Ian McDonald - Ares Express

Such talk clears bridges. Ricardo and Thwayte pulled Bedzo plug-free from the cyberhat and wheeled the comatose old gent to the escape hatch. Child’a’grace and Miriamme Traction scooped up Grandmother Taal, who was for staying with her wayward granddaughter. Romereaux was last to clear the battle zone. He looked back, as he knew he must, as Sweetness hoped he would.

“What about you?”

“I’ll be all right,” Sweetness said. The door sealed. She glanced up at the thumb-nail monitors. She saw Romereaux close the hatch to the tender. The rest of Catherine of Tharsis was empty. The exterior eyes told her the metal men were getting uncomfortably close. Looking up, the roof cameras told her what she hoped; the sudden return to this universe had jammed parts of the complex undersurface of Harx’s flying cathedral against Catherine of Tharsis ’s corporate gingerbread.

“Gotcha,” Sweetness hissed as she hit the buttons for the preignition sequence. “Let’s go play trains.” She punched the red tokamak overheat plate, gently eased the drive bar forward. Train and parasitic cathedral began to roll.

The sudden lurch sent Devastation Harx reeling against Sianne Dandeever. He pushed her away, flipped open his uplinker. The screen spat random numbers at him. Heaven was rebelling. That damn train with that bloody girl was back. Devastation Harx had a ball-shrivelling suspicion that something else had paved the way for her. Something else harrowing his heaven. Harx snapped the treacherous machine shut—should never have trusted it—tried to think what to do. Don’t get flustered. Gods may be capricious, but they’re never flustered.

His whole world lurched again, began ponderously to move.

“Get everybody off,” he ordered Sianne Dandeever. This was the end game now. Poor reward for the faithfulness of his faithful to risk them all on a final play of death or glory. “Abandon ship.”

“Sir.”

“Sound the alarms.”

They were picking up speed. Soon it would be too late for all of them.

Sianne broke open the sealed box and pulled down the lever. As the bells rang and Harx felt his airship tremble to hundreds of pairs of running feet, Sianne said, “Sir, with respect, I’m not leaving you. Whatever happens, I will be true.”

Which was as profound a profession of love as Devastation Harx had ever heard.

“Would you look at those purple boys go,” said Weill, watching the evacuation of the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family on the opticon from UA2’s stand-off position twenty kilometres east. “Here, Bladdy, take us in for a closer look, you don’t see this every day.”

“What about the reality-shaping weapon?” Seskinore warned, wringing his red, veiny hands.

“You think he’d be abandoning ship if he still had it?”

“If he were about to use it, he would,” Seskinore countered, but Bladnoch was already pushing the stick. On Weill’s monitor, purple-clad bodies tumbled down chutes, scrambled down wire ladders, slid down ropes, dropped in inflatable escape spheres, jumped, fell, ran through the advancing soldiery as the tottering, creaking lighter-than-air cathedral was dragged along by the slowly accelerating train.

“Wo, that is premier league chaos. Train-cathedral steel cage match, with fighting robots. Get the finger out, Blad, I don’t want to miss any of this.”

Instead of the mildly stimulating vibration of slightly unsynched engines, Weill’s groin felt instead the sensation of the fans powering down.

“Blad, I said get it on, what the hell is up?”

“That,” Bladnoch said, pointing up the western approaches of the valley where a disc of light, bright as the sun, was swooping toward them through the air.

One eye on the tacho. One eye on the tokamak monitors. A third eye…No third eye. Just trust. Sweetness edged the power bar forward. Too much acceleration and the wedged cathedral might tear loose. Too little and those steel flatfoots might catch up. Four legs, four arms. Nightmares. Thirty, forty. Keep it going. Fifty. Fifty-five. That’s a crawl. A crawl. You’ve got to get them a safe distance. Sixty. Seventy. That’s enough.

“Sorry folks,” she said to her friends and family and pulled the lever that blew the bolts coupling tender to train. The rearviews showed them falling behind. The wave of galloping soldiers broke around it, reformed. It was her now. On her own, with just the water and hydrogen in the tanks.

She prayed the Train Gods she had worked it out right.

A drilling, banging on the roof. Sweetness cringed, another deafening rattle. She flicked up the ceiling-eyes, found herself looking up the multiple barrels of a Gatling, with Devastation Harx behind the triggers. He loosed off another stream of bullets. The camera went blind.

“Right,” she said, teeth gritted, and pushed the drive bar forward. And went blind too. Light. Primal light, pure white, seared the cab. Sweetness cried out in pain, blinked away the after-images. There was something divine going on in the rearview cameras. The swathe of light scythed across the cavalry charge. Wherever it touched, it paralysed. Cybersoldiers froze in mid-step, arms uplifted, locked rigid. Ten passes, and the battlefield was a sculpture garden. The light flashed over Sweetness again, hovered for a moment. She squinted up through the glare at the flying disc of light. A vana, a skymirror, stooped down from the moonring to earth. Through the painful white, Sweetness thought she saw an image in the great mirror. A woman, with long dark hair. Her image.

She understood. She waved. The light went out, the vana twisted away and up on its long loop through Grand Valley.

The tattoo on the roof continued. Old Catherine could take it. The founding engineers of Bethlehem Ares built well. One hundred and twenty, one hundred and forty. Nice smooth power curve. Enough reserves to make it up to two hundred and eighty, if they didn’t hit any upgrades. Decision point was two hundred. Tokamak pressure was peaking high orange. Sweetness began the priming sequence. Deep-Fusion? Who needed them. All you had to do was watch and learn. This little button shut down power to the containment field. This little button overrode the overrides. And this little button got her fine ass right out of here.

One ninety. One ninety-five. Two hundred.

“This is Point of No Return,” Sweetness said. “This is for everyone.” She hit the Emergency Escape button. The lights went to red. Shutters sealed over the windows. Drive rod and navigation ball folded away into the floor. Safety bars enfolded her like overaffectionate aunts. The camera eyes went black. The read-outs blanked. Alone in the red dark, Sweetness heard the serial bangs of the explosive bolts, heavier and harder than Harx’s now-sporadic Gatling fire. Then she felt the grapple arms lift the driving cab free of the locomotive. Yellow digits counted down to primary ignition.

Here was the gamble. Here was the place where it could all go so so wrong. A misalignment of the escape rockets, and she wouldn’t be thrown clear to the side and back. She’d go straight up and be tangled in Harx’s cathedral.

The cab stirred under her. She was moving, but where. Where? Then the rockets kicked in and Sweetness momentarily blacked out under three gees. Burn burn burn burn burn. She was still moving, She was free. Then the rockets burned out and she was falling free. And in that instant, there was a light, brighter even than the light of the Little Pretty One vana, a light that penetrated even the meshed fingers of the blast shutters, the light of a Class 88 hauler containment field collapsing and a hydrogen fusion tokamak exploding. Then something like a steel fist punched the falling cab as hard as it could, sent it tumbling and Sweetness, strapped in her chair, screaming, crashing down to earth. Then the sudden whump of parachutes unfurling snatched her away from death.