Spares. Michael Marshall Smith
to leave at that point, but on the other hand, some people decided to stay. There were plenty of phones and meeting rooms, and the Mall had its own node on the Matrix. People could work. There were enormous quantities of food, consumer goods and clean sheets. People could live. There were, frankly, worse places to hang around.
They never got the engines going again. Maybe they were fixable, but they left it a little too late. After a couple of days people started to make their way in from the outside; people who'd been homeless since old Richmond went up in flames; people who lived in the backwoods; people who'd heard about the food courts and just wanted a spot of lunch. They came off the plain and out of the mountains and hammered on the doors. Initially, security turned them back like they were supposed to, but there were an awful lot of them and some were pretty pissed. For them the only thing worse than having to live in Richmond had been not having it to live in any more.
The security guards got together and came up with a plan. They would let people in, and they would charge them for it.
There was a period, maybe as long as six months, when Flight MA 156 was in flux, when no one was really sure if it was going to take off again. Then the tide turned, and people knew it was not. By then they didn't want it to. It was home. Areas inside the ship were knocked through, torn down, redeveloped. The original passengers staked out the upper floors and began to build on top of the Mall, competing to see who could get furthest from the mounting poor on the lower levels. A secondary town grew up around the Mall at ground level – the Portal into the city.
Eventually, the local utility companies just plumbed the whole lot in, and New Richmond was born. Apart from its unusual provenance and extreme oblongness, New Richmond is now just a city like anywhere else. If you didn't know, you might think it was just a rather bizarre town planning mistake.
But it's said that in a lost room, somewhere deep in the bowels of the city, there remains a forgotten suitcase, left there accidentally by one of the first families to leave, a mute testament to the city's birth. Nobody knows where this room is, and most people believe it's just an urban myth. Because that's what Flight MA 156 is, these days. Urban.
But I've always believed it, just like I wonder if sometimes, on some nights, the city itself must raise its eyes when it hears the other MegaMalls trundling slowly overhead. I wonder if it watches the skies, and sees them pass, and knows in some way that's where it should be. Up there in the heavens, not battered onto the Earth. But then which of us doesn't believe something like that, and how few of us are right.
‘Two hundred dollars,’ the man said, his eyes trying to look cool and watchful at the same time, and making a fearful mess of both. He wasn't talking about what I was trying to sell. I wasn't even in New Richmond yet. It was after eight o'clock at night and I was losing patience and running out of time.
‘Bullshit,’ I said. ‘Fifty is the rate.’
The man laughed with genuine amusement.
‘You been away or something man? Shit, I can't barely remember when fifty dollars was the rate.’
‘Fifty dollars,’ I said again. I guess I was hoping if I said it often enough I'd end up neurolinguistically programming him. I was standing in front of a door, a door which was hidden in the basement of a building in the Portal settlement, the high-rise nightmare of ragged buildings and shanty dwellings which surrounds New Richmond proper. I was there because this particular building had been constructed right up against the exterior wall of the city, inside which I needed to be. I'd put up with being frisked on entry by the street gang which was currently controlling the building, and had already paid twenty dollars ‘tax’ on my gun. I didn't have two hundred dollars, I barely had a hundred, and I was in a hurry.
The man shrugged. ‘So go in the main entrance.’
I stuffed my hands into my jacket pockets, fighting back anger and panic in equal measure. ‘And don't be thinking about bringing out your gun,’ he continued, mildly. ‘Cos there's three brothers you can't even see with rifles trained on yo ass.’
I couldn't go in the main gates, as he well knew. No one came to this part of the Portal town if they could enter New Richmond through one of the legitimate entrances. Going in that way meant running your ownCard through the machines, thus broadcasting your name to the cops, the city administration and anyone else who had a tap on the line.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘I've been this way before. I don't need a guide, I just need to get past you. Fifty dollars is what I have.’
The man turned away and signalled into the darkness with an upwards nod of his head. I heard the sound of several sets of feet padding out of the darkness towards me.
‘You still piecing your action from Howie “The Plan”?’ I asked, casually. The footsteps behind stopped, and the man turned to look at me again, eyes watchful.
‘What you know about Mr Amos?’ he asked.
‘Not much,’ I said, though I did. Howie was a medium-time crook operating out of the eighth floor. He ran some girls, owned a bar, and had pieces of the drugs action so far down the chain that he was tolerated by the real heavy-hitters above. He was a fat, affable man with a surprising shock of blond hair, but he was fitter than he looked and knew how to keep a secret. Late at night, when most of the customers were gone, he'd been known to sit in with his house blues band and play a hell of a lot better than you'd expect. He didn't have the Bright Eyes, but he could have done. He was a stand-up guy.
‘Just enough,’ I continued, ‘to tell the wrong people about some of the deals they don't know he's into. And if he thinks that information came from you guys, well …’
‘Why would he get to thinking that?’ the man asked, though he was losing heart. These guys were below bottom-rung lowlife: hardly on the ladder. They most likely didn't even know where the ladder was, and had to use steps the whole time. Running this door was as close as they got to operating in New Richmond. Guys like that don't want to tangle with the jungle inside. It bites.
‘I can't imagine,’ I said. ‘Look. Fifty dollars. Then on my way out I give you the other hundred fifty.’
For all he knew I was never coming out, but fifty was better than no cash and a lot of potential grief. He stepped aside. I peeled the notes off, and he opened the door.
‘And I'll give you an extra twenty,’ I added, ‘if you keep any mention of me off the list you sell to the cops.’
‘Don't know what you're talking about,’ he said stonily, but there was a change in his attitude. ‘But I'll take your twenty.’
I nodded and walked through the door. It shut behind me, and for the first time in five years I was inside New Richmond.
The door led into an old service corridor, which meandered towards the lower engine block through miles of dank and creepy corridors. There's nothing of value to be had there, and that's why nobody had cared when external construction had covered up the entrance. The one thing no one was going to be trying to do was get the engines going again. There's an old story which says one of the original repair drones still toils away down there somewhere, grown old and insane, but even I don't believe that.
For a long time the door was forgotten, and then somebody rediscovered it and realized its potential value as a covert entrance to the city. An adjunct to the service corridor leads via the exhaust ducts to a hidden and little-known staircase, which leads up to the second floor of the old Mall.
But I wasn't going to be going that way. I quickly followed the corridor for two hundred yards, past panels etched and stained with rust. It's eerily silent down there, perhaps the only truly quiet part of the city. The corridor took a sharpish right turn, and you could see the dim and intermittent lights in the ceiling disappearing towards the next turn, about half a mile ahead. Instead of following them I gathered myself and leapt upwards, arms straight above me, hands balled into fists. They hit a panel of the roof and it popped up and over, revealing a dark space beyond. I took a quick glance back to ensure no one was watching, jumped up again and pulled myself up through the hole.
When