The older ones spit.
Sergeant Toro asks if I’ve seen the city before and seems surprised when I say yes. He’d be even more surprised if he knew the story behind my arrival.
Farlight is a sprawl of a city trapped in the bowl of a long-dead volcano. To enter by road you take a track that snakes up the volcano and drops into its crater. Slums cling to the highest slopes of the inside edge. The air there is fresh, but water’s rare and so are jobs. The rich bits of Farlight huddle on the floor. The really expensive bits circle Zabo Square and the cathedral.
A virus hit that area years back.
Imagine blowtorching a toy city until the biggest buildings start to melt, then letting them set again. That’s what the boulevards around Zabo Square look like. Debro has a mansion there. Aptitude’s ex-husband had one also.
Until I burnt it down.
‘Ready?’ I ask.
Everyone nods.
We fire up our bikes.
The blacktop gets better the closer we get to the city. But the road still twists and turns viciously. And we waste hours running parallel to our old path, only heading in the opposite direction and fifty paces higher. With the next stage of our route switched round again and fifty paces above that. Our pegs grinding sparks as we navigate hairpin bends.
Any army that tried to take Farlight using this road would be hacked to pieces before they reached a third of the way up. In all of this, our lights only show the narrowest sliver of blacktop.
As one hairpin leads into another, it occurs to me we’re going to hit a bigger problem and hit it soon.
‘What?’ Anton demands when I pull us over.
‘We’re going off-road.’
He wants to protest that on-road is dangerous enough.
Sergeant Toro is watching. As we wait, his eyes flick to the corner ahead, the strip of road beyond that and the road above. He keeps his opinions to himself and his engine running.
A man after my own heart.
‘Want to tell him why?’
‘Roadblocks,’ the sergeant says.
‘We can talk our way through,’ Anton insists.
‘And if it goes wrong? You happy for me to cut their throats? We might as well send a message saying we’ve arrived.’
Sergeant Leona goes still.
Maybe she’s not used to people openly discussing the slaughter of Farlight’s finest.
‘So,’ I say. ‘Since we can’t kill them . . .’
Anton nods reluctantly.
Chapter 17
The city spreads out below us. So vast it froths up from the volcano floor right to the crater’s edge. A tiny speck in the middle is the cathedral. The gap in front is Zabo Square. You can parade an army there. OctoV has done it.
Just not in my lifetime.
Beyond the square lies an area of big houses, then the river. This is not a river at all. It’s a closed-system ribbon lake that cuts the city in two. Although the two pieces are not equal in size and it’s years since the river has flowed.
We stand on the eastern rim.
Around here, the caldera rises too steeply for anything but shacks on stilts to be built and scabs of bare rock show where some of those have toppled onto shacks below, sending them crashing onto the buildings below that.
Leona is looking around with a smile on her face.
‘Never knew it was so beautiful.’
That’s one way of putting it.
In a small square below, barrio dwellers are putting up stalls and unloading three-wheel tuktuks. A woman I know has a stall there.
Supplier of used weapons.
Cheapest price on the planet, guaranteed.
Beyond the little market is a row of rotting houses, built from stonefoam and fibreboard. I own one of the largest. Golden Memories. My bar and brothel . . .
Paper Osamu, UFree ambassador to this edge of the Spiral, told me they were designed to last less than fifty years. Seven hundred years later they’re still going. She knows stuff like that. The UFree like to study primitive peoples.
In my case, their ambassador liked to fuck them also.
That flat patch of dirt beyond is the Emsworth landing fields. A rotting square of concrete and scrub, edged with crumbling warehouses.
It was here OctoV first landed.
A bronze statue near the gate shows him in a bulky space suit carrying a helmet. He’s wearing primitive gravity boots and has an air scrubber on his back.
It is unlike any other statue of our glorious leader. These show him as he now is. Aged fourteen, in cavalry uniform, with elegant ringlets falling to his shoulders, and a sabre belted to his narrow waist.
Sven?
‘Fuck . . .’
‘Sir. Are you all right?’
I’m on my knees, fighting the urge to vomit. Around me the hard edges of the city fade to leave static in my mouth.
Sergeant Leona’s speaking.
Hers isn’t the voice I hear in my head.
Is that you?
Waves of nausea rock me.
We’ve been here before. In my head is the voice of the only man General Jaxx will bow his knee to . . . Mind you, it’s been a while since you could describe OctoV as anything approaching human.
That’s not kind.
The words fade and with it the nausea.
Leaving me on my knees, being watched by Anton, Sergeant Leona and Sergeant Toro. Anton looks worried. Toro looks shocked. Leona’s expression is harder to read.
Wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, I push myself to my feet and spit.
‘What happened?’ Anton asks.
Makes me realize he’s never seen me do that before. ‘You don’t want to know,’ I tell him. Only he does, and so does Sergeant Toro.
Can see it in his face.
‘Wetware.’ That’s the most I’m going to say.
Toro’s stare hardens.
Wetware is illegal. It’s also favoured by the metalheads. Since the Enlightened want us dead as badly as we want them wiped from the face of this galaxy, and it’s only fear of the U/Free that keeps us from slaughtering each other, owning a symbiont is close to proof of treason.
‘The general knows.’
Shouldn’t have said that. I’m supposed to be ex-Legion.
‘Did some work for him,’ I say. ‘Like you. Nothing special . . .’
The sergeant smiles sourly. He thinks he knows what nothing special means. It means I only just came out of it alive. And I have more sense than to talk about it to him or anyone else, ever.
Five minutes from here is a brothel, with wide beds and fresh food, alcohol and girls who’ll be only too happy to help us relax, or not . . .
As I said, I own the place.
Keeping it safe, and collecting their cut for keeping the neighbourhood safe from outsiders, are the Aux, my team.
It takes effort to keep walking. The turn-off to Golden Memories is deserted at this time of the morning. In the distance, a girl with blonde hair splashes water from a pail across a pavement outside.
Looks like Lisa to me. She could be settling the dust or washing away last night’s vomit. Depends on the evening everyone had.
Anton’s staring around him.
‘God,’ he says. ‘This is grim.’
Sergeant Leona catches my eye. Doesn’t look bad to us.
The houses have doors, roofs and windows. Most of their glass is unbroken. All right, the cats are thin, and the only dog we see has three legs, but it’s alive, and the cockcrow from a yard behind says chicken is still on the menu. There are cities where cat is what you get served. And the only reason you get cat is that all the dogs have gone.
‘What?’ Anton demands.
‘Just thinking . . .’
He opens his mouth and shuts it again.
All right, I know. Thinking makes me bad-tempered.
I lead them away from Golden Memories and down a narrow lane that skirts the landing field. Somewhere along here is a hole in the mesh. Unless someone’s mended it. They haven’t. Not sure who would anyway.