“Yeah.” Antoinette Bax grinned, revealing filthy teeth. “I’m hungry, Xave. And thirsty. Really thirsty. Have you ever had anyone drink you under a table?”
Xavier Liu considered her question. “I don’t think so, no.”
“Well, now’s your big chance.”
The spiders were going to win the war. They would take over the entire system, the Rust Belt included. They might not turn everyone into hive-mind conscripts—they had more or less promised that that was the last thing they intended—but you could guarantee things were going to be different. Yellowstone had not exactly been a barrel of laughs under the last brief spider occupation. It was difficult to see where the daughter of a space pilot, with a single damaged, creaking ship to her name, was going to be able to fit in.
But hell, she thought, cajoling herself into a state of forced bonhomie, it wasn’t going to happen tonight, was it?
They travelled by rim train. She wanted to eat at the bar under Lyle’s Crater where the beer was great, but Xavier told her it would be heaving at this time of day and they were much better off going somewhere else. She shrugged, accepting his judgement, and was mildly puzzled when they arrived at Xavier’s choice—a bar halfway around the rim called Robotnik’s—and found the place nearly empty. When Antoinette synchronised her watch with Yellowstone Local Time she understood why: it was two hours past thirteen, in the middle of the afternoon. It was the graveyard shift on Carousel New Copenhagen, which saw most of its serious partying during the hours of Chasm City “night.”
“We wouldn’t have had any trouble getting into Lyle’s,” she told him.
“I don’t really like that place.”
“Ah.”
“Too many damned animals. When you work with monkeys all day . . . or not, as the case may be . . . being served by machines begins to seem like a bloody good idea.”
She nodded at him over the top of her menu. “Fair enough.”
The gimmick at Robotnik’s was that the staff were all servitors. It was one of the few places in the carousel, barring the heavy-industrial repair shops, where you saw any kind of machines doing manual labour. Even then the machines were ancient and clapped-out, the kind of cheap, rugged servitors that had always been immune to the plague, and which could still be manufactured despite the system’s much reduced industrial capability in the wake of the plague and the war. There was a certain antique charm to them, Antoinette supposed, but by the time she had watched one limping machine drop their beers four times between the bar and their table, the charm had begun to wear a little thin.
“You don’t actually like this place, do you?” she asked later. “It’s just that you like Lyle’s even less.”
“You ask me, there’s something a tiny bit sick about that place, turning a major civic catastrophe into a bloody tourist attraction.”
“Dad would probably have agreed with you.”
Xavier grunted something unintelligible. “So what happened with the spiders, anyway?”
Antoinette began picking the label off her beer bottle, just the way she had all those years ago when her father had first mentioned his preferred mode of burial. “I don’t really know.”
Xavier wiped foam from his lip. “Have a wild stab in the dark.”
“I got into trouble. It was all going nicely—I was making a slow, controlled approach to Tangerine Dream—and then wham.” She picked up a beer mat and stabbed a finger at it by way of explanation. “I’ve got a zombie ship dead ahead of me, about to hit the atmosphere itself. I painted it with my radar by mistake and got a bunch of attitude from the zombie pilot.”
“But she didn’t chuck a missile at you by way of thanks?”
“No. She must have been all out, or she didn’t want to make things worse by revealing her position with a tube launch. See, the reason she was doing the big dive—the same as me—was that she had a spider ship chasing her.”
“That wasn’t good,” Xavier said.
“No, not good at all. That’s why I had to get into the atmosphere so quickly. Fuck the safeguards, let’s get down there. Beast obliged, but there was a lot of damage on the way in.”
“If it was that or get captured by the spiders, I’d say you did the right thing. I take it you waited down there until the spiders had passed on?”
“Not exactly, no.”
“Antoinette . . .” Xavier chided.
“Hey, listen. Once I’d buried my father, that was the last place I wanted to hang around. And Beast wasn’t enjoying it one bit. The ship wanted out as much as I did. Problem is, we got tokamak failure on the up and out.”
“You were dead meat.”
“We should have been,” Antoinette said, nodding. “Especially as the spiders were still nearby.”
Xavier leant back in his chair and swigged an inch of beer. Now that he had her safe, now that he knew how things had turned out, he was obviously enjoying hearing the story. “So what happened—did you get the tokamak to reboot?”
“Later, yes, when we were back in empty space. It lasted long enough to get me back to Yellowstone, but I needed the tugs for the slow-down.”
“So you managed to reach escape velocity, or were you still able to insert into orbit?”
“Neither, Xave. We were falling back to the planet. So I did the only thing I could, which was ask for help.” She finished her own beer, watching his reaction.
“Help?”
“From the spiders.”
“No shit? You had the nerve—the balls—to do that?”
“I’m not sure about the balls, Xave. But yes, I guess I had the nerve.” She grinned. “Hell, what else was I going to do? Sit there and die? From my point of view, with a fuck of a lot of cloud coming up real fast, being conscripted into a hive mind suddenly didn’t seem like the worst thing in the world.”
“I still can’t believe . . . even after that dream you’ve been replaying?”
“I figured that had to be propaganda. The truth couldn’t be quite that bad.”
“But maybe nearly as bad.”
“When you’re about to die, Xave, you take what you can get.”
He pointed the open neck of the beer bottle at her. “But . . .”
She read his mind. “I’m still here, yeah. I’m glad you noticed.”
“What happened?”
“They saved me.” She said it again, almost having to reassure herself that it had really happened. “The spiders saved me. Sent down some kind of drone missile, or tug, or whatever it was. The thing clamped on to the hull and gave me a shove—a big shove—all the way out of Tangerine Dream’s gravity well. Next thing I knew I was falling back to Yellowstone. Had to get the tokamak up and running, but at least now I had more than a few minutes to do it in.”
“And the spiders . . . they left?”
She nodded vigorously. “Their main guy, this old geezer, he spoke to me just before they sent the drone. Gave me one hell of a warning, I admit. Said if we ever crossed paths again—like, ever—he’d kill me. I think he meant it, too.”
“I suppose you have to count yourself lucky. I mean, not everyone gets let off with a warning where the spiders are concerned.”
“I guess so, Xave.”