They brought her meals on trenchers or disposable plates. She tried to get the guards to bring her something to write with but failed; she made ink from some nuts that had garnished a meal and used one of her bite-sharpened nails to write on the other side of Miz’s note, then put it in the door slot just before that evening’s meal. It was still there when her meal appeared. She buzzed the door, but nobody answered. She checked every part of the cell; there didn’t seem to be any way out without help or equipment. There was no screen. She spent a lot of time just looking out of the small window.
The bounty hunter had said he’d held the Passports in his hands. And he had looked ill. She had known for some time what the symptoms of radiation sickness were; it had been one of the first things the doc had told them about when they’d joined the anti-Tax Navy.
There had been a fashion, millennia ago, for assassination by plutonium amongst the governing classes of the system—pens, medals and articles of clothing had been the favored delivery systems—and for centuries nobody in a position of power would ever be without a personal radiation monitor, but the practice had been abandoned, banned and outlawed in that order long ago, and only a few Corps, administrations and old Houses with long memories still bothered with such precautions.
It had not even occurred to her, Miz or any of the others that the Huhsz would simply ignore the fact the Passports had been irradiated. She hadn’t thought to tell anybody.
No wonder the Huhsz missions had been able to move so swiftly. They hadn’t bothered with any containment mechanism; they had simply taken the Passports round as normal, and let the energy-broadcasting Holes they contained infect whoever came into range with their soaked tribute of ancient poison.
But why hadn’t Geis noticed? He seemed to have been following all that had gone on pretty closely; why hadn’t he spotted what was going on? She couldn’t understand. He must have known…
It didn’t matter. Whatever had happened, it came back to her. She had done it again. She had caused—was causing—people to die of radiation. Again. Eight years after Lip City and the Lazy Gun’s self-destruction.
“Cursed,” she whispered, when she realized. She thought—hoped—she had probably spoken too softly for the cell’s microphone to pick up.
Cursed, she thought, shaking her head and turning to the tiny barred window again, refusing to re-live that instant of realization in the dawn-lit hotel room eight years ago, when bliss had been forever contaminated by guilt.
The Land Car moved more slowly in High Marden, where the landscape was cut and parceled into small units, the countryside was littered with villages and towns and there were many detours to be made round both those and estates and enclaves that would charge the Car a toll.
The Lesson Learned was continually crossing walls in Marden. When the walls were especially high, the big wheels underneath her cell were lifted so far up they blocked her view.
The villages and hamlets passed by; houses were white and colored dots speckling the green hillsides. The Land Car took to rivers twice, bumping and twisting down their courses, ducking under bridges, splashing through shallows and bridging over the deeper pools, rigid links between the carriages supporting each one in turn.
In the evening light the Car passed along the shore of the Scodde Sea, over gravel fields and open meadows where a variety of grazing animals fled from it, bouncing and leaping across the grasslands in bleating, bellowing herds. As the Car turned a corner round a farm wall, she saw the Lesson Learned’s leading carriage, and caught a glimpse of some brown shapes running underneath, between the vehicle’s first two sets of giant wheels.
She had heard that some animals ran on just in front or underneath Land Cars for hours at a time, until their strength or their hearts gave out and they fell.
She looked away.
She rose on the last day she would spend in the Car. A line of white piled clouds ahead marked the Airthit Mountains; beyond lay Yadayeypon. The hills and forests thickened out of the arable land of Marden County as the Lesson Learned started to gain height again. She had given up trying to get them to take messages; they still hadn’t answered the door buzzer.
She watched the trees thin and disappear; when the wind-torn clouds parted above, it was to reveal distant peaks, sharp and brilliant white. The air in the cell became cold and her breathing became labored. Then they were through the pass and descending into trees again. The Lesson Learned had entered Yadayeypon Province.
She sat in the steeply tipped cell, swallowing and yawning now and again to clear her ears as the air pressure increased, and thought of how she might kill herself.
But she could not see suicide as a way of cheating them; rather it would feel like giving in. It was probably the sensible thing to do, but it would be ignominious. She thought she understood now the old warrior codes which held that when every other choice and freedom had been removed from one, it was still possible to confound the enemy by dying well, no matter how terrified one felt. Certainly she had not felt so without hope since her ship had been tumbling powerless toward Nachtel’s Ghost, fifteen years earlier, but she had survived that. At a cost, perhaps, but she had survived.
She hadn’t slept well during the night, as every revolution of these great wheels brought her closer to Yadayeypon, and the fear and despair grew inside her. She sat cross-legged on the bunk, trying to cheer herself up, until the very desperation of her attempts became pathetic and she wept.
After a while she fell asleep again, wan and exhausted, against the slope of trembling bulkhead behind her narrow cot.
She woke suddenly and didn’t dare hope it was what she thought it might be. An explosion shook the cell, jarring her teeth; she passed through fear, elation and back to fear again in a second.
A jolt sent her flying off the bunk; she landed on all fours on the floor. She could hear gunfire. The cell tipped as the carriage rattled and bounced along an incline, jarring her and everything in it. She struggled up the slope to the bunk and grabbed the window bars, trying to see outside.
The Land Car’s tall shadow was flung up a steep, grassy hillside toward a distant line of trees; the vehicle was crashing over and through what looked like dry stone walls. A smoky trail appeared suddenly from underneath the carriage in front, crossed a small field and detonated against a wall in a dirty fountain of earth and stone. A ripple shook the cell and vibrated through the bars in her hands as a part of the Lesson Learned’s shadow five or six carriages along was suddenly obscured in a dark, blossoming cloud. There was a flash of light from one end of the stand of trees. Something burst from the carriage in front of her, spraying wreckage: the cell leaped around her. A light tank in dazzle camouflage appeared from the trees, tearing down the hillside toward the Land Car; earth exploded into the air in front of it.
There was a terrific crash from behind her, she had a brief impression of the front of the Land Car’s shadow twisting and of the light tank firing again, then the cell whipped and heaved around her, shaking her like a dice in a cup.
The carriage rolled right over six times. She was conscious through it all. She fought the urge to brace herself and just went limp, crashing round the cell with the cot’s mattress and sleeping bag flopping and falling continually around her; it was like being trapped in a tumble drier. She had time to reflect that there was something to be said for padded cells, and that you could tell each time the wheels hit the ground because the bounce was slightly different.
It stopped; she was weightless for a moment, then slammed into the padded cell door, hurting her left shoulder.
The mattress and sleeping bag fell on top of her.
Another massive crash shook the whole carriage.
There was silence.
She stood awkwardly, rubbing her shoulder and feeling her head, looking for bruises or blood. Gunfire sounded in the distance.
She tried to climb up to the bunk but there was nothing to hold on to. She jumped, caught the window bars and pulled herself
up, ignoring the pain in her shoulder, but all she could see was dark-blue evening sky. She dropped to the canted floor that the cell door and corridor wall had become. More firing. It went on for a while; a couple of thudding detonations shook the carriage.
She tried the door buzzer but it didn’t seem to be working.
After a while she heard movement outside the cell, then the lock buzzed. She drew to one side, away from the door. Voices.
“Blow it,” she heard a man say.
She buried herself under the cot mattress and stuck her fingers in her ears; the explosion clanged round the cell, leaving her ears ringing.
She looked up into a gray haze. The door had disappeared. She started coughing in the acrid fumes of the blast. A gun and a man’s face appeared where the door had been.
The man wore an armored helmet painted in a hallucinatory purple and green design. He wore matt-black multi-sights over his eyes and had a little roundel painted on his forehead with the words AIM HERE printed underneath, and an arrow. He frowned at her.
“Haven’t we met?” he said.
She coughed, then laughed. “I was wondering who could be crazy enough to attack a Land Car.”
Another man appeared. He had a dark round face, and was bare-headed apart from a bright yellow bandana with the word REAL smeared on it in what looked like dried blood. He frowned strenuously.
She waved. “Politeness,” she said.
“Politeness,” Elson Roa replied, nodding.
It was warm and humid in the late afternoon air; they were in the tropics and the altitude was less than five hundred meters, though the prevailing winds—spilling down from the glaciers of the continent’s core—kept the temperature moderate.
She stood on what had been the side of one of the Lesson Learned’s cell-block sections; another carriage lay up ended against its roof. The thin prison overalls flapped in the warm breeze, and she could feel the air moving over her naked scalp. She looked around, smiling, watching Thrial disappear over the mountain ridge to the west.
Segments of the smashed Land Car lay strewn around the bottom of a dry, steep-sided valley like pieces of a toy after a child’s tantrum. Some carriages had turned on their backs, their suspension components looking naked and vulnerable and their wheels pointing pathetically upward to the patchily clouded sky. Smoke and steam drifted down the valley on the wind.
Solipsists in gaudy uniforms crawled all over the tangled necklace of torn-open boxes that was the Lesson Learned. A couple of light tanks and five half-tracks sat tilted on the grassy banks around the central valley, engines idling noisily.
A group of stunned Sons of Depletion sat on the grass, hands clasped at their necks, guarded by two Solipsists who appeared to be naked apart from skin-paint. Bodies lay near one of the still-smoking carriages.
Roa’s head appeared from a smashed window; she reached down and helped pull him out. He carried a small briefcase and her satchel.
“This is yours,” he said, handing the satchel to her.
“Thank you,” she said, putting the strap over her head.
Roa and the other Solipsist who had rescued her stood looking round the scene, then Roa shrugged.
“Let us go,” he said.
They climbed down through the carriage’s suspension components to the ground. All around, men in gaudy uniforms and body-paint were staggering from the wreck to their own vehicles, loaded with booty.
She followed Roa as he ducked under one of the Land Car’s buckled connecting corridors to the other side of the wreck, where a big, open half-track was waiting; a radar unit revolved on a thin mast above the vehicle. A blond face grinned down from the rear of the vehicle as Sharrow approached.
“Okay, I believe you about the Solipsists now,” Zefla called.
“Hey, kid!” Miz shouted, turning round.
“These are your apparences?” Elson Roa asked as he climbed into the half-track behind her. Sharrow was hugging Zefla; the others were dressed as she was in dark prison overalls. Miz blew her a kiss; Cenuij tutted and patted at a cut forehead with a handkerchief and Dloan sat massively, grinning at her.
Keteo, the driver who’d taken her and Roa into Aïs City a month earlier, was sitting in the vehicle’s central seat, clutching the wheel. He turned round, saw her and closed his eyes, making a humming noise from beneath his magenta and white-painted steel hat. His combat jacket was bright pink. A body-painted Solipsist—naked except for a beret—sat to Keteo’s left, clutching a microphone.
“Yes,” she said, smiling at Roa and still holding Zefla. “They’re my apparences.”
“Oh, thanks,” Cenuij muttered.
“Then we’d better take them, too,” Roa said, frowning.
Keteo turned round, looking annoyed.
“Molgarin didn’t say anything about—” he began.
Roa slapped him on the top of his armored hat. “Drive,” he said.
Miz stood up from the half-track’s rear seat, wanting to hug Sharrow too, but was forced to sit back down as the half-track lurched off across the grass. Sharrow and Zefla were thrown back onto the seat, laughing. Roa clutched at the half-track’s roll-bar, which held a small holo-screen, a pair of heavy machine guns and an empty, soot-smeared rocket launcher.
The half-track thumped and crashed over the uneven ground, heading down the valley toward some trees. Roa studied the holo-screen, then tapped the body-painted Solipsist in the front seat.
“Tell everybody there are aircraft coming,” he told the shivering man.
“Attention everybody!” the body-painted man shouted into the microphone. He paused. “Watch the skies!” he screamed, then he threw himself down into the footwell, leaving the microphone on the seat.
Roa shook his head.
A Solipsist dressed in violet and lime, dragging a long, black box, ran toward them, waving. Roa banged Keteo’s tin hat again; the half-track skidded to a stop, plowing turf with its tracks and sending everybody sliding out of their seats. Roa went, “Oof!” as he was thrown against the roll-bar. He glared at the back of Keteo’s tin hat, then reached down to pull the long, black box into the half-track. He tapped Keteo’s helmet again and hung on grimly as the half-track leaped away.
Sharrow hung on to the radar mast behind the seat, looking back to watch the Solipsists run from the wrecked Land Car and tumble into their half-tracks. The two garishly painted light tanks were already bouncing across the grass, following Roa’s vehicle.
“You all right?” Miz shouted to her over the noise of the machine’s engine.
“Yes,” Sharrow said.
An aircraft screamed overhead. She ducked instinctively. They all watched the sleek gray shape disappear over the sunset-rouged summits of the hills to their right. Another three planes flashed across the valley, higher up.
“Oh shit,” Cenuij said.
Roa readied the twin machine guns.
The half-track skidded off the grass onto a narrow wheel-grooved track leading down through a small forest. Dust tumbled into the air behind them.
They heard the noise of the jets again, then a series of flat, crumping sounds. The half-track’s radio made squawking, screeching noises.
The track steepened and started to twist as it followed a rocky gully downward. Keteo avoided a large boulder lying at the side of the track by a centimeter or so, skidded and almost sent the machine over the edge of the ravine, then hauled it straight again and gunned the engine.
Roa turned round and looked back up the track to where the first light tank had appeared in its own cloud of dust. A series of sharp explosions came from behind it. Keteo drove off the track and along a stretch of grassy bank to avoid a dead bird lying in the road.
“Interesting driving technique,” Miz shouted to Sharrow, nodding approvingly.
Cenuij closed his eyes. “I felt safer in the fucking Land Car.”
Behind them, smoke rose into the dark-blue sky above the trees. The track left the forest and ran along the side of a wid
e grassy valley crossed by stone walls and bisected by a stream that appeared from a small side valley. The end of the valley was about half a kilometer away.
“ Oh-oh,” Dloan said, turning to look behind them.
Cenuij was looking suspiciously at the long black box by Roa’s feet.
Roa reached under the roll-bar and lifted the microphone off the front seat. “Hello, Solo—” he said.
A great roar of noise slapped down on them; they all ducked again. Sharrow saw the jet tear overhead. Roa threw the mike down, grabbed the machine guns and fired at the already distant aircraft, scattering cartridge cases into the rear footwell.
“Where are the missiles?” Roa yelled.
“Under the seat!” Keteo yelled.
The air filled with a humming noise. Sharrow glanced at Dloan; he’d put his hands over his eyes.
There was a flash of light from behind them. Sharrow half-heard, half-saw a blur of movement to one side as something fell into the grass by the side of the track. Then the half-track’s long hood exploded.
Everything stopped. Silence, as the wreckage tumbled out of the sky around them and what was left of the half-track plowed into the track in a wave of dust and small stones.
Sound came back slowly; her ears began ringing. There were several other muffled explosions in the confusion as the broken half-track crashed to a stop. She was in the footwell, picking herself up; Roa was above her, looking stunned, his face bloody.
Smoke everywhere.
She saw Miz; he pulled her to her feet, shouting something at her. Dloan helped Zefla down from the vehicle. Cenuij sat, blinking, looking surprised.
Then she was out on the grass, staggering and running. She thought she’d left the satchel behind, but it was there, flapping against her hip. She followed Dloan and Zef; Miz ran at her side. Further back up the track the two light tanks burned fiercely, pools of bright orange fire beneath bulb-headed columns of smoke.
Against a Dark Background Page 37
