Against A Dark Background (46 page)

The bounty hunter son came to see her after dawn. Close up he was a pasty-faced, unhealthy-looking individual. He grimaced as he sat down on the fold-down seat across the soft-floored padded cell from her. He kept a stun-pistol pointed at her. She sat cross-legged on the bunk, dressed in the Land Car’s prison overalls. She still had a headache caused by whatever gas they’d used in the grenade.

`I just wanted you to know there’s nothing personal in this,’ the man told her, grinning feebly. He was in his late twenties, maybe, thin and clean-shaven.

Oh,’ she said,
thanks.’ She didn’t bother attempting to disguise the bitterness in her voice.

`I know all about you,’ the man said, coughing. ‘I always read up all I can on our marks, and I kinda admire you, really.’

`This is all making me feel a lot better,’ she told him. ‘If you admire me so fucking much, let me go.’

He shook his head.
Can’t do that,’ he said.
Too much at stake. Told the Huhsz we have you; they’re expecting to trade at Yada. If we don’t turn up with you, they’re going to be awwwful peeved.’ He grinned.

She looked at him, drawing her head back a little. `Get out of here, you cretin.’

`You can’t talk to me like that, lady,’ he said, scowling.
I can stay and I can talk all I want. I could use this gun,’ he said, gesturing with the stun-pistol. He glanced at the door, then back at her.
I could gas you again; I could do anything I wanted to you.’

`Try it, fuckwit,’ she said.

The man sneered. He stood up. `Yeah, proud aristo, eh?’ He held his hands out. The skin on them was angry and blistered. ‘I held the Passports in my hands, lady. I seen them. I seen what’s going to kill you. I’ll be thinking of you and all that pride when they put you to death; slowly, I hope.’

She was frowning.

The man buzzed the door. It opened. `Good long journey to Yadayeypon, lady,’ he said.

`Wait,’ she said, holding up one hand.

He ignored her. `Plenty of time to think about what them Huhsz’ll do to you when they get you.’

Wait!’ she said as he went out of the door. She jumped off the bunk.
Did you say

`Bye,’ the bounty hunter said, as the deaf-mute Son of Depletion outside closed the door again.

The Lesson Learned rolled across the savannah of the Chey Nar peninsula all day, heading north on ancient drove-ways between the crop fields. By the evening the Land Car had reached the foothills of the Cathrivacian Mountains and started the long detour round them that avoided a heavily tolled pass, heading up through the light forests of Undalt and Lower Tazdecttedy, rising on its suspension to brush the tops of the small trees with its underbody as it climbed through the clouds for the plateau of High Marden.

Traffic stopped on the Shruprov-Takandra turnpike the following morning while the Car passed over it, each set of wheels raising themselves above the turnpike fence and then setting down again to rumble over the road itself.

Somebody in the halted traffic - there was usually at least one -decided to have some sport by jumping the lights and driving underneath the Land Car, timing their approach so that they passed between the sets of wheels. The driver on this occasion failed; his small car caught the edge of one of the Lesson Learned’s nearside tyres and spun, bouncing off the inside of the wheels on the other side and ending up underneath the edge of the Land Car; the the Lesson Learned’s tyres rolled on over the automobile, crushing and compressing it into a half-metre high sandwich of junk.

The Land Car didn’t stop or even slow down; the Order had indemnities against that sort of thing.

It forded the Vounti River near Ca-Blay in a rain storm and turned south-west, setting a course that would take it across the plateau towards Mar Scarp and the downs and valleys of Marden County on the borders of Yadayeypon Province.

They brought her meals on trenchers or disposable plates. She tried to get the guards to bring her something to write with but failed; she made ink from some nuts that had garnished a meal and used one of her bite-sharpened nails to write on the other side of Miz’s note, then put it in the door slot just before that evening’s meal. It was still there when her meal appeared. She buzzed the door, but nobody answered. She checked every part of the cell; there didn’t seem to be any way out without help or equipment. There was no screen. She spent a lot of time just looking out of the small window.

The bounty hunter had said he’d held the Passports in his hands. And he had looked ill. She had known for some time what the symptoms of radiation sickness were; it had been one of the first things the doc had told them about when they’d joined the anti-Tax Navy.

There had been a fashion, millennia ago, for assassination by plutonium amongst the governing classes of the system - pens, medals and articles of clothing had been the favoured delivery systems - and for centuries nobody in a position of power would ever be without a personal radiation monitor, but the practice had been abandoned, banned and outlawed in that order long ago, and only a few Corps, administrations and old Houses with long memories still bothered with such precautions.

It had not even occurred to her, Miz or any of the others that the Huhsz would simply ignore the fact the Passports had been irradiated. She hadn’t thought to tell anybody.

No wonder the Huhsz missions had been able to move so swiftly. They hadn’t bothered with any containment mechanism; they had simply taken the Passports round as normal, and let the energybroadcasting Holes they contained infect whoever came into range with their soaked tribute of ancient poison.

But why hadn’t Geis noticed? He seemed to have been following all that had gone on pretty closely; why hadn’t he spotted what was going on? She couldn’t understand. He must have known . . .

It didn’t matter. Whatever had happened, it came back to her. She had done it again. She had caused - was causing - people to die of radiation. Again. Eight years after Lip City and the Lazy Gun’s selfdestruction.

`Cursed,’ she whispered, when she realised. She thought - hoped - she had probably spoken too softly for the cell’s microphone to pick up.

Cursed, she thought, shaking her head and turning to the tiny barred window again, refusing to re-live that instant of realisation in the dawn-lit hotel room eight years ago, when bliss had been forever contaminated by guilt.

The Land Car moved more slowly in High Marden, where the landscape was cut and parcelled into small units, the countryside was littered with villages and towns and there were many detours to be made round both those and estates and enclaves that would charge the Car a toll.

The Lesson Learned was continually crossing walls in Marden. When the walls were especially high, the big wheels underneath her cell were lifted so far up they blocked her view.

The villages and hamlets passed by; houses were white and coloured dots speckling the green hillsides. The Land Car took to rivers twice, bumping and twisting down their courses, ducking under bridges, splashing through shallows and bridging over the deeper pools, rigid links between the carriages supporting each one in turn.

In the evening light the Car passed along the shore of the Scodde Sea, over gravel fields and open meadows where a variety of grazing animals fled from it, bouncing and leaping across the grasslands in bleating, bellowing herds. As the Car turned a corner round a farm wall, she saw the Lesson Learneds leading carriage, and caught a glimpse of some brown shapes running underneath, between the vehicle’s first two sets of giant wheels.

She had heard that some animals ran on just in front or underneath Land Cars for hours at a time, until their strength or their hearts gave out and they fell.

She looked away.

She rose on the last day she would spend in the Car. A line of white piled clouds ahead marked the Airthit Mountains; beyond lay Yadayeypon. The hills and forests thickened out of the arable land of Marden County as the Lesson Learned started to gain height again. She had given up trying to get them to take messages; they still hadn’t answered the door buzzer.

She watched the trees thin and disappear; when the wind-torn clouds parted above, it was to reveal distant peaks, sharp and brilliant white. The air in the cell became cold and her breathing became laboured. Then they were through the pass and descending into trees again. The Lesson Learned had entered Yadayeypon Province.

She sat in the steeply tipped cell, swallowing and yawning now and again to clear her ears as the air pressure increased, and thought of how she might kill herself.

But she could not see suicide as a way of cheating them; rather it would feel like giving in. It was probably the sensible thing to do, but it would be ignominious. She thought she understood now the old warrior codes which held that when every other choice and freedom had been removed from one, it was still possible to confound the enemy by dying well, no matter how terrified one felt. Certainly she had not felt so without hope since her ship had been tumbling powerless towards Nachtel’s Ghost, fifteen years earlier, but she had survived that. At a cost, perhaps, but she had survived.

She hadn’t slept well during the night, as every revolution of these great wheels brought her closer to Yadayeypon, and the fear and despair grew inside her. She sat cross-legged on the bunk, trying to cheer herself up, until the very desperation of her attempts became pathetic and she wept.

After a while she fell asleep again, wan and exhausted, against the slope of trembling bulkhead behind her narrow cot.

She woke suddenly and didn’t dare hope it was what she thought it might be. An explosion shook the cell, jarring her teeth; she passed through fear, elation and back to fear again in a second.

A jolt sent her flying off the bunk; she landed on all fours on the floor. She could hear gunfire. The cell tipped as the carriage rattled and bounced along an incline, jarring her and everything in it. She struggled up the slope to the bunk and grabbed the window bars, trying to see outside.

The Land Car’s tall shadow was flung up a steep, grassy hillside towards a distant line of trees; the vehicle was crashing over and through what looked like dry stone walls. A smoky trail appeared suddenly from underneath the carriage in front, crossed a small field and detonated against a wall in a dirty fountain of earth and stone. A ripple shook the cell and vibrated through the bars in her hands as a part of the Lesson Learned’s shadow five or six carriages along was suddenly obscured in a dark, blossoming cloud. There was a flash of light from one end of the stand of trees. Something burst from the carriage in front of her, spraying wreckage: the cell leapt around her. A light tank in dazzle camouflage appeared from the trees, tearing down the hillside towards the Land Car; earth exploded into the air in front of it.

There was a terrific crash from behind her, she had a brief impression of the front of the Land Car’s shadow twisting and of the light tank firing again, then the cell whipped and heaved around her, shaking her like a dice in a cup.

The carriage rolled right over six times. She was conscious through it all. She fought the urge to brace herself and just went limp, crashing round the cell with the cot’s mattress and sleeping bag flopping and falling continually around her; it was like being trapped in a tumble drier. She had time to reflect that there was something to be said for padded cells, and that you could tell each time the wheels hit the ground because the bounce was slightly different.

It stopped; she was weightless for a moment, then slammed into the padded cell door, hurting her left shoulder.

The mattress and sleeping bag fell on top of her.

Another massive crash shook the whole carriage.

There was silence.

She stood awkwardly, rubbing her shoulder and feeling her head, looking for bruises or blood. Gunfire sounded in the distance.

She tried to climb up to the bunk but there was nothing to hold on to. She jumped, caught the window bars and pulled herself up, ignoring the pain in her shoulder, but all she could see was dark-blue evening sky. She dropped to the canted floor that the cell door and corridor wall had become. More firing. It went on for a while; a couple of thudding detonations shook the carriage.

She tried the door buzzer but it didn’t seem to be working.

After a while she heard movement outside the cell, then the lock buzzed. She drew to one side, away from the door. Voices.

`Blow it,’ she heard a man say.

She buried herself under the cot mattress and stuck her fingers in her ears; the explosion clanged round the cell, leaving her ears ringing.

She looked up into a grey haze. The door had disappeared. She started coughing in the acrid fumes of the blast. A gun and a man’s face appeared where the door had been.

The man wore an armoured helmet painted in a hallucinatory purple and green design. He wore matt-black multi-sights over his eyes and had a little roundel painted on his forehead with the words AIM HERE printed underneath, and an arrow. He frowned at her.

`Haven’t we met?’ he said.

She coughed, then laughed. ‘I was wondering who could be crazy enough to attack a Land Car.’

Another man appeared. He had a dark round face, and was bareheaded apart from a bright yellow bandana with the word REAL smeared on it in what looked like dried blood. He frowned strenuously.

She waved. `Politeness,’ she said.

`Politeness,’ Elson Roa replied, nodding.

It was warm and humid in the late afternoon air; they were in the tropics and the altitude was less than five hundred metres, though the prevailing winds - spilling down from the glaciers of the continent’s core - kept the temperature moderate.

She stood on what had been the side of one of the Lesson Learned’s cell-block sections; another carriage lay up-ended against its roof. The thin prison overalls flapped in the warm breeze, and she could feel the air moving over her naked scalp. She looked around, smiling, watching Thrial disappear over the mountain ridge to the west.

Segments of the smashed Land Car lay strewn around the bottom of a dry, steep-sided valley like pieces of a toy after a child’s tantrum. Some carriages had turned on their backs, their suspension components looking naked and vulnerable and their wheels pointing pathetically upwards to the patchily clouded sky. Smoke and steam drifted down the valley on the wind.