Penumbra (33 page)

Bennett heard the words, but had difficulty understanding their significance. Only slowly did he begin to comprehend what James was talking about.

‘We met,’ Mackendrick replied, glancing at Bennett. ‘He told me.’

James grabbed Mackendrick’s arm. The old man winced at the force of the gesture. ‘But did he give you the softscreen? Have you got it with you?’ There was something close to desperation in her voice.

‘He gave me the softscreen. But’ - and here Mackendrick looked up at Bennett again, as if apologising for his deception - ‘it was stolen from me.’

‘Jesus! You haven’t got it? Christ!’ She hit the rock with the palm of her hand, tears streaming down her face.

Bennett looked at Mackendrick. ‘Mack . . .’ He shook his head. ‘What’s going on? Why didn’t you tell us?’

‘Josh, I couldn’t. Please believe me. I’ll tell you later, explain everything, okay?’

Bennett closed his eyes. He wanted to believe Mackendrick, but at the same time could not quell the sour feeling of betrayal rising in his throat like bile.

* * * *

17

The muffled crump of an explosion shattered Bennett’s thoughts. He looked back along the road. The third crawler was a twisted mass of metal and rubber engulfed in roaring flames. He saw militia-men running, human torches cavorting in pain, and looked away.

Miriam James kicked him. ‘Get up! Back to the crawler. It won’t be long before they send out a patrol.’

‘What about Ten? She’s injured!’

‘We have medics where we’re going,’ James said. ‘She’ll be well looked after.’

Bennett stood, lifting Ten Lee. She was no weight at all as he carried her at a run to the crawler and eased her on to the flat-bed. He climbed up after her, holding her head in his lap as the crawler started up and tore off down the track, Mackendrick in front with James. Other green-uniformed guards had started the first vehicle and it accelerated ahead, away from the scene of death and conflagration.

Ten minutes later they slowed. Bennett peered ahead. The first truck was turning off the track, seemingly into the very face of the mountain itself. Their crawler followed and plunged into darkness. They were passing through a tunnel bored into the mountainside. Bennett closed his eyes and sat back in the padded seat, holding Ten’s head. Her small hand found his fingers and squeezed.

They seemed to travel through the pitch black of the mountain’s heart for long, uncomfortable hours. Bennett nodded off, but came awake often when the crawler jolted over uneven rock. He lost all sense of duration. Ten Lee’s fingers were still clutching his, and from time to time he heard her soft moans of pain.

Ahead, at last, he made out a source of faint light. They emerged from the mountain, into the pale opal glow of the setting gas giant. They trundled along another narrow track, the land falling away precipitously to the right. All around, rearing craggy rock filled Bennett with a sense of lifeless hostility. They seemed to be moving ever higher, climbing through an endless series of sweeping tracks carved laboriously from the side of sheer cliff faces. Bennett closed his eyes and considered the terrible irony of surviving the fire-fight only to die when the transporter plunged into a ravine.

They came to yet another bend in the track, but beyond this Bennett made out the purple sweep of a small vale dotted with habitat domes and A-frames. The crawler slowed, skirting a road that hugged the face of the mountain.

Beneath a great sheltering overhang Bennett saw a ragged collection of old vehicles, antique transporters and automobiles. Other vehicles were drawing up beneath the crag, armed men and women jumping down and embracing each other.

The crawler passed into the shadow of the rock, slowed and came to a halt. Wearily, Bennett lifted Ten Lee from the flat-bed and, carrying her in his arms with Mackendrick beside him, walked out of the shadow of the overhang towards a group of men and women climbing the incline of the valley to meet them.

‘Mack,’ he said. ‘What the hell’s going on? Who are all these people?’

Before Mackendrick could reply, a tall, bearded man stepped forward with outstretched arms. He embraced Mackendrick, touched Bennett on the shoulder and called for assistance for Ten Lee.

‘Welcome to Sanctuary,’ he said. ‘Hupcka. Hans Hupcka. Please, come this way.’

Bennett followed Hupcka down the sloping sward of purple grass, Ten Lee in his arms. Something in her eyes as she stared up at him, her lips pursed to fight the pain, reminded Bennett of a child’s trusting gaze.

‘Where are we, Josh?’ she said in a small voice.

‘Wish I knew, Ten. They must be terrorists.’

But what Bennett could not work out was the nature of Mackendrick’s involvement with them.

They came to a large A-frame and Bennett climbed the steps into a spartanly furnished lounge. Mackendrick and Hupcka crossed the room and stepped out on to a veranda overlooking the slope of the plain, the two men deep in conversation. Bennett laid Ten Lee on a foam-form and within seconds a medic was in attendance, peeling away the makeshift bandage of her flight-suit legging and cleaning the wound. Bennett knelt beside her, holding her hand and smiling encouragement rather than view the bloody gash.

‘You’re lucky, girl,’ the medic said. ‘The bullet went straight through. An inch to the right and it would’ve hit a major artery. We’ll have this fixed up in no time.’

He gave her an injection in the thigh and stitched the gaping hole. Bennett had expected the medic to use a plasti-skin sealant, but they were not on Earth, now. An antiseptic needle and thread was about as good as they could expect.

Ten Lee squeezed Bennett’s hand. ‘I heard what Mack said back there, Joshua. Why did he lie to us?’

‘I don’t know. He must have had his reasons.’

‘But why didn’t he tell us that he knew Quineau?’

Mackendrick came from the veranda and sat next to Ten Lee on the foam-form. He looked at Bennett. ‘I couldn’t tell you anything. I’m sorry. I didn’t know what the situation was here. For all I knew the elders might’ve taken us into custody and tortured us for information. I couldn’t risk that happening.’

‘They might have tortured you,’ Bennett said.

‘Of course, but that was a risk I had to take.’

Ten Lee tried to sit up. ‘What’s happening?’

The medic finished applying fresh bandage and Bennett eased Ten Lee into a sitting position. Others came up the steps and into the A-frame, Miriam James and four other green-uniformed guards. They were joined by two men and a woman in civilian dress, ragged and soiled versions of the simple fashions worn by the farmers Bennett had seen earlier. There was a hushed sense of anticipation about the group as they quietly settled themselves around the room, their eyes taking in Mackendrick, Bennett and Ten Lee.

Hans Hupcka pulled up a three-legged stool and sat before the gathering. He was a big man, perhaps in his late twenties, his beard and broad lintel brow giving him an imposing air of authority.

‘We’ve waited a long time for your arrival,’ he said, nodding at each of them in turn. He spoke English with the precision of someone to whom it was an acquired language. ‘We often despaired that you’d ever arrive. For fifteen years we’ve planned for this day. We planted sleepers in the militia; for a time we even had a man on the council itself, until he was discovered. In the interim, waiting for help from outside, we have waged a war with the regime known innocently as the Council of Elders.’ Hupcka indicated James and the other men and women. ‘This is my own council. They might call us terrorists, but we prefer to call ourselves rebels.’

Bennett leaned forward. ‘We’ve been hearing a lot about someone called Quineau,’ he said. ‘The elders said that he left Homefall to get word of the colony to the Expansion. But the council sent Klien to eliminate him.’ He looked at Mackendrick. ‘I presume Quineau reached Earth, where he contacted you?’ Bennett considered the many questions he wanted to ask, not the least of which was why Quineau had sought out Mackendrick.

What Hupcka said next cleared up that mystery. ‘Quineau didn’t head specifically for Earth - anywhere in the inhabited Expansion would have done. He went with the intention of locating the representatives of one of the big shipping lines or exploration companies - Patel or Redwood; we were not aware of the Mackendrick Foundation at the time - who might view the fact that Homefall was Earth-norm and inhabitable as a reason to open up lines of trade and communications. He obviously achieved this, though not quite as fast as we hoped.’

‘It’s fortunate that Quineau reached the cone of Expansion at all,’ Mackendrick added, ‘and pure luck that he came to my attention. His ship was poorly equipped, in a bad state of repair. It was a miracle he achieved transfer to and from the void in one piece.’

Hupcka smiled. ‘He departed in somewhat hurried and dangerous circumstances,’ he said.

‘How did you find Quineau, Mr Mackendrick?’ Miriam James asked.

‘I didn’t,’ Mackendrick answered. ‘One of my exploration vessels came across a small scout ship becalmed in regular space just inside the limit of the Expansion. They took the ship on board and found someone in the suspension unit. We learned that his name was Pierre Quineau. The ship had suffered massive systems failure in trans-c flight through the void; only an automatic eject program had brought it back into regular space. One of the systems failures meant that Quineau had been in suspension for over a year as the ship floated in space. When my men found him and gave medical assistance, he was irreparably brain-damaged.’

Hupcka shook his head. ‘But was he able to tell you about the expedition to the interior?’

‘I was on Earth at the time of the discovery, and I wasn’t immediately notified of his rescue. I had many other matters to attend to. My engineers and computer specialists had been working to find out where the scout ship had originated as the systems failures had all but destroyed the record of its flight-path. The information they did find suggested that the ship had phased into the void at some location far out on the Rim, which they couldn’t believe. Ships didn’t explore that far afield, and as there were no colonies out there . . .

‘This is when I was told of the mysterious star traveller. I was intrigued enough to travel to the colony world of Madrigal, where he was undergoing psychiatric treatment at a foundation medical centre. I found a man . . .’ Mackendrick paused and looked around the group of staring faces. ‘He could only be described as not being in his right mind. At the time of our first meeting he was extremely violent and had to be forcefully restrained. I tried to talk to him, but his rantings made little sense. No one had ever survived more than a year in suspension and the psychiatrists diagnosed his symptoms as those produced by chronic suspension trauma.’

‘Did he recover?’ Hupcka asked.

Mackendrick shook his head. ‘I saw him three more times during the week I was on Madrigal, and he showed no signs of recovery.’

Miriam James said, ‘What did he tell you, Mr Mackendrick?’

‘You must understand that he was barely coherent at the time. He ranted for hours in a mixture of French and English. He couldn’t even tell me the name of his planet. All he said was that he came from a world on the Rim, and that he’d been on an expedition, a long trek with two other men. He said that they’d walked into mountainous country and descended into a deep underground chamber. There he claimed that they’d discovered an alien race. He told me that the Ancients, as he called them, had incredible healing powers.’ Mackendrick smiled. ‘Of course, I was far from convinced. I took his story for the rantings of a madman.’

‘But didn’t he have the softscreen?’ James asked.

Mackendrick nodded. ‘He told me about the screen. He’d told no one else, he said, because he could trust no one. Secreted aboard the scout ship was a softscreen recording of the exploration he undertook with his colleagues, Klien and Carstairs. I had my engineers search the ship. I was still on Madrigal when they found the screen. I watched it with Quineau in his hospital room.