Context (85 page)

Piotr nodded.

Feeling slightly less guilty, Ro
ran along the curving corridor until she caught up with Zoë.

Vibrations
in the floor. The zone beyond the wall was high-
g
: a maglev centrifuge
cylinder some fifty metres across, spinning at immense speeds, to keep the squat
Veraliks in shape.

At the corridor’s end, Zoë
stopped before a ceramic door.

‘This is Fyodor’s apartment.’

‘Fyodor?’

‘Pet name. The Zajinet you’ve
already studied.’

‘Hope he’s not still frozen.’

The entire building shuddered as
the door was sliding open. It jammed halfway—and sirens began to whoop and
wail, with a calm woman’s (automated) voice declaring:
Please evacuate
calmly but immediately,
repeated in eight different languages—and Ro and Zoë
had to squeeze through the gap.

The Zajinet was not frozen, but
in chaotic disarray: the macrocomponents of his body, from granules to small
boulders, were spinning and shuddering, changing shape, pulling apart far
enough to reveal the Zajinet’s inner form: a tracery of electric sapphire-blue,
along which sparks of agitated white light burst and spattered.

<<... danger...>>

<<... danger...>>

<<... danger...>>

Every part of its group
consciousness, for once, was in agreement.

<>

~ * ~

44

NULAPEIRON
AD 3421

The
carapace was scarlet speckled with black, and the tendrils, too, were shiny
red.

‘What’s the matter?’ Its rider
swung her black-clad leg over the saddle, and slid to the stony ground. ‘Ain’t
you never seen a ‘sprite before?’

Tom shook his head, admiring the
thing. ‘Never.’

‘Chaos.’ She crouched down,
picked a shard from the floor, and idly tossed it away. ‘What a boring life you
must’ve led.’

The stone skittered across the
ground; small echoes started, died away.

All around, the cavern was vast,
unfinished and natural. It was interstitial territory, belonging to no realm—neither
Blight-controlled nor otherwise. On foot, Tom had descended fifteen strata, and
made three hundred klicks’ horizontal progress, since leaving the Academy.

He sketched a tricon—no holo,
just fingertip movement in the air—and waited for the countersign.

‘For Fate’s sake.’ The rider
rose, slapping dust from her shining black membrane-suit. ‘I’m Thylara, of the
Clades Tau, and if you’re not the man I’m supposed to meet, then you’re dead.
All right?’

There’s a vast chasm between
theory and practice—
as
Maestro da Silva used to say—
when your life is on the line.

Tom smiled.

So bridge that gap.
‘What, then, do I do?’ ‘Climb
aboard, my friend.’

He
slid onto the saddle behind Thylara, and carapace extrusions encased his legs,
looped round his waist.

‘Are you sure this is—?’

Acceleration jerked him back,
knocked air from his lungs.

Sweet Chaos!

The arachnasprite whipped into
motion.

Tendrils were a scarlet blur as
they sped towards the cavern wall and, still increasing speed, hurtled
upwards,
gravity and acceleration tugging together, and then they were speeding
across the ceiling, the
thwap-thwap
of tendril pads a constant
percussive refrain, with the broken floor far below/above Tom’s head.

Thylara whooped as she kicked the
‘sprite into overdrive, and Tom yelled once, hard, and then their wild laughter
was conjoined as they tore along maniacally, upside down amid the convoluted
cavern system’s myriad twists and turns.

TauRiders’
camp.

They swung into view, rapidly
crawled down the wall, leaped—tendrils flicking to maximum extension—onto a
broken series of marble pillars, danced downwards. Outriders circled overhead,
but Thylara waved them away.

Adults, running children—dirty
faces, but mostly clean enough. Parked arachnasprites, most of them dark blue,
some scarlet like Thylara’s. A handful of bigger, older arachnargoi:
brown/black cargo models, with holds sufficient to carry all the clan’s
belongings.

Tethered glowglobes, string-tied
and sticky-tagged to pillars, provided patchy light. Cooking smells rose from
thermopots.

‘Home’—Thylara slid down from the
saddle—‘for a day or two. Then we’ll all be gone.’

‘How— ah.’ Cramp—after a full
second day of riding as her passenger—hit Tom’s inner thighs. ‘How many of you
are there?’

Getting awkwardly to the ground,
he rubbed his legs.

‘Two hundred and f— no, two
hundred and three, as of next move. Tomorrow.’

Tom frowned, but his legs hurt
too much to decipher that.

Stripping off her gauntlets,
Thylara waved to somebody, then turned back to Tom.

‘Let’s eat.’

They
were too poor to eat fleischbloc more than once a tenday; Tom had no problems
with the food. Only with the ragged kids, who ran circles around the eating
adults until Thylara clipped one around the ear. They scampered off laughing,
unhurt.

Across one pillar, someone had
daubed a glowing dragon, all fiery breath and shining eyes, and Tom remarked on
it.

‘One of them, at least, has
talent.’

‘Baz.’ Thylara turned aside and
spat into the dirt. ‘Pity he can’t ride worth a damn.’

That’s all that counts here, isn’t
it?

He understood, then, the
appraising glances of the women, and the negative hand-sign Thylara had given.
He might look all right, but—like the unfortunate Baz—Tom Corcorigan could not
ride, and so was useless to the tribe.

After eating, he curled up inside
his cloak, and rested.