Two people; man, woman, trying to avoid each other in a worm-eaten potato of a moonlet, two billion humans’ final defence against interplanetary attack. Oh. Forgetting of course, SERAPAMOUN, Cheraph, exalted one, genius loci, seeded so thoroughly and minutely through Terror that the whole planetoid could be said to be one great orbiting brain. The real trigger finger, silent as only the angels can be silent, patiently waiting for a word certain never to be spoken, that would transform moon-stuff into machine warriors and send them falling out of the evening sky like diamond rain in their spin-carbon reentry shells.
Sometimes, as she hovered above the great viewing eye, Lutra Blaine wished for even a rumour of war. A blip on the sensors that watched the edges of System. A sudden rip in reality, spewing dagger-edged starfighters from some alien empire, filling all circumambient space with lambent beams of coruscating force. Skyjack and piracy on one of the big, stately Sailships. Something to set the alarms ringing and the amber lights pulse-rotating and Lutra and Taroudant hand-over-handing at flank speed along the tunnelways.
Nah.
So there was always the world, and it was unfailingly wonderful. The amazement that geography was actually the same as drawn in the atlas. The miracle of clouds seen from above. The revelation that weather moved and you could watch the birth, life and death of a storm. That the seas had currents, that the mountains had snowcaps and that the green of spring visibly spread south day by day. A thought unfolded the opticon arm, through its eye Lutra could look past the clouds to see the wakes of ships on her world’s small, landlocked seas. She could squint through the dazzle of sunlight from Worldroof to map the towns and tight-packed city-states of Grand Valley’s floor. She could track the progress of the great trains across the quarterspheres by the white plumes of steam lashing out behind them. She loved the trains most, cranking up the magnification on the opticon until she could make out the spider-silk threads of the tracks themselves, their junctions and switchovers, trying to guess the route this freight would take, that passenger express. The train was freedom. The iron way out. Her hormone-haunted teenage sleep had been broken at least once a night by a whistle far away through the labyrinth of stone streets and downramps between St. Berisha and Belladonna Main. Train a’leavin’. Without you, Lutra Blaine.
“Child’a’grace, not again!” she grimaced.
The enchantment was dispelled by a red light pulsing in the bottom left corner of the opticon. That intermittent again. She thought up a diagnostic. Her world went out of focus.
As she suspected. The bloody thing had kicked into assembler preignition. Sixth time in as many days. Senile bunch of scrap. No way, of course, to think of an angel, a Cheraph, no less, whose physical body you inhabited more as parasite than guest. But no one could deny that after that night it had started to go quietly ga-ga. No one had explained what the hell was going on there, like no one had explained what the hell was going on that night, when all the stars started shooting at each other with lasers and all the viewing panels had sealed up tight and somewhere inside her a nasty little voice had said, there’s stuff going on here they don’t want you to see, stuff that might, just might get you killed, Lutra Blaine.
Machines. The way they should do it: either fix the stupid machine so you don’t need any people so they can shoot away to their hearts’ content, or you scrap SERAPAMOUN and make it all people. But three; one angel, one girl and one pervo, is sure-as-eggs-is-eggs grief.
Pain in the hole. When it kicked off you had to go down there and shut the bloody thing down manually before it went into full Generation One assembler breeding. It was only a one-touch panel, but it was picking that panel out of a grid twenty by twenty all the colours of the rainbow. First time she’d made it with 007 seconds to spare. Once the processor halls started filling with assemblers, all hungry for moonrock to turn into cybersoldier, it took three different codewords from three separate Anarchs to put the system back into Condition Mauve.
“Tarou, he’s kicking off again,” she said more in hope than confidence. The first three times he’d told her she had to do it because she needed to know what to do in an emergency, the fourth time she realised that he was saying that because he hadn’t Idea One about how anything in the battle station worked.
Sort it yourself.
She’d worked out a way of negotiating Terror’s warren of tunnels, push with the hands in a long, gentle incline toward a point on the opposite wall way down the tube, spin one eighty halfway down so that she met the oncoming rock hands and face forward, ready for another long shallow swallow-dive. As she zigzagged toward the main soul-sphere in the zero-gee hollow at the core of the satellite where the heart of SERAPAMOUN depended, the thought niggled her, as it had each time before when the intermittent kicked off, that she should probably tell someone about this.
Nah (as she jack-knifed from the Equatorial One into Six O’Clock Diagonal). They didn’t pay her enough for responsibility.
One swoop past the intersection, Taroudant had left one of his tokens of intent. Grimacing, Lutra squeezed herself past the slowly revolving glob of milky jizzum.
“This wasn’t in my job description, man!”
This time, not even a far distant snicker, reverberating through the tunnel system. The wads she could cope with, just. The lurkings, the stealth approaches, the sudden shock of a hand slipped into her pants, the clutch of a (small) breast: not even a job creation scheme cosmonaut should have to tolerate that. And she never saw him coming. He could move fast and silent as a shadow in those endless corridors.
Creep.
As her hands touched gritstone for the next fist-off, a peculiar tremor ran through her palms. She seized a rung, stayed her flight. Fingertips told her unprecedented things were stirring within the pumice. What; her one-hour prelaunch neuro-induction course had not covered. Had covered very little, except how not to depressurise the station, and if in doubt, refer upward. She changed course at the next node, upward rather than inward, following the tremble she could now feel in the air around her to the nearest processor hall. Her arms cleared a swathe through a flock of foam styrene food trays, still sticky with sambhar sauce and curry ketchup, the detritus of Taroudant’s solitary dinners; she came in for a landing on the crystal porthole of the Valhalla 3 hall. Squinting down between her feet she could see at once through the hypercold the wasp-striped feed hoppers raised from their rest positions, pressed against raw rock, guzzling greedily. Shadows in the frosted diamond casting chambers. She bent closer, squinted. Steel bones and beaks. As she watched, swarms of assembler drones wove wires and smart-carbon sinews around the naked skeletons.
“Shit shit shit shit shit,” said Lutra Blaine. There was no avoiding having to tell someone now. She kicked off.
Something snagged the waistband of her pants.
“Leave it out, man!” she yelled at Taroudant. “This is serious, SERAPAMOUN’s lost it big time, the whole place is going monkeyshit.”