“Don’t look at me,” said Thwayte, caught up in the drama of it all and now beginning to wonder just what he had done. “I’m just a kid.”
“Don’t look at me,” said his older-by-two years sister Anhinga. “Girls don’t drive trains.”
“Don’t look at us,” said the three Traction folk. “We’re Traction.”
“So who the hell is?” Romereaux asked again, nervously observing the numbers clicking up on the tacho.
A noise, like something rusted jarring free, like years of phlegm from aggregation of the bases being gullied up in one bucket-filling gob, like relief after constipation, like the screech the prematurely buried would make when the rescuers opened the coffin lid. In a shadowy corner of the bridge, an object moved. Motors whined. Grandfather Bedzo rolled out from his alcove, caked with drool and shaking with palsies. But his cyberhat glowed with puissance. He grinned toothlessly, a terrible sight, and with a thought, threw the points at Abbermeyer Switchover and took Catherine of Tharsis on to the Grand Valley mainline.
“Tante Miriamme,” Romereaux said. “Have you got your gloves?”
“I have indeed, nevvy.” She waved them over her head.
“Then put them on and get you up there and play like buggery and let Sweetness know her family’s coming for her.”
28
Trainpeople have this innate sense. An evolutionary thing, really. A survival skill. Take them to a place once, and no matter how long a time until you take them back again, they can find their way round it, no problem. In the dark. In the fog in the dark. In a power-out in the fog in the dark. They get so many places, they have to remember them all, or they’d get New Merionedd mixed up with New Cosmobad, Wisdom with Lyx, Belladonna with Llangonedd, Iron Mountain with China Mountain and everyone would be hugely lost. So Sweetness convinced Pharaoh as she led him spiralling inward along the corridors and down the tunnels of the Cathedral of the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family. Maybe not convinced. Told well enough for him to follow.
“Where is it we’re going?”
“To the audience chamber. The presence room, whatever he calls it. The top of the shop.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Have you been here before?”
There being no answer to that, Pharaoh trotted behind the resolute Sweetness. Two sectors starboard, he stopped again.
“Can you smell something?”
“Like what something?”
“Sort of sweet, like chocolatey, a bit perfumey floaty butterfly-ie.”
“Floaty butterfly-ie?”
Pharaoh shrugged.
Onward. He was firmly convinced they had gone around this same orbit of corridor three times now.
“What does the lid have on it again?”
“Wings.”
“And you’re sure of that?”
Sweetness stopped abruptly. Her shallow temper flared.
“Yes, I’m sure of that and yes, I know exactly where it is and yes, I know exactly where we’re going as well. Here.”
She banged on a closed bulkhead to a radial corridor. She jumped back, startled, as the bulkhead flew up, opening on to a corridor filled from one end to the other with Ever-Circling Spiritual Family.
“Ah,” Sweetness said.
“Ahhh!” the Ever-Circling Family cried, threw up their hands in horror and fled as one.
“Simple,” Sweetness said, snapping her fingers with admirable nonchalance, surveying the now empty corridor. “Come on, this way.”
“I knew I could smell something,” Pharaoh said, sniffing.
Sweetness stopped at another circular door halfway down the corridor.
“In here.”
“What’s in here?”
“The way up’s in here. Child’a’grace, do you have to make a question out of everything? I got the genes, you don’t, that’s evolution. In here.” She slapped the door release with the heel of her hand. It flew up. Sweetness found herself looking in a darkness that glittered with a thousand mirrors.
“Maybe not this one.”
There was a man reflected in those mirrors, a man of distinguished silver and good personal grooming, of fine taste in tailoring with a black cane in one hand. A man who, as she watched, turned as if scenting her, all his mirror images turning as one with him. A man who was now aiming something that looked inarguably like a gun at her.
“Run!” Sweetness yelled and dived past the door, Pharaoh a step behind her, as a tremendous explosion and shattering of glass shook the corridor.
“You!”
The word hung in the electric air of the mirror maze. Eyes met in the mirror; green, grey. Then Harx reached inside his immaculate jacket, pulled out a hand-held field impeller, spun and with a terrible raven cry fired at the source of the image. A boom of exploding glass: a million minute shards rained down on Devastation Harx. In the same instant the corner of his eye saw the figure, that trainbrat, that dreadful persistent, rude little girl who would not accept her severe limitations, who would insist on trying her betters, who would absolutely not go away or take no for an answer or know when she was mastered, roll and duck for cover. He readied his gun, panting.
The gas. It’s getting to you. You can’t allow yourself to act this way, not over an uncouth trainbrat. But she irritated him so much. He wanted her gone, gone for good, so much. He spun, reading his mirrors for unauthorised reflections.
There.
“Yah!”
Harx spun, fired six fast, flat shots at the six standing figures that had swung into view as the mirrors revolved on their tireless waltz. The mirror maze rang to multiple detonations. Still she mocked him, now a dozen reflections away. No matter. Two-fisted, Harx aimed the field-impeller, blew the dreadful girl to hell and silica and so she would have no hiding place, each of the intervening mirrors as well. A slow snow of powdered silvering dusted Devastation Harx’s shoulders.
A serene place beyond the paranoia of the combat gasses said, She’s not moving. She’s not even there. You’re just shooting at reflections of reflections of reflections.
Selah. It was good to shoot. Good to cast off the constraints of holiness and spirituality and responsibility and guruship and blaze away with a very big gun at something that annoys you very much.
“Waaaaaah!”
Spinning like a Swavyn, impeller set on constant output, he cut a scything swathe of flying glass through his revolving mirrors.
“Come out come out come out!”
A movement. He turned. In one beautiful, oil-smooth movement, he levelled and aimed the gun at the figure in the glass. Too late he saw that it was not his Nemesis. Harx II, his otherversal counterpart, gaped at the gun, threw up his hands in supplication, denial, hope. Far far too late. The eager finger had closed the contact. A ram of gravitomagnetic force sent him raving up in a spray of subquantal shards.
Devastation Harx staggered. What man would not, who has already killed his brother, and just shot his own self? His field-impeller fell like a shriven sin to the ground. He gave a little creaking moan. He clutched at his heart. Something was torn out of him. Somewhere, he had felt himself die. In a pique of confusion and paranoia, he had killed himself.
No. That itself was paranoia. That was the combat gas, as much as that image of that taunting, grinning female, which he now knew to have been one brief glance, amplified by the vinculum circuitry of his shattered maze. The man had been a Harx, but not Harx. He had been a mirrorman, a reflection, a thing from a universe not his own. A dog soldier. And dog soldiers die.
He was glad. It had long angered him, being given orders by such a sloven.
Disgusted by his lapse of control, Devastation Harx stormed from his sanctum. There was a war to be fought, and won, and it would not be won by ecstatic, slashing violence. Control. Application. Determination. He found the corridor awash with purple: acolytes rushing hither and yon. Beyond the tumult of panicked voices, was that gunfire he heard? He seized a passing faithful, a runty, trembling boy with a pudding-bowl crop.