Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [251]
‘Run!’
They’re both still so dizzy that dodging and weaving, and falling and rolling, come quite naturally. Within a second or two they’re among the now screaming pedestrians in the plaza, though not yet out of the cone of fire from the tower-top.
Things are still going around and around. Ax is slamming into people, but continuing a pinball progress across the plaza. Dee fights her spinning senses into stability and sprints straight for an entrance-way that has an overhang. She reaches its welcome shadow and looks back. Ax, to her utter horror, has got into a fight. Three girls in secretarial gear are swiping at his head and kicking at his shins, while he butts at their midriffs and stamps at their feet and pummels their thighs.
Dee dives out of cover with a banshee howl and grabs a fistful of long blonde hair. She yanks the girl’s head back, reaches into the melée with her other hand and drags Ax by the collar until he’s behind her. Then with a sweep of both arms she shoves the girls together into a heap and catches up with Ax, who has very wisely chosen to run for the same overhang.
She stares down at Ax’s flushed dark face.
‘Run!’ she says.
‘Where?’
‘After me!’
Maps are dancing in front of her eyes. Soldier pages through the head-up and marks a route, hallucinating signposts in front of her. She runs along the steps of the building, around a corner, through a car-park, and over a railing into a noisome alleyway. Puddles splash underfoot. Ax pants along behind her.
The virtual arrowheads are pointing at a door in the wall. Dee rattles its knob. Locked. She fumbles her pistol out but Ax stays her hand. He grins at her and spins on the ball of one foot, kicking hard at the door with the other. It bangs open, showing a flight of steps. The map’s arrows glow on the steps like the footprints left by some gigantic radioactive bird coming the other way. Dee glances to left and right. At the car-park end, a head dodges swiftly back.
Dee fires a shot at the corner the head has gone behind, hopeful that a flying splinter or two might discourage further peeping, and goes down the steps. Ax treads on her trailing cloak a couple of times. She tugs it up indignantly.
At the foot of twenty-five concrete steps they emerge into a huge basement area with just enough clearance for Dee’s head. Dim-lit by organic noctilucence, it resembles an underground car-park, although there aren’t enough vehicles in this area to justify such a use. Instead it’s heaped with old machinery, coils of piping, and – to Dee’s amazement – obvious modular components of spacecraft. She knows that the city’s towers were partly grown from parts of the original Ship, but this confirmation is almost shocking. It’s like she’s arrived at the very pit of her world. From here, there’s no way down.
She hears movement at the top of the steps, and turns and sends another bullet back. It spangs and ricochets in the stairwell, most satisfactorily. Then she runs. Her instincts, and the guidance arrows, are leading her in the same direction: across the basement, towards the smell of water.
They can’t run in a straight line. Their flight weaves in and out between crates and hunks of hardware whose space-junk-pitted sides are stencilled with warnings and instructions and markings – Dee notices ‘Space Merchants, Karaganda’ and ‘Project Jove’ and part of her mind has time to marvel at these antiquities. Behind her and Ax, among echoes of sound and the screech of electromagnetic interference, she detects pursuit. More than one person, moving with swift deliberation.
There’s a line of light ahead at floor-level. The arrows that her guidance software is patching to her sight end there, flashing. (Like she wouldn’t notice.) As she runs up she pings the control-systems