Ian McDonald - Ares Express

Child’a’grace filled the stunned vacuum with action.

“With me, now!” she cried, leaped up from the conference table and was out through the carriage door. In a thought, Romereaux was after her, then, in order of fleetness, Thwayte Engineer, his sister Anhinga, Psalli, Ricardo and Miriamme Traction and Mercedes Deep-Fusion of the asbestos gloves and the impudent calliope.

“Quick quick quick,” Romereaux shouted, beckoning them through as Naon Engineer rose from his stupor with the terrible cry of “Mutiny!” on his lips and Sle and Rother’am at the head of the mob leaped for the hatch like hunting dogs. Romereaux slammed and dogged it in their faces. It would buy seconds, that was all. Seconds were all he needed. Tante Mercedes’s steatopygous rear was vanishing up the water tender companionway, already Sle and Rother’am were cranking away at the manual override and one of the six dogs was free. Romereaux punched his personal code into the emergency carriage release mechanism. The Engineer brothers saw what he intended and redoubled their efforts. Naon joined them, face pressed sideways into the porthole. Over the clacket of the wheels, Romereaux heard the repeated cry of “Mutiny, mutiny.” Two dogs were free, three dogs. The keypad spat out Romereaux’s authorisation with a curt “code not recognised.” Romereaux cursed exotically and reentered the code, willing his fingers to be slow, steady, patient. Four dogs free, five. So slow. The sixth and final dog was beginning to unwind. Was halfway unthreaded. Was three-quarters unthreaded.

“Code accepted,” the key pad reported. A square yellow button lit up. Romereaux hit it as the sixth and final dog hit the deck, the door scissored open, Rother’am and Sle dived and the explosive bolts in the carriage couplings blew. For an instant Rother’am and Sle hung suspended. Then it was as if they were being drawn slowly back while still in midleap as clear blue sky appeared between the carriages and the rear section of the train began to slow under its gargantuan weight.

Romereaux wiggled his fingers at the receding loyalists as Catherine of Tharsis , unencumbered, found unheard-of speeds. A last cry of “Mutiny!” penetrated the shriek of wind and steam and was gone.

Romereaux arrived on a crowded bridge. Catherine of Tharsis pounded at four hundred and twenty down the beautiful straight steel line.

“Excuse me,” he asked, “but who’s driving the train?”

“Don’t look at me,” said Thwayte, caught up in the drama of it all and now beginning to wonder just what he had done. “I’m just a kid.”

“Don’t look at me,” said his older-by-two years sister Anhinga. “Girls don’t drive trains.”

“Don’t look at us,” said the three Traction folk. “We’re Traction.”

“So who the hell is?” Romereaux asked again, nervously observing the numbers clicking up on the tacho.

A noise, like something rusted jarring free, like years of phlegm from aggregation of the bases being gullied up in one bucket-filling gob, like relief after constipation, like the screech the prematurely buried would make when the rescuers opened the coffin lid. In a shadowy corner of the bridge, an object moved. Motors whined. Grandfather Bedzo rolled out from his alcove, caked with drool and shaking with palsies. But his cyberhat glowed with puissance. He grinned toothlessly, a terrible sight, and with a thought, threw the points at Abbermeyer Switchover and took Catherine of Tharsis on to the Grand Valley mainline.

“ Tante Miriamme,” Romereaux said. “Have you got your gloves?”

“I have indeed, nevvy.” She waved them over her head.

“Then put them on and get you up there and play like buggery and let Sweetness know her family’s coming for her.”

Trainpeople have this innate sense. An evolutionary thing, really. A survival skill. Take them to a place once, and no matter how long a time until you take them back again, they can find their way round it, no problem. In the dark. In the fog in the dark. In a power-out in the fog in the dark. They get so many places, they have to remember them all, or they’d get New Merionedd mixed up with New Cosmobad, Wisdom with Lyx, Belladonna with Llangonedd, Iron Mountain with China Mountain and everyone would be hugely lost. So Sweetness convinced Pharaoh as she led him spiralling inward along the corridors and down the tunnels of the Cathedral of the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family. Maybe not convinced. Told well enough for him to follow.

“Where is it we’re going?”

“To the audience chamber. The presence room, whatever he calls it. The top of the shop.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Have you been here before?”

There being no answer to that, Pharaoh trotted behind the resolute Sweetness. Two sectors starboard, he stopped again.

“Can you smell something?”

“Like what something?”

“Sort of sweet, like chocolatey, a bit perfumey floaty butterfly-ie.”

“Floaty butterfly-ie?”

Pharaoh shrugged.

Onward. He was firmly convinced they had gone around this same orbit of corridor three times now.

“What does the lid have on it again?”

“Wings.”

“And you’re sure of that?”

Sweetness stopped abruptly. Her shallow temper flared.

“Yes, I’m sure of that and yes, I know exactly where it is and yes, I know exactly where we’re going as well. Here.”

She banged on a closed bulkhead to a radial corridor. She jumped back, startled, as the bulkhead flew up, opening on to a corridor filled from one end to the other with Ever-Circling Spiritual Family.

“Ah,” Sweetness said.

“ Ahhh! ” the Ever-Circling Family cried, threw up their hands in horror and fled as one.

“Simple,” Sweetness said, snapping her fingers with admirable nonchalance, surveying the now empty corridor. “Come on, this way.”

“I knew I could smell something,” Pharaoh said, sniffing.

Sweetness stopped at another circular door halfway down the corridor.

“In here.”

“What’s in here?”

“The way up’s in here. Child’a’grace, do you have to make a question out of everything? I got the genes, you don’t, that’s evolution. In here.” She slapped the door release with the heel of her hand. It flew up. Sweetness found herself looking in a darkness that glittered with a thousand mirrors.

“Maybe not this one.”

There was a man reflected in those mirrors, a man of distinguished silver and good personal grooming, of fine taste in tailoring with a black cane in one hand. A man who, as she watched, turned as if scenting her, all his mirror images turning as one with him. A man who was now aiming something that looked inarguably like a gun at her.

“Run!” Sweetness yelled and dived past the door, Pharaoh a step behind her, as a tremendous explosion and shattering of glass shook the corridor.

“You!”

The word hung in the electric air of the mirror maze. Eyes met in the mirror; green, grey. Then Harx reached inside his immaculate jacket, pulled out a hand-held field impeller, spun and with a terrible raven cry fired at the source of the image. A boom of exploding glass: a million minute shards rained down on Devastation Harx. In the same instant the corner of his eye saw the figure, that trainbrat, that dreadful persistent, rude little girl who would not accept her severe limitations, who would insist on trying her betters, who would absolutely not go away or take no for an answer or know when she was mastered, roll and duck for cover. He readied his gun, panting.