The Abyss Beyond Dreams (39 page)

Slvasta resigned his commission the week after Arnice committed suicide. He gave no reason, nor indication of where he was going. On his way out of the Joint Regimental Council
building, he paid a quick trip to the forward deployment bunker, where he quietly removed a couple of pistols and four boxes of ammunition, carrying them out in a satchel he fuzzed. Just as he
expected, no one questioned an officer.

‘We need to organize,’ Bethaneve said that evening. ‘That’s obvious.’

Slvasta had turned up at the house in Tarleton Gardens carrying just a single suitcase that contained all his civilian clothes. It was a symbolic arrival, he thought. He’d left his
uniforms behind at Number Seventeen Rigattra Terrace. Bethaneve, too, had left her lodgings on Borton Street.

They sat on the bare floorboards in the back room, with Javier propped up on pillows which Coulan had arranged. The worst of the big man’s swelling had just started to go down, and one of
his eyes was starting to open again. Amanarnik had reduced a lot of the pain, though Coulan was worried about the long-term damage to his knee.

‘Just how many people is this going to take?’ Javier asked.

‘Is what going to take?’ Coulan asked. ‘Exactly what is the aim here?’

‘To get rid of the Captain and the National Council,’ Bethaneve said. ‘Right?’

‘Yes,’ Slvasta said. ‘And then what?’

‘Democracy,’ she said indignantly. ‘Proper democracy, with courts that are open and honest. And government officials who are accountable. That’s for starters.’

‘So we have to physically kick the bastards out,’ Javier said. ‘That’s not going to be easy. They’ll put up a fight. We’d need an army.’

‘Or a mob,’ Coulan said. ‘We’ve just seen how powerful that can be. The Meor was hard pressed to defend the government buildings.’

‘You can’t control a mob,’ Slvasta said.

‘Don’t be so sure about that. A mob just needs the right leader.’

‘But if anyone establishes themselves as a mob agitator, the Captain’s police will pounce on them,’ Javier said. ‘If they’re lucky, they’ll escape with being
sent to the Pidrui mines.’

‘So their identities need to be kept hidden,’ Bethaneve countered. ‘That’s simply a question of maths.’

‘Maths?’ Slvasta queried – and maybe a little too much scepticism leaked past his shell.

‘Of course.’ She grinned tauntingly at him. ‘What we need is separate groups of agitators, kept in isolation from each other, but using private ’paths to keep in touch.
Lieutenants that don’t know each other, so they can’t betray anyone, and nobody knows us. Maybe some kind of pyramid structure, with instruction coming down from us and relayed through
the groups.’ She closed her eyes, her thoughts alight with geometric shapes designated by lines and nodes. ‘Humm, let me think on that.’

‘I like it,’ Javier said. ‘So if we’re group one, right at the top, all we have to do is just recruit the layer of groups below us. After that, the groups we found go on
to establish more groups. The layers build up.’

‘Sounds good,’ Slvasta admitted. ‘If only we knew someone who could organize that?’

Bethaneve gave him an obscene finger gesture.

‘We’ll leave that with you, then,’ Coulan said. ‘Our official communications officer.’

‘Not officer,’ she said sharply. ‘Regiments have officers.’

‘Comrade then?’

‘Yes. I like that.’

‘Our biggest problem is going to be motivating people,’ Javier said. ‘There are so many people who just accept the status quo.’

‘Water,’ Bethaneve said eagerly. ‘Everyone knows how badly the water companies maintain the city pipes. It wouldn’t take much to bugger up the pump stations. The
Captain’s family owns half of them. We can put it about that the failures are all down to him, squeezing profit out for himself and not spending enough to repair and replace essential
parts.’

Slvasta gazed at Bethaneve with a growing admiration. He’d never seen her this animated before; angry with the First Officer and the Captain, yes, but this – this was a whole new
aspect of her. He rather liked her fierceness, and how smart she was being.

‘We also need to think about how to get our message out to people,’ Coulan said. ‘A reason why our way is better than the existing system.’

‘Money,’ Slvasta said, determined to make his own contribution.

They all looked at him.

‘Everyone wants more money, right?’ he said. The idea that was blooming in his mind was only just keeping ahead of his speech, so he just let himself flow with it. ‘So we have
to show them we can give them that. They have to know that opposing the Captain is going to end in better times, especially money-wise.’ He paused, slotting the aspects together, feeling a
great deal of satisfaction at breathing some life into his personal goal.

‘Go on,’ Javier said.

‘There are a lot of people in Varlan on the breadline right now, and not just the ones in the Shanties. And every day there’s more drift in from the provinces in search of work.
Well, why don’t we make sure they get that work?’

‘How in Giu’s name do we do that?’ Bethaneve asked.

Slvasta smiled round at all of them as the perfect solution bloomed in his mind. ‘By taking it away from the mods.’

*

It took Javier a couple of weeks to recover well enough to walk. He had to use a cane and support himself with teekay. But once he was able to leave Tarleton Gardens he got
Slvasta a job at Coughlin’s stall in the Wellfield meat market. Coughlin was a hundred and sixty-three, so he relied entirely on Javier and two lads, Pabel and Ervin, as well as three
mod-apes in their third decade – it wasn’t kind keeping the creatures on that long.

Every morning, an hour before dawn, Javier would take one of the lads with him to collect their meat from the Plessey station goods yard where the night trains delivered it. Along with dozens of
other stalls, they’d load carcasses – some fresh, some salted – and cart them back to Wellfield, where the meat would be cut up and packed for their clients. Coughlin had taken
some convincing that a one-armed man was up to the task. But once Slvasta had demonstrated just how strong his teekay was, the old man relented.

‘This is a stall suspended in history,’ Javier confided when Slvasta arrived on his first day.

Slvasta took a look around the poky clutter of huts sheltering under the massive roof and thought Javier was being generous: the stall should have been relegated
to
history and a new
one built on its foundations.

*

They had to wake up at four o’clock every morning to be at the Plessey station. So getting up an hour and a half earlier wasn’t too much of a hardship. Bethaneve
had tracked down the addresses of the major adaptor stables across Varlan without any trouble. ‘You just have to know which public registry to search,’ she said brightly. Slvasta
hadn’t been surprised to find there were thirty-seven stables on her list; and plenty of people had smaller stables, too. There were a lot of mods in the capital.

The Dawa family’s stable was on Hatchwood Road, barely a quarter of a mile from the riverfront in the Oxlip district. A neat block with ten-foot-high brick walls, surrounded by spindly
voxin trees whose chaotic black and grey tufts waved about in the breeze. A six-storey townhouse stood beside the main entrance, with a neat little front garden and deftly trimmed pinku vines
scrambling up the front. Inside the walls was a traditional layout of barns and two exercise yards. The birthing manger was in the middle, long enough to hold twenty-five pregnant neuts, with the
hatchery at one end where their newly laid eggs would sit on clean straw. Two of the barns housed the hundred-strong herd of female neuts, where they were bred with the stable’s ten male
neuts. The remaining barns were for the young mods, with specific stalls for mod-apes, dogs, dwarfs, cats, birds and horses of various sizes. Right at the centre was the adaptor stockade, where
those with the talent sat for long hours beside a neut whose egg had just been fertilized and used their teekay to bring on the required traits in the embryo.

Slvasta and Javier turned down an alley at the back of the Dawa stables and hurried along it. There were no streetlights down the narrow passage, and the nightly river mist was reducing
visibility to a couple of yards. Nonetheless they both clad themselves in a subtle fuzz to deflect any ex-sight that might chance to sweep the alley. Not far from the corner, they found a sturdy
little wooden door which hadn’t been opened for years. It was secured with a Ysdom lock – still the finest anti-teekay lock on Bienvenido, with multiple springs and levers designed to
thwart the most skilful burglar. You could break it, of course, but the main bolt was solid iron an inch in diameter, so you had to either have the strongest teekay on the planet or bring a
sledgehammer along. Either way, chances were that an assault that blatant would be noticed. They’d found that out the hard way during their first couple of attempted incursions.

So Slvasta concentrated his ex-sight on the door’s hinges and used his teekay to turn the screws. They were old and practically welded into the wood, but he persisted. It took ten minutes
and eventually they all came free, methodically winding up from the hinges, and Javier lifted the door aside.

They crept into the stable complex, keeping up their fuzz. There were oil lamps on the corners of all the buildings. Slvasta reached out with his teekay to snuff the flames on some of them so
they could slink past unseen. Then they were at the barns. That was where they split up. Slvasta crept into one of the low buildings, wrinkling his nose up against the smell of neuts and their
manure. The creatures were all huddled together, sleeping on their feet. He sent his ex-sight into the body of the first, and followed with his teekay.

Slaughtering every mod they encountered would be easy. A quick spike of teekay into the brain or heart would kill the defenceless animal instantly. But that would be noticed, and the authorities
put on the alert, so they were going for a more indirect approach. A small pinch of teekay in the right place in a female neut’s ovaries and the creature was barren for life. After a few
weeks, the city’s supply of new mods would dry up, and all those jobs they were intended for would have to be done by humans instead.

Of course, new neuts could be bought and brought in from other towns and cities, but that would take time. By then, Slvasta was hoping the movement would have built enough momentum to cause a
lot of problems for the adaptor stables everywhere.

It took twenty minutes for Slvasta to sterilize all the female neuts in the barn. He and Javier crept out of the stable unseen, and fixed the door back into place behind them.

*

The Great North-Western train company had built Plessey station in Varlan’s Narewith district, the terminus to a main line that ran almost three thousand miles north,
crossing the equator to reach to New Angeles at the tip of the Aflar peninsula. Its goods yard sat behind the grandiose passenger terminal, with row after row of sheds whose steep roofs stood on
iron pillars covering the slender loading bay platforms. Every day, hundreds of goods trains brought raw materials into the capital and dispatched manufactured goods out across the north-west. The
money which flowed through the station on a daily basis formed a goodly portion of the city’s overall economy. Many people relied on it for their jobs.

Slvasta and Javier drove their carts into the goods yard at just after half past four, merging into the usual procession of carts belonging to various stallholders. They already knew something
was wrong before they passed the tall stone gateposts. The aether was bubbling with disgruntled ’path comments suffused with emotion.

There were a lot of carts pulled up in the loading bays which ran along one side of platform 8D, which handled the meat trains. Big yalseed oil lamps hung from the rafters, shining a meagre
yellow light down on the men milling along the narrow platform, but Slvasta couldn’t see the trains. Just about every platform was empty.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked Javier.

The big man just shrugged. There were no station officials anywhere, though Slvasta could sense the engineering crews in their shops, radiating disgruntled and in some cases nervous thoughts. He
scanned a little deeper, trying to identify individuals whose resentment burnt hotter than the others. By now he recognized most of the night-shift station workers.

‘Check it out, I think we might have three,’ he told Javier, his thoughts indicating the specific people hunkered down in the engineering shops. They avoided recruiting anyone from
the Wellfield these days. Bethaneve said a concentration of activists in the same place would be suspicious if the Captain’s police ever stumbled onto those cells.

Wherever they went now they were on the lookout for the resentful and sullen among the city’s residents. When a possible emerged, a day later that chosen one would receive a quick private
’path from someone they didn’t know, asking them if they’d like to actually do something about the focus of their ire. Responses were graded against a chart Bethaneve had drawn
up. ‘To see if we’ve got a talker or a doer,’ she said as she supervised their growing network of activist cells. Some of their best assets were cells of one – a person
broadly known as a political activist (criminal record preferred) who would happily take an order to cause a little physical havoc.

Testing Bethaneve’s pyramid of cells had so far resulted in water being temporarily cut off to certain streets (in one case for two days), allowing them to gauge the efficiency and
preparedness of the repair teams. That information, along with their growing map of the city’s main water pipe network, would allow them to cut off water to nine individual districts through
just seven small acts of sabotage, throwing the proverbial spanner in the ageing, rickety pump mechanisms of substations.

‘Good. Tag them for Bethaneve,’ Javier replied. His own ex-sight and intuition wasn’t as developed as Slvasta’s. He gestured around at the throng of unhappy stallholders
waiting for the overnight meat train. ‘This doesn’t look good.’ He ’pathed Vladja, another Wellfield stallholder, waiting in a bay further down platform 8D.