Engine City (28 page)

Lithomancer

IN THE OLD
days, the scientists of the Academy used to demonstrate the spontaneous generation of life: flies from rotting meat, mice from stored grain. What Gaius was seeing looked very like that: a tiny red spider forming out of a drop of blood. What shocked him was that Lydia snatched it up and swallowed it.

He grimaced. “Good trick,” he said. “How did you do it?”

She picked up the knife and did it again. This time, she placed the spider—it was a different color, green—on his palm, and handed him a folding lens.

“Look at it carefully.”

He peered through the magnifier. It wasn’t a spider. “
That’s a—
”

“Don’t shout.”

“Gods above.” He held out his hand. It trembled a little. The minute Multiplier was turning around, as though looking for somewhere to run. He pushed his sleeve back from his wrist.

“Take it,” he said. “Eat it, if you must.”

“Swallow it yourself,” said Lydia, daring him. Her eyes were bright. “Why don’t you? It’ll make you young forever, or so I was told. It’s worked for me, so far.”

He could believe her. “Take it,” he pleaded.

She caught his bared wrist and kissed the bad thing away. “There,” she said. “Well, not many people even have the chance to pass up a chance like that.”

Gaius wiped his hands on his knees. “Is that how it works? How the Bright Star Cultures spread?”

“Yes,” she said. “I suppose I’m a Bright Star Culture person, come to think of it.”

“You haven’t—?”

“Proselytized?” She leaned back and smiled. “I wouldn’t tell you if I had, but . . . no.”

“Why are you telling me this? Why did you show me that?”

“Because you needed evidence. These things, they live in my blood, small as cells. When it spills there’s a sort of dog-eat-dog situation.”

He nodded, understanding what he’d just seen, and why she’d told him. Telling him was no risk to her—he could not denounce her to the New Babylonian apparatus without giving them an intelligence coup that would strengthen them against his own country; her secret was now his, and, if she was thinking ahead as fast as he was, Illyria’s. He had to get her out.

“Anyway,” she went on, “they pass on bits and pieces of memories. All sorts of memories, of their progenitors and of the organisms they’ve been in. That’s how I know that Multiplier navigation is precise enough to jump straight to a planet’s surface.”

“Why didn’t they do that back in the first invasion?”

“Oh, I don’t suppose they were expecting to be attacked. If it really is the Bright Star Cultures that are here now, they’ll be expecting trouble.” She smiled as if to herself. “The folks back on Mingulay and Croatan knew Volkov of old, and they knew he was coming here. They’ll know what to expect.”

“But what can they do?”

“With skiffs that can set up lightspeed jumps with an accuracy of a few meters? I can think of quite a lot they could do.”

“When you put it that way,” Gaius said, “so can I.”

And all of them would tip the military balance against New Babylon. Whatever happened—and he was finding his assumptions about the long-feared arrival of the Bright Star Cultures shaken by Lydia’s words and actions—it was surely better that Illyria should face it in a position of strength. If New Babylon’s space defenses were knocked out, and the Regime itself tottering, the opportunities would be huge. He had to return to Junopolis, and take Lydia with him if he could. He was just turning this over in his mind when Lydia reached out and caught his arm.

“Don’t move,” she said. She was looking past his face. “A couple of cops just came into the bar. They’re looking for somebody. Probably after one of the local loan sharks. Play it cool.”

A moment later two men in dark suits came over. Gaius looked up at them with what he hoped was an expression of surprised but not alarmed query.

“Lydia de Tenebre?” one of them said. “We’d like you to accompany us to—”

Gaius didn’t so much see as later reconstruct what happened next. Lydia heaved her end of the table upward, crouched down and grabbed the middle of both sides, and threw it straight at them. They both stumbled back and then fell over backwards as the table, which Lydia leaped on like a flying cat as it hit, crashed down on top of them. Arms and legs projected from beneath it. Broken glass slithered across the floor.

Gaius was still sitting on the bench, a glass halfway between his mouth and where the table had been.

Lydia turned on the upsided table like a dancer on a low stage, and reached out a hand. “I think we should leave,” she said.

They ran to the door, past people who were carefully not stopping them—whether out of hostility to the police, or to maintain their cover, or fear of Lydia’s suddenly revealed fighting prowess. Lydia looked both ways before going out.

“They’ll have backup,” she said.

A car parked a hundred meters down the road revved its engine and headed straight at them. Lydia led the way in a dash across the street. Gaius distinctly saw the car’s fender a couple of meters away as he followed. Lydia vaulted the wall. Brakes squealed. Gaius hesitated at a drop of three meters onto slippery boulders, heard running footsteps, rolled onto the wall, swung down, clung and dropped. Lydia was already on her feet and steadied him as he landed and slipped.

The tide was out. The shore smelled like bad breath. Lydia ran alongside the bottom of the wall, surefooted. Gaius stumbled after her. He glanced up and saw two heads bobbing along above the top of the wall, keeping pace easily. This was hopeless. When he looked ahead again Lydia had vanished. A few steps more took him to the mouth of the tunnel she’d vanished into. He saw her face, pale in the light from the harbor. He ducked in after her. The tunnel’s roof was low and its floor was a phosphorescent green stream. He tried not to stand in it.

“Industrial effluent,” said Lydia. “You can walk in it. Just don’t drink it. Come on.”

Behind him, he heard a couple of crunching thuds, followed by yelled curses, then footsteps. He ran.

She had a pocket torch, and the faint glow from the effluent provided a path. It didn’t last long. A few tens of meters in, Lydia turned off into a side tunnel just as voices echoed along from the entrance to the main one. There were other tunnels branching off, and Lydia led him through a maze of them. The voices and splashes of the pursuit faded after a couple more turns. Ten minutes later they reached a ladder up to a manhole and emerged in an alleyway off the lower end of Astronaut Avenue. Lydia rolled the heavy lid back into place, brushed her hands, and stood up.

“How the hells did you do that?”

“I’m not sure,” said Lydia. “I may have seen the drainage system map in the Library.”

“That’s not an explanation.”

“No,” she said.

She strolled to a standpipe—it was not obvious, but she moved like she knew where to find it—and ran the tap over her boots. Gaius looked down at his shoes and trouser cuffs and decided to do the same. Better to be wet with water than with that gunk. It looked vaguely acidic and its smell, as it weakened in the open air, was becoming more nauseating, like cheap gin on the sinuses. He took off his shoes and rinsed them, then his socks and feet. Even wrung out, his socks felt horrible.

“Where now?”

“First thing I’m going to do,” said Lydia, “is go to the nearest public phone booth and call home. See if the cops have come for them, too.”

There was a phone around the corner. Lydia put down the receiver after trying a dozen numbers.

“Nobody home. Not good.”

They walked on up Astronaut Avenue, pending some decision on what to do next. The streets were a bit livelier now, though not by the standards of Junopolis at this time of a fine night. No shops open, and few beer parlors or places of amusement. Three armored personnel carriers crossed a junction a few hundred meters ahead. Gaius desperately wanted to get off the street.

“Why did they come after you?”

“For the same reason as you did, I guess.”

Gaius thought about that. “Let’s get off the street,” he said. He stopped outside a beer parlor. “In here.”

“That’s a bureaucrats’ watering hole. One of the bugged bars I told you about.”

“All the better,” said Gaius. “We don’t need to worry about that anymore. We need to worry about being bundled into a van.”

The place was full of men and women in suits. Gaius was cynically unsurprised that nobody stared. He bought a brace of drastically overpriced stiff drinks and sat down with Lydia in an alcove. There was a menu on the table.

“Suddenly hungry?” said Gaius. Lydia nodded. They ordered grilled patties of minced beef, the main item.

“The seafood used to be wonderful,” Lydia sighed. The waiter went away.

“What do you want to do?” Gaius asked.

“Walls have ears,” said Lydia.

Gaius leaned back and sighed. “I know about surveillance here,” he said. “Believe it or not, I know more than you do. It’s used for evidence-gathering, not rapid response. Think about it. Unless there’s a general alert out for us, or for you, all that’s happening is that we’re being taped, and sometime in the next few days some bored policeman is going to listen to us. And then only if they have reason to think this place’s tapes are worth checking. Maybe a description of us has gone out to police patrol vehicles, but that’s to cars, not bars. Besides, dragging people out of places like this is not their style. It tends to upset the lower middle cadre. So relax.”

“All right,” she said. “What I want to do is find out what’s happened to my family.”

“Have you ever been pulled in before?”

She shook her head. “They interrogate all the humans coming off Trader ships, release them, keep an eye on us but that’s it.”

“Any others like you?”

“Maybe one or two,” she said, sounding evasive. She nibbled her lip. “I’ve checked this, I’ve asked around discreetly. The former Traders do sort of hang together, help each other out. It’s only because of that that we haven’t all ended up in a heap at the bottom.”

“That’s still a lot of people to check.”

“It was,” she said dryly. “But remember, most of the ships that come back haven’t been in the Bright Star Culture’s expanding sphere, and of those that have, very few have directly encountered the Mingulayans or the Spiders. We were one of the first to meet them, on Novakkad. Things were at a pretty early stage there. Mostly the krakens or the saurs pick up that something’s going on within minutes of coming out of the jump, and they don’t even land—they jump straight back. It’s like a squid reflex.”

Gaius was still smiling at this image when the waiter returned with two plates of food and three men with guns. Two of them looked bruised, and familiar. The third was a bit taller, older, and heavier, and acted like he’d had to take charge.

Lydia swallowed her drink and stood up. There could be no surprising them this time.

“Looks like there was a general alert out for me after all.”

“It was the remark about the seafood,” said the waiter.

Gaius held his hands out and stood up, sidling from the alcove.

“This lady is under the protection of the Free Duchy of Illyria,” he said. “She has just asked me for asylum. I demand you let us go to the Consulate.”

“The Consulate is closed,” said the largest of the three men. “She’s coming with us. And you, Mr. Gonatus, are
persona non
fucking
grata.
The only place
you’re
going is the train back to Illyria.”

“I have an airline ticket—”

“The airport is closed.”

“—and there are no trains back to Illyria.”

“Oh yes, there are,” said the big police agent. “Only they don’t go quite all the way. Just to the foot of the mountains.” He glanced at his watch and grinned nastily. “Consider yourself lucky. In a few hours you wouldn’t be expelled for activities incompatible. You’d be fucking shot. So move it.”

Gaius looked at Lydia. She was giving such a good impression of being unafraid that for a moment he wondered if she hadn’t been setting him up. He dismissed it. She was brave and stoical, that was all. And probably difficult to kill or permanently damage. That must help.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“There’s nothing more you can do,” she said. She was shrugging into her jacket, which one of the men had returned to her after searching it. “Just go.”

He thought about what the policeman had implied, and wondered if Lydia had picked up on it.

“See you after the war,” he said.

The train left an hour before midnight. The one thing for which Gaius felt thankful was that his clothes had been left undamaged in his ransacked hotel room. He might not have his samples, but at least he had dry socks. He had filled the empty sample case with bottles of water and as much food as he could carry, bought in a hurry from the station’s stalls and turning stale within hours. In every other respect he felt deeply ungrateful. The train was packed. He almost envied the people squeezed together on the wooden seats or sitting on the floor. The northwest train out of New Babylon was officially for latifundia peasants on their way to and from the official markets; and indeed there were quite a lot of peasants, mostly very old women, or men with faces red from sun and drink, snoring in cheap flashy suits. But unofficially, and blatantly, it was for emigrants. Tonight it carried far more than usual—refugees, he suspected, from the now widely rumored war. The cloud people carried more baggage than the peasants, and had better clothes, and before the week was out most of the baggage would be strewn along the passes, the clothes would be in rags, and some of the emigrants would be dead. Statistically, Gaius knew, he was looking at dead people, as surely as if he was riding a troop train heading for the front. Statistically, he also knew, he might be looking at a dead man reflected in the dark window.

The train rattled across the plain, labored up the long gradual slope, thundered across the Massif. Gaius, jammed upright by the press of bodies around him, jostled by the train’s rhythm and the more annoying, random jolts as people made their way to and from the inadequate and increasingly foul-smelling toilets, dozed fitfully, now and again woken by a sudden shift in the balance of forces or by his forehead hitting the window. The train stopped every hour or so. At each stop some peasants got off and Gaius hoped the pressure would ease; but always, even more people got on. Mostly young men—draft dodgers, Gaius guessed and, patriotically, hoped. They drank a lot, smoked regardless of protests and talked loudly in a thick dialect. Gaius couldn’t make out enough to gather any intelligence from them.