‘Has it occurred to you that I’ll do just fine on my own? Don’t you get it? I’m helping you now. With what I know, what I can do, I could set myself up anywhere and look after myself a fuck of a lot better than you could look after yourself when we first met,’ she said, and she was probably right. ‘Thank you for believing me when we met, thank you for protecting me when I couldn’t, Jakob, but things have changed.’
‘Tomorrow I’ll try-’ I began but she cut me off.
‘Tomorrow you just concentrate on your job, because if you’re worrying about me then you’re going to get everyone killed.’
I just stood there feeling foolish. It looked like it was starting to rain.
‘Please go,’ she said. I did.
22
I would’ve been gratified by how ill Morag looked if f hadn’t been the only one who’d thrown up so far. I put that down to dying as I was pretty used to turbulent transport flights. The magnetic storms caused in a binary system like Sirius were considerably worse than anything the Atlantic could throw at us. Still it was a rough crossing, I thought as I retched into the waste-paper bin that seemed already half filled with my vomit, as the wind and rain battered us around over the ocean. I was really pleased that Buck and Gibby had had the time to set up the transport so they could control it through their interfaces and musical instruments. My head seemed to throb with every beat of the country and metal they were playing.
The transport flyer Mountain Princess was effectively a small warehouse with enough vectored thrust engines to make it fly. Basically it was the same principle as the gunships that Buck and Gibby had flown with the 160th but with none of the elegance or performance. Which was one of the reasons we were being battered around so much. We were also pretty low, but not because we were trying to avoid detection as we were showing up on Atlantis air traffic control as a supply transport from a nearby ore ship. Someone Balor assured us was a good friend of his captained the ore ship, though to me the captain looked like she owed Balor and was shit scared of him.
‘Jake!’ Mudge shouted across the cargo hold. I looked over to him; he was beckoning me over. Despite my misery I managed to stagger to my feet and make my way across the hold with my bucket of sloshing vomit. ‘Do you want to see the Spoke?’ he shouted at me over the roar of the engines and the storm. I don’t know why he was shouting as my audio dampeners were breaking down the noise and filtering what he was trying to say clearly. I was about to tell him that I wasn’t bothered but decided why not and followed him into the cockpit.
Buck looked ridiculous staggering from side to side in the cockpit, trying to play his electric guitar and not pull the wires out of his neck port. Gibby looked less so as his fingers played across his keyboard, a look of concentration on his face. Outside windswept rain battered the cockpit’s windscreen so hard we could have already been underwater. Below us I saw the white heads of a fierce high sea.
The only other Spoke I’d ever seen had been the Kenyan Spoke, from where I’d shipped out and been brought back to in restraints as a mutineer. They always made me feel a little uncomfortable. Maybe it was the humbling nature of such a feat of engineering. I wasn’t use to seeing a structure that completely filled my horizontal field of vision, and that was just the base of the elevator.
Atlantis climbed out of the ocean along the equator roughly halfway between Africa and South America. The Spoke had been built on a similar principle to the pyramids that they’d had in Egypt before the FHC Crusades. Build a big enough base and you can make a building any size. The roots of the building went down deep into the Earth’s crust and were designed to be strong enough to resist seismic events much like the Pacifica Spoke and the Spokes in southern Asia and South America.
The spokes were basically city-sized buildings that sheathed the carbon nanotube cable that supported the up and down Mag Lev lines. The end of the carbon nanotube was tethered to an asteroid counterweight, but lying some way beneath that was High Atlantis, Atlantis’ orbital equivalent and one of the space entrepots for Earth.
The elevators were huge multi-storey affairs. They were capable of hauling bulk cargo such as the resources of the Belt that were delivered to high orbit by enormous industrial mass drivers. There was a channel in the solar system that was a nearly constant stream of huge lumps of ore. From high orbit a huge fleet of tugs manoeuvred them into place at High Atlantis and other High ports and sent them down to the surface to be delivered by freight mag lev trains, airship or, for the poorer countries in the northern hemisphere, old-fashioned surface ship.
Tonight Atlantis was receiving a thorough battering from an angry Atlantic Ocean. I watched as high waves broke themselves on the Spoke’s thick, reinforced, chemically treated concrete walls. It was covered in lights both for the huge landing decks that seemed to sprout from it and as navigation aids for aircraft. Despite the weather, we were far from the only aircraft in the sky around Atlantis tonight. Everything from aircars to shuttles, for people who didn’t want to travel at the comparatively leisurely rate of elevators, was in the air around the Spoke. Illumination was also provided by the huge viz screens attached to the walls, many of them obscured by the fierce sea, which beamed out near-constant adverts to the network of surface vessels docked at this deep-water port.
I could see Gibby’s throat moving as he sub-vocalised. Presumably he was in contact with Atlantis air traffic control. Buck leaned over to me.
‘Two minutes,’ he said quietly, my audio enhancements picking up what he said. I nodded and moved back into the cargo hold, pushing Mudge in front of me. We’d run the final diagnostics not ten minutes ago, made any final last-minute adjustments to the Wraiths and stowed our gear. None of us had had the slightest idea what was in the oversized metal coffin that Balor had brought on board, but as I came back in I noticed it was open and everyone else was standing around it. I staggered over to the others.
Looking in the coffin, suddenly my nausea was forgotten. I turned to Balor.
‘You brought a shark?’ The coffin was a cryogenic storage box that was going through a rapid defrost program. Inside the box, through the cold smoke of the liquid nitrogen, I made out the form of a heavily armoured, cybernetically augmented twelve-and-a-half-foot-long shark. Balor was breathing in a funny way, and it wasn’t just because he was using his gills.
‘Are you linked?’ I asked incredulously. Balor just smiled. I suspected he had a remote biofeedback device that connected him and the shark, similar though not as intense as the one that Morag and I had used. It wasn’t a threat to our comms discipline because nobody would have a reason to use it. What it did mean was that at some level Balor was thinking and behaving like a shark. My day just kept on getting better and better.
‘That thing’s not going to attack us is it?’ Mudge asked. If they were linked I was more worried about Balor attacking us.
‘Magantu,’ Balor said proudly.
Morag looked up at him sharply. ‘That’s your girlfriend!’
‘That’s just something you tell people for effect, right?’ I asked him. He ignored me and just kept breathing funny. Fuck it, time for a little cocktail. Some of the sickness pills, a stim or two, some amphetamines to help the stims along – don’t want to fall asleep – and then some of the old red. Trying to make sure that nobody else noticed I sent a blast from the inhaler up each nostril. Tasted something I haven’t tasted since I was naked, cold and covered in blood on the Santa Maria. The perfect complement to my boosted nerves. Street level, none of the military-grade stuff any more, a bit rough round the edges but I could still feel the blood roaring in my ears.