Use of Weapons (15 page)

Sma
took a very deep breath. 'Apart from that... everything all right?'

'This,
Ms Sma, is no time for levity,' the drone said, soberly. Then; 'Shit!'

'What
now?'

'Meeting's
over, but Zakalwe the Insane isn't taking his car; he's heading for the
elevator down to the tube system. Destination... naval base. There's a
submarine waiting for him.'

Sma
stood. 'Submarine, eh?' She smoothed the culottes. 'Back to the docks, agree?'

'Agreed.'

She
hefted the drone, started walking, looking for a cab. 'I've asked the
Very Little Gravitas Indeed
to fake a
radio message,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw told her. 'A cab should pull up here
momentarily.'

'And
they say there's never one around when you need one.'

'You're
worrying me, Sma. You're taking all this far too calmly.'

'Oh,
I'll panic later.' Sma took a deep breath and let it out slowly. 'Could that be
the cab?'

'I
believe it is.'

'What's
"To the docks"?'

The
drone told her, and she said it. The cab sped off through the largely military
traffic.

Six
hours later they were still following the submarine, as it whined and whirred
and gurgled its way through the layers of ocean, heading for the equatorial
sea.

'Sixty
klicks an hour,' fumed the drone. 'Sixty klicks an hour!'

'To
them it's fast; don't be so unsympathetic to your fellow machines.' Sma watched
the screen as the vessel a kilometre in front of them burrowed its way through
the ocean. The abyssal plain was kilometres below.

'It
isn't one of us, Sma,' the drone said wearily. 'It's just a submarine; the
smartest thing inside it is the human captain. I rest my case.'

'Any
idea where it's heading yet?'

'No.
The captain's orders are to take Zakalwe wherever he wants to go, and after
giving him this general heading, Zakalwe's kept quiet. There's a whole heap of
islands and atolls he could be making for, or - several days travel away at
this crawl - thousands of kilometres of coastline, on another continent.'

'Check
out the islands, and that coastline. There must be a reason he's heading this
way.'

'It's
being
checked out!' the drone
snapped.

Sma
looked at it. Skaffen-Amtiskaw flashed a delicate shade of purple, intimating
contrition. 'Sma; this... man... totally blew it the last time; we're five or
six million down on that last job, all because he wouldn't break out of the
Winter Palace and balance things out. I could show you scenes of the terror
there that would blanch your hair. Now he's come very close indeed to
instigating a global catastrophe here. Since the guy suffered what happened to
him on Fohls - since he started trying to be a good guy in his own right - he's
been a disaster. If we do get him, and can get him to Voerenhutz, I just worry
what sort of chaos he'll engender there. The man's bad news. Never mind outing
Beychae; offing Zakalwe would be doing everybody a favour.'

Sma
looked into the centre of the drone's sensory band. 'One;' she said, 'don't
talk about human lives as though they're just collateral.' She breathed deeply.
'Two; remember the massacre, in the courtyard of that inn?' she asked calmly. 'The
guys through the walls, and your knife missile let off the leash?'

'One;
sorry to have offended your mammalian sensibilities. Two; Sma, will you ever
let me forget it?'

'Remember
what I said would happen if you ever tried anything like that again?'

'Sma,'
the drone said tiredly, 'if you are seriously trying to imply that I might kill
Zakalwe, all I can say is; don't be ridiculous.'

'Just
remember.' She watched the slowly scrolling screen. 'We have our orders.'

'Agreed
on courses of action, Sma. We don't have orders, remember?'

Sma
nodded. 'We have our agreed on courses of action. We lift Mr Zakalwe and take
him to Voerenhutz. If at any stage you disagree, you can always butt out. I'll
be given another offensive drone.'

Skaffen-Amtiskaw
was silent for a second, then said, 'Sma, that is probably the most hurtful
thing you have ever said to me - which is saying a lot - but I'll ignore it, I
think, because we are both under a lot of stress at the moment. Let my actions
speak. As you say; we lift the planetfucker and drop him in Voerenhutz. Though,
if this voyage goes on too much longer, it'll all be taken out of our hands -
or fields, as the case may be - and Zakalwe will wake up on
Xenophobe
or the GCU, wondering what
happened. All we can do is wait and see.'

The
drone paused then. 'Looks like it could be those equatorial islands we're
heading for,' it told her. 'Zakalwe owns half of them.'

Sma
nodded silently, watching the distant submarine creep through the ocean. She
scratched at her lower abdomen after a while, and turned to the drone. 'You
sure you didn't record anything from that, umm, sort of orgy, first night on
the
Xenophobe
?

'Positive.'

She
frowned back at the screen. 'Huh. Pity.'

The
submarine spent nine hours underwater, then surfaced near an atoll; an
inflatable went ashore. Sma and the drone watched the single figure walk up the
golden, sunlit beach towards a complex of low buildings; an exclusive hotel for
the ruling class of the country he'd left.

'What's
Zakalwe doing?' Sma said, after he'd been ashore for ten minutes or so. The
submarine had dived again as soon as it recovered its inflatable, and taken a
course back to the port it had departed from.

'He's
saying goodbye to a girl,' sighed the drone.

'Is
that
it
?'

'That
would appear to be the only thing to draw him here.'

'Shit!
Couldn't he have taken a plane?'

'Hmm.
No; no airstrip, but anyway, this is a fairly sensitive demilitarised zone; no
unexpected flights of any sort allowed, and the next seaplane isn't for a
couple of days. The sub was actually the fastest way of...'

The
drone fell silent.

'Skaffen-Amtiskaw?'
Sma said.

'Well,'
the drone said slowly, 'the doxy just smashed a lot of ornaments and a couple
of pieces of very valuable furniture, and then ran off and buried herself in
her bed, weeping... but apart from that, Zakalwe just sat down in the middle of
the lounge with a large drink and said (and I quote), "Okay; if that's
you, Sma, come and talk to me."'

Sma
looked at the view on the screen. It showed the small atoll, the central island
lying green and squashed looking between the vibrant blues and greens of ocean
and sky.

'You
know,' she said, 'I think I would like to kill Zakalwe.'

'There's
a queue. Surface?'

'Surface.
Let's go see the asshole.'

X

Light.
Some light. Not very much. Air foul and everywhere pain. He wanted to scream
and writhe, but could find no breath and make nothing move. A dark destroying
shadow welled up inside him, exterminating thought, and he lost consciousness.

Light.
Some light. Not very much. He knew there was pain, too, but somehow it did not
seem so important. He was looking at it differently now. That was all you had
to do; just think about it differently. He wondered where that idea had come
from, and seemed to remember he'd been taught how to do this.

Everything
was metaphor; all things were something other than themselves. The pain, for
example, was an ocean, and he was adrift on it. His body was a city and his
mind a citadel. All communications between the two seemed to have been cut, but
within the keep that was his mind he still had power. The part of his
consciousness that was telling him the pain did not hurt, and that all things
were like other things, was like... like... he found it hard to think of a
comparison. A magic mirror, maybe.

Still
thinking about that, the light faded, and he slipped away again, into the
darkness.

Light.
Some light (he'd been here before, hadn't he?). Not very much. He seemed to
have left the keep that was his mind, and now he was in a storm-struck leaking
boat, images dancing before him.

The
light grew slowly in strength until it was almost painful. He felt suddenly
terrified, because it seemed to him that he really was on a tiny creaking
leaking boat, tossed scudding across a seething black ocean, in the teeth of a
howling gale, but now there was light, and it appeared to come from somewhere
above him, but when he tried to look at his hand, or the tiny boat, he still
couldn't see anything. The light shone into his eyes, but it failed to
illuminate anything else. The idea terrified him; the tiny boat was swamped by
a wave and he was submerged again in the ocean of pain, burning through every
pore of his body. Somewhere, thankfully, somebody threw a switch, and he
slipped underneath to darkness, silence and... no pain.

Light.
Some light. He remembered this. The light showed a small boat assaulted by
waves on a broad dark ocean. Beyond, unreachable for now, there was a great
citadel on a small island. And there was sound. Sound... That was new. Been
here before, but not with sound. He tried to listen, very hard, but could not
make out the words. Still, he formed the impression that maybe somebody was
asking questions.

Somebody
was asking questions... Who...? He waited for a reply, from outside or from
within himself, but nothing came from anywhere; he felt lost and abandoned, and
the worst of it was that he felt abandoned by himself.

He
decided to ask himself some questions. What was the citadel? That was his mind.
The citadel was supposed to come with a city attached, which was his body, but
it looked like something else had taken over the city, and there was just the
castle, just the keep left. What was the boat, and the ocean? The ocean was
pain. He was in the boat now, but before that he'd been in the ocean, up to his
neck, waves breaking over him. The boat was... some learned technique which was
protecting him from the pain, not letting him forget it was there, but keeping
its debilitating effects away from him, letting him think.

So
far so good, he thought. Now, what is the light?

He
might have to come back to that one. Same with: What is the sound?

He
tried another question: Where is this happening?

He
searched his sodden clothes but found nothing in any of the pockets. He looked
for a name tag that he felt ought to be sewn on to his collar, but it seemed to
have been ripped off. He searched the small boat, but still found no answers.
So he tried to imagine being in the distant keep over the towering waves, and
visualised himself walking into a cavernous store room of jumble and nonsense
and memories buried deep in the castle... but could see nothing in detail. His
eyes closed and he wept with frustration, while the small boat juddered and
tipped underneath him.

When
he opened his eyes, he was holding a little clip of paper with the word FOHLS
printed on it. He was so surprised he let the slip of paper go; the wind
whipped it away into the dark sky over the black waves. But he had remembered.
Fohls was the answer. The planet of Fohls.

He
felt relieved, and a little proud. He'd discovered something.

What
was he doing here?

Funeral.
He seemed to remember something about a funeral. Surely it had not been his
own.

Was
he dead? He thought about this question for a while. He supposed it was
possible. Maybe there was an afterlife, after all. Well, if there was life
after death, that would teach him. Was this sea of pain a divine punishment?
Was the light a god? He dipped his hand over the side of the boat, into the
pain; it filled him, and he withdrew. Cruel god if that really was the case.
What about all the stuff I did for the Culture? he wanted to ask. Doesn't that
cancel some of the bad out? Or were those smug self-satisfied bastards wrong
all along?
God
, he'd love to be able
to go back and tell them. Imagine the look on Sma's face!