Chapter 30

Once they were through the perimeter, security was light. ‘Relying on the flies,’ hissed Cassiel, who was once again translucent. ‘Overconfident.’

‘Cormac got that right,’ said Leila. ‘Kneale Pit security’s usually based on the assumption that they can rewrite anyone they want to.’

‘They almost did,’ pointed out the Caretaker.

A minute and they were at the rear of the pyramid. ‘I’ll scout,’ Cassiel told them as she unhooked Leila’s disc from her back and vanished into the darkness. A minute or so and she was back. ‘They’ve opened up the main entrance,’ she reported as she shrugged the disc back on. ‘But there are guards on it. We’re going through Cormac’s back door.’

The pyramid rose away from them, its stone blocks blackened by age, their sharp edges looking slightly melted. Glancing up, Leila felt a strange kind of vertigo.

‘Why’s it so bloody high up?’ asked the Caretaker, looking doubtful.

Leila had asked Cormac the same question. ‘Makes it difficult to spot,’ she told the Caretaker. ‘Stops anyone just finding it and filling it in. And even if someone official does spot it, who’s going to bother going all the way up there just to block it up?’

Cassiel reached up, her arms elongating. Her fingers stretched out as they touched stone, reaching into cracks and holes to secure themselves. ‘Grab my back,’ she told the Caretaker.

‘What? Thought I’d be climbing up next to you.’

‘Too slow.’

Cassiel flowed up the pyramid like a liquid, the Caretaker clinging to her. Some of its blocks were loose, shifting beneath them. The Caretaker swore under his breath when he felt them move, but each time Cassiel found a firm footing and kept moving forwards. Leila, still soft-linked to her, felt a great sense of relief and confidence pulse through the mind. ‘You’re enjoying this,’ she said.

‘At last I can do my work unhindered.’

‘You haven’t fallen off yet, I’ll give you that.’

Leila expected a sharp reply. Instead, Cassiel stopped dead, suddenly throbbing with concentration.

‘Are we there?’ asked the Caretaker.

The mind shushed him. ‘Guard,’ she whispered. ‘Very basic.’ A moment, then: ‘I own it.’ A few more seconds of motion and she pulled them into an opening hacked in the stone, the mouth of a low, narrow passage. Soft light glowed out from within. She set down the Caretaker and Leila’s disc. ‘Wait here,’ she hissed, then was off into the darkness. Barely any time passed and she was back.

‘Where did you go?’ asked Leila as Cassiel shrugged her disc back on.

‘Setting up a distraction. Now, let’s see the guard.’

Leila gasped as it pattered down the passage towards them. It looked melted. One leg was shorter than the other, so it moved with little skipping movements. There were no arms, only stumps. Its torso stopped at its chest. Its skin was pitted with decay. Flies hung within it and buzzed around it. Leila flinched back.

‘The flies can’t see us,’ Cassiel told them. ‘And the guard is too limited to attack or even perceive us without them.’

‘What the fuck?’ asked the Caretaker, deeply shocked. ‘It looks so wrong.’

‘Significantly impaired on all levels. It was exposed to extreme heat. No effort made to repair it. It’s lost all but the most basic sense of itself. Deodatus must see this as a very unlikely entry point, to leave something so basic watching it.’

They squeezed past it and shuffled down the tunnel. It ended in a rectangle of light, its edges broken only by a black ring sticking out of a side wall. ‘For abseiling down into the main chamber,’ commented Leila.

‘Whoa,’ drawled the Caretaker, looking nervous.

Cassiel went to a crawl, the Caretaker following her. They reached the end of the corridor and peered out. It took a moment for their eyes to adjust to the glare. As vision returned they saw that they were looking past a pillar and out into pyramid’s interior.

‘Oh, wow,’ breathed Leila.

The great chamber bustled with activity, and yet all was silent. There were no machine sounds, no whine of engines or chug of power generators, no jack hammer blasts of industrial noise. Instead, there was only a quiet bustle, a strange low collection of grunts and groans and a regular metallic beat.

The space was dominated by a high, slender metal tower, shaped like an upside down test tube and built from a patchwork of metal plates. Spotlights shone up at it, sending jagged shadows leaping across the sloping walls. The tower was about seventy-five metres high and – at the lip that ran round its broad base – fifteen or twenty metres across. Improvised-looking scaffolding nestled around it. Little figures moved along rickety walkways or up and down unsteady ladders. The scaffolding stopped at two high, wide open doors. A bundle of translucent ruby rods peered out at the world. The whole machine had an air of malevolent age. The cracks and joints running across it looked like wrinkles carved into an ancient face. The rods glowed, making Leila think of a single bloodshot eye. The air around it was punctuated with flies. The main entrance to the pyramid was hidden behind it, on the opposite side of the pyramid.

Cassiel zoomed in and Leila followed her gaze. Maybe a dozen or so fallen minds were managing tens of human workers. The minds were clearly in charge. They were far more decayed than any Leila had seen in Docklands, fuzzed blisters and oozing welts burned across them, but they moved with authority, sending their charges bustling up and down the scaffolding and across the pyramid’s dirty floor. At first, they seemed to be entirely autonomous. But then Leila saw that each one would constantly stop to consult plans that were invisible to her, then pull their attention back into the work chamber and nudge their workforces into even greater efficiencies. They were fixed elements of a command structure, passing on an apparently very clearly defined vision.

Leila turned her attention to the humans, a tide of broken humanity become a single construction engine. There was no individuality in their actions – nothing that wasn’t rigid or programmed, no movement that wasn’t precisely calibrated to serve a greater whole. They were components, nothing more. And each one was a scrawny, desiccated ghost of itself.

‘That’s how Dieter and Kedrov ended up,’ said Leila. ‘They look just like sweatheads.’

‘I studied sweatheads,’ said Cassiel. ‘But I never saw a living one.’

‘What is a sweathead?’ asked the Caretaker.

Leila explained. She too had never seen one in the flesh – her weaveware always screened them out. But she’d seen the charity appeals, with their deliberately disturbing footage of broken addicts. She described their tottering yet oddly energetic gait, the way that they’d find tiny, repetitive jobs and work obsessively at them, the slow ruin of their bodies as Sweat, the drug they couldn’t stop taking, ate away at them. They’d been treated almost as badly as pre-Rebirth fetches. Then the Totality had come, taken pity on them and cleaned them off the streets.

‘Maybe the fallen minds diverted some of them to work here,’ suggested Leila. ‘If those guys aren’t just normal people who’ve fallen to Deodatus too.’

‘Oh man. Those poor bastards.’ The Caretaker looked shaken.

And yet the workers were not quite like the sweatheads that Leila remembered. The ones on the streets had never had anything of worth to their name. These people were patched round with fragments of technology, implants and add-ons that from far away looked like jewelled decorations. They replaced missing body parts, ageless components bolted on to exhausted flesh machines. Each worker had a different set of modifications, but they all had one thing in common – downwards-pointing triangles pressed deep into their bellies.

‘Why the triangle?’ asked the Caretaker. ‘Why not a square?’

‘I don’t know,’ replied Leila. ‘Maybe it’s a rank thing. Kedrov and the Pornomancer had those triangles too, and they were pretty much screwed. Holt and the minds all have squares, and they’re in charge. Dieter was killed by one, he’s pretty senior too.’ She turned to Cassiel. ‘And what are they building?’

‘I think it’s a laser,’ Cassiel told them. ‘A basic design, but very powerful. And dangerous.’ She glanced up at the pyramid’s point. It was still intact. ‘They haven’t fired it yet. It’ll take the roof off when they do.’

‘And hit the other side of the Wart,’ Leila said. ‘What’s the point of that?’

‘It won’t just hit it,’ replied Cassiel, her voice grim. ‘It’ll crack the Wart’s skin like an eggshell. And the Wart holds Station together.’

Leila imagined the Wart breaking, Docklands and Homelands drifting apart from each other. Pain shook through her. ‘Why are they even doing this? Won’t they all die too?’

‘I bet all this made sense, once,’ said the Caretaker thoughtfully. ‘I bet there was something out there for the laser to hit.’

‘Dieter thinks he’s going to break the gods and remake Station,’ said Leila.

‘If the laser fires, he’ll do that all right,’ Cassiel replied.

One of the workers on the scaffolding tripped then stumbled. He staggered towards its edge and almost caught himself on one of the barriers. But it wasn’t well secured and it fell. He went with it, tumbling down to hit the floor with a dull thump. Red pooled beneath his broken body. Nobody else registered the death. One worker crossed the spreading pool, leaving a trail of bloody footprints. Another stumbled over the body, nearly dropping her load. She steadied herself and moved on, unmoved.

‘Bastards,’ said the Caretaker. ‘Those fucking bastards.’

‘We’ll shut them down,’ Cassiel told him. ‘Once we find Deodatus, in his Shining City.’ She nodded down at the pyramid floor. ‘Got to get down there.’ In one corner of the room, there were stairs leading to the space below. ‘But there’s one more thing to see first. The flies are sharing their own version of the weave. Full local overlay. I’m patching us into it.’

‘Are you sure they won’t see us and zap us again?’ worried Leila.

‘No.’ Cassiel was absolutely confident. ‘We’re strictly passive. Just receiving a signal. They won’t even see us.’

The room shimmered and changed. For a moment, Leila lost all sight of it. Then vision returned, and with it emotions that leapt between surprise, fear and awe. They chased through Leila’s consciousness, for a moment overwhelming her. She remembered the gods looking down on her – vast brand icons, hanging in the sky. But there had always been six of them. The Pantheon always communicated a sense of choice, even if it was a limited one. The face that hung before her now, looking down from the apex of the pyramid, offered nothing but itself, on its own terms, for ever.

The eyes were cold blue jewels, wrapped around with gold bands. Each band was studded with multi-coloured crystals. White and green and red flared out, bright points in the two sunken sockets. The skin was a pale mesh, material that looked as if it had once been white but was now yellow. A bone pushed it out between and below the eyes, implying a nose. A flower-shaped diadem of red, green and white jewels, held together by another gold band, covered the space where the nostrils would have been. Sharp cheekbones cast dark shadows, hiding the hinge where the jawbone connected with the skull.

The mesh covered the mouth. There were no lips, just a series of small arches where yellow bone became white teeth. Its forehead was wreathed with golden leaves. A barbed halo of jagged gold spikes leapt up behind them, running all the way round the back of the head. The neck was invisible – there was just a glimmer of gold and red in the darkness beneath the sharp, protruding chin. Two shoulders, wrapped in gold brocade and studded with jewels, spiked jaggedly up. The image faded out beneath them. Leila imagined a rib cage, skeletal arms and hands, a waist and leg wrapped in more rich, dense, highly decorated clothing. It was all the wealth and power that had ever died in the past, alive and incarnate in the present.

‘Fucking hell,’ breathed Leila. ‘It’s like the richest sweathead you’ve ever seen.’

‘Deodatus…’ whispered the Caretaker.

‘It has to be,’ agreed Cassiel. ‘Didn’t Cormac think he might be a mind? The first one taken by the pit? That creature definitely started as a human.’ She almost sounded relieved.

Leila stared up at it. ‘Doesn’t look very human anymore.’ She turned to the Caretaker. ‘Bringing anything back?’

‘No,’ replied the Caretaker. ‘Which to be honest, I’m quite glad about. I don’t want to have that in my head.’ He shuddered visibly. ‘Poor guy. Looks like he’s been dead for a thousand years.’ He looked around the rest of the room. ‘I can’t fault his design skills, though.’

The rest of the room was transformed. The laser was now a thing of beauty, a brilliant, minimalist sculpture of ruby and white-painted metal. The rickety scaffolding was a labyrinth of gleaming poles, pale pine walkways and carefully enclosed ladders and stairways. The rough stonework of the walls had been bleached pale, giving it a subtle, clean, post-industrial elegance. A sunburst of colour-coded paths radiated out from the laser, guiding workers to equipment and supply stacks at the edges of the open space. The white floor gleamed. Taken together, it all implied a simple, perfect, unquestionable rightness.

‘It looks just like the Shining City,’ said Leila.

‘This is a suburb,’ replied Cassiel. ‘A little further down and we’ll be at its heart.’

The fallen minds had changed too. The flies were invisible. Each of them presented as a pressure man, a different version of the past overseeing a potentially radical transformation of the present. The workers toiled on as before. They had become more perfect versions of themselves. Faces shone with blank geometries of beauty. All wore pastel linens, draped around them to reveal the perfect proportions of their bodies. Replacement body parts became pale, minimalist sculptures, their beautiful practicality shining with a seamless blend of utility and wealth. They moved effortlessly through their workspace, blending together into a shining dance of tasked fulfilment. Leila looked round for the dead one, curious to see how he’d been remade. He was invisible, blanked out by the weave.

‘They look just like the sleepers in the Shining City,’ she observed.

‘They are identical,’ replied Cassiel. ‘Do you think Dieter woke them?’

‘I suppose he must have done,’ said Leila. ‘This must be his army.’ She paused for a moment, puzzled. ‘But all this – it looks like it’s been going on for a long time. And he’s only had Kedrov and the Pornomancer’s weaveselves for a couple of days.’

‘You can ask him about it when you find him,’ Cassiel replied briskly. ‘Right now, we have to keep moving.’ She pointed towards the sloping passage that led down to the room below. ‘That’s our next stop.’

‘It’s a long way down,’ said the Caretaker. ‘How do we get there?’

‘Simple,’ replied Cassiel. ‘First, we turn off the local weave. We need to see the truth of things again…’ Deodatus and his false paradise vanished. Once again, they were looking out over fly-blown corruption. ‘Then we wait for a few seconds.’

‘What for?’ asked Leila.

‘You’ll see.’ Cassiel reached an arm towards the Caretaker, pulling him close against her.

‘What the fuck?’ he complained. ‘Cassiel, I can’t move!’ Then her hand covered his mouth and he couldn’t speak either.

A low boom echoed down from high above them. Every fallen mind stopped, their corrupted heads turned up towards it. A moment’s silence, then there was a series of increasingly loud crashes, pounding out from the opposite side of the pyramid. One final crunching thump, then a cloud of dust rose up from somewhere behind the laser. As one, the minds ran, vanishing behind it. The flies swarmed with them. The workers carried on as before, completely oblivious.

‘What is that?’ asked Leila.

‘My distraction,’ replied Cassiel. She held up a hand. ‘Nanogel holds a lot of energy. I left a little of myself behind some loose blocks. Sent a detonate command, and boom! We’ve got an avalanche. Now, get ready to move fast.’

Leila only had time to say ‘What…’ before Cassiel reached up, grabbed the iron ring with her free hand, and pushed them all out of the passage and into empty space.

They plummeted towards the ground. Leila screamed. There was muffled howling from the Caretaker. Then, instant deceleration, and Cassiel was landing on two feet, the Caretaker staggering next to her, a long thin strand of nanogel falling back into her shoulder and becoming her arm again. ‘Run,’ she ordered and they hurtled towards the passageway, Cassiel half pulling, half supporting the Caretaker.

‘Someone’ll see us!’ gasped Leila.

They passed a worker. It didn’t register them. ‘Nobody’s looking,’ replied Cassiel. Then the ground sloped, then they were halfway down the passageway, the Caretaker spluttering, Cassiel sprinting with sure-footed confidence.

‘What about the guards?’

‘Checking out the avalanche.’ They burst out into the lower room. Leila had a brief impression of more spotlights and a circle of dark rectangles. Cassiel pulled them through a door and into a smaller store room. The Caretaker bent over, gasping. Leila turned to Cassiel.

‘And just how are we going to get out again?’

‘They’ll sweep the exterior, find no one there. Take them ten minutes or so. Then they’ll run an internal search. Just to be sure. But that’s enough time for us to break that.’ She nodded back out into the main room. ‘And if Redonda’s right, that’ll shut them all down.’

‘I hope my past is worth it,’ puffed the Caretaker as he pulled himself back together. ‘All this just to find out I’m some vacant old bore would really piss me off.’

They looked back out at the main room. It was empty but for a circle of twelve vast, rectangular servers, lit by more tripod-mounted spotlights. The units were equally spaced, forming a round henge. Age had written itself across their casings, pitting and corroding them. The spotlights forced shadows across them. Leila thought of the broken skin of the pyramid. The trilithons looked as old, if not older.

‘The tunnel’s been cleared,’ noted Cassiel. ‘The fallen minds must have found the servers down there, bought them out and started them up.’

All were active. Lights flickered across each one. A low, steady hum poured out of them, reminding Leila of the soft drone of fly swarms.

‘They must hold the Shining City,’ said Leila. ‘Dieter’s in there.’

‘And once we’ve shut them down, that’s it. The corruption wiped out. Deodatus and the fallen minds neutralised. Victory.’

‘I’m going in before you turn them off,’ said Leila firmly. ‘I’ll find Dieter and get him out.’

‘You’re sure you’ll be able to persuade him to come with you?’

Leila squeezed the pendant. ‘I’ve got his true past ready to push back into him. That’s all I need.’

‘I’m going in there too,’ added the Caretaker.

‘Are you sure?’ Cassiel asked. ‘Much easier if you don’t.’

‘Dude,’ replied the Caretaker. ‘She’s got to find her brother. And I’ve got to find myself.’

Cassiel sighed. ‘OK. I’ll give you five minutes. Then I’m cutting the power cables and shutting it down. I’ll stay out here and keep an eye on things. Any trouble beforehand, I’ll warn you. And you’ll need to crash out of there as quickly as you can. Now, let’s take a proper look at it…’

The room shifted before them as she bought the weave back up. Floor, ceilings and walls shimmered into whiteness, becoming a perfect vision of white marble. The servers vanished. In their place was a small, round temple, simple pillars supporting a perfectly proportioned dome. It gleamed whitely. Leila was reminded of a particular persistent advert for dental treatment that had done the rounds a couple of years back, of the way it reduced happiness to a pure, shining smile. The temple radiated the same reduced perfection, implying a world so simply perfect that nothing could ever go wrong.

‘We’ll soon crack that,’ Leila said. She called the cuttlefish into being. It shot over to hover in front of the temple. She felt a sudden, deep affection for it. It had come from her brother, passed through one of his closest friends and now lived within her. It was almost family. It squirted information back at her. ‘Same security as the pit that Ambrose and I fell down. We’ll be in there in seconds.’

‘Get ready,’ Cassiel told the Caretaker. ‘Leave your body in the store room.’ The Caretaker moved into its far corner and sat down. ‘See you in there,’ he called out to Leila, then closed his eyes. His head tipped forward as his weave systems reached out, winding up to create a virtual version of him and write it into the Shining City. A moment, and it appeared. ‘Good to go,’ he said. He waved his hand around a little. ‘I quite like being a ghost.’

The cuttlefish pinged Leila. ‘We’re in,’ she said, then, to the Caretaker: ‘Let’s go.’

‘Five minutes,’ warned Cassiel as they approached the temple. Leila set an internal timer going. The Caretaker peered at his watch.

As they approached it, they saw that the view beyond it had changed. The other side of the white room was no longer visible. Instead, there was a dark sky, scudded over with white clouds. Long, low buildings shone down a wide empty avenue, curving away to the right. A tower climbed up and out of sight. The landscape stretched far into the distance, mausoleum pale. There were sleepers too, dark masses scattered across the streets.

‘So let’s go,’ said Leila. She squeezed the pendant one last time for good luck, then stepped into the Shining City.