A Cactus Garden

by Jo Bannister

  “I suppose they reckon ‘Gyr’s’a whole new ball-game. Can’t blame them for that.” His lip curled reflectively. Disappointment soured his eyes. “Still, if they won’t stop and they won’t fight, we’re left with just two options – destroy them or let them go. I doubt I need ask your preference.”

  Chaucer leaned over the arm of his chair, his big body animated. “No. We have to have that ship. Damage it if you must, but get it for us. Or –” He stopped abruptly, his face flushed.

  Paul was watching him from behind an equivocal half-smile. “Or what, Chaucer?” His voice was sardonic, provocative. “Or you’ll take mine? Be your age. You can’t take ‘Gyr’off me, and you couldn’t handle her if you did. Shall I let you into a secret? When I die, ‘Gyr’s’clocks will run down. She’ll live just long enough to wreak vengeance on anyone close enough to have contributed to my demise and then she’ll self-destruct. If you kill me, my ship will raze Mithras.”

  Chaucer shook his head, but belief showed in his eyes.

  Paul laughed, without humour. “I keep telling you, you’ve been out of space for too long. Technology has got sophisticated in the last twenty years.”

  “Then why can you not capture that tin-can of a ship for us?” demanded Chaucer, his voice plaintive with frustration.

  “Because people are the same as they always were, and technology has no answer to brave men with nothing to lose.” He paused, frowning. “Unless –” Purpose sparked in his eyes and quickened his fingers on the console. “‘Griffin’, this ‘Gyr’. I have an offer for you. I’ll take your ship in exchange for your lives. You have a lifeboat there? – use it. You might be picked up, or you might make some habitable world before your supplies run out, but if not you can still have that clean death you prize so highly, just by opening the door.”

  Long silences spun webs around both cockpits. Paul was conscious of Chaucer’s eyes but did not deign to meet them. Eventually Meredith said, “I’ll have to give that some thought,” and tuned out. “Quasar Griffin” continued her futile flight into the darkness. “Gyr”, having already overhauled her prey, now formated upon her, the black bat hung like an incubus over the silver victim.

  Chaucer nodded slow approval and stood up, taking advantage of the hiatus to stretch his legs. He was stiff with tension. “Yes,” he said, “neatly done. And once they are safely away from the ship we can destroy them at our leisure.”

  Paul regarded him without expression. “Once you have command of the ‘Griffin’you can do with them anything you like; always assuming you can still find them. I shall deliver ‘Griffin’to Amalthea back at Mithras. If your people remember anything of their former trade you might learn to fly her in a week or not much more. If it matters to you, you can try hunting them down then – any competent clairvoyant could tell you where to start looking.”

  A broad spectrum of emotions played across Chaucer’s florid features. Anger yielded in turn to exasperation, disappointment, incomprehension, slow understanding and curiosity. A red light like candle-glow shone and then faded in his piercing eyes before he finally spoke. “You are not going maudlin on me, are you, Paul?”

  The mercenary glowered. “You hired me to fight a war, not carry out an execution. I didn’t promise you the ship: if you want her you’ll have to settle for the deal on offer. I can still blow it up, but I can’t outmanoeuvre a vessel that’s only interested in running away.” His eyes were steady on the screen that showed “Griffin’s” position beneath him – beneath was, of course, a purely subjective judgement – watching for any sudden sneaky attack or bid for freedom, but out of their corners he could see Chaucer prowling behind him. He did not like that, but ordering the Mithraian to his seat would have no likely effect besides betraying to him Paul’s unease.

  Chaucer said, “I appreciate the difficulties.” His well-modulated voice had gone silken. Paul had to fight to keep from looking round. The soft measured steps behind him raised the hairs up the back of his neck. “I just have my doubts about the way you are tackling them. Surely, Paul – surely by everything, if indeed there is anything, you hold sacred – you are not squeamish about killing people?” He gave a low, musical chuckle. “No answer. Then tell me this, mercenary – you who hold death on a chain: how many people have you actually killed?”

  Paul responded with a promptness that suggested neither pride nor guilt so much as the constant dwelling of the matter in the forefront of his mind. His eyes did not flicker from the screen. “Anything up to twenty thousand.” His voice was as bleak as the wind of winters Chaucer had all but forgotten.

  Shock jolted the Chancellor to his heels. His ponderous body froze in mid-space; his mind froze too. His round stunned eyes, denied any other purchase on the man whose back remained resolutely turned, found an imperfect reflection in the perspex screen and his face was set in hard planes like stone.

  His mind belatedly catching up with his ears Chaucer thought, with a surge of hope that he did not understand, that perhaps the figure was arbitrary, chosen for effect. But even wanting to very much, he could not sustain the theory in the face of the cold basilisk stare in the perspex and the hanging silence, which was such that he could hear his own heart-beat and the breathing of both of them, under and undisturbed by the busy chatter of computer tape and the blip of radar. He was left with the appalling conviction that Paul had answered his taunt with nothing more than the truth. Finally finding a voice, though it was not one his closest friends would have recognised, he whispered, “How?”

  “It’s not difficult,” said Paul. “All you need is a city of twenty thousand people and the means of blowing it up.”

  “And a reason?”

  “Oh, reasons are easily come by. Money’s not a bad one. Self-preservation is even better.”

  “You would kill twenty thousand people for money?”

  Paul’s lip curled in the reflection. “You’re hiring me to kill people: that could be considered even less noble. But no, to be strictly accurate, that was not the way of it. I sacrificed them in the cause of saving myself; I got into the position of having to make that choice for money, or more precisely still for this ship. Which was no mean recompense for the deed, though whether it was worth it would depend on how much imagination an individual had, and therefore how many nightmares.”

  “And do you have nightmares?”

  “Never,” Paul said firmly. He looked up at last. Half the colour had gone from Chaucer’s rosy face so that he looked tired and ill. Paul, who through worrying it had finally rounded the corners of the monstrous thing, felt again vicariously the pangs of their virgin sharpness. He sneered. “You want to tell me how many people you’ve killed, Chaucer?”

  Chaucer regarded him sideways. There was a strange kind of respect in his eyes, and a strange kind of compassion. “I defer to your superiority on the question of scores.”

  Paul’s teeth showed in a savage gleam no-one could have mistaken for a smile, even one of his. “Don’t be so anxious to concede. Any five-figure bid has got to be competitive. After all, I don’t actually know how many people died in Chad, only that there were up to twenty thousand there before the explosion and no city left afterwards. I didn’t actually go back and count the bodies.”

  “I can imagine,” Chaucer said hollowly.

  “I warned you about that,” said Paul. “Imagination.”

  In the long naked hull of the “Quasar Griffin”, helpless as a sleeper beneath the hovering menace of a vampire, Meredith was sprinting beneath the mess and the flight-deck. He had been conducting a straw poll of his men’s views. Breathless and dishevelled, sweating not only from exertion, he dropped into his seat and jabbed his console. “‘Gyr’, are you still there?”

  “You thought I might go away?”

  “Not thought; not thought, exactly.” Meredith sighed. “All right, how do we set about it?”

  “Couldn’t be simpler,” said Paul. “You take whatever survival rations you can pack on board your lifeboat and
abandon ship. When you’re clear I shall inspect the ‘Griffin’, and if I find you’ve left any souvenirs I shall come after you, pick your hull apart rivet by rivet, and make a small new asteroid belt of your treacherous carcases as a warning to spacemen yet unlaunched. Is that quite clear?”

  “Perfectly,” snapped Meredith. “How long have we got to embark the lifeboat?”

  “As long as it takes. How many are you?”

  “Nineteen.”

  For a slender moment Chaucer did not appreciate that his fiction had foundered. He realised first that he had trouble, then what it was, when Paul said tersely, “Say again,” and his eyes stabbed up from the screen and impaled the Mithraian where he stood.

  “Nineteen, nineteen,” Meredith repeated irritably. “How many men do you think it takes to fly a floating warehouse?”

  There was something unholy in the stillness of Paul’s body, the even tenor of his voice and the overt, slightly sardonic appraisal of his flecked gaze running over Chaucer like tongues of flame. He held the Chancellor with his eyes and addressed Meredith. “The lord Chaucer, Chancellor and Leader of the Council of Mithras, who is beside me, had the idea there were rather more of you.”

  “We were twenty,” growled Meredith, “until the lord Chaucer, Chancellor and Leader of the Council of Mithras, murdered my midshipman trying to do last run what you have succeeded in doing this run.”

  “Stand by, ‘Quasar Griffin’.” Paul regarded the Chancellor levelly. “Is there something you ought to be telling me?”

  “Yes.” Chaucer’s beard jutted like the prow of a sailing ship. “Get on with the job you are being paid to do.”

  “I was hired to kill pirates. But if I kill the entire population of the Hive,” Paul said thoughtfully, “who will pay me?”

  “You are our agent. Do as we require.”

  “I am my agent. You lied to me.”

  Chaucer laughed out loud. “Great heaven, moral indignation from a hired killer! Well tell me, mercenary, how you propose to get your woman back without returning to Mithras – because if you go back after letting our prize escape, they will tear you limb from limb. Or do you intend to run out on her, too?”

  “I’ll swop you for her, Chaucer.”

  The Chancellor shook his bear’s head. “You might be happy with such an arrangement, Paul. I might be happy with it. But do you suppose for a moment that Amalthea would relinquish her hold on you? Not to save me from roasting over a slow fire. I know exactly my worth to her, and I know it is not enough to outweigh her anger if you deny her now. If she does not get that ship she will want to hurt someone very much – preferably you, but failing that your whore will serve nicely.”

  He was talking his way back to a belief in ultimate victory. The collapse of his deception had been a nasty moment, when the mercenary might have done anything – from killing him to shooting up the Hive with his terrible guns. But the time for fury was past. Cool logic had supervened, and Chaucer was confident that there was no logical answer to his argument. Chaucer had built his career on an agile intellect backed by utter ruthlessness. But that had been among men less intelligent and on the whole more scrupulous than himself, and Paul did not suffer from those handicaps.

  Frowning, too preoccupied to rise to the threat, Paul said, “Amalthea wanted me to destroy the ‘Griffin’. It was my suggestion that I should try to capture it. Ah –”

  “Yes. We thought it would sound more plausible coming from you. We were fairly sure you would think of it sooner or later, but if not we were prepared to prompt you.”

  “It was clever,” admitted Paul. “Imagine anything so improbable so nearly succeeding. And yet discovery depended in a fairly long and lucid communication between me and ‘Griffin’which neither of us had any reason to pursue; each of us thinking we understood the nature of the engagement, when in fact I believed they were the aggressors and they believed I knew they weren’t. That’s why you came: to protect that misunderstanding for as long as maybe. And if ‘Griffin’had opened fire I’d have killed everyone on board and never known the difference.”

  “The difference does not signify,” said Chaucer. “It is, of course, as you surmise: the ship is no more than she appears, a semi-armed merchantman opening a new route between Feraux and the Ark Worlds. They used a turn round the back of Mithras to pick up speed for the home straight. They also picked up our first distress call. We almost had them then: Amalthea was inconsolable when they escaped. That ship is big enough to take all our people and all our garnered wealth back to those regions where it will serve us as it should. Also, Amalthea has an empire to reclaim. You understand – we must have the ship.

  “We knew they would be back – from what they knew of us there was no reason for them to abandon the route – but they did not know to expect you. Yes, we brought you here under false pretences, but that alters nothing. Not for them: they know why they are dying. Not for us: for though preying upon passing merchantmen may be widely considered reprehensible we are little moved by such conventions. And least of all you, because while bounty-hunting is a business of doubtful ethics most people would agree with you, that self-preservation takes priority. That is now your only choice: take the ship or take the consequences. You have killed up to twenty thousand people. What are another nineteen?”

  Their strange eyes met and held, Chaucer’s diamond-points drilling against the impervious obsidian under the mercenary’s hawk-hooded lids as if mining for the gold flecks there. The silence between them stretched and hummed like a lute string. Slowly, Paul began to smile. Chaucer smiled too, broadly, breathing a small and, he hoped, inconspicuous sigh of relief. Paul said, “I am a man of perverse ideologies.”

  To “Quasar Griffin” he said, “On your way.”

  The blanket of space enveloping the two craft seemed to pulse with shock. “No!” spat Chaucer, flames racing up his face.

  “What?” demanded Meredith.

  “Go. Depart in peace. Shift your burners out of here. Only do me a favour and find another way to the Ark Worlds.” Under the delicate play of his fingers across the controls the black bat lifted clear of the victim it had been covering and swung off into the oblivion between the stars.

  The concussion of her engines washed over the “Quasar Griffin” so that her crew clapped hands to affronted ears. When the shock-wave passed Van Tauber said, “Where the hell is she?” The screen was empty. He keyed up successive angles but the perspex remained stubbornly unfigured.

  “He’s gone,” Welland explained succinctly.

  “The cunning bastard’s getting a new drop on us.”

  “There was something wrong with the one he had?”

  Meredith said in a low voice, “You may be speaking of the only reasonable man on Mithras, young Pieter. Be respectful.”

  Van Tauber shook his blond head. “It’s a trick. Why else should he pull off? He had us cold – dead. Run a search for him, Ray, he must be there somewhere.”

  “You’re wrong, Pieter,” said Welland. “He’s gone.”

  “I’ll believe you back on Feraux,” grunted the gunner.

  “Back on Feraux I shan’t believe any of this happened,” Meredith vouchsafed reverently. “But right now I believe in miracles.”

  On the flight-deck of the battle-cruiser, surging into the spangled night at a speed which distorted the familiar images of the stars beyond all recognition, Paul was staring into the muzzle of a weapon he should have known Chaucer would have, and though Chaucer was visibly quaking with rage his gun-hand was steady. His voice was very low, full-timbred with emotion. He said, “Give me one good reason why I should not kill you.”

  Paul shrugged. “I already have. ‘Gyr’would destroy the Hive.”

  “Give me one good reason why I should believe you.”

  Paul smiled. He always smiled at the wrong things. “I’m not worried.”

  Watching him over the gun in his extended hand, frowning, Chaucer strove for some kind of understanding, of the acti
on or the man. Understanding eluded him, but he reached a decision. “Then you should be,” he said quietly, and the gun coughed.

  Chapter Four

  With a shriek, Shah awoke to a place she could not have identified even with all her wits about her. She had not. She had a lead slug lodged in her shoulder, she was in pain, she was fevered, and enough sweat had poured from her to soak not only her own clothes but those of Michal who held her. She sweated still.

  “Try not to move,” murmured Michal.

  “Where – what –” Shah was aware that she was not making much sense and made an effort to concentrate. Her head ached abominably. Her vision dimmed in pulses. All her right side was a stiff and swollen misery laced with sharp pain that stabbed when she breathed, and when Michal eased his cramped body under her. She ran her tongue over her hot lips. “What happened?”

  “You were shot. That —” Michal’s vocabulary proved insufficient to the task so he started again. “Balrig shot you. He must have been waiting for us. Please do not talk, Shah, help is coming.”

  “Help?”

  When Michal grabbed her by the hand and dragged her, still falling, back into the cover of the hated green, he made his choice between the two worlds available to him; perhaps not consciously but irrevocably. He could have left her and walked back to the Hive, trusting to the immunity that Amalthea’s patronage still afforded him. He could have waited until Balrig left and then sought help to take Shah to the Hive infirmary. He did neither. He took her to the forest.

  The briars of the hedge which had all but strangled him coming and sullenly scratched him going now snapped out of his way like cut elastic, offering no obstacle. On later consideration he found the idea of helpful plants hardly less disturbing than inimical ones, but at the time he gave it no thought, having his mind and his hands already full to capacity. Michal dimly remembered video shows in which brawny heroes were forever sweeping helpless maidens into their arms without turning a hair. Perhaps through lack of practice, Michal found it harder.