Moonsteed (24 page)

The lift rose, its metal panels rattling unsteadily. The air grew cleaner higher up, but still Verity could not stop coughing. Smith seemed to have recovered partially from his sedation, and he choked feebly, eyes streaming. As they got off the lift and onto the ice of the surface, Verity slid him off her shoulder and pulled her helmet off, coughing and pulling in great draughts of freezing air that left her throat raw, feeling as though she’d never be able to oust the suffocating itch from her lungs.

Vladimir stood with his hands on his knees, coughing and hawking up phlegm that froze as soon as it hit the ice. Verity at last managed to quell the coughing and take an uninterrupted breath in. “We can’t leave hi--” She pointed to the Commodore where he lay on the ice, but the effort of speaking brought on more coughing.

Vladimir nodded. They pulled Smith back up to his feet and started toward the base. Every so often one of them would have to stop, racked by coughing, but gradually the burning in her throat began to subside. Verity could sense the base’s ANT, but it wouldn’t respond to her. She must have been removed from the personnel list. Somehow it felt like a personal rejection.

They reached one of the rear entrances, and Verity had to use the override switch on it so they could get in. They deposited Smith on the floor as soon as they had the door shut. He wheezed and coughed feebly, his arms and legs making sluggish, uncoordinated movements. Verity was afraid he would choke, unable to clear his lungs under the effects of the sedation, but she couldn’t think of what to do to help him. They would just have to leave him here and hope someone would find him and he would be all right.

“Let’s get out of here,” Vladimir said.

“No.” Verity bent over and coughed hard, so hard her vision went dark for a moment and her stomach heaved. “I’ve to kill Farron, like I told the Magnolia Order I would.”

“Oh don’t be ridiculous,” said Vladimir. “What chance do we stand against him in this state?”

“
He’s right, Verity
,” Anthony thought. “
You’ve got your evidence. You’ve destroyed his work. If what you say is correct, he’s failed to brainwash you. You’re uncontaminated and you have everything the Magnolia Order needs to incriminate him. Let’s not risk it any more by going looking for him and giving him the chance to take that back from us. It’s not
like
there’s anywhere he can hide out here, or anything he can use to defend himself. He’s stuck here as a sitting duck until the Meritocracy’s big guns turn up
.”

“No! I need to avenge him. Vladimir, your connection to the ANT might still work. Can you use it to find Farron?”

“Let’s just try to get out of here with our lives, right? Verity, if we can get back to the lander, he won’t be able to come after us.”

“You go back to the lander then, but tell me where he is first.” Verity gripped the handle of her katana. “And if you don’t, I’ll stay here and look until I find him.”

Vladimir’s shoulders collapsed into a sigh. “Okay,” he said. “The ANT says he’s in his lab. But I’m not going back to the lander alone. I’m coming with you. Let’s finish this and get out of here.”

Verity nodded, and turned to the corridor that led that way.

“You don’t need to hold my hand anymore,” said Verity as they set off. “I think the drug has worn off and I’m all right now.”

Vladimir loosened his grip and dropped his arm to his side, and it occurred to Verity that she preferred it as it was. “Actually...” She closed her hand around the wrist of his glove.

He glanced at her and smiled awkwardly. “All right, then.”

Verity stuck the manual override switch into the lock.

Farron crashed into the corridor in front of them. He breathed fast and stridently, and there was a gun in his hand. “You think I’m going to let you off at level two?” He broke into a brief spate of coughing, and added, “
Ex nihilo nihil fit
.”

Verity let go of Vladimir and immediately shot her hand to the hilt of her katana, but her elbow froze rigid. Farron’s stare cut into her.

“
Kill him
!” Anthony screamed in the back of her mind.

But she couldn’t draw the sword. Her muscles wouldn’t respond.

Vladimir shouted, and he staggered forward with the fire extinguisher. He swung it up, slamming the base into Farron’s diaphragm. He tripped backward, arms folding around the heavy cylinder as he crashed to the floor, eyes wide and mouth groping soundlessly for words he didn’t seem able to speak.

Verity tried again to draw her sword, pulling a few inches of steel out from the sheath before her arm locked again and refused to obey her. She tried to tell Vladimir to take her wakizashi and kill him, but the words wouldn’t come.

Vladimir grabbed Verity’s arm and pulled her away, up the corridor that led to the stable block.

A sudden fear came upon Verity that Farron might be mortally injured, and she turned back to look, dragging on Vladimir’s arm.

“What you worried about
him
for?” Vladimir said, hurrying on so she stumbled and was forced to look ahead of them once more.

“I... I don’t know. Why didn’t you kill him?”

“I don’t kill people! How d’you expect me to do things like that?”

“
That’s what he does
,” thought Anthony Cornelian’s ghost. “
Don’t think what he wants you to think
!”

“Let’s just get out of here before he does anything else,” Verity said. “There might be horses we can take to get back to the lander.”

They reached the stable door and flung it open. No horse sounds greeted them, no background broadcasts of idle socializing. All the stalls stood empty, the tack missing from the racks opposite.

“They must have evacuated them,” Verity realized. “We’re going to have to walk it.” Walking would take more than an hour. Without horses, they’d be easy to catch, but there was no other option.

“Okay, out the stable door.”

Outside, the light of a dawn not yet broken hung upon Callisto’s icy horizon. Verity jammed on her helmet to protect her from the razor-sharp chill in the air. They ran for the main gates in great leaping strides in the low gravity. The scarp seemed so far away as they passed through. It would take too long to run all that way. They didn’t stand a chance.

“Halt in the name of the Meritocracy!”

Verity froze. She sensed the tremor of many hoof beats on the ice through the soles of her boots, and when she turned, the whole cavalry rounded the side of the perimeter fence to intercept them both. Sergeant Black came at the front, on the alpha mare, and beside and a little behind her rode one of the newcomers whom Verity didn’t recognize. Obviously he thought himself important and knew little about horses, because he was riding the stallion, of all things.

The other riders came about in a coordinated arc to cut them off from the base to surround them. As they closed their ranks and pressed in toward her and Vladimir, Verity unsheathed her katana. If she was to die today, she was going to take some of them with her, and she was going to make damn well sure they had to kill her properly, with guns, because she did not intend to be a decapitated head on Farron’s bench.

“Drop your weapons, Sergeant Verity. You’re surrounded,” said Black.

The man on the stallion raised an electroshock gun and aimed it at Verity’s head.

And the first sun ray of a new day on Callisto glimmered on the horizon, sparkling on the frosted coats of the horses and the icy plain.

The sight of the sunrise stirred strange emotions in Verity. Would she live to see that same sun come up over Torrmede once more? Or would her eyes be blind, her mind converted to a vessel of poison to be used against her people to buy Farron time? Would she look upon the sunrise and it mean nothing to the person she had once been? Would her eyes be no more than the cameras that informed a robot?

Nearly seventeen Earth days. Four hundred hours. A drop of molten light, brimming on the horizon.

“Put it down, Verity.”

The first rays of a new dawn spilled out over the icy plain, sending long fingers of shadow reaching toward the people gathered before the base. The sunlight had a thin, watery quality, light that had travelled nearly five hundred million miles to reach this cold place. The sunrise lent the landscape an eerie, cheerless quality.

“Verity, put it down!”

Verity looked away from the sun to take in the man looking down at her from the shoulders of the stallion, and the gun in his hand. These horses, whom she’d trusted with her life time and time again, these noble beasts she knew better than anyone, now being used against her by those with no such understanding.

She let the blade of her katana drop until it met the fingers of her left hand. Balancing the sword on upturned palms and without averting her gaze from the eyes of the man, she lowered it as though to put it down carefully, angling it as she did so the bright grain of the steel caught the sunlight, sending a dazzling reflection racing up the blade and into the face of the stallion standing in front of her.

His eyes wheeled to the whites, his head went up and he took a faltering step back, ignoring a barrage of surprised shouts and kicks from his rider. He shied and turned, crashing into one of the other horses as he tried to escape the scary shiny thing, and cantered to the safety of the building. The horse he’d gone into was the alpha mare, and Verity sensed the sharp broadcast of her anger. The hormones of early pregnancy were in her blood, and these were her horses for her to protect, and she would not have him, a mere stallion, bringing disorder here!Her ears went back, and she ran after the retreating stallion, lunging at his rump with her teeth as Sergeant Black yelled and pulled the reins, face rigid in concentration as she assailed the horse with thought-prompts. The stallion broadcast panic and sped to a gallop, unseating his rider. The other horses began to mill about as they tried to follow their leader.

Verity sprang upright, re-sheathing her katana, and seized the nearest horse by its bridle. She turned its head to her as its rider fumbled for his gun. She got the faceplate undone, synced herself to the horse, and immediately gave the thought-prompt to rear. The next moment, the rider was on the ice on his back, and Verity vaulted into the saddle. “Get a horse!” she shouted to Vladimir.

He had one by the bridle. Verity jammed on her helmet and gathered the reins as she moved her own horse alongside, grabbing its rider’s arm and moving away so he unbalanced and fell to the ground. “Come on!” As soon as Vladimir had mounted, she led his horse by its bridle as she gave hers the command to move away, trying to get them both clear of the commotion. She released it once he was into its stride and they were clear of the others.

“Keep close to me and make for the scarp!” she called to him as the horse rose to a gallop.

“
Not bad
,
for someone the Magnolia Order reckoned wasn’t up to this mission
,” thought Anthony from inside the bag.

“
You can tell them that yourself when we get back
.”

“There’s someone following us!” Vladimir shouted.

Verity used the horse’s vision to look. It was Farron. He wore his furry-collared coat and no helmet, and she was certain that was the alpha mare he was riding. “What’s he doing?” she yelled back to Vladimir. “He can’t control two people and their horses at once, and he’ll die of hypothermia dressed like that out here!”

“
Oh, he has his reasons
,” Anthony explained. “
He rather foolishly just told you what he was doing before he was interrupted. You now have intelligence he intended to overwrite with something else, and he doesn’t want that information to escape. If he can’t stop you, it’s in his interests to kill you
.”

Anthony was right. Verity urged the horse faster, pushing ahead of Vladimir to take the lead on the path around the side of the scarp. The crystal palisades of the ice protrusions rushed past amid the snorting of the horse and the clouds of vapor it threw over its shoulders with each breath.

“When I jump, jump after me!” she shouted. “I don’t care if it looks dangerous. I don’t want you to
think
about it, just
do
it!”

They rounded the edge of the scarp, and Verity had to duck over the horse’s neck to avoid a large ice spike that had come down from the ridge and fallen over the path. They must be nearing the edge of the crater now. There was the place Anthony’s body had fallen over the edge. This horse wasn’t like the stallion. She wouldn’t be afraid, so Verity didn’t have to worry about controlling her. She just had to know exactly where the right place to jump was.

“Here! Follow me.”

The crystalline edges of the path caught the sunrise and sparkled as she turned the horse and gave the thought-prompt to jump. The ravine sailed past below. Verity spotted the yacht’s lander, lying at the bottom a hundred yards or so away. The black ice of the plain below came up to meet them. She kicked her feet free of the stirrups as soon as she recovered from the jolt of the landing, and slid off with the horse still moving.

“Don’t dismount yet,” said Vladimir. “We’ve still got a way to go.”

“I don’t want the horses hurt by the fusion engine when we take off,” Verity argued. “Now get down and come!”

They bounded across the plain, back toward the scarp and the ravine where the lander was hidden. Verity glanced up at the ridge once before she leapt into the ravine, but saw no horse there.

“
Hurry
,” Anthony urged. She landed heavily and stumbled down on her knees, before getting up and running to the lander. She gave the thought-prompt to unlock before she’d even reached it, then Vladimir was up on the roof turning the wheel that would open the airlock.

She vaulted onto the lander’s roof. She was still synced, and in the horse’s peripheral vision she could see Farron and the alpha mare up on the ridge, his hair and eyebrows rimed with frost from his breath, fury on his face as he raised his arm and squinted down the barrel of a gun.

“Get in!”

Vladimir slithered through the hatch and into the lander. As Verity dropped her feet through and took up her weight on her arms to lower herself after him, a blow to the back hurled her forward against the rim. She fell into the pod across the headrest of the pilot’s seat with her head in the foot well. Her vision blacked out. He’d shot her in the back, the bastard. A dead mass filled her chest, and when she tried to draw breath her lungs would not respond. Certain that death was imminent, she could not even muster the voice to speak to Vladimir.