Terminal World

  In the darkness he heard a quick rustle of fabric. There was a flash of yellow light and a bang that echoed and echoed into a diminishing infinity. In the after-image of the yellow flash he saw Meroka’s fist holding one of her guns, the revolver, firing it into the warm draught. He steeled himself, wondering what she had seen or sensed. Then her torch beam alighted on a scampering black form, a soot-black rat. Part of its tail was missing. The rat looked up at them with ochre eyes and rubbed its snout with its forepaws.

  He heard the click as Meroka put the safety catch back on and slipped the gun into her coat.

  ‘Nothing to see. Let’s move.’

  ‘We’re only a few hundred spans from the exit,’ Fray said, wheezing heavily now. ‘Reckon I’d better turn around here, or I’ll be slowing you down too much. Meroka’ll take care of you the rest of the way. Send me a postcard from Fortune’s Landing. Anonymous, of course - don’t want everyone knowing you’ve skipped town.’

  In the gloom of the tunnel, Quillon shook the bigger man’s hand. ‘I’ll be sure to. And thanks for coming this far. You didn’t need to.’ He paused and remembered something he had meant to give to Fray earlier. ‘Would you shine the torch over here?’ he asked Meroka. He waited until the beam fell on his medical bag, then opened the fasteners. He took out a small package from near the top. ‘It’s not as much as usual, but our supplies haven’t been restocked for weeks. I’m afraid you’ll just have to make do until I can find another source.’

  Fray took the package of Morphax-55, crumpling the white paper in his fist. ‘You saved any for yourself, Cutter?’

  ‘Enough.’

  Fray passed the package back. ‘I’m pretty sure you’ll need this more than I do. I’m not going anywhere; you are. If you don’t make it back from the outside, I don’t know where I’d find another supplier.’

  ‘I’m sure you’d find someone,’ Quillon said. But he knew better than to press the point. He returned the antizonals to his bag, secretly grateful that Fray had turned them down.

  ‘When you two are done,’ Meroka said, ‘we got a train to make.’

  ‘Go,’ Fray said, squeezing Quillon’s hand once before releasing his grip. ‘And enjoy the scenery.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  They emerged from the tunnel through a low door that led into the back room of an all-night launderette. Quillon replaced his hat and pushed his spectacles back onto his nose, even though the steam fogged them almost instantly. With its pale green walls, sacks of soiled linen and churning coin-operated machines, the launderette was a bright, steam-filled oasis. Despite the lateness of the hour two people were sitting apart on the hard benches waiting for their washing cycles to end, staring into the hypnotic vortices of their whirling clothes. In that moment he would gladly have joined them, choosing life in the launderette over the uncertainties that lay ahead beyond Spearpoint.

  Then they were outside, in the night and the rain. Quillon caught himself looking around, eyeing the surrounding streets, buildings and vehicles for a potential spy or assailant.

  ‘Try not to look like you’ve got a target on your head,’ Meroka said. They took the funicular down to the next ledge, then rode the elevated. Slot-cars and slot-cabs buzzed by in racing blue flashes. Blade, the female pop singer, winked at them from an animated neon advertisement covering the whole side of a tenement building, while she took sultry puffs from a Mariner cigarette. The few pedestrians about were stooped under umbrellas, or had their hats jammed low against the weather. Quillon felt conspicuous, wondering what explanation he would offer if anyone questioned him about his association with the scowling, illegally armed Meroka. But none of the vehicles slowed, no one in the passing slot-buses or overhead trains gave them more than a second glance, and the other pedestrians seemed much more concerned with avoiding puddles and potholes than noticing Quillon and his new accomplice.

  It was nearly ten by the time they got to the station. Quillon looked up at the cluster of golden clocks set into the stonework above the arched entranceway.

  ‘Can we still make it?’

  Meroka nodded at one of several all-night diners across the other side of the road from the station ‘Wait in there. I’ll buy the tickets.’

  ‘Shouldn’t I stay with you?’

  ‘Don’t want you hanging around in the station. Angels want you this badly, they’ll have every station scoped. We get in, get out, fast. On the train and out.’

  ‘Understood.’

  He watched Meroka vanish into the station, then walked into the yellow glow of the all-night diner. There was a long zinc-topped bar, a trio of morose-looking customers perched at one end of it, none of whom acknowledged his arrival. The bartender gave him a noncommittal look. Quillon pulled up a red-cushioned stool at the far end and ordered a coffee and a doughnut. He lit a cigarette and smoked it hard. Like alcohol, the plant extract in the cigarette had no detectable effect on his nervous system, but smoking eased the tightness in his lungs. They were changing, just like the rest of him.

  When the coffee arrived he forced half the cup down immediately. He ate the doughnut in a few dutiful mouthfuls, wiped sticky residue from his lips and studied the station entrance, waiting for Meroka to emerge. Perhaps they had cut things too fine after all.

  Five minutes later she came out and walked over to the all-night diner. There was nothing on her face to say how the transaction had gone. She pushed open the door and took the stool next to Quillon’s.

  ‘We’re ready?’

  ‘Finish your drink.’

  They sat in brooding silence, like a pair of lovers after a public tiff. Every now and then Meroka glanced at the clocks behind the counter, checked her own watches or the times shown above the station entrance. It was already ten minutes past the hour, with the train due to leave in less than five minutes. It must already be in the station, waiting to depart.

  ‘Shouldn’t we be on our way?’

  ‘You want to do this on your own, be my guest.’

  ‘Did you see anyone inside?’

  ‘One or two.’

  ‘I mean anyone who looked suspicious.’ He caught the bartender’s eye and slipped a bill onto the counter, waving aside any change. ‘Like they might be the ones after me.’

  She gave him a sidelong look. ‘You think they’d be that obvious?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But I’m assuming you’re good enough at your job to spot the signs most people would miss.’

  Meroka simmered, clearly distressed at not being able to come back with a suitably cutting response. ‘Didn’t see anyone,’ she said eventually. ‘But that don’t mean no one’s there. They’re good, they’re going to be hard to spot. Even for me.’

  Quillon checked his own watches. ‘Then there’s nothing for it but to hope for the best. Isn’t it time?’

  ‘Train ain’t leaving for another three minutes.’

  ‘It’ll take us at least two minutes to get to the platform.’

  ‘Ninety seconds,’ she said, with fierce certainty.

  They sat in silence for another half-minute, at which point Meroka nodded and they were moving. He was aware of the bartender watching them, of the expert disinterest of the other three patrons. They crossed the street and entered the station. Above the arch, all the mechanical clocks paused their minute hands at the top of the hour, as if the hidden mechanisms behind their faces were drawing breath. Then the hands resumed their progress and it was less than a minute until the train departed.

  They walked quickly through the vaulted gloom of the station, never quite breaking into a run. Down blue-tiled staircases, onto wooden flooring, the smell of steam, oil and ozone heavy in the air. Meroka had cut their departure to the second, but at least it meant there were no crowds pressing around the boarding gates, where the station clerks checked tickets. They were waved through and instructed not to dawdle. The platform alongside the waiting train was nearly empty, all other passengers and luggage already aboard. The only people now standing on the p
latform were station staff, pillbox-hatted guards with crisp white gloves and silver whistles at the ready, porters waiting by empty trolleys. At the head of the train was an internal-combustion-powered locomotive, the fiery red of a transistor radio. On the opposite side of the platform, waiting to be relieved after it had climbed all the way up from the next zone down, was a black steam engine at the end of a long line of freight cars. The black engine was veiled in its own steam, hissing from pipes and valves as if the machine was on the point of exploding from its own pressure.

  They boarded the red-engined train, climbing into the vestibule at the end of a carriage. Meroka lingered nervously at the threshold, looking up and down the steam-cloaked platform. Most of the doors were already closed. One of the guards blew his whistle. The locomotive answered with a blast of its air horn. The train began to inch forwards. Meroka closed the door.

  Quillon saw the figure at the same moment she did. A man, little more than a walking silhouette, emerged from the white fog around the steam engine on the other side of the platform. He wasn’t wearing a railway uniform, rather a wide-brimmed hat and a knee-length coat cinched at the waist. He could have been an evening commuter waiting for the last train home. Something in his left hand caught the scarlet gleam of a signal light.

  ‘That’s one of them,’ Meroka said, as the same paralysing realisation formed in Quillon’s own mind.

  What was the man going to do? Get on the train, or wait as it rolled out of the station, picking up speed as it hit the descending grade, the start of the long spiral all the way down to Steamville? The moment stretched agonisingly.

  Quillon wanted to act for himself, wanted to take the initiative, but it had been too long since he had faced a similar crisis and the certainty of action he had once relied upon was not there. He watched in a state of numb indecision as the man grabbed the handrail of a passing carriage and swung himself aboard, opening the door and letting himself in, the difficult sequence of movements completed with a weirdly inhuman elegance, as if Quillon had just seen a movie run through the projector backwards. The man had stepped onto the train only four or five carriages from where they were standing.

  ‘We’re leaving,’ Meroka said, opening the door again.

  Quillon looked down at the platform, the wooden boards moving by more quickly with each instant that he delayed. It was already fast enough that if he did not judge his landing well he would be seriously injured.

  ‘It’s going too fast.’

  ‘Do it, Cutter.’

  He couldn’t. He was paralysed with fear and indecision, part of him wanting to place his complete trust in Meroka, another part unable to surrender. She grabbed his wrist and for a moment he thought she was going to launch herself into space and take him with her. The train was rocketing now, picking up speed quickly as the front portion reached the descending grade beyond the platform. His only instinct was to hold on tighter to the handrail, refusing to be dragged free.

  ‘It’s too fast,’ he said again, this time on a falling note, because he knew that any possibility of jumping was now behind them. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You blew the extraction,’ Meroka said. ‘Less than a minute into the journey ... and you fucking blew it.’

  Something snapped inside him. He shoved Meroka against the wall of the carriage, surprising himself with his own violence and the suddenness with which it had emerged.

  ‘Listen to me,’ he said, still pinning her in place. ‘I may seem meek and mild to you, and maybe I am compared to you, but there’s something you need to understand.’ He pushed harder, with a savagery he had not expected in himself. ‘I am not your damned package. I’m a man who’s spent nine years surviving alone, nine years after I killed two of my colleagues because they murdered someone I loved. And when I say “killed” I mean that I tortured them with drugs, slowly and painfully, until they died, because that’s what happens when you get on the wrong side of me. And I’ve been down here for nine years, minding my own business, never so much as treading on a fly. Until today, when my world turned upside down again. I’ve had to go from that, to this, in less time than it takes most people to pick somewhere nice to eat. I left work and now - only a few hours later - I’m leaving the city. So I apologise if my adjustment isn’t as quick as you’d like, but you’re just going to have to deal with it.’

  He released the pressure on Meroka. She moved her chin back and forth, licked her lips.

  ‘You finished, Cutter?’

  ‘For now.’

  She reached up to readjust the collar of her coat, where he had held her. ‘For something that looks like it crawled out of the ground, you have some strength, I’ll give you that. Felt good to get that off your chest, didn’t it?’

  ‘I’m just saying, it would be a mistake to underestimate me.’

  ‘You serious about the torturing and killing part?’

  He closed his eyes against the memory of what he had been forced to do. ‘Yes.’

  She slammed the door shut, the rushing air of their progress doing most of the work for her. Outside, the train rattled and swayed over a silvery labyrinth of criss-crossing rails. ‘Well, guess we’re on the train now, whether we like it or not.’

  ‘We don’t know how many of them were hiding in that station, apart from the one who got aboard. For all you know we’d be dead if we’d jumped off.’

  Meroka looked down the long corridor that ran the length of the carriage on the left-hand side. ‘Whereas it’s a stone-cold certainty that there’s one of them on the train now.’

  ‘I don’t know that he saw us. He may just have got on this train on the off chance that we were on it.’

  ‘He saw us. Saw you, anyway.’

  ‘We should move along the train, closer to the front. Maybe he won’t have time to reach us.’

  ‘Next stop’s twenty minutes away, when they switch the engine. He’ll have time.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean we should just wait here for him, does it?’ Quillon breathed in and out, trying to find some calm, however transitory it might prove. ‘We’re not defenceless. We’re both armed. There’s two of us, just one of him.’

  ‘Just the one we saw. Doesn’t mean he don’t have friends already inside.’

  Meroka looked along the corridor again. They could only see as far as the opposite end of this carriage, where the corridor jogged inwards to pass through the connecting bellows between one coach and the next. Four or five carriages down, Quillon thought, trying to hold the image in his mind like a photograph, scanning it for details he might have missed at the time. If the agent was working his way towards them now, the first warning they would have would be when he came around that corner.

  ‘You ready with that angel gun?’ Meroka asked.

  Quillon squeezed his palm around the waiting weapon, still safe in his coat pocket. He drew it out slowly. ‘Do you still work?’

  ‘Operational effectiveness is now sixty-three per cent and falling,’ the gun answered, quietly enough that its voice would not have been heard in the adjoining compartments. ‘I will become inoperable in energy-discharge mode in four hours, three minutes. Functionality will be severely compromised within two hours, twenty-five minutes. Error margins are available for these estimates.’

  ‘I’ll skip the error margins.’ He returned the gun to his pocket, before someone happened along the corridor. ‘Four hours is still good, isn’t it? Once we’ve lost this tail, we’ll be fine. Won’t we?’

  ‘Yeah. We’ll be fine.’ Meroka opened her coat and selected one of her own weapons, a bulky machine-pistol with squared-off, utilitarian lines. It had a stamped-metal barrel and a straight grip enclosing a long magazine. Meroka thumbed a lever on the side of the black-painted housing, clicking it to its third setting. ‘Anything else you need reassuring about?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t do reassurance.’

  ‘Got two choices. Wait at the front of the train for him to find us. Which he will, sooner or later - and he’ll kn
ow he’s got us cornered. Or take the fight to him.’

  ‘I’m guessing you like the second one best.’

  Meroka concealed the gun back inside her coat, the flap covering her hand and sleeve.

  ‘Stay behind me. Don’t shoot at anyone until I do.’

  They started walking down the corridor, passing compartments on the right. The first two were empty, and the third contained only one passenger, a young woman looking out of the window. Neon Heights slid by in a rain-smeared blur of mingled colours, the succession of advertisements and slogans tending to a rushing electric white as the train gathered speed. The next compartment was empty, and the one after that contained two men who were smoking and laughing. The next and last compartment in that coach was also empty, with only a couple of discarded newspapers on the seats. Quillon could feel the descending grade now, the train winding its anticlockwise way down the long, gentle spiral cut into Spearpoint’s side, losing a league in altitude for every thirty leagues it travelled along the tracks. There was still a long way to go before he reached the ground. He didn’t want to think about exactly how far it was.

  Meroka paused at the bend in the corridor, whipping out her gun and swinging around the blind corner. Quillon waited until she gave him the nod and followed behind, through the swaying connecting bellows between the two carriages. Then she held him back while she swung around into the next corridor.

  ‘Clear,’ she said quietly.

  They moved along the next series of compartments. Again some were empty and some were partially occupied. Only one was anywhere near full, the second along, with five rowdy businessmen trading stories, their shirt collars and ties loosened, the smell of an evening’s hard drinking hanging in the air. In the next compartment sat a mother and daughter, bolt upright in their seats, the girl wearing a bonnet, the mother a veil that covered the upper half of her face, both of them dressed in the elaborate and formal clothes that marked them as respectable citizens of Steamville, returning from what must have been an arduous and costly excursion to Neon Heights. On the mother’s lap, clutched as if it were the most precious artefact in the universe, lay a large brown envelope. The girl was pale of complexion, thinner than she should have been and in the grip of a constant shivering tremor. The mother probably couldn’t have afforded the expense of a full operation in Neon Heights, but she might have had the means to pay for a set of X-rays, the images intended to guide the hand of an affordable surgeon back in Steamville.