World of Fire (Dev Harmer 01) (5 page)

“I won’t, trust me.”

“We’ve already established that I don’t,” said Kahlo. “I’d like to keep it that way, for my own peace of mind.”

5

T
HE POLICE POD
shot across the city along the maglev track, accelerating easily to a humming, frictionless 200kph. Kahlo and a driver, Patrolman Utz, were in the front. Dev shared the back seat with Sergeant Stegman, who kept shooting surly, resentful glances at him.

“How long ’til we get there, captain?” Dev enquired.

“You sound like my cousin’s seven-year-old,” said Kahlo. “‘Are we there yet? Are we there yet?’”

“I ask because, if we’ve time, I’d like you to fill me in about the earthquakes.”

“We’ve got a few minutes.”

The pod shimmied slightly as it passed under an enormous arch formed by twin stalactites that descended all the way to the cavern floor. Their size – they were as big as skyscrapers – spoke of millennia of slow growth.

“So...?” Dev prompted.

“They started roughly a month ago,” Kahlo said. “The odd tremor now and then. Nobody thought much of it, at first. Mostly they were centred around the mines, and you do get the occasional rumble there. The digger rigs disturb the rock strata. There’s settling, subsidence. Par for the course. Miners call it ‘bellyaching.’”

“But it got worse.”

“We’ve had tunnel collapses. Equipment destroyed, some casualties. And it’s no longer confined to the mines. The quakes have spread outward, to the inhabited regions – the townships, Calder’s Edge itself. Which isn’t meant to be possible.”

“Because the inhabited regions were specially selected for their stability.”

“Exactly.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Alighieri was colonised back in the ’forties.”

“Part of the second wave of the Diaspora,” said Stegman, “when the next-generation Riemann Deviation drives came onstream and reduced infraspace journey times by half.”

“Thanks for the history lesson,” said Dev.

“Want me to mosquito you again?”

“As I recall, your boss did that last time, not you.”

“I’d quite like a turn.”

“Zip it, sergeant,” said Kahlo. “He’s only trying to get a rise out of you.”

“He’s succeeding.”

“So don’t let him. Don’t give him the satisfaction.”

Stegman, cheeks reddening, folded his arms.

Dev said to Kahlo, “Back then there would have been a colonisation precursor survey, wouldn’t there?”

“Yes. Sonar and ground penetrating radar were used to determine which were the safest caverns to build in. Calder’s Edge and the outlying townships sit dead centre of a tectonic plate. We’re nowhere near any faultlines, and the bedrock surrounding us is pure igneous granite. Solid as a... well, as a rock.”

“So why earthquakes all of a sudden?”

“That’s the honking great question, isn’t it? That, and why are they getting progressively more severe?”

“You think there’s a chance some living agency might be responsible? It’s perhaps enemy action?”

“Maybe so, maybe not. I’ve not found any proof as yet, but my gut says it could well be. What I
do
know is that it’s got people scared and restless, not least the miners, and they’re a hard lot to frighten. Nobody likes going around thinking the world could fall in on their heads at any moment. We’ve seen a marked upswing in emigration applications and requests to terminate work contracts and ship out early. The next scheduled gulf cruiser isn’t due for another six months, but if one put in tomorrow, I reckon we’d wave ’bye-bye to a third of our population.”

A passenger train loomed ahead on the track. The pod, being smaller, lighter and faster, had to tuck in behind the tapered end of its rear carriage until a station appeared. The train pulled in at the platform while the pod leapfrogged around it on a passing siding.

“What do you mine here?” Dev asked. “Helium-three would be my guess.”

“Bingo,” said Kahlo. “Alighieri’s got it by the crap-ton. No atmosphere, so there’s been nothing to prevent the regolith soaking up solar radiation, for millions of years. The He-three deposits are distributed evenly throughout the crust, extending to a depth of two thousand metres and more.”

“Rick pickings. Fusion power for everyone.”

And, Dev thought, who was more energy-hungry, more rapacious when it came to power consumption, than Polis+? The artificial-intelligence empire relied not on agriculture, nor on physical labour, but on its machines, and machines guzzled electricity.

Alighieri, blessed with the raw materials to keep thousands of aneutronic nuclear reactors fuelled for centuries to come, was just the sort of world Polis+ coveted and would like to claim for its own.

The pod entered a tunnel bored into the far wall of the Calder’s Edge cavern. Outside the windows, ribbons of geological layers rippled up and down. Seams of quartz and feldspar flashed by like horizontal lightning bolts.

“We may be a small planet, but we punch above our weight economically,” said Kahlo.

“Any internal troubles? Civil unrest? Radical elements?”

“None to speak of. We have a pretty sensible citizenry, and I keep a tight lid on things. You get folks going on a bender every now and then, and the drying-out tank’s never short of occupants. Sometimes native Alighierians and itinerant workers clash, but it’s bar arguments, rowdy neighbours, that level of nuisance, usually. The unions get stroppy from time to time and call a strike, and we have to oversee the picket lines. Nothing we can’t cope with.”

“People come and go, though.”

“Yes. We get migrant miners dropping by to do tours of three or four years. There’s a constant turnover. Every gulf cruiser that comes drops off about twenty thousand of them and takes a similar number away. The total mining workforce tops out at a quarter of a million at any time. Another couple of million of us – second- and third-generation Alighierians – are in service industries that support the mining biz, or else in administrative roles. A million more are children or other dependents. That’s just Calder’s Edge.”

“There are other cities?”

“A couple. You’ve got Xanadu. That’s our nearest neighbour, about seven hundred kilometres due west. Then there’s Lidenbrock City, way over on the side of the world. We don’t have much to do with Lidenbrockers, or them with us.”

“Troglodytes,” muttered Stegman.

“Uncalled-for, Stegman,” Kahlo scolded.

“But it’s true.”

“Still uncalled-for.” She resumed her conversation with Dev. “Unlike with Lidenbrock, relations between Calder’s Edge and Xanadu are open and cordial. There’s a direct rail link, calling at all the major townships along the way. Lots of Calder’s folk have relatives there.”

“They having earthquakes, too? Over in Xanadu?”

“None that we’ve heard about.”

“And who runs Calder’s Edge?”

“What do you mean?”

“Someone has to be in charge. You have a mayor? A prime minister? A president? Who’s top dog?”

Kahlo hesitated briefly, and Dev noticed Patrolman Utz aiming a sidelong look at her, as if intrigued to see how she chose to answer.

“The highest civic political position is governor,” she said. “But if you want the honest truth, the mining corporations call the shots. The place wouldn’t survive – wouldn’t have a reason to exist – without them, and they know it. They say jump, the governor asks how high.”

Dev filed all this information away. It might be germane, it might not. He wouldn’t know until he had been here a little longer. The first day of any mission was a miasma of acclimatisation and intelligence-gathering. You could scour the local insite via commplant to find out when you needed, but it was usually better to get it first-hand. You learned more from someone with an opinion and an insider’s perspective than from ’pedia entries and officially sanctioned publicity material.

Townships whizzed by – smaller caverns than Calder’s Edge’s, with smatterings of habitats, some forested with lichen outcrops and gargantuan mushrooms. One, Loveville by name, was evidently a self-contained red light district. Huge garish floatscreen signs advertised burlesque revues and lapdance clubs.

“Jansson Crossing,” said Utz eventually, and he retracted the police pod’s electromagnet array, drawing it away from the propulsion and levitation coils embedded in the track. The vehicle’s progress slowed to a gentle glide, and finally the pod coasted to a hovering halt.

The township was centred around a busy, intricate rail intersection. The crash had occurred on a branch line just outside its station. An automated freight shuttle had been involved in a head-on collision with a commuter train. According to the chief rescue officer on the scene, there were two confirmed fatalities: the driver of the train and one of the passengers. There were also several injured, with three people on their way to hospital in critical condition and paramedics attending to the rest.

Freight shuttle and commuter train were locked together like a pair of animals who had died in the throes of feral territorial combat. It was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. A knot of tangled, tormented steel fused them, nose to nose.

Survivors, interviewed by Kahlo, said there had been no warning, just an almighty walloping impact that had hurled them from their seats. They had emerged from the wreckage, shaken and bloodied, glad to be alive.

Kahlo looked baffled. And angry.

“What?” said Dev. “What’s the matter?”

“What do you think’s the matter?” she snapped. “An accident like this is impossible.”

“Accidents happen. There’s even a saying about it. It goes: ‘accidents happen.’”

She flared at him. “Don’t you laugh at this! Don’t you dare!” She fell silent for a moment, glaring at him, and he thought she was about to hit him. Then she looked away again. “Anyway, you’re wrong. The entire maglev network is computer-regulated. There are failsafes in place to prevent precisely this sort of thing, any number of minimum-distance protocols. One train
cannot
be heading down a track towards another coming the opposite way. Overrides would kick in. Worse come to worst, the power would shut down and they’d brake well before a collision.”

“Then there’s been a mainframe error. A software glitch.”

“Maybe,” she said, relenting just a very little. “I’ll have one of our techs analyse the records at the central rail control room.”

She made the call, think-sending the message over her commplant.

Meanwhile Dev’s gaze fell on a vending machine on the station platform, which sold high-protein, glucose-rich energy bars and electrolyte-replenishing drinks. It advertised its wares with the slogan R
EFRESH YOURSELF
! B
EAT THE MID-SHIFT SLUMP
! and illustrated their effectiveness with clips of burning suns and crashing waterfalls.

He activated his commplant and checked to see if ISS had given him a standard operational slush fund to draw on. They had. Hardly a king’s ransom, but enough credit to be getting on with.

He linked to the vending machine and bought himself a fistful of bars and two cans of drink. He tore open the wrapper of one of the bars – mint flavour – and swallowed it nearly in one bite. It tasted like sweet sawdust with a toothpaste top note. The next bar, claiming to be chocolate-raspberry, tasted much the same as the first.

But it was bliss to have some food inside him at last. As his blood sugar level rose, a haze in his mind seemed to clear. The last vestiges of the nausea he had been feeling since arriving on Alighieri were dispelled.

“Harmer!” Kahlo called from the door to the police pod. “You want a lift back to Calder’s? Or are you going to stand there all day stuffing your ugly face?”

He climbed aboard, and Utz reversed into a turning siding. Then, remotely triggering the appropriate points, the patrolman manoeuvred the pod out onto the track that ran parallel to the one they had come in on.

Dev proffered an energy bar to Stegman, but he turned his nose up at the humble olive branch.

“Kind of disrespectful. Eating, when people died back there. Everyone else thinking what a tragedy, you only thinking about your stomach.”