Against A Dark Background (61 page)

Nobody sane would take it on,’ Zefla said, after satisfying herself that Sharrow was comfortable. She hunkered down on the other side of the fire, her voice sounding faraway, distorted by the column of heated air rising between them.
So, we need to get word to outside, we need a guard tonight, and we need to guard the tower, too, to prevent Roa getting to it first.’

All these things are possible,’ Feril said.
What would you like me to do?’

They all looked at each other; and they each glanced at Sharrow, a bundled shape in the tent.

Vote,’ Zefla said.
I say . . . oh, guard the tower.’

Dloan nodded. `Me too.’

Miz made a tutting noise and looked away.

`Feril?’ Zefla said.

`Yes?’ It looked at her.

`What about you?’

`What-? Oh, I abstain.’

Zefla glanced back at the tent. `Guard the tower it is.’

They gave the android a laser pistol; the snow had stopped and the sky was clearing.

The fjord was pure black. A clear blue light came down from Maidservant, gibbous in the sky above; it coated the mountains and the dozens of small, snow-covered islands with a ghostly silver. Junklight sparkled in the northern skies, towards the equator. There were no fires on the far side of the water.

The android flitted away into the trees, silent and quick.

Zefla awoke in the middle of the night, her bladder full. She had tried to stave off the hunger pangs by drinking quantities of water made from snow they’d melted. Miz had talked about doing some nightfishing through a hole in a frozen stream, but then fallen asleep.

Snuggled down between the warmth of Dloan and Sharrow, she didn’t want to get out of the tent but knew she’d have to. She checked on Sharrow, who seemed to be breathing peacefully, then got up as carefully as she could, extricating herself from the others and wriggling her way out through the tent door. Somebody -probably Miz, lying cradling the machine gun murmured behind her, and she whispered, `Sorry!’

The fire was still glowing. It was light enough for her to see without a nightsight. She walked downhill through the quiet carpet of snow and squatted amongst the trees near the shore. The night was still and cold and clear. She heard a couple of muffled crumping noises in the distance, and guessed it was snow falling off trees.

She got up, fastening her fatigues. Steam filmed up from beneath her, just visible in the moonlight. Maidservant stood big and silver above the mountains on the other side of the fjord; it would be disappearing soon. She looked at it all for a few moments, thinking how beautiful this place was, and wishing the ache in her muscles and the hunger and the steady gnawing fear in her guts would vanish and let her enjoy it.

She turned and made her way back towards the camp.

The two figures were about twenty metres from the tent. They wore matt-black suits which covered their faces, and they each held small hand guns. They were creeping slowly closer to the tent, coming from the direction of the fjord head down a small ridge.

Her mind raced. Her gun was in the tent. The two figures hadn’t fired yet though they were well within range and must have realised there was no guard posted. They didn’t seem to have seen her. If she simply shouted, rousing Miz and Dloan, the two figures might shoot straight into the tent.

She shrank back and ducked, then ran downhill and curved round to get behind them. She tried to go as quietly as she could, slipping twice on buried roots but not making any appreciable noise. She found the rear of the ridge and ran up it, crouching.

The two black figures were right in front of her, still creeping toward the tent. She stayed where she was for a moment, getting her breath back, keeping her mouth wide so that her breathing didn’t make a noise.

The two figures were separating; one stayed where he was, crouched on one knee, gun pointed at the tent, while the other started to circle.

Zefla drew both her gloves off, placed them on the snow and crept down towards the kneeling figure, her hands out in front of her. There was a tickling feeling in her throat, probably because she’d been breathing hard. Fate, girl, she told herself, this is no time to cough, or sneeze, or get the hiccups . . . She got within five metres of the crouching figure, then something in the fire collapsed with a snap and a cloud of orange sparks swirled into the air.

She froze. So did the person circling round to the front of the tent. If they turned to look at the kneeling figure in front of her, they’d be bound to see her. She wasn’t close enough to make a dive for the kneeling figure. She watched the one near the tent, her heart thudding.

The circling figure kept its gaze on the tent, then moved slowly closer. Zefla relaxed fractionally and crept on towards the kneeling figure, her breath silent. The tickle in her throat wasn’t so bad now. Four metres; she would get to the kneeling figure with the gun before the other one got to the tent; three metres.

The snow fell from a tree immediately behind her without any warning.

She heard it, started to straighten as she thought there might have been another attacker behind her, then - realising, but knowing it was too late - pounced, shouting, at the man in front of her as he whirled round, bringing the gun up and firing as he rolled.

Miz had woken from a dream. He had been aware of somebody getting out of the tent. He felt stiff and sore and incredibly hungry. He still had the machine gun in his arms. He started to ease his arms and shoulders into a different position, then heard a whooshing, thumping noise, followed immediately by a scream and two shots. He tore the tent entrance open to see a black-suited figure right in front of him looking to one side, then turning to point a gun at him.

He had gone to sleep dreaming about this; his thumb flicked the safety an instant before his finger pressed the trigger. The gun shuddered and roared in his arms, trying to burrow back down past him and blowing the figure outside backwards, gun firing up into the trees.

Miz threw himself out of the tent. He felt Dloan follow.

There was a body lying in the snow, and an impression of movement downslope. Miz ran after the fleeing figure. The black-suited figure dropped the hand gun it had been carrying, dived into the water, swam for a few seconds then dived, disappearing in a black swirl of moonlit water.

Miz raised the machine gun and sighted at where the black suit had disappeared, then raised the gun a fraction. After a few moments there was a hint of turbulence to one side of where he was aiming; he corrected and fired, moving the gun around as though stirring the distant, fountaining water. The magazine ran out and the gun fell silent.

He remembered the nightsight and clipped it on. The body in the water floated darkly, oozing warmth.

Miz let the machine gun drop to the ground, then picked it up and started walking back up to the tent, shaking. He had just realised: the body on the snow had been wearing fatigues, and Zefla hadn’t been in the tent.

A sickness worse than any hunger grew in his belly as he walked, then ran, back up the slope to the tent.

Sharrow had woken with the noise, still groggy; then she saw Zefla’s pale, slackly unconscious face, and the blood oozing from the wounds in her chest and head.

Now their earlier roles were reversed and Sharrow knelt in the tent, tending to the shallow-breathing, trembling Zefla. Dloan looked on, his body shaking more than his sister’s. He held her hand, staring at her face, his eyes wide and terrified.

`Call for help,’ Sharrow told Miz.

`What?’ he said.

Of course,’ Dloan said, his eyes shining.
The Franchisers. We can call the Franchisers.’

But-’ Miz began, then looked from Sharrow’s face down to Zefla’s. He shook his head.
Oh, Fate,’ he said with a moan. He took his phone from a pocket and opened it. He tried pressing a few buttons, frowning. Dloan saw the expression and looked, wide-eyed, for his phone. Sharrow dug hers out from her satchel and found Zefla’s.

None of them worked; it was as though they had been turned off from outside.

There was little they could do for Zefla. The bullet in her chest had gone right through, puncturing a lung; the front wound bubbled with each shallow breath. The bullet that had struck her head had left a long gouged mark along her temple a centimetre deep; tiny shards of bone marked its edges. They couldn’t tell if the round had pierced her skull or grazed off. They sprayed antiseptic on her wounds and bandaged them.

Feril arrived back twenty minutes later; it had heard the noise from its position near the tower. It tried broadcasting a distress message using its own comm unit, but didn’t hold out much hope of it being picked up unless somebody was deliberately looking with a targeted satellite.

It put its hands gently to Zefla’s head, feeling carefully around, and told them there was a bullet lodged inside her skull near the back.

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 patronising.

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 recognise it, then recalled the woman at Roa’s side in Vembyr, during the auction and then afterwards 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 metres 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 a while 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 metres 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 centre 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 smouldering 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 towards 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 colours 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.