Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [42]
3Boss and her krewe had been discontinued, violently. The network had reacted with more aggression than anticipated. It would be up to Mariko to instigate containment procedures. One of the shoji in the room of her mind was marked with an eye - intelligence assets. Behind it she could sense gathering flux but the door remained closed.
Mariko picked up another walnut and flicked it at 2Boss who was snoring amongst a pile of bodies. The nut completed a perfect arc and bounced off his nose. He caught it before it hit the floor.
'Hey, 2Boss,' Mariko yelled across the cavern, 'we're short six razvedka. Pop out and get some more will you?'
Mitsubishi (Triton Central)
'I could murder a gumbo,' said Kadiatu, but the arcade off Walkman Square was wall-to-wall tampopo bars. There were a lot of people mooching in the arcade, passengers mostly, stranded by the sudden termination of the Pluto-bound train. Ronin under contract to the local zaibatsu were posted at the intersections to keep an eye on the crowd. Kadiatu watched as a couple of old white women were gently turned away from the staging gate to the suburban lines. Despite thirty years of civil-rights legislation Mitsubishi was still Sol's most segregated metropolis. Some of the suburbs wouldn't even take Koreans.
'There must be an alternative route,' said the Doctor, studying an STS map on the side of a Jade Tea stand.
All the trains were terminating one stop short of Pluto due to unspecified 'incidents' at Lowell Depot. Worse than that, alighting passengers were being herded off the platforms into Walkman Square.
'There's always an alternative,' muttered Kadiatu.
The Doctor turned and smiled at her. 'Absolutely,' he said.
The map's polychromatic surface was pristine; even the touch icons were unmarked by fingerprints. The map's default setting was of the interworld routes and some of the major feeder lines. Kadiatu touched Triton Central first, then Lowell Depot, and then a stylized icon of an arrow.
The map rippled as it rescaled. Triton Central in the lower third, Lowell Depot in the upper. Commuter lines appeared in a starburst pattern around Yamaha, Dentsu and Nagorno-Karabakh - Pluto's three other main cities. The Central Line link between Triton and Lowell pulsed red - the suggested optimum route.
'The map hasn't updated yet,' said Kadiatu.
'Is that unusual?' asked the Doctor.
'You get data lags at the peripheries,' said Kadiatu, 'but this is a major information nexus.'
'It's confused,' said the Doctor. 'The trains are running all right it's just that we're not on them. Is there another route?'
Kadiatu glanced at the map. There were no obvious connections. The only other InterWorld line that came this far outsystem was Outreach and that terminated at Nagorno-Karabakh. There were no obvious feeder or commuter routes between the Pluto and Triton local networks. There was a trick to this, Kadiatu knew; you let the map go out of focus and thought about what pretty patterns all those coloured lines made.
It was an article of faith amongst the undergraduates in the engineering department that the most efficient way to navigate the transit system was stoned out of your box.
'There,' she said touching the map, 'this feeder's connected to the branch line and the branch line's connected to the transverse line ...'
'And the legbone's connected to the thighbone,' said the Doctor.
'Which will put us on Pluto ninety-five,' said Kadiatu.
The Doctor wanted to go immediately but Kadiatu forced him to wait while she sniffed out a snack bar that sold something other than bean sprouts and exquisite slivers of pork. It turned out to be the inevitable Kwik-Kurry franchise tucked in between a branch of Bodyshop and a stall that sold suspicious-looking lingerie. From it she bought half a kilo of fufu wrapped in heat-resistant paper, and a medium-sized tub