Only Forward. Michael Marshall Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ I was mentally exhausted and beginning to think I’d find it easier passing myself off as an Fnaphette. They believe that each man has a soul shaped like a frisbee and spend their whole lives trying to throw themselves as high as possible, trying to get to heaven. I stopped for a cigarette.

      It must have been quite a feat of engineering for its time, Royle: the Square, which is about a quarter of a mile to a side, is made entirely out of one sheet of steel. I’d been there once before, a few years ago, just to see what it was like. It hadn’t changed much, and was better preserved than the bridges and walkways.

      What I like to do in empty Neighbourhoods is half close my eyes and try to imagine what they were like when they were still alive. As I sat I tried to re-enter a time when thousands of people walked across the Square every day, when the wealthy and cultured had flocked to the metal opera house down the other end, when the metal cafeés and shops along the sides had thronged with chattering life, when the Neighbourhood had been one taut sculpture of gleaming steel poised above clear water. It must have been pretty flash, I think, and now it was just a rather strange and alien scrapyard teetering above a sewage tank.

      As I sat there on the warm metal, two of my senses suddenly sent up messages at once. My hand registered the faintest of vibrations, and my eyes discerned some minute movement down the far end of the Square. I couldn’t make out more than that through the gleam of the sun off steel, but the message was clear: someone else was sightseeing this morning. I stood up and peered that way again, shielding my eyes, but was still unable to see anything. It could just have been some vagrant from Red: Royle is occasionally used as a hide-out by those who’ve run foul of someone like Ji. That was the most probable explanation. There was no reason for me to feel a little odd, as if some nerve had been touched. Probably just a vagrant. Either way it was time to be going.

      Within another fifteen minutes I was about two hundred yards away from the massive wall that penned in the half-million inhabitants of Stable, and began to choose my route amongst the interconnecting bridges more carefully, heading towards the area Snedd had told me about eight years ago. After a few moments I spotted the distinctive building he had mentioned and headed for it, taking a few risks on shaky walkways but eventually getting there in one piece.

      The building was unmistakable from Snedd’s description. It looked as though a borderline insane architect had bloodymindedly set out to create the most alarming building of all time out of gleaming metal, and had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Strange little towers and extrusions stuck out of it at disturbing angles, all of them different. Either the architect had lost his protractor before starting the job, or he’d deliberately broken it and stuck it back together wrongly.

      Round the other side was a peculiar balcony and, first testing it with my hand, I braced myself carefully and leant over to peer at the base of the wall just above where it went down into the water. Still about fifty yards away, the area was rather confused, covered in many generations of bracing struts and twisted metal, and it took a while before I found what I was looking for.

      Then I saw it: a small hole, about three feet above the waterline. Using it as a marker, I left the balcony and headed down the walkways that led in the right direction towards the wall.

      One of the reasons that Ji and Snedd make such a terrifying couple is that they are not exactly the same. They’re both primarily extremely dangerous psychopaths, to be sure, but within that there are shades of difference that make them a complementary pair. Ji favours a head-on approach to everything, whereas Snedd will often think a little longer, and sometimes finds a way of slipping round the side. Ji will simply destroy anything that’s in his way, but Snedd might try asking it to move first. Snedd also has an ability to Find Things Out which is frankly extremely impressive even to me, and I spend my life doing it. The fact that he is still alive after eight years of one-year countdowns is testament to that: to the best of my knowledge no one else has ever managed to find a way round DNA expiration. Snedd had managed to get into Stable as a result of one of those little pieces of information, and I was relying on it still being true.

      What he’d discovered was that, over the years, the level of the water in Royle had dropped. Not by much, it was still hundreds of feet deep, but enough to reveal the earliest external wastepipe Stable had built over two centuries ago. It had been replaced by a whole system of outlets which were below the present water level, but the pipe had never been blocked up. It was used by Stable police to gain access to the outside of the wall for maintenance work, and in the old days to eject intruders once they’d had their biological time-bomb set. The pipe was guarded by a unit of three men armed with machine guns, but to the likes of Snedd that was as good as rolling a red carpet down it and stringing up a neon sign saying ‘Welcome’. He’d crept in the hole that night eight years ago, annihilated the guards and gone running out into the Neighbourhood looking for fun, unfortunately not having found out about the eleven o’clock shutdown.

      As I got closer to the wall the pipe entrance began to look bigger, but it was still going to be a bastard to get to. Twenty yards away I stepped to the edge of the walkway, sat on the edge, and then swung myself under it. The outer wall of Stable is unbreachable by anything short of nuclear weapons. It hadn’t used to be, and Snedd had gained most of his information from a survivor of the last time a group had got in through the wall. Now it was impassable, so I didn’t expect Stable police to be wasting their time keeping too strict a watch on the surrounding walkways. But you never know, so I made my way to the end of the walkway by swinging along underneath.

      A few yards before it reached the wall the walkway stopped, destroyed a long time ago by Stable authorities. Just visible in the weathered rock ahead of me was the dim outline of where a large portal had once been. It was filled in tightly, and gave me a bit of an eerie feeling, as if I was about to try to break into a huge mausoleum, a tomb which had been bricked up with people still alive inside it.

      The next bit, I realised as I swung gently underneath the walkway, was going to be a bit of a challenge. The next bit was going to be pretty damned intrepid. With nothing to push against, I had to generate the forward swing to carry me over almost two yards of water, with enough momentum left to spare to give me time to grab hold of something the other side. As I tensed and relaxed my muscles, limbering up, I scanned the area below the hole, trying to spot something that looked like a handhold rather than a means of killing myself.

      I couldn’t see anything. Underneath the pipe entrance was a largish sheet of rusting metal, the remnants of some ancient brace or strut or other construction-related thing. The sheet had peeled away at the top to become a dangerous-looking lip of jagged metal. If I tried to grab that I would simply lose my fingers before falling the ten feet into the water, from which there was no hope of getting back up again. The pipe itself was only about a yard across. I estimated my chances of swinging myself neatly into it in a crouched position, as the lunatic Snedd had done, at just less than nil.

      Bollocks, I thought, my arms beginning to hurt. Bollocks.

      I might have hung there all day, or as long as my arms held out, had I not suddenly been given a massive incentive to move. There was a rush of air in front of my stomach, and a fraction of a second later I heard the soft phip of an energy rifle shot. As I looked round wildly, the same thing happened again.

      Some bastard was shooting at me.

      Intensely concerned at this development, I started to swing back and forwards as hard as I could, simultaneously craning my neck round to see where the shot was coming from. I couldn’t see anything, but a whining ricochet off the top of the walkway thirty seconds later removed the minimal chance that it had been an accident.

      Somebody was actually shooting at me. They really were. I couldn’t get over it. Give me a break, I thought. Surely I have enough grief on my plate as it is?

      The Stable police must have posted someone to guard the СКАЧАТЬ