A Question of Taste, page 3
When I was young I thought the Wild Hydras were an impossibly glamorous band of gunslingers and big-talkers with their huge hair and high boots and swirling blue gang tattoos. They were the meanest bunch of women this side of Lightshaft 9.
We lived in the DimZone – a borderland between the settled reaches and the underhive. Above us trillions of tons of rockcrete and people reached up into the clouds. Whatever they were.
‘Clouds are like water,’ Clete said, but that sounded daft. ‘Think of steam,’ she said, but it was clear that she was just repeating things other people had told her.
‘Clouds are like pollution,’ Blackeye said, and I believed her. She had that matter-of-fact confidence. And we knew all about pollution. DimZone was the dump into which it all fell and flowed.
I lay imagining uphive sometimes. It seemed an extraordinary place. Millennia of design and expansion, collapse and repair.
Higher up, I heard, the hive was lit with lightshafts and the Necromundan sun. There were domes so vast that they contained mountain ranges of compacted trash, their summits so high that they were lost in darkness; seething rivers of bubbling effluent; deltas of tox-swamps where skiffs of sumpkroc skin skimmed off by-products; and dense forests of fungus. They would take weeks to cross. So boundless that they had their own microclimates and species of flora and fauna, their own stories and myths that made sense of their world. Reaching slabs of stacked-habs set one by the other, the narrow canyons in-between whipping up dirt and debris with each downdraught. Suspended cities of spherical steel-pods, hundreds of them hanging from great chains linked with swing-wires, gantries and stressed-cable bridges.
That was what people said.
But none of us had ever been so high. DimZone was a buffer. A compressed series of strata where the rockcrete domes were broken and crumbling. Where tunnels had collapsed into perilous squeezes, sump pools, sinks and tunnel-siphons. Where the desperate clung on as their feet dangled over the edge. Below was the underhive – and nothing good came from there.
We all wanted to get the hell out of there, but despite that we were fiercely proud to live in the DimZone. We were better than those beneath us, and by Throne, one day, we vowed, we’d get back up to the more civilised areas, and we’d do it the hard way.
We lived on scraps brought down from the city above. We wore fourth-hand clothes. Lived in habs built of old flakboard panels of pressed mushroom starch or rusting sheet metal. All detritus discarded from above. Brought down to our level by the dumpload in heavy cargo lifters of rusting steel. Unloaded by hydraulic claw-arms, and dragged about the tunnels by sweating haulage servitors, their lobotomised bodies embedded in the cart-yokes, their unwashed flesh stinking with years of toil and filth.
The DimZone got its name because the few functioning lightshafts directed only a thin dusk-light down to us. And we were too deep to tap into the working energy cablings that powered the hive’s factorums above. We ran our lumens with an ad hoc mix of wheezing methayne generators, effluent-electric turbines, dams and, of course, the Lightning Farm – a colossal external structure flung out into the void around the outer-spire that channelled raw electric power from the atmospheric turbulence. It was the main source of power for the lower courses of the Western Districts. We all relied on it for our water siphons, the air pumps and scrubbers. It was an erratic energy source. When the weather was extreme the lights would flicker and spark, and the water-stills would run on double speed. When there was a lull, there came the dull rumble of the Chem Falls hydro plant whining into action. The only time the power died was when the gangs who owned it started squabbling.
There were no vast domes near us. Not the kind that featured in stories of uphive. They had been here, I was told, but they’d all collapsed as the hive grew over our heads. All that had survived was a confused and tangled web of small domes, service tunnels, excavated halls, pipes and chasms. It was a compressed zone, being slowly crushed and repaired with each hive quake season, each time a little tighter than before.
Lower down was a slum of lawless wilderness that stretched into the very roots of our world. A foul, foetid, stinking, desperate place, home to mutants and creeping creatures of scales and slime and fangs and bestial hungers. A place that offered escape, flight, deliverance, evasion, forgetting. A place for the shunned. The insane. The absconders. The redeemed. The excluded. The hunted. The damned.
‘But,’ Blackeye said with a wink, ‘it offers certain opportunities.’
Deep, deep down, in the forgotten depths of mines and shafts and chasms, were the scattered remains of the very first settlements upon the planet. It was said that fabulous treasures of art and archeotech were there for the finding.
That wasn’t a trade we dabbled in. There was too much bargaining and bartering for my mother. She liked danger and risk and the kind of problems that could be fixed with the knuckle or the gun. The Wild Hydras were warriors and they guarded the caravan route that went down to the underhive through a maze of tunnels known as Meander’s Guts. It was a perilous descent, prone to hive quakes and floods and all manner of dangers. When an immense rift opened up at the bottom of the Guts, our dome suddenly became an important hub. It was named Quake Chasm, and the Wild Hydras made a fortune keeping the approach tunnels clear of all the dreadful underhive monsters. The gangers brought back trophies of skulls and pelts and fangs and claws. Things that had names, and those that were unique creations of the tox-pools below, and which crept upwards in search of human blood.
We made a fortune charging tithes on each hiver heading to the Quake Chasm. Some went game hunting with cherished hotshot and long-las rifles slung over their shoulders. Others needed to escape, and fast. Others still were simply adventurers. Brave, heedless, desperate: they paid their credits and passed downwards with big hopes, big words and big guns. Most never came back. The underhive consumed them. Kept their bones and their names hidden deep in its bowels. Let nothing return.
Once news of the first discoveries started to appear then it didn’t take long for the guilders to hear. The Merchant Guild. In a world of murder, felony, bloodshed and lynching, they were the untouchables. The power brokers of the hives. The grease that kept us all working. Or so they told us. And if you crossed them then they used their massive financial muscle to squash you like a spitting-roach slammed with a power hammer.
Killing a guilder would bring swift and brutal retribution. It was a terrible crime that was spoken of in hushed voices, and the faces of the guilty were daubed all over the Western Districts – hoardings plastered inches thick with placards, posters and signboards bearing sketched mugshots, and the familiar stencilled words, Wanted: Dead. It was an easy way for the insane to make a name for themselves. They got their fifteen minutes of infamy.
So when news came that the guilders were on their way, my mother was edgy. It was both a threat and an opportunity. Which way the credit fell was up to her.
She prepared herself as she did for a battle. Spiked hair, vivid make-up, guns and knives loaded, oiled and honed.
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Denny Flowers, A Question of Taste
