The Road Called Good
Mireth is a world built vertically. So is the rescue.
Mireth is the kind of place the frontier is supposed to be for. Cities climb impossible cliffs. Mirrors trade daylight between the cuts. Hoists carry commuters, freight and children who know exactly which rules they can break. Homes, businesses and rivalries occupy different heights of the same astonishing world.
Kestrel arrives to open a road. First, her crew has to learn how Mireth actually works. Then the new cut fails. Suddenly the infrastructure that made ordinary life possible becomes rescue geometry. People are stranded above and below broken lines. Hoists stop. Access routes disappear. Every shortcut crosses somebody's home, somebody's work or somebody else's idea of what the danger really is.
The crew came expecting a difficult job on a strange world. Now they have to help save a place they have only just learned enough to love. The Road Called Good is Book Two of The Far Roads: a hard-SF encounter and rescue adventure about an inhabited frontier worth saving.
Era
2336
Series
Book Two of The Far Roads
Book Two of The Far Roads. A complete story on its own.
Wondering about order? Where The Far Roads sits, and what to read first →
Chapter 1 — The Crossing
The mount took up the whole of bed two and eleven feet of deck that had been walkway since the ship was cut, and Halloway had got used to going round it the long way before anybody else had.
Flat on his back under the near cradle, with the light hooked on the frame above him and the book open on his chest, Halloway put down four numbers and the hour beside them. He had done it at the end of every watch for eight days. Coolant, cold side. Coolant, warm side. Charge held on the bank overnight. Charge lost. The last one was the only one worth writing and it was the only one nobody had ever asked him about.
Sixty-one units lost across nine hours. Sixty-three the night before. He wrote the sixty-one, and did not write that it was better than the sixty-three.
Tavish came down the run with a coil over his shoulder and stopped at the mount. Everybody stopped at the mount.
“You’ve moved the near cradle.”
“Two inches aft.”
“Why.”
“Because the bolt pattern’s two inches aft of where a man who’d never seen this ship put it.” Halloway came out from under and got up, which took him longer than it had at Threap. “Threap’s foreman set that plant on a rock. A rock doesn’t come about.”
Tavish stood looking at it a moment longer, the coil still on his shoulder, and did not say the thing that four people had now not said in his hearing.
“Is it live?”
“It’s cold.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
“No,” Halloway said. “It isn’t.”
The board had the post on it from the sixth bell.
“Post’s calling. Post’s calling — they’ve a hull fouled on their own ground tackle and she’s being walked off the mooring.”
Rahimi came into the office with his coat still over his arm. “Whose hull?”
“MV Windlass. Tender off the post. Four aboard and a boy.”
“How fouled?”
“They put gear over to clear a strop off the post’s second anchor and the strop took their gear instead. There’s fifty metres of the post’s own wire through their after quarter now.” Kajola turned the sheet so it faced him. “It’s rated at nine and it’s carrying eleven, and it’s carrying eleven because Windlass is on the end of it.”
“Can they slip it?”
“They’ve no slip on that end. It went through a fairlead that isn’t a fairlead.”
Wells came in behind Rahimi with her board under her arm and stood at the sill and did not sit down.
“How long’s the wire hold at eleven?”
“The post’s man says a while. He said a while twice and then he said he’d not stand under it.”
Out past the port the crossing had four lights on it and one of them was moving, slowly, the wrong way, and had been for the length of the conversation.
“Nwosu,” Rahimi said, down the passage, and Nwosu was already in the doorway. “If that wire parts with them on it.”
“With four aboard and a boy, at that load, at this range.” Nwosu looked at the deck between his boots. “I would not be bringing anybody back.”
Rahimi put his coat on the hook.
“Get Veski up.”
Halloway heard it in the bay off the galley fan, which carried everything forward of the frame whether you wanted it or not, and he was standing at the mount when Denn came aft with the board.
“They’re putting the lander over.”
“I heard.”
“Rahimi wants your lot on the after ramp and he wants them there before Veski’s on her cradle.” Denn had his pen out and did not have anywhere to put the figure. “How long would it take you.”
“How long would what take me.”
“You know what.”
Halloway went on standing at the mount and did not help him with it.
Denn stood in the bay door with the board flat against his hip and the pen in his fist, and the fan came up through the deck, and he did not say it. Which was fair. Halloway had not said it either, in eight days, to anybody, and had come down here after every watch to write four numbers in a book that was not going to be read.
“Ramp,” Denn said. “Before she’s on her cradle.”
Veski put the lander off at the third bell and forty and was across in under six minutes, and everybody who was not doing something was in the office or the cross-passage where the channel was.
Tavish went with her, and Corrick’s job was done by nobody, because Corrick was at the Cairn with fifty-seven other people and had been for two years.
The channel had the lander’s noise on it and then had less of it, and then had Veski saying she was standing off Windlass’s after quarter and the wire had a bend in it that a wire that size should not have.
“Where,” Rahimi said.
“Two metres off their quarter. It’s not a bend, it’s — ” and there was a moment of the lander’s noise. “It’s making its mind up.”
Nobody in the office said anything. Wells stood at the sill with her thumb flat on it. Ravn had the access book open and her pen on the page and her eyes on the channel light. There was nothing yet to put in the book. She wrote the hour.
Then Tavish, close and breathy, with the channel clipped to his coat.
“I’m going onto their quarter.”
“With what.”
“With what I’ve got. Get the load off their quarter and onto their own bitt, then cut what’s below it.” The channel had his breathing on it and nothing else for a moment. “And I’ll be stood under it when I part it. I know what that is. I’ve a good hand and half of another one and I’d want Veski off my back end and not over my head.”
The channel went to the lander’s noise for a while.
Halloway was at the mount for all of it because the bay was where he was and going forward would have meant standing in the office with the rest of them and being looked at.
Three hundred and forty metres. He had the range off Kajola’s board before he had decided to want it, and the bank had come back up since the sixth bell, and at that range it would part a nine-rated wire before the noise of it got back across the water, from the hull, with nobody stood anywhere at all.
The thing that could do it had come out of a stack of dead plant off a shore that had killed a man, over twelve weeks, on his own hours, in his own hands, with one box of parts he had not paid for, and there was nothing in the whole assembly that was not chain plant, and it was bolted through the frames of a ship whose Master had not put his name to it and would not.
Sixty-one units. He looked at the number on the page under the hooked light and did not look at the mount.
The channel said Tavish was on the quarter. Then it said nothing for four minutes. Then it said the stopper was on and the load was on the bitt and would somebody tell the post to stop hauling, and somebody told the post to stop hauling.
Then Tavish again, flat, and short of breath:
“Cutting.”
Then the channel had the sound of a wire coming apart under eleven tonnes of load two metres from an open microphone, which is not a sound the channel was built to carry, and then it had Veski’s voice saying a word, and then it had Tavish saying, “That’s it off. That’s it off. Get the boy up.”
Ravn wrote the hour.
They were back aboard by the second bell of the ninth and it had taken five hours, and Windlass had her people, and the post had a claim to lodge against nobody.
The argument started in the after bay, where the mount was, and it started there because Halloway would answer a question in a corridor by walking further down it. This time it was not Halloway who started it.
“Three hundred and forty metres,” Wells said. She had come aft with her board and had not put it down. “Kajola had the range on the board the whole time and every one of us could read it.”
“So could I.” Halloway had the fault book against his forearm and had not opened it.
“And you sat under it.”
“Ask him and it’s his to answer,” Halloway said. “That’s why I didn’t. And it’s why you’re in here asking me.”
Tavish was on the crate tops with his coat off and his sleeve pushed up over the good arm and had not yet done anything about the other one. He had the spike out and a bit of the post’s wire in his lap, a short piece, the parted end, which nobody had asked him to bring back.
“He’d have said no,” Tavish said.
“He’d have said nothing.” Wells kept her back to him.
Rahimi came in on the end of that, which she had probably heard coming, and did not ask what it was about.
Wells turned round on him.
“There’s a man been aboard eight days building a thing on your ship you haven’t signed for, and today it sat cold twenty feet from him while Tavish went and put his hands on a wire under eleven tonnes.”
“I was in the office.”
“He’s already lost most of a hand doing that. On the ninety-third.” She had the board still up against her hip. “And you were right. That’s the part I can’t put down anywhere. If it had gone the other way I’d sooner be writing that a man went across in a boat.”
Wells did not have the rest of it ready and did not find it standing there.
Rahimi stood with his hands behind him.
“You’d still want it.”
“I said so at Threap and I’ve not taken it back and I’m not going to.” Wells put the board down flat on the crate at last. “I want it, and I don’t want to be the one who signs for it.”
Nwosu had come as far as the bay door and nobody had heard him do it.
“Nobody’s hurt,” he said. “Nothing parted that wasn’t meant to part.”
“It tells us he came back with his hands,” Wells said.
“It tells you that.” Nwosu did not raise his voice for it. “I was going over on the second boat. If that wire had gone early I’d have been the one bringing him off the quarter, and I’d not have brought him off it.”
Nwosu left it there.
The fan came up through the deck.
“How’s his hand,” Rahimi said.
“Ask him.”
“It’s cold,” Tavish said, without looking up from the wire. “It’s cold and it’ll be cold till the twelfth. It was cold before I went.”
Rahimi looked at the mount then. Everybody in the bay saw him do it, and nobody said anything about that either.
“It’s on the hull and it’s not signed for,” he said. “That’s where we were on the hundred and third and that’s where we are on the ninth. I’m not settling it in here because we had a good day.”
Rahimi went forward. Wells picked her board up off the crate and stood a moment with it against her hip, looking at the near cradle and its two inches, and then went forward as well. At the door she stopped and put two fingers flat on the cradle where it met the frame, and pushed once, and went on.
Halloway came back down after the last watch with the light and the book and got under the near cradle.
Coolant, cold side. Coolant, warm side. Charge held on the bank overnight. Charge lost, and the figure would be off the run to the post and back, so it would be a bad one and it would look like the thing had done something, and it had not done anything, and he wrote it anyway.
Under the four numbers he put the hour the post first came up on Kajola’s board, and the hour the lander went off, and the hour Tavish said that’s it off. Nobody had asked him for those three.
Then he ruled under the lot of it and sat there a while on the deck with his back against the cradle.
Five days to the Mireth approach if the crossing behaved, and then a road nobody had walked, and at the far end of it a place with a name on it and people in it who had asked, in writing, for somebody to come and say whether the road was any good. Wells was the somebody. She would range the way in and then put her own name to whether it could be used or not, and hers was the only name aboard that could go on it. That was the job, and there was a place in it for everybody forward of the frame. Eleven feet of deck that had been walkway would go on being a mount with nobody’s name on it.
Halloway put the light out and went forward the long way round.