13
The cable car was heavily armoured with a number of weapon systems sticking out of it like spines. Most of them were for point defence. The cable was carbon nanotube in an armoured sheath. Even allowing for this, the cable looked very vulnerable. Tailgunner had confirmed that during the twenty-year-long, on-off siege of Moa City, the cable car normally didn’t last long when They came calling. The locals had only just got this one up and running again.
We were sharing the crowded car with grubby, drawn, exhausted-looking miners coming off shift. I hoped the crowd was enough to hide us from the ever-present surveillance but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we stuck out. We were wearing clean clothes and looked healthy. I could feel the security lens burning into me, scrutinising me. It was as if Demiurge was staring at us. Which it would be as it ran our features through various facial recognition programs.
The cavern that Moa City occupied was the largest yet. It was more like a large alpine valley with a roof of stone. The cavern walls close enough to see were cut into terraces where they’d been extensively mined. This made me uncomfortable. It was like chipping away at the walls of your own house and then wondering why the roof fell on you.
Enormous geothermally powered strip-lighting rigs hung from the cavern roof among the stalactites. It was supposed to be daytime but the harsh light was more institutional than daylight. It wasn’t total either. Many of the lights had been destroyed or damaged. Some hung down from the rock; others flickered on and off intermittently. At ‘night’ the lights would go UV, providing what little modified vegetation was left with the band of light it needed.
The floor of the cavern was supposed to be a lush carpet of vegetation broken up by plantation-style mansions cut out of the rock itself. Big Henry had told me that it had been fashionable to have a seam of precious metal run through the wall of your own house. The problem with the Garden District was that the New Zealand colonial forces hadn’t been able to defend it when They had swarmed in from Nightside.
‘I remember during one of the attacks – the first one I saw – I looked down from the city and it looked like the whole place was crawling. It was like a carpet of insects on a nature viz. You could barely see the ground,’ Tailgunner said as he saw me gazing down at the cavern floor.
We’d used some of the morphic compound to change his features. His tattoos – they were called ta moko apparently and told his story – had been covered with foundation. The whanau were nothing if not pragmatic. A bandanna covered the computer tech protruding from his skull.
‘There’s people down there,’ I said. In some places huge bonfires were burning and by magnifying my optics I could just about make out large groups around the fires. There were large, oddly shaped statuary near some of the people.
‘They call themselves the End,’ Tailgunner said. I could hear the contempt in his voice. ‘They’re deserters. Part of some suicide cult. They use their religious beliefs to justify their cowardice. They moved into the Garden when They moved out.’
I had always been somewhat impressed with conscientious objectors. I was less sure how I felt about deserters. It was too much like running out on your mates when they needed you.
‘Who are the guys in the civvy-looking APCs?’ Cat asked.
There were wheeled armoured vehicles moving around far below us.
‘Probably salvage teams and private bailiffs,’ Tailgunner told us. ‘When They came the first time the Garden was overrun. Those that had the chance evacuated. The thing is, They don’t loot – no interest in what we have, just in killing us. In some of the houses there are still valuables left. Not to mention that some of the ostentatious bastards had veins of precious metals running through their homes. So the old owners, if they still have money, send teams in to clear out the squatters and see what’s left. Others are private concerns, looters.’
Far below us I saw muzzle flashes and the strobe of a laser in the streets. Much of it was already rubble, the abused ghost of a wealthy neighbourhood. The same could be said for almost all of the rest of the cavern. Moa City had been under siege for almost half of the war since Lalande 2 had been invaded fifty-five years ago. The story of the siege was written in craters, scars, gouges, blackened and melted stone almost everywhere you looked. No part of the enormous cavern was more heavily damaged than the city itself.
One of the greatest engineering feats of the pre-war era, a great deal of survey work, modelling and experimentation had gone into the city’s planning. An enormous stalactite hung from the cavern roof. It was about three miles high and its tip hung about half a mile above the Garden District. Engineers had decided that the stalactite could support habitation, and the city had been cut out of the stone and existing caves with lasers and microbes. It was designed to be a dormitory city for the mineworkers, while those who could afford it lived in the Garden, among the lush vegetation below.
After They had attacked, the wealthy who survived moved up into the stalactite. Initially thought to be a weak point in the planet’s defences, the giant stalactite proved to be a veritable fortress and much of it was given over to the military. The rest of the people were pushed into already crowded parts of the city and left to fend for themselves, particularly when the mines were abandoned by the human forces.
The stalactite filled much of the view through the scarred and pockmarked armoured-glass windscreen of the cable car. It looked like there was not a single inch of it left undamaged. Some of the rock was covered in a patchwork of armour plate. The plates looked thick enough to have come from mechs, or cavern-sea battleships; much had rusted due to the environment. Wart-like artillery, anti-aircraft and point-defence batteries grew out of the stone in numerous places.
‘Was the siege as bad as they say?’ I asked.
Both Tailgunner and Merle laughed humourlessly.
‘Mother’s first memory was of her mother cooking meat from her father’s corpse for the children to eat. He’d killed himself to provide food,’ Tailgunner said and then turned to fix me with his lenses. ‘Yeah, it was bad.’
I swallowed and nodded. It sort of put into perspective what we’d been through. We’d grown up in an impoverished war economy on Earth but it was way worse on the sharp end. Just trying to live long enough to be an adult was a challenge and meant you had to do bad things just to survive. And this had been done to them on purpose. I was pleased that Mudge was back with Pagan at the whanau base. I wouldn’t have liked him to remind Tailgunner about the proud cannibal heritage they’d claimed. I was also wondering why my world had suddenly become all about cannibalism. Morag was staring at Tailgunner, appalled. She was still sporting cuts and bruises from the FAV chase. I wasn’t; I’d healed quickly.
The cable car took us high up towards the cavern roof, towards the thickest part of the stalactite. We passed a broken lighting rig hanging down from the cavern roof. The light was flickering on and off, sending sparks cascading down. Just past the lighting rig we docked with the fortified gatehouse that was the cable car station. We tried not to move too enthusiastically as the mass of exhausted miners plodded off the car. I ignored the sense of vertigo as I stepped from rocking cable car onto stone platform.
To my heightened senses it seemed like there were lenses everywhere and all of them were pointed at us. Regular soldiers with the bored disinterest that came from garrison duty checked the fake IDs we’d fabricated in Limbo and let us through.
What got me most about Moa City was how quiet it was for a place so crowded. They may not have been starving, but the inhabitants looked hungry, drawn and exhausted. Hard times were etched into the lines on their faces.
The streets were smooth tunnels that seemed to always spiral down. The houses were cut out of the stone itself, but everywhere I looked I saw lean-to huts and other shanty-style dwellings. Off the main thoroughfares this part of Moa City was a densely crowded, tangled warren of alleyways. Like the outside of the enormous stalactite, the inside showed extensive battle damage.
‘What’s that humming noise?’ Morag asked.
A pair of armed surveillance drones floated by over the crowds of people.
‘The catapult is just above us. This was the scene of some of the worst fighting in the last ten years,’ Tailgunner said once the drones had passed.
The enormous mass-driver catapult was used to throw heat-shielded ore cargoes into orbit for collection by
