Smallworld (18 page)

Through the net curtains and the gold-plated glass, Armitage’s confederates could be seen assembling a massive device resembling a set of basketball hoops gradually reducing in size, levelled at the side of the Penitentiary like a gun. From positions of concealment behind armchairs, dressers, and cabinets, the Reborn-in-Jesus children observed without being observed.

“Prisoners,” said Unity, “don’t pay tax. They are not interested in Mr. Trapp for his money. As far as they know, he’s earned no money since being incarcerated.”

Apostle, on the other side of the Best Parlour, was rummaging in the King Charles III Ikea Armoire. “I can’t find old man Allion’s handgun. I could swear papa kept it in here.”

“Keep your nose out of such matters. That piece’s not been fired in close on nine kilodia. It’ll more like cook up in your hand. Besides, it’s only a cavitating-round rail pistol, practically an antique. Armitage’s men will have better guns than that, and know how to use them; and they’re probably wearing all sorts of armour.”

Apostle sulked. “We’ve only seen one gun.”

“Uncle Anchorite says, never assume what you’ve seen is all your enemy has, and never assume your enemy has what you think you’ve seen.”

Heads around the room all nodded solemnly. Uncle Anchorite was always right.

“So what do you suggest?” Apostle held up a carpet beater sardonically. “I could beat the dustmites out of ‘em.”

“First off, we’ve got to get the young uns out of here.”

“But we’ve got to go past their ship to get to the South End Construction—”

“You’re not going there. You’re going out to Dispater Crater.”

“Why is it
me
doing it? And why there? It’s an empty dust bowl.”

“Because I trust you to do it. And because it
is
an empty dust bowl. Mom and Pop never filled in Dispater, though they could have made a hectare field out of it. And the Devil’s been seen there. And have we seen any ship leave Ararat in the last five decadia?”

Beguiled’s eyes widened. “You think Uncle Anchorite’s still
here
?”

“You know as well as I do he doesn’t really live in that damn cave. It’s empty nine times out of ten. And there’s no back entrance out of it either. It’s a decoy to prove his hermit affidavits. I suspect Uncle Anchorite has a large and spacious abode elsewhere on this planet. The surface gravity here on Ararat might be one half Old Earth normal, but only four hundred metres down, it’s Old Earth standard. And those prospectors who met with that unhappy accident a couple years back sent a drilling drone down there and reported an oxy/nitro atmosphere.”

Day-of-Creation was spellbound. “You think he lives down
there?
”

“I’m sure of it. It’s his planet-sized Panic Cellar. And I’m equally sure there’ s a tunnel coming up from there to Dispater. All you have to do is look for it with one of those densitometers the rockhounds left behind in their haste to be elsewhere.”

“Whilst you’ll be doing what?”

Mr. Aidid answered the question. Though a small, physically unprepossessing man, his jaw was set as determinedly as if he had been disputing a Super Tax rebate. “We will be using your family communications array to launch an emergency message missile to Celadon loaded with a Code Grey.”

“What’s a Code Grey?”

“An encrypted all-points SOS to all Revenue vessels in the Celadon system,” said Aidid. “I have reason to believe there are two, one of which is being operated by the Special Revenue Service.”

“I see,” said Apostle.

“They could be here,” said Aidid, “within days.”

“Pardon my lack of enthusiasm,” said Apostle. “Also, Armitage’s men have cut the link between here and the comms array. Anyone making a call would have to go outside and climb right up the comms tower to do it. How are you going to do that under the eyes of a ship full of armed men?”

“We will have a diversion,” said Unity.

“What sort of diversion?”

Unity smiled and produced old man Allion’s handgun. All twelve of its barrels were loaded.

The weapon, Unity knew, was only accurate up to a hundred metres. The old Arkarch had intended it to be used for crowd control; it could cough out a cloud of ferrous metal swarf thick enough to pick a man’s flesh from his bones, but that cloud became random shrapnel beyond whites-of-eyes distance. For this reason, Unity was crawling on her knees and elbows, trying to get as close to the taxmen as possible.

If I took only
one
out—that would even the odds… if I took out Armitage, the leader…

Yet she knew in her inmost heart that she might not hit Armitage, even with the nightmarish weapon she was holding, and that even if she did, Armitage might be wearing some manner of protective clothing. And even if she hit and killed Armitage, if they had one armed man left, he would still be the equal of whole of the rest of Third Landing. And how would she get away, considering they had a surface rover, and almost certainly better weapons than hers, that might be able to pick her off at ten times the range her petty little paintstripper was accurate at?

The rover was between her and them, parked up by the goat track gate on six huge wire tyres, metres from the waters of the Pond. The goat gate had been left open. Goats were ambling boldly in and out.

Surface rovers were, unfortunately, made to be resistant to micrometeroids—and hence also to gunfire—in a way that people were not. Even though this one was operating in an atmosphere, the tyres showed it had vacuum capability. The gun might not be able to damage it irreparably.

However, there was one thing a farm girl with gravity-made muscles could do to a piece of equipment designed to be used on airless worlds with surfaces dry as dust. Unseen from the Penitentiary, she rose from concealment, walked up to the back of the Rover, positioned herself under its back bumper and, biceps and quadriceps straining, lifted it clear of the ground. Then, walking her hands slowly up its belly, she gave it one final shove and watched it topple into the deep waters of the Pond with a crash that sounded the way she imagined thunderous divine retribution should. She hoped it hadn’t cracked the Pond’s waterproof lining.

Then she was gone, running for her life, the handgun forgotten, bellyflopping into the crops. Almost certainly, though, they would be able to see her on infrared. They were very well-equipped. She jumped back up and continued running, ducking behind a tractor. There was a bright flash like a ship going into FTL, and a cloud of metal droplets stung her cheek. They were shooting at her. Looking behind, she zigzagged to keep the tractor between her and them. The Ten-North Drain was only a few metres away; it had thick concrete banks, and would surely mask her IR signature.

And then, in a moment, it was all over. Her frantic stumbling through the potato field had been far slower than the stealthy running of one of Mr. Armitage’s men down the Ninety-East track. He also had gravity-made muscles, and he was also carrying a gun. An infantry weapon, of the sort designed to kill people riding
inside
heavy armoured vehicles. The man had an expression of detached professionalism that gave her little comfort.

Then, suddenly, the man fell over onto the packed earth, his gun not even going off. Unity walked forward, examining the body in wonder; not a mark appeared on it. Surely a wound would have bled? With the professional eye of one who had seen many people who had died by violence, she turned the body over and there, two fingers beneath the nipple, found the tiny wound she’d suspected. It probably went all the way through the chest from front to back. The wound had not bled out because heart shots didn’t.

She looked up at the surrounding crops. Incautious laser fire had now set a hectare or more alight. That would play havoc with the world’s oxygen resources. Papa would have to buy in more. Still, the smoke and flames, combined with Ararat’s ten-metre horizon, would prevent the rest of Armitage’s men from shooting at her.

“So,” she said in a loud, clear voice, “you
are
still here after all. Thank you, and please look after my brothers and sisters.”

Wind rustled the potato stalks in answer. But of course, there was very little wind on Ararat.

Up on the comms tower, Mr. Aidid clung to the maintenance ladder trying to remain as motionless as a bittern in reeds, feeling as obvious as an elephant in a sauna. Mr. Armitage’s men were running, shouting, firing far below. He had to fight both his fear of getting shot if he moved and his fear of falling from his perch if he got shot. On Ararat, unfortunately, twenty metres above the ground felt closer to two hundred; the world’s curvature was visible even from ground level, and up here it seemed like he was perched on the side of the Quito beanstalk looking a hundred miles down on South America.

He had been made to memorize the algorithm for sending out Code Grey as a neophyte Collector; it came back to him easily, though the unfamiliar controls for Ararat’s emergency FTL messaging system were more difficult. If only he could remember how to call up the user manual on a separate screen…

He was fairly sure he had disabled sound, and the screen brightness was turned down as far as it could be without the display becoming unreadable. Whatever he did up here would be as unobtrusive as possible. The sound of ionized air crackling far below, the smell of burning vegetation, and the stink of pond-bottom muck bubbling to the surface as the rover sank, all rose up to him. Surely everyone on the ground below was too busy, too concerned with finding places to go and people to shoot, to worry about seeing and shooting him?

Only one more sequence, and the Mayday missile would pop out of its housing and begin to winch itself up the tower to take-off height. They would surely notice
that.
He had to be off the tower before then; not just for personal safety, but also to make sure Armitage and his crew still thought all the adults on Ararat were still locked in the Panic Cellar. They might not have recognized Unity. She had tied her hair back and put on a pair of her brother’s overalls, and many of them had only ever seen her from a distance.

He set up the Mayday missile launch as a one-time job in the tower’s schedule, closed the maintenance hatch gingerly, and locked it. Then a voice from the ground below froze him like a low-fee traveller.

“BEY, IS THAT YOU UP THERE ON THE TOWER?”

Mr. Aidid had no choice but to nod and wave.

“WELL, SHINE A LIGHT ON WHOEVER JUST TRASHED OUR ROVER AND TAKE THEM DOWN ONE KNEECAP AT A TIME.”

Mr. Aidid nodded and waved again, circled the tower out of sight, and slid down the ladder at a speed that burned his fingers. By the time he heard someone else yell “THAT’S NOT ME UP THE TOWER, BOSS,” he was running through the line of buildings and away.

No paths led to Dispater Crater. It was surrounded by fields of two-metre-tall potatoes of a particularly pungent pink skinned Bolivian variety. The crater itself was both larger and deeper than it once had been. Apostle remembered it from his childhood as a classic lenticular meteorite impact crater, surrounded by rays of bright ejecta. Now, it was a shell hole. Something had once come out of that crater, Apostle knew—something that arose whenever external forces threatened the peace of Ararat, which was to say, the Anchorite’s peace. Farming families the hermit could stomach, but when prospectors had come here and threatened to remove the gravitational kernel of the planet, he had sent his Devil out to do damage. The Devil had done battle here with the prospectors, and one or the other party had unleashed forces that had torn this great hole in the earth.

The Devil was nowhere in evidence now. The density scanner, however, when set to differentiate between air and solid matter, showed a set of promisingly regular caves beneath the surface. There was little clue, however, as to how the caves could be reached. Was there some sort of door?

Guessing that anything built of alloys transported across space as payload would be less dense than the surrounding rock, he set the density threshold to two tonnes per cubic metre, and was rewarded with a precise three-dimensional diagram of a door assembly hidden in the grass at the very base of the crater. He bent down to dig in the thin soil with his hand. The marram grass was sharp, and its roots held the earth together like solid rock. He sliced into it with a carving knife he had liberated from the kitchen when Unity had not been looking. The grass came away in clumps, revealing a dull sheen of metal.

“
How much longer we got to stay here?
,” whispered Measure-of-Barley from a prone position in the potato.
“My nose tickles. I think I got to sneeze.”

“I
think
I
got to
pee.”
This raised a snigger, and started a game of bodily function oneupmanship while Apostle excavated all around the circular object which was plainly a pressure door. On the pressure door were the words:

He suddenly noticed an emerald green beetle buzzing round his head in frantic random hyperbolae.

“
Uncle Anchorite?”
he said.

“I
got to give birth to the
Antichrist
—”

The bettle zeroed in on his ear and flew right in. He almost panicked and attempted to fish it out; it crawled around the inside of his otic canal, squeaking in a tickly, buzzing soprano:

“
DON’T TOUCH THAT DOOR! DON’T TOUCH THAT DOOR! DON’T TOUCH IT!”

He leapt back from the door in surprise. The insect stayed with him.

“Uncle Anchorite?”

“
GOOD LAD. I ADDED A FEW SURPRISES SINCE THE LAST TIME SOMEONE TRIED TO BREAK IN. NOW LEAVE THE DOOR AS IT IS AND CRAWL ON ALL FOURS UP THE TRACTOR TRACK BETWEEN THE ROWS OF SPUD IN FRONT OF YOU. ON NO ACCOUNT REMOVE THE BEETLE FROM YOUR EAR.”

“I
got to do
five babies
and a
Nabortion.
”

He crawled up the row for several yards before realizing a vital fact. “This track ain’t real. Our tractor don’t make these tracks.”