“That we will find out very soon,” Devastation Harx said, taking an orbital uplinker from inside his jacket. Sianne Dandeever blinked at the blasphemous machine. “Oh, for goodness sake woman, even God needs good rolling stock.” In a flicker of data and twittering, the little device reported on the state of his many fronts. In ten minutes he would be out from under this accursed roof, where he could get a once-and-for-all shot at these impudent pranksters in their airships with the partacs. Waves eight and nine were entering the upper atmosphere, the first four squadrons were down, shifted into ground combat configuration and were moving into occupation positions. The global communication network was buzzing with madness and rumour. Let it. Soon and very soon it would be silenced. The more they talked, the more they watched the pretty lights in the sky, the less they would suspect his true strategy. That was the eternal secret of all gods. Keep watching the pretty lights in the sky.
Then, one by one, he would put those pretty lights out. The infiltration of the reality shaping computers was almost complete. The simulacrum was perfect. St. Catherine herself would seem to give the command for the Artificial Intelligences to switch themselves off, then command of the multiverse would pass to its rightful users, the dirty, bustling, conniving, inquisitive, mortal humans.
“She’s getting away,” Sianne Dandeever warned.
Harx looked up from his schemes of splendour. He should know where that irritating little girl was going, in case something did go wrong with the protocols and he needed to access the original St. Catherine program. She was almost out of sight, spiralling lower and lower.
“Where are you going, you vexatious child?” Harx mused.
“Go on, your Holiness, just one shot,” Sianne Dandeever.
Then he saw the contrail of steam, the mirror steel lines, the blue and silver of a Bethlehem Ares fusion hauler.
“Of course! So loyal! Sianne, take us down.”
“Down it is.”
Never a question, never a query. He should have tried to get his hand into those thigh-hugging pants.
“We have a train to catch.”
In contrast to her departure, Taal Chordant Joy-of-May Asiim Engineer 10th’s return to Catherine of Tharsis was loud, crowded and chaotic. So many people on the bridge, all wanting her to answer their questions before they answered hers.
“What have you done to yourself?” Her old friend Miriamme Deep-Fusion’s voice cut through the babble with the one question everyone wanted answered but were too in awe of the terrible old lady to ask.
“A form of rejuvenation I would not recommend. It is most efficacious, but the price is excessive. Now, enough enough enough. I am senior here, it is you who must answer my questions,” Grandmother Taal said, glad to feel the creak and shift of hull-plates under her square-heeled boots again. “Where is everyone? Where is my son? What has happened to the train?”
A chorus of voices babeled answers. Grandmother Taal held up her hands for silence.
“Mutiny?”
The mutineers looked at each other, all except Grandfather Bedzo, deeply enmeshed in driving his train.
“For Sweetness,” Child’a’grace said.
“Hmph,” said Grandmother Taal. “Well, I suppose it’s an exceptional circumstance and my son and that Stuard could well do with a lesson in humility, but I would not condone it as a general course of action.”
Relief was general and unabashed. Into it, Child’a’grace asked, mildly, “So, where exactly is Sweetness Octave?”
Grandmother Taal craned around her to peer out of the window. She pointed.
“There, I suspect.”
Everyone turned to witness a spectacle almost certainly unique in aviation. It was like an animated lesson in marine ecology: big fish eats littler fish eats weeniest fish. Well to the rear was a massive cargo-lift airship, vast as a cloud. Ahead of it, no less small, was what could only be described as a flying cathedral, vaguely saucer-shaped with heavy Palladian pretensions, incongruously coloured earth-orange. Squeezing out from underneath the cathedral and pushing slowly ahead was a silver trout-shaped aircraft, sleek and streamlined, and in the lead, beating courageously down the sky, was the tiny delta wing of an airfoil. Everyone could see the dark speck hanging beneath it. The whole flying circus bore down on Catherine of Tharsis like muscular theology.
“That would be our Sweetness.”
Pursuit was good. Challenge was good. Danger was good. Tough flying was good. Everything was good that kept out that final image of Pharaoh and Serpio, locked together, falling through the killing air. Concentrate. Not much longer. Not much further. Line up on that great big beautiful steamy train there. A few hundred metres. Then you’ll be home. Then you’ll be safe. Then you’ll be among people who know you and your story can end and you can go back to your little cubby. Just you and Little Pretty One again.
You can’t go back, Sweetness. You’re a traingirl, you supped that truth with your mother’s milk. You can go everywhere, anywhere, all around the world, but never back. The tracks only lead forward.
She navigated in over Catherine of Tharsis. Whoever had their hand on the drive bar was good, matching her speed, compensating in an instant for her wobbles and surges as she carefully spilled lift, lining up on the back of the tender. Twenty metres, ten metres. She wove from side to side of the steam plume, checking her positioning. Up there behind her, she could feel the presence of heavy aerial machinery on the back of her neck. Ignore them. If they want to blow you away, they can do it any time. Concentrate on getting down. Down. Down…
Her toe-tips brushed the top of the tender, an eddy lifted her into the vapour trail. Moment’s blindness. She fought for control, stabilised, came in again. Almost almost almost…She tugged on the guy lines simultaneously, spilling lift, and touched down at a run in the middle of the tender. Immediately, figures—people! trainpeople! her people!—came surging off the access ladder, seized her, stripped off her flying harness and carried her down.
Sweetness babbled, recognising the faces of her bearers, trying to touch them, remember them.
“Psalli, Romereaux, Anhinga, it’s you. Thwayte, what are you doing here?”
She was borne along a sidewalk up a companionway through a shunting turret. She could feel the train was picking up speed again. Sweetness glanced backward. The cathedral eclipsed half the sky, the little air-yacht almost crushed between the two heavyweights of earth and air. On the driving bridge the people she loved were waiting for her. Her bearers set her down and immediately Child’a’grace hugged her.
“Your hair is needing washing, child,” she remonstrated.
Sweetness plucked at a greasy coil, then all the tension excitement fear confusion horror exhaustion dread wonder puzzlement loneliness hunger sleeplessness vertigo love loss and death of the days since she had ridden away from the grand steaming ruptured. She burst into tears. Her family, Domiety and non-Domiety rushed in to comfort her. Thus only Ricardo Traction noticed the shadow fall over the windows.
“Um, I hate to disturb you, but we seem to have a cathedral on the roof.”
Everyone looked up, the world went red, and they were somewhere else entirely.
30
Red. Red heaven, red earth. Red hills, red soil, red stones. Red sky, red sun, red lines of thin cloud at the close horizon. Bethlehem Ares Class 88 fusion hauler Catherine of Tharsis, pride of the fleet, stood in a half-kilometre length of neatly severed track in the middle of endless, featureless red.
Numb silence. Utter dislocation. Then young Thwayte Engineer cried out in sudden pain, clapped hands to ears. In the same instant, everyone became aware of a hissing scream, like steam escaping from a fractured pipe. Scattered papers flew up, across the room like carrion birds and packed themselves against the bottom of the starboard catwalk door.