The fingers did not let go. The other hand seized a fistful of work shirt.
“Tarou…”
She slapped behind her, yelped. The back of her knuckles had connected with something harder by far than barely-post-adolescent flesh.
A third hand snagged her right ankle.
She began a scream. A fourth hand ended it, fingers clapped around her open mouth. Six fingers of articulated stone. Lutra Blaine kicked with her free leg, struck out with her hands. Stone arms thrust from the tunnel walls to seize and pin them. Held immobile, Lutra Blaine could only watch the opposite side of the corridor unfold like an insect’s maw into an arsenal of graspers, blades, buzz-saws. A swift, sure pass of the scalpel opened her up from pubis to sternum. Rectractors peeled back flesh and bone as the robot mandibles proceeded to patiently disembowel her.
26
For three days Kid Pharaoh rode the cow-catcher of Grand Trunk Rapido Hep Badda, wide-eyed and hallucinating with speed and hunger.
In Xipotle he had jumped from the steps of the rickety-clickety stopper service across the sidings toward the gleaming behemoth of the big express. He had rolled under the grazer wagons, fragrant bovine piss leaking through the wooden slats as he pressed himself close to the track ballast, waiting for the Traction people to finish their inspection. As the boarding gantries retracted, he made his low, darting run and scramble up the slope of the cow-catcher. As Sweetness Asiim Engineer 12th had promised, he was invisible. His heart had bounded as the whistles blew and the drive shafts exploded in insane gouts of steam and the wheels fought for grip on the smooth steel. His fingers tightened their grip. Hep Badda gathered speed and swung out on to the Grand Valley mainline. On the upslope to midnight the sense of speed, of potential, of fast movement through a dimensionless, unguessed-at void thrilled him, on the downside the click of the joints and the brisk, muscular rhythm of the pistons began to hypnotise him. Pharaoh just, just, caught himself nodding off. Guillotining death winked in the moonslight; just, just, he pulled back. After that, he lashed himself to the cow-catcher irons with his belt and strips torn from his short sleeves. Crucified, he rode the steel rails. His numb, sun-scarred eyes were focused on those twin tracks of steel, forever reeling in beneath his crossed feet but never growing one centimetre shorter, always always reaching all the way to the horizon. The big luxury express had driven him against the wind so long and so hard he felt it was blowing straight through him, making a calliope of his rib cage, his skull transparent, a bowlful of gales. Wind madness.
Three days he rode thus, between starvation and velocity, mania and enlightenment, the cold steel rail and aspiration. Out of his head. Held together by strips and straps. He would have become another cheap martyr to the rails had not the sudden shock of a something jolted him back to his claw-hold on the cow-catcher. A shift of gravity, a change of pressure, a new tone in the mantra of the wheels; something. He opened his eyes and let out a rending shriek as tracks, train, passengers and Pharaoh perched on the very prow of it all were swallowed by the gaping demon-mouth of the mainline approach to Belladonna, mightiest and least obtrusive of cities. Pharaoh howled as Hep Badda plunged down into darkness, the twin beams of the head lanterns stabbing out on either side of him. Down down down. Signal lights and speed boards loomed at Pharaoh, switchovers glinted silver, hinting at strange other ways down darkly secret side tunnels. Pharaoh became conscious of other levels above and below that interpenetrated his space. Gleams of riding lights, echoes of whistles from high overhead, sudden gasps of steam wisping out of a side tunnel; on one occasion, the lights of carriage windows glimpsed through gaps in the track beneath his feet, other journeys speeding down there in the deeper dark.
After a timeless time in the dark, he became aware of a growing light ahead, a golden glow not from any device of Hep Badda’s, but from the tunnel itself. With a pressure gradient that wrenched the drum of his surviving ear, the rapido burst from its narrow tube into a wide subterranean boulevard. Houses and tenements carved from raw stone leaned over the tracks so steeply and closely that they met overhead in knurled concrete bosses and casement-studded fan vaultings. These were the barryvilles of Belladonna, the first diggings of the manformers when the world had no air and the radiation would roast your gear in your pants like a station vendor’s spiced nuts. Idiosyncrasies with cutting lasers had, over the centuries, deepened it into a chaotically baroque architecture, and the old vehicle out-lock had widened into the main thoroughfare into Belladonna.
The big train brushed terrifyingly close to overhanging orioles and stone balconies: Pharaoh saw, quite clearly, a woman in a simple white shift standing reading a letter in a glassed bubble. Her face was joyful. Then she was whisked into the past. Residents bustled along the arcades that hugged the faces of the red stone buildings like a ballet dancer’s tights his piece; made their way up broad, foot-worn staircases to the hanging markets on their precarious stone platforms. Elegant stone footbridges arched over the tracks. Pharaoh glimpsed children’s faces grinning down. He waved, they were gone. He had no notion how deep he was, but many tracks came together here under the vaulted ceiling: Hep Badda sprinted past a crowded local, a goggle-eyed, nocturnal creature that spent its entire life in the tunnels ways within Belladonna. The express gained on a big tanker train, drew level, prow to prow. Pharaoh glanced across, met another pair of eyes returning the regard. The two freeloaders strapped to their respective cow-catchers stared, then Hep Badda pulled away. Somewhere ahead must lie the terminus, Belladonna’s legendary Main, but squint as he might, Pharaoh could see no end to the great street, just the warm golden glow haze of ten thousand windows.
But end it must, and did, the Barryville terminating in a sheer face of cliff pierced by a dozen tunnels. Hep Badda selected its destination, slid over the points and into constricting darkness. The lights showed nothing but curving track, but Pharaoh’s kinesic sense told him his was headed upward. Then the Grand Trunk Rapido ground around a tight turn in the tunnel, a circle of painful white opened in front of Pharaoh’s pained eyes and in a fanfare of steam and whistles he was thrust into the Minus One and second-highest level of Belladonna Main.
Hep Badda glided in to the marble platform like an oil-drop on steel. Numb with wonder, Pharaoh gazed up, immune to the stares of the station staff. Belladonna Main filled a shaft a kilometre deep. The same constructional diamond technology that propped up Grand Valley’s roof here built the cantilevers and cables that supported the ten levels of platforms, tracks, concourses and ticketing halls that criss-crossed each other like outspread fingers in a children’s game of who-gets-to-go-first. What entranced Pharaoh was that, up there beyond the spans and spars of Level Nought, he could see dawn light glitter on the glass dome that capped the shaft-station, and through that, beyond that, the building-crusted shaft of a support pier leading his vision high, higher, highest, through the morning cumulus to the diamond glint of Worldroof.
The squeal of brakes broke his dream. The buffers were approaching. Porters and pedicab wallahs were already closing on the train like warrior ants tackling a snake. With stiff fingers, he worked loose the bindings, returned his belt to its more socially acceptable use of keeping his pants from obeying gravity. He stood up, balanced himself and stepped off the cow-catcher on to the platform at a gentle walking pace.