She glanced at the others sitting, bored, in the pavement section of a cosmetically restored but closed café on the other side of the piazza, then she turned to Feril.
“We are going to the Embargoed Areas,” she told the android, “to try to find the last Lazy Gun.”
Feril looked down. “You did not need to tell me that.”
“I suspected you had already guessed.”
“Indeed,” Feril said, “I must admit that I had.”
She cleared her throat. “Feril, I’ve talked this over with the others, and we’d like you to come along with us, if you want.”
Feril looked silently at her for what seemed a long time. “I see,” it said. It looked down at the old roundabout on the terrace beneath, watching its fellows swarm over it, making adjustments. “Why?” it said.
“Because we feel you could be useful,” she said, “and because we feel we need another person along, and because I think you might benefit from the experience, and because…we like you.” She looked away for a moment. “Though it will be dangerous.” She cocked an eyebrow. “Maybe if we really liked you, the last thing we’d do would be to invite you along quite possibly to get killed.”
Feril made a shrugging motion. “If I accompanied you, I would save my current personality with the city,” it said. “Should I be destroyed, I would only lose the memories of the experiences after I left here. I would continue to exist as an entity within the city AI cluster, and I would obtain a guarantee that I would live again when the next batch of androids is allowed to be built.”
She was silent, watching it.
“You are sure,” it said, “that the others in your team would not object to my presence?”
She glanced at Zefla, Miz and Dloan again. Dloan and Zefla were talking. Miz was watching her, chin on his uninjured hand.
“They trust who I trust,” she told the machine. “Any one of them could have vetoed the idea. We want you to come with us.”
The android tapped one steel and plastic finger on the marble, then nodded as it turned to her. “Thank you. I accept. I shall come with you.”
She put her hand out to the machine. “I hope you will not have cause to regret this,” she said, smiling.
It gripped her hand gently. “Regret is for humans,” it said.
She laughed. “Really?”
The machine shrugged and let go of her hand. “Oh, no. It’s just something we tell ourselves.”
20
The Quiet Shore
Trees stood in dense, dark-massed profusion from mountain-top to tideline. The ocean lay flat, black and still against the silent shore as though it had fallen under the heavy green spell of the forest. A bird flew slowly across the water parallel with the land, like a pale sliver of the soft gray clouds cast out of the sky and searching for a way back.
Half a kilometer out from the fjord mouth, the surface of the ocean swirled and frothed, then swelled and spilled from three dark, bulbous shapes.
The tri-hull submarine surfaced and floated stationary for a moment, water streaming from its fins and stubby central tower. Then a series of dull clanging noises chimed out across the water and with a swirl of wash churning round its smooth black flanks the central section and starboard hull slid slowly astern, leaving the port hull floating alone and facing the shore.
When it had dropped just behind the single hull, the submarine went ahead again, using delicate surging pulses of power from its bow to snick its rounded snout into the hull’s stern. A great slow stream of water washed out behind the submarine as it drove quietly for the shore, pushing the hull ahead of it.
The leading hull grounded in the shallows of a small sandy beach on the southern edge of the fjord’s mouth, its hemispherical black nose rising as it pushed a broad bulging wave across the few meters of water toward the crescent’s pale slope. Surf washed up the beach and along the rocks on either side.
“I do hope you understand; I have of course given much thought to this, but in the end I have the safety of my ship and crew to consider. Of course this is covered in our contract—”
“Of course.”
“—but it really would be asking for trouble to take you any further in. The fjord is quite deep—though there are underwater ridges in places according to our deep scan—but it’s just so narrow; a boat this size just wouldn’t be able to maneuver at all. With the obvious danger of hostile action, it would be foolhardy to venture further. As I say, I have my crew to think about. Now, if I could just have your signature…I mean, many of them have families…”
“Indeed.”
“I’m so glad you understand. Our underwriters have been blowing very cool in this last financial year, I can tell you, and even switching the log-graph off is going to make them suspicious. You can turn that trick only so many times, believe me. Ah…here and here…”
The captain held his clipboard up for her to sign the release papers. She took off one glove, picked up the stylo and scribbled her name. She was dressed in insulated combat fatigues and knee boots; a warm, ballisticized fur cap covered her head, the ear-pads clipped up. She and the captain were standing on deck near the bow of the grounded port hull; its single hemi-door had swung open and a ramp had been extended from the interior to the shallows. The first of the two big six-wheel All-Terrain trucks fired into life and rumbled slowly out of the hull, down the ramp, through the water and up onto the white-sand beach. The deck beneath them shifted as the vehicle’s weight was transferred from hull to land.
The AT’s gray and green camouflage flickered uncertainly for a few moments as it adjusted, then settled to a suitably non-descript set of interleaved shades that exactly matched the color of the sand and the shadows under the trees. A heavy stub-nosed cannon sat stowed above one of the two cab hatches.
The captain turned over a couple of pages. “And here and here, please,” he said. He shook his head and made a clicking noise with his tongue. “If only the fjord was a little wider!” He stared concernedly at the mouth of the fjord, as though willing the ridge-straked slopes of the mountains to draw back from the dark waters. He sighed, his breath smoking in the cold, still air.
“Yes, well,” Sharrow said.
The second All-Terrain lumbered out of the front hull section and onto the beach, making the hull bob again. Zefla waved from one of the vehicle’s roof hatches.
“And one last one here…” the captain said, folding the flimsies back over the clipboard. Sharrow signed again.
“There,” she said.
“Thank you, Lady Sharrow,” the captain said, smiling. He put his gloves back on and bowed deeply. The sunglasses he hadn’t needed when they’d surfaced fell out of a pocket in his quilted jacket. He stooped to retrieve them, his gloves making the operation difficult.
He straightened to find her smiling bleakly at him, holding her hand out. He stuck the sunglasses in his mouth, the clipboard under his armpit and took one glove off again. He shook her hand. “A pleasure, Lady Sharrow,” he told her. “And let me wish you all the best in…” his gaze flicked round the quiet forests and the tall mountains, “. . . whatever you may be undertaking.”
“Thank you.”
“Well, see you in four days’ time, unless we hear from you,” he said, grinning.
“Right,” she said, turning away. “Until then.”
“Good hunting!” he called.
Sharrow made her way down a thin, metal ladder to the hull’s interior, where the sub’s deck crew were getting ready to retract the ramp and close the door again; she checked there was nothing left behind, then walked down the ramp to the shore, her boots sinking into the sand.
Just as she turned to look back at the gaping round mouth of the hull, a white jet of steam flew up into the air behind it from the submarine’s conning tower. The shriek of the vessel’s emergency siren shook the air above the beach, then cut off as the white feather of the steam plume stood, just beginning to drift in the air. The men in the mouth of the opened h
ull section froze. A voice boomed out above them; the captain’s, breathless and panicky. “Air alert!” he shouted through the speakers. “Aircraft coming! Repeat; aircraft approaching! Abandon the hulls! Scuttle both!”
“Shit!” Sharrow said, spinning on her heel.
The men in the hull swarmed up the ladder to the deck; Sharrow clambered into the cab of the second AT. Zefla was standing on her seat, head and torso out of the hatch above, watching the seaward skies through a pair of high-power field-glasses. Feril was at the vehicle’s wheel, poised and delicate amongst the AT’s chunkily business-like controls.
“Fucking hell,” Miz’s voice said over the comm, “that was quick. Thought they didn’t bother much with the surv-sats these days.”
“Maybe we were misinformed,” Sharrow said, glancing at the android as the AT in front sprayed sand from its six big tires and lumbered up the beach for the rocks bordering the saplings and grass at the edge of the forest. “Follow Miz,” she told Feril. The android nodded and slipped the vehicle into Drive.
The truck lurched forward, following the leading AT toward the trees. Sharrow looked back through the side window to watch the last few crewmen jump from the sub’s beached section to the main hull, then saw the water froth round the rear of the fat boat as the vessel abandoned both hulls and powered astern, surrounding itself with foam. The small figures sprinted along the hull and disappeared down a hatch, swinging it shut. The submarine surged back through its own wake, starting to turn and submerge at the same time; the grounded hull section bobbed in the wash while the jettisoned starboard hull rolled back and forward, gently rising and falling in the waves.
“There’s no fucking way into these trees!” Miz yelled.
“Then make one,” Sharrow told him.
“No,” they heard Dloan’s calm voice say. “Look.”
“Hmm,” Miz replied. “Narrow…” The leading AT swiveled right.
“Zef?” Sharrow said, glancing up. “Zef?” she shouted.
Zefla ducked down, shaking her head, her hair gathered up inside a combat cap. “Nothing yet,” she said, grabbing an intercom stalk and clipping it to her ear as she stood again.
The AT in front of them bounced over rocks and charged across the grass toward the trees, tires gouging scooped trenches in the grass and spraying earth back at them as it climbed over springy saplings and pressed between the taller trunks beyond. Clods and stones thumped and whacked into the sloped chin and screen of their AT.
Sharrow glanced back; the submarine was submerged save for its tower, sinking rapidly into the swirling water as it continued to swing out astern from the shore.
Miz and Dloan’s AT shouldered its way between the trees, slowing.
“Got it,” Zefla said through the intercom. “Single plane. Low; looks big…fairly slow.”
“Think they saw us?” Sharrow asked as Feril maneuvered the snout of their AT to within a meter of the vehicle in front.
“Difficult to say,” Zefla said.
Miz was turning his vehicle into a small clearing to the right, the ATs mottled camouflage darkening as it burrowed deeper under the overhanging branches.
“No sign they’ve seen us…” Zefla said quietly.
“That’s about as far as we go,” Miz said. The leading AT rolled to a stop; Feril halted theirs immediately behind. Sharrow reached into the footwell and unzipped a long bag with a crude anti-aircraft symbol scrawled on it. She pulled a missile-launcher out and stood up on the seat, swinging the hatch back and sticking her head and shoulders through.
The plane was a lumpy black speck, low over the water. Where the sub had been there was just a patch of disturbed water near the abandoned floating hull. The plane’s image enlarged in the missile-launcher’s sight, went briefly fuzzy then came sharp; she flicked the safety off.
Then something waved in the sight, close and unfocused and partially obscuring the aircraft. Sharrow frowned and looked away from the launcher’s sight; some of the young trees behind them had risen up again after being caught under the ATs, forming a thin screen between them and the shore.
She squinted back into the sight and watched the plane’s silhouette tilt and thicken. It was a flying boat, about the size of an ancient heavy bomber; pairs of engines high on each wing root and a V-strutted float near the tip of each wing. Six small missiles, under the wings. The plane banked slowly, almost languorously away. She tracked it until it disappeared behind the trees.
Sharrow listened to the sound of the plane’s jets, echoing distantly among the mountains. She put the missile-launcher back to standby.
“Where’d it go?” Miz said.
“Think it went down the fjord,” Dloan said. Sharrow turned to see Dloan in the hatch of the stationary leading AT, its nose stuck into the trees. He was pointing the cannon over their heads at where the plane had been.
“See any markings?” Sharrow asked Zefla.
Zefla shook her head. “Didn’t look like a Franchise ship to me.”
“I saw one of those old things in Quay Beagh,” Dloan said. “While we were negotiating for the sub.”
“Think it could be another private operator?” Miz asked. They heard him grunt as the leading AT rocked fractionally back, then attempted to plow forward again, only to be resisted once more by the flexing trunks of the trees. “Now that’s what I call contempt for the Areas Laws,” he said, sounding almost amused. “Barreling right in with an antique that belongs in a museum of flight. Shit, we could have used ACVs after all.”
“Whatever,” Sharrow said, “it might be back. Let’s head along the coast and find somewhere better to hole up.”
“We are kind of hidden here,” Zefla pointed out.
“Only kind of,” Miz said. “And if anybody’s going to look for us, that hull’s where they’re going to start.”
“Our brave captain said something about scuttling the hulls,” Zefla said.
“Yeah, but the one on the beach isn’t going to sink too far.”
“Zef?” Sharrow said. “What do you think; did the plane see us?”
Zefla shrugged. “On balance, probably…yes.”
“So let’s go,” Sharrow said.
They reversed the two ATs out of the forest. The grounded submarine hull had settled by the stern; its cavernous open mouth towered over the little beach like an expression of silent surprise. The jettisoned hull had rolled over onto its back, rocking back and forth as it sank slowly into the dark water.
The two All-Terrains picked their way along the jumbled rock and tattered grass line between the water and the trees.
The plane had left a faint line of exhaust smoke a hundred meters or so above the center of the broad fjord. Zefla stayed on watch; Sharrow sat back in her seat with the missile-launcher on her lap. She looked over at Feril, sitting with apparent unconcern as it guided their AT after Miz and Dloan’s.
“Sorry about all this,” she said.
“Please, don’t be,” the android said, turning its head to her for a moment. “This is highly exciting.”
Sharrow shook her head, smiling. “Could get more exciting yet if we can’t find a place to hide.”
“Oh well,” Feril said, and turned from her to look around at the fjord to their right and the steeply forested mountains on either side. “Still,” it said as its hands worked the wheel of the AT, picking its way between the boulders littering the stony shore. “This is quite beautiful scenery, don’t you think?”
Sharrow grinned, briefly shaking her head at the android. Then she tried to relax, and took a slow, deliberate look round at the liquid silence of the calm black waters, the pitched abundance of the enfolding forests and the rippling, half-hidden morphology of the tree-smothered slopes, jagged-rimmed against the pale wastes of sky.
“Yes.” She sighed, and nodded. “Yes, it is beautiful.”
They had gone less than a kilometer down the side of the fjord and found no breaks in the trees, no fallen boulders large enough to hide behind and
no other form of cover, when Zefla shouted.
“It’s back!”
The flying boat appeared, a gray dot against the dark mountains toward the head of the fjord.
“Hell’s teeth,” Miz growled.
Sharrow watched the flying boat tilt and turn until it was heading straight toward them. She shook her head. “This is no good—”
“Firing!” yelled Zefla. Two bursts of smoke curled from under the wing roots of the plane.
“Stop!” Sharrow told the android. She grabbed her satchel from beneath the seat. “All out!”
“Shit,” Miz said. Both ATs skidded to a stop.
“Head for the fucking trees,” Zefla muttered, dropping from the hatch, bouncing on her seat and kicking the door open. She jumped to the ground holding a small backpack, followed by Feril. Sharrow jumped from the other door. Miz leaped from the AT in front and ran for the trees as well.
“Out, Dloan!” Sharrow yelled. She was heading for some large rocks near the water’s edge. She clicked the safety off the missile-launcher.
Dloan stood in the hatch of the front AT, sighting the cannon at the plane; the two missiles were bright points at the end of smoky trails, racing closer over the black, still water. “Dloan!” she yelled. She threw herself down between two rocks and sighted the missile-launcher.
The missiles zipped in; they missed the two ATs and screamed overhead, detonating in the forest fifty meters behind them. Dloan started firing the cannon; she could see each tracered eighth shell arcing up and out across the water, falling a hundred meters short of the plane in distant, tiny white splashes. She fired the missile; there was a bang as the tube juddered against her shoulder, then a flash and a clap of noise when the missile ignited and a whoosh as it raced away.
The plane flew lazily on up the center of the fjord, maybe two thousand meters away now; the missile lanced out on an intercept course.
Dloan had stopped firing the cannon.
The missile was a kilometer away, then five hundred meters.
“Oh well,” Sharrow said to herself. “Just ignore it then, assholes.”
Against a Dark Background Page 44
