Africa Zero (22 page)

“What
about what happened to Gurt?” I asked.

“The
Enmarks and other Families found out about his kind shortly after we instituted
the project. We pulled out and left it. It could have caused major problems.
Other Families have snatched sauramen since then to study. I would say the
Enmarks started it recently with a view to recruiting.”

“A
complete turnaround then,” I said.

“The
sauramen and the army aren’t really the problem anymore. The Enmark station’s
the big problem. If I’d have known you were a majority stockholder we could
perhaps have prevented a deal of grief,” she said.

“Perhaps,”
I said. I had always kept my cards close to my chest and I saw no reason to
change even then. Again, I looked at Gurt, who was sitting at her desk calmly
feeding chicken legs into his mouth. I couldn’t read his expression.

“I’ll
deal with the station,” I said. “Molly, order that heavy lifter unloaded of its
present cargo, then load a hundred and fifty skirmish guns with two hundred
rounds each.” Then I turned back to Susan, who had yet to cut her hologram.

“Where
did you get the DNA?” I asked.

“There’s
been a working template for sauraman DNA in the system since JMCC was founded.
It was one of their initial projects,” she replied.

“Ah,”
I said, brilliantly. I was the founder of JMCC and I didn’t know about it.
Well, I guess you can be a super-being and not know everything.

The
pilot and navigator of the heavy lifter were a little dubious of my
instructions.

“A
water landing?” the pilot asked.

“You
can handle it?” I asked in return.

“I
can handle it,” he said, and returned to the controls.

Below
us Madagascar was spread in all shades of green in the azure of the Indian
ocean. I don’t know what it was called now, but the lake that soon came into
view below us had once been called Lake Itasy. Gurt told me it was in the thick
jungles around this lake that most of his people lived. While the pilot brought
us down I walked back into the huge hold which extended into the thick wings of
the heavy lifter. The cargo I had ordered put aboard occupied one small corner.
Gurt had one of the crates open and was inspecting the weapons inside. The
problem with fighting a battle on a station is that high velocity weapons will
punch through the hull to the detriment of friend and foe alike. In these cases
were guns that fired mercury shot. Each took a fifty round box and could fire
on automatic. The mercury shot would kill a man, unless armoured, but not
puncture hull metal.

“Think
they’ll be able to handle them?” I asked Gurt.

“We’re
not complete primitives,” he replied.

I
let that go then decided to be direct.

“You
heard Jethro Susan. Do you still want to kill God soldiers?”

“They
killed Horl and the rest,” he said.

“That’s
not what I’m getting at,” I said.

“My
mother’s mother remembers the teachers. No-one believes the first comers, but
now I see it is true,” he said, and it took me a moment to figure out.

“Jethro
Susan and JMCC,” I said.

He
nodded.

“Do
you hate them?” I asked.

“How
can I hate what created me?” he asked, and that, I guess, was that.

* * *

The
pilot brought the lifter down on the glittering waves of the lake, adjusted AG
to keep it buoyant, then with delicate touches on the thrusters had it drifting
to the shore. It hit a floating mass of lilypads before the shore, but on AG he
got us over them and finally up against a vine-covered slope below thick
jungle. I went to the main-bay door as it opened down to make a ramp to the
slope. When the door was finally down I made to step out on the ramp. Four
heavy arrows thumped into my chest. I guessed the natives were unfriendly.

About
forty of them came roaring out of the jungle armed with bows, wide-bladed
spears, one or two Opteks, and what looked like muzzle-loaders. Their charge
stuttered to a halt when they saw me still standing at the ramp, pulling the
arrows out of myself and discarding them. Gurt stepped to my side then and
babbled something at them that was a mishmash of Urtak-Swahili, and Old French
and Portuguese. I was impressed. It seemed to me that this meant his standard
Family English had been recently acquired.

A
large saurawoman—I later discovered that the women were all bigger and more
ornery than the men—walked to the head of the crowd and burbled back at him. It
took a moment or two for my auto-translator to get up to speed. When it did, I
replayed the conversation and followed it through:

“Who
are you who comes with this armoured meat?” she asked.

“I
am Gurt of the Ankatra. Lieutenant of Horl Lord of Ankatra,” he said.

“And
I’m a lemur.”

“I
am Gurt and I will prove this on your flesh if you doubt,” said Gurt.

After
this friendly exchange the female looked to one of her fellows.

“He’s
Gurt,” said that one.

“What
do you want, Gurt?” she asked.

“Is
there no courtesy here?” Gurt asked.

The
saurawoman, whom I later learned to be called Sophist—an interesting
name—reluctantly welcomed us and invited us to her village. Before going with
Gurt I instructed the pilot to close up the lifter and stay alert. Sophist led
us down a jungle trail, all her fighters gathered close around us. I expected
to come into a village of wattle huts with streets smelling of sewerage. The
village was nothing like that. It was very much like a Cotswold hamlet
transported into the middle of a jungle. It was tidy. The stone houses had
neatly-tended gardens and multicoloured vines growing up the walls. Sophist led
us to a communal eating hall, with tables and chairs of fine-grained wood
neatly set out in rows. The one fly in this particular pot of ointment was the
gutted human corpse roasting on a spit over an open fire at the end of the
room. As we entered the room I felt someone prodding at my leg and looked down
at a naked child of the village. The little boy was more heavily-scaled than
the adults and he had a long tail. I guessed part of the growing up process for
him was the losing of that tail.

“Not
food,” one of the adults told that child and he scampered away.

Soon
after we had entered the hall other villagers began to file in. Gurt leapt up
onto a table and stood there waiting until everyone was in. I ended up with
armed adults crammed all around me, all of them looking at me speculatively.
They turned their attention from me when Gurt began to speak.

“I
am Gurt, Lieutenant to Horl of Ankatra. Horl of Ankatra is now dead,” he said,
eliciting much muttered disbelief. Gurt continued, “The child stealers came to
Ankatra and we fought them as we always do. This time they had not come for our
children. They took Horl and myself and seven brave fighters of the Mark. They
took us up.” Gurt pointed at the ceiling then went on to tell them all he had
told me. He told them of his meeting with me and those speculative gazes were
fixed on me again.

“He
is meat,” said a sauraman standing right next to me.

“He
is not. He is the Collector of legend. He is the man machine,” said Gurt.

This
was the first I’d heard of Gurt’s knowledge of me. His people must have either
picked it up from the JMCC ‘teachers’ or from the people they fed upon when not
arguing about ‘lemu rights’.

“Meat,”
said the arguer, prodding me with one horny claw.

“Show
them, Collector,” said Gurt.

I
was getting tired of pulling my face off so I turned to the arguer. He held at
his side a muzzle-loader with a long and heavy steel barrel, took it off him.
He tried to resist and a look of surprise appeared on his face when he found he
could not. When he released his weapon I bent the barrel in half then handed it
back to him.

“Strong
meat,” said someone, and there was a general tittering.

“The
child stealers live in a great building high in the sky. They are our enemies
and they are enemies of the Collector. We go there to do battle with them. Who
will come?”

There
was no sudden rush of volunteers.

“We
will consider what you have said,” said Sophist. “Now you must eat with us.”

I
sat at the table with the arguer on my left and Gurt on my right. Sophist sat
opposite us. I refused the meat, but not the drink made from fermented lilies
that was passed around. Sophist got the prime cut of the meat, which to these
people was the head. She broke it open and scooped out steaming brains with a
clam shell. The next course was the crackling, nice and salty, and passed down
the tables on trays. Next came slices of meat in deep bowls. Sauraman children
ran about munching on nicely crisped hands and feet. Large pots were then
brought out in which whole lemurs had been boiled with some sort of greenery.
The roast human had obviously only been a starter. I asked Gurt about this and
he said it was because of their rarity now.

“Do
your people build sailing ships?” I asked him.

“Yes,”
said Gurt, and grinned at me.

I
visualised the future of Earth humans when the Madagascan sauraman population
overflowed onto mainland Africa. It looked bleak for them.

We
returned to the lifter at nightfall, after receiving Sophist’s promise that the
news and the request Gurt had brought would be disseminated amongst the other
villages. Gurt slept a contented sleep that night in the cargo area. The pilot
and navigator banned him from the foresection sleeping area because of the
sudden stinking flatulence he suffered.

“What
the hell has he been eating?” the pilot asked.

I
thought it best not to tell him.

* * *

During
the night I watched as sauramen and women gathered on the shore and lit
campfires there. By dawn there were about forty of them, and when Gurt finally
woke and went to greet them, there were twenty more. He took with him a few of
the weapons we had brought and the recruits had a high old time blasting away
at the trees and anything foolish enough to show itself in the upper branches.
By midday there were over a hundred sauramen and women, which was getting
towards the full load the lifter could manage. I instructed the pilot to keep
the door between the fore section and the cargo bay closed unless I requested
it be opened. Then I told Gurt to bring our recruits aboard.

Space
stations are, by their nature, normally impossible to attack unless by
subterfuge. Computer-controlled shield projectors, lasers, missiles, and
pulsed-energy cannons, would be enough to deal with any attack. There was the
possibility that a ship the size of a station, carrying the same armament and
shielding, might be able to do the job, just as a fleet of ships might be able
to, though not without huge damages and losses. The Enmark station was one of
the smaller ones, at only a kilometre in diameter and two long. It supported a
population of ten thousand or more. It might have seemed madness to try to
board it with only a hundred or so sauramen, but for a few critical factors.

Callum
Manx Enmark was no longer the Director and no longer had cardinal status. In an
attempt to retain power he had obviously blown the computer system. This meant
that all computer-controlled shields and weapons were out—we should be able to
board. There might be fire from manually-operated weapons, but I was sure the
lifter’s own defences would deal with them adequately. Once on board I reckoned
on us facing resistance from people personally loyal to Callum, not from the
entire ten thousand. Most of the people on the station were civilians and would
be keeping their heads down until things were resolved. Callum’s actions, by
corporate law, were illegal, and some of those civilians might even be on my
side. All I intended was for the sauramen to get me through so I could kick
Callum out of office and put the system back online. I didn’t expect a lot of
resistance.

* * *

As
the lifter cruised towards the station and adjusted its attitude for docking, I
stayed alert at the weapon’s console. There was no attack at all as we closed
in and none while we docked. This puzzled me. I’d at least expected a couple of
missiles to be fired at the lifter. Nothing.

Docking
clamps crashed into position and the lifter was set against the station like a
fly come to suck blood. I went back into the hold where the sauramen waited.
They sat on the floor all armed with nice new weapons, complemented by the
occasional spear or muzzle-loader. With Gurt’s and Sophist’s help I manually
engaged the airlock and we were ready to go in.

“You’ll
find the floor here a little unnerving. The gravity of the ship is at ninety
degrees to that of the station. The corridor here will appear to curve down to
a precipice. That precipice is the floor of the bay area.”

Gurt
looked puzzled. “Just follow me,” I said.

I
led them to the down-curving corridor. Halfway round, with my body at an
attitude of forty-five degrees to them, I looked back.

“Come
on,” I said.

Gurt
was the first to follow—tentatively, as if someone was going to snatch the
floor from underneath him. The rest of them held back until they saw him
walking, without ill effect, around the curve. Soon all of us were coming out
into the open bay area. The first shots were fired then, and when I saw their
source I knew we were in trouble.

The
soldiers ran out of the back of the bay, armed with slow pulse guns. These were
another weapon designed to kill on-station without penetrating the hull. They
fired disperse pulses of ions that electrocuted those they hit. The men
carrying these weapons wore black uniforms and mirrored helmets. The Army of
God was here and there would be more resistance than I had expected.

Sophist
was the first to be hit by the bluish haze of an ion bolt. She convulsed where
she stood while small lightnings earthed themselves from her to the floor. The
sauramen opened fire with their weapons and two soldiers disintegrated where
they stood. Then everyone was running for cover and blasting away as they did
so. I dropped to one knee where I was and opened up on full automatic, emptying
box after box at the charging soldiers, forcing them quickly into cover so all
the sauramen could get out of the ship. I used the same weapon as my sauramen,
not the APW I had strapped across my back—that was for later, when we were
deeper into the station. Four ion bolts hit me while I was there and I was
paralysed while each discharged into the floor. Once the last had discharged I
started firing again and ran for cover myself. All the sauramen were in the bay
now, and I was getting double vision and some strange error messages from my
system monitors.