doused the vorgs, the machines exploding apart under the impact of the bullets. Two of them sprang away, jaguaring into the darkness. The others writhed and thrashed, even as they were reduced to bloody scrap. Then the shooter selected semi-automatic fire and delivered a volley of shots into the one remaining vorg, the one that had spoken, blasting away one leg and one forearm. The vorg keeled over and pawed at the ground ineffectually, unable to achieve locomotion.

‘The rest of you can surrender,’ the tall woman said, before turning to examine Meroka. She had elegant, birdlike features, the whites of her eyes flashing bright in the gloom. ‘You, kneeling on the ground: get up. This isn’t the day you die.’

Without raising herself Meroka said, ‘And who the fuck are you?’

‘You imagine I owe you an introduction, after rescuing you?’

Meroka stood to her full height, fixing the woman with insolent disregard. ‘If I’m being rescued, why am I being told what to do?’

The woman holstered her service revolver, evidently satisfied that her men had the situation within control. ‘Because you are now under our jurisdiction. I am Captain Curtana of the rapid scout
Painted Lady.
You are now clients of Swarm.’

‘What if we’d rather not be clients?’

‘You are now clients of Swarm,’ Curtana repeated. ‘And that’s a Spearpoint accent if I’m not mistaken, which puts you considerably out of your depth.’ She nodded curtly at her men. ‘Take them to the ship. There’s no fuel to be had here.’

‘And the prisoners, Captain?’ one of the men asked.

‘Which ones? Theirs or ours?’

‘The Skulls, Captain. Do you want them executed, or brought aboard as prisoners?’

‘We don’t need any more ballast than we already have.’

‘I’ll have them shot, then.’

Curtana appeared to weigh the decision before answering. ‘No, we can spare the bullets tonight. Take their weapons and anything else useful they have on them, then let them go. They’ll be dead by morning anyway; we don’t need to help them on their way.’

Quillon wondered what it meant to be ‘clients’ of Swarm, and suspected the answer was not going to be one he much cared for. The four of them were now being shepherded away from the Skullboys and the smoking, meat-spattered carnivorgs. Their hands were still bound. Two of Curtana’s men lingered behind at the scene of the shooting, with Curtana and the other three escorting Quillon’s party. Guns were present and visible. If they weren’t exactly being marched at gunpoint, there was a definite sense that they had no option but to comply with their new hosts. They were no longer about to be fed to machines, so Quillon could not deny that their immediate prospects had improved. As to how temporary that improvement might be, he dared not venture an opinion. He knew precisely nothing of Swarm, and had no idea what it meant to be under its jurisdiction.

‘Who are these people?’ he whispered to Meroka, blood still seeping from his mashed nose. ‘What is Swarm? I’ve never heard of it.’

‘That’s because it doesn’t usually come this close to Spearpoint.’

‘Until now.’

He was avoiding eye contact with her, not wanting her to see what was normally hidden behind his spectacles.

‘Lot of things changed last night.’

‘So it would seem. I’ll ask again: what is Swarm?’

‘Swarm is ... Swarm. History ain’t your strong point, is it?’

‘Medicine was enough for me. What did I miss?’

‘Long time back - we’re talking centuries here, lot of centuries - Swarm was the military arm of Spearpoint. Kind of its eyes and hands, letting it see and reach much further than it does now. Swarm could get halfway around the world and back, bringing supplies and news. Then some shit happened - something about an expedition gone wrong - and there was a split. Bad blood ever since. We don’t talk about them and they hate our fucking guts.’

‘How do they treat their prisoners, exactly?’

‘We don’t take prisoners,’ Curtana said loftily, for she must have overheard. ‘We take ballast instead. It’s a subtly different concept. I’m sure your companion will be happy to explain.’

‘I don’t think that’ll be necessary.’

‘Do any of you need medical attention?’ Curtana said, glancing at his nose. ‘We have a surgeon aboard
Painted Lady.’

‘I’ll mend.’

‘Your companion seems able enough, judging by her tongue. What about the mother and daughter?’

‘I don’t know. We haven’t been travelling together for very long.’

‘That wasn’t my question.’

‘I don’t know. They were being held prisoner by Skullboys. The Skullboys were ambushed and we did what we could to rescue the two of them.’

‘Do they speak?’

‘Why don’t you ask them?’

‘Please don’t try my patience, Mister ...’ She ended the sentence on a rising lilt, inviting him to continue.

‘Quillon.’

‘Also a citizen of Spearpoint,’ Curtana observed. ‘Although there’s something odd about you. And you’d be?’

‘Meroka.’

‘What are you doing outside Spearpoint?’

‘Counting my fucking blessings. What do you think?’

‘Then you’re not unaware of recent developments.’

‘It would be hard for anyone not to have noticed,’ Quillon replied. ‘Not if they’ve an ounce of humanity. There are thirty million people suffering in Spearpoint now, dying a slow and painful death through zone sickness.’

‘And it hasn’t occurred to you that there might be even more people dying a slow and painful death beyond Spearpoint? Sorry, I forgot: they don’t actually count, do they? They’re not real people at all, since they have the misfortune not to live in your precious city.’

‘Please don’t put words in my mouth,’ Quillon said. ‘I’m against needless suffering wherever it happens. But let’s not pretend this hasn’t happened before. People out here are tough and adaptable: they’ve had to be, to get by all this time. The zone shift, as bad as it is, is just one more thing they’ll eventually get used to.’

‘Plus or minus a few million graves, I suppose.’

‘All I’m saying is, you can’t expect Spearpoint to adapt as readily. It’s a delicate mechanism, like an expensive watch.’

‘In other words, something that was just waiting to fall apart and stop working. Something too complicated, too fussy, too interdependent for its own good.’ Curtana strode on, eating up the ground with her long legs. She wore riding pants and brown leather boots laced to the knee. She was tall and elegant and fiercely composed, the polar opposite of Meroka. ‘Face it, Mister Quillon - it was a catastrophe waiting to happen. The wonder is that it didn’t happen much sooner.’

‘And I suppose Swarm’s utterly unaffected by the zone shift?’

‘Mobility and flexibility have always served us well. It’s nothing we need be ashamed of.’

At that moment there was a short burst of shooting, a single concentrated volley with no return fire. Quillon slowed his pace involuntarily. The shooting had come from behind them, from the place where they had left the Skullboys in the hands of Curtana’s other two officers.

It had sounded very much like an execution.

‘What will happen to us?’ Quillon asked. ‘I’m still short on specifics when it comes to what it means to fall under Swarm jurisdiction.’

‘You’ll be taken back to Swarm at the earliest convenience. There, your usefulness will be assessed. We’re an inclusive society - despite what you may have heard - and we believe in giving newcomers a chance to prove their worth.’ Curtana’s tone became stern, almost as if she was addressing children. ‘But we’re not gifted with limitless patience. We’re well off by Outzone standards, but that doesn’t mean we can afford to go throwing our resources around.’ She gave Quillon a long, appraising glance, as if that was the first time she had paid real attention to him. ‘You’re obviously an educated man, so I’ve little doubt that we’ll find something for you to do. Of course, you’ll be accorded all the usual rights of a Spearpoint citizen, which is to say you’ll be assumed to be a spy, saboteur or seditionist until proven otherwise.’

‘No holding on to old grudges, then,’ he said.

They walked on into the roar of the engines, until the grey shape of Curtana’s ship began to emerge from the night, hovering just above the ground. Her engines were angled up, propeller blades directed to provide downward thrust to counteract the static lift from her rigid envelope. Quillon was not at all surprised to see an airship, for he had spotted enough of them during the day, even if they had never been more than distant dots foraging just above the horizon.

‘Nice blimp,’ Meroka said. ‘You steal it from the Skullboys?’

Curtana said nothing, but Quillon sensed that she was only ever one provocation away from doing something they might all regret. He willed Meroka to keep her mouth shut.

That
Painted Lady
was a military craft would have been obvious to even a casual observer, for the airship’s form was both purposeful and vicious. Her envelope was a slender cigar, spined with anti-fouling devices, barbed and bayoneted with jagged slicing edges, ramming spikes and retractile cutters. Her stiff fabric - reinforced here and there with aluminium sheeting - had been patched and repaired so many times that the vessel’s scars suggested to Quillon not so much vulnerability as the stubborn resilience of a very hardy organism, something that had evolved the ability to shrug off wounds that would have ended lesser creatures.

Beneath the envelope, her single gondola was plated with angled metal sheets, lending her a chiselled, formidable look, as if she was expected to serve double-duty as an icebreaker. Her few full-sized windows were protected by armoured shutters. Elsewhere, visibility was provided by cowled slits and swivelling periscope stations. Ball turrets were stationed beneath the front of the gondola, under the belly, at either side and at the rear, each sprouting the twin pipe-entwined barrels of air-cooled rotary machine guns. Another turret poked through the envelope to afford protection from above. She had
wings,
braced out from the side of her envelope on adjustable-tension cables, the wings able to flex to provide both positive and negative lift, in much the same way that angels modified their own flying surfaces.

Her propulsion outriggers - jutting from the gondola fore and aft, with two piston engines on each side - were edged to function as blades in the event of close action, ready perhaps to slice through another vessel’s envelope, wing-struts, control rigging or even crew. She was grey and blue-green metal-shades, save for a pink stencilled butterfly sprayed onto the envelope, the butterfly’s faded, bullet-riddled shape already eaten into by rectangular patch repairs. She had no number or other means of identification; nothing to mark her higher allegiance to Swarm.

Two armoured and uniformed airmen were waiting on the ground, guarding the lowered ramp leading into the gondola’s belly, the ramp flexing and scuffing against the ground as
Painted Lady
struggled to hold position. Curtana raised a hand and the airmen saluted back in the same fashion. ‘Keep right behind me,’ she told Quillon, ignoring the other three captives. ‘The updraught from those engines is enough to suck you right into the blades if you step anywhere under them. Trust me, I’ve seen it happen. Took all week to scrape the mess off the envelope.’

The inside of the gondola, the limited part that he was allowed to see, was all unpainted utilitarian metal, engineered for maximum lightness. The interior struts were perforated; the floor a metal grid over a service trough containing various pipes and amenities. There were storage lockers, rifle, crossbow and sword racks, shelves of battle-hardened instruments, stencilled instruction panels with terse, admonitory warnings in old-fashioned, angular stencilled script about such and such a procedure and how vital it was that Action A be performed before Action B, with dire consequences for deviation. There were curtained alcoves and doored-off compartments. There were speaking tubes and periscopes and complex, optical-looking devices whose function Quillon couldn’t even begin to guess at. All of this he was ushered past with maximum haste, until they reached a small, empty room at the back of the gondola, where it began to taper down to a fishtail steering vane. There was nothing in the room except two long benches, converging together at the room’s narrow end, and only the narrowest slits of windows along either tapering wall. Some kind of gaslight burned in an armoured lamp, recessed into the ceiling. Their hands were untied. Meroka and Quillon took the bench on one side, Kalis and Nimcha the other.

‘Your coats, please,’ Curtana said. ‘And that bag of yours, Mister Quillon.’

‘We’ll freeze,’ Quillon said. The metal skin of the airship was icy to the touch.

‘I’ll send down warm clothes and blankets. The bag, please. Now.’

‘I’ll be wanting my coat back,’ Meroka said, as Quillon handed over the medical bag.

‘Everything you owned is now the property of Swarm, so get used to the idea. In return you’ll be protected and well looked after.’