Ian McDonald - Ares Express

“Mish, I’ve lost her. She’s got away.”

Mishcondereya swore. Apparently the only subject her gentleladies’ finishing school taught well was Cursing and Advanced Cursing.

“I’m going after her. I need pick-up,” Skerry said.

After a pause clearly meant to be significant, Mishcondereya said, “It may have escaped your attention, but they’d shoot their own shadows back here.”

“Mishcon, I need pick-up. I know we can get her, I know we can get the Catherine artifact.” She saved the Portentous Line for last, though she doubted Mishcondereya had a functioning sense of portent. “If we don’t, Harx will.”

Heavy sigh. You love it, Skerry thought. If you hadn’t become a state comedian, you would have been a rich-girl terrorist. The action, the toys, the scent of men, the tang of alfresco sex, the adventure. You live it, you love it, you think. But you would think different if you had seen two boys who loved it as much as you, and for the same reasons, earn the bitter pay-off.

“All right, I’m coming in. Give me your fix.”

Buffeted by surface winds—Harx was taking this thing low and fast—Skerry touched her throat jewel. Seconds later, the blunt nose of the sky-yacht nudged into view beneath her. It crept up on the frantically pedalled airship until half its length underhung the much larger orange bulk, like a pilot fish pacing a shark. Skerry waited for Mishcondereya to lock engines. You get one shot at this.

She picked her spot on the skin.

Never a safety net, Skerry?

Arms spread, she swallow dived into the yielding cushion of the gas bag.

“I can take her out, one shot,” Sianne Dandeever said, rubbing her still-chafed wrists. His Holiness’s rescue party could have come a little more expeditiously. She rested her hand on the heavy Sharps’ rifle’s wooden stock, casually swung the sights toward the dwindling figure of Sweetness beneath her flying wing. She badly wanted to punish someone for her humiliation. The cathedral’s aux-con was an architecturally incongruous glass teat at the apex of the pseudo-classical portico of the Pilgrim’s Steps. From here two people could command and fight the full edifice and company.

“You will do no such thing,” Devastation Harx retorted. “We might still need it, in which case, I want it somewhere I can find it, not spread all over Grand Valley.”

“Do we need it?” Sianne Dandeever asked. “And if we don’t, can I have a shot anyway?”

“That we will find out very soon,” Devastation Harx said, taking an orbital uplinker from inside his jacket. Sianne Dandeever blinked at the blasphemous machine. “Oh, for goodness sake woman, even God needs good rolling stock.” In a flicker of data and twittering, the little device reported on the state of his many fronts. In ten minutes he would be out from under this accursed roof, where he could get a once-and-for-all shot at these impudent pranksters in their airships with the partacs. Waves eight and nine were entering the upper atmosphere, the first four squadrons were down, shifted into ground combat configuration and were moving into occupation positions. The global communication network was buzzing with madness and rumour. Let it. Soon and very soon it would be silenced. The more they talked, the more they watched the pretty lights in the sky, the less they would suspect his true strategy. That was the eternal secret of all gods. Keep watching the pretty lights in the sky.

Then, one by one, he would put those pretty lights out. The infiltration of the reality shaping computers was almost complete. The simulacrum was perfect. St. Catherine herself would seem to give the command for the Artificial Intelligences to switch themselves off, then command of the multiverse would pass to its rightful users, the dirty, bustling, conniving, inquisitive, mortal humans.

“She’s getting away,” Sianne Dandeever warned.

Harx looked up from his schemes of splendour. He should know where that irritating little girl was going, in case something did go wrong with the protocols and he needed to access the original St. Catherine program. She was almost out of sight, spiralling lower and lower.

“Where are you going, you vexatious child?” Harx mused.

“Go on, your Holiness, just one shot,” Sianne Dandeever.

Then he saw the contrail of steam, the mirror steel lines, the blue and silver of a Bethlehem Ares fusion hauler.

“Of course! So loyal! Sianne, take us down.”

“Down it is.”

Never a question, never a query. He should have tried to get his hand into those thigh-hugging pants.

“We have a train to catch.”

In contrast to her departure, Taal Chordant Joy-of-May Asiim Engineer 10th’s return to Catherine of Tharsis was loud, crowded and chaotic. So many people on the bridge, all wanting her to answer their questions before they answered hers.

“What have you done to yourself?” Her old friend Miriamme Deep-Fusion’s voice cut through the babble with the one question everyone wanted answered but were too in awe of the terrible old lady to ask.

“A form of rejuvenation I would not recommend. It is most efficacious, but the price is excessive. Now, enough enough enough. I am senior here, it is you who must answer my questions,” Grandmother Taal said, glad to feel the creak and shift of hull-plates under her square-heeled boots again. “Where is everyone? Where is my son? What has happened to the train?”

A chorus of voices babeled answers. Grandmother Taal held up her hands for silence.

“Mutiny?”

The mutineers looked at each other, all except Grandfather Bedzo, deeply enmeshed in driving his train.

“For Sweetness,” Child’a’grace said.

“Hmph,” said Grandmother Taal. “Well, I suppose it’s an exceptional circumstance and my son and that Stuard could well do with a lesson in humility, but I would not condone it as a general course of action.”

Relief was general and unabashed. Into it, Child’a’grace asked, mildly, “So, where exactly is Sweetness Octave?”

Grandmother Taal craned around her to peer out of the window. She pointed.

“There, I suspect.”

Everyone turned to witness a spectacle almost certainly unique in aviation. It was like an animated lesson in marine ecology: big fish eats littler fish eats weeniest fish. Well to the rear was a massive cargo-lift airship, vast as a cloud. Ahead of it, no less small, was what could only be described as a flying cathedral, vaguely saucer-shaped with heavy Palladian pretensions, incongruously coloured earth-orange. Squeezing out from underneath the cathedral and pushing slowly ahead was a silver trout-shaped aircraft, sleek and streamlined, and in the lead, beating courageously down the sky, was the tiny delta wing of an airfoil. Everyone could see the dark speck hanging beneath it. The whole flying circus bore down on Catherine of Tharsis like muscular theology.

“That would be our Sweetness.”

Pursuit was good. Challenge was good. Danger was good. Tough flying was good. Everything was good that kept out that final image of Pharaoh and Serpio, locked together, falling through the killing air. Concentrate. Not much longer. Not much further. Line up on that great big beautiful steamy train there. A few hundred metres. Then you’ll be home. Then you’ll be safe. Then you’ll be among people who know you and your story can end and you can go back to your little cubby. Just you and Little Pretty One again.

You can’t go back, Sweetness. You’re a traingirl, you supped that truth with your mother’s milk. You can go everywhere, anywhere, all around the world, but never back. The tracks only lead forward.

She navigated in over Catherine of Tharsis . Whoever had their hand on the drive bar was good, matching her speed, compensating in an instant for her wobbles and surges as she carefully spilled lift, lining up on the back of the tender. Twenty metres, ten metres. She wove from side to side of the steam plume, checking her positioning. Up there behind her, she could feel the presence of heavy aerial machinery on the back of her neck. Ignore them. If they want to blow you away, they can do it any time. Concentrate on getting down. Down. Down…