'Down boy,' said the Doctor. 'Sit, beg, roll over, play dead.'
'It's an autokart,' said Kadiatu.
'I think it wants us to get in.'
'That's not necessarily a good reason to do it, though. Is it?'
'More use than a ball of string,' said the Doctor and climbed aboard. Kadiatu followed him on and tried to find a comfortable position for her legs.
They sat there for a minute or two, feeling a bit foolish. The Doctor nudged Kadiatu in the ribs and pointed to the dashboard. There was a small microphone inset above the station name-plate.
'Central Line platform,' she said, 'please.'
The kart moved off down the concourse.
'Ah,' said the Doctor, 'the magic word.'
Entering the next concourse was like driving on to a building site. A line of yellow and black-striped drones were parked against one wall. Streaks of dirty black soot ran along their flanks, some of them showed extensive damage and signs of small arms fire.
'Fire-fighters,' said Kadiatu.
Small crablike robots scuttled over the drones, slipping in and out of open inspection panels. There were painful flashes of blue light as they electrowelded patches over damaged bodywork.
'This must be the forward workshop,' said the Doctor, 'where the walking wounded are patched up and sent back to the front.'
'No wonder the line was closed to passengers,' said Kadiatu. 'They must have been moving all this up.'
A blue police-drone buzzed the kart and scanned them with bursts of pink laser light.
'Oh shit,' said Kadiatu. 'We're going to get busted.'
The drone kept pace with the kart for a moment before becoming suddenly uninterested in them and gliding away.
'Did you do that?' asked Kadiatu.
'No,' said the Doctor, 'did you?'
'No.'
There was a knot of technicians at the end of the concourse. They were clustered around a projected map of the area. Kadiatu noticed that a lot of it was marked red for danger. The Doctor doffed his hat at them as the kart buzzed past.
'Hey,' shouted a voice behind them, 'who the hell are you?'
'As soon as we find out,' Kadiatu shouted back, 'we'll let you know.'
There were more drones in the next concourse and the next. They passed an assault model doing downtime, surrounded by worried-looking soldiers dressed in dirty olive green. Some malfunction must have popped all its jack turrets; lethal weapons sprung out at full extension like a busted puzzle box.
They heard the people before they saw them - a low restless muttering cut through with the sound of crying babies. The noise was funnelled down the passageway, slowly growing to overwhelm the hum of the kart's electric motor.
The living were more unruly than the dead. They did not lie quietly in ordered ranks. Instead they were spread out in chaotic patterns, whirls and loops that formed around family units. Some were standing, some sat crosslegged or leant against the walls. Some lay on the floor, curled up tight in fetal positions. Relief workers moved amongst them, wearing fluorescent donkey jackets with agency names on their backs - OXFAM, MEDAID, HIGGINS TRUST. They looked like a species of bright yellow wading bird picking over a beach.
'How many, do you think?'
'In here?' asked the Doctor. 'About a thousand.'
It was like the archive footage of the Australian famine. Worse, because Kadiatu was here amongst it, riding down the narrow corridor between the refugees. Only a few bothered to watch them pass.
'They must be evacuating the whole project,' said Kadiatu.
A line of refugees wound out of the concourse. A relief worker and a soldier were stationed every ten metres or so down the line. Periodically the refugees would silently shuffle a few steps forward and stop again. On the straight stretches you could see the shuffle working itself up the line like a sine wave.
The autokart followed the line down a long curved ramp that terminated on the platform. A tall Ethiopian was standing at the bottom; he waved his clipboard in front of the kart's motion sensor until it stopped.
'There's no room for this,' he said banging the bonnet. 'It'll have to go back.'
The Doctor and Kadiatu clambered out of the kart. A big sleek InterWorld train was waiting in the station. Refugees were being herded on board by sweating STS staff.
'Home boy,' said the Doctor to the kart. It beeped one last time and reversed back up the ramp.
Kadiatu watched as an old man was lifted into the train. He was slack mouthed and his eyes were deeply disinterested Tranquillized, guessed Kadiatu, or senile. How many people lived in the projects, she wondered. Ten thousand, twenty thousand?
'Where are you going to put them?' she asked the Ethiopian.
'Poland, Brazil, the Noctis Labyrinthus. Anywhere that's got facilities, army-training bases mainly.' He looked over at the Doctor. 'Who are you with?'
'Bomb disposal,' said the Doctor.
The man shot Kadiatu a very worried look. 'Really?'
'If you've got a bomb,' said Kadiatu, 'we dispose of it.'
His voice cracked. 'Here?' he asked.
'We're looking for a box,' said the Doctor, 'about two and half metres tall, one and a half wide, with a blue light mounted on top.'
The man looked relieved. 'No,' he said, 'nothing like that.'
'Do you mind if we look around?'
'Be my guest.'
They walked up towards the blank end of the station.
'He couldn't wait to get rid of us,' said Kadiatu.
'Kings Cross station,' said the Doctor. 'I asked what was at the end of the tunnel and you said Pluto, yes?'
'Yes.'
'So it should be here.'
'What should be here?' asked Kadiatu and then she remembered. A blue box, two and a half metres tall, blue light on top. Right in the middle of the platform - she'd run right into it.
The wind had been filled with knives and the stink of ozone.
'Next time I'm going to find a better place to park.'
'Well,' she said, 'it could have been diverted but the default signalling position would take it straight through to here.'
'Then it should be here.'
'How fragile is it?' Whatever came through Kings Cross had eaten through armour, muscle and bone.
'It's indestructible.'
Since the Central Line terminated at Lowell Depot the friction field stopped three metres before the end wall. A concrete apron extended the platform into an L-shape. A physical buffer constructed from layers of collapsible steel and permafoam stood at the end of the track. Last chance of a stop before the wall. The Doctor bent over to examine it.
'I wonder,' said the Doctor, 'does this buffer look brand new to you?'
Kadiatu looked. The paintwork did look suspiciously fresh. She didn't know though, maybe they were routinely replaced.
The Doctor straightened up and looked at the end wall. A rectangular sheet of plywood three metres high had been fixed to the wall opposite the buffers and then painted over to match the wall. The Doctor walked over and rapped his knuckles on the wood. It was hollow.
He handed Kadiatu a French fisherman's knife. A wickedly sharp blade hinged out of the wooden handle and locked in place with a metal ring. She jammed the blade under the plywood, ripping down until there was enough room for them both to get a handhold. The sheet came away easily, probably held to the wall only by the adhesiveness of the paint.
'I bet you always wondered,' said the Doctor, 'what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object.'
There was a hole in the wall with razor-sharp sides. It started about ten centimetres above platform level, creating a step. It was about one and a half metres wide and two and half metres tall. The ceiling had a stepped cross-section like a ziggurat.
The hole continued straight ahead into darkness.
'Well,' said the Doctor, peering inside, 'shall we dance?'
5: Hereditary Diseases
The Ice Maiden
Th
e rumours about Francine's eyes were wrong; she did not see in the far ultraviolet or deep infrared. She did not see at all. Instead, darkness rushed behind her eyes, non-glimpses of ridges or canyon walk in the random silver imagination of her damaged nerves. 'So sorry,' said the Doctors and their machines, 'an interaction between your brain and the devices that were put inside.'
So Francine took her disability pension and forged a cocoon for herself under the sea. A flesh place, a sex-driven life-support machine to suck in the capital to finance her real interests. Expanding her influence among the artificial ganglia of humanity's brand-new nervous system, m the hectic years after the war even the military had no idea how to protect itself. They had numerous theories and academic studies but nobody knew - until Francine taught them.
Francine, pirate of the wide-open silicon sea, blind eyes illuminated by the folded neon structures of the datascape, pillaging the fortresses of the corporations and government agencies. Within three weeks she had captured an estimated 35 per cent of the world's secrets—
The establishment learnt fast. The technology wasn't new and they too had their veterans and bum-out cases. People strange enough to risk the direct interface with the machines. They sailed out from I/O ports in vessels knitted together from operating instructions to hunt down Francine.
But the twisted DNA of human history replicated itself once again. The company privateers took up their own careers, raiding other corporations for fun and profit. Smaller corporations, those on the cutting edge of the new technology, saw an opportunity to wrong-foot the big industrial zaibatsu. They gave spurious licence to the privateers who became the gaudy property of the media gestalt. Life-and-death drama on the primetime infotainment shows.
The corporations screamed all the way up to the Global Congress but political consensus took too long when battles lasted seconds. Privateers dying jacked in at their terminals, brains gently fired by lethal for/next loops.
Under the corporate mantle macro-economics ground relentlessly on. The world government was pushing the transit system all the way to Pluto. The economy went into overdrive, mainlining raw materials from the new worlds. Plate tectonics pushed up new mountain ranges in the economy and laid waste to the old conglomerates. Sony went down as did IBM and Matsui. Consumers got used to new household names from Brazil, China and Africa: Imbani, Mtchali, Tung-Po. Japan suffered social collapse and mass emigration, Australia starved.
The new consensus finally emerged alongside the pictures of emaciated potbellied children. It was unthinkable that humanity could once again allow economics to kill children. The media gestalt demanded a scapegoat: they were given the pirates. Their high profile, their mystery and amorality made them perfect targets. The only problem was how to stop them.
Francine had long since vanished from the silicon sea. Instead she traded information for influence, influence for power, and made herself the undisputed mistress of the underworld.
Then she waited for the powers-that-be to pick up the phone.
The campaign against the pirates lasted seven days. Black neon frigates ran them down on the silicon sea. I/O ports were traced, doors kicked in, heads broken, arrests made. There were even a few trials, but not many. Caught in the glare of the cameras the pirates were too often revealed as sad individuals beset by personality defects. Not glamorous enough, said the media gestalt, and produced fictions instead. Moody stories with corrupted heroes leading double lives and dying in a blaze of static. It became a separate genre in itself: silicon noir.
The government paid her off in favours and turning a blind eye to certain real-estate deals she had going on the moons of Jupiter. More influence, more money, more power. The Ange! Francine lay back and waited to become 'old money'.
Eight years passed.
Francine hardly noticed the empire she had built. After all, she had created it out of a kind of defensive reflex. A soldier's instinct to dig in and fortify her position. It ran on automatic from an anonymous glass tower in Trieste. Sometimes she wondered if they still killed people, but it was an idle thought. She didn't care. She lay beneath the sea with her memories and the silver terrain of Mars behind her eyes.
Her long repose was broken by news of the Flying Dutchman. There were still people operating within the datascape, that was unavoidable. They rode in using the new hardware decks that allowed second-hand contact with the computer network. It made them harder to kill, but their reactions operated in slow biological time not quick enough to hack the real secrets. This new generation of pirates were furtive, devoid of elan or class: anonymous.
The Flying Dutchman was different.
One of her faceless executives came to see her. It was a strange experience for Francine, like listening to a talking dog. She was a bit surprised to find that one other companies was a contracted arm of the state, the Data Protection Agency. The executive explained the position and fled, suitably terrified by Francine's presence, leaving behind a bonded EPROM cartridge.
She saw echoes of herself in the Flying Dutchman. He cruised the datascape with impunity. His targets were a random scattering of commercial and governmental databases. Security never saw him, his trail was only visible in the files he misplaced.
So Francine broke her exile from the silicon sea and went hunting. She sailed out brain-naked with just enough software to navigate. The datascape had changed in eight years, the translucent towers had been replaced by squat bunkers black with lethal countermeasures. Scrambled data was shunted in secure buses like silver bullets. Francine ghosted across the sea, a random search to catch a random pirate.
She caught sight of the Flying Dutchman only once.
It was out on the margins by the Ministry of Education. A backwater region where shoals of whales swam, grazing quietly through the history files - students running search programs. A fine haze of translation flags hung over the still surface of the data. A flock of updates wheeled overhead. Occasionally one would dive into the files and vanish, rising up moments later with an error squirming in its beak.
The three-masted galleon was beautiful, image resolution so high that it looked like a physical object. She ran swiftly, heeling over as she beam reached into an imaginary wind, sails puffed out like sheets in a wind tunnel. A flag flew from the top of the mainmast, a white skull and crossbones on a black background. As the ship bore down on her, Francine began to make out details, gilded scrollwork on the forecastle, the neat stitching around a patch on the forestay sail. Only the figurehead was indistinct. The underlying figure was female but the features were constantly shifting.
The galleon swept past her like a tilted wall of clinkered timber. Francine could see a crew swarming over the rigging, cartoon skeletons in striped jerseys and navy-blue bellbottoms. There was a sensation of falling, and sudden confusion in Francine's inner ear. The file surface was in motion, rippling in the galleon's wash-white pixel spray flying up around its bow. She realized that the image of the galleon was so intense that it was distorting the fabric of the datascape, dragging everything into its own reality.
A man appeared at the galleon's rail, wearing a felt hat and an afghan coat. He looked down at Francine and said something. It was a strange thing to do in the perpetual silence of the silicon sea. The man seemed to realize this, and held up his hand -just a moment - and produced a megaphone. Nothing technological, just a metal cone with a mouthpiece at one end.
'Ahoy there, software off the starboard rail!' he shouted and with his voice the silence broke. Sound rushed in, the creak of the galleon's rigging, the slap of water against its hull, the raucous cries of the circling updates and the long slow white noise of the sea itself. There was the feel of wind against her face and salt spray in her nostrils. Canvas cracked above her head and suddenly she rode a ship, a white schooner that cut through the swelling waves of data, keeping a parallel track with the galleon.
'Good, isn't it?' shouted the man at the rail.
'How's it done?' There was brilliant sunshine now
; she could feel the warmth of it on her skin.
'That would be telling,' said the man. 'Are you the Angel Francine?'
'Yes.'
'Good, I have a message for you.' The man tossed a bottle down to her. The glass sparkled in the sunlight. There was a roll of parchment stuffed inside.
'Who are you?' shouted Francine but the man had vanished from the rail. There was a crash as the bottle smashed on the deck of the schooner, glass fragments shattering the unreal light.
Francine found herself back in the darkness of her room. The Braille printer beside her was chuntering hard copy on to the floor. There was a salty wetness on her cheeks.
She snatched up the first page of the hard copy and ran her finger along the top. There was a raised pattern in the centre, the printer's best guess at a company logo. There was a Braille translation underneath: 'IMOGEN - Wholly Confidential -Ubersoldaten - generation two.'
Twenty-one years before.
The Stop
'The light at the end of a tunnel,' said the Doctor, 'is often that of an oncoming train.'
They had penetrated perhaps six hundred metres into the tunnel and the ambient light from the station behind them had long become a tiny point in the distance. The Doctor had produced a small torch from his pocket. They needed it. Shafts bisected the tunnel at random intervals. The Doctor almost fell into the first one.
'What do you think it is?' he asked. Kadiatu didn't answer; she was trying to keep her grip on the Doctor's forearm. The fingertips of her right hand had found a shallow depression in the tunnel wall and she was trying to exploit it for leverage. Her kneecaps hurt from their impact on the floor and she was sure that the twisted position of her back wasn't doing her spine any good. Light flickered below her as the Doctor played his torch over the sides of the shaft.
'I think it's a maintenance conduit of some kind,' said the Doctor. 'I can see pipes and cables, that sort of thing. I can't see the bottom though. Hold on, I'll drop something.'
Kadiatu fought the slow progression of her fingertips out of their hold. If they slipped she'd pitch forward and she'd go head first down the shaft. There was a small sound from a long way below; metal hitting concrete.