Daylight Runner (10 page)

Rubbing his raw wrists, Sol pulled the body toward him and hauled it onto his shoulder. It was incredibly heavy and awkwardly limp: it was like trying to lift a bag of stones. Maslow picked up the other one as if it weighed no more than a child, and turning to survey the room once more, nodded in satisfaction and then made for the door. Sol followed close behind, struggling beneath the weight.

The hatch to the chute was down two flights of stairs, in a row of chutes for garbage. Each one was labeled with the kinds of rubbish suitable:
METAL
,
PLASTIC
,
DENCERAMIC
, etc. All organic waste went into the fertilizer chute. Maslow lifted the hatch and shoved his body bag into it.
He took Sol's load from him and dispatched it with equal ease.

“By the time they come out of the bottom of the grinder, there'll be nothing to identify,” Maslow told him.

Reluctant to ask him how he was so sure, Sol just nodded. His stomach was getting ready to climb out through his throat. With no idea where he was, he let Maslow lead the way out. They were somewhere deep in the Machine, well below the main levels of the city. All around was the rumble of machinery, and judging from the cold edge to the air, Sol thought they had to be in that chilly limbo underneath the muggy heat of the city's engines.

Here, in this part of the city, secret lives were led, and he was sure that this was where Maslow had spent a good deal of his life. Whoever this man was, he was like nobody Sol had ever met. And despite the fact that he had just saved his life, Sol was loath to trust him. But this violent man was a means of protection against the nameless hoods who were trying to hurt Sol, and there was a strong chance that he knew where to find Gregor. For the moment, Sol had no choice but to follow him and do as he said.

S
OL SAT WATCHING
a film called
First Blood
with Maslow. It had been four days since he had met the man, and they were sitting in a dingy, deserted office on the edge of one of the vast underground fields of modified soybeans laid out on shelved racks that were spread under the edges of Ash Harbor. The room was cramped, with a decrepit desk and two sagging chairs, the shelves crammed with hoarded odds and ends. But the webscreen was working, so they sat watching the film. Outside the window, the lights came on and went off every eight hours, simulating a shortened day cycle that sped up the growth of the crops.

They had been on the move since the first day. Maslow said it wasn't safe to stop anywhere for long, but he
seemed to be accustomed to life as a fugitive; there were places where he had food, clothes, tools, and weapons stored: locked rooms and derelict offices and workshops tucked away in the hidden corners of the sub-levels. He wore gloves that he rarely took off and was careful about clearing up any traces of his presence when they moved from place to place. Sol knew he would have been reported missing and wondered who would be looking for him, and how long they'd keep up the search.

Maslow jumped around on his seat, twitching like a kid on a games console every time the main character, Rambo, hit anyone, shot anyone, or jumped out of a bush and knifed anyone. Sol was finding the experience embarrassing, not to mention a little worrying.

His new guardian angel had taken him down to a cavern at one point, a place where construction had begun on a new tunnel only to be postponed, leaving an incongruous mix of modern denceramic beams and supports standing in the untamed space of a million-year-old cave. Here, Maslow had taught him how to fire a gun. It had a built-in silencer, but it was worn out, so the shots were loud. After emptying two clips into a pile of sand, Sol was fairly confident he could aim straight. But then it had been a
big
pile of sand.

“Got 'im!” Maslow yelled, laughing as Rambo felled another inferior opponent. “I love that bit!”

Sol turned to look at him with perplexed curiosity.
This man, in whom he'd placed so much trust, was still a mystery to him. Sometimes he tried to act like a mentor, clumsily and insistently teaching; other times, he hardly acknowledged Sol's presence. His only pleasure seemed to be in these twentieth-century action films—cop shows and war and spy movies—which he watched whenever they stopped in some refuge that had a working webscreen. Sol thought it a strange taste for a man who did it for real.

They'd done some hand-to-hand stuff as well. Maslow knew techniques Sol had never seen: deadly things. Sol discovered that boxing was pretty limited when Maslow felled him several times without even using his hands.

But it was frustrating, all this action-man stuff. His new bodyguard hardly talked about what Sol thought they actually ought to be doing: looking for Gregor.

Maslow had last seen him outside the depot on the day he'd disappeared. Gregor had given him the scarf, the note, and the gun and had begged Maslow to protect his son. That was all Sol had managed to get out of this surly stranger. He didn't even know how the two had first met.

It was clear that Maslow didn't know where Gregor was now, and instead of trying to find him, he was intent on training Sol for something. He had asked the man a number of times how he had become indebted to Gregor, but Maslow wouldn't talk about it, and Sol got the impression that he was keeping something important from him. It was incredibly frustrating.

“Maslow?”

“Yeah?” The man kept his eyes on the screen.

“I'd like to check out some things. See if I can find Gregor. I want to…to retrace his steps the day he disappeared. Starting with the dome. Could we do that?”

Maslow grunted. His head tilted and he grimaced, as if he was unhappy with what he was thinking.

“Okay,” he said finally.

“Thanks.”

They sat watching the film for a while longer, neither speaking.

“Y'know, this guy Stallone,” Sol piped up. “He did a boxing film; it's much better than this. It's called
Rocky
. Have you seen that?”

“Ahhh, yeah. I started watching it once.” Maslow grunted. “Arty crap. Too much goddamned talking.”

 

It was Sol's thirteenth birthday, and he was big enough to fit into a safesuit. Standing in the depot's changing room, he trembled with excitement as his father outfitted him. It was against company policy to take “civilians” out onto the dome, but many of the daylighters did it. Some of the supervisors approved of their crews' tradition of showing their teenaged sons and daughters life out on the glass: it built a closer-knit team and helped to prime future recruits for a tough and badly paid career.

“Stay close to me at all times,” Gregor told him as he
pulled the legs of the suit up around Sol's thighs and waist and strapped close the harness built into the hips of the suit. “There's no wind to speak of today, but gusts can hit at any time. The glass is clear, but that just makes it slippery, so keep the rope taut, and keep the slack behind you coiled, so you don't trip over it. Got it?”

Sol nodded. Gregor helped him get his arms into the suit, pushing the material up his forearms and then shoving on the big mittens that connected with an airtight seal into the sleeves. The three layers zipped and clipped up the front on different sides, and then Gregor pulled up the hood. He switched on the heater on the air intake and checked it was charged up. Before fitting the mask, he looked into his son's eyes.

“All the guys will be watching out for you; it'll be like having thirty big brothers and sisters out there.” He grinned. “Some people get agoraphobic surrounded by all that open space, but you won't. You're like your old man. I remember my first time on the glass. It was the first time I'd seen the sky without a roof. It was…” He hesitated. “Well, you'll see.”

He clipped the mask onto the rigid front of Sol's hood, checking the smart-lens lined up with his son's eyes. The outlets for Sol's breath fed through vents to the back of his hood, to stop the water vapor from forming ice on the mask itself. Gregor gave him a thumbs-up, and Sol nodded and answered in kind. It took his father a fraction of the time to
put on his own suit, and then he checked that Sol's safety harness was attached properly to his own before they walked toward the airlock. Sol's breath quickened as the internal door closed behind them.

The air temperature dropped suddenly around them; Sol couldn't feel it, but he watched it on the readout on the inside of his mask: 10
^º
…–5
^º
…–20
^º
…–40
^º
…–60
^º
…It stopped at –73
^º
. A soft alarm chimed, and the external door opened. Even with the tinting of the smart-lens, they walked out into a world of blinding white….

 

Sol awoke from his daydream as Maslow peered around the door and waved him inside. They were in a small maintenance depot on the west side of the wall, one Sol didn't know existed. Its entrance was about five hundred meters from the West Dome Depot, where Gregor worked. Inside was a rack of safesuits, some equipment rigs, and a little-used airlock.

“The daylighters are done for the afternoon,” Maslow told him. “They'll all be heading back in. We have maybe another hour of daylight, but after that, the temperature's going to drop….”

Sol nodded. They would have to be quick. Finding a suit his size, he pulled it out and dismantled it, carefully fitting on each piece as his father had shown him. He had been out on the dome six times since then, but he still got the shivers now as he got dressed. Maslow was already
half dressed, and Sol was surprised at his practiced ease. So he had been outside before too.

“The open airlock will register on the dome-controller's board,” Maslow told him. “But they probably won't pay it much attention. With the shifts finishing up, all the airlocks will be busy. Don't use the radio unless you absolutely have to. You know the hand signals, yeah? You ready?”

Sol clipped on the mask, and checked the lens readout to see if it showed any leaks. Picking up his plastic-coated ice ax, he gave Maslow the thumbs-up. Maslow punched the access code into the airlock's oversized keypad, and the internal door slid open. On a bad day, snow would pile against the external door, and they would have had to dig their way out, but not today.

Outside, they quickly scanned around for anybody who might still be out on the glass. In their fluorescent orange suits, they would be clearly visible to anybody this side of the dome's horizon. Moving ponderously in the heavy gear, they started out for the sector that Gregor had left in such a hurry: D63 in the Third Quadrant.

There had originally been machines to clear the dome's surface, but they had lasted about thirty years, as the need for parts was overtaken by the city's hunger for dwindling resources. And so people had been sent up to take over the machines' jobs. Even with safety precautions, one or two daylighters died each year in avalanches and falls.

Looking up into the clear, darkening blue above him, Sol felt the exhilaration of being below such sheer emptiness. It was as if he could fall straight up into it, and it set his heart racing. A feathery frosting was already starting to coat the hexagonal slabs of diamond-hard concraglass, but Sol could see the city lights coming on beneath his feet. They climbed an arcing, slippery denceramic stair up the curve of the dome, then branched off to one side, swinging from one piton ring to another and clinging to hand-holds until his readout told him he was in the right place. He was already breathing hard, burdened by the weight of the suit, and his gasps were loud in his ears. Even with the variable tinting of the lens, the white was hard on his eyes.

All the daylighters' tools were made so as not to damage the concraglass's surface, but it still had a slight glaze of erosion because of its age. It was level enough here for Sol to kneel down. After scraping away at the surface coating of new ice with his ice ax, he cupped his hands around his mask and put his face to the glass, squinting at the city below.

Underneath him, most of Ash Harbor's people were going home. From this height, slightly distorted by the two half-meter-thick layers of glass, it was possible to observe the clockwise motion of the city: its streets, trams, moving bridges, slanting escalators, and counterweighted elevators all moving in a perfect cohesion that provided
power—
life
—to the city. And in the middle was the triangular building that housed the three massive turbines of the Heart Engine, which continuously charged all the other systems. But what caught his attention was directly below him, protruding into his view below the gantry grid: the Third Quadrant tower crane. The crane he had been on the day his life had started to go down the toilet, where he and his class had watched Francis Walden and that other man, Falyadi, plunge to their deaths from the giant's arm.

“Well, I'll be damned,” he muttered.

He pretended to keep looking, unsure if he wanted Maslow to know what he'd found. Standing again, he scanned around him, as if searching for clues. Beyond the edge of the dome and the precipice that dropped down the side of the mountain, there was only a white landscape, broken by the odd peak of what had once been nearby islands. Now the sea around Ash Harbor was covered in several meters of solid ice.

“Do you know what those turret things are around the edges of the cliff?” Sol asked, pointing, his voice hollow behind the mask. “They've always been covered in snow every time I've been up here.”

“Gun emplacements,” Maslow answered. “Back when this place was being built—before the weather finished off everybody outside—some of the people who didn't make the list tried to force their way in. Soldiers would cut them
down from up here. I heard that once somebody actually ran an oil tanker aground down there. After the attackers were dealt with, the ship got sliced up and recycled.”

“Do you think there's anybody else alive out there?” Sol wondered aloud.

“We lost contact with Cheyenne Mountain about twenty years ago,” Maslow said. “The last reports said there was a famine. Everybody was fighting over what was left of the food. None of the other enclaves even lasted that long. I think we're all that's left.”

“Fighting over the food.” Sol sniffed. “You'd think they'd want to put all their effort into growing more, wouldn't you?”

“That's not the way people think,” Maslow replied.

“The sun's going down. Let's get inside.”

They made their way back to the steps, and carefully descended toward the airlock with Sol leading the way.

“Well, that was a waste of time.” Sol moaned loudly.

“Maybe I've got the wrong end of the stick here. We know Dad owed someone money—”

“Cortez,” Maslow said. “Necktie Romanos works for Cortez.”

“Right. Well, maybe we should talk to Cortez, then.”

“That's looking for trouble, Sol.”

Sol turned to face him. “That's what you're here for, isn't it? To keep me safe?”

“That's why we're not going near Cortez.”

“So I just have to wait until this guy Necktie finds me, yeah? 'Cos that is what these guys do. You got any money?”

Breath hissed from Maslow's valves. “All right, we'll do it,” he snapped. “But only because this is one problem we can solve with cash. If Cortez decides you're worth more as a hostage, we're going to be in it up to our necks.”