‘Life will stabilize,’ Nigel said. ‘Just hang on.’

She pressed her teeth together and stared resolutely ahead. The convoy made its way past vandalized statues and dried-up fountains that used to make the long boulevard so striking.

Militia stood guard round the massive palace. They saluted Coulan and opened the gates in the railings. The carts clattered swiftly over the expanse of cobbles outside, and through one of the impressive archways into a courtyard. A second archway at the back, with sturdy iron gates, led into a smaller, inner courtyard overlooked by the Captain’s private quarters.

‘We found some interesting stuff that the drones missed,’ Coulan said as they made their way down a wide staircase into the vaults below the palace.

‘Like what?’ Kysandra asked.

Coulan grinned. ‘Ship’s fusion chamber, so they had power after the landing – for a while, anyway. Three regrav units from the Vermillion. Someone tried modifying them – by the looks of things, without success. There’s also a smartcore that’s linked to some synthesizer nodes. Their molecular grids are all shot, so they must have worked for a long time. And right beneath the private apartments is an old clinic with some medical modules, which are all depleted. I’d say the Captain’s family had access to Commonwealth medicine after they landed here.’

‘How long?’ Nigel asked.

‘I think we’re looking at several centuries. The modules are badly worn. They cannibalized some to keep others working. The last one is a real patchwork. I wouldn’t have liked to use it at the end.’

‘And then there were none,’ Nigel muttered.

‘Yeah. But our most interesting find is the gateways.’

‘What do you mean: gateways?’ Kysandra challenged. Her educational memory inserts contained a huge file on Commonwealth gateways, but surely he couldn’t mean . . . ‘Not wormhole gateways?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ Coulan said happily. ‘The very same.’

‘Show me,’ Nigel said gruffly.

They had to go down three more flights of stairs before they came to the storage cellar. Kysandra could see why they’d descended so far when they walked through the door made of thick anbor planks. The cellar was huge, with a ribbed semi-circular roof thirty metres high at the apex. It was filled with five hulking cylinders whose tops nearly scraped the ribs. They looked as if they’d been wrapped in a dark-gloss spiderweb that clung tightly to the surface; the top half was covered by a heavy dust layer that killed the dull sheen. When her ex-sight probed through the wrapping, she could perceive they were giant machines. Not that they had any moving parts – they weren’t mechanical – but the incredibly complex components were locked together as tight as cells in living tissue.

‘I did not expect to find these here,’ Nigel admitted ruefully.

‘We should have done,’ Coulan said. ‘Standard equipment on colony ships. After all, who wants to transport raw material or people long distances when you reach your new world? Gateways help keep your population centres and manufacturing sites tied together. Best way of establishing a monoculture.’

Nigel smiled fondly at the dark inert cylinders. ‘I wonder if they’ve got any floaters?’

‘And they are?’ Kysandra asked somewhat peevishly. They’d risked everything to gain unrestricted access to the palace, now these two were taking a moment to have a nostalgiafest. Her tolerance was wearing thin.

‘Gateways you drop into a gas giant’s atmosphere. They float along the top of the gas/liquid boundary, siphoning out every kind of hydrocarbon compound you could ever need. An infinite resource.’

‘Is that relevant?’

Nigel reached up and patted the first gateway. ‘This is what I built, Kysandra – me and Ozzie. This is what made the Commonwealth possible.’ He pursed his lips in regret. ‘I don’t suppose we can use one to reach up to the Forest?’

‘They all have direct mass converters as a power source, which are glitchy at best in the Void,’ Coulan said. ‘But this is the original protective wrap. I’m guessing Captain Cornelius tried powering one up when they arrived. If it’d worked, they’d be using them instead of trains to link Bienvenido’s cities.’

‘So they kept them wrapped up and stored them down here. Makes sense. Damn. That would have been a real help.’ He regarded the big dark cylinders forlornly. ‘Looks like I’m going to be a rocket jockey after all. Wilson Kime will laugh his ass off when he hears about this. Come on, let’s get what we came for.’

*

It had always surprised Yannrith how many cab drivers were cell members. Their trade was wealthy people, and the revolution was busy frightening them out of town. Of course, a lot of cabs were also out of town right now, busy taking those same rich people to country estates or to the refuge of family in distant cities, for which they’d no doubt charge exorbitant fees. But those who remained were happy enough to run activists all over town to help the cause. Bethaneve kept them on a rota.

A more cynical side of his mind suspected it was to secure their position afterwards. Cab licences in Varlan were notoriously unobtainable; the only way to get one these days was to inherit it. The Varlan Cab Driver Guild could have taught Slvasta’s union a thing or two about restrictive practices and demarcation.

The cab turned out of Pointas Street onto Walton Boulevard. The statue of Captain Gootwai which had guarded the junction for centuries had been decapitated, and a pumpkin squashed onto the broken neck. Yannrith didn’t much care for the lawlessness that was gripping the city. He liked order in his life. Slvasta had already asked him to command whatever police force they assembled out of the remaining sheriffs and selected grade three activists. It would be a tough job, getting those two groups to work together afterwards.

‘Think of it as the perfect example of how we have to rebuild our lives afterwards,’ Slvasta had said. ‘Reconciliation has to start somewhere.’

Yannrith was scheduled to meet the surviving sheriff station captains that afternoon, to find out just how practical that was likely to be – that’s if any of them agreed to turn up in the first place. But right now he was more concerned about the shocking split between Javier and Slvasta. It had taken everyone by surprise, blowing up out of nowhere. He was convinced it was down to exhaustion and the unrelenting stress of the last few days. As reconciliations went, that one was pretty vital to all of them. Even Slvasta seemed to recognize that. Now.

Which was why Yannrith was on his way to the palace, to talk to Coulan, who was the calm sensible one, the one to negotiate a truce. Unfortunately, Coulan wasn’t responding to any ’paths right now, so Uracus alone knew what his game was. Maybe he was rushing to support his lover in a coup against Slvasta. Coulan always was an expert in subtle, intricate strategies.

Paranoia. Probably . . . The only way to find out was to confront him directly. Which Slvasta couldn’t do, because that would be a sign of weakness, and he had to build alliances with the People’s Interim Congress delegates who supported him.

It fell to Yannrith, then, to act as the go-between in this feud (because Bethaneve was furious with both of them). That suited him fine because he also wanted to know first-hand how the search for the Captain’s daughter was going. Once the whole of the Captain’s family was in custody, Slvasta could really start to apply pressure – like making the sheriff captains turn up this afternoon. Although nobody actually wanted to start executing any more members of the Captain’s family, not now. Aothori had to go, everyone knew that, but the kids . . . That would lose them a great deal of support.

Who could have guessed a revolution’s internal politics would turn out to be so insanely complicated?


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