The Gone-Away World (45 page)

“What the fuck are you all staring at? Is it your first dance? Bring back my company! Get in your suits, get in your trucks and
let's do this thing
!” And somehow that plugged us all back into ourselves, and we dived for our hazmat moonsuits and hit the trucks at speed and were gone in a rattle and a roar. I glanced in the mirror as we pulled out. Pestle was nowhere. The standard-issue guys were gone. Harrisburg was a ghost again, but just maybe, in the high window of a building by the gate, there was the shadow of a silverback.

I drove and Gonzo slept. Jim had chosen the southern route, and Bone Briskett's convoy moved us swiftly but cautiously along well-kept roads. No one wanted to risk a smash with ten makeshift FOX bombs in close proximity.

I wondered about Templeton, and whether it was possible what people said: that the vanishings were the
new
people, the Found Thousand showing their real face. I wondered about Zaher Bey—a most unlikely bogeyman—but I'd never been in his bad books. Only on his good side. If it was true; if the Bey was leading an army of vengeful horrors, then there was another war coming, and I would fight. Or maybe it was already here. Maybe the Found Thousand were just striking back. Who knew what we'd been doing, on the quiet and in the dark? Men of Gonzo's old profession slinking out beyond our fences to strike the enemy before they had the chance to become a threat.

I just couldn't see the Bey as a monster.

I wondered if that was because he was my friend, or had been.

I wondered that for three hours, and then Gonzo woke up to take his turn at the wheel. I stared at the unfamiliar ceiling of our new truck and wished for our old one, and worried some more until the sound of the road under us made me drowsy, and the little corner of the moon I could see through the window disappeared behind some clouds. I dozed, and in the patches of wakefulness when Gonzo braked a little harder or the wind played a higher note around the sheer edges of the cab, I thought about fire.

T
HE MIRACLE OF FIRE
is that it dies. It is a chemical and sometimes an atomic reaction, the collapse and recombination of things at their most fundamental level. Without it, we could not exist, and yet if it persisted past the point where it wanes, nothing would survive. Thus, the saving grace of fire is that it has limits and can be extinguished.

At least, very small fires can be. Others, one must simply outlive. We are so proud of our mastery of the element; we unleashed the broken atom in 1945 and thought ourselves quite significant, but a bad forest fire will release in ten minutes all the energy which consumed Hiroshima, and produce heat four hundred times greater than our most sophisticated firefighting units can control. Fire was our first magic and our first science, and we have harnessed it hardly at all.

Like an empire, fire must expand. It consumes the land it stands on, so it cannot rest. Thus it can be contained in two dimensions, though not reliably in three. A firebreak of pre-emptively burned ground will cage a blaze, and eventually, if the job is done well, it will fade and expire like a lonely bear. Also, flames need oxygen and enough ambient heat to sustain ignition. This is the fireman's triad: drive away the air for long enough, cool the fuel and abate the heat and your job is done. And thus our plan: the blast from our explosives would kill the flames themselves, blow away the oxygen and then draw in cold air from all sides. The reaction would consume much of the fuel, so that—we believed—the whole process could not begin again. This was less like conventional firefighting than it was surgery.

I wondered how it would look, this FOX fire, and how it would smell. I asked myself how hot it would be, how long we would be able to operate, even in our suits. I wondered whether that heat would stop the bombs from working, or set them off too soon. I thought of a towering plume, a great, white jet roaring like a geyser from the ground, fed by barrels and buildings, sucking in more air and spreading, flashing over into stands of trees. I thought about blackened grass and smoking soil, and the layered nature of fire: first, the clear gases which are not yet burning, which roost below the flame; then the thin bright line above it where those gases catch; and finally the incandescent cone which reaches up and out, orange or white or green, depending on all the badness in the mix.

And then I realised I was not dreaming. I was simply looking, staring, through the glass at the thing itself.

Station 9 was a circle of buildings like a hill fort, and once upon a time they'd been all sleek and
we're-in-control,
towers and domes and cylinders. Now, though, they were the stamen of a thick, manypetalled flower, grey and magnesium-white and blazing. Even this far out, I could feel the heat through the windscreen. The temperature around the main storage area was reaching levels it really didn't oughta, and the whole thing would shortly melt, tear and sluice down into itself. Little leaves of dirty fire were twisting away into the sky. If those leaves carried to the Border—and the wind was coming up, blowing that way even now—then we'd have failed, and more than failed.

Half a mile from Station 9 there was a broad circle of road, a turning place, with a patch of smoking grass in the middle. Bone Briskett stopped off to one side with his tank pointed at the fire as if he wanted to shoot it. We lined up the trucks in a row, facing the enemy. Five target zones on the edge of the blaze; ten primary trucks, each with a bomb and paired so that one could go wrong and the pattern wouldn't be upset; and ten more trucks in support, filled with lifting gear, decon chambers and medical bays and additional moonsuits. The suits are good for five hundred degrees—for a while, anyway—but the radios don't work in heat like that for very long, and the days of GPS came to an end on the first day of the Go Away War. There were triangulation towers around Station 9 which would tell us where we were, but they needed line of sight to be reliable and we wouldn't have it, so we'd memorised where we had to be. Every single one of us can work from a map with nothing more than a memory and the ground beneath his feet, or hers. This is what we do. We stared at the fire and waited for the word.

All around us, Bone Briskett's soldiers waited too, in suits of their own, most likely wishing for a stand-up fight over this, any day. Humbert Pestle had decreed that we should have our escort all the way to the edge of hell.
No harm in being safe,
he'd said, and
it only takes a few people to save the world, but it never hurts to have some guys on hand to carry them out afterwards.
You couldn't argue with him; he just smiled and did what he did, and you felt better for knowing he was there. I looked at the soldiers closest to me and wondered if they'd lied about their ages to enlist.

The growl of the engines was too quiet to hear over the noise of the fire.

“Hoods,” said Jim Hepsobah over the radio, and we checked our masks and suit seals.

“Locations,” Jim said, and we sounded off where we were going.

“Deploy in two minutes. Time to detonation, twelve hundred seconds from the go,” Sally Culpepper said. And we waited.

Twelve hundred seconds. Three hundred to enter and reach the target area. Six hundred to set and secure the bomb. Three hundred to get out again and reach safe distance. No radio detonators because they might be triggered by interference on the site. I checked my suit again. It was big and ungainly and made of impermeable fabric and some kind of metallic sheath. It had a coolant layer, and when you switched it on it filled with air. You could stand in a gas cloud and puncture the suit, and the air would flow out rather than in for long enough to keep you alive. No one had ever tried it with Stuff, because no one wanted to be the first.

“One minute,” Sally Culpepper said.

Gonzo looked at me and grinned through his faceplate. We were going through the middle with Jim and Sally, setting the bomb closest to the blaze. The most dangerous, the most important.

Gonzo's favourite thing. And then at some point Sally Culpepper said “Go” because everyone surged forward at once.

We ploughed in. Bone Briskett charged his tank through the main gates, and they
spanged
and
popped
and his tracks crushed them, bent them flat. Tobemory Trent and Annie the Ox went off to one side, and Samuel P. and Brightwater Fisk spun off to the other. Gonzo and I and Jim and Sally (first in, last out, no matter where and what) rolled over the busted gates, and our tyres chewed them apart, because they were heated up and soft, and we headed for our target. We were going inside the secondary depot of Station 9, just this side of the main holding area, which was currently holding the flames like a crucible—but not for long. We roared the trucks right in across the executive parking lot and the yellow and black tarmac which said access only, and then through the red trapezium reading restricted, and the paint on the bonnet started to blister. Then we crashed through the corrugated doors and into the depot, and it was like coming in out of the sun. The depot was filled with vapours and heat shimmer, but it wasn't as hot as outside. Two loads of Bone Briskett's men hurtled in after us and spread out to the sides.

Jim Hepsobah half swung, half jack-knifed his truck in a slewing turn which brought his bomb as close as could be to the X (there was no actual X) and stopped, leaving a trail of rubber on the floor and saving us twenty seconds. We stepped out into a hot, bad place. Bone's boys, looking like wasps in their armoured military suits, went out around us in a circle, like anyone would be crazy enough to attack us now, while we were doing this. They had big, special-manufacture guns which would work in these conditions, flanged and water-cooled and stacked with ammunition which would kill a man but leave a FOX tank unharmed. Probably.

Off to one side there was a row of black boxes, man-high and bound up in a tangle of hoses.
FOX generator, back-up, one.
Nothing to say how it worked. No magic wands or fairies flitting around it, no choirs of angels. If anything, it was sinister, like a row of six coffins linked together for a mass embalming. No lights on: good. If the thing isn't running, there's no danger of it feeding the blaze. We can just blow it away. One problem the less, and high time we caught a break.

The ground was thrumming. The whole structure was vibrating with the sheer power of what was going on on the other side of the wall. Twenty feet to the crucible. Seven feet through the crucible to the flames and the more-than-flames. Thirty feet from the most destructive force in the world, held in by a crumbling cup of not-very-strong stone and dust. No time to screw around then. Hoist, pulleys: Jim Hepsobah took the strain, and Sally steered with nimble arms, and all of us heard one another's grunting over the radios, but that was all—no chatter, no questions. We knew the job; we knew one another. Conversation meant misunderstanding.

“Position set,” Sally said, because it was. Time: four minutes fifty seconds and counting. Fastest ever, anywhere, by anyone. Jim Hepsobah stepped forward to adjust dials and set the timer, and then something went
plink.
I turned to see what it was, and I saw, and I felt the world turn to ice.

There was a man in here with us. A slender, ordinary man in black, almost priestly—or monkish perhaps. He was sweating, because it was way too hot in here for a human being. At around forty degrees, the human brain starts to flake out. Core body temperature can go up only a couple of degrees before you forget what's going on and start to die. This guy was not starting to die. He had not lost his concentration. He looked, if anything, slightly bored. In one hand he carried a length of chain with a hook on the end. He was about five eleven, had some Asian ancestry somewhere and his arms and legs were loose like a marionette's. He had a really posey little moustache, two half-inch barbs like the bad guy in a black-and-white film. He bowed.

“Good evening,” said the moustache guy. “My presence here is a regrettable necessity. This will be over soon.” And with that cursory introduction, he started killing Bone's boys.

Now understand, Bone's boys were not a bunch of slacker kids with guns. They were not just standing around waiting for Mr. Moustache to sink his hook-and-chain arrangement into their soft parts. They were armoured soldiers with modern weapons, some of the best troops the world had to offer. They fought. They took positions, created a kill zone, found firing solutions. A triangle-base volume of air (a pentahedron; you don't see many of those) maybe six feet in height became instantly uninhabitable. When he slipped past that, they dumped the guns and went hand to hand with carbon-fibre batons and ceramic knives. They were young and fast and strong, and they knew how to fight without getting in each other's way. There was a lot of karate and some Silat and the occasional bit of Iaijutsu going on, and none of it was amateur. Bone's boys were good. They were so good, they very nearly slowed him down.

Moustache stepped through them, fluid and measured. He was not particularly quick. He was simply exactly where he wanted to be. By the time they had compensated for one movement, he had made another. Contrary to popular wisdom, it was almost exactly
not
like a dance. A dancer works with rhythm and display. The body moves as a series of separate parts, finding beauty in harmony. A dancer wants to express something rather than conceal it. Moustache did none of these things. He did not move his body extraneously, or any part of it in isolation, and he was not showy. He killed without suddenness or excess force. He stabbed you just enough to make you die, not enough to get his hook caught up on your ribs or your spine. He killed ergonomically, so that later, when he was reporting to his evil moustache boss, he would not have an uncomfortable twinge in his shoulders, would not have to go to the evil moustache doctor and ask for some time off to get rid of his RSI. And occasionally, when he wasn't quite perfect, his chain-and-hook weapon went
plink.
It was the only energy he wasted.