Saturn's Children by Charles Stross Page A

rested; I’ll still be alive when my nemesis inches into view, rumbling inexorably toward me on a thousand wheels. The plinth my head rests on is part of the switchgear for swapping out undercarriage bogies. I try to sit up, but I only make it a few centimeters before I yank my hair painfully. The little thugs have tied it around one of the track ties. How long have I got? I wonder. Probably not long, a phantom memory answers; Cinnabar rolls at nearly thirteen kilometers an hour, and the twilight zone isn’t that wide. I prod for more details, but the echo is infuriatingly fuzzy and nonspecific. It’s probably a memory of Juliette’s, but she isn’t integrated enough for joined-up thinking yet. And she never will be, I realize: The wheels will crush my head and her soul chip like micrometeoroid debris while Stone’s sibs joke and watch my demise from an observation balcony on the prow of the city.
    It’s getting darker. The heat beating on the back of my head is beginning to let up. What about the track-repair gangs? I wonder. Surely they’ll see me . . . But maybe not: Flint and Slate wouldn’t have positioned me in front of a team of potential rescuers, would they? How long will it take Paris to realize I’m gone? I ask. Too long, says the icy-cold echo that knows too much about this desolate wasteland. You don’t want to rely on him, anyway.
    Alright, smarty-pants, I think irritably, you get me out of this!
    Something moves in the knife-edged shadows near the tracks. I roll my eyes in its direction, trying to ignore the whiteout. Who are you? Stone’s witness, here to watch me die?
    I have a sudden intuition. Let me handle this, says a certainty bubbling up from the back of my head. I’m not sure whose memory it is, but she feels almost happy. I let go, and everything slides into place.
    I concentrate on my chromatophores, tweaking the ones opposite the solar inferno away from their default reflectivity. I can mess with my texture and color, tune my skin from pink goo softness to refraction-grating scales. As a brief experiment I roughen the skin on my wrists and grate at my bonds with denticles of silicon; but there’s not enough freedom of movement to get anywhere—I’ll never cut those ties in time. A shame, but Stone’s vengeful sibs aren’t that stupid. So I work on my skin texture some more. Refraction. What I’m about to try is fiddly work, and if I slip from the mirror finish too soon, I’ll overheat badly, maybe cook myself. Diffract, diffract. Reddening my skin, roughening . . .
    The thing in the shadows moves, a curious rippling darkness against the penumbral background. I flex my back and try to turn my head farther, ignoring the tearing pain in my scalp. “Help,” I yell as loudly as I can in electrospeak. I can feel the heat licking around the edges of my mirror-finished back, warming my face as the diffractive spines sprouting from my chromatophores bend the solar backlight around me. I must look like a black silhouette of a burning woman, surrounded by a ruby red border. I tense, and force my spines to lie flat. Then I tense the other way, sticking them upright. A flashing ruby red border, that’s what I want. The only color in this stark, black-and-white landscape. Pay attention to me!
    The track hums beneath my cheek as I flare and fade, flare and fade. The barely visible thing snuffles around the sleeper ties, then turns toward me, and I have a nagging feeling that I’ve seen it before. It? Him. “Help!” I shriek, but all that comes out is a whisper. The track hums again as Cinnabar, a saucer-shaped bowl beneath a crystal dome, rolls ponderously into view from behind the jagged gash in the crater’s rim wall. The pale needles of half a hundred towers creep toward me on a thousand steel wheels, grinding all to dust beneath their juggernaut tread. The track squeals and grates like a living thing. It’s only a few kilometers away—the close horizon is deceptive. “Help!” I