The Abyss Beyond Dreams Read online

  Slaughtering every mod they encountered would be easy. A quick spike of teekay into the brain or heart would kill the defenceless animal instantly. But that would be noticed, and the authorities put on the alert, so they were going for a more indirect approach. A small pinch of teekay in the right place in a female neut’s ovaries and the creature was barren for life. After a few weeks, the city’s supply of new mods would dry up, and all those jobs they were intended for would have to be done by humans instead.

  Of course, new neuts could be bought and brought in from other towns and cities, but that would take time. By then, Slvasta was hoping the movement would have built enough momentum to cause a lot of problems for the adaptor stables everywhere.

  It took twenty minutes for Slvasta to sterilize all the female neuts in the barn. He and Javier crept out of the stable unseen, and fixed the door back into place behind them.

  *

  The Great North-Western train company had built Plessey station in Varlan’s Narewith district, the terminus to a main line that ran almost three thousand miles north, crossing the equator to reach to New Angeles at the tip of the Aflar peninsula. Its goods yard sat behind the grandiose passenger terminal, with row after row of sheds whose steep roofs stood on iron pillars covering the slender loading bay platforms. Every day, hundreds of goods trains brought raw materials into the capital and dispatched manufactured goods out across the north-west. The money which flowed through the station on a daily basis formed a goodly portion of the city’s overall economy. Many people relied on it for their jobs.

  Slvasta and Javier drove their carts into the goods yard at just after half past four, merging into the usual procession of carts belonging to various stallholders. They already knew something was wrong before they passed the tall stone gateposts. The aether was bubbling with disgruntled ’path comments suffused with emotion.

  There were a lot of carts pulled up in the loading bays which ran along one side of platform 8D, which handled the meat trains. Big yalseed oil lamps hung from the rafters, shining a meagre yellow light down on the men milling along the narrow platform, but Slvasta couldn’t see the trains. Just about every platform was empty.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked Javier.

  The big man just shrugged. There were no station officials anywhere, though Slvasta could sense the engineering crews in their shops, radiating disgruntled and in some cases nervous thoughts. He scanned a little deeper, trying to identify individuals whose resentment burnt hotter than the others. By now he recognized most of the night-shift station workers.

  ‘Check it out, I think we might have three,’ he told Javier, his thoughts indicating the specific people hunkered down in the engineering shops. They avoided recruiting anyone from the Wellfield these days. Bethaneve said a concentration of activists in the same place would be suspicious if the Captain’s police ever stumbled onto those cells.

  Wherever they went now they were on the lookout for the resentful and sullen among the city’s residents. When a possible emerged, a day later that chosen one would receive a quick private ’path from someone they didn’t know, asking them if they’d like to actually do something about the focus of their ire. Responses were graded against a chart Bethaneve had drawn up. ‘To see if we’ve got a talker or a doer,’ she said as she supervised their growing network of activist cells. Some of their best assets were cells of one – a person broadly known as a political activist (criminal record preferred) who would happily take an order to cause a little physical havoc.

  Testing Bethaneve’s pyramid of cells had so far resulted in water being temporarily cut off to certain streets (in one case for two days), allowing them to gauge the efficiency and preparedness of the repair teams. That information, along with their growing map of the city’s main water pipe network, would allow them to cut off water to nine individual districts through just seven small acts of sabotage, throwing the proverbial spanner in the ageing, rickety pump mechanisms of substations.

  ‘Good. Tag them for Bethaneve,’ Javier replied. His own ex-sight and intuition wasn’t as developed as Slvasta’s. He gestured around at the throng of unhappy stallholders waiting for the overnight meat train. ‘This doesn’t look good.’ He ’pathed Vladja, another Wellfield stallholder, waiting in a bay further down platform 8D.

  ‘There’s been no goods train come in since midnight,’ Vladja told them.

  ‘What about passenger trains?’ Javier asked.

  ‘Some, but only from the local stations.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Nobody knows, but it’s got to be some kind of major accident somewhere up the line.’

  Finally, a station official had appeared at the end of platform 8D; a young man in an assistant platform manager’s uniform, surrounded by a big scrum of stallholders. He looked terrified and his superiors had clearly sent him out with the purpose of saying one thing: we don’t know when the trains are coming.

  ‘Come on,’ Javier said. ‘This is pointless.’ He jumped back into the cart and picked up the reins. Slvasta followed him out of the goods yard. As they passed through the gates, his ex-sight showed him two more stallholder carts leaving.

  *

  Wellfield market had been on its current site, barely a mile from Plessey station, for over two thousand years. It had been completely rebuilt seven times, the last being two hundred and eleven years ago, though there had been many refurbishments since. This latest version covered six acres under a series of long curving glass-and-slate roofs that could easily be mistaken for one of the capital’s railway stations. Heavy iron girders supported the roof; every five years they had their rust scraped off so they could be given a fresh coat of red and green paint to protect against the humidity; some claimed it was just the paint layers holding it all together these days. Most of the sides were open, allowing a breeze to carry through, cleaning out the damp clingy smell of butchered meat. Over a hundred wholesale merchants had Guild permits to operate in Wellfield, supplying meat to the trade across the capital city.

  After a month working there, Slvasta was completely immune to the smell and sight of raw meat in the form of freshly slaughtered carcasses. They left the carts in the stables with Pabel. Javier started scanning round with his ex-sight. ‘We need to buy stock, quickly,’ he said. ‘Most stalls have some in reserve. Once they all hear there’s no train, they’ll cling to it like gold.’

  He started to hail people, using a confident, slightly amused tone to wheedle a carcass out of them. Never more than one per stall, for fear of arousing suspicion. Slvasta, Pabel and Ervin hurried around the market with barrows, collecting the meat. Their good fortune came to a halt about thirty minutes later. Slvasta was hanging up a salted pig carcass in the cool brick-lined store when Javier came in sighing.

  ‘Game’s up,’ the big man announced. ‘Great North-Western have just announced their main line service is suspended for today, and possibly tomorrow as well. Every stall is hanging on to what it’s got now.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘There’s something wrong with the bridge over the Josi. That’s about four hundred miles north of Varlan. It’s a big river, merges with the Colbal just outside the city.’

  ‘There must be other bridges,’ Slvasta said.

  ‘Not for the main line. There are plenty of branch lines out in the counties. So I suppose they can divert trains round onto the south-west main line, but nothing like the regular traffic. This is really going to bugger things up for a day or two.’ He looked round the store, which had a dozen carcasses hanging up. ‘We should have enough for today and some of tomorrow’s orders. After that . . .’

  They set to with cleavers, preparing the orders. A lot of people started to arrive in the Wellfield as the news of the trains spread across the waking city. Surprisingly, Coughlin was one of them, turning up a little after six.

  ‘I haven’t let anyone down in a century,’ the old man said, looking round the market in distress. ‘Time was when we’d
always keep four days’ worth of meat in the store, but the damn accountants put a stop to that. Dead money, they said. It should be in the bank accruing interest. Damn them all to Uracus.’

  ‘We can supply our regulars tomorrow,’ Javier said.

  ‘Yes, yes, you did well there, my boy,’ Coughlin said. ‘But now we have to take care of the days after that. I want you to accompany me. We’ll take a local train to Chelverton; it’s only about an hour outside Varlan on the local line, which – thank Giu – is still running. There’s an abattoir there we buy from.’

  ‘I remember the invoices, sir,’ Javier said.

  ‘Yes, indeed. They’re expensive, but beggars can’t be choosers. We’ll go there and buy a week’s worth of carcasses. It can be delivered by cart if that’s what has to be done, and Uracus damn the cost. If we sell it at a loss, so be it. But I will not allow my good name to be tarnished by this wretched railway. My reputation is all I have left.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘And you, er . . .’

  ‘Slvasta, sir.’

  ‘Slvasta, yes, yes, of course. Are you capable of looking after the stall until I get back?’

  ‘I can do that, sir, don’t you worry.’

  ‘Good man. Thank you. Come now, Javier, we’ll get over to the bank first, and take out some sovereigns, eh? People will always take good hard coins over a cheque any day of the week.’

  ‘That they do, sir,’ Javier winked at Slvasta as he untied his apron.

  *

  In the middle of the afternoon, Great North-Western announced it would take a day to bring in replacement track to repair the warped rails on the Josi bridge, then a further day or possibly two to get the trains back on schedule.

  ‘It’s caused chaos,’ Bethaneve said that evening. As always, after they’d had their supper, they sat and discussed strategy.

  ‘Chaos, yes,’ Coulan said. ‘But no hardship outside the merchant classes. Who cares about those Fallerloving bastards?’

  ‘There’s a knock-on effect,’ she said earnestly. ‘If the merchant’s business suffers, you can bet he’ll pass the pain down to his workforce.’

  ‘And customers,’ Slvasta pointed out.

  ‘But one of the main train lines goes down for a couple of days, and . . .’ She nodded her head in admiration. ‘It causes a lot more financial damage than knocking out the water.’

  ‘There are four main trans-continental lines into Varlan,’ Javier said. ‘They all have bridges, a lot of bridges. Bridges can fail.’

  ‘You’re saying we should sabotage the rail lines?’ Slvasta asked.

  ‘Uracus, yes! It would be much more effective.’

  ‘But obvious,’ Coulan said. ‘We could hardly blame the woe that brings on the Captain. It would be us hurting people.’

  ‘Only if we do it continually,’ Bethaneve said. ‘We could maybe shut down the rail lines as the final twist of the knife.’

  ‘Makes sense,’ Slvasta conceded.

  ‘I’ll get some level elevens to look at possible bridges,’ she said. ‘There are enough of them.’

  ‘Level eleven,’ Javier mused. ‘Recruitment is going well, then? How many do we have?’

  ‘We’re recruiting for level fifteen now,’ she said. ‘But I’m not using a pyramid structure any more.’ Her mind showed them a complex geometric structure mimicking some kind of crystal. ‘The inter-cell connectivity is difficult to crack, and I’ve started arranging loops which we can initiate but then they just feed back on the cell we imparted that initial instruction to, so there’s no way the Captain’s police can ever intercept us.’

  Slvasta tried to get his head around the concept of passing instructions round the cells with loops and cut-offs, and realized he was never going to be the mathematician Bethaneve was. Giu, but I’m lucky to have her.

  ‘Good,’ Javier grunted. ‘But, back to the merchant classes. How is making their lives more difficult going to benefit the cause?’

  ‘Hurting them financially weakens them and reduces their power over the workers they exploit. The point is that individual ownership of the method of production – or its distribution – is stealing from those who work to produce goods,’ Bethaneve said. ‘It results in an uneven distribution of wealth, which ultimately ends up in the unfair society we have today.’

  Slvasta and Javier exchanged a glance. There was no arguing with her when she was in this frame of mind. ‘Where do you get this stuff from?’ Slvasta asked.

  Bethaneve raised an eyebrow. ‘Books. I read books. I can read, you know.’

  ‘Oh. Yes, of course. Sorry. I should maybe start reading some of those myself.’

  ‘Coulan tracked down some useful ones for me.’

  ‘I found some very old political texts in the university library when I was working as an archivist there,’ Coulan said. ‘I can probably get you some of them.’

  ‘You used to work as an archivist?’ Slvasta asked. Now he thought about it, he knew very little of Coulan’s background. Just about all he did know was that the man worked for the Ministry of Industry, regulating chemical companies.

  ‘While I was a student, yes. They say the vaults under the university library are almost as big as those under the palace where the Captain’s ship is entombed. There are thousands of books and journals in there, and most of them are falling to pieces they’re so old. Looking after them helped bring a few coins in during the holidays.’

  Which must have been when he and Bethaneve were together, Slvasta realized – so don’t go there.

  ‘That could be very useful,’ Javier said. ‘We need to offer people a practical alternative to the government we have now, not just tear it all down. That would give us legitimacy.’

  ‘Form an opposition party, you mean?’ Coulan asked. ‘Risky.’

  ‘As opposed to what we’re doing now?’ Slvasta said.

  ‘People have to know there is something concrete to challenge the Captain,’ Javier said, ‘something that they can rely on and trust. Not Citizens’ Dawn, that’s never going to stand against the Captain, it’s just an extension of the aristos’ power. It’s got to be a new political party, one that supports the poor and the workers.’

  ‘Aren’t we a bit early for that?’ Slvasta said.

  ‘Not for the groundwork,’ Bethaneve said. ‘If we’re legitimately established before the Captain’s police realize we’re a problem, it’ll be a lot harder for them to dislodge us.’

  ‘Start small?’ Coulan suggested.

  ‘A borough council,’ Slvasta said.

  ‘That could work. Borough councils are almost powerless. Nobody cares about them. But it would give us a solid foundation to build on.’

  ‘One problem,’ Javier said. ‘We need to win an election.’

  ‘Preparation solves that one,’ Coulan said. ‘Never fight a battle until after you’ve won it. We have to be sure that if our party stands, then all the candidates will get elected.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘We need to have a pre-existing power base.’

  ‘Not the cells,’ Bethaneve said quickly.

  ‘No. What I’m talking about is an alternative political organization, one that’s mutually beneficial to a democratic party. I’m thinking maybe Slvasta and Javier could start a union in Wellfield. There hasn’t been one for two centuries. Not since the weekend payment accord was signed by the guild. Then the union could sponsor candidates for the borough elections.’

  ‘That doesn’t give us much time,’ Bethaneve said. ‘The borough elections are only five months away.’

  ‘Mod shortages should be noticeable by then,’ Javier said, ‘and this train bridge problem is an excellent starting point. Everybody in Wellfield is going to work harder to get round the problem. Half the stall owners did the same as Coughlin and I today, and visited abattoirs outside the city to secure meat for tomorrow. Do you think anyone is going to be paid extra for all that overtime?’

  As always at these discussions, Slvast
a was annoyed with himself for not seeing the obvious until after someone else had voiced it. How come I’m always so far behind with ideas? ‘That’s excellent,’ he said. ‘We can use it to stir dissatisfaction.’

  ‘You mustn’t be the leaders,’ Bethaneve said. ‘Not at this early stage. There are three cell members working in the Wellfield. We’ll instruct them to start the union. You can be staunch supporters.’

  ‘Puppeteers,’ Slvasta said contemptuously.

  ‘Just like the Captain,’ Bethaneve shot back. ‘He protects himself from any criticism with layer after layer of scapegoats. Starting with Arnice. Well, that’s what we’re going to do with you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you. You’re the perfect figurehead for this revolution. A regiment officer, a genuine hero who’s been out there on the front line slogging through the wilderness to scan for Falls. You’ve encountered Fallers, and escaped. And you rejected the Captain and the regiments because you know they haven’t got the interests of the people at heart – just themselves. And you’re not an aristocrat or from the merchant class; you’re an honest working man who will be a true representative of the people. People can sense that decency in you; I did the second you walked into my office. They’ll believe in you. You’re our secret weapon, Slvasta. You’re going to be this world’s first democratically elected president.’

  2

  It was a big day. Auspicious, even. The Watcher Guild had seen Skylords approaching ten days ago, and predicted their arrival accurately. A lot of people in Varlan were talking about the coincidence that they’d arrive on the exact centenary of Jasmine Avenue. A couple of pamphlets actually used the word: omen.