Terminal World (76 page)

Kalis’s expression was one of steely resolve, but at last she nodded and extended her hand. ‘If you think this is necessary.’

‘I do.’

He gave her two pills to swallow, and a third for Nimcha. He watched to make certain they complied. Then he went back to Fray, who was beginning to shake again, his ragged nervous system anticipating the stress of the crossing. Whatever benefits the alcohol had given him were beginning to wear off.

‘You don’t have to come with us,’ Quillon said. ‘You’ve already done enough.’

‘And miss this, Cutter? You’ve got to be kidding me.’

‘You’re not well.’

‘And I’ll be even less well if I attempt that crossing without Morphax inside me. Your choice, of course.’

‘Like I have any,’ Quillon said, unstoppering the vial and palming two pills. ‘You’re the man with the spingun, after all.’

‘There is that,’ Fray said.

They set off again. The boundary came on them more quickly than Quillon had been expecting, and at first the sharpness of the transition was enough to make him worry that he had misjudged the dose. But as they carried on walking, the Morphax-55 began to kick in and take the edge off the worst of the effects, even going some way to dulling the pain from his bullet wounds. He still felt wrong, as if there was a pressure in his head that was only being masked, not alleviated, but it was enough to enable him to function and retain some clarity of mind. He surveyed his companions and saw nothing immediately untoward in any of them. Even Fray appeared to be coping. Perhaps his body still had a few transitions left in it after all.

They passed through more tunnels. By now Quillon had given up trying to guess where they were in relation to Spearpoint’s hollow walls, whether they were nearer the inside or the outside. All he could be certain of was that they had not descended far from the level of the Pink Peacock. The Mire, whatever it was, must still be a great distance under their feet.

‘We’re getting near now,’ Fray said. ‘Not to cause any offence or anything, but when we meet the Mad Machines, it’ll be best if Meroka and I do the talking. Just to break the ice, so to speak.’

‘I’m all for ice-breaking,’ Quillon said. His apprehension was rising like mercury in a thermometer, creeping steadily up the shaft. ‘These machines ... the mad ones - have you been acquainted long?’

Fray seemed to take it as a straight question. ‘Long enough. We only get to deal with two or three of them - there’s some sort of hierarchy. The shallow tunnels are all fine and dandy if you just want to take a few short cuts or get away from the local heat for a few hours. But to go deep - which is what we’re doing now - you have to deal with the things that live down here.’

‘Why isn’t their existence more widely known?’

‘It used to be, but the city authorities were glad to turn a blind eye, provided the machines kept to their side of the zone. Storm shook things up a bit, but not enough to let them break out onto the ledges. Mostly, the authorities just didn’t want to deal with anything they couldn’t exploit or understand. All the cops I worked with knew about them, but they were the thing you never talked about. You’d use them to scare confessions out of people, say you were going to leave them in the tunnels and let the Mad Machines find them.’

‘That’s what parents tell their children will happen, if they’re naughty.’

‘Well, one thing’s for certain: some of us have been very naughty indeed.’

They emerged into what was evidently another large vault, judging by the way the acoustics changed and the lantern light fell away without being reflected from adjoining walls or ceiling. The party walked on for some distance until Fray raised his lantern and brought them to a halt. The lantern trembled in his hand, the little flame quivering. When he spoke, it was with atypical reverence. ‘This is where they come. They’ll be here sooner or later, one or more of them.’

‘How can you be sure?’ Quillon asked.

‘Because this is how it always happens, Cutter. You come here. You wait. The machines show up. Now remember what I said about letting Meroka and me do the talking? The one thing you don’t want to do is piss these things off.’

‘What are these machines?’ Kalis asked.

‘Take a guess. I don’t think even they know for sure. Maybe they were put into Spearpoint to keep it running, like janitors.’

‘They’re not doing much of a job,’ Quillon said.

‘Well, you don’t know how fucked it would be if they weren’t around, do you? Maybe they’re the only things that have been stopping this place from crumbling to dust all these years.’

Quillon thought about the broken stump of Spearpoint 2. ‘Perhaps.’

Then he felt a breeze that had not been there a moment before. Fray met his eyes and nodded once. Kalis wrapped her arms around Nimcha, drawing her daughter closer to her. Without a word being said, the little party formed a cordon around mother and daughter: Fray and Quillon on one side, Meroka and Malkin on the other. The breeze ebbed, but in its place was a distant but approaching sound: a continuous metallic clattering. It sounded like garbage being bulldozed down an alley, a building avalanche of junk and debris. Insofar as Quillon had given the Mad Machines any thought, nothing had prepared him for this.

‘Juggernaut,’ Fray said, speaking just loud enough to be heard over the growing clatter. ‘I think it’s Juggernaut.’

‘Sounds like it to me,’ Meroka said.

‘Is that good or bad?’ Quillon asked.

‘Depends what kind of mood she’s in. Juggernaut has off-days,’ Fray replied, then ran a finger across his lips, telling Quillon to zip it.

The machine stopped somewhere in the darkness. There was an oily smell on the air, accompanied by a low, barely perceptible humming. The clattering had all but ceased. Quillon could see nothing, even with the lantern light, but he still sensed Juggernaut’s looming presence. The sense of powerlessness, even with Nimcha at his side, was more intense than he had ever felt in his life.

Lights came on. Quillon squinted against the blue-tinged brightness, striving to see details beyond the glare. They were looking up at Juggernaut, the lights coming from the machine itself, stabbing down at them. Juggernaut was not what he had expected.

The Mad Machine was a towering, teetering pile of animate junk, tall and wide as a four-storey tenement and about as long as a city block. It was just barely symmetrical, like a heap of scrap that had been compacted into a roughly rectangular shape, but with enough gaps and lopsided protrusions to upset any hint of regularity or orderedness. He could see that it was a single entity, of sorts, in that all the visible parts were either articulated or fixed together by some means or other. But there was no sense of Juggernaut having been designed, or even that Juggernaut had evolved in steps from some earlier, more ordered state. It just looked like a heap of trash that had been flung together and which had, astonishingly, spontaneously, aggregated into a kind of building-sized robot.

It did not have wheels or legs or any other obvious means of locomotion, but many parts of it appeared capable of independent movement. It had nothing resembling a head. The lights - which to Quillon had the bug-eyed look of car headlamps, although all of different makes and sizes - had been arranged across its front in an entirely random pattern. He could see no means by which the machine was able to view its visitors, but that it was aware of them was beyond question. He had seldom had the impression of being more intently studied.

Fray was the first to speak. He raised his voice and said, ‘Thank you for letting us come here, Juggernaut. It’s good of you to allow us to come this far. I’m afraid we don’t have much to give you, but you’re welcome to what we have.’

Meroka took Malkin’s weapon in her hands, but not as if she intended to use it. Silently, as if the act had been rehearsed, she and Fray stepped forwards several paces and placed their spinguns on the floor. Then they walked back to the group, all without turning their backs on the machine.

Juggernaut did nothing for several seconds. The humming continued, perhaps a little louder than before. The clattering was also more emphatic. It was almost as if the machine was drumming fingers, thinking things over.

Part of its frontage moved. Pieces of articulated machinery hinged away from the lamp-dotted edifice, unfolding and elongating into a kind of mechanical trunk. The trunk swung through the air, lashing over their heads. Quillon couldn’t help but flinch. It was easily powerful enough to crush them all with a single flick.

But Juggernaut was more interested in Fray’s offering. The trunk curled around the spinguns. It lifted them into the air as if they were twigs, then folded back into the main mass. Just before the arm vanished back into the robot, Quillon saw pieces of the frontage maw widen, opening an impromptu mouth into glowing, red-lit mechanical innards. It was like the inside of a furnace or foundry. The spinguns had been consumed.

Clattering sounds ensued. Then Juggernaut quietened again. ‘Welcome, Fray,’ it said. ‘Welcome, Meroka. Welcome, companions of Fray and Meroka.’

Inasmuch as Quillon had been expecting the Mad Machine to speak at all, it was not with this voice. This was polite, dignified, almost ceremonial. It was just barely louder than if there had been someone standing there addressing them. It was the voice of a slightly disciplinarian but basically kind-hearted schoolmistress, not a machine as large as a building.

‘I’ll bring more next time,’ Fray said. ‘This is all we had on us. I’m afraid we weren’t planning on this visit right now.’

The machine cogitated. It clattered and hummed. ‘This will suffice, Fray. You have been generous in the past: You will be generous in the future.’ It said this with flat assurance, as if it either had a complete grasp of human nature, of Fray, of future events, or all three.

‘We need your help,’ Meroka said, electing to speak for the first time. Quillon heard a quiver in her voice that was entirely new to him.

The lamps swivelled en masse to focus on Meroka. ‘What is the nature of the difficulty?’ Juggernaut asked.

‘It’s not so much a difficulty, as ...’ Meroka faltered. ‘We brought this girl with us. She needs to get somewhere. We thought maybe you could help us with that.’

‘Where does she need to go?’

‘We don’t know. Near the Mire, maybe. Or not. Just somewhere she can act, or do whatever it is Spearpoint wants her to do.’

‘I do not understand you.’

‘Show them your head,’ Meroka said. ‘Maybe it’ll help.’

Nimcha hesitated at first, then took a brave step away from Kalis. She walked into the glare of the machine, the lamps angling onto her, turning her into a silhouette with multiple shadows. She stood resolute, with her arms at her sides. Then she turned slowly around and presented the back of her head for Juggernaut’s inspection.

‘She’s the genuine article,’ Fray said, glancing back at Quillon as if to say he sincerely hoped this was the case.

‘I have been instructed to act on this symbol. She will come with me, to the other machines. They will know what to do.’

And even as it spoke, Juggernaut folded out its arm again, the configuration not quite the same this time, as if the jumbled components had locked together in a different permutation. The arm ended in a flattened, paddle-shaped platform, which it placed on the ground just in front of Nimcha. ‘Step on,’ the machine commanded, not without kindness.

‘No,’ Kalis said, taking a step towards her daughter.

Quillon reached out and took her arm. ‘We brought her this far because she was dying, Kalis. If she doesn’t complete this journey, she’ll only get worse.’

‘This is what must be done,’ Juggernaut said. ‘She must be taken.’

‘Taken where?’ Kalis cut in, her own voice higher and louder than Juggernaut’s.

‘To the others,’ the machine replied.

Nimcha looked back, torn between the opposing poles of Juggernaut and Kalis. On some level, Quillon was certain, she felt compelled to go where the machine wanted her to. The thing in her head - the thing that had expressed itself via the birthmark, and which had given her the link to Spearpoint - was urging her to take that final step. On another, she was just a girl on the point of being wrenched away from the mother who had nurtured and protected her all her life. He could almost feel the psychic strain of that conflict, threatening to snap her in two.

‘We have to go with her,’ he said, his own voice coming from somewhere inside him that he barely knew existed. ‘Is that possible, Juggernaut? Can you take us with her?’

‘You don’t know what you’re getting into,’ Fray said warningly.

‘I know,’ Quillon replied. ‘Trust me on this.’

‘I will not leave her,’ Kalis said. ‘I will do all that I can to see her healed, but I will not leave her.’

Juggernaut clanked and clattered and hummed. ‘You may come,’ it said finally, as if the matter had been given due process. ‘Those who wish to.’

‘I will not leave my daughter,’ Kalis said.

Quillon nodded. ‘And I won’t leave my patients. I can’t say I’ve been much use to either of you, but I am still your doctor. Will you let me come with you, Kalis?’

‘Why do you ask me, and not the machine?’ she asked, taken aback.

‘Because you also have a say in this.’

She looked at him for lingering moments, then nodded slightly. ‘If you will, Quillon.’

‘Sign me up as well,’ Meroka said.

‘No,’ Quillon said sharply. ‘You’ve done enough for all of us, Meroka. You don’t have to come any further. There’s nothing left to prove.’

‘It was never about proving anything, Cutter.’

‘My point still stands. I don’t know where we’re being taken, or what’s in store for us when we get there. If we’re being taken anywhere near the Mire, then the zone transitions are going to be rapid, severe and essentially unpredictable. Nimcha and Kalis have natural tolerance. I have the tolerance the angels gave me, before they sent me down to Neon Heights. It’s still going to be difficult for us, and you don’t have either of these advantages.’