‘Thanks for keeping us in the air,’ he said, sending thoughts of affection and happiness and feeling Martha’s warmth spread across his mind in response. ‘You must tell me how you did it one day.’
Martha gave her wings an extra beat. She shouldn’t have been able to change her orders as set by his posture, the feel of his fingers or the positions of his arms and legs and the twitch of his muscles. If this was what the Fall felt like, then there was nothing to fear.
Max sobered. Of course that wasn’t how it felt. The briefest thought of Risa Kullani, or the unfortunates in Landfill told him that. But was this the start? The merest change in the relationship easily glossed over by an involuntary movement or a stray thought. And Max was exhausted; there were bound to be consequences. It would be all right once he’d had a rest.
No lasting damage, Max, nothing a good night’s sleep won’t fix. That’s what you always say,Dad. That’s because it’s nearly always true. And what about when it isn’t? I dunno really, two good nights’ sleep?
‘Dammit!’ roared Max, trying to clear his head, angry he’d dozed off again so quickly. ‘We’ve got to get down on the deck, princess. Don’t think I can stay awake much longer.’
Fatigue was only part of the problem. Max’s body ached all over; most of his muscles were stiff and his breathing felt a little constricted. He’d been in the pouch and flying for ten hours straight, and that followed a night where he had only emerged at dawn to stretch out and take a piss. Never mind the disastrous implications for his mental state, he was seizing up physically. His head was pounding again. And he was hungry and the hunger was making him weak in mind and body. And the thirst? Don’t even start with how thirsty he was.
‘Hey, princess, can you hear me?’ Martha rocked her head from side to side in response to the images he sent as much as to the sound of his voice. ‘Might not make the old camel shack.’
If she understood him, she didn’t indicate it. Their gentle descent continued and now Max had admitted his discomfort, it grew at a hyperbolic rate and he feared his body wouldn’t react the way he needed it to next time. They would soon be crossing the Heart of Granite’s wake. He could see the gouges in the sand. The HoG herself must be about four hours south.
Martha’s body rippled and she rocked her head again from side to side. Max felt a freezing cold rush across his body, leaving his head feeling like it was encased in ice. He wanted to cry out but there was nothing inside him to make a sound. On the back of the cold came fear, because this had to be the start of the Fall, but it was washed away by the warmth in his mind despite the ice stuck in his veins. At the last there were images and his subconscious mind decoded them and provided him with a single word that blazed in his head.
Trust.
Max found his voice and screamed.
‘Don’t do it, Martha, you don’t have to do it.’
The feelings of cold had gone but the following rush of heat caused brief, extreme agony. He’d screamed for the second time and terror had rolled over him. He tried to push her away, shut her out of his mind. It was like trying to push sunlight away. Max spoke to her; tried to persuade her to free him to fly like they always had, but there was nothing in return.
‘Haven’t I always treated you well, princess? We’re friends, a team. We’re in balance. Don’t change it.’
But she had changed it and it had left him a passenger . . . a prisoner. She’d frozen the pouch and no longer did his movements drive her. No longer did his thoughts influence her.
‘Not yet not yet not yet.’ He’d been a pilot so short a time and it wasn’t like he’d been with her that long since his escape. He didn’t understand it. Perhaps this wasn’t the Fall, but some precursor, some early symptom that would disappear as suddenly as it had come on. It didn’t explain why Martha was in control, although maybe if he was having difficulties, something within her kicked in to keep them going. He clung on to the thought; it was all he had.
Max felt abandoned, forgotten even. No, he felt betrayed and he sent the emotion out as strongly as he could. Ice poured into his head again. He gasped, feeling the cold surge down his spine. The flood of emotions and images came again, coalescing in the repetition of the single word. Trust.
‘So you do know I’m still here,’ he said. Martha purred. ‘Let me back in. I can help.’
She merely steepened their descent, flying in tight circles as if searching for something on the ground directly below her. Max looked too, seeing that they were above the HoG’s wake. The storm was closing faster, or that’s how it felt. He could feel the gusts on Martha’s flanks and wings.
Max tried to move his arms. He splayed his fingers, and tensed muscles, tiny twitches made large by the fatigue clouding him. Of course none of it made any difference; Martha had already made the adjustments.
‘Nothing down there but sand and shit,’ said Max. ‘We need a place to hole up, remember?’
In response, Martha barked. It was a sound of satisfaction and she dived. The desert floor was barren but for mounds of behemoth faeces; easily the most repulsive smell on the Holy Father’s ruined Earth.
‘I’m not sure I can build a sand castle large enough in time,’ said Max, trying to quell his fear, trying to believe Martha’s solitary word.
Martha rattled phlegm along the length of her throat, the vibrations funnelling into the pouch. She levelled out at about fifty and swept south along the tail trough. She had something in mind.
Correction: Max hoped she had something in mind so they could ride out the storm.
Max looked left and right, trying to work out what she wanted to do. Martha barked once more, dove down until she was almost touching the deck, backed her wings in front of a pile of dung larger than she was and flew directly up to a couple of metres above it.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ said Max. He clenched everything, praying she was just trying to find something to eat or track a scent or something but it was more than that. ‘Have you any idea what going in there would do to my sex life?’
Max’s mind was bathed very briefly with thoughts of sustenance. A heartbeat later, a sheath slid over his face, sealing him in the pouch and Martha dropped tail-first straight into the dung. There was a disgusting squelching sound, the sensations of Martha working her way ever deeper into the mound and using her wings to gather more about her and finally plunging her head into the filthy mid-green sludge.
Max’s last thought was how he was going to breathe in the sealed pouch but a sharp impact at the base of his spine and a second one at the base of his neck were followed very swiftly by a floating, nightmare-fuelled oblivion.
Professor Helena Markov was irritable. Incompetence had that effect on her and this particular instance was uniquely piquing. Because having got here, on a bloody gecko of all things, and reviewed the whole sorry saga it was clear that no one was actually to blame, just some amorphous ‘them’ that had organised the whole thing and outwitted the internal security might of the flag carrying behemoth.
So they sat around a table and she became increasingly frustrated at the bullet-dodging antics of Kirby and Moeller. In the end, she smoothed down her creased brown fatigues; pushed her long black hair back into a pony tail, and cleared her throat into a momentary pause to ensure that the two of them were paying her the correct level of attention.
‘I get it. You don’t know where Halloran is. What exactly are you expecting of me?’
‘We felt you needed context in order to bring your skills to bear most effectively,’ said Kirby.
Markov sighed. ‘You sound like a role player in a training vid, Robert. It’s me, Helena. Just talk to me like we’ve known each other for the last five years, why don’t you?’
Kirby smiled for the first time since they’d sat down over their ‘informal’ drinks in the otherwise deserted Bridge Bar as the afternoon waned towards dusk and the winds grew in strength.
‘Sorry, guilty.’
‘I’m not smiling. My sig
nature’s been forged on an upgrade approval. I’ll bring anyone else down I can if it comes to it,’ said Markov. Their reactions were enlightening. ‘You didn’t know.’
Kirby shook his head. ‘Why would we?’
Markov didn’t know whether to believe him or not. ‘That makes this the most senior of crimes, then.’
‘How far was the upgrade from being ready?’ asked Moeller. ‘How much risk is there to my pilots? Robert told me it was designed as a precursor to Fall testing.’
‘He’s right and it depends on your definition of risk.’
Moeller frowned. ‘Definition? You need me to spell it out?’
‘I can’t stop pilots going through the Fall,’ said Markov. ‘It’s only ever a question of time so there’s no way to mitigate the risk you’re talking about, that’s the problem. My primary role is to develop the conditions that allow pilots to survive the Fall. What else can it be?’
Moeller gaped and it would have been comical if it weren’t so sad. ‘You’re cold. What about methods to ensure they never hit the Fall in the first place?’
‘Can’t be done. That’s something we have managed to prove. We can’t even delay it but we can hide the symptoms and, perhaps most usefully accelerate it.’
‘And that’s why you want him back? For analysis?
‘I never wanted him to go in the first place,’ replied Markov. ‘He isn’t ready yet.’
Moeller’s contempt was embarrassing to behold. ‘And when will he be ready?’ He even made the quote marks gesture with his fingers.
Markov tensed and decided to take a sip of her warm and uninviting synthesised white wine before speaking.
‘Let me tell you a little tale,’ she said sweetly. ‘It’s about a man who sat on the conflict budget committee four years ago and made an impassioned speech about the risks to drake pilots and how further research could only lead to more risks as scientists sought to make drakes ever more effective. That the current level of drake sentience was entirely adequate to win the war and that current treatments of early symptoms of the Fall would evolve organically through medical analysis.
‘As a direct result, seventy-five per cent of the ERC’s research budget was diverted to materials, training and medical care.
‘But the clamour for Fall drugs didn’t diminish, did it? It simply went underground and all the best research on drugs to mitigate Fall symptoms is now done on the black market. It also effectively halted research into surviving the Fall and we were left with a grand data gathering exercise in the hope suitable subjects might suggest themselves.
‘But you knew all that, didn’t you, Gerhard?’
‘I know that there is a limit to how far mixed DNA experimentation can be allowed to go and I stopped you going over that line.’
But there was no real conviction in his voice.
‘Right, your paternal side is happier to see them subside into madness than potentially become something far greater.’
‘I know where you were heading with it so please don’t take the holier-than-thou route with me,’ said Moeller. ‘The number of young souls you were willing to sacrifice on the altar of your research was staggering. And I wasn’t alone, was I? How many of your precious team walked away even before the funding was cut?’
Markov shrugged. ‘Being a scientist, particularly in pressurised military research, requires courage and some people don’t have it. I have to make decisions that might affect one life but prolong or save a thousand others. I feel no guilt, but yours eats you, doesn’t it? You condemned all of your precious pilots to the Fall, one after another.’
Markov could see the fight leave him and almost felt sorry for him. He swallowed the rest of his gin and signalled for another round.
‘No one thought the war would go on so long,’ he said quietly.
Markov gave a brief smile. ‘So, now that we’ve established that I’m always right and you two are always wrong, let’s move on to how I can help.’
The Heart’s PA announced the sealing of the behemoth in advance of the imminent arrival of the sand storm. Soon, she’d shuffle round to keep her head away from the winds.
‘Can he survive this?’ asked Moeller. ‘Assuming shelter, of course?’
‘I’ve reviewed the data, well, what little data you have, and it’s by no means certain he’s survived so far. We have to assume that Halloran is smart enough to have selected a low expenditure environment so either he’s under a rock or he’s been on the upper thermals during daylight.’
Both men reacted and Markov pursed her lips.
‘Upper thermals it is, then,’ she said, noting another victory with the slightest of smiles. ‘That would indicate he’s been in the pouch a considerable number of consecutive hours – and probably at night too because his drake will need to share his body heat or be sluggish at dawn . ..’
Markov did some quick calculations.
‘Halloran’s only been flying combat for nine months so we can discount any effects from that. However, he’s now been in- pouch for large parts of two days and, come morning, two nights in a drake with an unshielded upgrade. Factoring in the exponentially increasing risks of consecutive hours in the pouch, plus the upgrade and his helpful daily named pill mix, I’d say he is roughly eighty-five per cent likely to be in stage three Fall twenty-four hours from now.
‘He and his drake must be returned here for analysis, alive or dead. I mean, this is beyond the wildest dreams of any ERC scientist. It’s like ten years of data in a sparkly wrapper given to me on my birthday. I sincerely hope you can find him now I’ve told you where to look.’
‘You’re actually happy he’s out there, aren’t you?’
‘I’d have liked it done under more controlled circumstances, Gerhard, but I’d be lying if I said I’m not excited about what might come back from the desert. Hal-X is our most likely candidate to survive the Fall.’
A fly landed on the table top to drink from a spilled drop. With impressive speed, Moeller swatted it with an open palm. He lifted his hand to flick away the carcass. It sparked once, faintly. They froze and stared at each other to confirm what each of them had seen.
‘Oh fuck,’ said Kirby.
‘My lab,’ said Markov. ‘Now.’
Chapter 32
Anyone who thinks they’ve taken a lungful of the worst stink in the world has never been within a klick of behemoth shit.
Maximus Halloran
Max thought he could hear voices. They were just out of reach, like claws appearing briefly from darkness to beckon him on, but it was too dim to follow. The voices would fade and he would shout after them but the sound was so muffled that they probably couldn’t hear him.
He opened his eyes and was immediately reminded that it was better to keep them closed. For starters, there was nothing to see, and for another thing his eyes ached whenever he opened them. The only problem with keeping them closed was the vivid images that played across his eyelids; there were worlds aflame and lands stained red.
Max knew what was happening. He’d fought it at first, tried to get Martha to fly out of the filthy sludge and let him go but in his heart he knew she couldn’t. Though he couldn’t properly keep track of time, he was aware of its passage and marked it by the images that Martha sent to him as if she was trying to keep him informed of progress. Progress. Towards what end, he wondered. His death, most likely.
There was strength in Martha that hadn’t been there before they’d landed in the behemoth sludge and she fed it into him somehow, presumably it was connected with the stabbing pains at the base of his neck and spine. He tried not to think too hard about the source of the nutrition but he did know he was no longer half as hungry or thirsty.
Max hadn’t expected to be so calm. He could feel everything; the buffeting of the wind on the faeces in which they hid; the gentle massaging of his body to ease away fatigue in his muscles; the touch of Martha’s mind on the periphery of his own – persistent but not intrusive; the vague anxiety
that she tried to soothe away with images of calm; and the curious sense of inner peace that came over him whenever he was awake.
Max had the impression it was dark outside. He was tired but that was hardly a surprise. He had a headache too. It had been nagging at him since he awoke a while ago and it was slowly but surely growing in intensity. And now he came to examine himself, his extremities were cold too, almost numb. Max took in a breath and opened his eyes. Like before, it was dark. The hood Martha had encased him in was opaque. He could see shapes beyond it, like the after images of a flash photo straight in the eyes, but he couldn’t make them out.
That aside, if this was the Fall, then it didn’t measure up to the rumours and scare-mongering. Frankly, Risa taking heaters was worse than anything he was suffering now, despite the brief early pain in his back and neck and the disturbing imagery he was seeing.
So perhaps it wasn’t the Fall. Perhaps this was just the consequences of the latest upgrade. He certainly didn’t feel changed, he didn’t feel different or better or worse or as if his brain was wired up in a new way.
‘It’s even quite comfortable in here,’ said Max. ‘If a little dull at times.’
Brace.
The word sat in his head, clear as drake sight, the voice familiar, the tone a warning.
Strength.
It echoed away into what Valera would have been delighted to call the caverns of his unoccupied mind.
‘Um . . . Martha, is that you?’ Warmth washed over him. ‘Oh.’
Max wasn’t sure what to think. All he did know was that his anxiety spiked and not even Martha’s care could stop the sweats, the palpitations and the shivering.
‘Why strength? And what’s this about bracing myself?’
Pain.
‘I can take some pain,’ said Max, feeling nowhere near as brave as he hoped he was sounding.
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