Pull that bolt, and the whole damn thing starts to come apart.
He spears another segment of apple on the pen-knife blade. It’s halfway to his mouth (it is a terrible, yellower-than-yellow novel) when the telephone rings. The red telephone.
Because it is the red telephone, he stares at it for ten, twenty, thirty rings.
The red telephone. The hot-as-Hades emergency line. For use only in absolute extremis. War pillage flood firefall a line invasion end of the world. The red telephone. It is still ringing.
Romereaux looks around, finds no one who can advise or he can delegate to. He picks up the receiver, suddenly fearful the caller might have run off in disgust. He dislodges a thick fall of dust.
“Hello?” He listens to the voice at the other end. The message is short. “Yes, I understand,” he says and reverently sets down the handset. Then it is as if he has had a cattle-prod inserted anally: he is out of his chair and across the conservatorium in one galvanic bound. He snatches up the gosport, uncaps it and bellows up to the bridge.
“Stop the train! Stop the train! It’s Grandmother Taal!”
Sweetness clung like a tick to the underside of the grapple arm. Around her, Vertical Boys with improbable face paint hung from the metalwork like festival piñadas. It was five minutes since the punky little scout with the spiky hair had reported the last of the acolytes scampering in an all-fired-hurry back into the cathedral. Oddly quiet up on the working platforms. Had Störting-Kobiyashi’s industrial trolls downed tools again? Sweetness’s own ears hinted at strange energies brewing inside the flying machine. Something was about to happen, but Sweetness held her forces back. Better to be safe than sorry. This is war.
Every story needs a good mass action scene.
Sweetness checked her beanie gun. She checked her emergency parafoil. She didn’t trust herself with either of them.
Point and pull. Simple. A soft thud and they go down. Guaranteed non-lethal. Lies. A feather pillow can be lethal in the wrong hands. One false shot could knock someone right over the edge, or what if they had a heart condition, or brittle bones? She had sworn her way across the Great Desert on the lives of those she’d love to kill and the ways in which she would enjoy doing it. Now the very real possibility stood before her and asked, Can you do it? Can you do it? Even that Serpio. It’s you, him and a big drop. One shot. Will you put him over? And if you do, will you fire from cover, an unseen assassin, or do you want him to see you, do you want him to know? Do you want your face to be the last, the very last thing he will ever see? What if he goes for you? What if it’s you and him? Bean the bastard. No questions asked. There. Justified. Sort of.
The parafoil was simpler still. Fall and pull. She had done the fall already and that had not been so hard when it came to it, but it seemed saner to trust in the power of story than this rustley wad of cut-and-glue nylon sheeting. How many goes did it take to get the design right?
Everything does come out right in the mass action scene, doesn’t it?
Pharaoh was looking to her for instruction. He had two parallel stripes of blue under each eye and they made him look fierce in a soft, cute sort of way…Aw, no. Have you no self-control, girl? Get a grip of yourself. It’s the going into battle thing. A whiff of danger, a reek of death and the DNA says, pass me on, pass me on, make babies, make babies.
“Okay, let’s go to work.” She had heard someone say that in one of Sle’s action movies. Pharaoh heliographed to squads two and three on the far grapple and underneath the service yard. Mirrors flickered compliance, the Vertical Boys unhooked their safety lines and began to advance along the girders and ducts.
It had been a hard march, filing up the narrow flanges of one roof-spar, swinging perilously in webbing harness across the huge annular bolt plates where spars joined the huge glass hexagons, then another long shuffle down the next rib to the next pier. One hundred metres out along the first spar Sweetness had discovered the first, and unspoken, rule of a Vertical Boy: Don’t let go of what you’ve got until you have a firm grip on something else. The second rule she knew already. Don’t look down. Shuffle. Swing. Shuffle. Scramble. She watched the nonchalant ease with which the Vertical Boys swung over terrifying gaps, hung one-handed over appalling chasms. It’s easy for them, Sweetness thought. They have no eggs, just lots of cheap and messy seed they can fire where and when they like, all over the place. Be careless with it. Nature is profligate with guys’ life-stuff. Death means nothing to boys that age. Gangs, guns and glory. They imagine themselves gazing down on their own heroic memorials, all their friends and the ones who scorned them and secretly fancied them gathering round and being amazed or sorry or distraught or manly-but-gutted. They hear staunch eulogies, they stand by weeping mothers and girls who could have been girlfriends, in a guy’s way, right? and look at their broken bodies and feel really really good. They can’t understand that death is death, end, terminated, finito: game over. No nothing.
Sweetness thanked the hormones of pubescent boys, that let her play the Fab but Unattainable Warrior Queen with great hair and them her berserkers.
They roosted around her on spars and struts at the end of the grapple arm. Clamps held the cathedral of the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family a short spit away. It filled half the world, an orange moon cratered with scars and punctures. Sweetness had reconnoitred her access points from the vantage of an adjacent roof-spar. You could march whole armies through the holes Cadmon and Euphrasie had blown in the skin. She flexed her aching muscles and gave her pre-invasion team talk.
“Okay, on my word, we go up and in. What we’re looking for is a jar thing, about this size, dirty greenish. It’s got a lid like a helmet with wings, right? It’s probably up at the very top; there’s a kind of glassed-over dome thing that seems to be Harx’s special place, I reckon he’s got it there if he’s got it anywhere. Work your way up, the place is all circles, so it’s easy to get about in but you can end up going round and round if you’re not smart. That jar is what we’re here for. Nothing else matters. Not even getting people, get that? Avoid unnecessary combat. That’s an order,” she insisted, seeing the looks of disappointment on some of the boys’ faces. “Don’t stop for anything. We want to get in and out, quick smart.”
“This fog is great cover,” green tiger-striped Vertical Boy said.
“What fog?”
The boy nodded down. Against the rules, Sweetness looked down between her feet. A raft of cloud boiled up toward her. As she watched, it swirled over her feet, up her legs, swallowed her whole. Sweetness and her strike force were suspended in grey murk.
“Something freaky here,” she said. Then the world lurched. “What the hell is going on?”
“We seem to be moving,” Pharaoh said calmly. Dripping blue arcs, power lines disconnected from the cathedral, swung free and began to retract. Water conduits unplugged, access scaffolds slid backward on their greased bearings. One by one the grapple fingers were releasing their grip. The sounds from inside the airship took on a deeper, more urgent tone. “Harx is casting free.”
“He’s what? He can’t do that. Signal the others.”
“In this?”
The arm lurched again. Sweetness looked wildly around. Her platoon awaited her command.