Against A Dark Background (33 page)

`No read-out.’

Shit,’ he said.
There might be some in there.’

`Yes, and it might be frozen,’ she said, shifting into the ship’s patchy temperature map.

Hold on,’ he said.
I’ll run it through . . .’ His voice went away. She was left alone for a few moments.

She’d always expected to be re-living her life at this point, but it didn’t seem to be happening. She felt cold and battered and tired. This combat flying lark was supposed to have been just a little exotic incident in her life, something to tell people about when she was old. It had never been meant to get this important, never been planned to be this crucial and ghastly and hopeless. It certainly wasn’t supposed to be the end of everything. It couldn’t all just end, could it?

Yes it could, she thought. Somehow she’d never really thought about it before, but yes; of course it could. She didn’t just accept it now; she knew it now. What a time to learn that particular lesson.

Yeah!’ Miz hollered.
If it’s there, there’s enough!’

Well,’ she said.
We won’t know until we try.’

But you’ve got reaction mass!’ he yelled.
You can do it!’

`Two minutes ago you were telling me I was crazy to even think about this; now suddenly it’s a great idea.’

`It’s a chance, kid,’ he said, quieter. There was something else in his voice, too; the equivalent of one arm holding some surprise behind his back, and a sly smile on his face.

`And?’ she said.

`I just ran a routine for your in-atmosphere control.’

`Using your astonishing powers of laser control, you will fashion a pair of crude but serviceable wings from-’

`Quiet, smart-ass; dig down to the clip’s non-mil suite.’

`Pardon? Oh all right.’ She shifted down the systems root to the clipper’s full display. What was this heap of civilian shit meant to do? Was he just trying to distract her?

`See the gyros?’

`Gyros? No.’

`Labelled FTU1 and 2; Fine Trimming Units.’

Yes,’ she said.
Well, the bow cluster, anyway. Shit, I thought those were stripped when these boats were militarised.’

They never got around to it,’ Miz told her.
Now, can you get power to that bow cluster?’

`Yes. But wouldn’t it be better-?’

‘No; it doesn’t matter that you’re tumbling on insertion if we get the burn timed right and you might need all the manoeuvring power in those gyros.’

All right, all right,’ she said.
They’re taking power.’

Okay!’ he yelled.
We’ll re-work the figures when we’re closer. Now, I’m going to try and match velocities; that should make things more accurate. Get ready for some incredibly skilful flying on the part of the Tech King, and then be ready to read out lots and lots of exciting numbers once I’m alongside, unless you can get the output comm link sorted.’

`Can’t wait,’ she said, the tiredness tingling through her. She just wanted to sleep. She forgot about her left arm for a second and tried to stretch.

She cut off the shout of pain as fast as she could.

`What?’ Miz’s voice said quickly.

She breathed hard a couple of times.

`I just remembered I paid my mess bill yesterday,’ she lied.

Wow.’ Miz laughed.
You really do tempt fate, don’t you?’

Yes,’ she said.
It must be male.’

`That’s more like it,’ he said. ‘Okay; let’s see if I can get this thing spinning and twisting like yours . . .’

Okay,’ he said, and she could hear the fear in his voice.
Here we go, kid.’

They had talked it through for the last half hour; she’d given him all the data she could, he’d run it past his machine dozens of times and every time it came out Maybe. She’d got the gyros up to speed, braked each one in turn and the ship had responded. She’d settled on a routine that would let her use the gyros to control the ship during its descent through the atmosphere of Nachtel’s Ghost.

They’d done a tenth-second burst from the pipes into the reaction chamber and got power; there was water in the pipe and it wasn’t frozen. They’d got a recent snow-field map of the Ghost from their base via Dloan, who was escorting Cenuij’s damaged craft back there; they’d selected a big snow-field on the equator. Miz had shown her the view he had of her ship, perfectly parallel with his own and slowly rolling while the rest of the system revolved around it. She’d complimented him on his flying and tried not to look too closely at the damage.

But now he had to move away, and she had to make that last burn, hoping the water in the pipe-work would be enough, and it hadn’t frozen somewhere further up the duct, and that the pump would work, and that the power didn’t fail, or even fluctuate.

`You take care now,’ she said.

Don’t worry,’ he told her.
Thirty seconds.’

`Me, worry?’ she said, trying not to let him hear the fear and pain in her voice. She was finding it more of a strain now. Her arm was hurting really badly and she was frightened. She wanted to tell Miz that there was a precedent for all this, that when she’d been five years old she’d been saved by a fall into the snow, but she had never been able to tell him that full story, and he had never pressed her for it. She wanted to tell him she loved hint and she was pregnant by him, but she couldn’t tell him any of that, either.

Look, ah .. . kid,’ he said (and she just knew he’d be grimacing now, and that if he hadn’t had the helmet on he’d be scratching the side of his head),
I know there’s .. . you know; things we haven’t said during the last few months; I mean, me and you, since we’ve been, you know, well, together, but-’

You’re making a complete mess of this, Miz,’ she told him, her voice matter-of-fact while her eyes filled with tears.
Don’t say anything else now. Tell me later. Ten seconds.’

He was silent for six of them.

Eventually he said, `Good luck, Sharrow.’

She was still thinking what to say in reply when she opened the valve, the motor roared in the distance and she had to devote all her attention to the attitude and heading readings. She shifted to the view through the one little flattie camera in the craft’s nose.

The planet came up to meet her; a curved white wall. The ship encountered the atmosphere’s outer layers. She tried the radio and heard interference. ‘Miz?’ she said.

`. . . ust hear y-’

She shouted, `If this goes badly and I make a crater, I want it named after me!’

If he replied, she never heard him.

The falling ship ploughed deeper into the planet’s atmosphere and began to judder and moan.

The five of them sat on the tavern terrace a little outside Pharpech city, she with her memories.

The others watched the huge stom as it wheeled and banked above the deep country a kilometre east of the tavern, beating back up towards the middle-layer of Entraxrln membrane it had cruised down from earlier. The monkey-eater birds mobbed it, stooping at its back and head in great plummeting circles, turning quickly this way and that, zig-zagging erratically, unpredictably, wings like jagged hooks in the air. The stom, four times the size of the monkey-eaters, moved with a ponderous grace that approached dignity, as it ducked its massive reptilian head and took what ponderous, almost gentle evasive action it was able to.

`Come on, baby,’ Zefla said. Sharrow had handed her the binoculars; Miz watched through another pair of field-glasses.

`Put some effort in there,’ Miz muttered.

Sharrow looked at Dloan, squinting in the same direction. His hands gripped the bark rail of the tavern porch, squeezing and releasing unconsciously.

She watched the stom as it struggled higher in the air, still beset by the scrappy, mobbing shapes of the monkey-eaters.

One of them was still falling.

The four of them had come out here for dinner at an inn called The Pulled Nail on the outskirts of the town after a day spent sightseeing. Cenuij hadn’t been in touch since they’d left him at the door of the monastery hospitale the night before; he was supposed to be trying to get an audience with the King. He would leave word at the inn if he had anything to report.

Pharpech in daylight hadn’t looked so bad. The people seemed friendly enough, though their accent was difficult to understand, and they had decided half-way through the day that they’d buy local clothes tomorrow; theirs made them too conspicuous, and people tended to ask them - in those strange accents, and with a hint of incredulity - what had possessed them to come to a place like Pharpech.

One of the things she’d found it hard to get used to was how difficult it was to access information. All it really meant, most of the time, was that you had to resort to rather obvious methods like asking people directions, or what a certain building was; nevertheless it was unsettling, and despite all her supposed maturity and sophistication she had the unnerving feeling that she was a child again, trapped in a baffling world of mysterious intent and arcane significance, forever making guesses at how it all worked but never knowing exactly the right questions to ask.

The first thing they’d done, on the advice of their two guides who were setting off back to the border that morning, was take their jemer mounts to a stable on the outskirts of town, where they sold the creatures - after much haggling on Miz’s part for slightly more than they’d paid for them. Then they became tourists for the day.

They had seen the great square in daylight, its flat, mostly unroofed buildings crowded round the sloped paving stones like a strange rectangular crowd of people, all squashed up shoulder-toshoulder, grimly determined not to miss whatever was going on in the square (and yet most of them were gaily painted and sported bright, full awnings, hiding little work-shops and stalls like shiny shoes peeking out from under the just-raised skirts of their canopies).

They had found the people fairly fascinating, too. A few of them rode on jemers though most were on foot like them, the crowding majority of then colourfully if simply dressed, but apart from their almost invariably pale skin - far more physically varied than they were used to; very fat people, unhealthily gaunt people, people in dirty rags, people with deformities . . .

They had viewed the castle from the outside; three stone storeys that looked planned and passing symmetrical, topped by a ramshackle excrescence of Entraxrln timber stacked and tacked and piled and leaning to produce a vertical warren of apartments, halls and the occasional grudged-looking concession to defence in the shape of gawky, teetering towers and forlorn stretches of battlement, all of it dotted randomly with windows and protrusions and capped by a few creaky towers pointing uncertainly towards the layers of leaf-membrane above as though in puzzled inquiry.

The rest of the town had been confusing, repetitive, occasionally riotous. The cathedral was small and disappointing; even its bell, which rang out each hour, sounded flat. The only really interesting feature the cathedral possessed was a stone statue of the Pharpechian God on the outside of the building, having various unpleasant things done to Him by small, fiendishly grinning Pharpechian figures armed with farming implements and instruments of torture.

They had walked the narrow streets, tramping up and down narrow lanes and twisting alleys, dodging water thrown from upstairs windows, treading in rotting vegetables and worse, continually finding themselves back where they had started, and often being followed by crowds of children - so many children - and sometimes adults, many of whom seemed to want to take them home or show them round personally. Zefla smiled generously at the more persistent proto-guides and talked quickly in High Judicial Caltaspian to them, usually leaving them bobbing in her wake looking beatifically bemused.

By lunchtime they were exhausted. They returned to the inn, then kept to the outskirts of the town in the afternoon, passing the high walls of various monasteries and prisons, a school and a hospital. The monastery hospitale where Cenuij had been given a bed for the night looked closed and deserted, though they could hear muted curse-singing over the high walls.

They found the royal zoo; a sad mouldering of cages and pits where sick animals paced to and fro or threw themselves at fire-hardened bars, snarling. A glide-monkey troupe huddled in a corner of their net-roofed pit, their connective limb membranes wrapped round them like cloaks, their large eyes peeking out fearfully. A tangletooth paced back and forwards in a small cage, head down, its emaciated body containing in its movements only an echo of the animal’s lithe power. One huge, bare cage contained a full-grown stom, sitting crouched by one wall, its wings tied and splinted, its snout and legs scarred and cut. Even while they watched, appalled at the size of the animal and the painful squalidness of its situation, the beast raised its metrelong head and hit it off the wall a few times, drawing dark-purple blood.

`Why is its wing splinted?’ Zefla asked a zoo-keeper.

Not exactly splinted, lady; more tied up,’ the keeper replied. He carried a bucket full of something bloody and gently steaming. Sharrow wrinkled her nose and moved up wind. The keeper shook his head and looked serious.
See, she just roars and beats her wings against the bars of the cage all day if you don’t tie her up.’

They didn’t stay long in the royal zoo.

The town became farmland quite suddenly, the streets leading past the various walled institutions straight into fields, where the membrane-beds stretched like neat lines of straked, fresh wounds into the distance and the serried plants of the Entraxrln’s secondary or tertiary ecology sat troughed and still. A field-guard recommended the tavern, a kilometre away along one of the raised scar-tissue roads.

They sat on the terrace of The Pulled Nail, eating surprisingly subtly cooked meats and vegetables; then Dloan pointed out the stom as it flew down the dulling light of the evening from a distant gap in the second-highest membrane level; the beast turned, carving the air, heading for a composite trunk and the specks of a glidemonkey troupe. But the monkey-eater birds roosting further up the trunk-space had seen the reptile and stooped, their cries faint but furious through the still air, and began to mob the single black giant. It had turned, something resigned but almost amused about its delicately lumbering, slow-motion movements; a calm core of stolidity set amongst the jerky whizzings of the monkey-eaters, electrons to its weighty nucleus.