Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [85]
Might not mean anything, but suddenly everything had meaning – in a wash of good old communist paranoia: comrades, this is no accident – and Moh started walking, fast, in a direction he at first thought was random.
‘What’s going on?’ Jordan asked, loping beside him, Janis jogging to keep up. Moh stopped, throwing them both off-balance.
‘Jordan, time to split. You nip back in, help old Bernstein pack up. He has places to dive into around here. Hole up with him until it’s over, then take the monorail back to our place. Start a search for Cat: you’ll pick up the trace on the house phone; go from there and keep an eye on the net. Try to contact the ANR. I’ll call you later.’
‘Until what’s over?’
Jordan was puzzled; the situation was just beginning to dawn on Janis. Moh, fighting a surge of impatience, had to remind himself that neither of them was exactly streetwise.
‘Don’t know,’ he said. ‘Not staying to find out. You see the cops coming in? Just a show of strength maybe but with all those kids—’
He heard the crash of the first bottle.
‘Knew it,’ he said. ‘Balls for brains, these guys. Move it. You got two minutes before this place is a—’
Something burst over the wall where they’d just been sitting. Long strands of sticky stuff drifted down on to a couple of reckless Neos, who instantly began a predictably counterproductive effort to swipe it away.
Kohn tugged Janis’s arm and they both started to run. The last he saw of Jordan, when he glanced back a second or two later, the youth was standing, still dumbfounded, waving and moving backwards as if on a station platform: goodbye, goodbye.
Clutching her sunhat and backpack, Janis followed Moh as best she could as he hurried through an obscure exit from the shopping centre into a tiled tunnel lit with flickering fluorescent tubes and smelling of urine and disinfectant. Eventually they came out in a more open foyer where a man in a peaked cap and dark uniform stood by a robust barrier. There were posters – yellowing now, but once heartily colourful – on the walls; between them, damp paint bubbled and flaked. Another uniformed man looked out impassively from behind a pane of wired glass. Moh went over and pushed a few low-denomination coins through a space under the pane. After half a minute’s deliberation, the man pushed a couple of tickets back the other way.
Moh handed Janis a ticket and walked in front of her, putting the ticket in a slot on the barrier. With a wheezing, sucking sound the barrier – a pair of padded jaws at hip-level – opened and Moh stepped through. Not half a second passed before the jaws thunked shut again, emitting a momentary groan as if cheated of their prey. Moh turned and snatched the ticket as the machine ejected it.
Janis went through with her eyes shut, then down some broken concrete steps covered with plastic shopping-bags and empty cans and dry leaves and out on to a broken concrete platform. There the litter had apparently metamorphosed into its adult form: overturned bins, shopping trolleys and the remains of small trees. From the edge of the platform railway tracks could be seen for a few tens of metres in either direction; beyond that, they vanished among weeds. But they were at least shiny, not rusty.
‘What is this place?’ Janis asked.
Moh looked at her. ‘It’s the Underground,’ he said.
‘The Tube? Is it still running?’
‘Occasionally,’ Moh said, looking anxiously up and down the track. ‘Main thing is, the Kingdom cops won’t come here, not without a lot of hassle. We’ve crossed a border.’
‘Into what?’ A second look along the platform revealed about a dozen people, most of them very old,