Earther, Banger, Scrubber

The Paths

Trell breathed air through her suc. A small plastic disc she sucked between her teeth, her lips creating a seal to its specially constructed shell. You could not live out here without one. To breathe the carbon dioxide rich air was death. She crested the cracked permacrete slope, perfectly balanced on her feet, her sythn boots gripping better than her feet alone ever could, and launched herself feet first into a controlled slide down the curving path. She felt the thrill of the acceleration, her synth pants and jacket fixing her to the glide of the path as her boots had done, her eyes honed on the twists ahead trusting the sythn to hold her as it had always done. She would ride the path, to fall was death. Her path was three metres wide, she had space to lean into and glide out of the twisting curves.

Behind her she heard the snarling, a deep sensory throb that entered your ears and resonated down through all your bones. She sucked her fear down with every breath she took through her suc rebreather. The snarling was receding, the hounds would not follow. She had outrun them again.

The first of the twisting turns came up fast and Trell rode into it, swinging her body like an air luber righting themselves or a speed biker pushing into a skid. She allowed her instincts to flow, twisting and turning with the permacrete path. Up and into the second twist she rode, her body sliding right towards the edge of the path as she twisted with it round and round, almost inverted, then down and down as the path twisted back, righting itself. The gun holstered to her thigh weighed against her muscle as gravity forced it against her. She thundered into the second twist, her core muscles straining as she took the g-force of the tightening turn. Again twisting till almost inverted, her speed and the synth weave of her jacket and pants holding her to the hard permacrete path. The knife sheathed on her right breast reassuring as it pressed her flesh. Then she was righted and racing down the final incline. Towards the gap. A gaping maw in the tired, worn city scape. Tired and old, worn yet on a sunny day still glistening cityscape. It was not sunny today, cloudy, heavy grey skies hung above, like almost every day. Not raining though. Thankfully not raining Trill told the clouds in her thoughts. Rain was death, turning the permacrete paths to slippy rivers. Rain at eve and in the night cloud banks, she thought, hold your burden till eve and night when she would be home.

Trell looked to her left. She liked to look at the fallen towers, broken monoliths where people once lived, so long past, before their world fell. The great cluster of monos was there, rising high above the cityscape about it. Each mono had once risen many miles into the sky, even the shortest still now reached above a kilometre. Dangerous places now. Sometimes though bountiful in tech for scrabbers who made it in and out again, then back home.

The paths crisscrossed the city scape, pathways that wove over roads and bridges, round monos and skyers, great scrapers reaching for the clouds themselves, but shorter than the monos, built aeons before just the same. Where skyers reached for the clouds, monos once stretched up till they broke into the sky itself. Trell strained her neck to glimpse the monos till the last as her path pulled her away. Always such a sight hanging broken in the sky.

She refocused her attention to what lay below her. She counted off the landmarks that marked her way as she sped on down and down, the path slaloming its way between skyers and rises and falls in the landscape. It wasn’t the ground below her. It was layer upon layer of the floors of the cityscape. She marked the first of the landmarks, a dome of metal skeleton ribs about twenty feet below her path to her left. The dome stood still and some of the blue steel plates that once completed it’s crown remained in place, strangely pure of colour, but now it resembled a long killed deer. One the wolves had been at, with its ribs exposed and whatever life it had once throbbed with long gone. Dead. Everything on the surface was dead. Everything but the cybos and the scrubbers and pockets of plant life. Scrubbers like her.

The second landmark rose from the city scape beneath her, a solid rectangular manufactorum long abandoned. It’s roof ran on for two kilometres, and Trell raced above it for over a minute. It was smaller than the one she called home. Perhaps that was what had killed it. Too small to survive. She could see the long shallow curve ahead that would take her to the third and final landmark before the drop. She wondered if Gav was there today. She decided she would step off and find out. Her Warrant would be pissed if she was late to clock in but there were still several hours till nightfall. Nightfall was death on the cityscape surface.

There ahead rose the cathedral spire, to the right of her path. So high above the cityscape around the base of the spire passed the path itself, the upper spire rising higher Still. A danger sometimes, if a hound or hawk should choose to perch there. Trell looked about and touched her heels to the path to slow her a little. The synth tech cloth woven into her heels working to her will. Synth gels secreted to act on the permacrete path. The path was surprisingly dry, synth secretions creating small sparks as dust and dirt combusted in the heat produced from the friction before the air dissipated it into the general atmosphere. The wind dries all, Trell thought, another memory of man’s wisdom.

There was nothing lurking on the cathedral spire and she quickly lifted her right arm and checked her display, a leather band holding it in place on her wrist. The device was scanning, downloading data from the satellite above. It blipped green. No target markers identified, no movement identifiers. The wind was up, so that was no guarantee there wasn’t something lurking around Trill thought. But no cybos were present she was sure, their electronic signatures would have lit her display up like company day, when fireworks lit up the sky. Gav could be there Trell thought to herself. He was too smart to be caught on a sat. He’d be tucked up in a nook, waiting. If he was here today.

The cathedral drew alongside and Trell pushed herself up from her heels and stepped off the side of the path into the empty air. She was still travelling fast despite slowing her pace, perhaps ten kilometres per hour. She took another step into empty air, then her third step found the stone rail that circled the platform forming a balcony about the spire. The synth in her shoes arrested her pace, and she bounded down onto the balcony, all the momentum of her travel dispelled as she landed surely, knees bent to absorb what energy her body had to deal with. Trell reached into the pocket on the inside of her jacket, over her left breast, and touched the cold metal of the heart shaped locket hanging there on a chain secured to the inside. Her heart stone, ‘her way home wherever she may be’. She remembered her mother’s words.Her ma had gifted it to her when she reached her thirteenth name day. Just as her grandmother had gifted it to her mother years before. Trell could no longer remember her grandmother, only from pics her mother kept.

The spire

Gav was there, hidden in a shadow behind a stone wall. Trell smiled as she saw him, her eyes lifting from her display which still tracked sat data on the area. Still showing clear.

“Hey Banger, glad I waited.” Gav said. He had a suc between his teeth too, but the device didn’t interfere with speech or his smile. The only thing you couldn’t do with one engaged was shout. They had an amplifier built in, that made your voice louder if you needed it, but it wasn’t like a fleshy shout, it was all metallic, like a cybo version of your voice. He called her Banger, it was her tribe she supposed. She didn’t call him after his, ‘cept when she mentioned him at home. Then she called him by her tribe’s name for him, Hauler.

“Glad I ignored this thing. You look well.” Trell replied as she waved her wrist display in his direction.

“You well? Good range?” He asked her. He was a scrubber too, just like her.

She stopped a few feet from him, unsure whether to close the distance further. Caution paid off out here, and scrubbers kept their distance most times. She had met Gav a few weeks ago, on a scrub, he had got to the floor in the skyer before her. When she’d first seen him he had been hanging from the blown window frame, evidently about to sail down the side. The wind had him, but his grip on the frame kept him steady. He was six feet tall, she guessed a year or two older than her. He was nice looking, and had a smile that had put her at ease that first time she’d seen him. Just like today. She nodded in reply.

“You know I hide well.” He smiled broadly at her and closed the gap between them a step. His eyes were blue, and full of interest. “ How was your ride out today. I heard hounds.” The concern in his voice made her feel both like laughing and pleased somehow.

“Yeah I was fine. A pack came through the western ports, tracked onto me, but I hit the path and was gone before they got close.”

“You be careful out there. I’d hate to miss you air stepping. Score?”

Air stepping, it was what Gav called stepping off the path, that step or two where your feet were on nothing solid. Not everyone could do it. If you couldn’t do it you couldn’t hope to be a scrubber. Speed and balance was all, kept you alive.

“Us scrubbers have to stick together right?” He added.

“Yeah.” Trell said. “You have to hang with the best to learn from the best.” Gav’s eyes lit with amusement. She slipped a drive from a pouch on her right breast and waved the small black cuboid at him. It was barely the length of a third of a digit, just the last knuckle to the tip of her finger. She had no gloves, she found it easier to use her fingers without them. Dexterity was a survival skill for a scrubber. Gav had gloves, stretchy synth, a deep dark brown. She thought they probably didn’t hinder him. They must have cost, she’d only seen similar worn by engineers back home. Gav made a playful lunge for the drive and Trell stepped smoothly out of reach. They circled each other.

“A good find. Intact?” He asked.

“It is.” Trell said as she slotted the drive back into its pouch and fastened the velcro to seal it.

“Be a boon for your factor yeah.” Gav said. The factor, the slang for a manufactorum. These great, working, life giving relics from the past, built when the earth had air you could breathe unfiltered. Trell knew the value of the drive. Selly had told her himself. With his white whiskers and orange lensed goggles that allowed him to see and zoom into tiny detail. She couldn’t remember ever seeing him without them on. He was older than almost anyone she knew. She presumed his eyes didn’t see too well. The other techs at home were all younger and though some used goggles for work they didn’t wear them elsewise. For a half moment she thought of the dimimly lit Celler two nights past, the thumping beat of the music blaring from the speakers and the gaggle of techs propping up one end of the bar. It was rare for them to get out as a group. Always on their shift rotations and being called to one emergency or another. Rafy had been with them, still in the greys of his work, loose fitting pants and shirt. They had seen one another for a while, till a few months past. That’s when she had first met Gav.

“Your home must be doing great, all the stories you tell of sailing down the skyers.” Trell said.

Gav smiled at her.

“I don’t ask about anything but which skyer I need to climb next.” He stepped in gently, right up close to her. He pointed up from their place on the balcony to the dense grey banks of cloud resting heavily above them. “We could travel beyond them.”

“The clouds? Up where the loaders go?” Trell asked, looking up too. She could imagine what lay beyond, she’d caught glimpses on rare clear nights. The moon, the stars. “They say there are so many stars. Do you think it’s so?” Trell asked him. Breathing in his scent, and feeling the closeness of him here in this place.

“Beyond counting.” Gav said. “We could go. You and I. Hitch a ride on a loader.”

Trell looked away from the heavy lidded clouds and looked intently at Gav’s face, aware for any sign of a jest.

He looked down at her. Their eyes held for a long moment. Then Trell twirled away.

“I gotta go. Time is credits.” She smiled broadly as she tapped her pouch where the drive nestled snugly.

“See you in a few days.” Gav said.

“You scrubbing far?” Trell asked as she reached the stone wall of the balcony of the cathedral spire and balanced on it, her path a metre behind her ranging down and away.

“Yeah, a ranging. I’ll ping you.”

“Tread well.” Trell said and stepped lightly back with a flick of her toe that activated the synth in the sole on her boot, she sprang the full metre backwards effortlessly. She waved as she stepped and Gav stood there smiling broadly at her.

Suddenly her waving wrist lit up red, the display alerting her. All her senses snapped into focus. She looked at the display as she sailed backwards towards her path. Movement showed bright and fiery on the display, close and closing fast, beats sounding from the tiny bud in her ear. Trell looked from her display to Gav as she sailed through the air. She could see he had snapped alert as quick as she had, his own display must have flashed the same urgent warning, his bud blaring haste.

Gav was already moving she saw, not towards her and the relative safety of the permacrete path though. He headed into the cathedral spire, bounding with his own synth boots, one sailing step taking him up into the air and towards the old stone steps that led up the spire.

“Run!” Trell shouted, the tin tone echoing from her suc, and then her foot landed on the permacrete path and she began to accelerate rapidly. She descended as she slide away and Gav was lost behind the cathedral instantly. He had to be heading to the spire rooftop, he could jump and sail from there to the safety of her path she thought. As she accelerated she saw the hound. So massive and terrifying her voice caught hard in her throat. It burst from the stairwell leading up from the depths of the cathedral below. How could the beast not have been picked up by the scans? She had no answers.

The hound was thick set, it’s shoulders and body sleek and brown, a cybo construct synthed to a brain. Her people didn’t know where these hounds came from or who had made them, but they taught every child to fear them. Faster than a man, they could leap further, fall uninjured, and to their fore they had massive jaws wide enough to snap a limb or snare your head, filled with hard metallic teeth, and claws on each smooth brown paw the same. They had dogs in the manufactorum, kept back home to help secure the camp, but those were flesh and blood, air breathing dogs. Friends to those they knew. These hounds were built to hunt in the poisonous air, built to bring death.

Trell fell onto her back as she accelerated, doing as she had trained and practised these last six months. It was the only way to slide as the speed built, lest the push of the bad air send her to her doom. She craned her neck to look behind her. Still no sign of Gav. Her wrist display flashed red. Two, no three rapidly moving. She couldn’t be sure which were hounds and which if any was Gav. She took a sliver of hope from the fact all were moving. The chase was on but the quarry surely not captured.

Behind her a hound landed on her path, gnashing teeth all she saw and the bone chilling snarl curdling her blood. Damn she thought. The path was level with the cathedral balcony and the hound had pounced across the void. Trell was accelerating fast now, into a low rise that pulled up into the twisting turn to the great drop. The hound was charging behind her. At first the distance between them remained even, but as she curved her legs into the turning rise she glanced behind again and the hound was closing.

Trell’s mouth ran dry like the beds rumoured to run beneath the upper levels of the cityscape. She felt clammy and hot flushed, the heat of the day enhanced as her body pumped itself for flight. But there was no flight, only the slide, to crest the rise and twist into the great drop. The rise seemed to take an age, it could only have been four or five seconds, yet even in that short time she could sense with the fine finesse of the hairs on her arms and neck that the hound closed. Her ears confirmed as it’s snarling roared close with a bone shaking pitch. Too close.

Trell risked a look behind, craning her neck. The twist into the drop was ahead, she would enter it in a moment, but instinct, a base fear, forced her to look back once more. The hound was there, only a few metres behind her. It dwarfed her, barely fitting to the path. All smooth brown cybo shell working to drive at her. It’s legs pistoned it forward but had not the grip of her synth clothing. The hound was careening up the slope of the path, closer and closer it’s jaws reaching for her. She had to reach the drop. The drop!

Trell snapped her head back round just as the path tilted into a 45 degree roll. She was out of position, just a fraction, but she knew a fraction could be death. She swung her shoulders, rolling her hips and pushing her heel into the path. She felt the jolt like running into a wall, vibrating her ankle, her shin painfully, her hip excruciatingly. Her body swung into the curve as the path inverted to 90 degrees then 180 degrees. Her shoulder rode the inside curve and she felt her head pressed into the permacrete. She cried out with an agonised howl as sharp fire exploded in her shoulder and neck and her cheek burnt in the friction of contact with the permacrete. But she rode the path, rode into the twist and then into the great dive as the path dropped sharply down.

Trell fought to get her legs straight and loose and her shoulder blades flat to the permacrete. She knew she was in shock and pain but had no time to comprehend. She was accelerating as fast as she was able to go. Rayleigh, an air luber, had once told her the great drop was as fast as you could fall. Only the synth was holding you to the path. If you flew on a disc as he did and fell, you would fall no faster. Fall, she was falling.

The wind rushed past her face, painfully bracing where her head had hit the permacrete. She craned her head, fear driving past the agony of doing so. The hound hung behind her, beneath the 180 degree twist of the path, upside down to her view. It’s legs pistoned as though it still ran, but Trell knew it didn’t. It was seemingly hanging in the air. Her path took her down but on the faintest incline, away from the hound. Time slowed like a pic taken now on show, the hound hanging there in empty sky, limbs scrabbling for purchase on empty air. It didn’t seem so large now.

Distance a part of Trell’s brain shouted to her as though from from far away. The hound had no eyes. That was the sight she couldn’t look away from. There were slits in its brown shell where eyes should be, but only a soft red light deep within them glowed there. No eyes. She realised the hound was falling too, it was well below the inverted curve of the path now, many metres behind her, falling head first.

She pulled her eyes down to her feet. The maw was coming. She saw it. A great black jagged hole the path fed into. Jagged teeth to crank her bones. No Trell told herself. No just the maw. She straightened up, let the sythn and the pull of the earth take her down, down so fast, and into the maw.

The maw

Trell landed on the padded crash mats. Massive inflated mats set beneath the end of the path to catch any who fell. She had fallen. No air stepping as she was known for. For the first time. The landing knocked the wind from her and all she could do was lay there. She heard voices raised and rushed. Then felt hands lifting her as distant questions rang strangely in her ears.

“Are you ok?”

“Can you hear me?”

“What is your name?”

She was being carried now, by legs and arms, and then laid on a bed. A stretcher she knew.

“Trell.” She tried to say. Then again stronger. “Trell.”

Twenty minutes later Trell sat on a large air bag, her face slathered in a slime to heal where it had traveled the permacrete and burnt and rubbed away. The pain was gone. She’d been slimed before many times. They grew it in vats in a lab to one end of the manufactorum. Her shoulder was sore still, popped back into its socket by a med, the weight of her right arm supported in a sling the med had fashioned for her. She hadn’t known the girl, but had been grateful for the help and the pills she had been offered and swallowed. The pain would ebb away.

“Your scrub?” Warrant Milligan asked when he arrived. He was dressed in his blue duty uniform with his rank emblazoned on his shoulders and breast. The Warrant on duty commanded all breech actions. All on mission beyond the habitat walled by their miles long manufactorum. Scrubbers like Trell fell under his command when out on a scrub.

“A success sir.” Trell reached clumsily over with her left hand up to the pouch on her breast and pulled the drive clear. Milligan took it and it turned it in the fingers of his brown gloved hand. The leather work was solid spec, not bespoke. Milligan was always very much a company man.

“Fine work soldier. Undamaged. Let’s hope it contains the data drives forecast.”

Trell knew little of data drives, that was work for techs, but she knew her mission objective should replace the damaged tech data that drove the key production line of the habitat.

“Yes sir.” She went to salute but winced instead as her injured shoulder protested and her arm caught in the sling.

“You are on recovery leave soldier, two days.”

“Yes sir.” She said. With that Milligan turned on his heel and left her.

Trell rested back onto the air bed cushions, sinking into them. Two days leave, she’d be tabbed up like now, floating high. With luck she could hook up with some of her crew. She blinked open the holo from her wrist display, and navigated to her groups. Hopefully the company will have credited her account by the time she hit the bars. She could do with some Gumba rather than the pig swill lager they drew from the steel barrels. Fingers crossed. Trell crossed her left fingers.

It was several hours later when Trell stood in the dome against the glass to one side of a space some half mile across, her arm still in the sling but the slime gone from her face, it’s work done. The dome was the only green oasis in all the factor. The joint highest point any worker with credits to pay could go in the whole habitat.

Half the reinforced dome was covered by a metal shield. You could not look out away from the manufactorum she called home. Only inwards and up. Above her the heavy deep grey clouds still hung in the sky and rain fell now as dusk drew in, droplets sitting on the glass. The light from the sun, hidden by the clouds but lighting them from behind, could be seen slowly falling to where the horizon would be. All hidden by the gloomy cloudscape. ‘The fate of earth’, her ma had told her when once she asked about why it was always so cloudy. The planet had been this baked ball of hot gas for centuries. History lessons on the vid told of ancient times when earth had blue skies, temperate climes and breathable oxygen rich air. The vids could only estimate when that changed. When earth choked.

Below her Trell could see the loaders. Vast lifters to haul the manufactorum’s bounty away to places Trell dreamt of. One was lifting slowly, smoothly despite the lashing rain and strong cross winds. She could see the flag markers were whipped this way and that. There was no sound from the outside in the dome. She didn’t hear the roar of the loaders lift drives as it powered upwards. So smooth and fast as always. The sounds Trill heard were the thumping background noise of the main production belts in full flow. The sound of the factor, of home, as crates of cylinders in all and many sizes filled with processed gases, with sythn, with the same slime that had fixed her cheek, her head, her ear.

Those were the pounding main belts of her manufactorum. Making the main products the Bangers sold. Bangers, named for the sound the manufactorum pounded out when in full flow. Up here you could dream of where the loaders traveled to, push the banging to the background, dream of what lay beyond.

She watched as the loader that had lifted switched to its propulsion drives and a white glow lit its rear and fat wings. The loader didn’t use its wings for lift or flight the way the cybo hawks did when they hunted over the cityscape from the skies just as the hounds hunted from below. Anti grav and drive tech fulfilled those needs better than true wings ever could. In Trell’s life no loader had crashed on landing or lift off from the manufactorum, though hundreds came and went most months.

It was rare for a crew to disembark. She had heard rumours most weren’t crewed at all. She found that hard to believe. If a hound or hawk had to be cybo’d to a living brain, how could something that could pierce clouds do so on tech alone? The loader accelerated sharply and was gone into the cloud. Up and out, beyond earth, to dock once more on a starship. Trell had seen vids of starships, but she couldn’t imagine them as they were described. Miles and miles in length. Bigger than her home. The company had no starships. Just belts and habitat.

Trell thought back to the words Gav had said to her and strained her eyes, pushing right up to the glass pane, to look over the landing zone, over the second loader nestled on the landing bay for loading, all the way to her dome’s twin. The solar rose in parallel some mile away. She looked hard, looked past the solar’s distant glassy dome lit bright from within, into the clouds beyond. She thought she could see the blue white glare of a drive, subdued by the lashing rain and heavy weight of dark cloud. Then another. Fainter still. The blue white glare of loaders rising from other manufactorums.

On those rare clear days you could see them better, at least till the heavy carbon infused air blurred the distance. So many loaders, rising and falling, each from another manufactorom. Each manufactorum supplied with its needs by the smaller network of working factors around it. Each its own feeding belt. So many. All trapped beneath the heavy veil of poisonous air. Except those few, those children taken. Like her sister. She had tried to hang on to the memories of what her sister had been like, but time had woven memories with dreams. She couldn’t picture her face anymore. She thought of Gav. If he was still alive, could he make her the exception, the child to leave rather than be taken? Trell stared into the cloud, and through it to the starfields of space she imagined there.