Mellanie’s virtual hands brushed several icons and she began scanning the scene with her eyes, retinal inserts on maximum resolution, sending the image back directly to the Michelangelo studio in Hollywood. She murmured a few accompanying, patronizing comments about desperation and the flotsam of war. Disdain came easy now; proximity to Alessandra had seen to that.
A text message popped up in her virtual vision. GOOD STUFF. ALREADY! KNEW I WAS RIGHT ABOUT YOU. REMEMBER, TAKE CARE WHEN YOU GET THERE. LOVE MA.
Michelangelo had been surprised when she pitched the Far Away trip to him during their private interview. He thought she was trying to prove something. Normally, interns would just have to go to bed with him to earn their probation contract; in that respect he had an even greater appetite than Alessandra. Mellanie had suggested the assignment after they’d finished fucking and she’d already got the job. It’d thrown him slightly, but he smiled and said he liked her style.
He had quite a lot of style of his own. Thanks to Dudley, who was a triumph of quantity over quality, she’d almost forgotten what truly hot sex could be like. He could also be funny. She’d laughed out loud a couple of times at the stories he told. When she did that she realized laughter was something that never happened when she was with Dudley—nor ever would, she thought. Most of the subsequent train journey back to Oaktier had been spent fantasizing what else she’d have to do in that large bed of his to earn a permanent contract.
“Is that the office?” Dudley asked.
“Huh.” Mellanie shook off the reverie that the text message had kindled. Dudley was pointing to a small clump of boxlike prefab buildings adjoining the terminal, each of which had tour company signs above their doors.
“Yeah. We want Grand Triad Adventures. They said someone would be waiting for us.” Her semiorganic coat had birthed a hood that she pulled over her hair to protect it from the rain. The boots she wore were practical rather than stylish, probably the kind of thing a Randtown local would possess. To match that, she’d chosen a pair of olive-green jeans from her own collection, and a black sweatshirt of semiorganic fur fiber that was wonderfully soft against her skin. Dudley had just put on his usual nonlabel pants and a cheap shirt and jacket. She’d given up trying to dress him properly.
They splashed their way through the puddles to the rank of tour operators. Grand Triad Adventures was easy enough to find. It was the only office with a light on.
The deputy assistant manager of tour bookings, Niall Swalt, was sitting behind the reception desk, absorbed by some bizarre game show on the portal. Rock music thundered out across the deserted office as female figures dived in and out of vats filled with oily fluid. When the door opened, he lunged to his feet, the bright figures and the music shrinking away.
“Ms. Rescorai, a pleasure.” Niall came around the desk, eager to greet her. “I’m a real big fan of yours. I still access Murderous Seduction once a month at least.” He was wearing one of Mellanie’s old promotional sweatshirts, with a hologram of her face in the middle of his chest. It had been washed so many times the image flickered badly through its smile cycle, drizzling green and red interference specks.
“Always delighted to meet a fan.” She made herself smile neutrally as he grabbed hold of her hand. He had cheap OCtattoos on his fingers and arms that her own sophisticated inserts analyzed instantly on contact. The thin green lines were capable of delivering crude sensory impulses to his nervous system; to Mellanie he briefly appeared as a glowing arabesque wire sculpture, with the densest entanglement concentrated around his groin. “And you can still see,” she remarked dryly.
“Oh, yes, it’s a fantastic story. And it’s all real.” He was grinning profusely as he stared at her; the heat in his cheeks highlighted his pimples. “You are sensational in it. You feel gorgeous.”
“Thank you.” Mellanie didn’t risk glancing at Dudley, who was ominously quiet beside her. “That’s very sweet.”
“Do you mind if I ask you about the hunting lodge night? Did that happen for real?”
“Yes, yes it did, that was quite a night.”
Dudley’s face had frozen, with every muscle rigid. Only the color spreading across his cheeks revealed he was even alive.
“Wow!” Niall whistled admiringly. “And the time Morton took you to the Falkirk restaurant. Why didn’t you sue the security people?”
“Who would have benefited? And let’s face it, we shouldn’t have been in the ladies’ washroom together. It was a bit naughty of us; but the singer was very beautiful. Who could resist?”
“Right. Yeah. I’ve noticed some mistakes, too.”
“Really?”
“The party on Resal’s yacht: when you go on board you’re wearing black silk panties, but when you leave they’re gold satin.”
“Gosh, I never knew. I’ll have to have a word with the continuity people about that.”
“The other thing was Paula Myo. I checked the actual court files from the trial; according to the Directorate case notes the Investigator did research Oaktier’s organized crime groups. But Murderous Seduction showed her completely dismissing the possibility that Shaheef was killed by a third party.”
“We were emphasizing the point. Myo didn’t do a thorough job.” Mellanie’s face had become as inflexible as Dudley’s; for the first time she actually had to consider that automatic response. What if Myo had investigated properly? What if Morty… She flexed her shoulders, annoyed with herself for doubting.
Emboldened by how easy it was to talk to his idol, Niall gave a shy grin and asked, “Are your breasts really that firm, or did they edit the tactile stream to make them feel like that?”
“Hey!” Dudley snarled.
Niall gave him a puzzled frown.
Mellanie put a hand on her devoted fan’s arm. “Niall, our train was late, we routed through StLincoln before we got to Wessex, so we’re worried we might have missed the connection.”
“Oh, no,” Niall said earnestly. “Everything’s ready for you.”
“Great. This is all our luggage.” She pointed to the two cases that had rolled in behind them. “Where do we go now?”
“The company has a car. Uh, I’m afraid you’ve got to be cleared by the Far Away freight inspectorate division before you go through the wormhole. It’s a new thing, they’ve only just started doing that. They make sure you haven’t got any weapons or illegal stuff.”
“Sounds like a good idea.”
The car was a Mercedes limousine; all it did was drive them eight kilometers across the station yard to a nearly empty warehouse. Several scanning systems had been set up inside the yawning building, one of them an archway large enough for an entire freight train to pass through it. A couple of very bored police officials were reviewing shadowy images of crates on a big portal. They ordered Mellanie’s luggage to roll through a small scanner hoop.
“There were a lot of people waiting to leave outside the station,” Mellanie said to Niall as their bags went through. “How difficult is it going to be for us to get on a train once we get back from Far Away?”
It was as if she’d issued the young man a personal challenge. He straightened himself up to compose his features into what he considered a reassuring expression. “Grand Triad Adventures guarantees the safe transport of all its customers on both sides of the gateway. We take responsibility for your holiday as soon as you arrive on Boongate, and that doesn’t finish until you leave. Mr. Spanton, the manager, he left me in charge when he took off for Verona with his family. I shall be here to make sure you get your allocated seats.”
“Thank you, Niall.”
“All part of the service.”
“Don’t you want to leave?”
“Sometimes I think maybe I do. But this is my home. Where would I go? The Commonwealth isn’t going to abandon us. There’s a lot of new defense equipment coming in. I know that for a fact. I work here at the station. I see things. Everyone in the crowd out there, they’re just frightened stupid rich people. I’m not like that. I’m staying.”
“Good for you.”
After the luggage check, the Mercedes took them over to the small tour-embarkation building, which had its own platform along one side. Mellanie saw an MLV22 electric engine hitched to a single carriage waiting under the short composite panel canopy. There were three other people in the suiting room: Trevelyan Halgarth and Ferelith Alwon, a pair of physicists on their way to the Marie CelesteResearch Institute, and Griffith Applegate, a bureaucrat in the Governor’s office. Griffith confided that he was one of eight staff that were coming back on rotation—he was the only one who’d shown up. Trevelyan and Ferelith were pleasant enough, but Mellanie worried they were both Starflyer agents, and went for a polite but aloof approach when they tried to talk to her.
The suit Mellanie had to wear to compensate for Half Way’s atmosphere was a baggy mauve overall with its own heating web and a metal ring collar. Its array interfaced with her e-butler, and as soon as she’d settled the ring on her shoulders a rubbery semiorganic membrane slithered out from inside the rim to form a seal around her neck. A transparent bubble helmet clipped neatly onto the ring and locked tight. Her e-butler ran a quick check on the rebreather module and threw up a row of green icons in her virtual vision. She took the helmet off again, and carried it under her arm.
Niall led them down a corridor to the train, where a steward was waiting outside the open carriage door. “I’ll see you in about a week,” Mellanie told him. She let Dudley carry on through into the carriage, then gave Niall a quick impish kiss on the cheek. “They’re real,” she whispered and hurried off. Her last image of him was an astonished, happy smile on his gaunt face.
The inside of the carriage looked similar to all the rest of the standard-class furnishings in CST’s fleet. It was only the airlock doorways at both ends that made it different. As soon as the five passengers were sitting down the outer door closed, sealed, and the train began to roll forward.
Rain splattered down across the window as soon as they left the platform behind. Nothing else was moving across the station yard. Even the big cargo depots were quiet and unused.
Red light began to seep in through the carriage windows as they approached the Half Way gateway. Then Mellanie felt the tingle of the pressure curtain. It might have been her imagination, but she thought it was stronger than usual.
As soon as they were through, the rainwater that had smeared itself across every window in the carriage immediately turned to ice and fluoresced a strong crimson. She pressed her face against the triple glazed glass, peering through the frost pattern. The landscape outside was a desert of naked rock, stained a dark carmine by the M-class star. A coral-pink sky rose from a distant jagged horizon, phasing to a deep scarlet directly overhead. There were no clouds, not even the gentlest of hazes to mar the uniformity of the heavens above Half Way; the atmosphere was incredibly clear. Powerful blue-white flashes were going off constantly, an almost monotonous rhythm cutting through the red sunlight. No matter where Mellanie looked, she couldn’t see any lightning bolts; nor was there any thunder.
The journey from the gateway was short. On one side of the track, the rock began to dip down to reveal Half Way’s last remaining sea, a flat calm surface of slate-gray water. They were traveling toward a deep V-shaped inlet, whose sharp cliff walls extended back over a kilometer from the main shoreline. On any other
