Against a Dark Background

by Iain M. Banks

  The android suggested it went on guard now. Miz gave it the machine gun. It closed the tent and left them to tend to the wounded woman as best they could.

  It knew now that it should have spoken its mind earlier when they were trying to decide what to do; it ought to have suggested that it stay here, on guard, but it had not felt it was its place to say anything. They were experienced at this sort of thing, their lives were more totally at risk than its was, and it had not wanted to be thought presumptuous or patronizing.

  Fool, fool, it told itself, taking the safety off the machine gun. Fool, Feril; fool.

  It sat down in a pile of freshly fallen snow near the top of the small ridge above the camp, and nursed the gun until the bitter dawn arose.

  They set off just after dawn, leaving Dloan behind in the tent with Zefla. She was still breathing shallowly. The bandage round her chest was soaked red, and they had to keep her turned on her side to let her cough up blood without choking. Dloan just sat there with wide, frightened, child-like eyes, stroking her hands and whispering to her.

  “She’ll be all right,” Sharrow told him, not believing it but feeling it was the only way to dam his despair. The big, powerful man looked about five years old.

  Dloan said nothing but looked at Sharrow with a faint, tremulous smile, and kept on stroking Zefla’s hand. Sharrow ran her hand over Zefla’s pale, hot face and stroked her cheek.

  “You’ll pull through, eh, girl?” she said, trying to keep the choke out of her voice, then pulled away and stood shakily outside the tent where Miz and Feril were waiting.

  She hesitated, then went to the body lying frozen just up the slope from the tent; it had been torn almost in half by the machine-gun fire. Sharrow pulled the black mask off the figure’s head, remembering Keteo. It was a woman’s face.

  Again, she thought at first she didn’t recognize it, then recalled the woman at Roa’s side in Vembyr, during the auction and then afterward at the docks. It was her. She let the mask snap back and rejoined Miz and Feril.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  They set off into the snow-quiet forest under skies like milk.

  Feril knew the fastest route; they moved as quickly as they could, uphill through broken boulders and deformed, wind-blasted trees. Sharrow walked until the android saw her stumble and gulp for breath, then offered to carry her.

  She said nothing for a moment. She stood breathing heavily, her bandaged hand hanging at one side. For a moment Feril thought it might have mistimed its offer, but then she nodded.

  Feril picked her up easily and strode off through the trees. Miz struggled to keep up; the air was like freezing water in his throat, his legs weak and shaky with hunger and fatigue.

  They were fifteen hundred meters away when they heard the firing up ahead.

  They stopped for a moment and Sharrow got down from the android’s arms. Machine-gun fire crackled and laser fire snapped; there were sharp explosions that might have been grenade or mortar rounds, and a booming ripple of fire that could have been a cluster munition. Trees around them reacted to the shuddering air, loosing powdery falls of snow.

  “What,” Miz wheezed, “was all that?” His breath smoked in front of his face. “The Solipsists…couldn’t have had…ordnance that heavy…could they?”

  “I believe I heard jet motors,” Feril said.

  The gunfire and explosions died away, the echoes fading slowly to silence amongst the mountains.

  They listened awhile longer, then Sharrow shrugged. “Only one way to find out.” She looked back the way they had come, as if trying to see the tent. She let herself be lifted when Feril offered her the cradle of its arms again.

  A few minutes later they saw the smoke rising above the trees ahead, piling silently up to the calm skies, spreading and fanning in the shining space above the peaks.

  They came to the tower quarter of an hour later.

  The trees ended four hundred meters from the tower; the slope descended to a delta of tall rushes. The stone square containing the shallow-walled circle with the stubby tower at its center was just as the android had described it, near the straight edge of the fjord’s end with the braided river delta beyond.

  They looked out onto devastation. The whole small estuary around the stone square and the tower was dotted with smoldering fires, bodies and wrecked vehicles. The decaying superstructures of a couple of long-foundered boats rested above their still images in the quiet waters of the calm fjord.

  It was hard, at first, to distinguish ancient wreckage from fresh carnage, then the android pointed to the trail of bodies that led from a break in the trees on the far side of the river delta and stretched toward the tower. Smoke still rose from several of the corpses.

  “Those the Solipsists?” Miz asked it. Most of the bodies were too blackened for any colors to be visible.

  The android took a moment to reply.

  “Yes,” it said eventually.

  They could see the two parachutists the Solipsists had dropped; they must have been hit again, because both their bodies were burning, too. Sharrow caught the smell of the individual pyres on the breeze and felt sick. There was just one other gaudily uniformed figure visible, sprawled at the corner of the stone square nearest them.

  “Who did all this?” Sharrow said. “Was this all the tower defenses?”

  The android lifted a hand, pointing toward the forested valley behind the small estuary, then seemed to droop.

  “I believe…” it began, its voice small, then it fell over slackly, thumping into the ground and rolling a little way downhill, limbs flopping.

  “ What—?” Miz said, stumbling after the android with Sharrow.

  They lifted Feril’s head.

  “Fate,” Sharrow said. “How do you bring one of these things round?”

  “Can’t see any switches,” Miz said. “Think this was natural? You know; just a fault in the android, maybe? No?”

  She looked around the silent mountains, the valley and the river delta. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t think so.”

  They gazed at each other. Miz’s face looked strained and gray. Sharrow had never seen him look so old and careworn. She wanted to take his head in her hands and kiss his poor face better.

  “I don’t like this, kid,” he said. “This isn’t good.” He glanced at the tower, pulling his hunting jacket closer around him. “This isn’t a good place.”

  She unhitched the machine gun from the android’s shoulder, pulled it free and handed it to Miz.

  “I know what you mean,” she said. “But there’s nowhere else to go, is there?” She looked across at the tower. “Not if we’re going to get Zef out of here.”

  Miz took the machine gun and checked it. He shook his head. “I hate it when you’re right.”

  She readied the HandCannon, holding it awkwardly in her right hand, then they left Feril where it had fallen and walked down toward the stone square and the tower; a rough stone stump capped with black.

  They passed ancient burned-out tanks and rusting All-Terrains and motorbikes, wrecked helicopters and the hulks of small ACVs. The bodies were mostly long-decayed, reduced to bleached bones and faded rags that had been clothes and uniforms, all gone to tatters.

  They crossed the field of chin-high rushes, their boots crunching through shallow, ice-dried pools. Miz hauled himself up onto the plinth of the stone square near one corner; he reached down and hauled Sharrow up after him.

  They walked through the flat expanse of snow to one of the small stone posts set in a corner of the square. It was like a tiny model of the central stone tower; a stump rising to a black hemisphere.

  A garishly colored, motley-uniformed body lay in front of it, face down, limbs spread; the snow here was pitted with neat holes that ended in shallow, blackened craters in the flagstones. Miz turned the body over with one foot, keeping the gun trained on it.

  Elson Roa’s dead face stared up at the sky. His chest had been opened and burned by a laser. He
looked surprised.

  Miz looked at Sharrow, but she just shook her head.

  He pushed Roa’s body off the edge of the stone square, down into the rushes beneath.

  The pitted metal cover on top of the post swung back easily. It was on a spring; Sharrow held it back with her bandaged hand. The double-sided handprint was there, just as Feril had said.

  Sharrow gave the HandCannon to Miz, took the glove off her right hand using her teeth, then—after a look at the handprint there, and the cryptic legend—put her hand down firmly on the slick chill of the plastic template.

  Nothing happened for a few moments. Then the plastic under her hand lit up and glowed softly; a four-by-five grid of little bright dots appeared on a panel above Sharrow’s middle finger and started to disappear at one per second.

  Miz and Sharrow looked at each other, then round the estuary, feeling exposed and vulnerable. A wind came out of the valley and ruffled the tops of the trees, scattering snow.

  The last of the dots disappeared.

  There was a grinding noise behind them; they turned quickly to see two shining metal shell-doors sliding up out of the tower, gradually covering the black hemisphere at the summit of the squat structure and meeting with a hollow clunk.

  Another grinding noise came, from the side of the tower facing away from the fjord. Sharrow took her glove out of her mouth and threw it over the low stone wall into the circle. The glove landed unharmed in the snow. She shrugged, stepped over the knee-high wall and started walking to the tower.

  Miz followed her.

  On the valley-facing side of the tower a door had dropped vertically into the floor, revealing what appeared to be another door of black glass. There was a hint of a small space behind the black glass door the daylight did little to illuminate. A smell of plastic wafted from the tower’s entrance. As they looked in, lights came on inside; the Lazy Gun sat on a pedestal in the center of the room, gleaming.

  “Yes,” Miz breathed.

  Sharrow moved forward; another handprint appeared at face level on the surface of the black glass door. She put her palm to it, and with hardly a pause it, too, sank into the floor.

  She looked at Miz. He nodded at her. “You go on; I’m staying out here.”

  She walked forward, entering the tower. She stepped quickly over the doors that had sunk into the floor, and went to the Lazy Gun. It looked real. She lifted it from its plinth and swung it around. It was light but massy; a strange, disturbing sensation, like something from a dream.

  So it was real. This was the eighth and last Lazy Gun. Her head swam; she felt dizzy. She put the Gun down on its pedestal again and walked to a hole in the floor where a broad ramp led down beneath the tower.

  She went halfway down to the floor below; a softly lit space perhaps half the area of the stone square outside stretched away around her. She saw equipment of a hundred different types, and boxes and cases that might have concealed a hundred more; a billion more, on some scales. There was a strange, car-like device near the foot of the steps, resting on one canted wheel, its single-seat cockpit open. What looked like a fabulously hi-tech suit of armor stood nearby. A rack of bewilderingly complex guns stood to one side of what might have been a cluster of black-body satellites gathered together to resemble a carousel. Something that resembled an old radar unit sat on the back of what was probably a small ACV.

  She was still looking for something that looked remotely like a comm set when she heard the firing.

  Miz watched Sharrow enter the tower. He felt nervous; there were too many dead people around here. Even the android had keeled over once he’d come back within half a klick of the place.

  The wind gusted, lifting snow from the trees in the valley behind the tower and from the stone square itself, blowing it across the square and into Miz’s eyes. He blinked.

  He heard something like clattering feet coming from behind him. He turned and looked through the cloud of drifting snow.

  A huge black four-limbed animal was charging toward him, its head down. Something on its head glittered. Miz stared. The animal was thirty meters away. A sial; a racer; one of the things they raced in Tile, one of the beasts somebody had been naming after his defeats and setbacks for the past half year or more.

  He blinked; this couldn’t be happening. The animal charged on; its warm breath powered out of its black nostrils and curled in the air. Miz raised the machine gun and fired.

  The animal vanished utterly. The noise of its hooves faded a second later, then came back, again from behind him.

  He turned: another night-black sial with something glittering on its head. He sighted the gun. When the beast was ten or so meters from him, and he could have sworn he could feel each shuddering hoofbeat through the flagstones under his boots and make out the great silvery spike attached to its forehead by a glinting harness, he fired; that animal too disappeared, just like a hologram.

  The noise faded, swung round behind him. He turned again: two animals, racing toward him, heads lowered. He glimpsed movement in the doorway of the tower and saw Sharrow. She sagged against the doorway, then fell forward into the snow.

  “Fucking setup!” he roared.

  He glanced at the two animals tearing toward him through the snow, hooves flinging curves of powdery white behind them. He fired, saw the image flick out of existence and turned to see two more beasts coming from the other direction. He fired at them too, until the gun’s magazine ran out; then he ran for the doorway.

  He realized then that he had seen only one of the first pair of sial disappear. He glimpsed something bearing down on him to his right. He turned to use the machine gun as a club and put his hand to his pocket for his laser.

  The firing came again before Sharrow could stumble from the ramp to the doorway; when she got there, she saw Miz firing through a hazy cloud of wind-blown snow. She opened her mouth to shout and then the pain struck her, incandescing. An instant later the pain shut off abruptly and was replaced by a terrible numbness, exactly as though somebody was using a nerve weapon on her. Her arm holding the HandCannon wouldn’t move. Her legs folded under and she collapsed against the side of the door, before falling forward into the snow.

  She could move her eyes and blink and swallow; nothing else. Her bladder had emptied, and if she had had anything to eat for the last few days her bowels would have voided. Her heart spasmed, beating quickly and irregularly. Her breathing was shallow, uncontrollable. She had a view forward across the snow-covered stone square to the low circular wall and the dark-on-white chevrons of a forested mountain beyond.

  She felt the stones beneath the snow ring to hoofbeats like a drumroll and glimpsed movement from the corner of her eye.

  There was a scream and a terrible tearing noise, then great hooves pounded past; a pair of camouflage-clothed legs kicked and struggled in the air in front of the flashing hooves, and then the scream gurgled to nothing.

  She closed her eyes.

  There was a single loud shot and then a ragged thump a few meters away. She opened her eyes to see the black back and haunches of the great beast fall heavily to the snow. A single, jacketed arm flopped into the snow beyond the head of the animal.

  A sial. One of the things they raced in Tile, with criminals’ brains emplaced. She stared at the arm lying loose on the snow, and saw movement. She watched the fingers clench, then slowly unfold and go limp.

  The sial’s hide steamed gently in the cool air. She could see blood on the snow, where the animal had passed in front of her.

  She waited. The paralysis went on. Then she heard the squeaking, cramping sounds of somebody walking toward her across the snow. Two sets of footsteps.

  Two identical pairs of boots came into view; one pair went over to the fallen sial. She could see the person wearing them up to about mid-thigh level; he was standing near Miz’s motionless arm. The butt of a large hunting rifle was lowered to rest on the snow. She could hear other footsteps, but only those two pairs of boots were visible. The p
air in front of her tilted as the person wearing them squatted. She saw knees, then a pair of clasped hands, held in front of a smart uniform jacket the color of dried blood and decorated with insignia she didn’t recognize; then a face.

  The young man pushed the cap back from his blond-browed, gleaming face, revealing a bald scalp. He favored her with an enormously wide smile.

  “Why, Lady Sharrow!” he exclaimed. “Fancy meeting you here!” He glanced over to where his twin was also squatting down, still holding the hunting rifle and studying the dead animal.

  The one with the rifle saw her looking at him and waved cheerily. He lifted the limp arm lying on the snow in front of him, and made that wave too.

  Miz’s hand was made to flop up and down. Tears came to Sharrow’s eyes.

  The young man said, “Yes, and you brought some of your little friends with you. How chummy. What a pity Mister Kuma seems to have taken all our criticism to heart!”

  He laughed, and then she felt herself lifted up by the armpits until she was half-resting on her knees. The young man stood behind, holding her.

  “Oh, look,” he said. “Isn’t that a shame.” He tickled her under the armpits. “But Molgarin will be pleased.”

  Molgarin, she thought groggily. Molgarin; that means something; that was what I was trying to remember. Molgarin…

  She looked over the bulging, still-steaming corpse of the dead sial to where Miz lay sprawled on the snow, joined to it.

  The sial had had some sort of great metal spike secured to its head by a collar fitted round its neck and head. The spike was a meter and a half long and perhaps ten centimeters thick at its base. The artificial horn had pierced Miz through the chest; it protruded from the back of his hunting jacket for nearly a meter. The snow around him was bright with blood. His face looked like Roa’s had; slightly surprised.

  The tears welled in her eyes. Then the young man let her down and laid her carefully on her back. She had time to see camouflage-suited men with guns slung over their shoulders coming out of the tower’s door carrying boxes, and glimpsed two dark, fatly sleek shapes approaching through the air above the valley; as she saw them they slowed and dropped and she heard the sound of their jets.