Corso flicked a glance towards Udo, who glared back at him in response. Neither of them replied.
‘I don’t have time to play tourist guide,’ Dakota snapped at Corso. ‘I have…’ Further words stalled in her throat.
Udo gave her a toothy smile. ‘People to see? Places to go?’
Fuck you. ‘What do you think I’m going to do then, run away?’
‘You could, but I can run faster.’ Udo laughed at his own bad joke. ‘What’ve you got against my brother, anyway?’ he added. ‘Seeing as you asked for me specially.’
‘How does it feel being such a shithead, Udo?’
‘It feels great, Mala.’
‘You’ve visited this particular coreship before?’ Corso asked her, clearly trying to break the current thread of conversation.
‘I’ve been in Ascension a few times in the past, yeah.’
And I’m not the only one who’s familiar with this place, she thought, shooting a glance at Udo and remembering what she’d discovered.
She spared him a thin smile.
An air taxi had been hovering in the vicinity of the Hyperion ever since it had docked. Udo beckoned it down, and made a show of getting in first and taking the front seat directly behind the dashboard unit that housed the craft’s cheaply manufactured brain. He wasn’t as subtle as Kieran, either, Dakota reflected. There was too much of a swagger in Udo Mansell.
Ascension was soon spread out below them in all its seedy blackened glory. If the view from a couple of hundred metres up was anything to judge by, it had changed little since her last visit there.
She surveyed a landscape of grey and black concrete interspersed with open areas of patchy green-fire zones from the civil war of fifty years before. In the further distance the city came to an abrupt halt against the shaped fields that kept humanity separate from other species inhabiting the coreship, but with different atmospheric and gravitational requirements.
These days, two-thirds of the city was back under Consortium control, while a few remaining warlords still claimed control over a few outlying districts. The Shoal didn’t appear to give a damn what went on inside their coreships, at least up to a certain point. Fission weapons remained a big no-no, even though there were a thousand urban myths about people somehow stumbling into otherwise forbidden alien sectors of the coreships and finding there only sterile, irradiated ruins.
Some humans lived their entire lives on board a core-ship, never seeing beyond these narrow slivers of apportioned living space. The coreship might travel the length and breadth of the galaxy, but once it left the minuscule portion of the Milky Way humanity was permitted to see, the surface ports were sealed until it returned to within Consortium space. Whatever lay beyond would therefore always remain a mystery even to its most long-term inhabitants.
‘What happened to this place?’ asked Corso in awe, peering down through the taxi’s wraparound windscreen. They were passing over occasional pockets of devastation, now half overgrown with weeds.
‘Power struggle,’ Dakota replied. ‘The Consortium won, but only just.’
‘So the Consortium is still in charge here?’
Dakota shrugged. ‘Nobody’s strictly in charge. It depends which part of the city you’re in.’
Corso looked disbelieving. ‘But someone must be in charge of keeping this place in order-the Shoal at the very least. It’s their ship, so where are they anyway?’
‘Corso, they don’t care about anything but their trade agreements.’
‘Well, then-’
‘No one is in charge here,’ Udo muttered, his voice full of distaste, ‘because no one here has the honour or strength to do something about it. This whole place is a monument to the very worst aspects of human nature.’
‘-what exactly do the Shoal get out of all this?’ Corso continued, despite Udo’s interruption. ‘With all their technology, all their advanced might-as-well-be-magic science, what do we have they could possibly want from us?’
‘That’s the eternal question, Corso,’ Dakota answered. ‘Nobody knows, and the Shoal aren’t telling. Maybe they just like being in charge, full stop.’
‘But they’re just, just… fish!’ Corso cried. ‘How in God’s name do fish come up with all this?’
Dakota shrugged again, but offered him a small smile. ‘Same answer.’
The air taxi had now dropped below the level of the tallest buildings surrounding the city centre. The rooftops of some of these buildings stretched all the way to the coreship ceiling, where they were securely anchored. Dakota noted some of the lower structures still retained Consortium gun posts on their rooftops, their weapons aimed permanently towards the rebel districts beyond. The momentary brush of their security systems against her implants came to her like a faint mental tickle.
Severn. She sensed him again, as she had ever since they’d docked, somewhere out there among the grimy streets and half-rotted buildings of downtown-the site of much of the worst devastation from the civil war. He’d have sensed her too, of course. It was all part of the eternal joy of being a machine-head.
The air taxi changed course, obeying Dakota’s unspoken command. At this, Udo looked around wildly for a moment before his gaze finally settled on her.
‘I’m in charge of this craft,’ Udo snapped. ‘Relinquish your control.’
‘You’re here to keep us safe,’ Dakota snapped back. ‘Not to tell me what to do.’
Corso sat to one side of Dakota, looking baffled by their argument. The air taxi began to drift downwards on its cushion of energy. ‘You’re taking us outside of the Consortium-controlled sector of Ascension,’ Udo hissed tightly. ‘This is a lawless area.’
‘Anyone looking for trouble isn’t going to be swayed by whichever part of town we land in. And there’s someone here I haven’t seen in a long time.’
She spared a quick glance at Corso, remembering their conversation after Udo had attacked her. Corso was still part of the Freehold, and there wasn’t any reason to believe for one second he’d be anything but loyal to Senator Arbenz. But what he’d said to her on the bridge had nevertheless appeared to contradict that.
The taxi settled down with a soft thump near an open marketplace. As soon as Udo cracked open the taxi’s hatch, the smell of cooking assailed Dakota’s senses: tear-inducing spices mixed with the smell of roasting meat and the fresh smell of newly cut vegetables. Animal brains sizzled in pans suspended above smoking braziers, while dogs whined and barked in cages next to an open-air restaurant, awaiting their turn for slaughter.