Ian McDonald - Ares Express

Within the presence chamber, the wedge chair creaked, wooden billets cracked. The door slammed again.

“Let’s go!” Sweetness said, wrenching the pyx free from the altar. She held it up in her hand like a mace. She expected a glow. She expected an angelic chord. She expected a ray of light to beam through the shattered dome of the sacred place on to her face. She expected a sense of completeness, reunification with her sundered twin, of mission accomplished. What she did feel was Pharaoh’s hands plucking urgently at her feet.

“Hey, get off me, I’m coming, I’m coming…”

She looked down at the face behind the insistently clawing hands. It was not Pharaoh’s face. They were not Pharaoh’s hands. Pharaoh was on his knees on the broken glass, retching from an evident boot in the testicles.

Him.

“You, you turd!” Sweetness shouted.

Serpio.

Devastation Harx pulled the gunners away from their crank-wheels and chain feeds and Gatling sights and cast them aside like a Poor Claireen purging a stockmarket dealing pit.

“Stop it, stop it at once, buffoons, fools, po-heads, cretins. I, your Harx, command you! Cease fire! Cease fire! You are shooting at lies! Lies!”

But convincing lies. For the first moment, when the blast doors opened and he saw the things he had always dreaded, always dreamed, flocking and swooping outside the Gatling turret, his parts had shrivelled with pure, superstitious dread. In that moment, the Nagging Demon that pricks all holy men and preachers whispered, you had to do it, didn’t you, you push and push and push and in the end, you succeeded, you pissed the Panarch Himself off, and now look what you’ve done, saints and angels coming out of the sky like hailstones at a holiday barbecue. Well, I hope you’re happy, Devastation Harx. Just for the first moment. Then for the next moment, he saw his brave boys, his mail-order crusaders, meet the limitless powers of the Omnipotence with whooping determination and good marksmanship, their grim-set mouths foam-flecked with zeal. Then he had seen the white stutter of tracer pass harmlessly through the seemingly corporeal divine hosts, the cloudy wakes they left behind as they howled and loomed and Pride Demon said, Call that an effects budget? When the Seven Trumpets play sweet bebop and God the Panarchic calls out the boys, you’ll know about it.

Then Devastation Harx felt a towering rage, that the enemies against whom he pitted his every strength and resource should insult him with ghost candles and magic lantern spooks and mists of ectoplasm.

He straight-armed the shrieking gunner away from the triggers, slapped up the safeties and turned to thunder down on his faithful.

“Illusions!” he proclaimed. “Deceptions! Flim-flammery to dupe us from the real enemy! We are infiltrated, our enemy is within, in this sacred place, on our own sanctum, and in here.” He touched finger to head. Devastation Harx frowned, touched finger to forehead again. He shook something that was not lingering battle gas out of his head, swivelled his eyes upward to the main bulk of the cathedral hanging above. His mouth opened, a quiet ah went out of him.

“Did you feel that?” he asked his cowed, stoned disciples. “Did you feel that? Some…thing went out of me. Some…thing touched me.” His eyes went wide. “No! They have it! Bastards!” He raised his cane. “With me, people! They must not get away with this! We shall recapture St. Catherine.” He leaped from the gun platform and was borne out of the turret on a surge of ululating, drug-berserked believers.

Ben’s Town to Annency; Annency to Perdition Junction; Perdition Junction to Laurel Hill. Woolamagong. Serendip. Acacia Heights. Atomic Avenue. The nameboards blurred past, waiting passengers stepped back, then stepped forward to stare after the vision of blue and silver and steam that had thundered past them, drawing all their newspapers into a rattling dance in its wake. Class 88 Catherine of Tharsis broke all records for the Grand Valley mainline. The fusion djinns howled inside their tokamak bottles, the drive rods shuddered and jumped in their housings, every loose scrap of metal and under-tightened bolt rattled and hummed as the Ares Express came through. Scruffy little commuter shuttles, ill-bred schoolgirl specials, slow local stoppers bustled out of the path of the furious monster on to branch lines. Thousand car freighters and Intercity Limiteds were herded and held on sidings; even the transplanetary expresses found themselves inexcusably held at orange as the Insane Train ran every signal and flaunted every speed restriction. Central Track Control sent command after command, all ignored as Grandfather Bedzo, with a saliva-y smile, opened up the throttles and poured in the steam. In the panoramic Central Dispatching Room of the half-kilometre-high glass nail of Central’s control tower, despatchers in the ankle-length beige duster coats of Great Southern Traction debated throwing the runaway on to a long run of branch line. They ran the figures on their wrapround Track Display Visors, thought again. At its current speed, the intruder would tear through the points like a child ripping open a birthday present. A four-hundred-and-eighty-kilometre-per-hour derailment and subsequent tokamak explosion would take a ten-kilometre square section of the planet’s most densely utilised rail network out of commission for a time measured by half-lives.

Let them get where they are going in so all-fired a hurry, was the conclusion. Re-route, hold and divert and pray the Angel of Trains they don’t meet anything coming in the opposite direction. We’ll get them in the courts later.

Then, amazement in the tower of glass. The Runaway Train was slowing. Senior Signallers summoned Track Regulation Officers Grade II to confirm the information on their visors. They ran to their Dispatch Assistants levels 2 and 3 and returned with the reports from the Signal Attendants: yes, out there in the green fields of Canton Thrench, Catherine of Tharsis was coming to a halt.

“What is happening, why are we slowing?” Child’a’grace chirped as, through her boot soles, she felt the subtle shift of weight that meant that her train was losing speed. Bedzo’s face was tight with either concentration or constipation as he applied and released the brakes. The rising screech of hot brake shoe filled the driving bridge.

“What is going on?”

“Something on the track ahead,” Romereaux said, frowning, trying to read traffic information from the data-sphere.

“Another train?” Child’a’grace asked.

Catherine of Tharsis had slowed to a undignified commuter-train lope and still Bedzo applied the brakes.

“Doesn’t look like it,” Romereaux said. “Looks more like, lots of little things.”

“Little things?”

“I can’t get any detail on this effort,”

The great train had slowed to walking pace. Psalli called from the window.

“I see them, I see them!”

Her tone brought Romereaux straight to the curving glass.

“Full halt!” he yelled. Bedzo complied with a thought. Everyone on the bridge staggered as brakes bit hard, steam billowed, drive shafts flailed and kicked into reverse. Wheels screeched on steel rail, then all was quiet. Catherine of Tharsis stood panting gently on the Grand Valley up line. Facing it across a hundred empty metres was an army of robots. They were twice the height of a man and twice as broad, had four metal legs and four metal arms all of which ended in stabbing, slashing or snipping weapons. They had beaked metal insect-heads with complex metal mandibles that opened and closed and chewed in a horrid way. They glowed golden in the Grand Valley sun, their eye clusters glittered. They said, we are painless and tireless and relentless and merciless and perfectly professional about what we do. Every one of the watching faces pressed to the observation glass up on the bridge could see that very clearly.