Dogface grabbed his kit and they walked down the narrow connecting corridor towards the passenger platforms. It terminated in a security door to keep people from hitching free rides on the flatbeds. Dogface unlocked it with his index finger and the door hissed open. The platform beyond was clean. Platforms for the InterWorld lines usually were. It was the feeder lines that got knee-deep in garbage. A small group of people in dowdy overwashed clothes waited with quiet resignation for the next train. They were body servants, cooks, cleaners, the Stop's second biggest export. Further up the platform stood young men and women with feet jammed into high-heeled boots, thighs into fishnets, breasts overflowing bra cups, buttocks wrapped in lycra, the white flesh crammed into the selling clothes - the Stop's principal export waiting to go to work. As they walked past Blondie tried keeping his head down but it didn't work. Someone called his name, his real name, and he turned to look without thinking.
'Hey Zak, wait up!'
He almost didn't recognize Zamina as she clicked towards him, face hidden under a layer of skin tone. Blondie looked at Dogface who shrugged and walked on - he could catch up in a minute.
'Well, look at you,' said Zamina, looking him up and down, her tongue clicking on her teeth. 'Pretty drab.'
'Not like you,' said Blondie. He could see faint lines on her pale skin running over the neckline of her halter top. An implant job, he realized, and a sloppy one at that. Zamina caught him looking and adjusted the top a bit to cover the scars.
'They said you'd got out, but I figured you for catfood by now.'
'I got lucky,' he said.
Zamina licked her lips. Stop protocol said you didn't ask questions but they'd been friends once, lovers even in a mindless adolescent fashion. Blondie could feel her need to escape as an almost physical force dragging at him. How long did Zamina have? Two, three years? You got old fast in the Stop.
Dogface whistled at him from the far end of the station.
'Gotta go, Zimmy,' he said.
'Give us a call sometime,' she said as he turned away.
'Sure,' he said but he knew he wouldn't. When you got out of the Stop you never went back. You never called and you tried not to think about the people you left behind.
Dogface had the access panel open and was probing inside with his finger sensors. 'When's the next train?'
Blondie checked the hologram hanging over the platform. 'Two minutes.'
'We'll see how the next one runs through,' said Dogface, 'and take it from there. See if you can get Lambada.'
Blondie plugged into the maintenance link. The implants still itched when he did it but he'd been told that was normal for the first six months or so. Some of the Stoppers on the platform were watching them. Blondie could make out Zimmy standing with her back to him.
'Wake up, Blondie,' said Lambada on the link from Mercury
'We're just waiting for a train,' sent Blondie. At this distance there was a timelag even with the signal going through the tunnels.
'Get a move on,' said Lambada, 'me and Sam are freezing our arses off down here.'
Blondie felt a breeze lift the hair on the back of his head. A murmur came from the people on the platform and the hologram changed to 'Train Approaching'. With a sudden rush of warm air and an ozone stink the train shot from the tunnel into the station.
'Everybody stand by,' said Dogface.
Blondie took a deep breath and accessed the system.
'I can taste something.'
'What?'
'Cinnamon, I think.'
'Relax, Blondie,' said Lambada, 'that's just static.'
'She's loading up,' said Dogface.
Blondie could see the train through the link. The train, designation IW56 series 2 class B, mass 14,000 kilograms at 1 gravity. Sensors in the carriage floor counted the footsteps as the passengers boarded. Thirty-one passengers adding 2,325 kilograms, under the average for the station and well within safety parameters.
The door-closing hooter sounded in the real world and almost snapped Blondie out of the link.
The train's field regulator charged up, and the gateway field flickered and strobed as air molecules were sucked into the tunnel. Then with ponderous grace fourteen tonnes of metal, ceramic, copper and human flesh surged forward to start its journey through subspace.
'Did you get that?' asked Dogface.
'I saw it,' said Lambada, 'but what was it?'
'We lost fifteen seconds on that transfer,' said Old Sam.
'Was it the regulators?' asked Blondie.
'Screw the regulators,' said Dogface. 'Somebody's stealing power from the tunnels.'
Lunarversity
Max had his place in an unfinished side tunnel off Yeltsin Plaza. The entrance was blocked off with a repeating hologram of a crate shack, complete with a family of destitute Australians. To get in Kadiatu had to step through the potbellied girl who endlessly came to stand in the doorway every two minutes or so. Max called it his taste barrier. Inside Max was kneeling half naked in front of a fan, his nose pressed against the grill, dirty blond hair blowing over his scrawny shoulders.
'Lend us some money,' said Kadiatu, moving behind Max to catch the breeze from the fan.
'What have you got?' said Max.
Kadiatu was stuck. Max would take anything. His shelves were piled with junk, ring pull cans, software, sim tapes, litre jars of preserved fruit, packets of suspicious pharmaceuticals. If it could be sold, bartered or used. Max did.
'Nothing,' said Kadiatu. 'I want a loan.'
'Go to a bank.'
It was a tough opening move and Kadiatu, haggling from a position of weakness, played for time. 'There's a recession going on,' she said, 'or hadn't you noticed?' Important to find what he wanted from her, he must want something or the bargaining wouldn't have started.
'Things are tough all over,' said Max.
The dismissive tone was a bad sign; whatever he wanted Kadiatu wasn't going to like it. 'If you can't help, you can't help.' Kadiatu went to leave, and the bastard let her get right up to the edge of the hologram before speaking.
'Your body, six hours,' said Max.
Big mistake. Max, thought Kadiatu, should have named the price and let me sweat. Now I know what you want. But how badly do you want it?
'No chance,' said Kadiatu and stepped forward.
'You haven't asked how much?' said Max quickly, too quickly.
Kadiatu turned with deliberate slowness, let him see the merchandise, all those muscles, all that grace. Bad weakness, that, wanting to be what you're not. Max had twisted to stare at her, making the tendons stand out on his thin neck; he was trying to hide the hunger in his eyes. No mercy, though; Kadiatu, it's a dog-eat-dog world and the richer you are, the more dog you eat.
"You couldn't afford the price.'
'Nothing kinky,' said Max. 'I just want to walk around in it for a while.'
'Just to walk around in?' said Kadiatu, and then, just to show willing: 'How much?'
'Piece of a deal,' said Max.
'What's the deal worth?'
'Twenty thousand.'
'And I get?'
'Fifteen per cent.'
She squatted on her haunches so that their eyes were level. 'Tell you what we'll do,' she said. 'I get the fifteen points as a loan, you get six hours walking-around time in my body if I don't pay back within three months.'
She could see Max fighting himself. It was a terrible deal for him, but he wanted it. Wanted to spend six hours wrapped up in her skin. His weakness, her strength.
'Deal,' he said.
When they shook hands on it, his palms were damp. Max straightened up, walked over to a shelf. He picked up a small oblong package and handed it to Kadiatu. It felt like a wooden case wrapped in rice paper, quite heavy. She didn't ask what was inside. 'You take this to STS maintenance, ask for Old Sam, get the money, skim your percentage and bring the rest back.'
Kadiatu tucked the package under her arm and left.
She got as far as the next intersection before the deal unwound in her stomach and she vomited onto the floor.
Acturus Terminal (Stunnel Terminus)
'Is that it?' The Stunnel gateway was twice as big as its Central Line counterpart at the other end of the station. Accordingly the roof and walls of Acturus Station sloped inwards down its two-hundred-metre length. It was like being in a huge funnel.
Doctor Verhoevan glanced up from his instruments. 'Impressive, isn't it?'
'Why is it that big?'
'Safety margin. On a tunnel of this length there's bound to be some real-space displacement of the carriage. We don't want it scraping the sides when it comes through.'
Close up the gateway was a dull bronze colour, the field boundary had an oily shifting look. It was making her uneasy. 'It's a funny colour.'
'Yes, interesting, isn't it?' said Verhoevan. 'It could be a function of the distance. No one's ever projected a tunnel this long before.' Verhoevan stopped and looked carefully at Ming, sizing her up. 'I'd really like to do a test run first.'
'Nervous?'
'Of course I am,' said Verhoevan. 'The President's going to be here, and the Minister and God knows who else.'
'So?'
'What if I activate the thing and nothing happens?'
Ming looked back at the gateway. 'You're getting the carrier signal?'
'Yes.'
'What's the problem then?'
Verhoevan shrugged.
The problem was power. Establishing the Stunnel was going to take sixty per cent of the total STS grid and the grid was stretched by normal operations as it was. It was the trains that took the power and the trains ran twenty-four hours a day across nine planets and fifty-six time zones.
Constitution Day, the holiday that marked the end of the Hundred-Day War, the only point when demand on the transit system fell enough to release the necessary power.
Tomorrow was Constitution Day.
'Twelve hours,' said Ming, 'and then you turn it on.'
Behind her the Stunnel gateway shone a dark greasy bronze. Ming decided that when Verhoevan cracked it open, she was going to be somewhere else.
Olympus Mons West
The floozies had gatecrashed the clerical workers' party at midnight Greenwich Mean Time. It was always Greenwich Mean Time in the system, it didn't matter where you started from or where you ended up, it could be full bloody daylight outside, but when you stepped into a station and the clock said zero zero zero zero it was bloody midnight, and don't you forget it. It could be hard on the biorhythms but not for Blondie, not for a boy from the Stop. A boy from the Stop could handle anything - right? Blondie was trying to explain this to people at the party but they kept on moving away. In a comer Lambada, dressed in a pink crochette T-shirt, had pinned a trainee clerical officer to the wall. The boy had a startled look on his face which troubled Blondie until he noticed where Lambada's other hand was. Clouds of suspicious-smelling smoke were rapidly overpowering the air conditioners and beginning to form a twisting strata at head height. Blondie thought it was probably now illegal to breathe deeply while standing upright, and probably dangerous as well. A noise box was pumping the latest subsonic backbeat into the floor. The vibrations were making Blondie feel queasy and a little sad. Credit Card bounced past, arms flailing out of time to the beat. The dance style had been obsolete for twenty years but Credit Card didn't care. His manic grin was locked into the memory of parties past as he slammed off people, walls and furniture. Dogface was sitting on one of the room's terminals, telling one of his sick stories to a group of young accountants. He described how two trains on the Millfield Branch line had been switched on to the same station by mistake. When he got to the punchline about the man who ended up with two heads and three buttocks the accountants laughed guiltily. Old Sam was dancing rub-a-dub-dub with the head of data processing, so close together that they looked like one of Dogface's accidents, a single mass of dreadlocks on top and two bodies welded together at the hips.
Blondie's head felt too heavy for his neck. He closed his eyes and let it drop towards his knees. Beyond the darkness of his lids the room started its ethanol spin around him. Silently he willed it to go faster, a vertiginous tumble that obliterated all sense of the outside world and then, just as he felt that his mind was dissolving away, he pulled himself out. When his eyes opened she was standing in the doorway.
From the doorway the woman gazed around the room. When she turned her face towards him Blondie saw that her eyes were pointed at the comers giving them an almond shape. The irises were coal black. He wondered who she was looking for.
She was wearing a leather jacket over a cut-down sweatshirt with 'Lunarversity' in faded letters across the chest. Memory crystals and silver thread were plaited into cotton hair extensions that were braided into a rope down her back. Blondie had an insane urge to grab hold of her hair and pull himself upright, but he didn't think it was a good idea.
She came over and stood in front of Blondie. He found himself staring at a strip of brown skin between her belt and the frayed bottom edge of her sweatshirt. When she spoke it seemed to float down from a long way above.
'I'm looking for Old Sam,' she said. 'Seen him?'
STS Central - Olympus Mons
At 01:00 GMT, one hour after the start of Constitution Day, Ming the Merciless started a phased reduction in services. It started with the branch lines in Western Europe, West Africa, Luna, Martian Plains, Mercury and all the other planets in the solar system except Triton, whose time, for historical reasons, ran at GMT + 5. Under instructions from the controllers, trains were taken out of service and shunted to their depots. All over the system passengers spat on the platforms as empty carriages cruised serenely past them. The big mainframe that handled customer complaints recorded 634 negative calls in the first ten minutes.
Ming set up one of her terminals to show the power saving as a percentage; as a laugh she put the total number of customer complaints next to it and told the computer to look for correlations. Down in the pit the controllers were passing around a bottle of Ganymede Vodka. This was one operation they didn't want to handle sober.