Part 14 (2/2)

'Father? You don't bear children in the turbine halls do you?'

Rudge snorted. 'Of course not. The plating in our suits might be enough to hold off the worst of the deformities, but working in the turbine halls removes the lead from your pencil right enough. No, you have to get a double on the ballot two from the same family called into the guild. It's less rare than you'd think now there's so few names in the cities to be called.'

Cities. He had been labouring down here long enough not to hear, then. It was just the capital now on Jago. Hermetica. The last city.

Rudge jumped across the gap between the two RAM suits wedged next to each other in the shaft, bringing Hannah's load across.

'A punch card writer for you,' said the navvy, slinging her a heavy sack. 'In case it's a coding problem on the gate.' He tapped the two gla.s.s torpedoes slung under his arm, filled with swirling liquid explosives separated by an ignition membrane and a clockwork timer. 'Charges to blow the gate open if it's a physical jam that can't be cleared with my tools.'

He wound a line of powdered tape around Hannah's hands and fitted a climber's sling across her chest, making sure that it was properly connected to the line that she was going to use to abseil down.

'What if the lines aren't long enough?'

The navvy shook his head in annoyance. 'This is your first time, grub, not mine or T-face's. I've been counting the distance all the way down here. You just hold onto your line and keep your gear secure.'

He cast her line off the side of her suit, jumped back to his own machine and then lit a chemical flare belted onto his sling to augment the light of the suits' lanterns.

Down the three of them went, another thirty foot, the powdered bandages on Hannah's hand gripping the abseil line's pulley-like mechanism, the machine droning as she fell. Rudge's calculations were right on the money, though, the three lines playing out a foot above the jammed pressure gate below them.

'Don't touch the surface, grub, and stay on your line. It's burning hot.'

Hannah hardly needed his shouted warning. The gate below was trembling under the pressure of the superheated steam building up on the other side of its heavy vanes, metal plates steaming with moisture from the incredible heat being held back.

Rudge pointed to the stone handholds laddering down the shaft and indicated that Hannah should use them to get to the transaction engine built into the wall. At close quarters the thinking machine was every bit as primitive looking as Hannah had been told by the navvy. A flared trumpet sucked in the pa.s.sing steam, while a bank of transaction-engine drums rotated to perform the basic calculations needed to help regulate the flow. Under the machine was a tiny stone platform where maintenance work could be done. This must be what working with transaction engines back in the Kingdom of Jackals was like.

'See if the fault's inside there,' ordered Rudge, as he and T-face lowered themselves further down towards the metal gate. 'We're going to check each vane for rusted bearings.' He removed a small hammer and began to tap across the gate's surface, listening to the returning clangs with all the intent of a safe cracker, while T-face held his line steady above him.

Hannah brought out the portable punch card writer that she had been given and rattled out a basic diagnostics query then levered off the cork plug that protected the brutish machine's injection reader from the steam that would usually be powering up this shaft. She quickly became absorbed into her work, forgetting there were others in the tap working alongside her. Checking the transaction engine carefully, Hannah calculated there was enough residual steam in its reservoir for about ten minutes worth of operation time. The inconvenience of having to read the symbolic results directly off the rotating drums was going to be the least of her problems down here.

In the end, it was the garbled nature of the symbols coming up on the transaction-engine drums that gave the fault away and Hannah allowed herself a brief thrill of elation. The gate's transaction engine had recorded a spike of steam well beyond the bounds its guild programmer had originally allowed, so the engine had tried to cope by resetting its ceiling values itself. But it had set them too far beyond the normal parameters, and now the gate that the thinking machine controlled was permanently locked, convinced that the killing pressure building up below was only a slight up-draft that it wasn't even worth the bother of harnessing.

Hannah rattled out another punch card with a more realistic set of pressure peaks and troughs for the control mechanism to follow factoring in enough time for them to exit the shaft before the gate reopened. She had injected the punch card and re-corked the engine, but the self-congratulatory words of praise she was about to call across to Rudge were lost as one of the rivets exploded from the gate below blasted away by a pressure front far more intense than the gate's safety margins allowed for. A geyser of steam discharged through the tiny hole that had been opened knocking the three of them swinging around the shaft on their rappel lines. There was a cras.h.i.+ng sound as the spear of steam dislodged one of the RAM suits wedged in the shaft above. The suit came tumbling down like a landslide of metal and crashed into the gate. For a terrible moment Hannah thought the impact was going to smash the gate open, but it proved to be made of tougher stuff. The fallen RAM suit lay over the hole left by the dislodged rivet, temporarily sealing the leak. However, if sealing the leak had spared the three of them from steam burns, it had done no other favours for Rudge. The dislodged suit had brought his line down with it, and now the young navvy was pinned under the knee joins of his own suit, the arch of the leg trapping him with all the weight of a two-tonne foundry-forged tree trunk.

T-face was off his line, whining and pus.h.i.+ng hopelessly at the ma.s.sive suit's leg. Rudge was still conscious enough to see Hannah trying to climb up into his downed suit's pilot cage.

'Suit won't work,' he coughed up at her. 'Not this far down the shaft.'

'It might,' Hannah called down. 'I just need enough power to lift the leg off you.'

'You'll as like crush me, grub. You're the only one with a line left tied to a working suit. Climb back up and take T-face with you.'

Hannah tried not to gag. She could smell Rudge's skin burning where it was touching the gate. 'I've found the fault, you idiot. The gate's vanes are going to open up underneath you.'

'Good job, girl. Then there's only one way me and my suit are going, and that's straight down.'

There was a loud creaking noise from underneath them. The gate wasn't going to hold together long enough for Hannah to get out before the flow of super-pressurized steam resumed. It looked as if Vardan Flail had got his way. He was going to buy Hannah's silence with her death after all.

Burning. Burning, as he rolled across the hotel room's floor. Boxiron's body was burning, but not as fiercely as his mind. The Steamo Loa that his people knew as Radius Patternmaster was reaching into his brain and filling it, preparing to swell and crack his nanomechanical neural channels and burn out each and every memory that Boxiron possessed. Not just the almost-decrypted code hidden inside Jethro's church painting, but everything that made Boxiron a distinct being. His inferior, man-milled body was finally going to get the mind it deserved that of an idiot savant.

Something deep inside Boxiron struggled and writhed in reaction to the pain a vomit-like reflex that was trying to emerge and fight the possession of the Loa. What was it? A routine that had been hidden inside him by the flash mob? The cunning mechomancers who knew that there was always a danger that one of the steamman's G.o.ds might strike at the abomination they had created for their Jackelian criminal masters. But whatever defences the crime lords had secreted inside his body felt too far away and the weight of the Loa riding him too intense for him to connect with it- -as he felt Jethro's shadow falling over his body, the gear lever on his back slid squealing up to five. Top gear Top gear.

Now it was the Steamo Loa's turn to shriek as the cobbled-together firewall the flash mob's hirelings had inserted inside Boxiron connected with his mind. Blocks were raised on every circuit he possessed, the Loa that was trying to ride him cut into a million separate, self-aware splinters, steam leaking out of his joints. The manifestation of Radius Patternmaster tried to seethe out of Boxiron's body, broken and mangled beyond recognition, attempting to reform...but merely dissipating in the air of the hotel room.

Boxiron pulled himself groggily to his feet, trying to avoid placing a heavy iron foot on Jethro's toes as he swayed to and fro. Jethro was standing there before him, as was the young ursine Chalph urs Chalph.

'That was one your people's G.o.ds, was it not, old steamer?'

'A Loa I rejected him,' said Boxiron, 'much as you reject your G.o.ds.'

'I am not much of a standard to aspire to,' said Jethro.

'You are more than they.'

A coldness flowed through Boxiron, as if every crystal board and node inside his body was hardening after being freed of the corrupting hold of the Loa. But it was not the aftershock of cleansing himself of the possession he felt. It was the cipher from the painting It was the cipher from the painting.

a.s.sembling. a.s.sembling. The last of the flash mob's crooked processing units came back online pa.s.sing him the final clue he needed to crack the steganographic code one third of the mathematical weapon that the priest Bel Bessant had crafted so many centuries earlier. It was like nothing that Boxiron had been expecting.

But then, neither was the explosion of pain as the terrible, cold, alien thing unfolded within his consciousness...

CHAPTER TWELVE.

'I've never seen the like,' said the commodore to Nandi as they emerged from the conning tower. He waved the punch card containing the Joshua Egg in the air as if he was still trying to clear the smoking ruin the card had left of his transaction engine's navigation drums. 'This blessed egg is jinxed, right enough. Raising a switching storm in the dark valves of those guild dogs, then roasting the transaction engine on my precious boat. It'll take my crew weeks to repair this mess, and Jagonese tugs guiding us out or no, I won't be sailing the Fire Sea blind without my navigation drums. We're as good as beached here until the navigation room is fixed.'

'It's a coincidence,' said Nandi. 'I know that u-boat men are superst.i.tious, but you can't believe a few lines of code are cursed.'

'I believe it, la.s.s. This whole wicked isle is cursed. Jackelians find nothing but bad luck here, and look at the Jagonese. They were as good as us, once, and now see what they've become. Pale-faced lickspittles tending their infernal turbines and hiding in their mortal caves. Milksops raised on bamboo soup where once they would have swigged beer and eaten beef as proudly as any Jackelian.'

'Just a coincidence,' said Nandi again, trying to make herself believe it.

The commodore crossed the gantry over to the dock. 'No, la.s.s. This dark isle is a vampire land. It's sucked the vigour out of a whole nation. Why do you think the Fire Sea surrounds it? There's not one good island sitting in this whole d.a.m.ned sea and I've visited a few of them. Old Lord Tridentscale is the master of the oceans and he knew what he was doing when he sealed the black cliffs of Jago off behind the s.h.i.+fting magma. Yes, I'll be right glad to swap the dark vaults of this place for the queer wooden towers and oak minarets of Pericur.'

Nandi started. Of course, the other end of the commodore's voyage. Pericur.

'That's it!' said Nandi. 'I know how to run the Joshua Egg.'

'Don't be asking me to solve the numbers of its formula by hand,' whined the u-boat man. 'Not that my genius isn't up to the task, mind, but I can feel it in my bones anyone who attempts to solve that dark code will go mad. Don't ask old Blacky to end up in an asylum for this lunatic chase you're on.'

'I'll prove it to you,' said Nandi. 'That what we have here is only a complex code without a single supernatural expression in its formula; and I'll do it with the help of Amba.s.sador Ortin. Your cargo, Jared, transaction-engine parts bound for Pericur and the amba.s.sador took a good few crates of them for installation in his emba.s.sy.'

'Ah, la.s.s,' said the commodore, 'if that fur-skinned fellow has a need for processing power that's not satisfied by the monstrous thinking machines of the guild, it is only because he doesn't trust the Jagonese with what he's handling. Cipher work, Nandi. You'll find his blessed emba.s.sy's transaction engines come with an officer of the Pericurian secret police attached to them.'

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