“There’s one on our port fairing!” Psalli shouted, peering out of a shunting oriole. “He’s climbing up!”
Grandfather Bedzo rolled and farted under the coronet of his cyberhat. A twitch of the corner of his mouth, a blast of steam from the overheat release valve sent it spinning half a hundred metres. The old man rocked and laughed as the mutineers put the rout beneath their wheels.
“I see her, I see her!” Miriamme Traction called from the forward observation balcony, Sweetness’s former vantage. “She’s waving a flare!” But even before Child’a’grace could call full stop, Bedzo was already applying the brakes. These striplings today understood nothing, respected nothing. Understood nothing because they respected nothing. Had no pride. Bedzo Trine Cirrus Minor Asiim Engineer 10th had been Engineer of Engineers. He would bring his train in so sweet, so smooth, the old lady would not even have to walk to the steps.
“I don’t know where you popped up from, but you’re going right back again,” Sweetness said to Serpio, centimetre by centimetre climbing her legs. She clubbed him hard with the St. Catherine pyx. He cried out, lifted his hands to his bleeding head, fell heavily to the ground.
“To think, I gave up a perfectly good stainless steel kitchen for you,” Sweetness said, leaping nimbly over Serpio and sprinting for the other, unbarred door. But he was already on his feet, after her. God, he might be a Waymender, but he was fast. He dived for Sweetness, was knocked sideways with a crunching oof as Pharaoh came barrelling in in a sliding tackle that would have had any soccer player red carded. The two men rolled over and over in a tangle of attempted blows. Sweetness reflected casually, and inappropriately, how alike they looked.
“Out!” Pharaoh shouted. “Down and out!”
“You mean?” Sweetness winced as Pharaoh took an elbow in the ribs.
“The aperture, go on, go! Jump! I’ll catch up.”
They fell to it again. Sweetness hit the door catch, pelted down the short curving corridor and almost knocked down a very tall, very big woman dressed in purple cycle gear. Big muscles too. Sweetness jumped back. The big woman blocked her escape. She smiled, beckoned with her hand, give, here.
“Uh uh,” Sweetness said and pulled out her beanie gun. Sianne Dandeever grinned like a skull and took a step forward.
“This will hurt, you know,” Sweetness said, and shot her point blank. Sianne Dandeever’s hand moved like a snake striking. She caught the bean bag in midair. She tossed it, caught it in her palm, smiled. Then she dived and brought Sweetness, beanie gun, canister and all down in a crunching tackle.
“Get off me, you big fat lesbian dyke!” Sweetness shouted and looked for something to bite but the big woman’s big hands were forcing her fingers open. Then she heard a noise like wind-rotor blades slicing air, a soft-edge whistling, glimpsed, past the big body crushing the wind out of her, something back-flipping fast down the corridor. The willy-willy demon whirled past, something caught Harx’s lieutenant a hefty whack on the back of the head, sending the big woman sprawling.
Skerry rolled out of her tumbling sequence as Sianne Dandeever shook the impact of grip-soled left foot out of her head and came up slugging. A savatte kick under the jaw sent her straight down again. Skerry cuffed her wrist to ankle with plastic wire grips.
Sweetness scrambled up, backed away, beanie gun levelled.
“I’ll have that,” Skerry said, advancing toward Sweetness.
“You will not.”
“Look, I’ve had a difficult day. Just hand it over.”
“Get away.”
“I’m the government.”
“You would say that.”
“Don’t make me take it off you. I can. I will.”
Sweetness shook her head. Skerry saw her finger twitch on the firing stud of the beanie-gun.
“I think I should tell you, I’d not just catch that, I’d throw it right back at you as well.”
“Oh yeah?” Sweetness said, swinging the beanie-gun a millimetre and firing at the pressure-seal emergency door switch she could see and she knew Skerry could not. Skerry caught a fistful of air as the metal semicircles slammed together in her face.
“Balls!” she muttered. She called up Seskinore. “The girl’s got the thing and she’s making a run for it. There’s still a chance.”
The bloody show must bloody go on.
“Please deposit three million dollars for the next ten minutes of personalised weather,” the computer voice at Grand Valley Regional Weather said without the least flicker of irony. Weill lifted the telephone receiver away from his ear, looked at Seskinore.
Seskinore, listening on the monitor, shook his head and cut his throat with a terminating finger. Weill hung up without a word. Together, they watched the apocalypse dissolve into the early afternoon sunlight. Pursued, pursuer and pursuer-of-pursuer were now so far away down the long tunnel of Grand Valley only the airborne cathedral was visible, a wobbling orange oval. Rather like a flying dog-biscuit, Weill thought inconsequentially.
“The mission is a complete and unqualified lemon,” Seskinore said ringingly. His fancies of summer seasons, charabanc picnics, celebrity bingo, maybe even once again doing the cruise trains, had evaporated like the cloud saints and angels. He was now and forever an unfunny comic with weak material in a too-small suit.
“No it isn’t!” Skerry roared on the comline. “Get Mishcon in here, I’m going after the girl.”
“Such a pro,” Weill said, admiringly.
There comes a time in running, Sweetness discovered, when it is very easy to forget just why you are running, where to and who from. It is just running, pure and purposeless and absolutely chemical, and therefore very very silly and very very dangerous. She willed herself to stop, think, think girl. Think. Down and out, he had said. Back to the aperture. Aperture. Where had that been? Where was she now? Sweetness looked around for landmarks. Few and featureless in these circular corridors. Some cathedral this. No shrines of the saints, no centavo-a-candle angelic light-’em-ups. No swinging censers, no hand-hammered carillons, no statues with scary eyes that followed you around the place, suspicious of sin. No bells, few smells now that that weird perfume Pharaoh had complained about seemed to have dispersed. Not even piles of leaflets or self-sew purple habit kits or whatever mail-order paraphernalia the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family needed to conduct its business with God. The single piece of religious engineering she’d come across she’d climbed all over with her size sevens. She’d seen more spiritual tat in an arcade game.
Refreshed by her brief exercise in cynicism, Sweetness peered at the outer corridor wall. It sloped very slightly inward from top to bottom. Southern hemisphere. Any down ramp around her would do. She slipped back into running mode. Anything that got in her way, stuck a face round a corner, looked vaguely in her direction, she roared at. The things fled, shrieking thinly. There was obviously very much more going on here than she knew about; the angel-thing she had glimpsed through the shattered dome, the seeming plague of mass hysteria, the fit girl in the green leotard. All of them were up there, behind her somewhere, with the big hard woman and Pharaoh and that Serpio, and, ultimately, Harx himself. Don’t think about it, Sweetness Octave. You’ve got what you came for. You get in, you get it, you get out. The rest will sort itself.