Moonsteed (2 page)

She straightened slowly and turned to face him, trying to keep her voice steady. “I’m your sergeant. That’s my sword. Is there a problem?”

“You’re the problem, that’s what.” His eyes burned with righteous passion behind his visor. “You and those
scientists
who think they’re gods. I wasn’t alive to stop the four that came before you, but I’ve stopped him.” He gave a brief jerk toward the path behind with his head. “And I can stop you, and after you, I’ll stop however many more it takes. Destiny has decided that your life ends here and now, Zeta.”

Verity forced saliva into her suddenly dry mouth. It wasn’t something she’d done. It was something she
was
. How had he found out? She put the question aside for now and thought quickly through what her training had given her. He was some sort of extremist, a denier of science, an idealist. He had not killed her when he had the opportunity, when she stood with her back to him to deal with the horse. Even now, rather than shooting her with his gun, he was possessed with the irony of killing Verity with her own katana. He was an idiot who valued ideas before practicality. He didn’t have the training the Magnolia Order had given her. Words would unnerve him. Tactics could unhinge him.

“That sword’s main strength is in one’s opponent not seeing it until it’s too late.” Her voice quavered when she spoke. Did he hear her fear?

Aaron’s eyes narrowed. “Lofty words for one so young.”

“I am the child of Caleb. I trained in Torrmede. I’m Pilgrennon’s blood and Blake’s direct descendant.” If she could remain calm while intimidating or angering him, it would make things easier for her.
An irrational mind does not fight rationally
.

“Jananin Blake was the Antichrist! Lucifer’s daughter! And Torrmede is on another world!” He raised the sword and Verity brought up her arm, blocking the blade with the bracer protecting her forearm as it came down. She twisted toward him, using the motion of her shoulders to launch a punch into his chin, dislodging his helmet and exposing his throat. He reeled back and Verity sensed a tremor through the ground, a shadow over her. His horse reared, hoofs kicking out for her. She grabbed his armor at the collar and spun on her heel, interposing his body between herself and the horse. It swerved too late, and its hoof struck him in the chest with a crack of ribs. Verity hurled him to the ground, landing with her knee on his diaphragm. She drew her wakizashi from under her right arm and pressed its edge against his neck. Her thumb dug into the tendons of his wrist as she fumbled at the fastening of his gauntlet until he cried out and dropped the katana.

She punched him in the jaw so his helmet fell off and she could see his shameful face. Tears welled in his eyes and his skin was a bloodless white. Vapor left his nostrils in short, rapid breaths. Verity put her thumb to the neural shunt in his forehead, disconnecting him from his horse.

Verity’s knees trembled as she got up from him. She took a deep breath and said, “Iaido means ‘the way of drawing the sword,’ not ‘the way of parading about waving a sword.’ Now put your hands together!”

“If I don’t succeed here today, someone else will finish the job for me.” John Aaron snarled, but he lifted his hands weakly and clasped them, fingers interlocked. Verity picked up her katana and tried to wipe it on her cloak, but the blood had frozen to the blade. She re-sheathed it, making a mental note that she needed to take it out and clean it before the stain had time to thaw. There was a climbing rope in the gear bag behind her saddle, so she used it to tie Aaron’s hands together.

Verity picked up her helmet and searched for the spy’s head, sighting it some distance away, hair splayed out on the ground. She ran to it in great leaping strides. The cheek had frozen to the ice and left a graze on the skin when she pulled it up. Already the eyes had become glazed and vacant, lids drooping. He would have lost consciousness probably seconds after his head hit the ice. For how long could a brain be subjected to ischaemia before permanent damage started to occur? She remembered learning something like that in Torrmede. It seemed a long time gone. Verity put the question to the base’s ANT, through its radio mast somewhere behind the ice spire. It retrieved the data from its banks almost immediately: four minutes maximum, assuming optimum reperfusion.

Arrays of Neuro Technology could get information for her, or run probability calculations, but they couldn’t make decisions. She would have to choose what was best. Killing him had not been an ideal contingency, but running through what had happened again as she strode back to John Aaron, she still saw no alternative. She’d told him to stop, twice. He’d reached for a weapon. It had been her or him.

Aaron whimpered like a six-year-old when she grabbed him by the neck of his cloak and ripped through the fabric of it with her wakizashi. Turning to a stand of ice spikes, she raised her knee to her chest and brought her heel down hard into the heart of the formation, smashing it. She gathered the shards into the cloak, placed the head in the center, and folded the cloth around it to form an ice pack. Incorrect freezing damaged cells, but she hoped the ice would only chill the brain, with bone and skin insulating it.

Her horse stood with its right front hoof lifted slightly. Aaron’s horse was uninjured and would be faster. Verity synced herself to it. She put the cloak with the man’s head in it in the bag behind the saddle. Now she had a problem. Leading the injured horse back with John Aaron on it would slow her. She needed to get the spy’s head back to the base as fast as possible. Leaving the horse here in a sweat where it would freeze to death would be irresponsible, and she couldn’t abandon Aaron to the same fate, even if his actions made him a criminal.

“Stand up and come over here!” Verity moved to the injured horse and reached across to take hold of its bridle.

Aaron’s mouth distorted with pain as he struggled to his feet, a tear dribbling from his eye and freezing as it tracked down his face.

He came forward, holding up his clasped and bound hands as though he were praying to his magic god. Verity lashed his wrists to the pommel of the injured horse’s saddle.

“Now get on and take the horse back to the base! Let them deal with you there when it’s done.”

He got into the saddle as Verity returned to the other horse. “But I’m not calibrated to this horse! I can’t ride it with no interface on this terrain.”

“Then learn to like people did in the old days, or fall and die.” As she adjusted the stirrups, Verity glanced at the dead horse’s bulk and the sheet of frozen blood under it. “Noble death is for the noble.”

She jumped up, caught the front and back of the saddle and swung her leg over. The horses were all eighteen hands high, and she’d never have mounted them on Earth without standing on something.

From behind her, Aaron shouted, “Waste of time expecting compassion from you! You’re made by man and not by God. You don’t have a soul!”

Verity turned her horse and set off back along the track around the spire. She urged the horse to as fast a gallop as she dared on this narrow path with sharp ice debris bordering its edges. For what seemed like an age they weaved along the path, concentrating so fiercely it felt dangerous even to risk an instant to blink. At last the shard-like outcrops of ice dwindled, and the treacherous terrain of the eruptions around the newer crater gave way to the older dark plain of the great Valhalla crater with its knobbly spires blunted by erosion. The horse galloped flat out toward the research base on the horizon. Verity counted seconds.

The gates and the walls of the compound loomed ahead. Verity rode straight through the courtyard and into the stables. Hoofs thundered on the flooring in the main corridor. A bespectacled man stood ahead of her, a hold-all in each hand. He was young, broad framed, tall and slightly plump with a sickly demeanor and an expression suggesting he was about to throw up.

“Get out of my way!” Verity drove the horse into the man’s shoulder, knocking him against the wall. She didn’t look back. She would have felt it had the horse trampled the man, and it was his fault for obstructing the corridor.

A woman in a lab coat met her at the corridor junction. “Take this to Inquisitor Farron, at once!” Verity pulled the head in the cloak out of the bag and slung it at her. The woman turned and ran down the corridor toward the laboratories.

Her connection with the ANT told her the four minutes was up just about now. The brain should still be in reasonable enough condition for Farron to get the information from it, whatever information that was. Perhaps he would also find why the spy had been prepared to lose his own life and kill a perfectly good horse over it. Now the race was over, her and the horse’s breathing came loud and fast in the corridor, and the heaving of the animal’s ribs pushed her feet out with each breath.

An uncomfortable tension knotted her stomach, refusing to be reasoned away. Aaron’s words returned to her:
If I don’t succeed today, someone else will finish the job for me
. What did that mean? Was it something to do with the spy? Could he have been involved too? Could it be that a conspiracy was afoot, and some unknown number of people on this base plotted against Verity just because of the way she had been born? She queried the ANT for John Aaron’s location and it came back negative. He shouldn’t be out of range. He should at least be off the scarp by now, so where was he? There was no record on the ANT’s database of any thought-prompts having been received from him since she’d left him, and the ANT’s scanning equipment could not locate him or the horse anywhere within its range.

Why had the spy not surrendered? What secret was so vital it could be worth dying over? Verity was tired. She would have liked to have seen Farron and found out if the data in the man’s brain had survived and could be extracted, but attending to the horse took priority. She flicked her feet out of the stirrups and slid off. Taking hold of its bridle, she headed back toward the stable block.

It was times like this she missed Gecko most. His name was Lieutenant Dwayne Uxbridge, but everyone called him Gecko after some incident in his past of which Verity had never discovered the full details. Probably it was to do with his controlled, patient manner, what his squadron members called
cold bloodedness
. Verity had always suspected that whole squadron laughed at her behind her back. They seemed to find endless amusement in the phenomenon of someone like Gecko carrying on with the likes of her.

At the time Verity had never thought of her arrangement with him as being anything more than two people scratching one another’s mutual itches, and there had never been any expectation from either of them for it to last--it never did in the Sky Forces. Her area of expertise had been in animal handling, so after she’d been promoted to sergeant, she’d been relocated to the new base on Callisto. Gecko’s specialism was machines, and the Dennis Terraforming Company was paying him to oversee a survey of one of Saturn’s moons.

She stroked the horse’s neck, now wet with thawed sweat and condensation as they passed through the stable doors.

It wasn’t just the sex Verity missed, although Gecko had turned out to have surprising stamina and appetite for it, given the impassive attitude he presented to the outside world. Since they’d parted, Verity had come to miss his great tolerance for being shouted at--an ability to sit calmly and humor her while she raged and lost her temper at him over something that always seemed trivial afterward. Other people, it seemed, so easily took umbrage over a harsh word or an abrupt comment, but not Gecko.

Verity wanted to send word to him, to tell him what had happened here. Perhaps he could give some words of reassurance that would make what had happened feel less of a shock. She had already sent him two messages in the three months she’d been on Callisto, but he’d replied to neither. She sometimes worried about something having befallen him out there on Titan, but more often she feared he had simply moved on from the past, and his refusal to contact her was merely a hint to her to do the same.

Another horse poked its head over a door as Verity led hers into the stables. Its nostrils flared and its upper lip pulled back over its teeth and, as it exhaled a great moist gust into Verity’s face, she sensed an urge and a broadcast of frustration. It was a male horse, a stallion. The other horses were all mares, although Verity never really thought of them as having a sex when she worked with them. The stallion must have been brought in on the recent shuttle.

A nervous worry had begun to cramp up inside her. The ANT still returned negative when she requested the whereabouts of Private Aaron. What if he hadn’t gone back to the base as she had ordered, but had gone somewhere else? It had already occurred to her he might have something to do with the spy, and the spy must have been going somewhere, and what if Aaron had known about it and had gone there? Perhaps she had made the wrong decision. Verity made a request through the ANT to Commodore Smith, asking to speak with him as soon as possible.

She led the mare past the stallion and into her loose box before divesting herself of her helmet, sweaty jacket and gloves. The mare nudged a panel at the back of the stall and water poured into the bucket fixed there. Verity quickly removed the bridle so the horse could drink freely. She soon had the saddle and the rest of the armor off, and hung them on the door to the stall. The ice on the horse’s coat had already melted, leaving the hair damp, so she rubbed vigorously with a stable blanket to dry it off and stimulate its circulation. She checked the diagnostics from the connection: horse was uninjured, heart rate and breathing slightly increased from the exercise, and horse was
happy
to be home and have its armor off and be rubbed down.

Verity selected a spanner from its place on the wall ledge outside the stalls, and gave the command for the horse to pick up its foot. They always liked it when their shoes were taken off. As she cradled the hoof in her hand and bent over, something in the horse’s vision caught her attention. She put down the foot and looked up to see a young man enter, the same one she had run the horse into in the corridor.