‘Turds! Don’t you binaries ever think about anything else?’
Laughing, Ollie put his arm around hir, and they went outside together. Sunglasses on in unison. Ollie’s were like ski goggles – hardly the kind of stylish image he wanted, but their thick rims didn’t allow the light from the devil-sky around the edges. Even with the additional protection afforded by his tarsus lenses, too much direct exposure always left him with a migraine.
It wasn’t far to Reedham Street, where the government nutrition agency had set up a public kitchen in the community centre. Plenty of people were walking towards it. Ollie recognized most of them from the daily visit and nodded occasionally. Saying anything was pointless, thanks to the constant background buzz from the shield straining to hold back the perpetual energy bombardment from the Olyix ships as they attempted to overload the shield generators. Consequently, conversations these days tended to be up close and loud.
‘I saw Mark today,’ Lolo said.
‘Right,’ Ollie acknowledged as they passed the end of Chadwick Road. One of the big old plane trees halfway along had survived since the siege began, but in the last couple of months it too had succumbed to the absence of rain and the eternal devil-sky. Ollie was mildly sad to see it was finally shedding its yellowed leaves. ‘Who’s Mark?’
‘He’s the one who always brings the mushrooms.’
‘Ah, okay.’
‘Anyway, his friend Sharon has a sister who works at the defence ministry. She said one of the seismologist techs told someone in her office that the Olyix aren’t tunnelling under the shield any more. They’re playing the long game now. Their ships are heading for the settled star systems, and when they get there they’ll cut the power those planets are feeding back to Earth, and the interstellar portals will die. We won’t have any food pellets for the printers, or electricity to run them. So they’ll starve us out.’
Ollie did his best not to sigh. For someone who had been educated in the supposedly excellent egalitarian school system of Delta Pavonis, Lolo could be fucking stupid at times. ‘That’s a load of bollocks. You’ve got to stop living off gossip. What you just said is a paradox. I’m sure the Olyix are heading for the settled worlds, but if they cut the power that’s coming to us from Delta Pavonis and New Washington and all the others, Earth’s city shields will fail.’ His finger pointed up at the devil-sky. ‘And that mothermonster will come crashing down, just like it did last month in Berlin. We’ll all die – which is exactly what they can’t afford. Not after the effort they’ve put in to beating us down.’
‘Berlin’s shield fail didn’t kill everyone.’ Lolo pouted. ‘Just the ones the storm hit when it burst down.’ Sie paused for a second. ‘And the ones who drowned when the river Spree flooded back in.’
‘Thankfully for everyone else, the Olyix flew in real fast and converted them into cocoons, so they got to live on, sort of,’ Ollie scoffed. ‘Lucky them. They get to see what the universe is like at the end of time.’
‘You can be such a downer.’
‘Most like, when the power does get cut from the settled worlds, the Olyix will just starve us out. We’ll walk meekly into the arkship two million by two million.’
‘We wouldn’t! People are better than that.’
‘Face it, if there’s a choice between dying in a tsunami of ruined supercharged toxic atmosphere or taking your chance as a mutated freak cocoon that’s on a trillion-year pilgrimage to meet an alien god, what do you do?’
‘Well, I’m not going to give in. I’m going to make a stand.’
That statement was a wide opening into a world of snark that Ollie wasn’t prepared to enter. Not tonight. ‘And I’ll be standing right there beside you.’
Lolo gave him a happy hug.
The Bellenden Community Centre was a civic hall built eighty years ago on the site of an old school. Its composite panels had been printed to resemble traditional London brick, though that had faded over the decades so they now looked like walls made of a kid’s fraying building blocks. There was a constant stream of people walking through the entrance arch, most of them carrying bags full of cold dishes they’d printed out at home to accompany their hot meal. Nearly half of them were refugees who’d poured into the city when the Olyix started their invasion. Everybody who lived in the countryside or the ribbon towns had come, seeking safety under the shield, boosting the population towards eleven million. They were crammed into old deserted buildings, with few amenities. Communal was how most people lived these days. Ollie didn’t mind; it allowed for plenty of anonymity.
The scent of cooking filled the air as they went up the community centre steps. Inside, the main hall had been laid out like a makeshift cafe that no one had quite got around to regularizing, with a jumble of various tables and chairs taking up most of the floor, and long stainless steel canteen counters along one side. Rations were served from a hatchway that had two light-armoured police standing on either side. You could either choose to have the rations cooked in the centre or take them home. Most people ate in the hall, as electricity was scarce in this part of town. Who had enough kilowatts to heat food every day? Ollie queued up and held out his R-token for the woman inside the hatch. Registering for it had been surprisingly easy. Just after the siege started, he’d stolen Davis Mohan’s identity – one of his old neighbours from Copeland Road. When he and Lolo had begun exploring the nearby houses, they’d found Davis lying on his kitchen floor in an advanced stage of cocooning, his body a barrel of modified organs, limbs almost gone, fading in and out of consciousness. For Ollie, a fake identity was a simple enough task – one he’d done dozens of times before while he
