The transit descended with a low hum which deepened and broadened as it neared the ground, whipping the sedge in the waist-high planters to either side of the boardwalk into a frenzy. The door slid open before it had even reached the ground and out came the Commander, easily leaping four feet to the boards below. She was halfway to the entrance by the time the transit had come to a halt and, even with only the guide lights to see by, everyone could see she was furious.
“What the fuck happened?” she shouted over the inrush of air. “You fucking morons. Where’s Jakubsen? Who’s in fucking charge around here?”
“Jakubsen’s dead,” said Lt Mioru. His grey uniform, usually pristine, was creased all over, and his sword was missing from its scabbard. He sounded tired. “I’m the ranking officer. Sir.”
“The fuck you are. Dead? What happened? You know what, I don’t care. Show me. And you?”
She turned to the staff, who stood to attention in a neat line in the foyer, trying not to stand out. “You fucking stupid? What are you doing? You standing around? You waiting for your problems to go away? Call this incident response? Fuck off, get outta here, make yourselves useful. Fucking morons.”
They scattered. The Commander turned back to Mioru. He’d never been this close to a Divine before, never spoken to one. He’d dreamed this moment many times. But never like this. Now, it all seemed rather pointless.
Still, even in his sleepless state, her face was terrible.
He led her through the sanctum, stepping over the bodies. Her boots crunched on the mirror-shards underfoot, from where they’d smashed the mirrorwalls, the ones which should have kept the sanctum protected, kept the Divines never more than a whisper away. They’d known to smash those first. He didn’t know how they’d found that out. He didn’t want to know. Questions like that had dangerous answers.
She pointed at particular things and asked about them. Though she was still thrumming with rage, her questions were succinct. “How is that door secured?” (With biometrics, which they shouldn’t have been able to fix, but somehow they had.) “Why didn’t that alarm trip?” (It had, but the guards who would have heard it were all dead when it went off.)
And finally, when they got to the core: “Good fucking god.”
The chamber was in ruins. The grand archive that circled the walls had been ransacked; chips littered the floor, some crushed, others burned. A huge bite had been taken out of the exquisite lacquer screens that protected the core, by some sort of sonic weapon of a size that exceeded anything Mioru had ever seen, perhaps bigger than anything the Empire had ever built. Jakubsen’s body was crumpled against the far wall, his once grey uniform turned black with soot and gore, half his skull missing. The air was still heavy with the stink of burnt plastic and ozone.
In the centre, atop the plinth, nothing.
The Commander walked around the chamber, placing her feet carefully about the detritus. The emergency lights glinted from her cheeks and made her expression unreadable. When she got to Jakubsen’s body she crouched and sat very still. Mioru thought she was looking into his still half-open eyes. He was seized by an impulse to look away, to give her some privacy, like she was a human being.
Then she straightened and turned to the plinth. The holster that was built into it had been snapped clean off, leaving only a jagged shard, twisted like a dead tree.
Deliberately, finger by finger, the Commander pulled off one white glove. Mioru saw her hands had the same awful sheen as her face. She licked her forefinger and ran it along the jagged edge.
There was a slight hissing sound, and Mioru saw a puff of smoke.
The Commander calmly pulled the glove back on. “Fucking typical,” she said. “The one security measure that didn’t fuck up.”
“Sir?” said Mioru.
“The mindfall failsafe,” said the Commander, striding back towards the door. “It’s a suicide pact. Anyone who takes the box from the plinth without deactivating the failsafe gets tagged. Anyone who gets tagged has between two and twenty-four hours before they die in foaming agony.”
Mioru looked at the plinth, horrified. Then pulled himself together. “Sir. That means whichever of the thieves took it might already be dead.”
Instantly she turned on him. “Then what are you fucking waiting for!” she roared. “If they’re dead, they can’t answer our fucking questions, can they!”
She grabbed him by his lapel and pulled him off the ground as easily as she’d pulled off her glove. Up close the light gleamed off her mirror-skin, no warmth in it, only a silver sheen and reflected in it the cold red of the emergency lights. He squirmed, horrified, trying to look away, unable to look away.
“You and your shitty little unit, who have caused potentially the greatest fuckup in the history of the glorious Empire, are going to tear this city apart to find who took that box. Then you’re going to bring them to me and we’re going to have a nice little chat. So you’d better fucking hope the thief isn’t dead, because that wouldn’t reflect well on you, would it?”
She waited. “Would it?”
He spluttered, “Yes, sir.”
She let go and he fell coughing to his knees. When he looked up she was off back the way they’d come.
He watched her go, her silhouette reflected one-thousandfold in the mirror-shards on the floor, streaked at random angles with blood.
The Wasteland stretched into the distance until it faded into the yellow-purple haze.
“The render depth is crap,” said Az. “You can’t even see the horizon.”
Tentatively he put out a foot and kicked at the bare rock. A handful of pixel-sand came loose and hung in the air, glittering.
“It’s because they spend all their cycles on shading,” said Jorda. “All the top-end ones do it now. It’s because the human brain doesn’t focus on anything more than 100m away, so you only need to render what’s close by.”
Az ripped the dreamware off his head. “That’s crap. People look at the distance all the time. They’re just trying to justify using low-quality vis. There’s no way Dr Chip will take more than eighty for it.”
Jorda looked hurt. She was sitting cross-legged on the blanket, playing with her hair. “No way. The guy I got it off was talking two, three hundred.”
“Well, you got scammed.” Az gave her it back and stood. He was almost too tall for the container now, and his hair brushed the ceiling. “Maybe if you give Dr Chip the same spiel you gave me, he’ll throw in some Soli pills out of sympathy.”
Jorda pouted, but packed the dreamware into its case nevertheless. “I don’t want Soli pills. I want my money. You’ll take it to him, right?”
“What, so it’s my fault when he says it’s junk?”
“No, because you know him.” Jorda held out the case.
Az sighed and took it. “OK, I’ll see what he says. But I’ve got a few errands to run first.”
He shrugged on his jacket and she opened the hatch for him to leave. “Okay, don’t go losing it in the meantime, though.”
“See you, Jorda.”
Jorda lived in her mum’s container on the Grafford Stack, nestled under the Route 30 Bridge. They were only three levels from the top, and sound of the freighters going by overhead was almost overwhelming. Jorda’s mum kept a white noise machine in their container to drown it out, but it gave Jorda headaches and Az had never seen it used.
It took Az ten minutes to descend the flimsy steps to street level, hands shovelled into his pockets against the wind. The twilight had deepened these last few months, and the temperature dropped with it. Soon the city would be on the move again, starting the great process of migration to follow the daylight around the slow-moving edge of dusk; the first time since Az was a young child, which he couldn’t remember. He wondered what it was going to be like in the daylight. Hot, probably.
Below, at street level, it was almost as loud. Down here not many people had transits, or the people who did were too smart to leave them where an accident might happen. So apart from a few cyclists furiously ringing their bells to get through, and despite the cold, the street was packed. Hawkers and vendors of every kind, selling clothes and tech and food; a pavement game of Go, which two old women were playing in complete concentration as a crowd watched and placed bets; children throwing stones at a sorry feral bot which, malfunctioning, ran around in circles spitting sparks.
Az spotted a couple of Greys on patrol coming down the street and pulled his collar up. He was just a kid, sure, but anyone who worked with Dr Chip ended up with their name on one list or another and it paid to be discreet. The dreamware case was bulky under his jacket; any idiot could see he was carrying something.
One of the guards nudged his companion and pointed in Az’s direction.
Shit. Time to make himself scarce. He ducked into a side alley and made for an opening by the gutter sealed off by thick iron bars. He squeezed through (that was getting harder by the day, too; soon he’d need another way in) and found himself in a tunnel twice the height of an adult, lined with glo-paint warnings. The maintenance tunnels. In a few weeks they’d become the living sinews of the city as it began its slow roll westward. But until then, he had them all to himself. Az whistled as he set off down the tunnel.
He almost missed it. It was only his scavenger brain – what Dr Chip had referred to fondly as his “little klepto instincts” – that was almost on the lookout for salvage that made him look twice at the bundle of trash at the end of a side tunnel, below a ladder that (Az knew) led under the City Square.
Az paused, stopped whistling, blinked.
Various thoughts flashed through Az’s mind. Curiosity won out. He cautiously approached the bundle. It was wrapped in plastic and smelled of smoke.
He’d been right. It was a body.
In the low light it wasn’t easy to tell how long the man had been there, or how he’d died. He had dark hair and a trimmed black goatee, and was curled into a ball hugging his arms to his chest. There was nothing around to suggest a fight or an accident; just a man, sat in a tunnel, expired.
Az crouched to get a better look; about his mouth were traces of spittle, like he’d choked on something, or had some kind of allergic reaction. There was something wedged under his coat and the floor. Very gingerly Az nudged the coat with his foot. It was a gun.
Az looked again and realised that there was something in the man’s arms.
It would be a lie to say that Az did not think about the wisdom of what he was about to do next, but he certainly did not think twice.
He prised the object from the man’s stiffening grip. It was a box, made of sleek black wood. No longer than his hand, palm to fingertip, with some strange kind of sharp plastic sticking out of the bottom which Az avoided touching. Something rattled inside it.
Inscribed along the lid, in silver letters: HAVEN.
Something had gummed up the latch, but nothing a quick whack against the tunnel wall couldn’t fix. It was flimsy, almost like it wasn’t supposed to keep the box secure, just enough to hold it shut. The lid came clattering off and something came out with it.
Az bent over and picked it up.
It was a thumb drive – or something that looked like a thumb drive – wrought in the shape of a rose.