To have tried to run the fluorescent vee-slash of the Necroville gate would have been as certain a Big Death as to have been reduced to hot ion dust in the nanotok flash. The mopedcab prowled past the samurai silhouettes of the gate seguridados. Sol had the driver leave them beneath the dusty palms on a deserted boulevard pressed up hard against the razor wire of St. John. Abandoned by the living, the grass verges had run verdant, scum and lilies scabbed the swimming pools, the generous Spanish-style houses softly disintegrating, digested by their own gardens.
It gave the cochero spooky vibes, but Sol liked it. He knew these avenues. The little machine putt-putted off for the lands of the fully living.
“There are culverted streams all round here,” Sol said. “Some go right under the defenses, into Necroville.”
“Is this your dead-sight again?” Elena asked as he started down an overhung service alley.
“In a sense. I grew up around here.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Then I can trust it.”
She hesitated a step.
“What are you accusing me of?”
“How much did you rebuild, Elena?”
“Your memories are your own, Sol. We loved each other, once.”
“Once,” he said, and then he felt it, a static purr on his skin, like Elena’s fingers over his whole body at once. This was not the psychic bloom of death foreseen. This was physics, the caress of focused gravity fields.
They hit the turn of the alley as the mechadors came dropping soft and slow over the roofs of the old moldering residential. Across a weed-infested tennis court was a drainage ditch defended by a rusted chicken-wire fence. Sol heaved away an entire section. Adam Tesler had built his dead strong, and fast. The refugees followed the seeping, rancid water down to a rusted grille in a culvert.
“Now we see if the Jesus tank grew me true,” Sol said as he kicked in the grille. “If what I remember is mine, then we come up in St. John. If not, we end up in the bay three days from now with our eyes eaten out by chlorine.” They ducked into the culvert as a mechador passed over. MIST 27s sent the mud and water up in a blast of spray and battle tectors. The dead man and the living woman splashed on into darkness.
“He loved you, you know,” Sol said. “That’s why he’s doing this. He is a jealous God. I always knew he wanted you, more than that bitch he calls a wife. While I was dead, he could pretend that it might still be. He could overlook what you were trying to do to him; you can’t hurt him, Elena, not on your own. But when you brought me back, he couldn’t pretend any longer. He couldn’t turn a blind eye. He couldn’t forgive you.”
“A petty God,” Elena said, water eddying around her leather-clad calves. Ahead, a light from a circle in the roof of the culvert marked a drain from the street. They stood under it a moment, feeling the touch of the light of Necroville on their faces. Elena reached up to push open the grate. Solomon Gursky stayed her, turned her palm upward to the light.
“One thing.” he said. He picked a sharp shard of concrete from the tunnel wall. With three strong savage strokes he cut the vee and slash of the death sign in her flesh.
Thursday
He was three kilometers down the mass driver when the fleet hit Marlene Dietrich. St. Judy’s Comet was five AU from perihelion and out of ecliptic, the Clade thirty-six degrees out, but for an instant two suns burned in the sky.
The folds of transparent tectoplastic skin over Solomon Gursky’s face opaqued. His sur-arms gripped the spiderwork of the interstellar engine, rocked by the impact on his electromagnetic senses of fifty minitok warheads converting into bevawatts of hard energy. The death scream of a nation. Three hundred Freedead had cluttered the freefall warren of tunnels that honeycombed the asteroid. Marlene Dietrich had been the seed of the rebellion. The corporadas cherished their grudges.
Solomon Gursky’s face-shield cleared. The light of Marlene Dietrich’s dying was short-lived but its embers faded in his infravision toward the stellar background.
Elena spoke in his skull.
You know?
Though she was enfolded in the command womb half a kilometer deep within the comet, she was naked to the universe through identity links to the sensor web in the crust and a nimbus of bacterium-sized spyships weaving through the tenuous gas halo.
I saw it, Solomon Gursky subvocalized.
They’ll come for us now, Elena said.
You think. Using his bas-arms Sol clambered along the slender spine of the mass driver toward the micro meteorite impact.
I know. When long-range cleared after the blast, we caught the signatures of blip-fusion burns.
Hand over hand over hand over hand. One of the first things you learn, when the Freedead change you, is that in space it is all a question of attitude. A third of the way down a nine-kilometer mass driver with several billion tons of Oort comet spiked on it, you don’t think up, you don’t think down. Up, and it is vertigo. Down, and a two kilometer sphere of grubby ice is poised above your head by a thread of superconducting tectoplastic. Out, that was the only way to think of it and stay sane. Away, and back again.
How many drives? Sol asked. The impact pin-pointed itself; the smart plastic fluoresced orange when wounded.
Eight.
A sub-voiced blasphemy. They didn’t even make them break sweat. How long have we got?
Elena flashed the projections through the em-link onto his visual cortex. Curves of light through darkness and time, warped across the gravitation marches of Jupiter. Under current acceleration, the Earth fleet would be within strike in eighty-two hours.
The war in heaven was in its twelfth year. Both sides had determined that this was to be the last. The NightFreight War would be fought to an outcome. They called themselves the Clades, the outlaw descendants of the original Ewart/OzWest asteroid rebellion: a handful of redoubts scattered across the appalling distances of the solar system. Marlene Dietrich, the first to declare freedom; Neruro, a half-completed twenty kilometer wheel of tectoplastic attended by O’Neill can utilities, agriculture tanks, and habitation bubbles, the aspirant capital of the space Dead. Ares Orbital, dreaming of tectoformed Mars in the pumice pore spaces of Phobos and Deimos; the Pale Gallileans, surfing over the icescapes of Europa on an improbable raft of cables and spars; the Shepherd Moons, dwellers on the edge of the abyss, sailing the solar wind through Saturn’s rings. Toe-holds, shallow scratchings, space-hovels; but the stolen nanotechnology burgeoned in the energy-rich environment of space. An infinite ecological niche. The Freedead knew they were the inheritors of the universe. The meat corporadas had withdrawn to the orbit of their planet. For a time. When they struck, they struck decisively. The Tsiolkovski Clade on the dark side of the moon was the first to fall as the battle groups of the corporadas thrust outward. The delicate film of vacuum-compatible tectoformed forest that carpeted the crater was seared away in the alpha strike. By the time the last strike went in, a new five-kilometer deep crater of glowing tufa replaced the tunnels and excavations of the old lunar mining base. Earth’s tides had trembled as the moon staggered in its orbit.