The Abyss Beyond Dreams (67 page)

‘Poor boy. Can we use him?’

‘He’s on my watch list.’

‘Okay. What about the palace?’ Nigel nodded at the wall on the other side of Mayborne Avenue.

‘Real progress there.’

Kysandra’s u-shadow reported that Coulan was sending over a file. It was a recording from an artificial bussalore that
Skylady
had synthesized. Coulan had taken a week just
getting the slippery little drone into the palace gardens, sitting in his Preservation Society office as the ersatz-rodent nosed along the wall, examining cracks. Eventually it found a deep one and
slithered inside, then began clawing at the mortar joints, taking days to tunnel through and break out into the gardens.

‘It is true what they say about the Captain’s family,’ Coulan said solemnly. ‘It took me three days to navigate across the garden. There’s a lot of degenerate
nocturnal behaviour going on in there, let me tell you.’

‘We should record it,’ Nigel said. ‘Nothing wrecks a reputation worse than a scandal. It can always be gifted to the city when we need it.’

‘I’ll send in another bussalore drone tonight.’

The file continued to play, showing Kysandra the interior of the palace. Even though she’d seen the façade, she wasn’t quite prepared for the opulence of the rooms within. But
Coulan didn’t keep it above ground for long. The vast building squatted above an expansive labyrinth of cellars and vaults and tunnels. She found herself in a brick vault with the
drone’s little enhanced-sensitivity retinas looking up at the far wall. It was a convex curve made from metal that had darkened with age and gathered a dusting of powdery pine-green algae.
There was a door in the middle, a big circular affair with an odd collar of torn metal and what looked like shredded rubber, whose stands hung limply.

‘Is that plyplastic?’ she asked.
Skylady
didn’t use much of the substance, but there were hundreds of references in her newly implanted memories.

‘Yes,’ Nigel confirmed.

‘So that’s . . .’

‘A cargo module, by the looks of it.’

‘Correct,’ Coulan said. ‘I found another eleven of them underneath the palace. The bussalore drone managed to get inside one. It’d been stripped clean. Even some of the
internal structure had been removed.’

‘Useful material,’ Nigel muttered. ‘Probably propping up some aristo’s mansion roof.’

‘Indeed. Then two weeks ago, I found this.’

The image changed to another large vault, this one annular with a ribbed ceiling. It enclosed a big ellipsoid made of smooth hexagonal panels which stood on its wide end, supported by brick
buttresses. Metal struts which protruded from the panel intersections appeared to have been broken off. Tangles of cables and pipes formed a tattered web around the object. Six thick seamless tubes
emerged from the panels around the narrow end, extending upwards so they almost touched the vault’s curving roof.

‘It took a while, but the drone eventually found a way in; some of the conduit mouldings had perished,’ Coulan said with a note of pride.

The recording switched to a weird spectrum of cobalt-blue and black. Scale was difficult to make out, and the interior of the ellipsoid was filled with a dense lattice of support struts and
cables and wire tubes, which made the picture confusing. Lean lines of scabbed electromuscle had distended from various mechanisms, oozing flaccid knobs that hung limply over dark gulfs, as if it
had briefly turned liquid, only to resolidify. Cradles held blurred shapes; spheres, cylinders, discs . . .

‘Freeze,’ Nigel commanded.

The recording focused on a long cylinder with a wasp-waist middle and a mushroom-profile head.

‘Oh, holy crap,’ Nigel whispered. His lips parted in a soft lopsided smile.

‘My thoughts exactly,’ Coulan said.

Kysandra wanted to shout the question at them, but she knew the way this game was played now.

‘This changes everything,’ Nigel said. ‘We have to get in there. I need them.’

‘Not going to happen,’ Coulan said. ‘Not easily, anyway.’

‘I could ask nicely.’

‘I’ve studied Varlan’s society closely while I’ve been in the city; it’s conservative and sliding down the decadence decay curve. Can you imagine your impact? Hi
there, Captain Philious, I’m from the Commonwealth. I have more knowledge than you, so just give me what I need and I’m going to try and get you all out of here, back to a universe
where you will have none of your wealth and power, where you’re just the same as everyone else.’

‘Yeah,’ Nigel drawled, and scratched the back of his head. ‘So, we put together a crew of master criminals and pull off the crime of the millennium.’ He grinned.
‘Finally, something to rival the Great Wormhole Heist of 2243. I’d love to see Ozzie’s face at that news.’

‘It took me nearly three weeks to get a seven-centimetre remote drone into that vault. The palace has about a hundred armed guards on duty at any one time. There’s a Marine barracks
five minutes away. And the Captain’s police aren’t idiots or slack. I just don’t see how we can realistically get into the vault, let alone take those out through the palace and
back to the
Skylady
.’

‘So we have to get rid of the guards and Marines and the police, then.’

‘And manufacture a time crazy enough so no one will notice them being carted off down Walton Boulevard in broad daylight.’

‘Ah, hell. I suppose so. We don’t have a lot of options right now.’

Kysandra gave up. ‘Right, you two! What the crud is that thing?’

Nigel turned to face her, actually expressing some genuine gusto for once. ‘The
Vermillion
’s armoury.’

Even though he’d sworn not to return, Slvasta had enjoyed seeing his old regimental comrades again. He’d made the journey back to Cham just ten days after
he’d returned to Varlan from agreeing the deal with Nigel. Sergeant Yannrith had written, asking him to be a character witness for Trooper Tovakar. He was to be court-martialled,
Yannrith’s letter explained: there had been one too many charges of drunk and disorderly behaviour. Major Rachelle was to be the prosecuting officer. If found guilty, Tovakar would be given a
dishonourable discharge and stripped of his pension.

That it was Major Rachelle was a big factor in Slvasta’s return. That and the injustice. Tovakar was no saint, but to strip a trooper of his pension – a man who’d faced
terrible danger to keep his fellow citizens safe – well, that was exactly the kind of thing Democratic Unity and their organization were fighting in Varlan.

His arrival caused a stir. Even provincial old Cham had heard of the Hero of Eynsham Square and looked favourably on a famous son. Ultimately, though, it had made no difference. Slvasta’s
testimony appealed to emotion; Rachelle deployed cold logic and impeccable legal precedent. Tovakar was kicked out of the regiment and his pension rights revoked.

Afterwards, Slvasta almost didn’t bother with the subtle recruiting questions, but routine and paranoia made him ask them anyway. He wasn’t asking them with the usual protection of
anonymity, and Uracus alone knew how furious Bethaneve would be with him for that breach of security. But Tovakar was absolutely perfect material for their movement, so Slvasta made him an offer to
accompany him back to Varlan and help Democratic Unity with certain politically useful acts. Tovakar didn’t even hesitate, which got Slvasta thinking. The trooper would be extremely useful
when it finally (Giu forbid) came to using the weapons that Nigel had agreed to supply. There weren’t many ex-regiment people in their organization yet, and they could really use someone with
that kind of experience. In his own way, Tovakar was indisputably loyal and reliable.

So he went and sat down with Andricea, and then Sergeant Yannrith. It helped that the Cham regiment hadn’t been having the happiest time since he left. True, they didn’t take mods
with them on sweeps any more, but most of the other reforms he’d instituted had quietly been dropped. There were more officers, recruited from the county’s gentry – junior sons
and daughters who received no income from their family estates, and who saw the regiment purely as a way of maintaining their lifestyle. To pay for them, there were fewer troopers. Brigadier Venize
was withdrawing from the day-to-day running of the regiment, with Major Rachelle stepping up to fill the gap. So when he made them the offer, Yannrith and Andricea were on the train with him and
Tovakar back to Varlan.

It turned out to be the smartest recruiting move he’d made. Even Bethaneve agreed with that. Eventually.

*

As always these days, Yannrith, Andricea and Tovakar were the ones standing with him on Varlan’s quayside in the grim meagre twilight, waiting for the ferry to chug its
way over the Colbal. It was raining hard, a thin drizzle swirling out of featureless grey clouds that formed an unbroken ceiling over the city. Despite the rain, Slvasta was suffering a clammy
warmth. Under his coat he wore a protective waistcoat of drosilk. Bethaneve insisted on that at all times. As the official leader of Democratic Unity he was a public figure, and not all the public
admired him. The waistcoat would help against any sudden attack.

Drosilk, which had started to come on the market eighteen months ago, was astonishing: a light glossy thread that formed a fabric with a beautiful moiré shimmer. But it was also
fantastically strong; there had been nothing like it on Bienvenido before. At first it had been used by society ladies for their couture dresses. But soon the factory looms had begun to weave
tighter fabrics, strong enough to turn a blade. Really thick weaves were supposedly bullet proof. Everybody wanted the stuff, which had first appeared from Gretz county. Slvasta had been mildly
alarmed to learn that drosilk came from a mod. Some adaptor stable had produced what it was calling a mod-spider which spun the stuff out. The spider, barely the size of a human hand, was utterly
harmless. That was going to add complications for his anti-neut policy. Drosilk was becoming an important commodity, helping the city’s battered post-mod economy along. Democratic Unity
couldn’t afford to be seen opposing it; weaving and tailoring the bales of cloth into finished clothes provided a lot of work. A couple of the old adaptor stables in the city were already
bringing in the mod-spiders, adapting their old barns to accommodate them, and nobody was protesting. Slvasta considered that the thin end of the wedge, but Coulan had advised him to say nothing
and bide his time over the problem.

Even with the constant downpour of murky rain, the docks carried on as usual. Commerce, the city’s great engine, was floundering in these difficult economic times, and simple downpours
couldn’t be allowed to restrict the flow of commodities. So every jetty bustled with human stevedores using muscle and teekay to load and unload the cargoes from a multitude of different
boats – the big three-masted ocean-going clippers docked alongside the longest jetties, sturdy river barges, fishing boats with cold-holds full of their catches, steam ferries which crossed
the river several times a day laden with cargo from Willesden station. Several jetties had huge lumber rafts tied up to them after their long trip down river from the mountainous lands in the east,
with steam cranes hoisting the thick trunks up onto flatbed wagons one at a time. There wasn’t a mod-ape to be seen along the whole quayside, not these days. Horses pulled heavily loaded
carts along the jetties, but they were terrestrial animals, not mods.

It was a rare thing indeed to catch sight of any mod now. The sheriffs (and the Captain’s police) still used mod-birds drifting on the thermals above Varlan to keep an eye on known and
suspected recidivists; and rumour had many grand houses still employing mod-monkeys behind their thick ex-sight-proof stone walls. But the time of civic teams cleaning the streets, or building
teams using them for heavy work, were now past. Even cabs used terrestrial horses, raising their prices to pay for the new and expensive animals.

Democratic Unity had ridden the wave of popularity that had come from the employment shift, with new party chapters forming in over a dozen cities. They’d even held their first convention
a month ago to formalize their policies for the forthcoming elections. As the democratically elected leader of the party, Slvasta was now a readily identifiable figure right across the city. So as
they stood in the lee of a big warehouse at the end of Siebert jetty, he used a mild fuzz to deflect any ex-sight, while his wide-brimmed rain hat left his face shaded. A bulky grey greatcoat also
disguised his missing arm. No one who worked on the quayside paid him a second glance as they passed by, allowing him to remain perfectly anonymous amid the busiest district in the whole of
Varlan.

The four of them watched silently as the ferry
Elmar
pulled up at the jetty on schedule. Slvasta’s ex-sight scanned across the throng of passengers huddled together under the
awning pitched across the mid deck. It was a miserable duty, but he didn’t complain. They’d been receiving a delivery from Nigel almost every ten days since Slvasta returned from Blair
farm. Either Slvasta, Bethaneve, Coulan or Javier would be on hand to collect it – not that they didn’t trust anyone else, but . . .

Russell stood close to the back of the ferry, where the wind pushed a quantity of rain under the edge of the awning. Like most of Varlan’s citizens that day, he wore a long dark coat
slicked with rain, while his teekay brushed the heaviest droplets away from his face and hair. One hand rested on the handle of a large trunk bound with brass strips and a small set of wheels on
the bottom.

‘Get ready,’ Slvasta said. Andricea and Tovakar walked away from the warehouse in opposite directions, mingling with the traffic along the broad quayside road. Their ex-sight
scanning round, alert for anything out of place, any police operation. Slvasta himself used his ex-sight to keep watch on the wet sky overhead, alert for mod-birds. Russell joined the queue of
people disembarking along the gangplank, walking steadily, his trunk trundling along behind him. An unremarkable figure, indistinguishable from the other ferry commuters that damp evening. As soon
as he reached the end of the jetty, he made straight for the warehouse. Slvasta and Yannrith walked back into the loading bay they were temporarily borrowing – courtesy of the
stevedores’ union – where the cab was waiting. Russell wheeled the trunk round to the cab’s door. He was fuzzing it slightly, preventing any curious ex-sight from pervading the
interior. Yannrith was already in the cab; he leaned out, gripping the top of the trunk. Slvasta used his teekay and his one arm to help Russell push the trunk up and inside. The thing was
excessively heavy, but the three of them managed to shove it onto the floor of the cab quickly enough.