‘Not to mention sneezing,’ said Dee. ‘What’s the matter, anyway? That’s your…seventeenth sneeze in thirty-five minutes.’
‘Fallout.’ Tamara sniffed aggressively. ‘It fucking gets up my nose, OK?’
They were walking in single file along a back street at the northern edge of the Fifth Quarter, the side opposite to the one that faced the human quarter. Their objective, Dee had told them, was to continue along that course, past the tip of the Quarter where it tapered into the sand, and on until they intersected the Stone Canal. The only activity they’d encountered was that of small biomechs, hopping or crawling across their path, heading into the wind that was bringing the radioactive dust in off the desert. Eventually, Tamara had explained, whole flocks of them would congregate at the blast-site, to feast on the rich unstable isotopes.
‘Kind of ecological,’ she’d added. ‘Keeps it out of the carbon-life food-chain, see?’
They walked on. The sun got higher in the sky, and the suits became increasingly uncomfortable. Dee, with more conscious control of her pain-tolerance than the others, allowed her impatience to goad them on.
‘The sooner we get there,’ she said, ‘the sooner we can get this clutter off.’
‘Those of us who get there,’ Ax protested. ‘Bury me in something else, that’s all I ask.’
‘Try a bin-liner,’ Wilde called back callously.
Dee urged them all to be quiet. Badinage wasn’t a feature of the humanoid robots. The shadow of a swooping aircraft emphasised her point, and, fortunately, none of them looked up.
Eventually the Fifth Quarter petered out, the street running into the sand. The canal gleamed in the distance. They approached it across desert and, later, fields. Tamara guided them carefully around those fields whose owners were unlikely to tolerate robots clumping across their crops. In some of the fields the crops were difficult to distinguish from the irrigation-systems. There was a kind of modified cane that could be harvested as jointed plastic pipes, and these fields they walked through, parting the tall synthetic stalks.
They reached the bank of the Stone Canal. The pathway along which Wilde and Jay-Dub had entered the city, four days earlier, was on the opposite bank. The canal itself had no traffic in sight.
Dee had led them to the exact spot where the boat, in which Jay-Dub had rescued her and Ax, waited for them. Jay-Dub had recalled it from its mooring, many kilometres farther up the canal, by a coded transmission shortly before entering the tunnel. Spy and Soldier between them had had no problem in identifying the co-ordinates, accurate to the nearest metre, which had been among the last pieces of information Jay-Dub had passed to Dee’s mind.
Beside the boat, another robot waited – a patroller. It was smaller and squatter than Jay-Dub had been, but of a similar shape. On first glimpsing it Tamara had given an excited cry, then she fell silent as the robot extended its legs and peered at them.
‘This boat matches the identification of one used to impede an investigation,’ it informed them as they walked up. ‘Do you know anything about it?’ The question was repeated on several microwave channels and in several codes, but only Dee was aware of that. The initial aural query had been a mere courtesy.
Wilde walked on past the patroller, ignoring it. Tamara and Ax, after a moment of hesitation, followed. Dee walked a few steps behind them, her unsteady gait barely a pretence. The patroller’s hull swayed as it tracked backwards and forwards after the marching metal figures. As Dee passed it, she lurched sideways against one of its legs. The robot toppled into the water and sank without trace.
And that was that. They all piled into the boat, cast off, and headed up the canal. As soon as they got inside the cabin, they stripped off their armour. Ax made to heave his hated disguise over the side, but Dee stopped him.
‘We’re going to need the steel,’ she told him.
The sun had long since set when they reached their destination, the limit and source of the canal. There was a small jetty at one bank, and steps cut into the rock up the same side of that steep, barren glen in the Madreporite Mountains. Dee moored the boat and they all stepped out, and stood looking at the hundred-metre-high concrete dam that blocked the valley before them.
‘The Sieve Plates,’ said Dee.
‘You mean there are more?’ asked Wilde, staring up.
‘Oh yes,’ said Tamara. ‘Another five, I think.’
‘Jesus.’ Wilde peeled the cellophane from his final pack of cigarettes and lit one. He couldn’t stop looking up. ‘Who built this? Martians?’
‘Robots,’ Dee said, a trace of pride in her voice. ‘Now come on. There’s no time to waste.’
By starlight and comet-glow they ascended the stair. It zigzagged up and up, until they were above the top of the dam and could see the dark lake of cometary water and, two kilometres farther up the glen, another and higher dam.
‘Martians,’ Wilde said. ‘Gotta be.’
‘New Martians,’ Tamara panted. The air was noticeably thinner, although oddly enough Wilde seemed to cope with it better.
‘Machines,’ Dee insisted.
‘Fuck who built it,’ said Ax. ‘When does this goddamn stair stop?’
Five minutes later he had an answer, as they turned around a buttress of rock and found themselves in the mouth of an artificial cavern. The cave was about three metres high and two across, with a fused-rock floor. Ahead, around several bends, was a faint glow. Dee led them confidently towards it.
The light brightened, the cavern widened, and they turned the final corner and stepped into a far greater cave, a warehouse cut from the rock. A good thirty metres high by fifty wide, it was stacked with crates and machinery and lit by arc-lights hung from the roof. It was hard to tell how far back it went.
‘Who the fuck built this?’ Ax asked.
Tamara wrinkled her nose. ‘Somebody with nuclear blasting-equipment,’ she said. She glanced up at the lights. ‘And nuclear power to burn.’
‘It was built by Jay-Dub,’ Dee said.
‘All by himself?’ Wilde sounded amused.
From behind the nearby stacks of machinery and crates came the unmistakable sounds of firearms being readied to fire.
‘Not quite by himself,’ said David Reid, as he stepped into view. He waved a casual hand. ‘And you are not by yourselves, either, in case that isn’t clear.’
They all stood stock still.
‘It’s clear,’ said Tamara.
Reid gave her a wry smile, Ax a polite one, and Wilde a cold glance. Then he looked Dee straight in the eye.
‘Well hello, Jon,’ he said. ‘Not like you to hide behind a woman’s skirts.’
Behind him, several armed men in black jumpsuits moved into view, and then surrounded the group. Reid checked to see that everyone was well covered. They were. He leaned forward with a slight bow, and offered Dee a cigarette.
‘Mind you,’ he went on, after he’d lit it for her, ‘it’s not like you to die heroically, either. I must say I was quite impressed that you did, even in the knowledge that you had a copy.’
Dee regarded him silently for a moment.
‘I’ll talk to you later,’ she said.
Her expression and stance altered slightly.
‘Hello, Dave,’ her voice said. ‘I should’ve known you knew me better than that.’
‘Shit,’ said Wilde. ‘You bastard.’
Reid laughed at the comprehension on Wilde’s face, the bewilderment on Ax’s and Tamara’s.
‘Wilde, or Jay-Dub if you like, downloaded into her computer,’ Reid explained, as if it should have been obvious.
‘And Meg,’ said Dee’s voice. ‘It’s not even crowded.’
Reid sighed and turned to Ax and Tamara.
‘What makes you people go along with this?’ he asked. ‘What did this machine, or that –’ he indicated Wilde, who was very slowly and carefully pulling his pack of fags from his pocket ‘– tell you? That information wants to be free?’ He laughed. ‘If that’s what you want, go back to Ship City right now – the whole place is in an uproar, with arguments turning into fist-fights, if not yet firefights. Just what you’ve always wanted – anarchy in the streets! Or did it tell you it could raise the dead? What could be worth the risk of replacing humanity with…flatlines?’