Janus (39 page)

Jon Grebbel was crouched in the dark beside the wire fence that bounded the landing field. He felt the safety catch on the Ingram machine pistol, and contemplated the level of commitment represented by one motion of a finger. Inside his coat was the trigger switch to the explosives, which might prove more important if they ran into difficulties. Osmon and the others were beside him, below the line of sight of the main windows, and half hidden by the undergrowth. The sky was a great cave of black and silver, and without the perimeter lights, the landing field was mystery of shadows. The moons were setting into a bank of clouds. Until the perimeter lights came on, they were safe from the control tower: anything on the ground in this direction would be lost against the dark of the valley wall. He glanced up at the nearest light mounted above the fence not fifteen metres from where he waited. If the power went on now, the field would seem incandescent. They would be spotted before they got ten metres. He wiped his hand on his thigh.

“What’s happening in there?” one of the men whispered. “If they’ve killed the lights, why don’t they signal?”

“Quiet,” Grebbel rasped. “Keep listening.”

There was wind, stirring branches on the step hill slopes. There was the rush of the river, the cry of a raptor—a brief flutter of wings. Something else. Grebbel tensed. The beat of airscrews.

“It’s coming.”

“Two minutes early.”

“Shit.”

“I’ve got its lights. Just below the skyline. Following the beam.”

“Right. That’s it,” Grebbel said. “The field should have been lit by now, so I’m assuming the power’s been taken care of, and we’re going in. You all hear that? Into position when I move, then go when the fence is cut.”

He crouched and ran to the fence. Beside him, Osmon bent and sheared the lower half of the wire, and they ran through. They thudded across the cleared field, the control tower bulked low ahead of them. Beside it, the beacon rotating on the landing pylon splashed red light across its slab walls and empty windows.

“Move it! If the building’s dark, they won’t land.”

Their boots clattered on the concrete apron, and then the door was swinging open and they were in.

“Lights!” shouted Grebbel. “Lights first—then get in position.”

Joe Abercrombie opened the circuit-breaker panel and started resetting the breakers. Lights flickered on in open doorways. In the entrance to the control room, Ahmed Mahmoud lay bleeding from the chest. A dead guard lay beside him clutching a long-bladed knife. Osmon crouched over Mahmoud and shook him by the shoulders, trying to ask what had happened. Grebbel pulled him away. “He’s too far gone. Let him be. Get into position.”

“We need to know what happened. If a warning got out—”

“There are no guards. That’s enough. He did most of his job. Lafayette must be here too. He didn’t get as far as the control panel, so we’ll have to fake the talkdown ourselves.”

“If they got out a warning—”

“Then we all say sorry and go home. Now let’s get the comlink alive.” He stepped into the control room. “Let’s have the landing lights, but not all at once—and keep them erratic. Look as though we’ve got power problems.”

“They’re coming in on the receiver now,” Hammond called. “We’ve got a voice link. They want to know what’s wrong.”

“Circuitry problems. Don’t be too specific. It’s coming under control. Fake transmission breakup if you have to, but see they get that they’re cleared to land.”

Grebbel, Osmon and four others found ground-crew jackets and put them on over their coats and weapons. Grebbel picked up a personal transceiver and checked that the control room team were reading him. Then he followed the other five outside to wait for the landing.

Stars glittered icily in a patch of clear sky. In the dark at the head of the valley the red and green riding lights of the dirigible were clear now. Grebbel watched them hungrily, and flinched away as the nearest bank of field lights blazed in his eyes. A moment later they were dark again, leaving the world a pulsating black void. “Give us a countdown,” he called into the transceiver. “I can’t see anything from here through the lights.”

“Just over a klick yet. They sound a bit suspicious, but they’re still coming.”

“Deploy, everyone,” Grebbel muttered to his group. “Check your weapons.”

The aurora pulsed turquoise, silhouetting three skeins of cloud above the western range. The light dimmed to sea green, shifted to violet, and was lost against the sky.

“Two hundred metres.”

The Ingram seemed alive in Grebbel’s hand, growing light and then heavy, then light again. Around him, the others were shades, dim faces with flickers of eyes and teeth.

“They’re over the pylon. Deploying the hook now.”

“Okay,” he rasped. “I’ve got them.”

The dark, round cloud above them was swelling and starting to catch the light from the field. He could hear the motor whine beneath the throb of airscrews. Then the grapple on the pylon clacked home. The winch raced and began to pull. Now the airscrews were feathered, idling down to a steady flicker. He watched as the gondola beneath swayed and sank and halted, and found he had been holding his breath.

“They’re opening up. Let’s go.”

The six ran forward and were waiting as the yellow light from the cabin spilled down the extending stairs to the concrete. The first of the crew appeared in the doorway. Grebbel nodded to the others to hold back and started up the steps.

The man in the doorway had not moved. “Hold it right there,” he shouted. “I don’t know you. What the hell’s going on here?”

Grebbel kept climbing. “Security check,” he snapped. “Blue triple-zeta. Flash just came over the satellite link. You should have picked it up. Explosives in the hold. The crew goes down for clearance while we check the cargo.”

“Now you just hold it. Nobody said anything to me about this.” The man turned towards the cabin. “Hey, Rolf, you got anything about a blue triple-zeta?” He turned back to Grebbel. “You got a flash from the satlink? Your whole comset was down—”

Grebbel took the last rungs in a stride and clubbed the man twice with the barrel of the Ingram, then kicked the body off the loading platform. The other five started up the steps behind him. From inside, someone called out, “What’s going on down there?”

“Upstairs,” Grebbel snapped, and burst into the entrance, then up clanging steps to the control room. A pistol cracked twice as he threw the door open. The second shot whipped past his head, and he fired a short burst. It knocked someone down and shocked the air with echoes. Grebbel saw that he’d let himself fire within thirty degrees of the gasbag. Two crewmen froze in their seat, their faces as blank as those of the dead.

Smoke was still eddying up into the air-conditioning vents when Osmon and the others pushed in after him.

Grebbel motioned Carl Davis to the controls. “Set things up and we’ll get the others aboard.”

The man he had shot moaned and tried sit up. Grebbel stared, then went and lifted his head by the hair. “Well, well,” he rasped. “An unexpected bonus. Martin, old friend, old colleague. After all these years. How has life been treating you, eh?” He jabbed with the gun muzzle. “Eh?”

“Grebbel? Is that you?” The man gasped and shook his head. “It’s over, all that. I’m not what I was.”

“Now there’s a funny thing,” said Grebbel. “Neither am I.”

Davis called from the pilot’s seat, “I can’t load the aerodynamics program. And our IFF signal’s dead; we can’t answer challenges.”

Martin nodded weakly. “We had just enough warning. You’d better quit now, before you make things worse for yourselves.”

“We’ll fly this thing on our own if we have to.”

“Where are you going to go? Not back to the Flats without the IFF unless you’re bent on suicide.”

“Then you’d better tell us how to switch it on again, hadn’t you.” He pushed with the gun muzzle, and twisted.

Martin groaned and tried to double up. The blood left his face and he gasped chokingly. Then he lifted his head. “It’s over,” he whispered. “Can’t you understand? There’s nowhere for you to go. Give it up now.”

“Sorry, that’s not what I want to know. Osmon, I’m going to be busy the next few minutes. Do you think you can persuade my old friend here to tell us what we need to know?”

“Oh yes, I think so.”

“Do it yourself, Grebbel!” Martin cried. “Do your own dirty work. You always did before.”

Turning away, Grebbel stopped, and seemed about to reply. Instead he lifted his transceiver and spoke quietly into it. “Let’s refuel and get everyone aboard.”

Osmon put down his pistol and went to crouch over the wounded man.

Dying wasn’t the worst, Larsen thought; it was the pain that destroyed. Pain stripped one bare of humanity, left one grunting and howling like an animal. But even worse than pain was the fear of it. It was fear that humiliated, destroyed one’s own worth. It was fear that crippled the will and paralysed the flesh. That was why he was on the floor now, curled up like a foetus—unable to move or make a sound, hardly to breathe, for fear that he would wake the pain once more and it would blast him.

So it had all been failure, and now he could not even move to undo some of the harm. The computer link was there above him, on the desk. If he risked turning his head a couple of centimetres he would see it. But that would bring the first stirrings of the pain, and for what? To reach for the link, to pull himself up and set his fingers working on its keys, he would have to scale ridge after vertiginous ridge of agony.

That was how it was when you were led by conscience, but ruled by fear and pain. One passion unopposed would shape a life. But to fight fear one needed something as strong. Love? He had neither loved nor hated. In an earlier age, he might have found a god he could have served, and poured his fear and his need into that service until it turned to love. But his times valued knowledge over conviction, and he had acquired knowledge of what was right, without the inner certainty. Now even his knowledge was tainted. And all his pretences at love had been mere callous, squirming betrayals by the flesh.

Here was the final betrayal, as the flesh pinned him helpless even while the life oozed out of it. One betrayal following another. From the parish school and the children, to the university, to the trial, to this place, with half his mind cut away . . .

Deliberately he was working up something to fight the pain, something that began to feel like rage.

Rage then. If not love, then at the end of it all, hate. Something to fight the fear, something as strong as pain. His head turned, and the rent in his flesh seared, but his eyes had found the edge of the desk and the terminal, and they gave him a ledge to cling to.
Now. Now.

His breath rasped, and once more the flesh betrayed, his muscles would not move.

Now. Damn you to hell. Now.

He was wrong. Nothing was stronger than pain.

The cry turned to a sob, and then to retching.

It was unbearable. It had to be borne.

It had to be—because now his elbows were on the desk, his fingers, shaken by spasms, were crawling across it and stabbing at keys.

Just five seconds. Three keys. One more breath. And it will all be over.

“Music is perhaps the highest of the arts, don’t you agree?” said Dr. Henry. “At its best, it can evoke illusive and heightened states such as no other medium can approach. And yet it is so much more immediate than most of them.”

Elinda said nothing. The room was full of a strange tangle of sounds whose fragmentary rhythms plucked at her nerves.

“This piece, for instance. I discovered it quite recently. It doesn’t have the exalted scale of the great works, but I think it showed promise. I get the feeling the composer was not quite reconciled to the medium. The sound is all synthetic of course, but notice how closely it’s made to resemble a small classical orchestra. Later, you’ll hear synthetic approximations of voices, too. It’s almost as though the composer would have preferred to write for chorus and orchestra, but knew no one would ever pay for such resources to perform an unknown work.”

“Is this supposed to mean something to me? Or are you just filling in time?”