Fractions (62 page)

‘Back!' she gasps.

They turn and run back. The guard's footsteps echo behind them. Dee notices, out of the corner of her eye, a movement behind a thin area of the wall – not a window, but internal to the building. She runs on for a few metres and then stops and turns. The guard is just coming into view. She aims carefully at the thin patch and shoots at it. It shatters like glass and a blue, bubbling liquid floods out, slicking the floor. The guard slips on it and tumbles, then jumps up and begins tearing off his uniform and yelling for help. Dee can sense a barrier up ahead, thick and resilient – perhaps a cordon of guards; she can't be sure at this distance.

Close by there's an elliptical hole in the wall. Somebody has scrawled above it ‘FIRE EXIT?!' Dee looks at it, looks at Ax, raises her eyebrows. Ax nods.

Dee peers in. It's a dark chute, sloping sharply down and turning out of sight. She steps in, lies down on her cloak, and lets go of the top edge of the hole.

She instantly finds herself plunged downwards and whirled around what feels like an almost vertical spiral drop. ‘AAAAAHHHHH!' she observes. Her scream is quite involuntary, but it comes too late to discourage Ax, who's followed her a scant second later. His heels are perilously close to her hooded head. She hunches forward, only to see the drop as even more terrifying. Her ankles are crossed, her hands are clasping the cloak in front of her thighs. It's all she can do not to curl up into a ball. The walls of the tube are in places transparent – at some moments she sees, or thinks she sees, over the city's roofs, at others she glimpses the interiors of rooms, with the startled faces of their occupants looking straight back at her for fractions of a second. She can smell the fabric of the cloak beginning to scorch.

Her other senses are utterly confused. She retreats to the detached perspective of Sys, which is already running the first steps of the bale-out routine, getting ready for somatic systems failure. Dee has a brief, chilling image of her computer detaching itself from the remains of her animal brain and crawling out of the bloody wreckage of her skull.

Then she's sliding along more slowly, in an open space. Light shines on her closed eyelids. She opens them and finds herself still whizzing along, but decelerating…she braces her shoulders and, right on Newtonian cue, Ax's heels cannon into them. Daylight and open air, and people yelling.

Dee sprawls and stops. Everything is still spinning. She sits up and looks around. Ax is a few metres away, eyes still shut, mouth open. They're at the bottom of a gentle slope of black, vitrified material at the foot of the tower, in a plaza. Among benches and fountains and the entrances to other buildings, people are staring at her.

Just to the right of her right hand, a centimetre-wide hole appears in the black glass. Cracks radiate out from it. At the same time, she hears a soft
pock.

Another hole, closer.

‘She-
it
!'

Dee leaps up, staggers forward and grabs Ax by the ankle and drags him across the lip of the slope. He falls half a metre with a bump. He cries out and opens his eyes. Dee looks up the face of the tower, sees dark figures darting on balconies high above. She fires a couple of shots upwards, on general principle, then hauls Ax to his feet.

‘Run!'

They're both still so dizzy that dodging and weaving, and falling and rolling, come quite naturally. Within a second or two they're among the now screaming pedestrians in the plaza, though not yet out of the cone of fire from the tower-top.

Things are still going around and around. Ax is slamming into people, but continuing a pinball progress across the plaza. Dee fights her spinning senses into stability and sprints straight for an entrance-way that has an overhang. She reaches its welcome shadow and looks back. Ax, to her utter horror, has got into a fight. Three girls in secretarial gear are swiping at his head and kicking at his shins, while he butts at their midriffs and stamps at their feet and pummels their thighs.

Dee dives out of cover with a banshee howl and grabs a fistful of long blonde hair. She yanks the girl's head back, reaches into the melée with her other hand and drags Ax by the collar until he's behind her. Then with a sweep of both arms she shoves the girls together into a heap and catches up with Ax, who has very wisely chosen to run for the same overhang.

She stares down at Ax's flushed dark face.

‘Run!' she says.

‘Where?'

‘After me!'

Maps are dancing in front of her eyes. Soldier pages through the head-up and marks a route, hallucinating signposts in front of her. She runs along the steps of the building, around a corner, through a car-park, and over a railing into a noisome alleyway. Puddles splash underfoot. Ax pants along behind her.

The virtual arrowheads are pointing at a door in the wall. Dee rattles its knob. Locked. She fumbles her pistol out but Ax stays her hand. He grins at her and spins on the ball of one foot, kicking hard at the door with the other. It bangs open, showing a flight of steps. The map's arrows glow on the steps like the footprints left by some gigantic radioactive bird coming the other way. Dee glances to left and right. At the car-park end, a head dodges swiftly back.

Dee fires a shot at the corner the head has gone behind, hopeful that a flying splinter or two might discourage further peeping, and goes down the steps. Ax treads on her trailing cloak a couple of times. She tugs it up indignantly.

At the foot of twenty-five concrete steps they emerge into a huge basement area with just enough clearance for Dee's head. Dim-lit by organic noctilucence, it resembles an underground car-park, although there aren't enough vehicles in this area to justify such a use. Instead it's heaped with old machinery, coils of piping, and – to Dee's amazement – obvious modular components of spacecraft. She knows that the city's towers were partly grown from parts of the original Ship, but this confirmation is almost shocking. It's like she's arrived at the very pit of her world. From here,
there's no way down.

She hears movement at the top of the steps, and turns and sends another bullet back. It spangs and ricochets in the stairwell, most satisfactorily. Then she runs. Her instincts, and the guidance arrows, are leading her in the same direction: across the basement, towards the smell of water.

They can't run in a straight line. Their flight weaves in and out between crates and hunks of hardware whose space-junk-pitted sides are stencilled with warnings and instructions and markings – Dee notices ‘Space Merchants, Karaganda' and ‘Project Jove' and part of her mind has time to marvel at these antiquities. Behind her and Ax, among echoes of sound and the screech of electromagnetic interference, she detects pursuit. More than one person, moving with swift deliberation.

There's a line of light ahead at floor-level. The arrows that her guidance software is patching to her sight end there, flashing. (Like she wouldn't notice.) As she runs up she pings the control-systems of a wide, metal roll-up door. With much grinding and squeaking it begins to move up. After it's risen thirty centimetres, it stops. Dee bounces more short-range radar off it, to no avail.

The bead of a laser-sight appears on it. Dee drops, tripping Ax so he tumbles to a landing that's soft for him, though not for her. She rolls from under him, half-sits, and shoots back along the clearest avenue, towards some detected motion. Hastily she jams another clip in her pistol, and fires again. A flash replies and a bullet whizzes above her nose. She empties the clip with a random spray. The pursuer dodges behind a crate and Dee rolls again and crawls for the gap under the door. It's too low for her.

‘Go ahead!' she hisses to Ax. He needs no urging. He rolls under the door and leaps sideways.

She hears him yell: ‘No!' and then fall silent. A pair of mechanical feet appear at the gap, striding to the middle of the door. Metal claws reach under the door and lift. The door rolls and ravels upward like a slatted blind. Whatever is lifting the door lowers its body at the same time, between its legs. A line of dust-particles flares above her head as an industrial-strength laser beam stabs into the darkness of the basement.

Hopeless now, Dee ejects the empty clip, and inserts another that she's scrabbled out of her handbag. She's definitely running low. She turns to face her new antagonist. It's a squat, squatting robot. Its laser, protruding between its upper and lower shells, moves and ranges and fires again. There's a yell from behind her, far too close.

‘I think I've blinded the bounty-hunters,' the robot says. ‘But I think you should get out.'

Dee stares at it for a moment, and then recognises it as the robot that accompanied Wilde the previous night.

‘Oh, it's you,' she says ungraciously, and scrambles out. The robot lets the door fall with a rattling crash and, for good measure, fuses the locking-mechanism with a close-up blast. They are standing on a quay at the back and bottom of the building, overlooking a fifty-metre-wide canal between the backs of other buildings. The canal is empty except for a few long, automatic barges going about their oblivious business in a world little more demanding than the toy realities of the first AI experiments. There may have been light under the door, but that was just the contrast; it's dim down here, as it probably is even at brighter times than twilight. Ax is standing hesitantly a little distance away, keeping a suspicious eye on the robot. His clothes are torn; where the robot grabbed him, Dee guesses.

‘We're OK,' she tells him. ‘I think.'

‘I certainly mean you no harm,' says the robot. ‘I have no intention of turning you in, as I think my actions have shown.' It waves a limb, indicating a streamlined boat with a powerful outboard engine and, most welcome of all, a small but concealing cabin.

‘Come with me,' it says. ‘We have much to do.'

‘Yeah,' says Ax. He tucks his gun away inside his now ragged shirt. ‘Will you just
look
at the state of her clothes.'

 

As the boats of the litigant alliance moved away from the main canal-system and out of the human quarter into the sandflats and marshes, Tamara's boat shifted towards the front. By the time they were no longer in recognisable canals but in reed-banked streams and barely navigable ditches, she took the lead. Somewhere far in towards the centre of the city, a hovercraft roared across the flats, sending birds scrambling skyward for kilometres around. A vee-line of geese flew overhead, golden dots in the deep-blue sky.

‘The things I see when I don't have a shotgun,' Tamara sighed.

Wilde slapped at insects. ‘Why the fuck,' he demanded, ‘did we have to bring fucking
midges
across interstellar space?'

‘Ecology,' Tamara said, with a trace of smugness. She passed him a tube of insect-repellent. Wilde rubbed it on and spent the next few minutes gloating as the tiny black devils landed on his skin and then dropped off dead, straight to whatever hell awaited their evil, two-byte souls. He expounded this unorthodox theological point to Tamara at some length, making her laugh and relax.

She told him about her occupation of hunting for biomechanisms, and her political activity in the abolitionist movement. Apart from pressing her for details of the banking system and the abolitionists' actual forms of organisation, and their social objectives, he was not a bad listener. Then he lay back in the prow of the boat and flicked through Eon Talgarth's notes about Jonathan Wilde. Sometimes he scowled, more often he laughed out loud. Ethan and Tamara urged him to tell them what was funny, and he now and again did. After a time he fell silent, and sat and looked at the early pages of the file, and at the end, and then the beginning again. At last he stowed it in Tamara's pack, and sat looking away from the others, out over the damp desert, which in the sunset lay ruddy like a field of blood.

Ship City is in the tropics of New Mars. Darkness came within minutes of the sun's disappearance behind the horizon. Wilde smiled at Tamara and Ethan, and lit a cigarette.

‘It's strange,' he said, ‘being able to see in the dark.' He looked around again. ‘Shit! I can't!'

‘Shield the cigarette,' Ethan told him. ‘It's blinding you.'

‘Damn' near blinding me,' Tamara said. ‘No, no, just cup your hands around it, that's OK.'

Wilde did as he was asked, and shortly threw the butt into the water and gazed up at the stars. With the lights of the human quarter behind them and the less ordered lighting and unpredictable random flares of the Fifth Quarter not far ahead, they were less overpowering than on his first sight of them the previous night, but impressive nonetheless. He gasped at a bolide's whispering flight, blinked at the flash it made behind the western horizon.

‘The robot called something like that a “waterfall”,' he said to Ethan. ‘What does that mean?'

‘Cometary ice,' Ethan explained laconically. ‘Feeds the canals.'

‘It's a kinda slow terraforming,' Tamara added. ‘Planet's habitable, sure, but we want more water and a thicker atmosphere. Take us a couple more centuries, like, but by then it'll be as green as Earth ever was.' She paused, as though she'd got a little carried away. ‘Least, that's what Reid says.'

‘I wonder,' Wilde murmured, ‘how green Earth is now. Whatever “now” means.'

‘Ah,' said Ethan promptly. ‘I can tell you that.' He made a show of looking at his watch. Tamara and Wilde laughed, so loudly that heads turned in the single file of boats strung out behind them in the narrow waterway.

‘Nah, nah,' Ethan went on. ‘Serious. “Now” is two times. Absolute, if there is such a thing: fuck knows. This way: if'n you got a signal from the Solar system, it would've been a long time on the way. Thousands a years, millions, fuck knows. But if you went back through the Malley Mile, that's the daughter-wormhole gate, right, you'd be right back at 2094
anno domini
plus Ship-time. Six point four gigasecs, lemme see…uh, twenty-three-nineties, early twenty-four hundreds, maybe. So now is the twenty-fifth century, outside.'