by Neal Asher
Fethan gazed at her. ‘That gives us a breathing space. If we’re not seen, we should get to the mountains with no real problems,’ he said.
Eldene laughed. ‘You don’t need to breathe,’ she pointed out.
‘Ah,’ said Fethan, then quickly moved over to the flute grass near to where he had been working on the aerofan. Soon he returned, carrying a tangle of equipment it took a moment for Eldene to recognize. ‘You’ve got enough in this bottle for a day or so, and the spare should provide you with enough for another two to three days.’
Eldene now recognised Proctor Volus’s helmet with its tinted visor, lower breather collar against which the visor sealed, and a tangle of pipes leading to a flat square bottle which was worn on the back. For a little while she felt the urge to continue feeling sorry for herself, but Fethan was now offering her a chance at life. She stood up and held out her hands for this equipment.
Fethan withheld it for a moment. ‘Not yet. You want to get as much as you can out of your scole before it dies and that could be in anything from six to twelve hours – anyway, start direct-breathing oxygen now and it’ll just take it out of you to store up,’ he said. Eldene well understood that, as she knew that the oxygen keeping them alive during the working day was stored up by the scole during the night they spent in the compound bunkhouse. She nodded, and he then allowed her to take the breather.
Eldene inspected the helmet and breather unit – she’d seen proctors wearing these without the helmets and visors, just using a muzzle-shaped mask like Ulat had worn, which hinged up from the collar and sealed over the mouth and nose. After a moment she noticed a pack of such masks – compressed fibre and disposable – clipped to the side of the pack containing the oxygen bottle. She detached the helmet and visor and discarded them, placed the collar around her neck, closing its clip at her nape, then fitted the mask to its hinge below her chin. Hooking her arms through the straps, she hung the oxygen pack on her back – the spare she slung from its straps over her shoulder. With the mask hinged down – for closing it up against her face instantly started the flow of oxygen – she turned back to Fethan.
‘You said the mountains?’ she said, noting that Fethan now had the Proctor’s stinger and pistol at his belt.
‘Yeah, we head there and find ourselves an entrance to the Underground. Should take about three days so let’s get moving.’ Fethan led the way across the sodden ground and began tramping a path through the flute grass.
As she followed, Eldene could not help but speculate on how the figure of three days so closely matched the extent of her remaining oxygen supply. Perhaps Fethan was merely humouring her in the last days of her life.
The flute grass was last season’s, and consequently dead, dry and brittle. Just by walking into it, Fethan had it breaking and collapsing before him. Each stalk was hollow and the thickness of a human finger, with holes down its length where side shoots had earlier broken away. In gentle breezes, strange music issued from these stands of vegetation, but anything more than a gentle breeze would turn them into snowstorms of papery fragments. Under Eldene’s feet, the ground was thick with fragments already trodden down by Fethan, or what had fallen from the plants earlier, and it was this layer, over the plants’ rhizomes, that prevented her from sinking into ground that was becoming increasingly boggy. Stabbing up from the rhizomes themselves, she noticed the bright green-and-black tips of this season’s new growth poised to explode into the air. When the temperature rose above a certain point – something due to happen soon – the plants would begin growing at a rate that was sometimes visible.
‘Ah, Theocracy justice,’ said Fethan at one point, making a detour around something lying in the stand of grass.
Eldene saw a skeleton pegged out on the sodden ground – grass stalks growing up through its ribcage. With a grimace, she remembered that this was one of the many punishments handed out by the proctors for serious infringements of Theocracy law. Precisely at this time of year the proctors pegged out such criminals, and as the grass grew, its sharp points penetrated flesh and the stalks then just grew straight through. Something like this, she knew, would be her own punishment if they caught her.
The paralysis was easing a bit now, though Thorn was not sure if he could manage to stand. The cold ceramal floor had sucked the heat out of him, and worked its own paralysing effect. His pelvis still ached, but at present the major pain was coming from his shattered teeth and broken nose.
As was his nature, and the nature of his training as Sparkind, he dismissed from his mind the deaths of friends and comrades, and instead concentrated his attention upon his present situation. That Brom intended to use some sort of mind-ream on him, he had no doubt, though he did doubt the man would find anything useful to him by that means, since it was ECS policy to change all relevant codes once an agent disappeared. When they came to inflict that on him, he had to be ready to act – for he either would die during the reaming, or be killed shortly after.
Using a huge effort of will, Thorn rolled over and managed to drag himself to his hands and knees. Just this effort left him dizzy and nauseous, but he pushed himself even further and managed to rock back onto the support of his knees only. His neck felt like it was without bones, his head swollen and aching, and the rest of his body as responsive as a sack of potatoes. Not allowing himself any pause, he flung himself to his feet, nearly went over on his face, staggered to the table, and clung while he vomited over the autodoc.
‘Careless,’ he grated, once he got his nausea under control. He was about to turn the doc over in search of something sharp inside it to use as a weapon when the door opened behind him.
‘Oh, up and about already? We’ll soon change that.’
Thorn glanced over his shoulder as Lutz pulled a baton from his belt and slapped it into the palm of his hand. Behind Lutz, John Stanton drew the door closed. Momentarily Thorn felt despair: he might be able to take on Lutz, but John Stanton? Well, maybe, if he was at the peak of condition.
‘John here tells me that Sparkind are trained to resist direct-mind interrogation, but I was delighted when he told me how we should go about softening you up,’ said Lutz.
Thorn turned fully. Maybe if he threw the autodoc at Stanton he would then have a chance to get to Lutz and take a weapon from the man. While thinking this, it took a moment for it to impinge upon him what Lutz had just said – it was nonsense. Sparkind had no more ability to resist reaming than anyone else did. Something like that could not be trained in; it required substantial alteration of the structure of the brain. He watched as Stanton moved up beside Lutz and looked with bored contempt at the man.
‘Yeah,’ said Stanton, ‘and because you’re so completely stupid, you believed every word.’
Lutz had time only to whip his head round. Stanton’s straight-fingered strike went into his throat like an axe. Lutz stood there choking for a moment, then went down on his knees, where he tried to retrieve something from his jacket. Stanton stooped down and, with a complete lack of haste, took hold of the man’s head and turned it right around.
Thorn winced at the sound of crunching vertebrae and stared as Lutz thudded down on his front and shivered and gargled into death. Then he transferred his gaze to Stanton as the mercenary stood.
‘Bloody amateurs,’ said Stanton at last, rubbing his hands before removing an injector from the pocket of his long coat. He walked over to Thorn and inspected him. ‘How the hell did they manage to catch you?’
‘I got careless,’ Thorn managed.
Stanton acknowledged this with a snort, then reached out and pressed the injector against Thorn’s neck. Immediately something cool suffused Thorn’s body and he felt his limbs freeing up.
‘It’ll take a minute or two. That paralytic of Brom’s is a curare derivative. You may find you’ve received some nerve damage.’
‘Does this mean you’re on my side?’ Thorn asked. ‘I thought you were here selling arms.’
Stanton grinned nastily. ‘That�
��s what they think, too.’
Suddenly Thorn found he no longer needed the support of the table. ‘Some other contract?’ he asked.
‘You’ve met Dorth?’ Stanton asked, and now there was a hardness in his expression that had not been there even while he had tried to twist Lutz’s head off.
‘The Deacon? Yes, briefly.’
Stanton turned and gazed somewhere distant. ‘Well he comes from my home world and I have been tracking him for the last year. When I knew him way back, he was just one of the Theocracy’s proctors. He was my mother’s lover and he had her accuse my father of heresy, supposedly to expedite a divorce. Once she signed the papers, the bastard took my father outside and shot him through the face.’
‘Your mother?’ asked Thorn, studying the man.
‘Died under questioning.’
‘Personal, then,’ said Thorn, now flexing his torso and wondering if the numbness in the ends of his fingers might ever go away.
With a flat expression, Stanton turned back to him. ‘I would guess you’re here to retire our friend Brom. So, let’s be about it. Brom is in his cabin and the Deacon is there as well.’ He turned and stepped towards the door, drawing a large pulse-gun.
Now more confident in his body, Thorn moved away from the table and stooped down by Lutz, pushing the dead man over onto his back, which incidentally put him onto his face. A quick search yielded a gas-system pulse-gun – not quite as effective as the weapon Stanton carried, firing as it did ionized gas rather than aluminium dust and consequently not having the range, but good enough for close work.
‘You don’t really need me,’ Thorn observed, standing. ‘Why did you risk this?’
Stanton glanced round. ‘Let’s just say that after Viridian I have the greatest respect for Ian Cormac, and that my perspective has changed somewhat.’
‘Doesn’t really answer my question.’
‘It’s all the answer you’ll get,’ Stanton replied, opening the door.
Once they were outside, Stanton removed a small cylinder from under his jacket, twisted the timer on its end, and tossed it back into the cell. Moving on, he led them up the stairs and through a hatch, out onto the deck. It was night, and Thorn realized he must have been out of it for longer than he had thought. Now they moved into the moon-shadows of a tower supporting some odd oblate device.
Stanton pointed at this and whispered, ‘’Ware generator,’ and placed another cylinder next to the wall of the low building below it.
‘What timings?’ Thorn whispered.
‘Ten minutes. Can’t get a low-power signal out while that thing’s up, and I’ll need to. There’s two or three hundred of Brom’s people aboard and I can’t take them all.’
They moved on until Brom’s cabin came into sight. Between them and it, all the structures on the deck were well lit. One of these was a long cabin with light glaring through its wide windows. Stanton pointed beyond it. ‘I’ve got a nice planar load in their middle hold. That’ll go in’ – he glanced at his wristcom – ‘six minutes. The one I have on their pile should go . . . shortly.’ He squatted down and Thorn squatted beside him.
‘What’s your route out?’ Thorn asked.
‘Same way as I came in,’ Stanton replied, gesturing to the right of Brom’s cabin, where Thorn had earlier seen him supervising the unloading of the catamaran.
The first of the explosives blew, ripping the side out of the barge, some distance from them. Thorn observed hot metal flung across the sea, then sinking in clouds of steam, next the orange glow of fires lighting the sky as all the lights on the ship went out. He pressed his hand to the deck and felt the vibration of its engines stutter to a halt. Glancing at Stanton, he nodded back at the tower they had just passed.
‘Independent power supply – U-charger I think,’ Stanton explained, rising to his feet.
Some of the crew were now rushing towards the source of the explosion. Others were quite wisely not moving in that direction at all, but arming themselves. The two men broke into a trot to match this frenetic activity.
‘Hey, you’re—’ one man managed, hesitating in his rush to join a group of his comrades. Thorn shot him in the face, then quickly dragged the corpse to a nearby dark hatch and shoved it down below.
Stanton was meanwhile twisting the timer on another explosive, while staring in the direction of the group the dead man had been about to join. He stooped and rolled the cylinder along the deck towards them, then gestured to the nearby long cabin. ‘We go through here.’
Thorn was not sure that was such a good idea, but was not about to argue – his companion certainly seemed to know what he was doing.
Stanton explained anyway. ‘There’s a camera down that side, and you can guarantee Brom’ll be watching his screens right now.’ He kicked open the door, they stepped through. The door closed on explosions and screams from the deck behind them. Inside the cabin were a man at some sort of console, a woman screwing a power pack onto a pulse-rifle, a second man sitting on the side of a bunk, pulling on his boots. Both Stanton and Thorn hit the woman first – the greatest immediate danger – and she toppled back over a bench strewn with weaponry, leaving most of her head on the bench itself. The man at the console was groping for something just to his right when Stanton’s shots blew him backwards, still in his swivel chair, then threw him jerking out of the chair, to sprawl beyond it. Thorn meanwhile shot the man on the bunk before he could get his other boot on.
‘Back window,’ urged Stanton, as they ran down the length of the cabin.
To their right, crouching by some lockers, a man still in his underpants, unarmed. Stanton aimed at him, then changed his mind and stepped in, ready to knock the man out. Thorn shot the guy when he made a grab for something in the locker. He went over, clutching a heavy rail-gun, its attached cable and power pack falling on top of him as it fired, taking away half the ceiling and opening the cabin to the night.
‘Shit,’ said Stanton flatly.
Thorn gave him a berating look.
Stanton shrugged. ‘In his underpants?’ he said.
Four shots – not being sufficient to shatter the tough chainglass – blew the window out of its surrounding seal in one piece. Stanton, for such a heavily built man, went through in a graceful swan-dive, rolled, turned, and fired at something Thorn could not see as he stepped through the gap. Soon he spotted the two guards outside the door to Brom’s cabin. One of them was down, but the other – boosted like Stanton – was trying to drag his rail-gun round on target, despite having lost his right arm. Stanton and Thorn fired together, repeatedly. The guard went backwards through the door, and the two men followed him through, stepping over what remained of their victim into Brom’s so luxurious accommodation. Behind them came two further explosions, the light of which cast their shadows ahead of them as they entered.
‘Leave it!’ Thorn ordered.
Brom was sunk in his otter-hide armchair, a screen opened up from the pedestal table beside him. His feet were bare and Thorn was fascinated to note that his toenails were painted lavender. His hand was poised over the organic-looking weapon he had used earlier, which was now resting on the arm of the chair. He stared back at them with the intensity of a snake, and slowly moved his hand away from the weapon to his lap.
‘Where’s the Deacon?’ Stanton snapped.
Brom shifted his gaze from Thorn and said not a word. Out of the corner of his eye, Thorn saw Stanton hold out his free hand and as if by magic, a dagger slapped into it. Again, Thorn felt some fascination – the dagger was a Tenkian, and Stanton had summoned it to his hand from somewhere else about his person.
‘I won’t ask so nicely, next time,’ said Stanton.
Brom blinked and smiled. ‘Well, I’m afraid you’ve missed the fellow. He’s on his way home.’
‘Fuck,’ said Stanton. He stared at Brom. ‘When did he go, and by what route?’
Brom shrugged, a hint of a smile on his face as he grew more confident. ‘He went by AGC about four h
ours ago. Should be on the shuttle to Cereb even now, if he hasn’t already shipped out.’
Stanton seemed lost for words for a moment, then flung Thorn a glare of accusation. Thorn looked back from him to Brom, and noted that the Separatist had a slight tilt to his head and an abstracted expression.
‘His aug,’ he said.
Stanton returned his attention to Brom and threw. The dagger entered the seated man below the chin. Brom’s eyes grew wide as he choked, then he stood and groped at the dagger with fingers soon bloody. He managed a step before he went over.
Just to make sure, Thorn fired down once, excavating a cavity in the back of the man’s head. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he then said.
Stanton nodded, held up his hand, and did something with the ring on one of his fingers. Brom’s body jerked as the dagger pulled free, arced through the air, and slapped its handle into Stanton’s hand. He stooped and wiped it on Brom’s clothing. Now there came an explosion that rocked the entire barge.
‘Seems like a good idea,’ Stanton opined, as he stood upright again.
5
Boy and woman bowed over the book as over a very complicated jigsaw puzzle. The text provided the bare bones of the story, but the picture filled out that story to such an extent it had to be studied for some minutes before moving on to the next.
‘Presently, little Molly Redcap knocked on the door. “Who is it?” inquired a gruff voice. At first the voice frightened her, but thinking her grandma might be ill she replied, “I bring you potato bread and wine from my mother.” Softly the voice replied, “Come in, come in, you are welcome to come in.” When she entered, Father Siluroyne hid himself under the heat sheet. “Put the bread and wine in a fridge and come sit on the bed with me.” Molly took off her mask and bottle and skipped over to the bed where she was much surprised at the change in her grandma.’
