Skyfall Read online

  ‘That will do, Janil,’ snapped their father, but Janil just laughed.

  ‘If you say so, Father.’

  Without warning, he pushed forward on the joystick and, engines rising to a scream, the flyer dropped its nose towards the deck then surged through the round door into the sky. The city and the fading horizon lurched sickeningly as the flyer dropped towards the lower levels like a stone. Lari kept his eyes closed.

  ‘Janil!’ Dernan Mann growled from behind. ‘Fly properly.’

  ‘I’m the pilot, Father.’

  Lari’s stomach surged again as Janil snapped the flyer out of its plunge and swung it through a tight gap between two domestems. Around and above them, the city was rushing past – maglift shafts and conduits flicking past far too close for comfort.

  ‘Isn’t this fun?’ Janil offered. ‘If you’re going to throw up, there’s a bag in the pocket on the side of your seat.’

  ‘I’ll be okay,’ Lari muttered through gritted teeth.

  ‘If you say so.’ The flyer heaved quickly up and over a low-level dome, then dropped further into the smoky tangle of the old city.

  ‘It’s not safe to fly like this inside the city, Janil.’ His father was really angry now. ‘And if you don’t want me to have you grounded, you’ll stop immediately.’

  With a sigh, Janil pulled back on the control column and the flyer steadied in the air.

  ‘Much better,’ muttered Dernan Mann.

  ‘Just trying to have a little fun.’

  Gradually, the flyer climbed back up until they were sliding through the upper layer of domes into clear night sky. Above, stars glittered, their faint incandescence lost in the glow from below as the flyer skimmed across the city, flying slightly higher than the uppermost domes. From up here, the city’s size became obvious, and in spite of his churning stomach Lari was transfixed. Skydomes, each lit from inside, sparkled out to the horizon in every direction.

  ‘It’s so big.’

  ‘Not as big as you’d think, copygen. Certainly not as big as it needs to be.’ Janil’s tone was superior.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Don’t worry, you wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Later, perhaps. Look!’ Janil pointed ahead, to where a sharp line of darkness indicated the eastern edge of the city.

  ‘Is that the start of the Darklands?’

  ‘No,’ his father answered from the back seat. ‘Just where Port City finishes, Larinan.

  ‘What’s out there, then?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing for a very long way. Then there’s the wall, then the Darklands.’

  In silence, with only the dull glow of the stars and the instrument panel for illumination, the flyer thrummed east into the night.

  It’s like there are two lands.

  Inside her head is the falling land. The cold, white, falling land. That’s where she spends most of her time.

  Sometimes, though, she finds herself in the round room.

  There’s not a lot of difference between the two. They’re both cold.

  They’re both white.

  But more and more often, now, she finds herself in the room, where the light feels strange and the sounds are wrong.

  But at least there, she isn’t falling.

  Outside the flyer, night rushed past, and in the darkness, with the only light the dim cast of the pilot’s interface, Dernan Mann was remembering.

  Below was a vault of empty darkness and somewhere below that, he knew, the ground was flashing beneath them – the hard, dead, inhospitable ground, the ground that had claimed his wife.

  There was a time when Dernan Mann had been as fascinated by the field as Eyna, when the thought of standing out there, actually physically standing on the ground itself, was as exotic and as exciting to him as it had been to her.

  The living Earth, Eyna used to call it, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

  In reality, the bare earth wasn’t exciting. Seductive perhaps, and definitely dangerous, but exciting? No. Not that. Never that again.

  And yet after all this time, here he was, strapped into a flyer, hurling himself through the night towards the very same patch of dirt that had consumed his love and been his obsession for as long as he could remember.

  He’d forgotten the sensation of flying, the sickening, lurching feeling in the pit of his stomach that even a lifetime of magging across the city couldn’t prepare you for. He’d forgotten the faint vibration that the resonators sent through the airframe, at the same time soothing and disturbing. He’d forgotten the muted whistle of air being torn apart by the screaming rush of a machine moving through it at almost twice the speed of sound.

  Most of all, he’d forgotten the trepidation – how it felt to sit there, helpless and strapped in, and not knowing if you’d be returning again in a couple of hours or if this time you’d end up lying, exposed and burning, somewhere out there on the merciless dirt that they called the Darklands.

  He remembered it now, though. All of it.

  And this was where he was taking his sons.

  From his position behind the two pilots’ chairs, Dernan Mann studied them both. They’d never admit it, either of them, but the two were so similar. That was never more obvious than now, in the dim monochrome light. Both had their mother’s cheeks, high and wide, the inheritance of some long-dead, long-forgotten northern ancestor. Their noses were the same, too. Both Janil and Larinan had managed to aquire his long, aquiline snout, the same as his own father’s.

  Genetics, he mused. There’s no escaping them. No getting away from who – or what – we truly are. It doesn’t matter how hard we try, how far or fast we run, how much we probe and manipulate ourselves, DNA will always come through in the end.

  The thought gave him hope, somehow.

  Because, Sky knew, at that moment Dernan Mann needed all the hope he could get his hands on.

  The message had come up on his interface earlier that afternoon, soon after the meeting with the Prelate. Janil had no idea, of course, that his father had put a mole into the program that monitored conditions in the exposure chamber, and so the moment he accessed the environmental manager, Dernan Mann had been alerted.

  Looking at his elder child now, Dernan Mann sighed. At least he hadn’t gone through with it – hadn’t given the command. But still, so much anger.

  Dernan didn’t know which was more dangerous, Janil’s rage or Larinan’s lack of it.

  His younger son was staring out of the nosedome, peering into the blackness. The night Larinan had been born had been both the best and the worst night of Dernan Mann’s life.

  All things considered, Larinan’s had been an easy birth, but that wasn’t surprising in a society where difficult childbirth was the exception rather than the norm. Still, it hadn’t been completely simple. Unlike most women, Eyna had insisted on having a ‘natural’ for Larinan. She was strange, that way. Occasionally she got these oddly romantic notions, and when she did nothing Dernan said could persuade her out of them. Larinan’s birth had been one such example.

  ‘Nobody uses natural,’ he’d said. ‘There’s pain, there’s risk, there’s—’

  ‘Dernan, stop trying to talk me out of it.’ She’d rested a hand on her swollen belly. ‘Women have been doing it for thousands of years.’

  ‘The majority of those women didn’t have a choice. You do. The reasons for not having natural are well documented. Sky above, Eyna! Even lower-level women use C-meth. The only ones who have natural nowadays are the ones who slink away to have them off the system – shifties and clanswomen and—’

  ‘You know that’s not true as well as I do. Some women still choose natural.’

  ‘You didn’t use it for Janil.’

  ‘All the more reason for me to do it with Larinan, then. This is my last chance to experience one of the last great rites of passage for women. Think of the subjects. Think of what that girl went through the night we pulled her in.’

&n
bsp; ‘That’s exactly my point. She was half-dead by the time we got to her.’

  ‘She’d experienced something that used to be every woman’s right, something which our precious society has more or less taken from us, whether we wanted it to or not.’

  ‘So you’re doing this to make some kind of a point? A political statement? You do know this isn’t the twentieth century any longer, don’t you?’

  Laughing, Eyna Mann had leaned over and planted a kiss on her husband’s forehead.

  ‘You’re a big softie, you know that, Dernan Mann. You can bluster and argue all you want, but I know the truth about you. I know that basically you’re just scared.’

  ‘Even if that’s true, it’s not without reason.’

  ‘It’ll be fine. Don’t worry.’

  And it had been fine – the birth, at least. Larinan Mann, born naturally after seven hours of labour, younger child of noted scientists Dernan and Eyna Mann, younger brother to Janil, city-sanctioned breach of reproductive protocol, copygen.

  He still lay awake some nights wishing they’d done it differently, wishing his younger child had been born a girl as custom dictated, then feeling guilty for thinking that way.

  But he’d acquiesced to Eyna. He always had. And now, for better or for worse, the three of them were flying out into the most dangerous place on the planet.

  Formerly the most dangerous place on the planet, he had to remind himself. Eyna’s work, now so ably completed by Janil, with its not unexpected but nevertheless frightening conclusions, had inverted pretty much everything Dernan Mann had always taken for granted about Port, including its safety.

  It was a little like the flyer but on a much grander scale. That was another thing he’d forgotten: the artificial, womb-like quality that these machines took on, with the reassuring pulse of the engines and the warm, filtered air recycling through the cabin. In here, the hostile world outside was held at bay by three centimetres of clearcrete, and it was easy to forget how vulnerable you really were – how your life depended on that single slender thread that held everything together.

  It was easy to get complacent. Just like they had in the city.

  ‘Is it much further?’

  Larinan’s question broke into his thoughts and pulled Dernan Mann back into the present.

  ‘Not a lot. We should see the wall in the next few minutes,’ Janil answered.

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘You’ll find out.’

  Even though he’d never shown any interest in the program, Larinan couldn’t hide the edge of excitement in his voice. It was the excitement of the unknown, of plunging into another world. Dernan Mann remembered it well. Eyna used to get the same way every single time they’d flown out. The closer they got to the fieldedge, the more excited she’d become.

  ‘Think about it, Dernan,’ she’d said on one occasion as they slipped into the field. ‘Think about what it must be like to actually expose yourself to that. To stand bareheaded under the sky, barefoot on the dirt, to feel the air – real air – on your cheeks and arms and legs. Don’t tell me there isn’t even a tiny bit of you that wants to try it.’

  ‘No. Not a bit.’

  He’d known it was a lie as he said it. She’d known, too.

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘Even if I am, it would be such a complete breach of protocol—’

  ‘Oh, shush. We both know the field protocols are there to protect the stupid.’

  He’d laughed at her. ‘And you think wanting to go out into the field unprotected doesn’t put you into that category.’

  ‘It’s night, Dernan. There’s no radiation.’

  ‘No solar, perhaps. But there’s still residual.’

  ‘Only in the towns and a few select sites between.’

  They had flown on in silence, until his wife had given him a sideways look.

  ‘Let’s do it.’

  ‘What? No.’

  ‘Yes. Let’s land now. Go out—’

  ‘The monitors—’

  ‘Can be turned off.’ She’d tapped a couple of commands into the interface panel. ‘Just like that. We’re off the system, Dernan.’

  He hadn’t replied and Eyna Mann dropped the flyer, low and fast, pulling up just a few metres above the hard red dirt of the Darklands.

  ‘There’s nothing and nobody for a thousand square kilometres, and rad levels are all well within the acceptable ranges. So, what do you say, husband. Feel up to an adventure?’

  He’d looked out the window. The ground below was indeterminate in the faint starlight. It was like looking out into another world.

  ‘Okay.’

  A few seconds later the flyer had settled onto the hard earth. Eyna was out of her chair almost before the resonators had finished spooling down.

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘Are you certain?’

  ‘Dernan. Come.’

  He’d fumbled with the straps and when he finally clambered up out of his chair he had been startled to find his wife standing there naked.

  ‘Eyna, what in the Sky …’

  ‘Come on, silly.’

  She toggled the hatch open and dropped through it, outside.

  ‘Eyna! Wait.’ He almost threw himself after her. ‘This is insane. It’s … Shi!’ His shin collected the hatch coaming in his haste to catch up. Then he was down on the ground below the flyer. He ducked his head low, automatically, before remembering that he wasn’t wearing a helmet.

  ‘Eyna …’He stopped.

  His wife was standing a few metres away, her pale skin glowing silver in the moonlight, her arms outstretched, legs slightly akimbo, her face reflecting the glory of the sky.

  ‘Feel that, Dernan. Feel it!’

  Cold tingled at Dernan Mann’s nose and cheeks, and the unfamiliar sensation of air moving across his face made him want to scratch.

  ‘Eyna, you need to get your suit on, now.’

  ‘No, Dernan. Listen …’ She waved her wristband at him.

  ‘I can’t hear anything.’

  ‘Of course not. No warning. No exposure. It’s safe.’ Arms still outspread to the night, she turned a slow circle. ‘It’s safe.’

  Dernan looked around, taking in the vastness of the landscape. Seen without the filter of his helmet, everything seemed heightened, the contours of the land sharper. There were colours here, he realised. Even in the washed-out light of the moon, the landscape was dappled with hints of muted red and green and a thousand shades of earth-brown, colours foreign to his skycity-trained eyes.

  ‘It’s …’ he began, but his voice trailed into night silence.

  ‘It’s beautiful, Dernan. It’s the living Earth.’

  Behind them, the flyer looked tiny and insignificant against such an awesomely distant horizon. It gleamed and reflected the stars, as though pushing back against this world in which it had landed.

  ‘Dernan.’ Suddenly his wife’s hands were around him, pulling at the neck fastening that held his field suit in place, her face, speckled with night, lifted to his. ‘You have to feel this.’

  Numbly, unresisting, he let her pull apart the seam and his field suit peeled away. The bare flesh of his arms and legs rumpled into gooseflesh. As the silver material pooled around his ankles, he slipped his toes out of the attached boots and placed his bare feet on the red sand. It felt grainy and strange. The ground was cold, and yet there was some distant hint of heat in it.

  ‘Naked, Dernan.’

  She pulled his underclothes from him and took his hand.

  ‘Let’s walk.’

  And Dernan Mann had walked, hand in hand, naked with his wife, across the Darklands.

  Lari peered through the nosedome. Since leaving the city, the darkness below had been absolute and he’d lost all perception of their height and their speed. Now though, a single long line of glowing red beacons stretched across the horizon, and as they rushed towards it Janil eased the flyer downwards.

  ‘Is that the Darklands?’

&
nbsp; Janil nodded. ‘The start of them.’

  ‘How big are they?’ Lari twisted his head to follow the line of tiny beacons out into the distance. They appeared to go on forever.

  ‘Huge. Thousands of times larger than the whole of Port City,’ his father answered. ‘But with a population of only a few hundred. And that’s declining fast, nowadays.’

  They covered the distance to the wall in surprisingly short time, and when Janil began to wind back their speed, Lari’s weight pulled him sharply forward against his harness. By the time they arrived above the wall, the flyer was almost stationary in the air, and Janil guided it slowly, staying a little above the antenna arrays. Then the searchlights below the nosedome burst into life.

  ‘What do you think?’

  The wall was grey, rising up, featureless and monolithic, from the red sand. It showed no signs of weathering or decay, no wear at all.

  ‘What’s it made of?’

  ‘Plascrete,’ answered their father. ‘These walls were the reason plascrete was initially developed. It’s impermeable, highly mouldable during production, and one hundred percent radiation-reflective. The perfect material for a barrier of this kind and, as we realised later, for making skydomes. Let’s move on, Janil.’

  His brother nodded, flicked the lights off, then pushed the flyer forward across the top of the wall and into the Darklands.

  ‘Welcome to hell,’ he muttered.

  ‘Don’t be cynical, Janil,’ Dernan Mann responded.

  Janil ignored his father. ‘Where do we go first?’

  ‘Go to the facility.’

  ‘You’re the boss.’

  Lari pressed back against his seat as the flyer accelerated.

  ‘Let’s see if anyone’s around.’ Janil touched a control and a round readout appeared in the centre of the console with one tiny, glowing blip at the very edge of it.

  ‘Got one!’ He sounded surprised.

  ‘Is that unusual?’

  ‘This close to the wall it is. Whoever that is, they’re a long way from home.’ Janil glanced at their father. ‘Shall we go take a look?’