was an oval panel in the part which jutted out, more or less the same size as the panel which he had found in the wall. ‘This one normally carries steam.’
‘What is it carrying now?’
‘A few thousand atmospheres. Nothing to worry about.’
Quirrenbach placed his hands on the panel and slid it aside. It moved smoothly, revealing a curve of dark green glass, framed by clean silver metal inset with controls. They were marked with a very old style of writing; words which were almost but not quite Norte.
Amerikano.
Quirrenbach tapped a few keys, and I heard a series of distant thumps. Moments later, the whole pipe thrummed as if sounding a monstrously low note. ‘That’s the steam flow being rerouted along another network, for inspection mode.’
He pressed a button and the thick green glass whisked aside, revealing a mass of bronze machinery, nearly filling the bore of the pipe. At either end it was all pistons and accordioned sections, festooned with pipes and metal whiskers, servo-motors and black suction pads. It was difficult to tell whether it was ancient — something from the Amerikano period — or much more recent, cobbled together since the plague. Either way, it didn’t look very reliable. But in the middle of the machine was a skeletal space equipped with two large padded seats and some rudimentary controls. It made a wheeler look like an exercise in spaciousness.
‘Start talking,’ I said.
‘It’s an inspection robot,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘A machine for wriggling along the pipe, checking for leaks, weak spots, that kind of thing. Now it’s… well, you figure it out.’
‘A transportation system.’ I studied it myself, wondering what were the chances of riding it and surviving. ‘Clever, I’ll give you that. Well — how long will it take to go where it goes?’
‘I’ve ridden it once,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘It wasn’t any picnic.’
‘You didn’t answer my question.’
‘An hour or two to get down below the mist layer. Same time to come back. I don’t advise that you spend too long when you get there.’
‘Fine. I’m not planning to. Will I pass for someone in the know if I take this thing down?’
He eyed me over. ‘Only people in the know arrive via this route. With Vadim’s coat you’ll pass for a supplier, or at least someone in the loop — provided you don’t open your mouth too much. Just tell whoever meets you that you’ve come to see Gideon.’
‘Sounds like it couldn’t be easier.’
‘Oh, you’ll manage. A monkey could run the machine. Sorry. No offence intended.’ Quirrenbach smiled quickly and nervously. ‘Look, it’s easy. You won’t have any trouble telling when you’ve arrived.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Especially as you’re coming along for the ride.’
‘Bad move, Tanner. Bad move.’ Quirrenbach started looking around for moral support.
‘Tanner’s right,’ Zebra said, shrugging. ‘It would make a kind of sense.’
‘But I’ve never been close to Gideon. They won’t necessarily take me any more seriously than they take Tanner. What am I supposed to say when they ask why we’re there?’
Zebra glared at him. ‘Improvise, you spineless little shit. Say you heard some rumours about Gideon’s health, and you wanted to check them out for yourself. Say there are stories about the quality of the final product reaching the streets. It’ll work. It’s the same kind of story that got my sister close to Gideon, after all.’
‘You’ve no idea whether she got close at all.’
‘Well, just do your best, Quirrenbach — I’m sure Tanner will be there to give you all the moral support you need.’
‘I’m not doing it.’
Zebra waved her gun towards him. ‘Want a rethink?’
He looked down the barrel of the gun, then at Zebra, his lips pursed. ‘Damn you as well, Taryn. Consider your bridges well and truly burned, as far as our professional relationship is concerned.’
‘Just get in the machine, will you?’
I turned to Zebra and Chanterelle. ‘Take care. I don’t think you’ll be in any danger here, but keep an eye out in any case. I expect to be back within a few hours. Can you wait that long?’
Zebra nodded. ‘I could, but I’m not planning to. There’s enough room in that thing for three of us, if Chanterelle can hold the fort back here.’
Chanterelle shrugged. ‘Can’t say I’m exactly looking forward to spending a few hours up here on my own, but I think I’d rather be here than down there. I guess this is one you owe to your sister?’
Zebra nodded. ‘She’d have done the same for me, I think.’
‘Way to go. I just hope the trip’s worth it.’
I spoke to Chanterelle now. ‘Don’t put yourself in any more danger than necessary. We can find our own way out of here if we have to, so if anything happens… you know where the car’s parked.’
‘Don’t worry about me, Tanner. Just take care of yourself.’
‘It’s a habit of mine.’ I slapped Quirrenbach on the shoulder, with all the hearty bonhomie I’d have liked to have felt. ‘Well, are you ready? You never know. You might be inspired on the way down; something even more depressing than normal.’
He looked at me grimly. ‘Let’s get this over with, Tanner.’
Despite what Zebra had said, there was barely room for two people in the inspection robot, and it was a painful squeeze to accommodate a third. But Zebra’s articulation was not fully human, and she had an uncanny ability to fold herself into what space remained, even if the process caused her some discomfort.
‘I hope to God this isn’t going to take too long,’ she said.
‘Start her up,’ I told Quirrenbach.
‘Tanner, there’s still…’
‘Just start the fucking thing up,’ Zebra said. ‘Or the only composing you’ll be doing is decomposing.’
That did the trick; Quirrenbach pressed a button and the machine rumbled into life. It clunked its way along the pipe, moving like a slow mechanical centipede. The machine’s front and back moved jerkily, the suction grips hammering the wall, but the part where we were seated travelled relatively smoothly. Though there was no steam in the tunnel now, the metal sides were hot to the touch and the air was like a steady belch from the depths of hell. It was cramped and dark except for the weak illumination from the basic controls placed in front of our seats. The pipeline walls were smooth as glacial ice, polished that way by the monstrous pressures of the steam. Though the pipe had started out horizontally, it soon began to curve, gently at first, and then to something that was not far off vertical. My seat was now a deeply uncomfortable harness from which I was hanging, constantly aware of the kilometres of pipe that fell away below me and the fact that all that was stopping me dropping into those depths was the suction pressure of the cups arrayed around the inspection robot.
‘We’re heading for the cracking station, aren’t we?’ Zebra said, raising her voice above the machine’s hammering progress. ‘That’s where they make it, isn’t it?’
‘Makes a kind of sense,’ I said, thinking about the station. That was where all the pipes came from: the city’s great taproots. The station nestled deep in the chasm, lost under the perpetual mist layer. It was where titanic conversion machines sucked in the hot, raw gaseous poison rising from the chasm’s depths. ‘It’s out of the way of any jurisdiction, and the people who crew it must have the kinds of advanced chemical tools they’d need to synthesise something like Dream Fuel.’
‘You think everyone who works down there is in on the secret?’
‘No; probably just a small clique of workers producing the drug, unknown to anyone else in the station. Isn’t that the case, Quirrenbach?’
‘I told you,’ he said, adjusting a control so that our rate of progress increased, the hammering becoming a harsh tattoo. ‘I was never allowed close to the source.’
‘So how much do you know, exactly? You must know something about the synthesis process.’
‘Why would it interest you if I did?’
‘Because it doesn’t make much sense to me,’ I said. ‘The plague made a lot of things stop working. Implants — complicated ones, anyway. Sub-cellular nano robots; medichines — whatever you want to call them. That was bad news for the postmortals, wasn’t it? Their therapies usually needed some intervention by those little machines. Now they had to make do without.’
