Transit By Ben Aaronovitch Prologue The Doctor stood alone on a Devonian beach and tried to persuade the lungfish to return to the sea. 'You won't like it,' said the Doctor. He noticed that the fish's fins had become short stubby legs. It had become an Ichthyostega, the first true amphibian. The Doctor checked his watch. About two million years early at that. 'You're making a big mistake,' said the Doctor. The amphibian ignored him, its flat head fixed on the line of cool vegetation ahead. It had covered a quarter of the distance across the hot white sand. 'I know it's crowded in there,' pleaded the Doctor. 'I know the food chain is overstocked, I know it's a fish-eat-fish ocean ...' He trailed off. The gill slits had healed up, the legs lengthened. Claws sprouted from the feet. The panting mouth was full of teeth. From across the sea came the sound of thunder. 'Don't do it," said the Doctor. But too late. The reptile was suddenly flushed with hot blood. Hair sprouted over its body, it got off its belly and surged up the beach, getting smaller all the time. By the time the Doctor caught up with it, the mammal was five centimetres long and cowering behind a shell. From the forest ahead came the crash and roar of gigantic lizards. The Doctor hunkered down and stared at the rodent. Its small eyes gazed over the half of the beach that remained. The Doctor felt that it should at least look terrified but it didn't. It looked expectant. There was a sudden scream in the stratosphere and the earth bucked under their feet. 'Did that sound like a ship full of Cybermen to you?' asked the Doctor. The sky went black with dust, the temperature dropped, the forest echoed with the meaty thump of collapsing species. 'I was there, you know,' said the Doctor. 'I lost a good friend. Not that you care.' The dust cleared from the sky. The sun came out. The forest was silent. The rodent ran for the treeline. The wind blew in from the sea, bringing the smell of salt; from the horizon dark clouds raced towards the shore. When the Doctor looked back the animal was walking upright, flexing its new hands. As he watched the biped shed her fur. Breasts sprouted, the cranium ballooned backwards, the forehead lifted. Intelligence flared in brown eyes, the co-ordinated digits of her right hand picked up a stick and she looked around for something to hit with it. The storm struck the beach. The Doctor struggled through the rain and stepped in front of the human, blocking her path. 'Don't do it!' he shouted over the wind. But her eyes were full of fire and dangerous ideas. She raised the stick which became a club, a sword, a gun, a hydrogen bomb. Lightning fused the sand around them. 'Please,' said the Doctor. The stick came down on his face. PART ONE 'Are you sure,' asked his companion, 'that this is the nineteen-eighties?' The Doctor looked around. 'Which nineteen-eighties did you have in mind?' Conversations that never happened. 1: Oncoming Trains Olympus Mons West Credit Card took the call from Central but he had to shout to make himself heard. Dogface was arguing over a game of Damage with Old Sam. Only Dogface was crazy enough to pick a fight with an old veteran like Sam, but Dogface always said that even Old Sam got bored with pushing people about. It was good therapy, he said, to stand up to him from time to time. At the time the call came in, both were in full flight, Old Sam on his feet with his two-tone dreadlocks flailing around his head, Biondie edging towards the door while Lambada surreptitiously cleared any breakables from the table. Dogface was leaning comfortably back in his chair, arms across his chest, a big eastwood clamped in his mouth. Old Sam had cranked up to full volume, swearing in something that had been an Indo-European language about two hundred years ago. Credit Card figured that the military must have augmented his lungs along with the rest of his body. Credit Card sighed, stuck his right index finger in the slot and jacked into the system direct. 'What the hell's going on down there?' Credit Card winced. Talking to Ming the Merciless was a pain face to face, going direct was like rubbing his brain on a cheese grater. 'Keep it down,' he sent, 'I'm plugged in.' Ming the Merciless had a problem, mainly a brown-out on the Central Line which was knocking fifteen seconds off transit time station to station. Ming was very democratic: if she had a problem she liked to spread it around. 'We're on a break.' Ming didn't care. She wanted the problem sorted out - now. Credit Card pulled his finger from the socket and watched Ming doing goldfish impressions on the screen, her mouth silently opening and closing. 'What's Ming want?' asked Lambada. 'Brown-out on Central.' 'Again?' said Lambada. 'It's the regulators,' said Old Sam. 'They're bloody antiques.' 'Twenty-bloody-five years old,' said Dogface. Old Sam sat down opposite Dogface and chewed the end off a fresh eastwood. 'Got a light?' he asked Dogface, who tossed the lighter to him. Old Sam snatched it from the air, insect fast, just to show that forty years hadn't slowed him down none. Credit Card plugged his finger back in. 'It's the regulators,' he told Ming. 'I know it's the regulators,' screamed Ming, 'of course it's the bloody reg ...' Credit Card yanked his finger out again. 'She says she knows that it's the regulators.' 'I hate that Ming,' said Lambada. 'Yamatzi series five,' said Dogface. 'It's the coupling on the field controller.' 'Always dropping out of line,' said Old Sam. 'Two, maybe three, angstroms.' 'Five angstroms,' said Dogface. 'Very dodgy workmanship,' said Old Sam. 'Not like the new Nigerian regulators.' 'Japanese got no idea how to make precision gear.' 'It's not in their culture.' 'Not like the Africans.' 'Now they understand interstitial dynamics,' said Dogface. 'All that mystical stuffs second nature to them.' 'You can't swear undying loyalty to your company and then build something that relies on the transient nature of reality as a basic operating principle,' said Old Sam and blew a smoke ring at the ceiling. 'Common sense, innit?' said Dogface. 'So what do I tell Ming?' asked Credit Card. 'Tell her we'll get round to it later,' said Old Sam. 'Much later,' said Dogface. 'Don't you ever worry about getting the sack?' asked Lambada. 'Nah,' said Old Sam. 'Me and Dogface are the only ones who know how the system really works.' 'I could fix them,' said Blondie. 'Shut up, Blondie,' said Dogface. STS Central - Olympus Mons Ming the Merciless decided that banging her head violently against the console was not an effective method of stress management and consoled herself by screaming at the next person she saw. Once the young technician had fled into the corridor she sat down and considered her position. The duty office overlooked the master control room. Colour-coded holograms displayed the system in its entirety. Red for the mterWorld lines like the Loop, Central Line and Outreach, orange for the commuter networks, blue for the feeders and yellow for the branch lines. A three-dimensional tangle of colour, each subsystem descending into a fractal infinity while data streams in white light marked the passage of a hundred thousand trains, fifty-six million passengers at fifty thousand stations. It was an animal, Ming had decided a long time ago, a vast organism with a multitude of orifices that swallowed people and spat them out elsewhere. Grown up from an embryo over two centuries, it encompassed the solar system and stopped the ancient motion of the planets. In subspace all distances are the same distance so distance became meaningless. Orbits became an abstraction, the distance to Mars was a function of how far away the nearest station was. For most people the map of the system was the map of the universe. And now the system was ready to eat up the light years between Sol and Acturus. Amongst the tangle of light, a new thread, picked out in silver, and a new station - Acturus Terminal, a new line, the Stella Tunnel, the Stunnel. The beast had yawned and stretched out to annihilate another frontier. The trouble is, Ming thought, the beast is sick. Lunarversity Kadiatu was watching The Bad News Show on English 37, lying on her back with the TV projected on to the ceiling. It was hot and her bare back kept sticking to the plastic skin of the mattress. The campus administration had promised that the environment would be fixed soon, but what with recent cutbacks students weren't holding their breaths. Bad News was showing a jumpy video of a security raid in Melbourne, intensified images shot over the shoulder of the lead policeman. Yak Harris, the Bad News anchorman, was making a big deal out of the way the camera operators wore full combat armour, 'Better than the real cops'. Yak chortled ruefully as one of the policemen went down with a bullet in the face. 'Just goes to show, you can't be too well protected,' Right on cue they ran a twenty-second advert for personal armour - 'How safe are you?' - and Yak was back with the latest body count over a slowmo action replay of the cop's death.