Men and Machines II

  Charlie Nash was born in England and holds degrees in mechanical and space engineering, medicine, and writing. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Aurealis and Ditmar awards. She lives on the eastern seaboard of Australia, and is working on two new novels, and a third Ship’s Doctor installment.

  w: charlienash.net

  f: authorcharlienash

  Also by Charlie Nash:

  Short Story Collections

  Men and Machines I: space operas and special ops

  All Your Dark Faces

  Men and Machines II:

  punks and postapocalypticans

  Charlie Nash

  Published in 2019 by Flying Nun Publications, http://flyingnunpublications.com/

  “Blue ICE” first published 2014 in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #59

  “The Message” first published 2014 in Dimension6 #1

  “Alchemy & Ice” first published 2015 in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #61

  “Arachne” published 2019 in Men and Machines II: punks and postapocalypticans.

  In all the above first publications, stories originally credited to Charlotte Nash.

  Copyright © 2014, 2015, 2019 Charlie Nash

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations or people, living or dead, is coincidental.

  ISBN:

  978-1-925775-11-2 (paperback)

  978-1-925775-12-9 (eBook)

  Cover design by Richard Priestley

  Contents

  Blue Ice

  The Message

  Alchemy & Ice

  Arachne

  Your thoughts?

  More from Charlie Nash

  In memory of MC, who got me reading first

  And NS, who showed me how bold and bombastic words could be

  Blue Ice

  Tak knows a dozen words for grub, all of them cut with curses, and none these men will understand. She’ll have to reach for something basic. There’s mud, of course, but you don’t get mud here under the artificial irrigators. Mud is from back home, where the filth flows with a kind of clean consistency. Sloshes in wheel ditches on old-style farms where you’d still find people in the machinery.

  Yeah, well, at least you used to. Here in Dubai, Tak knows mud is only in salons. And you’ll never find Tak in a salon.

  Right now, she’s knee deep in quicksand squelch, clip-pad shedding brown fluid, yelling at the men through the tumbling shit-water. Her ears are full of the stuff, and when she shouts, it runs between her teeth, coating her tongue with grit and sterilizer.

  She spits. Ugh. Nothing but a sticky rice and a number twenty-three from Hiro’s will cut the taste. But she’s responsible for this pipe-farm fuck-up, the heart of the system that grows food on land that should be desert.

  And somewhere high in the snaking, pipe-laden ceiling, the system has a constipated shit-jam.

  Tak punches her commlink, holding the clip-pad umbrella fashion over her head. “Mud,” she gargles. “Look for mud!”

  Crackling chatter. The men are overhead in the pipes looking for the blockage. The one that dried up the irrigators a half-k down the next field. It’s a system quirk that the block happens right over where the rain’s still working, and the flowing squelch water doesn’t stop for anything, even for fault-finders making quagmire with next year’s sorghum.

  She falls over the squelching mud-pile before she sees it. Then the sucking mud is inside her collar, sticking her ’ralls to skin, tumbling down her legs. Her boots feel like quick-set cement, but she’s got a rage going now, which means things are about to happen. The fault is right overhead.

  Tak hauls out of the mud, zombie-style: hair straggling, mouth drawn, teeth bared white and rimmed in grime. She spies a stalk: one of the structural conduits that both hold the roof, and jam the harvest machines when their position sensors get coated in the mud. Tak’s commlink isn’t even giving static now: given up to the squelch. So she finds the stalk side, caving-ladder style, and hauls her ass up, along with two tons of mud.

  Once she gets up above the crop heads, the ladder is a streaming slick. Tak wishes she had her GrippyFingers right now, but they’re tucked in her apartment back home, wedged between the mattress and the bed-end. Finally, she reaches the zone above the spray and hauls her dripping ’ralls onto the pipe deck. Down the line, she sees the blue-covered shapes of men, and the thin wisps of vape-smoke rising roof-wards. Lazy fuckers.

  She stomps her boots into the pipe trays, ready to rip them new sphincters, when the expanding mud-pile glops into view. There’s the problem: a ball-valve control stick glows red: off. The pressure has pushed the mud line through the seals, shorting out the water line next door. Tak runs back up the line in irritation. Shouldn’t fucking happen. There’s a relief valve here that should blow first … then she finds it, its own control stick as red as the Webz Great Red Beyond. Nice. Someone’s got the line on manual, and forgot to switch it back.

  She throws the switch at the emergency panel and is back in the lockers in under five, mouth full of grit and curses. She calls it in while she stands under the sprays. Boss answers in a flat minute by busting in, unannounced, overriding locks like a tank across a kid’s cardboard fort. Tak is lucky she’s still in the ’ralls, because she could be buck naked right now. But she knows this about Boss, and she never gets naked at work.

  “Manual mode fuck-up,” she spits at him, shutting down preamble as she shuts down the water. “Some jerk in your software room’s got his hand on it instead of watching the program.”

  Boss eyes her back with the searching up-and-down. His hair is a standing coif, wind-defying hair replacement. Tak knows it’s real hair on the outside but synthetic core, just like Boss himself, and all of it standing proud of a barren body landscape; a body made for slouch and fueling the brain-center called management. Not what a body’s made for.

  “Right,” he says, with such an inflection that Tak knows the aforementioned Jerk in Software’s going to get reamed in precisely five minutes.

  Then Boss narrows his eyes, so Tak sees the crinkle wave his eyelids put on the contact lenses. Tak wonders if he has transtex imagers in those lenses, and he’s looking at her naked anyway, ’ralls stripped to just her skin and tatts. His smile veneers glitter like wet bone. “Get dry,” he says. “Scram’s off the pad in forty-five. New problem for you in Sydney.”

  Boss leaves a trail of sour deodorant-cloaked man-stink, or maybe that’s just Tak’s brain remembering Sydney. Olfactory is the most primitive sense, just a step below the one she uses to understand what Boss really means: Good job; you can keep it another week.

  The Scram busts through the curve of the Earth, and East Coast Australia expands in the forward camera view. In the ten-inch, seat-inlayed screen, Tak watches the light cluster explode into starfield. Sydney is a glowing nebula, webby fingers spreading inland. But north of the border is a new, dark patch. Where Brisbane used to be. No lights, no nothing there. A wasteland, now, flooded and destroyed, and she can’t get used to that.

  Off the Scram, her transport shoots through the tunnels, ejecting her into the basement office of her MegaCorp employer. She stands impatient for the door scan, then fixates on the slit between the lift doors as they scream pass ground—the call bu
tton for that floor has been hacked out and taped over—it’s just a flash of light that quickens her heart. Then the lift empties her into the safety of the fifty-third, the FarmTower control room, one of a dozen in the city heart. Tak’s eyes are slits that appraise the slack bastards in their three-grand chairs: fake-cheese-poof eating, waist-expanded boredom jocks, skin lit gray under the green wall-to-wall plant screens.

  The head bastard, Southern Boss, waddles across her view. “We have an intermittent valve malfunction,” he begins, stubbing his finger on the on-screen pipe array.

  “Why do you need me?” she asks, chucking her ’sack on an empty hot-desk, and trying not to sound as bolshy as she knows she is.

  “Tried everything,” says Southern Boss. “Every time we send someone up there, nothing’s wrong. Replaced the faulting valve twice.”

  “So, it’s not the valve,” says Tak, scribbling the part’s number on her hand, above the thenar eminence southern cross allegiance tattoo. She unthreads her tool holster, slings it about her hips. Southern Boss passes her an old-skool paper plan in a tight roll; the grid’s too big for tablet screen, the MegaCorp too cheap for soft condensed matter sheets.

  “Good luck,” he says. His grin is from the same school as Boss’s back in Dubai, faux humanness from a man who can’t remember what it was like to be tribal. No one cares about her, really, in the bigger context of the FarmTower MegaCorp. They care about her skills, about what she can do for them and for what price. Everything else is secondary, which Tak knows would be painfully apparent the moment she fails to deliver.

  They’ve never tried everything.

  Tak takes the lift right to the top, then stairs and ladders into the roof space. Through a swipe-door and she finds the valve, in a manifold right on the outer roof. It stares out on the endless sparkling skyline. Its control stick glows green: no problem. So she starts chasing lines. Must be a wire cross, somewhere in the valve’s control path.

  Tak hunts the paths like an animal tracker, down shafts, up floors and around bends; hours through the endless FarmTower grid, all while the moon slinks a sickly slip above the skyline. Each floor is a shock of elemental color: lime green leaf forests, vermillion tomatoes, golden grain heads. She skirts the color. Tak is a gray-world girl, made for the conduits and cables that support the farm. The living stuff is too reverent, too elemental. She knows her place.

  Each run ends at the control room, or back at the valve. Sometimes the fault is glowing on a control room screen, sometimes not. She resists the slack bastard invites to drinkies after work; resists the official end of her day. But she doesn’t solve it, and a rage glows warm inside. This is all just a system. The problem is discoverable, understandable. Must be.

  The control room is quiet, now. She checks her tab-phone; nearly midnight. Shift change. She spends another seven-twenty degrees of the clock and still, nothing. This job is blowing her average, pissing her off. The fault hasn’t come in a while now. She storms up the tower one more time. That fucking valve. She peers at it through the swipe-door’s glass panel, glowing green control stick. She is running out of options, out of energy, out of consciousness. She thinks of her flat, not far away, the softness of the bed and its pillows. Then she thinks of her reputation, of Southern Boss coming back tomorrow without a fix.

  She sinks down behind the door, mind a whirl of fantasy sleep, red strobes and hardware malfunction.

  She wakes again, sore ass from the concrete, sore back from the hard door. Two seconds tick as she remembers what she’s doing. Then she hears it: a soft, sneaky footfall, just one. Tak presses her teeth, groove in groove, ready to scare any lazy ass maint guy coming up the ladder. She inches up, ready to vent valve-directed rage at the guy, because the valve could take whatever she had without returning satisfaction.

  Later, Tak doesn’t know why she glances out the swipe-door window at this point. Maybe to make sure the valve is watching the anticipated display of mind-to-mind violence, so it knows what it’s facing in her, and maybe it can stop fucking her around now. Maybe to confirm she really is in Sydney, biggest, baddest New Kingdom city-state in this former great southern land. But what she sees is a shadow; someone out there on the valve deck.

  Tak swipes her pass and throws the door on its hinges. Half a second of clear view is all she gets of the mutherfucker, but that’s enough time to work out quite a lot. Like, this guy doesn’t work for the company. He’s tall and lean, broad-shouldered and black-suited from toes to fingertips. Balaclava, too. He’s not here to help. A jack line umbilicals from his tab-phone to the valve control stick, a cut-down rig, built to be concealed. Intermittent fault. Tak connects those dots in an instant. He’s fucking with that valve, probably for a while now.

  “Hey!” she yells, though it’s not necessary. He’s seen her as soon as the door sprung its latch, and he’s already moving, a black back against a black-and-sparkling skyline. He vaults across the barrier wall, onto the round-deck runway. Vanishes in a second flat.

  Tak sprints after him, rage in her heart-lines, growl in her airway. Fucker on her turf! One shot of him and she’s in her animal brain, her territorial center framing the labels she puts on him. Saboteur. Trespasser. Violator. She scrambles over the wall and hauls ass along the no-railing walkway, chasing tiny white bips that flash with every pace of his running gait. His arms flail in a strange pattern and he slows; Tak knows she’s caught him now; the runway’s ending at the building edge, nowhere to go. She gropes in her pocket for her tab-phone. One capture is all she needs to send his ass to the slammer.

  Then, he’s gone. Tak blinks, retinas telling lies. Like, that the fucker just went over the edge, up here on the sixty-ninth. She skids to the edge. The next ’scraper is a half-field away, and below, a pedbridge links them, an old one, barricaded and unlit, sides concrete-cancer pocked, shedding lime dust as the fucker lopes along the top.

  Getting the fuck away.

  Tak doesn’t think too much as she falls over the edge. The thoughts she does have she tries to turn feline: land on your feet, roll if you need to, but not over the edge! It’s further than she thinks. The impact jars her knee, puts a pain-snarl on her lips. But she’s on the level with him again, on her feet, and after him.

  He reaches the ’scraper and she expects him to climb the maint ladder. It ends before the pedbridge, but he could reach it. But he doesn’t. He goes up the wall like a spider. Tak gets it then: the funny arm movements. GrippyFingers. He was putting them on.

  He’s almost up and over the wall before she reaches the ladder. She’s losing him now; losing it herself. She leaps for the ladder and catches her hands; hauls up her body in a lat-dorsi fiber-popping moves. Expects him to be gone when she gets to the roof, but he’s just standing there, five meters away by an open stairwell door.

  Tak stumbles to standing. She whips the tab-phone from her pocket and points it at him. She knows she’s spent: muscles frayed, all the adrenaline she has cashed in. But it’s all worth it now.

  “Got you,” she gasps. He’s got goggles under the balaclava, but the cam shot has transtex to strip his black suit, enough for an ID. She’s won; average preserved.

  The balaclava mask shifts—a grin—and he points his tab-phone cam straight back at her. “Nice work,” he says.

  Tak hears approval in that male voice, approval from a saboteur. Too confident. Rage pumps her flagging heart. “You’re not getting away,” she reminds him, her breath finally coming back. “Your life just changed, fucker.”

  They shoot at the same time, twin bursts of tungsten-powered flashlight. When the afterimage is gone, so is he. But the tab-phone screen glows with the black outline of him, caught: full-frontal, center-shot and stupid. She clutches the tab-phone, pacing, punching the app to strip the photo back to skin. In a moment, she’ll have him.

  But she doesn’t. She punches the app again, not believing what it shows. Because the image is a white-out. The fucker was wearing a lined suit. Tak curses. Even the places the suit d
idn’t cover are cleanskin: not a single tat or implant on his head, hands or feet, and the goggles blocked retina scan too.

  Tak retraces her steps, cold frustration replacing victory. She looks down at the ladder and the pedbridge, peppered in condemned notices. She can’t go back that way. Dead ends, all.

  Now fucking what?

  Thumper counts this night as one of his less auspicious moments, the type that generates new rules. He toes open his pad window while two hands and his other toe hold him on the building’s edge. He’s immune to vertigo now, has been for a long time, but the drop to the sill and the vault inside draw a hiss tonight.

  He whips off the GFs and sticks his hand in his armpit, clamping down the wind-frozen underarm suit wall on his smarting fingertips. New rule, no doing jobs when injured.

  He sentinels between the two windows getting re-leveled, checking the pad out. One chair, one Webz neck-hugger. Ball of fluff still under the door. Undisturbed.

  This should bring settlement, but it doesn’t. He flicks through his tab-phone to the shot of the woman from the FarmCorp. Her ID is an oversaturated square, her face an angry flush. He transtexes the image to get at her skin. He zooms into her tatts, each mark a telltale of her lineage, her allegiance. The southern cross on her hand, FarmCorp’s logo on her bicep, a huge curling phoenix around her middle. An industrial trophy. She’s impressed someone big.

  Thumper lets his head smack against the wall. He doesn’t know what he’s feeling when he looks at her. It’s a little like the feeling he gets when he does something new, things other people have told him are impossible. And a little like the thrill of going down to ground level; letting your feet touch that dangerous and unfamiliar street turf, just for a second before you vault for elevation safety.