by Eric Brown
“A few days. Two or three. I really don’t know.”
The man smiled. “I don’t think you’re telling me all that you know, Sukara.”
She felt suddenly sick. She shook her head, wordlessly, and knew that she was powerless to get rid of her interrogator.
“Where has Vaughan gone?” he snapped.
Her stomach flipped. “Away. Off-planet.”
“Off-planet?” he repeated, smiling. “Where precisely off-planet?”
She shook her head. She looked past the Westerner, in the hope that she might by lucky enough to see a passing cop and call for help.
The corridor was deserted.
The Westerner reached up, his hand striking cobra-fast, and clutched Sukara’s throat. He exerted pressure and pushed her at the same time. She staggered backwards, tripped, and fell into a sunken bunker.
By the time she righted herself, fear coursing through her along with the desire to shout for Jeff to help her, the Westerner had entered the apartment and closed the door behind him.
She cowered on the sofa, curling herself into a tight ball, not wanting to admit to herself who this man might be.
“What do you want?”
“I told you. I need to see Vaughan.” He looked around the apartment, smiling to himself. She recalled a word that Jeff had taught her. The man was arrogant.
He looked at her as she scrunched into a tight, defensive ball, and said, “You see, Vaughan is working on a case that was officially closed. The cops found the killer and paid off Kapinsky and your husband. I just called around to remind him about this.”
Sukara shook her head. “How did you find out where he lives?”
“An old acquaintance of his, one Dr Rao.”
Jeff had mentioned Rao in the past. She wondered how the Westerner had obtained the information. An awful thought occurred to her. Could it be that this man was the laser killer?
The Westerner smiled, and what he said next confirmed Sukara’s worst fears. “Is your shield portable, Sukara, or sub-dermal?”
Her stomach turned, and she knew then that this was the event that her premonitions had been warning her about. She was in her apartment with the telepathic killer who would stop at nothing to get what he wanted.
He was staring at the screen of his handset. “Portable, I see. That’s good. Otherwise I would be forced to cut it from your flesh, and that would be terribly messy.”
Sukara fought her tears, and the panic rising through her. He would make her get rid of the shield and then read her mind...
And he would find that Pham would be returning here soon...
He pulled something from inside his jacket and levelled it at Sukara.
She had never seen a laser before, except in the movies, and she was surprised now at how small and insignificant it looked. It was hard to imagine that a single pulse could end her life.
“Take your shield,” the man was saying, “and throw it across the room.”
Now Sukara could not stop her tears. They trickled over her cheeks—but she was determined not to sob. She shook her head.
The blinding lance of white light burned a hole in the seat beside Sukara, and she screamed.
“The next shot will amputate your right hand,” the Westerner said. “Get rid of the shield!”
Now she was sobbing, uncontrollably, as she fumbled in the pocket of her shirt and found the silver oval of the mind-shield.
She pulled it out, fingers trembling, and could only think of Pham.
“Good girl,” the man smiled. “Now, over there.”
She could do nothing, she told herself, nothing at all but obey him. Even so, as she tossed the shield across the carpet she could not but help feel that she had betrayed both Pham and Jeff.
The man stared at her, eyes wide in concentration. He flung back his head and brayed with laughter.
“I don’t believe it,” he said to himself in a whisper. “I trawl the fucking length and breadth of the Station, and all the while...” He stared at her. “When will she be back?”
She knew that her every thought was open to him, that she could withhold nothing.
The Westerner smiled. “So... I think I’ll just make myself comfortable and wait for Pham to get back,” he said. “And then I might as well wait for Vaughan to return.”
Sukara was slowly shaking her head, wondering how it had come to this. Life had been so good; she had been so happy, and all that was about to end at the hands of this evil man.
Now she knew that she had been right to fear her forebodings.
The Westerner said, “There is no such thing as good and evil, merely those who are powerful, and those who are weak.”
She watched him raise the pistol and aim at her, and she could only think of Jeff and Pham, and of her unborn baby.
Then he fired his laser and shot Sukara through the head.
* * * *
TWENTY-FOUR
BREITENBACH
Vaughan thought back to the laser fight in the starship, overcome now with an odd retrospective dread; he had felt fear at the time, but fear only for himself. Now he realised that, had he died back there, Sukara would have borne the brunt of his passing, alone on Bengal Station, bringing up their daughter. The idea filled him with horror, and he told himself that no more would he put himself in a situation where his life was at risk.
Which was a fine sentiment, but he wondered if the combined forces of Scheering-Lassiter would bear that in mind if they apprehended him.
He flew a convoluted course south, through the snow-clad massifs of the southern range, following the route marked on the screen of Weiss’s palmCom. He had completed around half the journey so far, which had taken him a couple of hours. He hoped to reach Breitenbach well before sunset.
He was perpetually on the lookout for pursuers. He turned in his seat, attempting to scan three hundred and sixty degrees for any sign of fliers, like an old-fashioned fighter pilot. He wondered how long it might be before Denning’s team was missed. No doubt Denning had had orders to report his progress at intervals, and after a while without word from him a search party would be sent out. How long, after that, would it be before an alert was broadcast for S-L forces to be on the lookout for a stolen flier?
Not that there seemed to be much sign of life in this region of Mallory. This range of mountains was the longest on the planet, stretching the thousand-kilometre length of the southern coastline and extending inland, in places, for a hundred kilometres. It was bitterly cold and inhospitable down there, and Vaughan wondered what kind of bolt-hole Breitenbach had fashioned for himself.
Ten minutes later he made out the first sign of a road far below, though on further inspection it was less a road than a precarious track carved into the side of the mountain. It wended its way around the cliff face and over a saddle-like ridge. He slowed and consulted his map. A faint track was marked, leading to the coast. Breitenbach’s position was marked as a circle on the screen of the palmCom, a hundred kilometres west of the road.
For the next twenty kilometres Vaughan’s route would follow the track below, before he peeled off west and began the last leg of the journey.
As he came over the crest of the track, between the mountain peaks, he saw with a sudden jolt of shock that there was a vehicle far below. Then he saw the others—four military troop carriers strung out in convoy along the narrow track. He throttled back, slowing, so as not to overtake the convoy and show himself. He took the flier up, beyond the peaks of the nearby mountains, then pulled the binoculars from his jacket and focused on the vehicles.
The trucks, splotched with blue and white camouflage markings, leapt into silent life in the viewfinder as they trundled south. Each vehicle carried perhaps thirty soldiers, sitting in rows under glassed-in canopies, gripping laser rifles.
His first thought was that they were looking for him; his second, that he was being paranoid. They were, doing what the rest of the military was doing in this part of the planet: slaughter
ing the pachyderms.
He took a great loop around the mountain peak and rejoined the track ten kilometres further on. Five minutes later, looking down at the narrow grey track slung around the mountainside like a contour line, he saw the object of the military exercise.
Perhaps twenty Grayson’s pachyderms were strung out along the track, plodding slowly south, their long articulated legs taking what seemed like great, slow motion strides. Compared to the progress of the following troop carriers, the herd was moving at a snail’s pace. It could only be a matter of minutes before the military caught up, and then it would be a bloody rout, with nowhere for the animals to run: a precipitous drop of a thousand metres to the left, and lasers burning mercilessly from the rear.
Vaughan, hanging five hundred metres above the pachyderms, had never felt as powerless in his life. The carnage was inevitable. The only imponderable was whether he should remain to witness it.
Any intervention on his part would be futile, he knew, and would only alert the military’s attention to his presence. He had a duty to Weiss, Larsen, and the other radicals, to deliver the crystals to Breitenbach.
He was about to bank right, away from the track, when he noticed that the file of animals down below was slowing and coming to a stop. Then he saw why: the leader of the herd, a great bull with a daunting array of facial tusks, had come to a halt and was easing his way up a defile in the rock face. It disappeared, and was followed by the second in line. Slowly, as the minutes ticked by, one by one the pachyderms inserted themselves into the fissure and continued on their journey up the narrow cutting. The last animal slipped into the cliff face perhaps a minute before the first troop carrier hove into view around a bend in the mountain.
Hardly able to believe that the creatures had managed to save themselves, Vaughan watched as the carriers approached the cutting. Had they tracked the pachyderms so far, perhaps with heat-seeking devices, and would they easily detect their sudden turn?
The first troop carrier approached the fissure and showed no sign of slowing down. The other vehicles raced by, and when the last carrier passed the cutting Vaughan punched the dashboard in jubilation.
He banked, slowed, and eased the flier into the cutting, ascending so as not to startle the creatures. A minute later he overflew the slowly plodding file, pressing his face against the side-screen to look down at their leader.
At that second, the great bull looked up, as if sighting the flier, and raised its abbreviated trunk as if both in greeting and in acknowledgement of its herd’s close escape.
It struck Vaughan, then, that the bull was the same one that had led him towards the detour on his first day on Mallory. He smiled at the romantic notion and accelerated away from the herd, following the route on the palmCom south-west.
Fifteen minutes later the southern ocean came into view, a stretch of silver lame coruscating on the horizon beyond the last of the mountain peaks. According to the palmCom, Breitenbach was in hiding in the mountains overlooking the sea.
The more he thought about the lone radical, the more questions he realised there were to be answered. Breitenbach, if Weiss were to be believed, was privy to the secrets of the crash-landed extraterrestrials—though how this might be so, when the ship had arrived on Mallory many thousands of years ago, and no aliens had survived to this day, was a mystery. According to Weiss, Breitenbach had described to Travers the aliens’ appearance, which seemed an impossibility. Could it be, Vaughan speculated as the mountain peaks flicked by outside, that the aliens had survived the crash-landing and lived on in the mountains of Mallory?
He smiled at the conceit.
And, disregarding the aliens, what was to be made of Breitenbach’s claim that the pachyderms were sentient creatures—or that at least some of them were?
The thought that soon he would locate the radical, and have his questions answered, filled him with anticipation.
He glanced at the palmCom. He was perhaps ten kilometres from Breitenbach’s position. He slowed, following the marked route as it took him over a broad valley cradled between soaring, scimitar peaks, and through a pass towards the coast.
Down below, on a path leading from the valley to the pass, he saw another dozen pachyderms ambling south in slow procession.
And then, once he’d seen the first herd, he made out many more: they were strung out across the valley, in single file, trundling with slow, ponderous footsteps on a journey which must have taken them over hundreds of kilometres through the mountains. And if Breitenbach was right, and the pachyderms were intelligent, then what might be signified by this mass exodus into the southern ranges?
He counted more than a hundred animals, then gave up and turned his attention to the palmCom.
Breitenbach was located some three kilometres away, beyond the pass. Vaughan banked the flier and skimmed across the valley, alongside the great caravanserai of alien beasts. Many of them turned their heads to regard his passage, but there was no sign of consternation or panic in their ranks. It came to Vaughan, fancifully, that they were aware he was on their side.
He hopped over the pass between the peaks and was confronted by the great shimmering expanse of the southern ocean. Above it to his right was the bloated orb of the late afternoon sun, and directly before him two of the three moons sailed in slow motion through the sky.
He glanced at the palmCom. The marked route veered right, hugging the mountains that paralleled the line of the shore. He banked and overflew a littoral of blue grassland, glancing inland at the sheer mountains in which Breitenbach evidently made his home.
He banked again, approaching the first range of grey peaks, and he understood then why the palmCom had brought him in this way: before him, looming in the side of the mountain like a yawning mouth, was the opening to a great cave.
The marked route on the screen of the palmCom led directly into the cave.
He decelerated, eased the flier into the shadow of the opening, and came down on a shelf of rock as flat as a landing pad. The setting sun flung the shadow of the flier ahead of him, and illuminated a natural chamber without the slightest sign of habitation. When the turbos cut out, Vaughan sat for a while, then climbed from the vehicle and stared about him.
The first thing that struck him was the silence. It sealed around him like something solid and impermeable. When he took steps towards the back of the chamber, his boots rang on the rock, amplified and echoing. He felt as though he were trespassing on hallowed ground, the sound of his footsteps a profanity.
The second thing he noticed was an opening in the rock to his right, large enough to admit the flier. He looked around the chamber, but could see no other openings he might explore.
He was tempted to call Breitenbach’s name, but something about the cathedral hush of the chamber prevented him.
He returned to the flier, turned on the headlights, and fired up the turbos. He eased the flier forward, its roar deafening in the confined space. In the cone of light flung before the vehicle, he made out the natural archway of the opening and steered the flier through it.
The corridor seemed, to Vaughan’s untutored eye, to be a natural feature of the rock. It twisted and turned, narrowing and opening out by turns, but never closing to the point where the flier could not pass. He estimated he had been in the corridor for perhaps ten minutes when he made out, in the patch of darkness far ahead where the headlights of the flier did not reach, a glimmer of light.
He cut the turbos, and when the flier settled he turned off the headlights too. There, in the distance, was a hazy yellow glow: the light at the end of the tunnel.
He restarted the flier and flew along the remaining length of corridor. It opened out and the illumination grew brighter, and a minute later he could see through an arched opening—clearly not the work of nature—into an open area cradled in the mountain-tops.
The flier emerged into daylight and he cut the turbos, climbed out, and stared around him in amazement.
He was on a path that
led down into a miniature valley, perhaps half a kilometre from end to end and almost as wide. Low peaks to his right admitted the day’s last rays of sun, slicing the valley into two equal halves of light and darkness.
It was not the valley, however, that caused Vaughan’s amazement, but rather what the valley contained.
At first he thought they were some kind of alien termite mounds, hundreds of them filling the valley in orderly rows. Then he made out, in each beehive-shaped construction, the unmistakable shapes of doors and slit windows.
From his perspective, looking down into the valley, he was unable to determine the size of each dwelling. Only when he saw the figure of the human being, standing beside a mound which barely reached to his shoulder, was he aware of their scale.
