The Abyss Beyond Dreams Read online

  Some borough voting forms were in short supply.

  Officials never turned up to open voting stations.

  Four Democratic Unity candidates were arrested on charges ranging from tax evasion to assault, making their candidacies invalid.

  It was another unremarkable election day on Bienvenido.

  Despite everything the establishment threw at them, Democratic Unity’s vote held solid in their strongholds of the more deprived boroughs. Slvasta, who arrived at Langley’s council hall at five o’clock in the afternoon for the count, was ’pathed reports from party officials right across the city. Turn-out had been good. Interference was about what they expected. By eight o’clock, results were starting to come in. With a third of the thirty-three borough councils in the city up for election, five of them were shaping up to be Democratic Unity boroughs, with another three predicted to have no one party with an overall majority, and Citizens’ Dawn claiming the remaining three (the richest boroughs). For them it was a disaster.

  Five National Council seats in or around the capital were also being contested, along with a hundred more across the continent. In Langley, it was obvious from the moment the first sealed voting sacks were opened who was going to win. Tuksbury hadn’t even been seen in public since the day Hilltop Eye published his tax records. Thanks to quiet surveillance by cell members, Slvasta knew he was holed up at his family estate just outside Varlan.

  By eleven o’clock Slvasta had been confirmed as the new National Council representative for Langley. He gave a short thank-you speech (written by Coulan and Bethaneve) to his delighted supporters. By midnight the results for the Varlan boroughs were verified. Democratic Unity had won five outright, one more was theirs thanks to a coalition agreement with three independent councillors, Citizens’ Dawn had four, and one was left without a majority party.

  ‘Seven councils, counting Nalani,’ Slvasta said as he walked home with Bethaneve, Javier and Coulan. ‘That’s amazing. Really, it is.’ The dark streets had a lot of pedestrians and cabs for the time of night, all of them going home after the count. High overhead, Andricea’s mod-bird kept level with them, its superb eyesight vigilant for trouble. Yannrith himself was barely a hundred metres away, and carrying two pistols. There were other party members close by, ready to rush in at a single ’pathed alert.

  Javier had insisted on the precautions.

  ‘You’ll have to resign from Nalani tomorrow morning,’ Coulan said. ‘You can’t sit on two councils.’

  ‘You’re the only Democratic Unity candidate to get a National Council seat,’ Javier said; he sounded regretful.

  ‘Bapek gave them a good run for their money in Denbridge,’ Bethaneve said. ‘Thirty-two per cent.’

  ‘Denbridge is over the river,’ Javier said. ‘Large middle- and working-class population. Shame we couldn’t win it.’

  ‘We didn’t win Langley,’ Slvasta said. ‘We were given it, remember?’

  ‘Yeah, and are they ever going to regret that,’ Bethaneve said happily. ‘They think that’s a bribe to keep us in line. Well, even if they survi—’

  A wide corona of bright orange light flared across the southern skyline, silhouetting the rooftops and chimney stacks. They saw the flickering haze of a fireball ascending at the centre of it, wreathed in churning black smoke. Seconds later, the sound of the explosion rolled across them.

  ‘Uracus!’ Javier snapped. ‘What was that?’

  ‘It’s down near the quayside, I think,’ Coulan said. ‘Eastwards, too. There are some companies around there that deal in yalseed oil. Big barrels.’

  ‘Crud,’ Slvasta grunted. ‘Did we order that?’

  ‘No,’ Bethaneve said. ‘And I don’t like the timing.’

  *

  It took two days to get the warehouse fires under control, and the city authorities were lucky it rained on the second night. Smoke hung over Varlan for another day as the ruined buildings three streets above the quayside smouldered. Exploding barrels had thrown flaming yalseed oil a long distance, and the volunteer fire crews were scared to venture too close for fear of more barrels detonating.

  Eventually, when all that was left was a circular area of blackened walls and piles of rubble, hospital staff and fire officers started to pick their way through the tangled debris, ex-sight probing the stone and charred wood and smashed slates, hunting for bodies.

  Twenty-three business premises were destroyed. Fortunately, given it was a commercial district, and late at night, fatalities were minimal. Only eight people were known to have died. But it was another blow against the city’s economy, with insurance companies hit hard. Everyone’s premiums would be going up.

  *

  Kysandra was deep into the farm’s accounts when Russell rode into the compound. His arrival gave her an excuse for her u-shadow to fold the spreadcube files away and free up her exovision. When they’d started planning the revolution, she’d been so enthusiastic and excited, never thinking she’d spend hours – days, weeks – having to manage the basic finances of the enterprise. But as she’d swiftly learned, shoving a government aside wasn’t cheap.

  ‘Our insurrection doesn’t even have to work,’ Nigel had said. ‘Not permanently. We just need time to get in and out of the palace. All we really need for that is anarchy.’

  ‘It should work,’ she objected. ‘Otherwise we’ve let down so many people.’

  ‘You can’t afford to think like that. The radicals who make up the movement are just another set of tools to help us complete the job. Nothing more.’

  ‘But . . . they have to believe that their lives will change for the better to commit to the cause. You’re asking them to risk everything they have.’

  ‘And that risk will be repaid a thousand-fold. Not by replacing one set of useless, corrupt leaders with another, but by liberating them from the Void. You have to learn to see the big picture, Kysandra. No more small-town thinking, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’ But it was difficult. People, real people, were going to get hurt. She just had to keep telling herself it was all worthwhile, because: this was destiny they were working to achieve.

  Russell jumped off his horse as his teekay fastened the reins to the paddock fencing. ‘Slvasta won the Langley election,’ his ’path shout informed the compound. ‘Democratic Unity is now a legitimate opposition party.’ He waved a couple of Varlan’s gazettes above his head. ‘It’s official.’

  Kysandra hurried out of the house and met him on the veranda. ‘Let me see,’ she said, and took one of the gazettes. It was a large edition, printed yesterday, she noticed – fast delivery to Adeone. She kept her shell hard so she didn’t reveal the swirl of disappointment that came from reading the results. Only Slvasta got elected to the National Council? We put candidates up in five constituencies. And just six new boroughs with Democratic Unity in the majority? In her heart she’d been hoping for so much more. Some public validation from the people they were about to set free.

  ‘I’ll go and show Nigel,’ she said with a cheery smile. ‘You go in and ask Victorea for some lunch; she’ll make you up some sandwiches.’

  Russell touched the brim of his hat respectfully. ‘Thank you.’

  Kysandra set off across the compound. It was barely recognizable now. So much had changed, so many buildings added. There were over thirty barns and storehouses, some of them vast, with iron I-beams supporting the wide span of their roofs. Eight of them were used purely for the farm, housing the mod-apes, horses and dwarfs needed to tend the crops and herds of terrestrial beasts that now covered almost the whole valley. The two timber mills were as busy as always. And the bulky steam engines thrummed away at the side of the engineering shops. Labourers and the dominated used two long barns as dormitories, dividing them up into snug but comfortable private rooms, with communal washrooms at one end. The three that housed the weapons factories were quiet now, their machines idle. Enough guns and ammunition had been manufactured and sent to the various radical groups they’d established,
with the majority delivered to the capital. The mod-dwarfs that had worked on the production lines were now sitting in their stalls, doing nothing but eating and sleeping.

  But it was the launch project she admired the most. Four long sheds lined with racks of ge-spider cages, spinning out vast quantities of drosilk. Nigel had introduced that particular variant to Bienvenido, of course; but not directly. Marek had travelled halfway up the Aflar peninsula to Gretz before teaching the adaption to a small family-run neut stable. That way it wouldn’t be yet another innovation emerging from Blair Farm. After some experimentation, Nigel had found that to produce the best drosilk, ge-spiders should eat leaves from the deassu bush. If everyone else was breeding ge-spiders and producing drosilk for the clothing industry, there would be nothing odd about Blair Farm buying deassu leaves in considerable bulk.

  After the ge-spider sheds was the booster bunker, which had been dug deep into the soil. Here the drosilk was wound carefully and precisely onto a long iron cylinder (precision milled, which had taken months) and sprayed with resin before being cured in a huge kiln. There were nineteen layers in all, each of which needed to be flawless. Only when sensors linked to the Skylady had confirmed that the last layer was unspoiled did the cylinder get taken out of the tube. Despite their very best monitoring and quality control, they only managed to get one perfect cylinder for every three attempts. Finished cylinders were wheeled into the second half of the booster bunker, behind thick iron and concrete wedge-shaped doors so heavy that they needed a set of train wheels to roll across the chamber on their own tracks.

  That was where the process was finished, filling the cylinders with propellant, turning them into giant solid rocket motors. She could still remember the first test firing, with the booster standing vertical, its exhaust nozzle pointing up into the sky. Even standing a kilometre away, the roar of sound was like a solid force as it punched across her. The fire plume was incandescent, searing purple after-images across her retinas for minutes, while the smoke jet soared ever higher into the clear sky, reaching for the clouds above. It was as if the universe had somehow cracked open, allowing a gale of elemental forces to howl through the gap.

  Afterwards, staring in astonishment at the still-smouldering booster casing while her overloaded senses began to calm, she said simply: ‘You cannot sit on top of that. You just can’t.’

  ‘They’re perfectly safe,’ Nigel said contentedly. ‘People flew into space on chemical rockets for decades before Ozzie and I put a stop to it.’

  ‘No! Just . . . no!’

  But of course there was no choice. So the production of the solid rocket boosters went ahead, despite her fears. Nigel had chosen an ammonium nitrate-based fuel, which was one of the easiest to make – especially given the production method they had discovered. Again it was all about keeping a low profile; he didn’t want to add chemical refineries to the farm compound as well as everything else. Fortunately, the Fallers had given them an unexpected alternative in their slave species.

  Kysandra walked past the booster bunker and along the rows of mod-pig silos. Out of the whole project, these animals were her biggest headache. They had to be fed a very specific diet of substances which their weird secondary digestive tract broke down and rearranged into faeces pellets that were the fuel used by the boosters. She had to track down suppliers right across the continent, seeking out merchants who dealt in powdered aluminium, hydrochloric acid, sodium, liquid rubber and a dozen types of nitrate-based fertilizers. Then she had to arrange to have them shipped to Blair Farm, but not in quantities that would arouse interest. She and Valeri set up dozens of small businesses in towns along the continent’s main train lines, where labels could be swapped and the compounds forwarded in different containers. Then, when they did get here, they had to be mixed in just the right proportions before being fed to the mod-pigs.

  The testing shed was two hundred metres past the silos, perched on the riverbank. She plodded over to it, through the shadow cast by the big iron crane of the launch framework. The squat gantries that would support the Skylady and her booster rocket assembly when they were ready to send her soaring back into space had been completed several weeks ago. Five red-painted iron scaffold pillars curved upwards in shallow arcs over a big circular pool filled with river water, to merge into a bracelet-shaped cradle where the crane would hoist the starship. Right now, it was a strange empty construction, as if it had outlasted a building it had once contained.

  There were filter masks hanging up under the testing shed porch. Apparently exposure to perchlorates could cause thyroid problems in humans. Kysandra put one on before going in. The interior was simple enough, with a broad bench running along one side, filled with the kind of glassware that told anyone they were in a chemical lab. Nigel and Fergus were standing over a jar of greenish fluid, where a couple of thumb-sized fuel pellets were fizzing like bad beer.

  ‘Slvasta won,’ she announced.

  ‘Yes,’ Nigel’s voice was muffled by the mask. ‘We sensed Russell. Most of the county did.’

  ‘That means it’s going to happen!’

  ‘Yes.’ He still hadn’t looked up from the sensor module that was scanning the jar and its dissolving pig faeces. ‘That’s up to standard,’ he said to Fergus. ‘Load the booster.’

  ‘Slowly and carefully,’ Fergus retorted.

  Nigel abandoned the bench and put his arm round Kysandra, walking with her out of the test shed. ‘Sorry,’ he said when he’d taken the mask off. ‘Some things just have to be done correctly. I’d hate to wind up sitting on top of a bad batch.’

  She nodded earnestly. ‘I understand.’

  ‘Those pigs are pretty unpredictable.’

  ‘We get the feed mix right every time.’

  ‘I know, but I doubt the Fallers ever had this in mind when they designed the neuts.’

  It had been the final revelation they’d extracted from the Proval-Faller’s memory. Neuts were their perfect domestic slave race, biological machines created for one reason – to serve the Fallers. Capable of being moulded into dozens of sub-species, from animals that could perform most kinds of physical labour to immobile organ clumps whose enzymes turned them into simple chemical refineries, neuts eliminated the need for an overly mechanized civilization. You just had to know how to format the embryo. That was the second part of the puzzle.

  When they assumed human form, the Fallers had thick bundles of additional nerves stretching down their arms to a small wart-like protuberance on the back of the wrist. It allowed a direct synaptic interface to a corresponding patch of nerve receptors at the back of a neut’s head. All mods had an identical patch, through which instructions could be channelled. It was a discovery which had delighted Nigel. ‘So that’s how they operated outside the Void,’ he’d muttered as the Skylady displayed the information through their exovision. ‘Paula will be happy about that.’

  It had taken the Skylady a while to work out the sequence, but eventually they got the mod-pig embryo correct. So the fat creatures lay in their stalls, with stumpy legs that were little more than wedges to keep them upright, and a body containing bio-reactor organs that could crap out pure rocket fuel. They didn’t live long; the toxicity of the compounds they ate saw to that. But they had enough of them in the silos, and with regular births to replace the dead, the supply of pellets matched production of the booster casings. There was only one booster left to fill now, and they’d have a cluster that could send Skylady racing over ninety kilometres high. But it would be a ballistic trajectory; her speed would fall far short of orbital velocity. Achieving that still depended on the starship’s degraded ingrav drive providing the final impetus. Nigel swore the figures checked out, and he’d make it to the Forest.

  ‘Will the last booster be finished in time?’ she asked as they made their way back to the farmhouse.

  ‘It takes ten days to load the propellant and catalyse the final binding, so yes. Phase one isn’t scheduled for another month. That’ll give us plenty
of time for the final stack assembly.’

  She turned to look back at the launch framework. ‘What if the weapons are no good?’

  ‘Come on, Coulan has had drones in there examining them for eighteen months. Their integrity hasn’t been compromised. They’re simply powered down.’

  ‘They’re three thousand years old, Nigel.’

  ‘Irrelevant. Their warheads are solid state. All the ancillary components are fragile, granted. We’ll have to refurbish and replace quite a bit, but they’ll function just fine. Stop worrying. You’ll make me jittery, and that’s no good at all.’

  His arm went round her shoulder, holding her close. She’d noticed him becoming gradually more tactile over the last year or so.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, pouring out insincerity.

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘But I do have a question.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I was going through the accounts. Who’s James Hilton? We’ve been paying him an awful lot of money recently.’

  ‘Ah. Actually, James Hilton was a novelist back on Earth, pre-Commonwealth era.’

  ‘So why are we paying him a small fortune?’

  ‘He’s only really known for one book, Lost Horizon; it featured an imaginary valley called Shangri-La, which was sheltered from the rest of the world. I thought that an appropriate name.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘A refuge, in case anything goes wrong.’

  ‘What can go wrong?’

  ‘Ah, now there you are. That’s exactly why I was keeping it quiet. If you start having doubts, you always panic.’

  ‘I do not!’

  ‘Then why are you worried?’

  ‘I’m not worried. I’m curious, that’s all.’

  ‘So now you know. If anything happens, there’s a place where you, me and the ANAdroids can go and regroup.’