Against a Dark Background

by Iain M. Banks

  Light glittered around the nose of the flying boat.

  The missile blew up; it flashed and disintegrated in the air, creating a thick black paw of smoke from which dozens of little dark claws trailed out and down, falling into the water in a flurry of tall splashes.

  “Son of a bitch,” Sharrow breathed. The plane tipped toward them once more.

  Dloan fired the cannon again, sparks arcing high toward the plane. The plane flew through the rising bulb of smoke left by their intercepted missile. It fired another two of its own.

  Sharrow glanced at the AT. “Dloan!” she screamed. She saw him crouch down a little behind the cannon. He fired a last burst of shells, then sprang out of the hatch and ran along the top of the AT’s roof. Sharrow could have sworn he had a great big smile on his face.

  Dloan jumped the three meters to the ground, rolled and dived into light cover a half second before the pair of missiles screamed into the ATs and blew them both to smithereens.

  She must have ducked. She lifted her head to the smoke and the flame. Both vehicles had been obliterated. Hers lay on its back, burning fiercely. The other AT still seemed to be the right way up, but its body had been torn half off, lifted so that the three engines lay exposed between the flayed, burning tires. What was left of it shook, crackling with secondary detonations; she ducked down again and watched the sea plane fly past a half-kilometer out and curving away from them again.

  A line of black smoke curled from its starboard engine. It was losing height and it sounded rough and clattery. Somebody whooped from the trees.

  She looked at her left hand, resting on the ground. It hurt. She pulled it away, peering at the blood, then shook it, cleaning earth away from the cut. It didn’t look serious.

  “ Yee-ha!” whooped the same voice from the trees. Dloan.

  The flying boat labored on through the air for another kilometer, gaining height; then it tipped and banked, turning and heading back down the fjord again, this time angling for the far shore as the black smoke behind it thickened and it dropped closer and closer to the water.

  The air cracked and rang as more explosions sounded in the two wrecked ATs; smoke piled into the sky.

  “Sharrow?” Miz shouted during a lull.

  “Here!” she shouted. “I’m all right.”

  The flying boat hit the water, bounced in a double curtain of spray and hit again, stopping quickly and slewing round as it came to rest facing them, fifteen hundred meters away.

  She slung the satchel onto her back and crawled away from the shore-side rocks, staying in the cover of some smaller boulders until she was near the trees; then she got up and ran in a crouch to where the others were lying just inside the cover, watching the ATs burn and the flying boat near the far shore sink. Its glassy, complicated nose was already raised in the air; one wing float was canted out of the water, the other submerged.

  She dropped down beside them.

  “Okay?” Zefla asked her.

  “Yes. Nice shooting, Dloan,” she said, wiping her bloody hand on the trousers of her fatigues.

  “Thanks.” Dloan grinned. “Fancy missile-intercepting laser couldn’t deal with old-fashioned cannon shells.” He sighed massively, looking happy.

  “Yeah, but now what do we do?” Miz said, looking at her. “Swim the rest of the way?”

  “Oh,” Feril said, “look. What unorthodox camouflage.”

  Sharrow looked.

  Zefla squinted through the field-glasses. She groaned.

  “I don’t fucking believe it,” she said. She handed the binoculars to Sharrow. “No, that’s not true.” She shook her head. “I do believe it.”

  Sharrow watched through glasses; the faceted nose of the flying boat was tipped high up now, pointing at the sky. From doors just under the wing roots she could see perhaps three dozen or so small figures clambering into what she guessed were inflatable boats. It all looked a little confused.

  Sharrow could make the figures out easily because they were dressed in shocking pinks, lime-greens, blood-reds, loud violets and bright yellows that were even more vibrant and obvious than the orange boats they were packing into. She put the glasses down.

  “They really are mad,” she said, more to herself than anybody else. “It’s Elson Roa and his gang.”

  “That maniac?” Miz said, eyes wide. He gestured at the sinking plane, its fuselage now vertical to the sky and submerged almost to the wings. Two bright clusters of color were just visible to the naked eye, heading slowly away from the sinking aircraft toward the thick green blanket of trees on the far shore. “That’s him?” Miz said. “Again?”

  Sharrow nodded slowly, setting the field-glasses down on the ground. “Yes,” she said. “Again.”

  The ammunition in the burning ATs continued to explode for a few minutes, then the fires began to die and the detonations ceased. They ventured out from the trees and searched the wreckage scattered round the remains of the two ATs until they heard a series of quiet phutting noises and saw thin fountains in the water nearby.

  “Machine gun,” Dloan said, looking toward the far side of the fjord. The air cracked and whined; little clouds of dust jumped off rocks around them. They retreated quickly into the forest.

  They had one light emergency tent and survival rations in a small backpack Zefla had rescued; Sharrow had her satchel, which contained the HandCannon, the two dials from the old bike, and a first aid kit. Miz had rescued a medium machine gun and a single anti-aircraft missile. They’d found some clothes and a few more ration packs while they’d searched the wreckage. Apart from that, all they had was what they stood in; fatigues or hiking gear, a pistol each, a couple of knives, one small medical kit and whatever else had happened to be in their pockets.

  “I should have thought,” Sharrow said, banging the heel of her hands off her temples. She winced as her left hand hit; she had washed the wound in a stream and put a plaster on it, but it still hurt. Miz still wore a small bandage on his hand, too, and Dloan limped a little, just as she did.

  We are coming to reflect each other, she thought.

  They sat in a small hollow, round a smoky, feeble fire they had finally lasered alight. The late afternoon was made evening by the tall trees rising around them.

  “I should have thought,” she repeated. “We could have got more stuff together to take out of the ATs while we were looking for a place to hole up.” She shook her head.

  “Look,” Miz said. “We’re all alive; we have a tent, some food, and we have guns; we can shoot what we need to eat.” He gestured at the forest around them. “There must be plenty of game in here. Or there’s fish.” He patted one pocket in his fancy, much be-pocketed hiking jacket. “I’ve got hooks and some line; we can make a rod.”

  Sharrow looked dubious. “Yes. Meanwhile, we’ve got four days to walk two hundred klicks,” she said, “for a rendezvous our brave captain probably isn’t even going to try to make.”

  “We could leave somebody here,” Zefla said. She held her combat cap out on a stick in front of the fire, drying it. She sat loosely cross-legged, at her ease. Dloan had his injured leg out in front of him. Miz had rolled up a rock to sit on; the android squatted on its haunches, looking skeletally sharp and angled. “Some of us could go on to the end of the fjord,” Zefla continued, “while somebody stays behind to meet the sub and tell them to come back later.”

  “We’ve nothing to signal with,” Sharrow said, taking her pocket phone out of her jacket. “The dedicated comm stuff was in the ATs and these won’t work here.”

  “Well,” Dloan said, “technically they do, but the calls get transferred to the Security Franchise and they come to investigate the source.”

  “Yes, Dloan,” Sharrow said. “Thank you.”

  “I could signal the submarine,” Feril said. It tapped its chest. “I have a communicator; it’s not long range, but it need not utilize the phone frequencies. I could communicate with the submarine even when it is underwater, if it comes within a few
kilometers.”

  “Could you get in touch with it now?” Miz asked.

  “I suspect not,” the android admitted.

  “What about the Solipsists?” Dloan said. “Maybe they don’t realize who we are.” He looked at Sharrow. “We could try radioing them.”

  She shook her head. “Somehow, I think they know exactly who we are,” she said. “Anyway, it’s not worth breaking silence.”

  “Oh, come on,” Miz said, poking at the fire with a branch. “The Franchise people can’t have missed that performance.” He nodded in the direction of the wrecked ATs, smouldering on the shore a hundred meters away through the trees. “They’re probably on their way in now to pick us up.”

  “Of course,” Dloan said, “they might just nuke us instead.”

  Sharrow glared at him.

  “So do we hike to whatever’s at the end of the fjord, or what?” Zefla said.

  Sharrow nodded. “We’d better, or Elson and his boys’ll get there first.”

  She took the two bike dials from her satchel. “Still pointing that way; range is down to just under a hundred klicks. If the maps were right and these are accurate, whatever they’re pointing at is at the head of the fjord.” She put the dials away again. “Or was.”

  “Pity we lost the maps,” Dloan said, flexing his leg.

  “Actually,” Feril said, holding up one hand tentatively. “I have remembered the map of the area.”

  “Oh yeah?” Miz looked skeptically at the android. “So how far is it to the end of the fjord?”

  “Hugging the coast, approximately eighty-nine kilometers,” the android told them. “Though there are a couple of sizeable rivers to be forded.”

  “Two days in and two back,” Dloan said.

  “If I may say,” the android began. They looked at it. “I could perhaps get there and back in about twenty hours.” It looked round them, then made an almost bashful shrugging motion.

  “So Feril could scout ahead,” Zefla said. “But what do we do when the rest of us get there?”

  “If we find the Lazy Gun,” Sharrow said, “we just make a phone call. When the Franchise forces come in to investigate, we take whatever they arrive in; aircraft probably.”

  “Just like that?” Zefla said.

  “We will have a Lazy Gun,” Miz said, grinning.

  “And if the Gun is not there?” Feril asked.

  Sharrow looked at the android. “Then we think again.” She picked up a length of branch and threw it into the smoking heart of the fire.

  They kept near the edge of the trees as far as possible, ten meters or so from the shore. The interior of the forest was very quiet. The only noise they heard over those first few hours, while the early winter light faded gradually around them, was that of rushing water in the tumbling, rock-strewn streams they crossed, and the sound of branches and twigs breaking underfoot.

  The floor of the forest was covered with old trees and rotting trunks; trees were tilted and canted at various angles, producing tangles they had to walk round. Clearings made by fallen trees bristled with new growth and afforded them glimpses of the gray and darkening sky.

  “Kind of disorganized, isn’t it?” Miz said to Sharrow, ducking under a fallen trunk raised off the ground by the bowed trees nearby. “I thought forests were just trunks and a nice soft carpet of—shit!” The hood on his jacket snagged on a branch and almost pulled him off his feet. He released it and glared at Sharrow before continuing. “Trunks and a nice soft carpet of needles.”

  She ducked under the trunk. “Those were plantations, Miz,” she told him. “This is forest; the real thing.”

  “Well, it’s damn messy,” he said, brushing rotten wood out of his jacket hood. “Might as well be back in the fucking Entraxrln.” He looked around. “We’d have had a hard time getting through this lot with the ATs, anyway; might have had to stick to the shore, sats or not.” He slipped on a root hidden in the ground cover of needles and fallen twigs and staggered. He shook his head. “Fucking Solipsists.”

  Sharrow smiled.

  They camped when the light got too dim for them to see properly; they had two sets of nightsight glasses, but two people would still have to have gone without, and they couldn’t have traveled very quickly. They were anyway tired after only a couple of hours walking; they found a level area next to a stream, hidden from the other side of the fjord by the bank, and decided to stop there.

  Sharrow changed the dressing on her cut hand. Dloan worked out how to pitch the thin emergency tent. Zefla looked for wood to make a fire. Miz sat on a stone and started unlacing his boots. His feet were sore; he’d been hobbling for the last half hour.

  Feril put wood down by the circle of stones it had set in place, then attempted to help Dloan with the tent until the man shooed it away. It came and squatted near Miz.

  “Damn boots,” Miz said, struggling to untie the laces. They seemed to have become tighter after they’d got wet. He’d thought the boots looked great in the store in Quay Beagh; really chunky and rugged and outdoorsy, in hide and with real laces, like something out of an ancient photograph, but now he was starting to wish he’d gone for a more modern pair with memory foam inserts, heater elements and quick release buckles. Of course, he hadn’t chosen his boots thinking he was actually going to be doing much walking in them.

  “Don’t suppose you have this problem.” Miz grunted, glancing at the android as he pulled at his laces.

  “Not really,” Feril said. “Though I do have pads on my feet that have to be replaced every few years.” It looked at its feet.

  “What a fucking Fate-forsaken place,” Miz breathed, looking around the dark enclosure of trees.

  Feril looked around. “Oh, I don’t know,” it said. “I think it’s rather beautiful.”

  “Yeah,” Miz said, trying to tease one lace out from under another. “Well, maybe you see things differently.”

  “Yes,” the android said. “I suppose I do.” It watched Zefla dump a load of wood onto the ground by the fire and then heap pieces into the center of the stone circle. She used her laser pistol on low power and wide beam to dry and then ignite the twigs; they burned smokily.

  “Hey,” Miz said to the android, looking embarrassed. “My fingers are getting cold. Could you give me a hand here?”

  Feril said nothing as it came over to kneel before Miz and untie his bootlaces.

  They sat round the fire in the black darkness of a deep forest under thick overcast, four hundred kilometers from the nearest sunlight-mirror footprint, street light or headlamp. They chewed on emergency army rations. They had enough for perhaps two more days.

  “We’ll catch something tomorrow,” Miz said, chomping on a foodslab, looking round at the others, their faces seemed to move oddly in the flickering orange firelight. He nodded. “Tomorrow we’ll shoot something big and have a proper roast, real meat.”

  “Yuk,” said Zefla.

  “We haven’t seen a damn thing so far,” Sharrow told him.

  “Yeah,” Miz said, wagging the half-eaten foodslab at her. “But there must be all sorts of big game in these mountains. We’ll find something.”

  “Excuse me,” Feril said from the top of the river bank, a couple of meters above them. Its metal and plastic face looked down at them, glinting in the firelight. It had volunteered to keep watch while they ate.

  “Yes, Feril?” Sharrow said.

  “What I believe is an inflatable boat has just left the far shore; it is heading this way.”

  Dloan reached for the machine gun and stood up. He slipped on a pair of nightsight glasses.

  “How far away is it?” Sharrow asked.

  “A hundred meters or so out from the far shore,” Feril said.

  “Let’s take a look,” Sharrow said.

  They trooped down to the trees facing the shore, Dloan leading Zefla and Sharrow leading Miz, who tripped a couple of times on his undone laces. They lay on the ground; with the nightsights zoomed on infrared Sharrow and Dloan
could just see the heat signature of the people in the inflatable.

  Dloan found a boulder and rested the machine gun on it, its barrel pointing at nearly forty-five degrees.

  “Should just about have the range,” he said. “Better get back,” he told the others, “just in case they have something that can home in on this.”

  They fell back a little into the trees.

  Dloan fired a dozen or so rounds, filling the night with sound and light; Sharrow had to turn the sights away, the fire was so bright. There were no tracers in the shells, but when she looked back she could see the tiny sparks of the bullets in the nightsights for about half their arcing journey over the fjord. As they cooled they disappeared.

  “Just over them and to the left,” Feril called out.

  Dloan adjusted his aim then fired again. They heard the sound of the gun echoing off mountains and cliffs far away. A clatter and a snicking sound announced Dloan was changing magazines.

  “Still a little to the left,” Feril said.

  Dloan fired once more. Sharrow saw no alteration in the furry-looking image in the sight.

  “Yes!” Feril said.

  Dloan paused, fired again. “Right! To the right!” Feril shouted as Dloan fired. The gun fell silent.

  “I believe they are in difficulties,” Feril said.

  Sharrow watched the hazy image in the nightsight change; it grew smaller and eventually, after a minute or so, there was just the hint of a few tiny heat sources in the water.

  “Their craft has sunk,” Feril announced. “They appear to be swimming back to shore.”

  “Good shooting again,” Sharrow told Dloan.

  “Hmm,” he said, sounding satisfied.

  He came back up from the shore. Sharrow turned to go as Dloan passed them, then saw the android still staring at the far side of the fjord. She checked the glasses but all they showed were the same few indistinct heat-glows against the gray clutter of the fjord’s cold waters.

  She watched the android for a few moments. It didn’t seem to notice her. “Feril?” she said.

  It turned to her. “Yes?”

  “What is it?” she asked.