‘How long does that give us?’ Sunday asked.
‘Two hours, maybe less. Means we’ve already pissed away most of our head start.’ He shrugged on the murky brown coat. It had wide shoulder patches and a collar that went halfway up the sides of his skull. Now that she had a good look at him, Sunday saw fine tattoos covering every visible piece of skin, from his face to his scalp and the back of his head. The tattoos were of weird little dancing stick figures, executed in primitivist lines and squiggles.
She had nothing against weirdness – hell, she lived in the Descrutinised Zone – but she’d been hoping for a driver who exuded quiet authority and confidence, not someone who looked borderline psychotic.
‘So much for your cousins seeing sense,’ Jitendra said gloomily.
‘Maybe the golem’s on autopilot. Either way, I’m not in the mood to talk to it.’
‘You all right?’ Gribelin asked her, casually, as if he had only marginal interest in the answer.
Her face was reflected back at her from his bug-eyes. ‘Had better weeks. Can we just get going?’
‘Sure thing, sweet cheeks.’
They took an elevator. In the enclosed space, Gribelin gave off a hard-to-place mustiness, like the contents of an old cupboard. A garage lay three or four levels under the concourse. It was pressurised and floodlit, but even colder than the public spaces above. Sunday coveted Gribelin’s coat and boots. The floor was covered with a tan- coloured tar of compacted oily dust that stuck to her shoes. They walked past rows of bulky machines, some of them as large as houses: cargo haulers, excavators, tourist buses, all mounted on multiple sets of springy openwork wheels.
‘Here’s your ride,’ Gribelin said, stopping at one of the trucks. ‘Don’t scuff the paint job.’
He cranked down a ladder and made his limber way up into the cab airlock. Halfway up he paused, looked down and reached for Sunday’s luggage. She passed him her bag, then Jitendra’s, and then followed him up into the vehicle, trying to kick as much of the muck off her soles as she was able. The paint, what remained of it, could fuck itself.
It was a six-wheeled truck with a crudely airbrushed dragon on the side. Up front was a rounded accommodation and command bubble, with engine and cargo space at the rear, comms blisters and deployable solar vanes on the roof, now tucked back like retracted switchblades. Clamped to the front like a trophy, under the chin of the command bubble, was an androform maintenance robot.
There was more room inside than Sunday had been expecting. Two small sleeping cabins – one for Gribelin, another for his passengers – and a mini-galley with four fold-down seats. They took seats either side of their guide in the command bubble. The truck smelled as musty as its owner, dirt and mould in the corners, cigarette burns in some of the upholstery.
Gribelin had one hand on a steering yoke, the other on a bank of power-selector levers. They hit the steep upgrade of the garage’s exit spiral; the truck laboured, then found its stride. Gribelin floored it, there was a lurch of wheelspin and then the curving walls were speeding by only a hand’s width from the wheel rims. They climbed and climbed, barely slowing when the ramp flattened and the truck barged through a trio of self-sealing pressure curtains.
Then they were outside. For a few minutes they rumbled along surfaced roads, between low banks of bunkerlike buildings with narrow slitted windows and faded, weatherworn plastic logos on their roofs. The roads were perforated sheets, raised up on stilts. Signs on masts advertised the businesses along the route, with enormous neon-lit arrows pointing off to airlocks and parking ramps. Power lines ran overhead, sagging low above the road and its intersections. It was sprawl, the outskirts of a one-horse town on a planet where even the biggest city was small by Earth or Lunar standards. Sunday saw a repair crew working with welding torches on part of the road, but no pedestrians at all.
The buildings thinned out and soon they passed through a gate in a concrete dust-wall, flanked by flashing beacons, beyond which the road abandoned its lofty ambitions and settled for being a two-lane dirt track. Boulders and large stones, bulldozed out of the way and left along the sides, formed a crude demarcation. Every few hundred metres they passed a transponder or beacon on a flimsy pole, and that was the extent of the road markings.
Not that it appeared to matter to Gribelin, who was only pushing the truck harder. Sunday watched the speedometer climb up to one hundred and sixty kilometres per hour. Dust billowed out of the wheels, and wind- sculpted undulations in the road caused the truck to nose up and down like a small boat in high seas.
‘How long until we reach the Evolvarium?’ she asked.
Gribelin made a show of opening a hatch in the dashboard and rolling himself a cigarette before answering, stuffing it with some dark-red weed.
‘Eight, nine hours,’ he said eventually. ‘Can’t be more precise than that.’
‘I wish we had more time on Lucas.’
He drew on the cigarette, examined it carefully before answering. ‘That your buddy in the train, the golem?’
‘He’s not my friend,’ Sunday said.
‘Figure of speech, sweet cheeks. Kind of obvious you’re not on kissing terms.’ The truck reached the summit of a hill; Gribelin upshifted one of the power-selector levers. They passed the wreck of another vehicle, turned turtle in the dust. ‘The golem’ll need to hitch itself a ride out of town, unless it’s planning on walking. Maybe you’ll get lucky and there aren’t any rides until morning. Who’s on the other end of the proxy?’
‘My cousin, back on Earth.’
He nodded slowly. ‘Same place you’re from, right?’
‘The Moon,’ Sunday said. ‘There’s a difference.’
‘Earth, Moon, just tiny pissholes in the sky here. What is this, some kind of family feud?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Next time, maybe give some thought to settling your scores back home.’ He scratched at the skin around the
