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  “More Worrier than Warrior.”

  Foord nodded, wryly. Thahl’s quiet friendship and gentle mockery had been like a soothing antiseptic balm after the orphanage; yet still he could do things like this.

  4

  The journey was turning feverish. The road was now a six-lane carriageway, the middle and outer lanes jammed with a thrombosis of traffic and the inner lane cleared for them, cars and trucks shunted to one side by the military. The oncoming three lanes were an unbroken procession of military vehicles: more lowloaders and groundcars, tankers and multiwheels and personnel carriers, each one with its own battery of sirens and lights. Ahead there were VSTOLs hovering low over the road, low enough to force traffic into the outer lanes. Their road was being made for them as they travelled it.

  They were in the flat country leading to the rim of the Bowl: immense and drab, partly fields and partly industrial wasteland, littered with low-grade and failing development: warehouses, factories, workshops, silos, apartment blocks. Some of them were soiled with brown stains from their partly-exposed steel skeletons.

  Foord’s wristcom buzzed.

  “Commander, it’s Cyr. We’ve got a situation.”

  “Situation?”

  “It’s the crews of the Horus Fleet ships. They’re stuck here until our refit’s completed and they’re gathering round our Grid—not doing anything yet, just watching. And when I refused to hand over our people to Swann, civilians and military started gathering too. They don’t seem to know what they want yet, but Swann won’t order them away because he says their mood is unreadable and he can’t predict the consequences. And now the news of what Thahl did …How long until you arrive, Commander?”

  “About ninety minutes.”

  “It may get worse. And when you do arrive, it’ll take something exceptional to get you through this crowd and on board. You won’t reconsider the landchariot?”

  “Not now.”

  “A moment please, Commander…Smithson says he has an idea about what to do when you arrive. I’ll call back.”

  “Thank you, Cyr.”

  The landchariot sped on. The landscape stretched either side of the highway, reflecting the sky’s greyness as if it was a stretch of ocean.

  Now that they were approaching the edge of the Great Lowland Bowl, there was a strangeness about what they saw. The country was too unrelievedly flat to see the actual rim yet—it wouldn’t be visible until they were almost on top of it—but the strangeness had to do with how its presence was felt and almost seen. Freighters and warships, going to or from Blentport, appeared to fly into and out of the ground at a distant point on the horizon where the rim was located but not yet visible; at the same location and for miles beyond, the air was coloured with rainbows from the rivers which fell in torrents over the edge; and occasionally, there was the sense that beyond every rise in the horizon there was not simply more land, but emptiness—a difference in the quality of the landscape, like the difference felt near a coast before the sea was visible. And it did things to the air. Above the rim, so high above it they couldn’t be seen properly, were flocks of white things floating on the roiling air-currents. They weren’t birds, but they had wings over thirty feet across. Angels.

  Blentport is situated in the Great Lowland Bowl. It is the headquarters of Horus Fleet, and the Commonwealth’s biggest port outside of Earth. It has landing and takeoff capacity for warships, freighters and liners: nine large and ten minor Grids, each able to repair, rebuild or refit a ship.

  Commonwealth cities grew rapidly in the Bowl. Blentport grew rapidly too, because Horus Fleet was needed to protect the natural riches of Horus system; but the cities grew faster, making one huge conurbation surrounding the port.

  You will have consulted your ship’s Codex about Blentport. Remember, however, the following:

  First, how it got its name.

  Second, its unique “City Centre” location. Population pressure in the Bowl conurbation is high, and Blentport is inevitably affected by (or even the cause of) the political and social pressures around it.

  Third, its capacity. It can only refit, at any one time, less than half of Horus Fleet—adequate for most situations, but not for what you will find when you arrive there. The enforced deployment of the entire Fleet to a defensive cordon around Sakhra will precipitate a serious emergency, with more ships than it can handle putting in for refit.

  Your ship has total priority, but the situation is volatile. The effect of anything ill-considered on your part is something you may be able to imagine better than the authors of this briefing.

  They hung poised over the rim, and Foord froze. The traffic lurched forward and their road, along with all the others, commenced its long spiral descent round the sides of the Bowl. As it did so the Bowl effectively vanished; its curvature was so vast and shallow that it was no more discernible, from its own surface, than the curvature of a planet.

  They were in a huge but ordinary landscape, occasionally hilly and occasionally flat. Their road was cantilevered out from the Bowl’s sides where the gradient was steep, almost flat where it was shallow. There were junctions with other major roads which forked off into the interior of the Bowl, and these roads too followed the ordinary demands of the landscape: sometimes raised on columns and sometimes at ground level, sometimes on embankments and sometimes in cuttings.

  Overlaying the landscape was the Bowl’s metropolis. There was no single name for it: people tended to cling to the names of the original cities and districts, perhaps because the Bowl conurbation was too big for any single name. The cities and suburbs did not fill the Bowl levelly or evenly, like water, but crept up its sides, like brandy. As soon as the landchariot entered the multilane road spiralling down, outlying buildings rose and crowded alongside it. Some were quite mundane, like the suburbs of any city: schools, apartment blocks, shopping malls, leisure centres, vehicle workshops (including, as they passed through one of the seedier districts, workshops for landchariots).

  The traffic was as heavy and slow as it had been on the rim, except for their lane, which the military still cleared ahead of them. But now they had entered the Bowl, there were more junctions and more delays. They came to a major junction and slowed, waiting to take the turnoff to the interior.

  Foord said “Thahl, about the driver…”

  “What of him, Commander?”

  “Why is he so angry? I can feel it coming off him in waves.”

  Thahl paused. “Commander, when you decided to return to Blentport by landchariot, was it something you considered important?”

  “Yes. Also to make a point to Swann, but it was important to me. Why do you ask?”

  “The driver believed it was important to you. That’s why he agreed to take you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Thahl waited politely until he did.

  “You mean, because of the evacuation he won’t be allowed to leave...and if he has to stay he’ll have his poison glands removed?”

  “Yes, Commander, that’s possible.”

  “Does he know?”

  “Yes, Commander. I discussed it with him back at the clearing. He said he agreed to take you in and he’ll take you.”

  “Thahl, we must stop this. I had no idea. I’ll call Swann and get a flier…”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it, Commander. Don’t try to stop him. He’d sooner kill you than be persuaded not to take you in.”

  •

  Foord snapped open his wristcom.

  “Yes, Commander?”

  “Cyr, we’ve entered the Bowl. We should be at the ship in an hour. How is the situation there?”

  “The refit is almost finished, but we’re now fully surrounded. Our Grid is full of crews from the other ships, stranded here because of us. And Port personnel. And troops from the Port, who are supposed to keep the others away from us but aren’t. They’ve been coming since we last spoke.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes. Swann came to the
ship. Asked to come aboard.”

  “What the fuck”—Foord rarely swore audibly; this was his quota for the day—“What the fuck made him think he could come aboard my ship?”

  “That was almost exactly, word for word, what Smithson said to him.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He said the mood of the people around us was difficult to read, and said he wasn’t going to force them off our Grid without first trying a better way.”

  “Better Way? I thought you said Smithson had an idea.”

  “That’s what he meant. Smithson had asked Swann to get the commander of the garrison at Blentport, Colonel Boussaid, to help. Smithson met Boussaid at one of Swann’s receptions when we first landed—”

  “One of those I didn’t go to?”

  “Yes, Commander. Smithson was impressed by him.”

  “Smithson was impressed?”

  “Yes, he said Boussaid’s one of the few real people at Blentport. Anyway, Swann only wanted to say that he’d get Boussaid to help you when you reach Blentport. That was all.”

  “So Smithson asks Swann for Boussaid’s help, Swann turns up personally to say yes, and Smithson...”

  “Yes, Commander. Tells him to fuck off.” She laughed. Her voice was dark and beautiful, but she could also make it ugly. “We’re still piling indignities on him, aren’t we?”

  Foord knew that Thahl was smiling; not by any upward turn of the corners of his mouth or change of expression in his eyes, but Foord knew. He snapped his wristcom shut.

  The landchariot hurtled on.

  “Thahl, it’s too late now, isn’t it?”

  “Late, Commander?”

  “For the driver. Now we’ve entered the Bowl.”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  After a while, Foord said “Are you sure? I could put pressure on Swann, maybe invoke our priority, and….”

  “And what? Refuse to lift off?” Privately, Thahl regarded Are You Sure much as Smithson regarded Do You Understand.

  “Alright, but this law about removal of poison glands…..you of all people….”

  “Commander, that law will almost certainly be repealed soon. Most humans here think it’s wrong. ”

  They hurtled on. Cyr did not call back. The driver said nothing. Thahl said almost nothing, and Foord did not reply to it. In the window the web still quivered and salivated over the particles of wood and dry paint Foord had dropped into it—perhaps the most apocalyptic event of its recent life.

  The journey was beginning to tighten around them.

  They kept to the fast multilane roads, which meant they drove through the suburbs between cities more than the cities themselves. Often their road would rear itself up on columns and rise over sunken or congested areas, covering them like a smear of cosmetic. It passed through districts which were once open grassland separating the original cities but now, with economic ebb and flow, were variously rich and poor.

  They drove through wasteland scabbed with empty buildings where businesses had grown and died. Through a vast and deafening open market where carcases hung dripping from hooks with signs like Wild Chimaera’s Handkilled By Sakhran’s, or Angel’s Freshly AirSnared (someone had added And Freshly Fallen). Through political and financial districts, where people occurred rather than worked, lounged in pavement bars, or dined luxuriously in unnamed restaurants where menus carried Angel and chimaera dishes, but had the good taste not to show prices. They drove through civic districts with huge public buildings, flowing and organic, some of them honeycombed so that they softened sunlight into granular latticeworks, and some of them designed to appear not designed but on the brink of metamorphosis into some higher form. They drove through, or around, or over, districts so different they didn’t seem to belong on the same planet, yet were linked to each other as inextricably as nerve-ends; a universe apart but a postcode away.

  And sometimes, after feverish speed, there was feverish slowness; where gridlocked junctions were like archipelagos, and even their military escort couldn’t clear a path immediately. At these times the atmosphere grew as thick and heavy as standing water, as though the vehicles cramming the road were shadows cast on an ocean floor by objects floating above in still salty froth.

  Even when they were travelling at speed, it seemed that the landchariot stood still while the cities and suburbs moved and unfolded around it, trying on different sets of clothes, changing and rechanging obsessively and restlessly, unable to decide what they were. The road and its traffic wound on, and around, and in, and out, like a stream of antibodies seeking a source of infection.

  5

  They were directed by the military, who obeyed Swann’s orders to the letter, through the gridlocked junctions and on to a major six-lane highway leading directly to Blentport. After thirty minutes, they found themselves rushing alongside a thirty-foot high chainlink fence, with vast grasslands rippling beyond it: the outer perimeter fence of Blentport. The road to their right was choked with traffic, and the air above them was full of VSTOLs. They hurtled on.

  Later, his wristcom buzzed.

  “Commander Foord?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Khalil Boussaid. Colonel Khalil Boussaid, commander of what remains of the garrison at Blentport. Most of it has headed for the hills. Literally.”

  “Thank you for calling, Colonel. Smithson says you’re the only real person he’s met at Blentport.”

  “I think,” Boussaid laughed, “he meant only that most of the others have gone… Commander, we have a very troubling situation here, and I want to get you back on board your ship without anyone getting hurt. I’m waiting for you at Gate 14. You need to continue round the perimeter fence for twelve miles…”

  “Twelve miles?”

  “Blentport is a very large place, Commander. And please hurry. Things are worsening here.”

  “Thank you, Colonel.”

  The fence rushed past on their left. It loomed thirty feet high, jewelled with electronic monitors, bristling with swivelguns, and crackling with high voltage, and this was only the outer fence; the two inner fences got progressively stronger. To the lowland cities, Blentport was an old and central presence, a slow heart surrounded by rapidly growing organs; it limited their growth and fuelled it, linking them as they strained to grow away from it. Maybe that was how the Commonwealth viewed Earth.

  From the few glimpses Foord had got of Blentport from his ship as it landed, he remembered it as a vast yellow plain as big as the cities around it, with its three concentric fences looking like cell walls to prevent it and the cities from infecting each other. From ground level it looked like the only large area of living land they had encountered in the Bowl, a windswept expanse of yellow-green grass. From above, the great gates were spaced at regular intervals in the fences to allow the approach roads to spiral symmetrically inwards, but from ground level the sheer scale reasserted itself and the distance between gates, which had looked negligible, became interminable.

  The landchariot sped on. They started to encounter roadblocks, but each time they were waved through by soldiers who knew very well who they were. The traffic was thinner and moved faster, as more of it was bled off at the roadblocks. The vehicles still sharing the road with them were mainly articulated trucks on their regular runs, with their cabled flanks and multiple wheels towering above the roof of the landchariot and more than filling the window on Foord’s right, where the web ignored them and continued to have wet dreams of small cataclysms.

  In the distance, sirens wailed, both the high unbroken harmonic of military groundcars and the two-tone of VSTOLs, the latter both military and ambulances, but they were less frequent now; either the evacuation of the military had reached and passed its peak or the landchariot had left it behind. The evacuation, thought Foord sourly. Sakhra had the Commonwealth’s second-largest fleet, and almost all of it was deployed in a defensive cordon against just one ship. Her. The evacuation was their way of saying that they expected Her to defeat Foord�
��s ship and penetrate the cordon.

  Foord was watching a truck thunder past on the right in apparent silence, and realised its noise was drowned in the roar from the left as a Horus Fleet ship, probably an 078, lifted off from the distant centre of Blentport. It looked overladen and undermaintained, and rose as heavily as a methane bubble through mud, barely clearing the tops of the distant control buildings as it made its belated, and bloated, way to join the cordon. Apparently, the Charles Manson’s refit was nearing completion and Blentport was returning to other work.

  There was a gap in the perimeter fence up ahead, an approach road leading to a gate.

  “Take it!” Boussaid yelled in Foord’s wristcom. “Take it, it’s Gate 14!”

  They took it. So, immediately, did some of the smaller and slower groundcars which were bunched behind them on the inside lane. Sirens blared and four military sixwheels, which in the noise and chaos Foord had not noticed waiting in the verges, lurched forward to block the approach road. The landchariot slewed to a halt within a few feet of their slabsided flanks. The groundcars immediately behind halted, and vehicles behind them, on the inner lane of the main road, but unable to see what was causing the holdup, skidded and sounded their horns.

  The military sirens died out. The horns from behind did not. Voices were raised behind them as soldiers set about moving back the vehicles which had followed them into the approach road. The arguments reached a crescendo and died abruptly when someone, Foord hoped a soldier, fired a shot, Foord hoped into the air. A moment of silence was followed by a gunning of engines and churning of wheels as the vehicles behind backed off. Then the landchariot was alone, faced by sixwheels and ringed by soldiers whose positions, faces and weapons were unwavering. The wind rolled hugely over the Blentport grassland. The traffic roar from the main road seemed a long way away.

  The soldiers lowered their guns, and one of them spoke into his wristcom. Immediately Foord’s buzzed.

  “Boussaid, Commander. They know who you are. Follow them to the middle gate, they’re expecting you.”

  The Sakhran driver, who had given no sign of being able to speak Commonwealth, but was fluent in the language of levelled and lowered guns, did not wait for instructions. He lashed the team forward just as the sixwheel directly in front gunned its engine—it squealed, like a metallic chimaera—moved aside, let them pass through the outer gate, and followed close behind.