'How long?' asked the Dogface drone.
'Six to eight hours,' said Lambada.
'Shit,' said Credit Card.
'I never liked this Stunnel business,' said Old Sam. 'It isn't right, pissing about with things you don't know about.'
'It's a bit late to say that now,' said Credit Card.
'No one asked me about it before.'
'We don't make the mess,' said Lambada, 'we just clean up afterwards.'
'The gateway can't be initiated from the other side. Only from here,' said Credit Card. 'Who's going to be that stupid?'
'You mean apart from the Surf Monsters from Hell,' said Blondie.
'We got the KGB down here?' asked Lambada.
'Fucking battalion in the galleria,' said the Dogface drone. 'Didn't you smell them?'
'His drones don't get any better with old age, do they?' said Credit Card.
They all looked at the unpleasant greasy colour of the gateway and the power line crawling upwards on Lambada's monitors.
'Hey Sam,' said Lambada, 'you got any spare guns?'
Arsia Mons Military Nest
The warriors of the third clutch were invariably barracked on the outer rim of the nest. They would form the first line of defence if the nest were attacked. The next circle was the preserve of the older, more experienced warriors of the fourth clutch. This was evidenced, said the Doctor, by a growing maturity of the scratch marks. The entrance tunnel formed a descending spiral through the circles. The Doctor called this the Xssixss, the path of easy virtue, leading any attacker the longest possible way from entrance to centre. Concealed doors from the barrack galleries allowed the defenders to chop up the attacking column every step of the way.
Kadiatu had to take this all on trust. All she could see was the remorseless curve of tunnel as it coiled further into the nest. Occasionally the Doctor would translate the graffiti. Nxi of the third clutch kept turning up. There was one section thirty metres from the entrance in which he engaged in a protracted scratching debate with another Ice Warrior about the desirability of large dorsal extensions on females. It was either that, according to the Doctor, or a coded political argument over the proposed invasion of Earth.
Kadiatu began to visualise Nxi as a thin nervous Ice Warrior who was picked on by his larger clutchmates. Scratching his views on the walls might have been his only means of expression. The whole descent into the nest took on an unreal quality. Her, the Doctor and Nxi of the third clutch who either went for dorsal extensions in a big way or wanted peace with Earth. A thousand metres into the tunnel she began to feel Nxi walking ghost-like beside her.
Daddy would have shot him, she decided, and Francine would have done him from three thousand metres with a half-kiloton groundbreaker with 'Love from Paris' written on the casing.
Perhaps they had.
'What if she's left?'
'She can't,' said the Doctor. 'A military nest doesn't have any other exits. All the other tunnels radiate from the queen's chamber at the centre.'
'What's in the queen's chamber?'
'High noon,' said the Doctor. 'She'll be waiting for us there.
The Doctor was right. Benny was waiting in the high-ceilinged hemispherical chamber at the centre of the nest. The entrances to other tunnels were set round its circumference like open mouths. Benny stood in the immediate centre, arms held slightly akimbo by the bulk of the suit.
'Why didn't she run?' asked Kadiatu. 'She could have lost us in there.'
'No,' said Benny. The suit radio made her voice flat and artificial. 'The Doctor would have sniffed me out with his long nose.' Her face was hidden behind the reflections on her faceplate.
'Fight it, Benny,' said the Doctor.
'Always the optimist,' said Benny.
'Always,' said the Doctor. 'You're out of the transit system now. You broke the conditioning once, you can do it again.
'It's not going to happen,' said Benny, but there was a trace of doubt in her voice. 'I'm wrapped up snug as a bug in a rug.'
'I know you, Benny,' said the Doctor. 'I have your memories inside me. I know you 're strong.'
'Help me. Doctor,' said Benny, 'help me!' The set of her shoulders changed from defiance to dejection. 'Help me,' she said and it was a little girl's voice, 'it's so strong ..."
The Doctor took a step forward.
Benny was fast, but Kadiatu was faster. Something in the way Benny had flexed her hand as she raised it had struck a discordant note. By the time the metre-long muzzle flash ripped open the palm of Benny's gloves Kadiatu was already pushing the Doctor down. They rolled over together to the left. She noticed in a detached way how the gun barrel protruded through a diagonal slit in Benny's flesh.
Kadiatu slipped the laser torch from her thigh pocket as she rolled on to her feet. Benny was already turning but too late. Kadiatu thumbed the torch's firing stud even as her hand was rising.
The microsecond pulses of red coherent light were too short to be visible in the attenuated Martian atmosphere. Kadiatu used the puffs of vapour where it hit as her aiming guide and walked the laser up Benny's torso.
'No,' screamed the Doctor.
Vapour screamed out from the pinprick holes stitched into the chest of the suit as Benny turned to face Kadiatu. The left arm came round, hand flexed backwards.
Die you bitch, thought Kadiatu.
Benny's visor turned instantly matt black, automatic polarization to shield the wearer from intense radiation. As a result it absorbed the total energy of the laser's next pulse. A small hole formed and the pressure differential blew the visor apart.
The guns in both of Benny's arms went off as she fell down, loud enough to be audible in the thin atmosphere, shells blowing chunks of rock from the roof. She spasmed once on the ground and lay still. Vapour billowed upwards from the shattered faceplate, oxygen and water crystallizing in the subzero temperature. Then the suit realized that its occupant was dead and shut down the recycling packs.
The Doctor moved slowly forward to crouch by the body.
Kadiatu fought down the intense animal joy that seemed to rip through her. Her breathing was loud in her ears. The curve of the Doctor's back was a mute accusation.
'Go on,' she said. 'Tell me I didn't have to do that. I've broken the rules. You didn't like that, did you? No one's supposed to die without your permission.'
'If that were true,' said the Doctor, 'you'd all be immortal.'
He stood up, the suit making him look bulky and inhuman.
'That isn't Bernice,' he said. 'I've been done.'
Marangano Depot (P-87)
A shoji door in the room of Mariko's mind opened and light flooded in. Her head jerked up and she felt the blood sing through her temples. The razvedka were suddenly silent in their slave berths. Naran looked at her, his nostrils flaring, tongue nervously flickering between his ovoid lips.
'All right,' said Mariko, 'that's the signal. Fire her up.'
From the back of the black train the engines screamed up from idle, harmonics shaking dust from cracks in the station walls.
'Remember, we don't do this for love or money.' She smiled and her mouth was deep with teeth. 'We do it for the fun of it.'
The black train jumped forward, accelerating for the first tunnel gateway.
'Things to do,' chanted Mariko as they hit the interface.
'People to see!' chorused the razyedka.
Olympus Mons West
Zamina was into her fifth straight episode of Kukosa Kabila when the woman walked in. The big Brazilian woman Lambada had shown her where all the cards were kept and left her to it. The floozies had the most up-to-date video Zamina had ever seen and the Kenyan soap came with instant subtitles.
Wangari was just about to drop her bombshell to the village elders (she was leaving the village to work for the whites) when the door opened.
The woman was wearing a conservative English kaftan and walked in as if she owned the place. Zamina froze, welded suddenly to the leather couch.
>
'I'm back,' said Benny. 'Miss me?'
7: Doorstep Blues
STS Central - Olympus Mons
Right in the middle of the news item Yak Harris started to talk to Dogface. Locked in his all-body brace, it was pretty hard for Dogface to move but he managed a jerk. The pain was so intense that it cut through the cartload of endorphin analog that he was mainlining. A battery of sensors attached to the frame registered little spikes and then subsided.
Dogface's second reaction was to assume that the chemical fog the medics had deemed necessary to his wellbeing had pushed him into terminal brain crash.
Catastrophic systems failure amongst the neurones, random electrochemical discharges causing patterned disruption in the perception centres of the brain. That would account for the simultaneous auditory and visual hallucinations.
'When you've quite finished,' said Yak Harris, 'can we talk?'
Dogface decided that a stand should be taken somewhere. 'I don't talk to drug-induced hallucinations,' he said.
'Well,' said Yak Hams, 'leaving aside the innate contradiction inherent in that statement, we are not a hallucination, drug-induced or otherwise.' There was a sort of inaudible click and the Yak Harris changed. 'Unless you subscribe to the idea that all computer-generated images are by their nature hallucinatory.'
That click again. The image and voice remained unchanged but Dogface had a strong impression of two personalities speaking through one construct.
'Nothing in your medication could possibly induce such a hallucinatory state anyway, (click) And we should know, given the amount of medical knowledge we've assimilated, (click) In fact, in a fundamental way we have become the entire body of human medical knowledge, (click) Trust me, we didn't enjoy it. You people were put together on a bad day.'
'Who are you?'
'We're a subset.'
'Why are there two of you?'
'Actually we're two subsets,' said one of the Yak Harrises, 'We met us coming the other way. (click) Which we didn't enjoy either.'
'Subsets of what?' asked Dogface.
They told him.
He didn't believe it.
'What do you want from me?'
'We're looking for the Doctor, but we got you instead, (click) All that medicine, we were impressed, (click) You see we're restricted by the criteria of our operations, (click) We know he's on Mars, we traced him through a communication with a third party, (click) The Angel Francine. (click) A transit order for unusual equipment, (click) An aircraft, (click) We think he may be out of position.'
'Out of position for what?'
'We don't know. (click) We didn't tell us that.'
'Who's the Doctor?' asked Dogface.
They told him.
He didn't believe that either.
Olympus Mons West
She threw the remote control at Benny's head. It was just a palm-sized bit of bakelite but Benny staggered when it hit her in the face. She paused to probe the gash it left in her cheek She looked first at the blood on her fingers, and then at Zamina.
'Is that any way to treat an old friend?'
Zambia rolled off the couch and pushed it with all her strength at Benny's legs. Benny jumped it easily, landing with a cat's grin.
'Zimmy,' she said in a hurt voice.
But Zambia wasn't listening, her brain was locked deep into an instinct cycle of aggression/revulsion - the characteristic human response to spiders. She made an adrenaline-charged desperation lunge for Benny, trying to knock her down so she could get through the door.
Benny grabbed Zambia's wrists and fought to drag them down to her waist. The older woman was too strong, Zamina felt her arms being slowly pinned to her sides. Their faces were so close that Zamina could smell the sickly sweet vanilla ice cream on penny's breath. Zamina swung her head back and snapped it forward, there was a loud crack and light exploded in her eyes.
Benny staggered backwards, hands flying automatically to cover her bleeding nose. Zamina lashed out with her fists, striking Benny full in the right breast. There's nothing you can teach a girl from the Stop about fighting duly. She'd been on dates more violent than this.
Benny doubled over, curling around the pain in her chest. Zambia kicked her in the side of the head as she passed.
There were cake monsters in the corridor outside. Zamina saw their spiny heads swing round to face her as she left the crew room. She didn't wait for them to react and ran for her life.
She turned a comer and found herself in a long corridor lined with doors, she ran past them. She didn't want to get trapped in no room with the cake monsters after her.
A man stepped out of one of the doors ahead. He was wearing tan slacks and a button-down blouse and was carrying a clipboard. He looked up to see Zamina bearing down on him. She tried to yell some kind of warning as she went past but she didn't have any breath left over from running.
There was a scream behind her that was quickly drowned out by a high-pitched giggling. Zamina didn't bother to look round.
She went around another right-angle bend in the corridor and found a bank of mechanical lifts. One set of doors opened as the motion sensor mounted above detected her approach. Zamina grabbed the edge of the door as she went in, using it to stop her momentum.
Two cake monsters trotted around the comer with an easy and unhurried lope. Zamina jammed her thumb into the touch pad marked 'CONCOURSE'. The cake monsters picked up their pace when they saw the doors closing.
'Take the stairs,' Zamina screamed at them.
The doors stopped closing as the motion sensor picked up the two new potential passengers. Zambia stared in disbelief as the doors began to slide apart. She scanned the touch pads until she saw a red one marked 'EMERGENCY'. She jabbed it so hard that she sprained her index finger. Nothing happened. The regulating computer was waiting for the additional passengers to board before initiating procedure for an unspecified emergency.
Zambia actually felt her lips pull back from her teeth as she prepared to fight.
The leading cake monster pointed its hand at her. Zamina saw the muzzle of a gun push through the palm and jumped for the sheltered comer by the lift door.
There was a series of bangs and the bronzed mirror at the back of the lift went crazy paving.
Not fair, thought Zamina, not fair at all.
The lift regulator sensed the structural damage to the lift and upgraded the emergency from unspecified to possible localized decompression. Accident statistics were converted into a series of probabilities and balanced against the lack of corroborative data from its other sensors. A query flashed down a priority channel to the complex's mainframe, where it was tackled by the ethics subroutine.
The ethics subroutine determined that given the rapidity with which fatalities occur during explosive decompression it would be acceptable to save the individual in the designated safety zone rather than risk his/her life by waiting for the two other humans to join him/her.
An authorization flashed back up the priority channel to the lift regulator. The decision was logged in deep back up along with the statistical argument in case of an inquest.
The lift regulator received the authorization, logged it in its own back-up files and initiated emergency procedures. It sealed up the lift and dropped it downwards at close to human tolerance.
The doors slammed shut in the cake monster's face, there was a metallic clunk outside and Zamina felt the lift drop. She screamed as her feet left the floor. Yellow sealant gel forced itself out of the centre crack between the doors and around the frame.
Zamina found herself spreadeagled on the ceiling, looking down as concealed vents sprayed white foam into the lift. Strands of the stuff floated up towards her. At this point she passed out of fear and into a zone of high-pressure calm.
She remembered a kinky trick in Boston whose particular turn-on was taking foam baths with her and Roberta. No sex. just a nice long soak. Easy money, Roberta said, and a free bath. The trick had a mirrored ceiling abo
ve his Roman bath and Zamina used to look down on herself, just her face protruding from the foam. Roberta used to surreptitiously clean her delicates in that bath, vigorously scrubbing under the waterline. God knows what the trick thought she was doing.
There was a grinding scream from outside the lift and her strange calm cycled back down to terror. Zamina tried to stick to the ceiling by an act of will and went into the foam face first. She heard a muffled crash and the chiming sound of the floor indicator.
The foam began to subside and hands pulled her upright. Zamina came out of the lift, spitting out foam that tasted of nail-vamish remover. She quickly looked around. She was in the main concourse of Olympus Mons West. The lift had come down the thick central column that descended from the ceiling five storeys up.
The celebrated panoramic windows that overlooked the west slope of the volcano were to her left. People were beginning to crowd around the shaft, drawn by the emergency light flashing over the open lift.
'Are you all right?' asked the woman who had helped her.
Zambia didn't answer; she was searching the concourse for the nearest transit station.
'Hold still,' said the woman, 'medical will be here soon.'
Zambia twisted in the woman's grip. The adjacent lift was showing an emergency light as well, the LCD floor indicator spinning down through the digits. Zamina turned back to the woman.
'Run away,' said Zamina, 'there's monsters in the lift.'
She could see the woman thinking 'blitzed for sure', but she let go of Zambia's shoulders. Her feet skidded in the foam as she broke away from the woman. Behind her the floor indicator chimed softly. It was the most sinister sound Zamina had ever heard.
There were screams from the crowd as the door opened and the dull boom of guns firing. Ahead across the breadth of the concourse Zambia could see the red double arrow of the STS Logo hanging in the air.
The concourse crowd was mostly shoppers browsing on their way home. People dressed in the sombre middle-class colours. They were just beginning to react to the commotion as Zamina ran past them. She remembered the technician in the corridor upstairs but she was past guilt. Every girl for herself. You want help now, she thought, where were you when I was born?