Ian McDonald - Ares Express

“Okay,” Little Pretty One said. “Okay. You want me to do something. Watch this. You won’t see this again in a hurry.”

On cue, the earth shook again. Not a shiver, nor a side-of-beef-toppling quiver, but a sustained quake that made Sweetness glance up, suddenly alarmed by the thousands of tons of metal over her head. Out at the party, people reached for anchorholds, failing those, each other. Sweetness remembered some School of the Air bone-slug piece about how, unlike Mother-world, this world was cold-hearted and had not stirred since the fires that built Olympus a billion years ago. She was about to protest the geophysical impossibility until Little Pretty One nudged her and said, “Look.”

The light play between heaven and earth had become a battle. Rapiers of lilac and blue from above clashed with sabres of slashing scarlet stabbing upward and were parried. Blades and guillotines of light struck and shattered; ball lightnings arced fizzing through the air; pyrotechnics met and mutually annihilated in cascades of sparks. It would have been pure fiesta but for the vibration. Sweetness could feel the earth groan in her teeth. Bishop of Alves ’s every bolt and rivet rattled. Rust flakes snowed down on her hair. Dust was sprung from the grass and spun away into scampering devils. Sweetness put out a hand to steady herself and yipped. Her second electric shock that day. The steelwork hummed with static.

“I couldn’t really recommend staying here,” Little Pretty One said. In illustration, a fat blue spark dropped from axle housing to wheel. Little Pretty One and Sweetness skipped out from her hole like a rabbit. Bishop of Alves came alive with lightning.

Party was over. The son et lumière had been entertaining, but everyone was afraid now. Here were forces beyond their reckoning. Engineers’ hair stood out from their heads; their clothes ballooned away from their bodies. The battle in the jungle was now a blinding cylinder of light, earthy crimsons and heavenly lilacs swirled together like a cosmic fool pudding. Trainfolk watched, eyes shaded by hands. Sweetness and Little Pretty One stood gobemouche . For the lilac was winning. The crimson was turned back on itself, confused and confounded and pressed down until it formed a boiling line of scarlet interrupted by the silhouettes of the fantastic jungle plants. End game. The whirling cylinder of light stretched to a column, to a single sunbright beam. The earth spasmed. People staggered. Spits tipped, a beer fermentory split, spilling its heady cargo around spectators’ feet. The party was ruined. No one noticed. Again, the earth shook, throwing up cataracts of dirt which were sucked into the vortex of light. Electricity cracked continuously between the apex of the hurricane and the insulating plastic forest. Derricks fell in showers of sparks, windmills detonated, crazy sails spinning as they blazed, severed creeper-pipes thrashed like beheaded snakes, spraying jets of vapour. It was most spectacular. A third time the earth heaved, hard enough to imagine the end of the world. Sweetness and Little Pretty One clutched each other. There was a cry, long and wailing and terrible, a voice, but none any present had ever dreamed of. The cry was in their heads and it went on and on and on and on and the earth danced like a poison-maddened mongoose and everyone decided they really wanted it ended now before things went wrong that could not be put right again, even by divine energies, and just as they were certain, absolutely certain that it never would and it was all over for everyone, it did.

The earth erupted in a stupendous gout of soil and plastic chaff like a hard-pulled tooth. The unseen battler flew clear. The trainpeople saw a soft-edged cube, blue and orange tiger-striped, hang in the shaft of light. The bulk of the hovering ROTECH device played tricks with its dimensions; the newcomer was the size of a Class 15 freight hauler. A fall of red dust and coloured confetti spattered the onlookers. Sweetness’s hair was a party of rust flakes, plastic spangles and red ochre. The quaking settled and ceased. The cube started to spin, faster, faster until it was a blur. And it seemed to be shrinking, as if the intense violet exerted an irresistible pressure inward.

It all ended suddenly and spectacularly. With an echoing boom of inrushing air, the cube imploded into a black dot and vanished. The beam of killing light exploded outward, engulfing the spectators in momentary blindness. In the same instant they heard a rushing mighty wind and a voice spoke in every head: This unit was defective. It has been scrapped.

An orph , Sweetness breathed to herself in the eye-blinking, carpet-patterned after-dazzle. Every child knew the hagiography of the machines that built the world before their fourth birthdays: most of the orphs had returned to heaven after the manforming, but some had refused the summons of St. Catherine and remained, buried deep in the ground, pumping out humus and microbacteria and going ever so slowly insane.

This unit was defective. It has been scrapped .

As she repeated the doom, her vision returned. Heaven-machine, orph, plastic other-world place, tracks, Oxus plains, all were gone. The twin queues of trains faced each other across two kilometres of bare earth.

“Wow,” Sweetness said. “That was a blast.”

What did I tell you ? Little Pretty One skull-whispered as she slipped back inside her host.

Unsure of exactly what they had witnessed, the people stood staring at the stripped earth. All, but one. The unmistakable prickle of alien eyes on back of neck alerted Sweetness. She turned to see who was impudent enough to seek her out with eyes, and give him a gobful of her best disdain if it was Romereaux. The victim was a short skinny Waymender boy, easy to recognise by his flat, inbred nose. One eye was a milky film, the other stared shamelessly at her hip.

Sweetness put her hands on her hips and leaned back, as she had seen the heroine do in Feisty Grrrl comic.

“Like it, then?”

The kid frowned.

“What’s that hanging off your hip?”

His name was Serpio and Sweetness saw in the dawn with him, tailbones chilled and alert against the cold iron of a number five driving wheel. With the dawn the tracksters went out. Hours of talk had left Sweetness post-conversational, ravenous and slightly high; a nudge in the ribs poked her back into reality.

“Look. See?”

It was a sight too splendid to be kept only for the unpopulated dawn hours. The big Waymender train was a caterpillar of windowless service cars, yellow and green, bearing the red globe-and-rails clan colophon. At the touch of sun the cars opened like yawns. Ramps crept forward, tested the temperature of the ground, settled. In the shadows, motors trembled, big machinery woke. With a gleeful shout, the survey buggies leaped into the high plain tallgrass. Their riders were keen-faced, clench-teethed teens. They wore goggles and mouth-scarves. They arrowed out across the pampas drawing tails of rising dust. Ranging lasers flickered mensurations, theodolite mirrors heliographed responses. Next, unfolding like thermophilic insects, the levellers stepped from their cocoons. Clawed feet shook the morning dew from the grass blades. Piggy-backed jockeys pulled levers. Long orang-arms, shovel-handed, scooped and shifted soil. Wheel-heeled graders ponderously descended their ramps, stomped the soil into submission. Surveyors darted around the heavy shanks of the big earth-movers. Watching them, Sweetness wished more than any wish that at that moment she was a badmaash Waymender and not an exalted Asiim Engineer. She wanted scuffed work boots and cut-off T-shirts and heavy gauntlets. She wanted dusty goggles and headscarves that waved their tassels in the dawn wind. She wanted to twist handles and pull levers and have machinery—any machinery—do her bidding. She wanted not to have Narob Stuard approaching over the close horizon in his wedding shirt and hat and vest with the dollar bills pinned all over it.