Doctor Who: Transit

  The army had arrived.

  She remembered the confrontation on Williamsberg Avenue. Hatred rolling out like an Atlantic wave to break over the single line of blue uniforms. You came from the Stop, from bad housing, bad schools, from meals made out of pet food, from a place where recession was status quo and the one thing that was clear was that you never got out. You got to see out, watching Systemwide! on English-5, riding the trains to all the places that you'd glimpsed. You learnt quick that visiting wasn't living, that the Stop clung to you wherever you went.

  So you went back because the job evaporated and without the job you couldn't raise the key money for a pad. Back to the catfood monsters, the urine-smelling stairways and the shitty flights that were always broken. Back because it suited the Powers-that-be that you stay there.

  They cracked the paving stones and threw them at the cops.

  Pulled fixtures out of shops, filled bottles full of industrial alcohol and made rag fuses from the strips they tore from their clothes. The missiles arched overhead to rain down on the policemen who stood their ground, dodging the firebombs, letting the stones bang off their armour. You could see the fear in the set of their mouths under their helmet visors. Fear overtaken by anger and hate.

  Zamina recognized the sergeant in charge. The same tired-looking face and masai haircut, the detective from the murder scene two days ago. His hair was scraped back and plastered down with red mud. It came in little enamel tins, she'd seen them in a Mombasa fashion boutique. He paced up and down behind the line of policemen calmly giving orders, keeping them steady. It could have gone on like that for hours if it hadn't been for the kid in the white T-shirt.

  The boy came running through the crowd. He was maybe ten years old, thin white legs sticking out of baggy khaki shorts. He was cradling something close to his belly, masking it with both arms, making his gait awkward as he ran. The cops shifted as he ran towards them, the shock-rods nervous in their hands, but no one wanted to beat a kid. Catch him if he comes closer, they were thinking, throw him in the tank until he cools off and Social Services bails him out.

  The grenade was a thousand metres of monofilament wrapped around two hundred milligrams of cyclotol chipped to detonate one metre above ground level. Only the sergeant saw it coming, had just enough time to yell a warning and dive away.

  Zamina stopped again as a white drone the size of a beachball hovered over Roberta's corpse. It had been methodically working itself up the street, pausing to check each body in turn She knew that somewhere behind it larger medical drones would be moving up and sorting out the injured. The drone pinged twice and pinned a microtransmitter to Roberta's face, marking her as dead.

  The drones worked in silence except for the imperceptible hum of their lifting fields, each of them acting in accordance with their programming and bound together by an invisible web of microwave communications. It was like watching an invasion by alien insects. Zamina hadn't seen a live human being for hours.

  The authorities were leaving the Stop to the ministration of the machines.

  The cuts and abrasions Zamina had collected began to sting. There was a line of pain running down her left thigh, and she could feel a spreading wetness soaking into her leggings. Zamina didn't look, she knew if you looked it always hurt more. Her throat was sore from the smoke even though it was beginning to clear. She should have forgotten about Roberta but she couldn't leave her lying on the street. Zamina had been her friend.

  Benny was waiting for them in the orphanage, leaning against the wall just back from the door by a large poster that said 'JESUS SAVES' in blood-red letters. She didn't move to help Zamina as she dragged Roberta inside. Benny seemed untouched by the violence; she looked down at Zamina from a great distance.

  'She's dead,' said Zamina.

  Benny shrugged her shoulders, bone and muscle moving under Roberta's second-best leather jacket. 'Underclasses,' she said vaguely, 'poverty, insensitive policing.' The words were slurred, sing-song, like the recitation of a junkie. 'Happens all the time.'

  'Hey, Benny,' said Zamina, 'you wired or something?'

  Her eyes snapped into focus. 'I studied history so I know. Did I tell you that?'

  'You never told us nothing,' said Zamina, 'nothing at all.'

  'No I didn't did I?'

  What had she said to the boy in the white T-shirt? Did he know it was a grenade or had she just handed it to him and said, Hey kid, here's something for you to throw. Mind you get in good and close. He had to get in close, he was just a small boy not strong enough to throw beyond the grenade's lethal range. The cops had their armour but the boy was cut in two.

  'Come on, girl,' said Benny, 'she's dead and we've got things to do, people to see.'

  West Triton Feeder/Pluto ninety-five

  Memories chased the Doctor up the non-existent tunnels of the transit system. Kadiatu assured him that this was the last but one leg of the trip to Lowell Depot, for which he was grateful. Since leaving Mitsubishi there had been a lot of empty trains and deserted stations. Each transition through a tunnel disturbed him; he had spent far too much time in unreal environments recently, the inside of his own mind being the worst. Perhaps he should have done some reordering while he was in there, a bit of DIY amongst the old grey cells. He could have recatalogued his memory into things he knew, things he might know and things that thought he knew them.

  The train raced ahead of his mind's own event horizon with his memories howling behind.

  Intuition, the data-processing of his unconscious mind that he had learnt to follow but never trusted, drove him on. In his darker moments he often considered the possibility that his subconscious was in some respect not his own. That it belonged to some other, vaster, more complex personality. As if he was just a dream in the mind of a god. Sometimes he posited a theory of reverse-existentialism in which he existed only because other people thought he existed. Kadiatu's phase-space model worried him. Tracing him as a series of gaps in the sequence of human history was a bit too much like empirical confirmation of his worst nightmares.

  I am thought of therefore I am.

  You could go mad thinking like that.

  Kadiatu didn't help his peace of mind either. Too many coincidences piled one on top of each other. It was like walking around with a club sandwich made by fate.

  Travelling on the underground always made him morbid.

  We are all lost luggage in the Victoria Station of life.

  Kadiatu was stretched out on the seat opposite, ankles crossed, hands folded across her stomach, eyes half closed Perfectly relaxed.

  He kept on looking for traces of his old friend in his great-great-grand-daughter. Some characteristic gesture or tick that would link them over five generations. There was nothing, of course; human genetics didn't run to that sort of thing. especially after what had been done to hers.

  The train pulled into another station. Kadiatu rolled to her feet.

  What would the Brigadier have said if he knew?

  'All change,' said Kadiatu.

  She led him through deserted galleries paved with red slate and lined with unused shops. The air was frosty and undisturbed. It was like walking across a field of virgin snow.

  'This must be one of the unfinished developments,' said Kadiatu. 'They were supposed to revitalize this whole end of the system.'

  'What happened?'

  'The money ran out.'

  The entrance leading to the platform they wanted was blocked by a sliding metal cage gate. A red No Entry sign was stencilled on a plywood sheet attached to the gate with gaffa tape. The Doctor let Kadiatu have first go at the lock. He wanted to see what she did.

  Kadiatu carefully examined the point where the locking mechanism joined the wall, took a step back and kicked it hard twice. She took another look and, satisfied, yanked open the gate. The entire locking mechanism came out of the wall with a puff of cement powder. The gate rattled open and slammed into the opposite wall with a crash.

  'Nemo m
e impine lacessit,' said the Doctor.

  'What?'

  'No one attacks me with impunity,' said the Doctor, walking through the open gate. 'The family motto of the Stewarts.'

  Kadiatu poked her finger into the hole made by the lock. Chunks of cement crumbled and fell out. 'Graft above all things,' said Kadiatu. 'Motto of the building contractor.'

  It got colder as they got closer to the platforms. There was no tiling here, just a scored floor of unfinished puff concrete. When they stepped out on to the platform Kadiatu automatically looked down the platform for the indicator hologram. It was blank. Her breath steamed as they waited.

  'I hope there are trains running on this line,' she said.

  The Doctor watched somewhat smugly as Kadiatu began bouncing up and down on her toes to keep warm. A low musical chime sounded from somewhere and the indicator lit up.

  'At last,' said Kadiatu.

  'NEXT TRAIN: STRAIGHT TO HELL 5 mins.'

  'Someone's got a sick sense of humour,' said Kadiatu.

  'No,' said the Doctor quietly. 'Somebody's trying to tell us something.'

  Isle of Dogs

  Ming took the call in Fu's office: Credit Card staring out of the Philips HDTV. Another of her Number One Husband's many antiques. The analog decoder wasn't really compatible with the scrambler's signal protocol, so Credit Card's face was spread out to twice its normal width.

  'I can't see you,' he said.

  Fu stretched out a long arm and placed a minicam on top of the TV.

  'That's better.'

  A wedge-shaped portion of Credit Card's hair had been shaved away and a strip of artificial skin ran down from it to above his right eyebrow.

  'Can't you stop him?' asked Ming.

  'He's putting on his armour, for chrissakes, I didn't even know he had it with him. I'm not crazy enough to try and get in his way.'

  'What about Dogface?'

  'He's at the local medical centre. The spike was off centre and missed his spine. It's just a kidney, some intestine and a few other bits and bobs they have to replace. He should be out and about in a few days.'

  'Is there any more?'

  'There's loads more,' said Credit Card. 'Old Sam's taking Blondie with him. Says he needs someone who knows the stop.'

  'They know about the riots?'

  'It's on TV, ain't it?'

  'So why's he going?'

  'I think he's got business but the way he's acting I don't know. It's like he's on a mission or something.'

  'V Soc,' said Fu from behind the TV.

  'What was that?' asked Credit Card.

  'Nothing,' said Ming. 'What about the freesurfers that attacked you?'

  'I didn't see them till they was dead and believe me that's the best way to see them. Scary stuff. The KGB scraped up the remains and took them away. I don't know where.'

  'Probably the Nueva Lubyanka,' said Ming. With Dogface down and Old Sam going up the line with Blondie, Ming was down to just two Special Maintenance. 'There's been some more of those power drains you and Dogface found so fascinating.'

  'Christ, Ming, I need a rest.'

  You shouldn't have spent twenty years making yourself fucking indispensable then, should you?'

  Credit Card terminated the link from his end.

  'I may have married you,' said Fu, 'but I'm glad I don't work for you.'

  'Management is a hierarchical process,' said Ming. 'You're never going to be comfortable with your boss, however nice she is. Better to give them a proper hate figure in the first place, that way they know where they are. Play your cards right and your employees do the work right just to spite you.'

  'Does that mean that underneath that cold hard exterior you're really a warm lovable human being?'

  'Fu,' said Ming, 'you never heard a rationalization before?'

  She punched a call code into the phone.

  A dancer dressed in abbreviated green armour appeared on the screen. It was a classy graphic for a hold signal but the illusion of reality was destroyed by the way the decoder spread random pixels over the image. The dancer was replaced by a joyboy's face that didn't look real even though it probably was.

  'Ice Maiden,' said the face.

  'I want to talk to Francine,' said Ming.

  Stazione Centrale de Rhea

  Have you ever used a Vicker's All-Body Combat System before?

  The world had become a very simple place for Blondie, an abstract landscape leached of colour, simplified into friends and targets by the helmet's CPU. The data went straight into the auxiliary contact jack on his neck the images forming directly behind his eyes.

  Please specify which weapon systems are activated.

  The military software had been surprisingly polite, running down a pre-arm checklist before fine-tuning the system to his requirements. It gave him the simplest possible combat environment and divided up the world into discrete zones of evaluated danger. Moving around gave Blondie a profound feeling of unreality, as if he were playing an intricate VR game. Lambada said that the veterans had systems like this chipped into their cortex. Combat software directly integrated into the mind's eye.

  Please specify current rules of engagement.

  Blondie realised that this was the way Old Sam saw the world all the time.

  'Can you hear me ?' asked Old Sam.

  Old Sam was wearing his full rig from the war. It came out of the same bags as the helmet, piece by piece, smelling of grease and liquid Teflon. He must have maintained the equipment over all those years. Blondie had heard somewhere that it had over two thousand separate components. He had a vision of Old Sam, late at night, bent over a workbench. Tools and components laid out in neat rows around the workspace, squinting to hold a jeweller's eyeglass in place as he assembled some microscopic widget. Except he wouldn't be using an eyeglass, not with the eyes he already owned.

  'Hey Blondie,' said Old Sam, louder. 'Can you hear me?' It was radio communication relayed into the helmet speakers.

  'How come we're using radio ?' asked Blondie.

  'ECM,' said Dogface. 'No direct neural input that can be accessed from outside. You don't want the enemy breaking into the net and scrambling your mind. How do you feel ?'

  'Strange.'

  'You'll get used to it. Has the CPU asked for rules of engagement yet?'

  'Yes.'

  'Tell it Melbourne Protocols.'

  Blondie formed the words in his mind and pushed them towards the interface. It wasn't that different from the work he'd been doing in system maintenance.

  'You won't notice any difference at the moment but the CPU won't let you fire unless it detects a weapon,' said Old Sam 'Now a few things to remember. You're wearing what's called "low threat" armour. Support troops used to wear it, medics, base personnel and the like. The breastplate, codpiece and greaves can take a direct hit from most projectile or energy weapons, the rest of it cannot. I'm not expecting real trouble but if we get into a firefight get your face in the dirt and I'll handle it.'

  'What if you can't handle it?'

  'I wouldn 't think about that contingency, my lad,' said Old Sam. 'I really wouldn't.'

  Credit Card came over to join them. Blondie watched the silver kill icon hovering over his chest. As Credit Card got closer the icon refined its position until it was neatly aligned slightly to the left of his breastbone.

  Bang, thought Blondie, straight through the heart.

  He broke into a sudden sweat when he realized what he'd nearly done. No wonder Old Sam had him on failsafe.

  'Visors up,' said Credit Card testily, 'or I'm not talking to either of you.'

  Lowell Depot

  The dead were waiting for them at the station. They lined the platform in four neat rows, tricked out in their best black bodybags for the special occasion. Pinned to the foot end of each bag was a white smart card, little robotic forget-me-nots to carry the dead into the inactive files of the system database. Some of the bags were far too short to contain adults.

  Th
e Doctor and Kadiatu had to step over them to reach the exit.

  Kadiatu waited in the archway, watching as the Doctor unsealed one of the smaller bags. Caught a glimpse of the child's pale face and the puckered hole above its left eye. The Doctor looked up from the body and straight into her eyes. Kadiatu turned away, trying to catch her breath. The Doctor took her arm, leading her away from the platform, but she stumbled over nothing and fell against the wall.

  'Cry,' said the Doctor.

  Kadiatu cried for the first time since her parents' funeral. Her face buried in the Doctor's shoulder awkwardly bent over to reach his level. He didn't move, no arm put around her shoulders, no words of comfort. He just waited until she'd finished.

  'Better?' he asked when she'd straightened up.

  Kadiatu nodded.

  'Lesson number one,' said the Doctor. 'Those that travel this road, walk alone.' Then he smiled and, reaching up, patted her cheek. 'But backup is always useful.'

  It made her feel better but she was damned if she knew why.

  For passengers a transit station consists of an entrance, the platforms and the concourses. For an engineer like Kadiatu they're much larger. Even the smallest branch station had a network of conduits, maintenance shafts, niches for cleaning robots, not to mention the parallel freight station with its handlers and cargo lifts.

  Lowell Depot had been built during the post-war boom years. Pluto had been expected to soak up the population overspill from the more crowded worlds and the depot had massive overcapacity built in. That was before the Australian Famine and the Martian terraforming project, before the stop became the Stop. Like Kings Cross, it was a labyrinth of passageways and open space, only here mostly empty.

  Finding their way to the main Central Line platform was going to be a problem.

  An autokart raced towards them when they emerged on to a concourse, stopped suddenly a metre from their feet and beeped twice. Kadiatu looked at the Doctor, who shrugged. The kart beeped again and performed a neat three-point turn.