Faith (2 page)

All his calculations were wrong, he thought irritably, all of them; the attack was earlier than he expected and the advanced convulsions were worse than he had imagined and
if you don’t get up and get back to the boulder and find time to rest you’ll lose this child, it’ll die, you’ll carry a dead thing in your belly
.

His vision blurred, but he saw the remaining two moving towards him. Their mouths were very pink, opening and closing in unison: absolutely perfect unison. He shook his head and the double vision cleared, leaving one in front and one, he realised just before he felt the first tearing and clawing at his back, behind. He fell face down, almost welcoming the shift in the focus of pain away from his abdomen. The second one joined the first. His face was pressed into the dust with their weight and he felt their tearing at him shift, subtly, from random to rhythmic; he was no longer being attacked but being eaten.

He had often watched something similar, back on Sakhra: one of the huge herbivores, run to exhaustion by a hunting party, giving up and allowing itself to be eaten, still standing. He made a decision. There were two alternatives, both involving his death, but only one involving his death now. He would not die in that way; it was obscene.

He bunched his arms and legs underneath him, then screamed and rolled onto his back. The two predators either jumped away from him or were sent flying, he was not sure which. He stood up, feeling dust and gravel where he bled, and with his forearms covered in vomit which he knew somehow was his own; its colour was like the dust, and as he spread his clawed fingers it formed a shaking web between them. When had he vomited? How did he recognise it as his? He put the questions aside for now, though the second one particularly interested him.

The two predators crouched where they landed, staring up at him wide-eyed. He sheathed and unsheathed his claws. His tongue licked across his teeth. He shut down the poison glands in his hands and feet. He would not need them now.

Only when he finished did he stop to analyse his motives. It was not that without poison the act of killing them was slower, or more vengeful; it was simply fitting, because it introduced a proper element of balance. Without poison it was more risky for him, though only marginally so. But anything less would have been a discourtesy to the child he had let die inside him.

He lay down on his back, spread his legs, looked up at the pewter sky and pushed. It was not an act of birth but an act of defecation. He buried it in a shallow grave and turned quickly away before the soil started crawling.

Ten hours later he stood unsteadily on a low ridge overlooking a shallow dust bowl—stood, because he could walk no further, but knew that if he were to lay down, or fall down, he would never get up again—and considered what he saw with a mixture of astonishment and amusement.

He had been taught that life, while it happened, had no real meaning. Meaning could be assigned later by others, but life, while it happened, was only the total of a series of random accidents, each one operating
on-off
like a binary gateway, either
this
or
that
, to give it its particular direction; but not its meaning. And now
this.

He revised his ambitions. They were limited already, and he made them more so. Never mind living long enough to see Her again and help others stop Her. He wanted only to know if Thahl had similar ambitions. If he could live long enough to get spotted by an aerial patrol drone, perhaps he’d have time to communicate with Thahl.

The wounds on his back and the septic trickle from the birth rupture in his lower abdomen attracted clouds of flies which he was no longer strong enough to keep brushing away; he endured them with a herbivore’s patience, his secondary eyelids flicking horizontally every now and then. Something small and multi-legged erupted from underneath a rock by his feet and made for the cover of another rock, froze as his claws whipped out in reflex, and sank into the sand like a brick into mud. The rocks around him seemed to sing with the refraction of sunlight. The air quivered. A few minutes passed. He counted them, and with them the ironies of pure, binary accident which were the only life-shaping force he understood or recognised. Sakhrans called them Binary Gates, and liked reciting them. It appealed to their sense of irony.

One, that She had moved on Bast rather than Horus or the other former Sakhran systems. Two, that the only ship in Bast able to engage Her was the
Pallas
, on which he was an officer—one of only two Sakhran officers in the Commonwealth. Three, that when his ship died around him—that was not an accident, but a certainty—his particular abilities meant he was the only one among several qualified pilots to get a lifeboat away with some survivors. Four, that the lifeboat crashlanded and the others aboard all died. But five, that it landed and he survived. Yet, six, that he had no communications equipment and could only try to walk out of the desert and find a command post or be spotted by a patrol before the predators, premature childbirth, or a ruptured minor heart killed him. But, seven, he had lived through the first two of those. But, eight, the third one—his heart—was still counting away, unevenly but inexorably, the time he had left.

He lost count. No, he concluded, there could be no overall meaning. There usually wasn’t, when you reduced events to their building-blocks. Accidents occurred, chances fell; gates opened here and closed there; but there was no hidden force insisting on an overall direction. Nothing
made
him survive the crashlanding or predators. No sinuous enigmatic force had willed it, any more than if he dropped dead now it would have been willed. If he dropped dead now, it would mean only that his abilities weren’t enough.

And yet, he stood swaying on the ridge, a slight dark figure, and wondered if all his teaching was wrong. For below him in the dust bowl lay the ninth and final irony. He had no idea it would be there when he laboured up the shallow incline; he had thought to skirt the slope but his innate tidymindedness, or maybe it was obsessiveness, made him keep to his straight path, even if straight meant up.

And now, below him in the shallow dust bowl and almost but not quite within hailing distance, sat a small Commonwealth command post. He continued to stand on the ridge, unable to walk forwards. A few more minutes passed.

•

“Fucker,” said Sergeant Madsen, mechanically and without malice. The way he said it, without emphasis on either syllable, gave it an everyday cadence. If he had spoken it as part of a longer sentence, it would have been hidden in the other words.

He was talking to a dismantled drone lying on the bench in front of him. He’d been working on it for four hours, and couldn’t get its optical circuits to function. Unknown to Sarabt, this was the tenth and possibly final irony. If it had been working properly four hours ago, it would have been quartering the area of desert where the lifeboat crashlanded, and would almost certainly have seen him.

Madsen was just about to give up on it. The optical circuitry wasn’t responding to any of his efforts. He leaned back and listened to the door of one of the outbuildings banging in the wind.

Only a Sakhran would be polite enough to describe it as a Command Post. It was a collection of three sheds (two plus an outside toilet) to which Madsen and two others had travelled by tracked groundcar. It was the only collection of buildings anywhere near the area where they had calculated, from the lifeboat’s last known trajectory, that the crashlanding might have occurred. Their orders were to set up at the command post and quarter the desert with the remotely-piloted drone to spot any survivors. It hadn’t worked. The drone was a low-budget, short-range model, and its optical circuits were trashed. Ironically (would Sarabt have seen this as the eleventh irony?) it had been assembled by Sakhrans, as part of a failing Commonwealth re-employment project.

In fact, the whole thing was rather half-assed. Yes, they’d told him, it would be easier just to quarter the desert with a flier, but all piloted fliers (Bast 3 didn’t have that many) were commandeered. In case, they told him, She came back.

Hynd looked round the door.

“Luck, Sergeant?”

Madsen shook his head. “S’not gonna work. Give up, is best. Where’s Stockton?”

“Toilet,” Hynd said, and added, “Wanking himself silly.”

Madsen snorted, not in disgust but because he always snorted rather than blow his nose, and returned to the drone. It was spread out on the workbench like a dissected bat. He folded up the pinions and fabric of its wings, folded back its jointed body, went to return it to its carrycase, and found it wouldn’t fit.

“Get him to come fit this back in its box. We’ll have to go back for another one.”

“Should’ve brought two,” Hynd muttered as the door closed behind him, but Madsen heard.

“Three,” he shouted at the door. “ ’Member who made them.”

He snorted again, for the same reason as before. His personal hygiene was not of the first quality. While he waited for Stockton, Madsen remembered that his scalp itched. He scratched it—an event he had been saving, as a treat, for just such a moment. White flakes flew around his head and settled on the workbench, where they were camouflaged by dust.

Stockton came in, still buttoning his fly, and, at a nod from Madsen in the direction of the workbench, commenced unpacking and re-packing the drone. Like Hynd, he was of average build with regular and not unpleasant features, but there was something not right about him. He had tastes he couldn’t share with real people, so he kept them to himself; and made frequent visits to the toilet. His colleagues often said he might have been Outsider material. He had all the required deviances and loner tendencies, and lacked only the talent.

Second time round, the drone still didn’t fit. Part of its nose with the malfunctioning optic—if it had
really
been a bat, it would be part of its head with the left eye hanging out—refused to go in the carrycase. Stockton was about to start again, but Madsen couldn’t face the tedium.

“Oh, leave it. Tell Hynd, take the groundcar and bring another one…No, tell him bring another three.”

“Another
three
, Sergeant?”

“He’ll understand.”

Stockton went out. A moment later he was back.

“Sergeant, you’d better come and see this.”

He got up, at first wearily; then, seeing Stockton’s face, he straightened, hurried to the open doorway, and stood, with Hynd and Stockton, gaping at the figure which stumbled down the incline towards them. A slight, dark figure.

“He needs help,” Stockton pronounced.

“Oh, you think?” Madsen roared, and ran towards the figure, the others following. The figure bumped into the groundcar which stood directly in its way—still trying to keep a straight line—and continued, and when they reached it, it did not fall into their arms, or fall down, but stood before them swaying.

Sarabt was still wearing his Commonwealth officer’s uniform, but only the top half. Below his waist he was naked. Madsen smelt, then saw, the bloody ruins hanging from his lower abdomen and between his legs.

“Oh, you poor bastard,” he said, “you were pregnant, weren’t you?” He took Sarabt by the shoulders and gently lowered him to the ground. The secondary eyelids were flicking horizontally, and the mouth worked soundlessly, but his thin face held no expression.

“Mmmmmmmmm,” Sarabt said, and “Ssssssssssssss.”

“Later,” Madsen said. “Rest. Rest is best.” He turned to Stockton, who was already rushing back to the shed, and shouted “Tell Command to get a medical team here,
now!
Sakhran survivor of
Pallas
, premature childbirth, can’t be moved.”

The smell from between Sarabt’s legs was shocking, even to Madsen, but Madsen stayed with him.
He lost it
, he said to himself,
it died. Probably buried it out there, they do when they lose them, they bury them immediately. Along with their name and their past and their future.

Now that Sarabt had stopped moving, flies were circling thickly around the area between his legs. Madsen went to cover him with his jacket, then thought better of it; better not touch or cover any injuries before help arrived. Instead he began waving his hands a few inches above the injured area, just to disperse the flies. He thought how strange it would look to Stockton if he returned; to Stockton, of all people.

Stockton returned just then, but was too preoccupied to notice.

“Mmmmmmmmmm,” Sarabt said again, and “Ssssssssssss.” It was no use. The words stayed inside him. His lips wouldn’t shape them.

“They’re on the way,” Stockton said. Madsen nodded.

Stockton brought a cup of water. Madsen propped Sarabt in his arms so he could take it. He accepted it gratefully, though he spilt most of it; the cup was too big for his narrow carnivore’s mouth.

He seemed to be more comfortable propped up in Madsen’s arms, so Madsen stayed holding him, with the other two sitting close by in the dust. Arranged thus, they waited for help to arrive. His smell had got worse—Sakhran blood had a smell which humans found unendurable—but they stayed with him.

The medical team arrived in two fliers which landed vertically nearby, but there were also at least eight others which continued overhead and into the desert, in the direction from which Sarabt came. Madsen remembered the drone and exchanged a weary glance with Hynd.

An hour later he started talking, though he was incomprehensible to any but the Sakhran doctors with the medical team. One of them turned to Madsen.

“Sergeant, he keeps saying he wants you to put in a call to Thahl.”

“Get the location. Stockton’ll do it, won’t you?”

“He means,” the Sakhran said, “the First Officer on the
Charles Manson.
”

“Oh, shit.”

Not even ordinary warships would take non-military calls when they were on a mission: custom, as well as regulations, forbade it absolutely. Outsider Class ships, like the
Charles Manson
, were the most unreachable of all. Officially, they were almost nonexistent.