Africa Zero (15 page)

We
made about half the return distance before Gurt halted and sniffed the air.
Wondering precisely what it was he had noticed I upped the sensitivity of my
nose. Immediately I picked up the smell of burning wood overlaid with the tang
of petroleum. Camp fire, I thought. I couldn’t have been more wrong. We moved
on more cautiously, Gurt showing more caution than myself. He halted a second
then a third time. On the third occasion, he climbed a tree to scout-out our path.
He came down the tree very fast.

“Fire,”
he said.

I
was about to offer some sarcastic remark in return when I heard the explosions.
As we stood there below the tree he had just quit, two springboks went hurtling
past us, closely followed by a lioness. Shortly after them, came a family of
chimpanzees, some on the ground and some in the trees. There were no pursuers
here: they were all running. Beyond them I saw the wall of fire and concluded
that the explosions were exploding trees. Taking a leaf out of Gurt’s book of
meaningful communication I was reduced to monosyllables.

“Run,”
I said, about a second after Gurt had already shown me his heels.

Gurt
was impressively strong and dangerous in a fight, but one thing he was not was
a sprinter. Had this been an ordinary forest fire I think he might have managed
to outrun it, but as it was being encouraged along with liberal doses of napalm
and oxygen bombs he wasn’t fast enough. I accelerated past him and twenty yards
ahead I halted, and pushing my APW round to my front on its strap, I pointed a
thumb at my back. He didn’t hesitate. He discarded the Opteks and leapt
straight on my back when he reached me. Such was his weight that he even had me
staggering for a moment before I corrected. I started off at a steady
fifteen-kilometres-an-hour to get used to the load and steadily built it up.
Shortly I was up to thirty-kilometres-an-hour, then forty. I passed a couple of
chimpanzees, one carrying her baby on her back just as I was carrying Gurt. I
clipped another one that chose the wrong moment to leap from tree to tree in
front of me and after it had picked itself up it screeched along behind me for
a moment before I outdistanced it. Vicious little bastards, but then what can
you expect from man’s nearest relation?

“Faster,”
said Gurt, and I imagined that I could feel the heat on the back of my neck.

I
accelerated, feeling heat build up in my joints because of the extra loading. I
turned on my sweat glands, and they used the water I had drunk earlier. Forty
kilometres an hour, forty-five. A bird bounced off my chest and Gurt caught it
as it fluttered past. I thought this a rather unreasonable time to be taking a
snack.

The
fire was soon far behind us and I was able to slow and put Gurt down. From
there we continued on at the kilometre-eating trot he seemed able to maintain.

“How
wide?” he asked, gesturing at the trees.

“Thirty
kilometres,” I guessed.

He
grunted and we just kept going. An hour later I had to carry him ahead of the
flames again. An hour after that I did it again. By mid-afternoon, just ahead
of a pall of smoke and amongst the fleeing animals, we reached the abrupt edge
of the forest and the deep hissing stutter I instantly recognised.

I
suppose I should have expected something like this. My excuse is that I just
got caught up in the excitement of the moment. I had even, momentarily,
forgotten all about my precious tree orchids. Why, I should have asked myself,
would people who had come to harvest the trees, set fire to the forest? They’d
done it to drive someone out of the forest, or at least to remove that
someone’s cover. It was all about me. I try moderately hard not to be
conceited, but this was the only conclusion to which I could come. The weaponry
was the decider. You don’t position a number of AG gun ships, armed with
pulsed-energy cannons, on the edge of a forest to nail an escaped slave or
two..

“Shit,”
I said, monosyllabically.

“Agreed,”
said Gurt.

The
gun ships were square-sectioned stubby crosses, each with a spherical cockpit
on the end of one of the arms. On the arms either side of the cockpit were
sideways-projecting gun turrets adapted to support pulsed-energy cannons. There
were no markings on them, but they were standard corporate Family manufacture.
The question was: which Family? It was not a question I felt inclined to
consider for over-long when one of those cannons turned on us and opened fire.

The
pulsed-energy cannon works on much the same principle as the quantum cascade or
QC laser. The laser, developed originally for the solid state electronics’
industry a couple of millennia back, was soon taken up by the military when a
power pack was invented that could support it as a weapon. These lasers produce
coherent light, usually at the red end of the spectrum. The pulsed-energy
cannon produces coherent radiations inclusive of X-rays and microwaves. One
pulse looks like a tracer bullet. Where it hits it leaves nothing but
radioactive ash. It is not a clean weapon, but it is certainly an effective
one.

We
crawled then ran back into the forest with trees exploding behind us and the
whole forest burning ahead of us. Things had taken a decided turn for the worse
and it was perhaps this that returned to me, if but for a moment, an at least
workable sense of direction. I pointed to our left and held my arms so Gurt
could remount. I then ran as fast as I could—forest burning to my right and gun
ships blasting away the trees to my left. I could have just buried myself in
the earth to wait for it all to be over. There was, though, the nagging suspicion
that whoever was hunting me would be wise to that trick and that there would be
Soldiers of God out with metal detectors once the fire had finished. Also, I
didn’t want to abandon Gurt—he was one genotype I didn’t have in my collection,
and anyway, I liked him.

The
forest floor soon began to slope downhill and I had to slow myheadlong rush as
the ground got softer. Prairie elms were soon replaced by other deciduous trees
like oaks and horse chestnut. You got a curious mix this near to the glacier.
The weather is such that old Africa is much encroached on by the temperate
climate that had been farther north before the meteor strike and subsequent ice
age. Patches of forest like this had sprung up soon after, in the dryer veldt,
fed by melt water and cooled by cold air flowing down off the ice. Soon we
reached an area of fallen trees where the ground had become too soft to support
them and I had to put Gurt down. We made our way through this wreckage to an
abrupt stand of bamboo seemingly colonised wholly by giant snails and the
adapted land crabs that fed upon them. Beyond the bamboo was swamp that the
fire had yet to reach. Gurt looked askance at the water and sphagnum bogs then
looked up as one of the gun ships passed overhead, scattering fire in every direction.
I waded in and he followed.

Night
had fallen by the time we reached the river. Using a narrow-beam setting on the
APW I cut a tree to raft us downstream. I can’t swim, and walking along the
bottom gets a bit tedious. I also tend to end up going the wrong direction when
I try that. As we floated downstream in darkness I had to discourage one
crocodile with a rap on its nose, but otherwise we were okay. A gun ship
crossed the river upstream of us with its searchlight probing the water. It had
missed us by half an hour or so, for which I was grateful. I had no doubt it
was rigged-out with detectors suitable for picking up human-sized lumps of
ceramal. Still in darkness we paddled ashore and got out on a muddy bank below
the open veldt. I listened to a passing herd of mammoth up there, while Gurt
slept curled in the mud, oblivious to the world. I decided then that I needed
information and there were those who would be with the mammoth who could
provide it. Leaving Gurt to sleep I climbed the bank and set out through the
waist-high elephant grass.

A
dark shape rested in the stunted branches of a baobab and with glinting eyes
watched me approach. He was about to fly until I pulled the glove of
syntheflesh off my hand and held up that hand in greeting. The Pykani settled
down and waited until I was under the tree.

“I
am honoured, Collector,” said a lisping voice in the darkness.

“To
whom do I speak?” I asked.

“I
am Stuka,” replied the little vampire in the tree.

Someone,
I mention no names, took DNA from the frozen corpse of a mammoth dug from the
Russian tundra. From this DNA that someone resurrected the mammoth into a world
swiftly being depopulated by water wars, manufactured plagues, and more
esoteric killers like the Great African Vampire—creatures bred to feed on
people, lots of people. Someone then took DNA from the aforesaid, spliced it
with the gene of pygmy humans and produced the Pykani—creatures well adapted to
feed upon the blood of the mammoth. Stuka was a perfect little man with a
slightly translucent body, bat wings, and fangs.

“An
army of God is burning my forest, Stuka,” I said.

“We’ve
seen the lights,” replied the Pykani.

I
looked behind me and I too could see the lights: the long low glow of burning
forest and the higher firefly glows of about ten gun ships.

“I
think they were after me,” I said.

“Their
weapons are fearsome.”

“Who
are they?”

“The
Army of God is powerful because it has powerful weapons. They were fanatics
without power until someone gave them those weapons. Now their leader styles
himself the Lord of Cuberland. You have been named demon and must be
destroyed.”

“Their
weapons?” I asked.

“One
of the Families. I do not know which one.”

“What
about the gun ships?”

“They
came only yesterday, Collector.”

I
thought about that. I thought hard about that. Someone had provided a bunch of
fanatics with the weaponry to put them in power. I was now a demon. Sounded
like a deal to me: we’ll give you these if you off him, we’ll also give you
back-up. A Family punch-up with the Army of God as incidental I reckoned. I
held sixty percent of the stock in the Jethro Manx Canard Corporation, which
made me a viable target either internally or if another Family was making a
move on Manx Canard. I bet on the latter, as Jethro Susan, my wife of two
centuries, had the reins there. I had to get back and find out what was going
on.

I
just wondered what forces would be arrayed to prevent me getting back. I needed
more of an edge than was usual for me.

“I
require your assistance, Stuka, and that of your tribe,” I said.

“You
have but to ask, Collector. You are no demon to us,” replied the Pykani. I felt
a touch of embarrassment at that. In the past I’d let slip that I had been the
someone who had resurrected the mammoth and had my status elevated to something
angelic as far as the Pykani were concerned. I just hoped they’d never find out
who had made them.

* * *

A
pall of smoke sat in the air above where my forest burned and in that pall flew
vultures that had moved in to feast on what charred corpses they could find.
The gun ships were absent, which could be a good sign or a bad sign as far as
my plans were concerned. When I explained to Gurt he was typically loquacious
in giving his opinion.

“We
kill them,” he said, and grinned.

In
the morning we left the river and found a sheltered area underneath a couple of
acacias that grew verdant next to a water hole. Gurt lit a fire then went and
crouched by the water, still as a heron. I worried about the smoke for a second
then dismissed my worries. There was still plenty of smoke in the air. After
half an hour Gurt snatched at the water a few times and came back clutching a
couple of terrapins. These he opened, beheaded and gutted, then roasted in
their shells. The meat had a somewhat adverse effect on him, because thereafter
he sat with his stomach grumbling, letting off eructations that were so foul I
had to turn off my nose. Perhaps terrapin meat was not the kind he was used to.
He had been awfully proficient at cutting up that soldier.

At
midday Stuka came gliding in to see me, which surprised me as Pykani are
nocturnal. As he landed on the shore of the water hole I saw with even more
surprise that he was wearing tight sunglasses. Things move on.

“Little
vampire,” said Gurt.

“Yes,”
I said. “Not dinner.” Then I went to hear what Stuka had to say.

“It
is unusual to see you in the day,” I said to Stuka.

“It
is unusual to see in the day,” replied the vampire. “Jethro Susan has given us
much.”

“Ah,”
I nodded my head. My wife, when she had been human, was protected by the vampires
and in turn protected the mammoth for them. What developed went by the name of
braided debt. I should not have been surprised at the source of these vampire
sunglasses. “Good,” I stumbled on. “You ... have news for me?”

“We
have located them. They are forty kilometres to the east,” said Stuka.

I
pointed to where I thought east might be and Stuka corrected me. He then
reached into a pouch at his waist and wordlessly handed me the instrument from
there. It was a compass. I turned it over and looked at the initials JMCC
etched into the back.

“Er,
thanks.”

When
we set out I gave the compass to Gurt to use, and he seemed to manage okay. I
found that no matter how I held it it kept pointing at my power supply.

We
moved at a steady pace through the elephant grass, or mammoth grass if you
like. After half an hour we hit a mammoth trail that led in the direction we
wanted to go and I naturally speeded up until Gurt began gasping at my side. I
slowed to his pace and kept going. He wasn’t built for running distances at
speed. This did not matter too much to me as I soon intended to find us some
transport.