Lament for the Fallen (20 page)

[They are not good men.]

‘Perhaps. By the norms of their society, they have been more than punished for it. Redemption comes after release. They won’t repay the balance of their debt unless they’re given the opportunity to return.’

[They seem to want to. Repay it, I mean.]

‘Yes, it seems so. Maybe there is hope, even here?’

[I have located a potential storage area for rocket fuel.]

‘Where is it?’

[You will not like it.]

‘The other end of the station.’

[Indeed.]

‘Very well. Shall we go?’

Samara disrobes, leaving his cloak inside the door to the tunnels. His skin once again invisible against the dark metal. He adjusts to the lack of gravity, careful not to make any sound that could attract the Furies.

Once more, the endless network of grid-like passages and the purring silence broken by howls and madness.

25

Farinata Uberti lies prostrate in the dust before his sacred grove.

His arms and legs are outstretched. Dust blows about his face with each breath where his mouth is downcast close to the ground. His feet and hands are dirty.

Plaited palm leaves are wrapped around the trees either side of a small, palm-fronded hut. Bowls of water interspersed with rounded brown and white stones are arranged in rows before it. Sharpened sticks, eggshells impaled upon them, stand upright here and there. A pile of human skulls mixed with the bones of fish, goats and chickens is just outside the hut entrance. Seeds and feathers have been scattered over the roof and about the grounds. A python skin hangs between the two trees and above the hut.

Uberti is naked except for an okuru, a sheet cross-woven from strands of cotton and palm fibre. His body is plump. His hips and thighs – where they protrude from the sheet wrapped about his waist – are riven with stretch marks.

He is midway through the ceremony of divination.

A white ceramic bowl lined with a white cloth and filled with clear water is boiling on a tripod over a heap of coals to his right side. He pushes himself upright and sits, cross-legged, and empties a wooden bowl filled with finely scraped woody fibre from a freshly cut sapling into the water. He waits until the liquor becomes cloudy and begins to simmer once more. He gathers up the cloth in the bowl, carefully squeezing the water back into it.

A dead chicken, its body torn open while still alive, is to his left side. The knife he used is next to it, partly under one half-extended wing. He squeezes a few drops from the lump of cloth into its chest and over its intestines.

Last, he sits back on his heels, moulding the fabric-covered fibre between his hands. He sits like that for almost an hour, waiting for the ndem of his grove to reveal the future to him.

He stands, collects the chicken, the two bowls and the tripod, and stows them in the little hut. He removes his okuru, his flabby belly hanging over his scrotum, carefully folds the fabric and places it within the hut as well. He recovers his clothes, and dresses.

Turning, he follows the path through the trees until his house comes into view. His guards are waiting for him there. One hands him his AK-47. This is not a printed version but a Chinese original acquired at great cost from the Chinese traders who still sometimes visit the city.

‘Ciacco!’ he shouts. ‘Ciacco, you worm, run!’

Uberti never speaks when he can bark.

Ciacco, a small, wire-faced man, races from the house. ‘Great Awbong, you have returned. What news?’

The older man sneers. ‘What news, indeed? You tell me.’ Uberti strides towards the house, a guard on either side and his rifle slung across his back, Ciacco hovering on the periphery.

‘There is news from the markets. A group arrived from the south. They have sold half a ton of aluminium scrap to the digesters.’

‘That is interesting news. When was this?’ Uberti washes his hands in a bowl of water, stumps up the stairs and on to the veranda of his house. He grabs a clean white towel from a slave, throwing it back at her when done.

‘Only two hours ago, my Awbong.’ Ciacco knows the news will please.

‘Who are they, these outsiders?’

‘Your men in the market say they sound as if they come from along the Akwayafe.’

‘Aha,’ he says. He leans out over the wall of his veranda. This is the largest house in Henshaw Town and the highest up the ridge. From here he looks down on Beach Town and across the bay towards Ikonitu.

‘They’re from Ewuru. Those filthy vagrants owe me a helicopter. D’Este is even less forgiving than I, and I had to part with most of the money from that bauxite to pay him off.’

Unsaid, that it was too expensive to afford a revenge attack. But now that they have come to him, and have something worth taking –

He turns to Ciacco. His eyes burn and his jaw bunches where he is grinding his teeth.

They almost could not find the bauxite because of those peasants’ stupidity when they marked Pazzo’s map. Eventually, they had seen it from the air, but not before one of the pilots had gotten bored and decided to have some fun taking his team to attack the village. That had cost him a helicopter, even though he had beaten d’Este down on the price for those flying scrapheaps.

‘Send men. They owe me comey.’

It does not matter where the aluminium came from. All that matters is his fee.

Ciacco turns without a word and flees into the house.

‘Good,’ says Uberti. ‘They can pay me at least part of what I lost.’

‘My Awbong,’ says one of the guards. Uberti grunts at him. ‘My Awbong, the Akan players have arrived for tomorrow night. Can they set up in the back garden?’

Uberti will throw a festival for his men. Women will not be permitted, as many secret rites will be shared. The Akan are amongst them.

Many of the other local warlords will be present. They have adopted the old title of ‘Awbong’, king, and divided up the city along its ancient boundaries. They re-established the Egbo secret society, brought back the tortures, mysticism and superstitions. They pretend at being an organizing force, but they are more like a fungus. The moisture they need to thrive is provided by the society itself.

‘Last year’s players dropped one of their puppets. Make sure these players are aware of the consequences.’

Uberti has only one real punishment for those who displease him. He sacrifices them to the trees. He butchered the man who dropped the puppet. The others he sold as slaves to Filippo Argenti, one of the other warlords in the city.

The warlords do business with each other even as they skirmish for control. They are always looking for an opportunity to erode each other’s power. Murder is frequent, but consolidation unlikely. As one dies, another militiaman steps forward, equally brutal.

‘Duruji?’ he says softly to one of the guards. The man leans close. ‘That old woman, the one in the market?’

Duruji indicates that he remembers her.

‘Kill her. The ceremony did not work.’

Duruji is about to leave.

‘And, Duruji,’ Uberti glares at him. ‘Not a word.’

The militiaman nods and leaves quietly, hurrying around the outside of the house.

‘It is good when one is feared, isn’t it?’ he says to another of his guards. He does not expect an answer. No one answers the king.

Uberti draws in the dust on the veranda wall. His first two fingers trace two arcs in parallel. He erases the second arc at a point off centre, breaking it. He places a dot between them. He studies it for a moment, then rubs it out with his palm. And he laughs.

26

‘No more, please,’ begs Samara, his self-awareness a fragment lost to the inevitable onslaught of his memory.

[It was a good trap.] ‘Please, not here –’ fading once more.

‘Yes, the entire situation at the bar. Someone was waiting for us, expecting us,’ says Samara.

[To what end?]

‘I do not know, but we can assume they have Oktar as well. He could be somewhere amongst the inmates, or he could be being kept down on Earth.’

[Perhaps they think they can keep us here?]

‘No, I don’t think so. Perhaps they think either I or Oktar can assist them in some way?’

[And the masked section of Tartarus, or the gauntlet of Furies?]

‘Maybe it isn’t related? That empty section could be an unfinished part of the jail? Maybe the Furies have been hacked by another group taking bets on how long prisoners survive? Some sort of torturers game show?’

[One hundred and fifty people a year killed for sport? There are some very messed-up people in your world.]

‘Indeed. I wonder if that number is just sufficiently low to escape notice against the death rate of the prison population? No matter, we will confront this when we get back to Achenia.’

Samara is moving slowly. He is travelling in a wide arc around the central hub controlled by Athena. He is not entirely sure of his ability to fend off a massed Fury attack, and he does not wish to trigger any alarms or leave a trail of disabled Furies that might lead to a complete lockdown of all exits.

Every few minutes, he must stop and angle himself against the floor as another lion’s-head shaped Fury slides silently past.

[I love the way the intervals are random.]

After a few hours, he sees another lit tunnel ending in another unlocked hatchway.

[They use hydrazine rocket engines to maintain the station attitude. There should be plenty of stores here we can use. I hope.]

‘Getting sufficient back will be difficult.’

[I got us here. I leave the heavy lifting to you.]

He opens the door. Inside, there is gravitation again. It is dark save for the illumination from the tunnel. He closes the hatchway behind him and lights come on. He is in a short, white-painted interspace, sealed at the end in a thick blast door.

A green button is flush with the wall at the end. He presses it and the blast door rolls open. There is a tick, gradually increasing in speed, as he steps through. The door will close once the ticks become continuous.

His skin returns to matt titanium. No need to waste energy here.

Inside is a large chamber. It is a grid of floor-to-ceiling square containment vessels. He notes, in passing, that each is bigger than any of the prison cells. It is cold here. Red and yellow warning signs are centred on every wall.

Each containment chamber has a heavy door surmounted by a stainless steel wheel.

Samara spins open the first one he sees. The door gradually ejects towards him, coming back on two large hinges at the top and bottom. These are on wheels in embedded flanges and run along the inside so that the door slides to the side.

It is empty, a few containment boxes left lying on the floor alongside high shelves.

He closes the door and moves on. The fifth one contains a number of boxes. Each box contains a single half-metre rocket engine. The heads are flat, with a small connection plug socket. The pipes are pinched a third of the way from the end, then angling out to a cone the same width as the pipe. A waxy wrapping seals each end.

[Perfect. They’re integrated. We can build a controller, and I can manage our descent easily. Let’s take twelve, to be safe. We may not use them all.]

‘You have a strange definition of ‘safe’. How stable are these?’

[They’re cheap, but there’s a reason we never used these. I wouldn’t recommend dropping them.]

Samara carefully carries boxes to the blast door and piles them gingerly in the interspace between. It takes an hour before they are all carefully stowed there.

He returns to the storage bunker intending to close the last containment vessel door.

[Hazard!]

A man, wiry, his hair grey, long and wild about his head, his beard across his chest, attacks him with a sharpened metal spear.

Samara ducks, twists past him, the spear clanging against the containment vessel.

‘Stop! I have no wish to hurt you,’ he shouts, as calmly as he can.

The man’s eyes are manic, his teeth grinding frenetically inside his open mouth. He is naked, his body emaciated, his fingernails bitten, his toenails long and curved.

He screams incoherently and swings again.

[His mind is gone.]

‘Please,’ says Samara. Edging backwards towards the blast door.

The man grabs the remaining box from inside the open containment vessel. He is shaking it furiously.

[Oh. That isn’t good.]

‘Stop!’ shouts Samara, but the man flings his spear at him.

Samara catches it, then sees that the man has opened the box and is preparing to attack him with the heavy rocket engine.

[Disable him.] The words urgent in his head.

Too late: the man smashes it against a wall as he runs at Samara. The end starts to spark. He stops, looks at it in puzzlement, then at Samara.

[Run.]

Samara hits the red button on the outside of the blast door, pummelling the green button on the other side before it has scarce opened. The door slides shut.

There is a dull retort, as of something smashing into the solid wall on the other side. The banging continues, around the containment vessels, against the outer walls. A rapid series of thuds. Uncontrolled, it will burn until there is no more fuel.

[I don’t believe we need to go back in there.]

‘No. Poor man,’ says Samara. ‘What a terrible life.’

He must have been sleeping while Samara was busy. Perhaps there are food stores here too for the technicians who must sometimes visit to reload the attitude adjustment systems. Living alone in that cold room for years on end.

He stands for a few moments, then secretes a small silver bead from his finger on to the green button. The droplet slides behind it, into the mechanism, disabling it on both sides.

No alarms have sounded. Either the station sensors are broken in the storage room, or there were none to start with.