Ian McDonald - Ares Express

“The mission is a complete and unqualified lemon,” Seskinore said ringingly. His fancies of summer seasons, charabanc picnics, celebrity bingo, maybe even once again doing the cruise trains, had evaporated like the cloud saints and angels. He was now and forever an unfunny comic with weak material in a too-small suit.

“No it isn’t!” Skerry roared on the comline. “Get Mishcon in here, I’m going after the girl.”

“Such a pro,” Weill said, admiringly.

There comes a time in running, Sweetness discovered, when it is very easy to forget just why you are running, where to and who from. It is just running, pure and purposeless and absolutely chemical, and therefore very very silly and very very dangerous. She willed herself to stop, think, think girl. Think. Down and out, he had said. Back to the aperture. Aperture. Where had that been? Where was she now? Sweetness looked around for landmarks. Few and featureless in these circular corridors. Some cathedral this. No shrines of the saints, no centavo-a-candle angelic light-’em-ups. No swinging censers, no hand-hammered carillons, no statues with scary eyes that followed you around the place, suspicious of sin. No bells, few smells now that that weird perfume Pharaoh had complained about seemed to have dispersed. Not even piles of leaflets or self-sew purple habit kits or whatever mail-order paraphernalia the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family needed to conduct its business with God. The single piece of religious engineering she’d come across she’d climbed all over with her size sevens. She’d seen more spiritual tat in an arcade game.

Refreshed by her brief exercise in cynicism, Sweetness peered at the outer corridor wall. It sloped very slightly inward from top to bottom. Southern hemisphere. Any down ramp around her would do. She slipped back into running mode. Anything that got in her way, stuck a face round a corner, looked vaguely in her direction, she roared at. The things fled, shrieking thinly. There was obviously very much more going on here than she knew about; the angel-thing she had glimpsed through the shattered dome, the seeming plague of mass hysteria, the fit girl in the green leotard. All of them were up there, behind her somewhere, with the big hard woman and Pharaoh and that Serpio, and, ultimately, Harx himself. Don’t think about it, Sweetness Octave. You’ve got what you came for. You get in, you get it, you get out. The rest will sort itself.

Her traingirl sense stopped her in midstride. Here. She skipped back a step. The tunnel looked the same as all the others in this forsaken burg, but ripples in her water insisted: here, yes, really. She rounded a dog’s leg and saw sky. A lot of sky. Into which she was meant to jump with little more than her trust in the home-brew parafoil on her back. And she had done the Point of Worst Personal Threat bit. The Feisty and Resourceful (But Cute With It) Heroine was into narrative terra incognita . She edged up to the lip. Crosswinds buffeted her; the cathedral started and swayed as if taking evasive action. She could still hear gunfire from overhead. She crept forward, took a peek at the ground. Seen worse. Risked higher. Still far enough and hard enough to kill you dead dead dead.

“Why is there never a Plan B?” she pleaded with the Laws of Universal Narratology as she secured the Catherine bottle in a breast pocket of her track jacket and braced herself against the side. Wind whipped her hair into her eyes. She tried to comb the greasy, stinky, sticky stuff out of her eyes, lost her balance as the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family seemed to drop out from underneath her and fell into the void.

“Aaaagh!” she cried, staring at a plan view of the undulating drumlin country of Canton Thrench. Then her hands found the rip cord, thirty square metres unfolded above her and she was jerked up into the air. “Oooh,” said Sweetness Asiim Engineer, flying. Pharaoh had given her verbal instructions in the control of the parafoil but they had been strictly just-in-case. Sweetness shifted her weight in the harness, pulled on the guys to scoop air into the left winglet and went spiralling up the side of the cathedral.

The sound of gunfire grew louder and closer. Maybe not that way.

She spilled lift, slid downward and forward. She slid out from underneath the belly of the cathedral into clear air. Grand Valley opened before her.

“Weee!” she whooped. Beneath her feet the Grand Valley trunk line was four streaks of silver meeting in a wink of light at the vanishing point. There was a loco on those tracks. A deadheader, no train, but putting out a lot of steam. Someone was really whipping the tokamaks down there. The funnel configuration identified it as a Class 88. Black and silver livery, Bethlehem Ares. Sweetness peered closer. Those patterns on the roof, and that finial on the tender: a roaring Iron Lion? And, at the limits of vision, covering the boiler cap with her wings, was that a figurehead of a silver angel, proud-breasted?

“Pharaoh, look, look, it’s Catherine of Tharsis , I know it, I’d know that old train anywhere, we’re safe!”

Pharaoh. What had happened to him? She scooped deeply into the wind, bought altitude to rise level with the hole in the hull At the outward edge of her turn, she had seen other aircraft in full pursuit of Harx; one a small, minnow-like racing yacht, the other a big grampus, a heavy lifter. They seemed to be occupying the full attention of the gunners who were spraying black arcs of tracer indiscriminately toward them.

Pharaoh was standing in the gaping rent, looking down at the ground beneath him, fingering his harness. As Sweetness swooped past him, he waved.

“Pharaoh, they’ve come back for me!” she shouted. “ Catherine of Tharsis . I knew they wouldn’t give me up. They’re down there, we’re safe! Come on!”

Hand on rip-cord, Pharaoh stepped into the air. In the same instant, a dark mass leaped from the shadows in the corridor and seized him around the waist. Serpio. The airfoil opened but the combined weight of two bodies was too much for Vertical Boy engineering. Air boomed, seams tore, the wing folded up in the middle, failed. Locked together in a final, ludicrous embrace, Serpio and Pharaoh plunged down in a fluttering, tearing death spiral to the meadowlands of Thrench below.

Skerry clung to the edge of the punctured corridor, riven with sick doubts. Seconds before, she had seen the two young men fight and fall to their deaths. No purpose, no logic, no great cause served, no noble sacrifice. Just the momentary blindness of aggression. Boys and their competition. Fight, and fight to the death.

Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.

They would still be falling.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. How we laughed.

“Bastards!” she suddenly swore, kicking and punching at the jagged exposed metal in the hope it would tear and hurt her. The soft airframe aluminium and plastic bent under her hard hands and feet. “Bastards bastards bastards!”

She was Skerry Scanland Ghalgorm. She could flip and swing and juggle. She could walk tightrope and walk on her hands and walk over fire. She could swing trapeze and sway-pole and do rope tricks that would make your mouth hang open in amazement. She could put both legs behind her neck. She was an entertainer. A provider of simple spectacle and wonder; a Good Night Out. She was not a secret government agent. She was not a Synodical warrior. She did kids’ parties. The Anarchs had no place, no place at all, asking her to run the End of the World, fight people, watch people fall to their deaths.

But what of the show, Skerry Scanland Ghalgorm? Always, the show. She took a deep centring breath and called Mishcondereya on the bindi-mike.