War in Heaven by Gavin Smith

Author:Gavin Smith
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780575094734
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2011-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

13

Moa City

The cable car was heavily armoured with a number of weapon systems sticking out of it like spines. Most of them were for point defence. The cable was carbon nanotube in an armoured sheath. Even allowing for this, the cable looked very vulnerable. Tailgunner had confirmed that during the twenty-year-long, on-off siege of Moa City, the cable car normally didn’t last long when They came calling. The locals had only just got this one up and running again.

We were sharing the crowded car with grubby, drawn, exhausted-looking miners coming off shift. I hoped the crowd was enough to hide us from the ever-present surveillance but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we stuck out. We were wearing clean clothes and looked healthy. I could feel the security lens burning into me, scrutinising me. It was as if Demiurge was staring at us. Which it would be as it ran our features through various facial recognition programs.

The cavern that Moa City occupied was the largest yet. It was more like a large alpine valley with a roof of stone. The cavern walls close enough to see were cut into terraces where they’d been extensively mined. This made me uncomfortable. It was like chipping away at the walls of your own house and then wondering why the roof fell on you.

Enormous geothermally powered strip-lighting rigs hung from the cavern roof among the stalactites. It was supposed to be daytime but the harsh light was more institutional than daylight. It wasn’t total either. Many of the lights had been destroyed or damaged. Some hung down from the rock; others flickered on and off intermittently. At ‘night’ the lights would go UV, providing what little modified vegetation was left with the band of light it needed.

The floor of the cavern was supposed to be a lush carpet of vegetation broken up by plantation-style mansions cut out of the rock itself. Big Henry had told me that it had been fashionable to have a seam of precious metal run through the wall of your own house. The problem with the Garden District was that the New Zealand colonial forces hadn’t been able to defend it when They had swarmed in from Nightside.

‘I remember during one of the attacks – the first one I saw – I looked down from the city and it looked like the whole place was crawling. It was like a carpet of insects on a nature viz. You could barely see the ground,’ Tailgunner said as he saw me gazing down at the cavern floor.

We’d used some of the morphic compound to change his features. His tattoos – they were called ta moko apparently and told his story – had been covered with foundation. The whanau were nothing if not pragmatic. A bandanna covered the computer tech protruding from his skull.

‘There’s people down there,’ I said. In some places huge bonfires were burning and by magnifying my optics I could just about make out large groups around the fires. There were large, oddly shaped statuary near some of the people.

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