Ian McDonald - Ares Express

The enchantment was dispelled by a red light pulsing in the bottom left corner of the opticon. That intermittent again. She thought up a diagnostic. Her world went out of focus.

As she suspected. The bloody thing had kicked into assembler preignition. Sixth time in as many days. Senile bunch of scrap. No way, of course, to think of an angel, a Cheraph, no less, whose physical body you inhabited more as parasite than guest. But no one could deny that after that night it had started to go quietly ga-ga. No one had explained what the hell was going on there, like no one had explained what the hell was going on that night , when all the stars started shooting at each other with lasers and all the viewing panels had sealed up tight and somewhere inside her a nasty little voice had said, there’s stuff going on here they don’t want you to see, stuff that might, just might get you killed, Lutra Blaine.

Machines. The way they should do it: either fix the stupid machine so you don’t need any people so they can shoot away to their hearts’ content, or you scrap SERAPAMOUN and make it all people. But three; one angel, one girl and one pervo, is sure-as-eggs-is-eggs grief.

Pain in the hole. When it kicked off you had to go down there and shut the bloody thing down manually before it went into full Generation One assembler breeding. It was only a one-touch panel, but it was picking that panel out of a grid twenty by twenty all the colours of the rainbow. First time she’d made it with 007 seconds to spare. Once the processor halls started filling with assemblers, all hungry for moonrock to turn into cybersoldier, it took three different codewords from three separate Anarchs to put the system back into Condition Mauve.

“Tarou, he’s kicking off again,” she said more in hope than confidence. The first three times he’d told her she had to do it because she needed to know what to do in an emergency, the fourth time she realised that he was saying that because he hadn’t Idea One about how anything in the battle station worked.

Sort it yourself.

She’d worked out a way of negotiating Terror’s warren of tunnels, push with the hands in a long, gentle incline toward a point on the opposite wall way down the tube, spin one eighty halfway down so that she met the oncoming rock hands and face forward, ready for another long shallow swallow-dive. As she zigzagged toward the main soul-sphere in the zero-gee hollow at the core of the satellite where the heart of SERAPAMOUN depended, the thought niggled her, as it had each time before when the intermittent kicked off, that she should probably tell someone about this.

Nah (as she jack-knifed from the Equatorial One into Six O’Clock Diagonal). They didn’t pay her enough for responsibility.

One swoop past the intersection, Taroudant had left one of his tokens of intent. Grimacing, Lutra squeezed herself past the slowly revolving glob of milky jizzum.

“This wasn’t in my job description, man!”

This time, not even a far distant snicker, reverberating through the tunnel system. The wads she could cope with, just. The lurkings, the stealth approaches, the sudden shock of a hand slipped into her pants, the clutch of a (small) breast: not even a job creation scheme cosmonaut should have to tolerate that. And she never saw him coming. He could move fast and silent as a shadow in those endless corridors.

Creep.

As her hands touched gritstone for the next fist-off, a peculiar tremor ran through her palms. She seized a rung, stayed her flight. Fingertips told her unprecedented things were stirring within the pumice. What; her one-hour prelaunch neuro-induction course had not covered. Had covered very little, except how not to depressurise the station, and if in doubt, refer upward. She changed course at the next node, upward rather than inward, following the tremble she could now feel in the air around her to the nearest processor hall. Her arms cleared a swathe through a flock of foam styrene food trays, still sticky with sambhar sauce and curry ketchup, the detritus of Taroudant’s solitary dinners; she came in for a landing on the crystal porthole of the Valhalla 3 hall. Squinting down between her feet she could see at once through the hypercold the wasp-striped feed hoppers raised from their rest positions, pressed against raw rock, guzzling greedily. Shadows in the frosted diamond casting chambers. She bent closer, squinted. Steel bones and beaks. As she watched, swarms of assembler drones wove wires and smart-carbon sinews around the naked skeletons.

“Shit shit shit shit shit,” said Lutra Blaine. There was no avoiding having to tell someone now. She kicked off.

Something snagged the waistband of her pants.

“Leave it out, man!” she yelled at Taroudant. “This is serious, SERAPAMOUN’s lost it big time, the whole place is going monkeyshit.”

The fingers did not let go. The other hand seized a fistful of work shirt.

“Tarou…”

She slapped behind her, yelped. The back of her knuckles had connected with something harder by far than barely-post-adolescent flesh.

A third hand snagged her right ankle.

She began a scream. A fourth hand ended it, fingers clapped around her open mouth. Six fingers of articulated stone. Lutra Blaine kicked with her free leg, struck out with her hands. Stone arms thrust from the tunnel walls to seize and pin them. Held immobile, Lutra Blaine could only watch the opposite side of the corridor unfold like an insect’s maw into an arsenal of graspers, blades, buzz-saws. A swift, sure pass of the scalpel opened her up from pubis to sternum. Rectractors peeled back flesh and bone as the robot mandibles proceeded to patiently disembowel her.

For three days Kid Pharaoh rode the cow-catcher of Grand Trunk Rapido Hep Badda , wide-eyed and hallucinating with speed and hunger.

In Xipotle he had jumped from the steps of the rickety-clickety stopper service across the sidings toward the gleaming behemoth of the big express. He had rolled under the grazer wagons, fragrant bovine piss leaking through the wooden slats as he pressed himself close to the track ballast, waiting for the Traction people to finish their inspection. As the boarding gantries retracted, he made his low, darting run and scramble up the slope of the cow-catcher. As Sweetness Asiim Engineer 12th had promised, he was invisible. His heart had bounded as the whistles blew and the drive shafts exploded in insane gouts of steam and the wheels fought for grip on the smooth steel. His fingers tightened their grip. Hep Badda gathered speed and swung out on to the Grand Valley mainline. On the upslope to midnight the sense of speed, of potential, of fast movement through a dimensionless, unguessed-at void thrilled him, on the downside the click of the joints and the brisk, muscular rhythm of the pistons began to hypnotise him. Pharaoh just, just , caught himself nodding off. Guillotining death winked in the moonslight; just, just , he pulled back. After that, he lashed himself to the cow-catcher irons with his belt and strips torn from his short sleeves. Crucified, he rode the steel rails. His numb, sun-scarred eyes were focused on those twin tracks of steel, forever reeling in beneath his crossed feet but never growing one centimetre shorter, always always reaching all the way to the horizon. The big luxury express had driven him against the wind so long and so hard he felt it was blowing straight through him, making a calliope of his rib cage, his skull transparent, a bowlful of gales. Wind madness.

Three days he rode thus, between starvation and velocity, mania and enlightenment, the cold steel rail and aspiration. Out of his head. Held together by strips and straps. He would have become another cheap martyr to the rails had not the sudden shock of a something jolted him back to his claw-hold on the cow-catcher. A shift of gravity, a change of pressure, a new tone in the mantra of the wheels; something . He opened his eyes and let out a rending shriek as tracks, train, passengers and Pharaoh perched on the very prow of it all were swallowed by the gaping demon-mouth of the mainline approach to Belladonna, mightiest and least obtrusive of cities. Pharaoh howled as Hep Badda plunged down into darkness, the twin beams of the head lanterns stabbing out on either side of him. Down down down. Signal lights and speed boards loomed at Pharaoh, switchovers glinted silver, hinting at strange other ways down darkly secret side tunnels. Pharaoh became conscious of other levels above and below that interpenetrated his space. Gleams of riding lights, echoes of whistles from high overhead, sudden gasps of steam wisping out of a side tunnel; on one occasion, the lights of carriage windows glimpsed through gaps in the track beneath his feet, other journeys speeding down there in the deeper dark.