by Gary Gibson
He found the ship he’d long been preparing for his flight. It hadn’t been easy finding the time and opportunity to sneak down here regularly, but one thing Matthew had inherited from his father was his cunning. There were only a dozen of them standing between Vaughn and his plan involving the gods of Kasper, but that was enough. They were all well trained in their separate skills, skills they’d have needed in Vaughn’s brave new world. Skills they could also use against him. No turning back now.
He climbed into the shuttle and within a minute felt its engines growl before it shook and lifted up from the floor of the cavern. He guided it forward into the sunlight, and took off into the clear skies.
Elias
Elias was mildly surprised to find he was still alive.
The creatures – the Kaspians, he should call them? – had come pouring out of the forest in their dozens, swarming over Kim’s prostrate body. He’d thought she must be dead at first. They’d then flung themselves onto him, binding him tight with something that looked like pale blue reed. He’d expanded his chest as wide as he could while they held him to the ground.
Just before they’d attacked, he’d looked up from Vincent’s body, to notice two of these creatures watching him from within the woods. Strange eyes which were curiously blank, long, wolflike snouts, and legs that bent the wrong way.
For all their alienness, they carried what were recognizably weapons. One of them had what looked uncannily like an old-fashioned flintlock strapped across its shoulders. They were garbed in heavy clothes dyed a deep brown and black, with some kind of pattern interwoven into the material, colours which made them seem to almost vanish amid the earth and trees.
He’d turned to see Kim edging towards him, and tried to say something to her. But the sudden shock of the landing had chased all sense from his tongue. Just then, one of the creatures had come running out from the woods, twisting something round its head like a bola. As the creature released it, it slammed into the rear of Kim’s head, and she dropped like a stone.
After that the three of them were dragged off and thrown into a wagon, its wheels bumping and lurching across rough ground. Elias shifted against the reed bonds constraining his arms and shoulders. It was much tougher than expected but, by sucking in breath and wiggling his torso, he managed to manouevre the bonds further up towards his shoulders. It then took only a matter of minutes to free himself.
The slatted covering of the wagon was loose and crude enough to allow a fair amount of light in, striping the three prisoners in alternate shades of light and dark. The enormous beasts hauling the vehicle looked to Elias vaguely like hippopotami, with wide, splay-toed feet. There were maybe forty of the Kaspians in attendance. Most were on foot, but a few of them rode three or four each on the back of some of the beasts drawing the wagon.
He kneeled down and touched Kim’s head. He’d already tried to do something for Vincent, but wasn’t sure his administrations would work. The Kaspians had interrupted him too soon. Even in this dim light he could see how badly bruised Kim was. But she stirred at his touch, and an eye flickered open.
‘Kim?’
She replied with a moan of pain. He tried to help her sit up, leaning her against one side of the wagon. It was so low-roofed he couldn’t stand, in fact could barely crouch, as it bumped and crunched over the rough terrain.
‘Kim, wake up,’ he urged. Her eyes opened again, but unfocused. She snorted, pushed him weakly away, then leaned over to vomit in a corner of the wagon. Elias held her arm steady until it was over.
‘What’s my name?’ he asked, after she had managed to right herself.
‘What, you’ve forgotten?’ He could feel her shaking, and hoped she hadn’t gone into shock. ‘Your name’s Elias.’
‘I just needed to check. You’ve been knocked unconscious twice now. It can cause serious brain damage.’
She shuddered suddenly. ‘That thing that came at me . . .?’
‘Was a Kaspian,’ said Elias.
‘God, I’ve seen pictures, but . . .’ She shook her head.
‘Yeah, I know.’ He helped her struggle out of her bonds and, once she was free, she tried unsuccessfully to find a more comfortable position inside the wagon.
‘Vincent?’ she enquired. ‘Is he—?’
‘He’s alive,’ said Elias. ‘I’ve been trying to do something for him, but he needs the kind of medical attention he’s not likely to find around here.’
She fell quiet after that.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘we’re a long way still from those mountains the shuttle was heading for. Maybe hundreds of kilometres? I know we didn’t exactly discuss this before, but you’re going to have to decide what you’re going to do now. As Vincent will take a while to get better, you might have to decide for him in the meantime. You suggested this Citadel would be a good place to hole up in?’
The expression on her face changed to one of horror. ‘Only as a last resort,’ she protested. ‘Things are . . . they’re strange in the Citadel. I was there a long time ago, doing research and artefact recovery. That wasn’t a good experience.’
‘But it’s still an option, right?’
‘Yes, but . . .’ she shuddered, ‘it’s dangerous.’
‘How?’
‘Hard to explain. Let’s not worry about it until we get there. If we ever do.’
She leaned over Vincent, listening at his mouth. ‘I’m no doctor,’ she said, ‘so I’ve got no way to tell if he’s getting better or worse. I think we need to find some way to communicate with them. Maybe the Kaspians can help us with Vincent.’
‘These creatures don’t want to help us. Talk to them if you like, but I already told you where I’m going.’
‘Look, maybe you have a chance of getting away,’ she said, ‘but Vincent doesn’t. I’d better stay here with him.’ She let out a long, low sigh. ‘I wish I had the medical kit from the Goblin.’ Her eyes widened. ‘But we’ve still got smartsheets, haven’t we?’ Joy filled her face. ‘Elias, we could send a distress signal!’
He smiled grimly and produced the one he’d used only a few days before to guide him through the Jager. ‘I already tried it. Remember, the local Grid’s databased on the Station. So no Station, no Grid, at least for the moment. Could be days before the whole thing gets online again.’
Kim looked crestfallen. ‘We should keep trying anyway. It’s one way out of here.’
‘Yeah, we should,’ Elias agreed.
He shifted, moving closer to Vincent’s crumpled form. Something was wrong. He splayed out the fingers of one hand, placing them over the other man’s cheek. Kim moved towards him, alarm on her face. ‘What are you doing?’
‘He’s fading,’ Elias said. He closed his eyes, trying to see what couldn’t be seen . . . but there was no other way to describe it to her. Like something on the edge of his memory, a hint of a shape or a concept just out of his mental vision, always refusing to come to the fore. But there, nonetheless, a spark of life, of knowledge.
Vincent was fading fast. Elias couldn’t be sure just what the injury was: most likely his long and anguished tumble across the cockpit as they accelerated towards the surface of Kasper. Fate now suggested Vincent was going to die for lack of medical attention. Elias might be able to do something for him, but good results weren’t guaranteed. If all three of them were to escape, they’d have to carry Vincent with them, and the process would almost certainly worsen his condition, quite likely kill him.
Elias, on the other hand . . . what if he moved on his own? He glanced quickly over at Kim, then back again. That would mean abandoning them.
But he’d made a promise to Trencher. Trencher, who had always been able to see so much further into the future than Elias could, and so much more completely. For Elias, the future was usually just a hint, a flash of something or other that sometimes didn’t reveal its significance or its meaning until it actually happened. But if Trencher was truthful in what he had said, then for him the future was a clear and op
en book, full of little in the way of surprises. He’d made it clear to Elias that this talent was much more of a curse than a blessing.
But abandoning Kim and Vincent . . .? He despaired of finding a clear path of action. Those two were innocents, bystanders, in the war between Trencher and Elias on one side, and Vaughn on the other.
He kept his fingers and palm pressed on Vincent’s face and neck until the skin of his own hand tingled. He closed his eyes, imagining there was something still there in the darkness.
Something yielded, and a soft groan escaped Vincent’s lips.
Trencher once said that people like me and him aren’t really human any more, he thought. Sometimes Elias wondered just how many others might be out there who’d been blackmailed or cajoled, bribed or beaten or ordered into accepting gene treatments, and who had come out of it something more than they had been before, but no longer quite human.
Luke
The weather worsened rapidly, as visibility dropped to no more than a few metres. They could hear the distant hum of the Jager shuttle’s engines long before it hovered into view. Luke swore as the craft suddenly appeared above them, dropping rapidly. They scattered as it dropped onto ancient ice, kicking up a cloud of superheated steam. Freezing hail pelted them as they ran forward.
‘We were lucky with the ice storm,’ yelled Michelle as she hammered the security code into the shuttle’s airlock door. ‘If it screwed up the radar, then maybe they won’t have noticed anything at all.’ She talked rapidly, almost stumbling over her own words. Luke could understand why she sounded so nervous.
No, not nervous, terrified. He wondered if she would be able to handle the strain; after all, they were risking so much. Regret about his own family began to flood over him, but he pushed it away, thinking, This is the right thing, this is what we have to do. And with any luck, they too would all see that . . . once Vaughn had been dealt with.
As the airlock door slid open, Luke jumped in first, glancing back over the heads of the others. What if Matthew hadn’t been able to make it? What if Vaughn had stopped him? What if their reprogramming of the flight path had been discovered? He listened anxiously for the sound of Matthew’s shuttle approaching, but it was impossible to discern anything over the wind howling through the open airlock.
‘Move!’ yelled Jason, behind him. ‘We’ve only got a couple of seconds.’
Luke pushed open the inner airlock door, and the other two jumped in behind him. The shuttle was much, much smaller than the ships that had originally brought their families to Kasper. It was clear the life-support systems and much else had been stripped out. He wondered about the great cargo ship it had come from, the people who walked its echoing corridors.
More people than he could count, perhaps, or imagine. From a world beyond a snowy wasteland; beyond a great spinning Station, the gateway to a whole universe. It was out there, and real, but so damnably out of reach. It wasn’t fair; they had the right to choose their own destiny – not to have it decided for them by someone else.
Next through to the bay storage area, and there it was. The deepsleep coffin, a man from another world inside it. ‘Michelle, you’ve got the access code,’ he said. She nodded and stepped up to the coffin.
Jason eyed his chronometer. ‘There isn’t enough time to do what we need to,’ he warned. ‘This thing’s going to take off again before we can get him out of here.’
‘Shut up,’ growled Luke. Just then a light blinked on the side of the coffin, and a faint snick told them that a lock had been released. Together, Jason and Michelle heaved the lid up hurriedly. Trencher lay inside, barely visible amongst the tangle of wires and tubes, and a strong antiseptic smell flowed out of the coffin’s interior. A nasty business, thought Luke, having to keep a human being like this for so many years.
Though Trencher was old, Luke could still see the resemblance to Vaughn – a resemblance that unnerved him considerably. He stepped quickly forward and helped them lift the body free.
‘Let’s get the hell out of here, now,’ urged Luke.
The shuttle’s engines had already started their ascending whine, a vibration rolling through the floor beneath their feet. If they weren’t quick, the craft would take off with the three of them and Trencher still on board. The old man’s naked body was slippery from the chemicals, and it took all three of them to manhandle him out of the shuttle door and down onto the ice. The shuttle’s whine built up to a roar, just as Michelle flung herself out of the airlock, and the ship began to move. Jason grabbed her arm to steady her, and then they fled, dragging Trencher’s body unceremoniously across the ice as superheated steam again shot out from under the shuttle’s belly. They watched silently as the craft rose high into the sky, the airlock door closing as it ascended to its original flight path.
‘Remember,’ said Luke, ‘we now keep strict radio silence. If anyone back home tries to contact us and we reply, they might be able to figure out where we are. Got that?’
The other two nodded. They would have to get him into clothes or he could freeze to death in seconds, thought Luke, before he remembered: the genengineered ones, Sam and the rest, they were all something different now. They didn’t die.
Trencher was still unconscious, his bare flesh assaulted by the vicious hail. Luke and Michelle held him up while Jason dropped his backpack to the snow and pulled out a sleeping bag and some thermal sheets. After all, he might be invulnerable, but there was no reason to let him suffer extreme discomfort. Then they waited.
Come on, come on, thought Luke. Long, tense minutes passed, but none of them had the will or the energy to say anything. Matthew should have been here by now. And still the icy wind whistled along the valley’s length.
He’s not coming. Luke felt panic begin to rise in him. He tried not to let the others see just how relieved he was when, moments later, another shuttle fell out of the sky, setting down a hundred metres or so away from them. It was impossible to see who was at the controls, but it could only be, had to be, Matthew. They half-carried, half-dragged Trencher’s limp form towards the waiting craft as the airlock door opened and Matthew jumped out.
Having pulled Trencher inside, and onto a diagnostics palette, all four watched as the shuttle’s medical unit took over. His skin felt like ice, thought Luke, and they were out there for only, maybe, two minutes. A normal human being could die in half that time in this environment without adequate protection. Trencher’s chest now rose and dipped with greater regularity, his eyes moving regularly beneath their lids, his lips parting. Luke glanced at the others to read their expressions.
Good, he thought. They all look just as scared as I feel.
Sixteen
Kim
She’d never known anything like it.
She had watched Vincent die. What she had seen Elias do to revive him had nothing to do with any medical textbook available anywhere in the galaxy. The performance had filled her with an odd, almost supernatural, dread. Vincent had actually died there, in Elias’s arms, a death rattle slipping from his throat, the life leaving him forever. His features had smoothed out, becoming a mask.
And then, somehow, he had come back.
Kim was a rationalist. There had to be, as in all things, a reasonable explanation. Blowouts and tunnel collapses were not uncommon in the tiny Hellas colony she’d been born in, and it still happened occasionally. She already knew from unpleasant experience what a dead body looked like, felt like. Once you’d been there, once you’d witnessed something like that, a dead body held no mystery.
Although there might be techniques for reviving the apparently dead seconds, or even minutes, after apparent demise, she did not believe such techniques could possess such a hallucinatory quality. That deep sense of dread that had filled her, an almost instinctive horror at something. She almost believed she’d seen a shape flickering in the air, an uncanny sensation of being on the edge of something vast and deep and unknowable of which, if she squinted in just the right way, she might just
catch a glimpse.
Vincent’s eyelids had flickered, showing the whites of his eyes. Then his chest began to move again, erratically, for the first time in many minutes. By this stage, the convoy they were part of had left the edge of the forest behind. Now, they seemed to be passing through a wide, grassy plain.
Elias looked at her, shrugged. ‘He’s getting better.’
She couldn’t keep the wobble out of her voice. ‘I know when someone’s dead. Vincent was dead.’
‘Not dead enough, then,’ said Elias, with the faintest hint of a grin. ‘I told you how they experimented on me.’
She swallowed. ‘So anything else you want to tell me? Maybe about communing with the devil?’
‘Yeah, I guess, something like that.’
Even in the slatted darkness of the wagon, Elias could sense her expression was icy.
Sam Roy
‘You had something to do with this, didn’t you?’
The lash cut through the flesh of Sam’s back, ripping fresh wounds. Red, human blood glistened in the Kaspian sunlight. Freezing air blew across the mountain-tops, adding fresh pain to the raw edges of the new wounds.
‘I knew it would happen,’ said Sam. ‘Don’t you know that?’ His lips pressed together in a snarl as the pain descended again. His hands scrabbled at rock and snow and earth, the sinews beneath his ruined flesh standing out like steel cords, almost fleshless.
Vaughn stopped the punishment for a moment, panting heavily. ‘Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to,’ he growled, ‘you want to ruin everything. But we have a purpose here – God’s purpose.’ His voice became almost pleading. ‘Sam, why did you turn against me?’
Sam Roy muttered something under his breath, which in itself was strange, because, for decades now, he’d grown used to not giving Vaughn the satisfaction of any answer. He could hear Vaughn somewhere behind him, by the edge of the cliff.
Vaughn came closer again. ‘It’s still not too late. We’ll have a world to ourselves before long: fresh and clean of the sins of the old. God’s world. I can forgive you, Sam. You used to be my right-hand man. You used to be my brother.’
