influence, and I’m willing to wager that a few people are wealthier and more influential than they were before.’
‘That’s always the way with disasters,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘They’re never bad news for everyone. Something nasty always rises to the top.’
As we descended further I thought about cover stories and camouflage. I hadn’t given much thought to either, but — weapons and logistics aside — that was the way I usually operated, preferring to adapt to my surroundings as I found them, rather than to plan things in advance. But what about Reivich? He couldn’t have known about the plague, which meant that any plans he’d formulated would have been in disarray as soon as he learned what had happened. But there was a vital difference: Reivich was an aristocrat, and they had webs of influence which reached between worlds, often based on familial ties which reached back centuries. It was possible — likely, even — that Reivich had connections amongst Chasm City’s elite.
Those connections would have been useful to him even if he hadn’t managed to contact them before his arrival. But they’d have been even more useful if he’d been able to signal them while he was on his way here, forewarning them. A lighthugger moved at nearly the speed of light, but it had to speed up and slow down at either end of its journey. A radio signal from Sky’s Edge — sent just before the Orvieto’s departure — would have reached Yellowstone a year or two in advance of the ship itself, giving his allies that much time to prepare for his arrival.
Or perhaps he had no allies. Or they existed, but the message had never got through, lost in the confusion that was the system’s communications net and condemned to bounce endlessly between malfunctioning network nodes. Or perhaps there just hadn’t been time to arrange for a message to be sent at all, or it hadn’t crossed his mind.
I’d have liked to have drawn comfort from any of those possibilities, but the one thing I never counted on was having luck on my side.
It was generally simpler that way.
I looked out the window again, seeing Chasm City for the first time as the clouds parted, and thought: he’s down there, somewhere… waiting and knowing. But even then the city was too large to take in, and I felt a crushing sense of the enormity of the task that lay ahead of me. Give up now, I thought; it’s impossible. You’ll never find him.
But then I remembered Gitta.
The city nestled within a wide, jagged crater wall, sixty kilometres from side to side, and nearly two kilometres high at its tallest point. When the first explorers arrived here, they had sought shelter from Yellowstone’s winds within the crater, building flimsy, air-filled structures that would have survived five minutes in the true badlands. But they’d also been lured by the chasm itself: the deep, sheer-sided, mist-enshrouded gully at the geometric centre of the crater.
The chasm belched perpetual warm gas, one of the outlets for the tectonic energy pumped into the core during the encounter with the gas giant. The gas was still poisonous, but much richer in free oxygen, water vapour and other trace gases than any comparable outgassing anywhere on Yellowstone’s surface. The gas still needed to be filtered through machinery before it could be breathed, but that process was much simpler than it would have been elsewhere, and the scalding heat could be used to drive immense steam turbines, supplying as much energy as any burgeoning colony could use. The city had sprawled across the entire level surface of the crater, surrounding the chasm at its heart and spilling some way into its depths. Structures were perched on perilous ledges hundreds of metres below the chasm’s lip, connected by elevators and walkways.
Most of the city, however, lay under a vast toroidal dome, encircling the chasm. Quirrenbach told me the locals called it the Mosquito Net. Technically, it was actually eighteen individual domes, but because they were merged it was hard to tell where one ended and another began. The surface hadn’t been cleaned in seven years and was now stained in filthy, near-opaque shades of brown and yellow. It was largely accidental that some areas of the dome remained clean enough to reveal the city beneath them. From the behemoth, it looked almost normal: a phenomenal mass of immensely tall buildings compressed into festering urban density, like a glimpse into the innards of a fantastically complex machine. But there was something queasily wrong about those buildings; something sick about their shapes, contorted into forms no sane architect would have chosen. Above ground, they branched and rebranched, merging into a single bronchial mass. Except for a sprinkling of lights at their upper and lower extremities — strewn through the bronchial mass like lanterns — the buildings were dark and dead- looking.
‘Well, you know what this means,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘They weren’t kidding. It wasn’t a hoax.’
‘No,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘They most certainly weren’t. I also foolishly allowed myself to entertain that possibility; thinking that even after what had become of the Rust Belt, even after the evidence I had seen with my own eyes, the city itself might be intact, a reclusive hermit hoarding its riches away from the curious.’
‘But there’s still a city,’ I said. ‘There are still people down there; still some kind of society.’
‘Just not quite the one we were expecting.’
We skimmed low over the dome. The structure was a sagging geodesic drapery of latticed metal and structural diamond stretching for kilometres, as far into the brown caul of the atmosphere as it was possible to see. Tiny teams of suited repair workers were dotted across the dome like ants, their labours revealed by the intermittent sparks of welding torches. Here and there I saw gouts of grey vapour streaming from cracks in the dome, internal air freezing as it hit Yellowstone’s atmosphere, high above the crater’s thermal trap. The buildings below reached almost to the underside of the dome itself, groping up like arthritic fingers. Black strands stretched between those painfully swollen and crooked digits; for all the world like the last tracery of gloves which had rotted almost away. Lights were clumped near the tips of those fingers, reaching in long meandering filaments along the thickest webs which bridged them. Now that we were closer I saw that there was a finer tracery altogether, the buildings enveloped in a convoluted tangle of fine dark filaments as if delirious spiders had tried to fashion webs between them. What they had produced was an incoherent mass of dangling threads, lights moving through it along drunken trajectories.
I remembered what the welcome message aboard the Strelnikov had told me about the Melding Plague. The transformations had been extraordinarily rapid — so rapid, in fact, that the shifting buildings had killed a great many people in ways far cruder than the plague itself would have done. The buildings had been engineered to repair themselves and reshape themselves according to architectural whims imposed by democratic will — the populace having only to wish a building to alter its shape in sufficient numbers for the building to obey — but the changes wrought by the plague had been uncontrolled and sudden, more like a series of abrupt seismic shifts. That was the hidden danger of a city so Utopian in its fluidity that it could be reshaped time and again, frozen and melted and refrozen like an ice-sculpture. No one had told the city that there were people living within it, who might be crushed once it began to shape itself. Many of the dead were still down there, entombed in the monstrous structures which now filled the city.
Then Chasm City was no longer beneath us, but the toothed edge of the crater wall; the behemoth slicing expertly through a notch in the rim which looked only just wide enough to accommodate it.
Ahead I could see a huddle of armoured structures near one edge of a butterscotch-coloured lake. The behemoth lowered itself towards the lake, the scream of its thrusters audible now as it fought to hold itself at this altitude against its natural tendency to float upwards.
‘Disembarkation time,’ Quirrenbach said. He got up from his seat, indicating a general flow of people across the lobby.
‘Where are they all going?’
‘To the drop capsules.’
I followed him across the lobby, where a dozen sets of spiral stairs led to the disembarkation level, a whole deck below. People were waiting by glass airlocks to board teardrop-shaped capsules, dozens of them which were slowly being pushed forward along guideways. At the front, the capsules slid down a short ramp which was jutting from the behemoth’s belly, before falling the rest of the distance — two or three hundred metres — and splashing
