“Only trying to help,” Tona Criid shrugged.
The river tides were ebbing and thick, ore-rich spumes were coursing down the waters of the Hass. Longshoreman Folik edged his dirty, juddering flatbed ferry, the Magnificat, out from the north shore and began the eight-minute crossing to the main wharves. The diesel motor coughed and spluttered. Folik eased the revs and coasted between garbage scows and derelicts, following the dredged channel. Grey estuary birds, with hooked pink beaks, rose from the scows in a raucous swirl. To the Magnificat ’s port side, the stone stilts of the Hass Viaduct, two hundred metres tall, cast long, cold shadows across the water.
Those damn sirens! What was that about?
Mincer sat at the prow, watching the low-water for new impediments. He gestured and Folik inched the ferry to starboard, swishing in between the trash hulks and the river-sound buoys.
Folik could see the crowds on the jetty. Big crowds. He grinned to himself.
“We’ll make a sweet bundle on this, Fol!” Mincer shouted, unlooping the tarred rope from the catheads.
“I think so,” Folik murmured. “I just hope we have a chance to spend it…”
* * * * *
Merity Chass had been trying on long-gowns in the dressing suites of the gown-maker when the klaxons first began to sound. She froze, catching sight of her own pale, startled face in the dressing mirror. The klaxons were distant, almost plaintive, from up here in mid-Spine, but local alarms shortly joined in. Her handmaids came rushing in from the cloth-maker’s vestibule and helped her lace up her own dress.
“They say Zoica goes to war!” said Maid Francer.
“Like in the old times, like in the Trade War!” Maid Wholt added, pulling on a bodice string.
“I have been educated by the best tutors in the hive. I know about the Trade War. It was the most bloody and production-costly event in hive history! Why do you giggle about it?”
The maids curtseyed and backed away from Merity.
“Soldiers!” Maid Wholt sniggered.
“Handsome and hungry, coming here!” squealed Maid Francer.
“Shut up, both of you!” Merity ordered. She pulled her muslin fichu around her shoulders and fastened the pin. Then she picked up her credit wand from the top of the rosewood credenza. Though the wand was a tool that gave her access to her personal expense account in the House Chass treasury, it was ornamental in design, a delicate lace fan which she flipped open and waved in front of her face as the built-in ioniser hummed.
The maids looked down, stifling enthusiastic giggles.
“Where is the gown maker?”
“Hiding in the next room, under his desk,” Francer said.
“I said you’d require transportation to be summoned, but he refuses to come out,” Wholt added.
“Then this establishment will no longer enjoy the custom of Noble House Chass. We will find our own transport,” Merity said. Head high, she led her giggling maids out of the thickly carpeted gown-hall, through drapes that drew back automatically at their approach and out into the perfumed elegance of the Promenade.
Gol Kolea put down his axe-rake and pulled off his head-lamp. His hands were bloody and sore. The air was black with rock-soot, like fog. Gol sucked a mouthful of electrolyte fluid from his drinking pipe and refastened it to his collar.
“What is that noise?” he asked Trug Vereas.
Trug shrugged. “Sounds like an alarm, up there somewhere.” The work face of Number Seventeen Deep Working was way below the conduits and mine-head wheels of the mighty ore district. Gol and Trug were sixteen hundred metres underground.
Another work gang passed them, also looking up and speaking in low voices.
“Some kind of exercise?”
“Must be,” Trug said. He and Gol stepped aside as a laden string of ore-carts loaded with loose conglomerate rattled by along the greasy mono-track. Somewhere nearby, a rock-drill began to chatter.
“Okay…” Gol raised his tool and paused.
“I worry about Livy.”
“She’ll be fine. Trust me. And we’ve got a quota to fill.”
Gol swung his axe-rake and dug in. He just wished the scrape and crack of his blade would drown out the distant sirens.
