Engine City (33 page)

“The same with Volkov’s call to his supporters to attack the Regime’s degenerate apparatus. Very convenient for us. That’s exactly what we want them to do. With the Regime’s air force in disarray and the space stations in our hands, we’ve been able to just walk in. Unopposed air and sea landings, mostly. Of course he also called on patriots to attack the aristocratic reactionary invaders, but our boys are giving them something of an education in confining their attention to easier targets. It’s not just the old guard, of course. We’ve won, but there’s no one left to surrender to us. Various units of the Regime’s forces and local militias are running around shooting at each other for tediously obscure reasons. All sorts of scores are being settled out there. Lampposts and petrol, you know the sort of thing. Very messy. But it means we’re the only force which can maintain order, so we’ll end up on top of the heap.”

“Some heap,” said Gaius. “And what about the Bright Star Cultures?”

Attulus shrugged. “The Mingulayans and the Multipliers—I gather that’s what the Spiders call themselves—are presently firmly under the guns of the Ducal Marines, though they may not realize it yet. They can’t move against us, that’s the main thing.”

“I was thinking of their main force,” said Gaius.

“Well,” said Attulus, “they evidently thought New Babylon’s Space Defense was a threat to that main force. It’s now
Illyria’s
Space Defense—which rather suggests we can handle them when they do turn up.”

“We’re not going
to fight
them?”

“Not for me to say, old chap. Political decision. Point is, we have the option.” Attulus frowned. “Same applies here, of course. Until we’re quite certain that the Spiders aren’t going to eat our brains and turn us into drooling zombies, we need to keep a very firm grip on people with baby Spiders swimming around in their blood. Without going quite as far as Volkov and his brave band of renegades, one can understand his concern about the ex-Traders and de Zama’s camarilla. Potential enemy within, and all that.”

“I don’t know about the ex-Traders,” said Gaius, “but surely de Zama and her lot are all dead under the rubble.”

“I rather think not,” said Attulus. “If they are, they’d be the first ruling clique in history to stay in their top-floor offices while expecting war within hours. We may hope so, of course, but it would be foolish to count on it.” He smiled. “Which is where you come in, Gonatus. You know your way around the city—what’s left of it. Find the de Tenebre woman and her sept. Find any Traders or senior Modern Society members that you can. Find them, and pull them in.”

“I may possibly need a revolver,” said Gaius. He looked at his feet. “A decent pair of boots would not go amiss.”

Attulus snorted. “We’re not asking you to do it on your own. We’re rounding up both categories as part of the peacemaking operation—protective custody, detention centers, fair trials, health inspections—you know the score. All you have to do is winkle out the Spider people. Plenty of backup on call, and a couple of good assistants.”

He stood up and beckoned. Gaius turned to see two junior officers of the Illyrian Army bestir themselves from a nearby table and head toward where he sat.

“John Terence and Matthew Scipion,” said Attulus, introducing them. “Sound chaps. They’ll look after you.” He stuck out his hand. “Must be off. See you around.”

The low-slung, open-topped Army vehicle careened down Astronaut Avenue, swerving in and out between abandoned cars and fallen masonry. After a certain point all the windows were shattered, their glass covering the street like ice on a refrozen lake, shards crunching under the thick tires. A few hundred meters further, and everything was covered with dust. There was black dust and there was white dust, and here and there a flash of color from something—the side of a car, a scrap of clothing, a sign—that had been momentarily sheltered from the monochrome hurricane. A little further on, the ruins started. All the buildings of the Volkov era and the Modern Regime had been blown away, leaving the granite and marble and sandstone blocks of the ancient city merely damaged.

Closer now, and everything was down. Rubble blocked the streets. People with and without equipment were already—or had been all night—hauling it off chunk by chunk, shovelful by shovelful. Black-furred flying squirrels pawed through it like demonic rescue workers. At the sound of the car, they glanced over their caped shoulders and resumed their sinister rummaging and occasional exultant caw.

Terence pulled up and turned off the engine. They got out. It was the first morning of Gaius’s new job—he had collapsed with exhaustion the previous afternoon and slept all night—and he had felt obliged to see the destruction before he settled into any kind of routine. Terence and Scipion had not queried his motive.

They ascended the rubble barrier—it was like going up a very unreliable staircase—and paused at the top. The sun was in their eyes.

“Gods above,” said Gaius.

For about a kilometer, there was not even rubble. The very stones had been pulverized to jagged lumps, fist-sized and smaller. Faint traces of radial lines indicated the direction of the blast, outward from a central crater several meters deep. A dozen or so yellow-painted ground vehicles and two green autogyros stood about at random points within the blast radius, as though they had miraculously survived it. Whatever initial impulse had taken them there had ebbed at the sight, leaving them stranded. There was simply no possibility of anything’s being alive here. Not even the carrion-eating flying squirrels were looking into it.

Gaius crunched and slithered forward down the atomic scree, occasionally stopping to peer and poke at the ground. Terence and Scipion came after him.

“What are you looking for?” Terence asked.

Gaius straightened and put the heels of his hands on the small of his back. “Spiders.”

There were no Spiders. The three men traversed the blast area in two directions and returned to the vehicle in a couple of hours. A stench had risen with the sun, but it didn’t come from the blast area. It came from the wider area around it, the next circle of hell.

“Boss,” said Scipion, after draining a water bottle, “shouldn’t we get to work?”

“That was work,” Gaius said. His back ached and his eyes stung. He was beginning to worry, belatedly, about radioactivity. He brushed his palms together briskly. “But you’re right. Let’s go and look for Spiders somewhere else.”

What constituted a safe route through the streets changed by the minute. Scipion crouched on the back seat yelling instructions with a radio-telephone at his ear and a street map in front of him, penciling updated locations of allied occupation troops, Regime loyalists, Regime defectors, Volkovist partisan bands, and gangs of youths who had gone immediately and utterly feral.

For all that, the streets outside the bomb-damaged area and the immediate rescue or recovery operations were busy and, Gaius thought, livelier than they had been before the war. Stalls had sprung up everywhere, selling food, Illyrian goods, and loot. Most businesses were open. Above all people were talking to each other, in ones and twos or in larger groups, in a way he hadn’t seen before. They talked to the troops and to the members of the less belligerent, or just temporarily inactive, militias on the corner. Every so often a flurry of shots would clear a street, and then the firefight would continue until superior forces arrived, or would die down of themselves, and people would drift back and resume their activities. Here and there Terence had to swerve or reverse rapidly out of such incidents, or away from scuffles as Illyrian soldiers broke up lynchings, or arrived too late to do more than cut down the bodies of the victims and shoot at the likely—because fleeing—perpetrators.

Eventually the car managed to fall in with a convoy of New Babylonian trucks driven by Illyrian troops and escorted by Lapithian motorcycle outriders and a clattering autogyro high overhead. The convoy took them to a newly built camp on the outskirts. Hundreds of meters square, it was surrounded by four-meter posts with barbed wire still being strung around the outside. Existing buildings had become part of the camp, and soldiers and prisoners were busy erecting prefabricated huts.

Gaius and his men showed their passes and drove in. They parked the car in a big pound and headed for the admin block. The Ducal raptor-claw crest on a sky-blue flag fluttered above it. There was a long list of names to look through, and it was extending with every courier who came in from the screening sheds. The clerks were far too busy to help, and the names they’d typed out had not gone into their long-term memories. They did not put it quite like that.

“Look for de Tenebre,” Gaius said. “Any other Trader names you recognize, sure—Rodriguez, Delibes, Bronterre. But de Tenebre is the goods.”

Scipion found a cluster of names within half an hour. “De Tenebre, P, F, C, and E,” he announced.

Gaius hid his disappointment with a pleased smile.

A clerk was able to tell them, by a quick flip through a card index, that the three people mentioned had been screened and had not yet had their health check, so they were probably in the—

“Oh, and thank
you
, gentlemen,” he said to the banging door.

A burly man with ginger hair and a stubborn scowl stood in front of a long table behind which sat medics in white coats.

“Why?” he was saying.

“There’s a big demand for blood products,” the technician said. “A lot of burns and lacerations and major trauma. Suspected radiation sickness. We need every contribution we can get.”

“Ah, I understand that,” the man said. “Unfortunately I can’t help.” He glanced around at three women on the front bench a few steps behind him. “Nor can my w . . . my wife and her friends. We’re all Traders, and we’ve all picked up some nasty bugs on our travels. Always been told not to donate.”

“I know that’s been the policy,” said the technician patiently. She glanced at the impassive Illyrian military policeman at her shoulder. “Nevertheless. This is an emergency and frankly the people down at the hospitals are not worried about malaria or odd tropical diseases. They’re
dying
down there for lack of platelets and plasma.” She licked her lips. “Come on, this is just a test. If there’s anything really nasty, we’ll pick it up. Stick out your hand. It’s just a prick in your finger.”

The man folded his arms.

“No.”

Gaius tapped his shoulder. “Esias de Tenebre?”

“Who the hells are you?”

“Gaius Gonatus, Allied Civil Assistance,” Gaius improvised smoothly. “I believe I can help you to find Lydia.”

De Tenebre’s face convulsed with consternation and rage. “I
know
where Lydia is,” he said. “She’s in the hospital. Emergency Field Hospital Two, Ward Five. The serious burns unit.” He looked away. “You can tell who she is by the name on the end of the bed.”

Gaius met his eyes. They were distressed, but calmer than his voice had sounded. “You know she’s going to be all right,” Gaius said. “And I know that’s why you don’t want to cooperate here.”

Esias tensed and looked around but it was too late. Five military policemen had already surrounded the three women, and Terence and Scipion were closing on his arms.

“Now please come with us,” said Gaius. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. Only a little prick in your finger.”

The building to which Gaius took the four prisoners had been some kind of cattle shed. It stank of herbivore shit, and the electric lamps were few and dim. Gaius dismissed the military policemen with thanks and asked the prisoners to line up against a stack of bales of hay. Under the guns of Terence and Scipion they complied. Gaius shoved a barrel against the door with his foot and sat down on it, cradling a revolver. The polygamist and his three wives were, according to their particulars in the admin files, in their early fifties, but they looked a lot younger. Gaius was not surprised.

“I and these gentlemen,” said Gaius, “have been asked by Illyrian Military Intelligence to detain people who are suspected of being infected by the Spiders. What I know, and what these gentlemen don’t, is what Spider infection does to people. Citizen Esias de Tenebre, I am about to toss a small knife on the ground in front of you. I strongly urge you not to do anything foolish with it. Instead, I would like you to demonstrate to my colleagues some of the more, ah, spectacular effects of Spider infection.”

“Sure,” said Esias, picking up the knife. He opened it and tested the blade on his thumb. Then he held up his hand and made a quick, deep slash across the palm. The welling of blood was dark and clear in the yellow light. He clenched his fingers over it, laid the knife back on the trampled straw, and walked over to the two soldiers.

“Boo!” he said, opening his hand.

Childish though the gesture was, it made them jump.

“Five little Spiders,” said Esias. He clapped his hand to his mouth, then held it out again, palm upward. “And then there were none.”

“He never cut himself,” said Terence.

“Good gods,” said Gaius. “Please repeat the demonstration, slowly.”

“Do I have to?” said Esias. “It bloody hurts.”

“Your own fault for leaving open the possibility of a trick,” said Gaius. “Do it again.”

Esias retrieved the knife and did so, right in front of Scipion and Terence. This time he didn’t close his hand.

“Satisfied?” said Gaius.

The soldiers nodded. Esias strolled back to his wives.

“How long have you had this infection?” asked Gaius.

“Ten years,” said Esias. He glanced sidelong at his wives. “The ladies, a bit less.”

“Now, if—purely hypothetically you understand—I and these gentlemen were to shoot you down where you stand, what would happen?”

Esias paled. “If you were to blow our brains out,” he said, “we’d be dead. Otherwise, we’d, well, recover. Not that I would like to try it.” His voice became more cheerful as he added, “Blood would get everywhere, you know.”

“Oh, I know,” said Gaius. “I’ve seen what happens when people are shot. Blood gets, as you say, everywhere. Especially when brains are, as you say, blown out. And we’ve seen what happens when your blood is spilt, and starts to dry. How easy would it be, do you reckon, to retrieve or confine or destroy the little Spiders that would swarm from your blood?”