Penumbra (37 page)

She imagined herself as his latest victim, one side of her face burned beyond recognition, the other scored with a bloody crucifix.

No, she told herself. He needs me alive.

‘I’ve killed many people, Sita,’ Klien told her matter-of-factly. ‘I would suffer no compunction at killing you, too.’

She wanted to call his bluff, then, tell him that if he killed her he would never know who kidnapped her. But something in his manner made her realise that this would be a mistake. He had lost his urbane charm, or arrogance, and he was close to breaking point. There was a light in his eyes that was almost maniacal.

She shook her head. ‘You’ve got it all very wrong, Mr Klien. You see, there were no kidnappers.’ String it out, she told herself. Play for time . . .

He barked a laugh. ‘No? Then who robbed your father’s safe? Who took the softscreen?’

‘I took the softscreen, Mr Klien. I ran away from home, but first opened the safe and took some money and the screen.’ She shrugged. ‘People must have thought that I was taken by whoever stole the softscreen, but that wasn’t how it happened.’

That gave him pause to consider. He watched her, his mind ticking over.

He nodded slowly and licked his lips. ‘Very well.’ His voice was no longer the sophisticated drawl. The words caught in his throat. He was so close, after all, to what he had sought for such a long time. ‘Very well, Sita. Now tell me, what did you do with the softscreen?’

She smiled. ‘I kept it, of course. I lived on the streets for five years and kept it with me. It was a source of great entertainment for me and my friends. We—’

He interrupted. ‘Where is it now, Sita?’

She hesitated. She imagined the security team, hurrying towards the apartment. Play for time . . .

‘Tell me why you need it, and I’ll tell you where it is.’

His reaction scared her. He moved forward, jabbing the gun at her. ‘Tell me!’

‘Ah-cha, ah-cha . . .’

She glanced through the window. Shiva! In the street below she saw an unmarked truck draw up, half a dozen plainclothes men jump out. She thought she might pass out with fear and dread.

‘Sita, if you don’t tell me . . .’

‘Ah-cha. It’s ... I sold it. I sold it to . . .’ She bit her lip, feigning concentration. She heard footsteps on the stairs.

‘Who? Who did you sell it to, Sita?’ He stared at her, something insane in his eyes. He raised his pistol and directed it at her chest.

She heard a movement in the doorway. The door swung back, smacking the wall. The first shot turned the window behind Klien’s head to molten, dripping slag. Rana saw a security marksman crouching in the doorway.

Klien ducked and swung his weapon, fired instantly. The marksman screamed and fell as the laser hit him in the head.

Rana watched with a sense of disbelief as Klien turned towards her. She could intuit his intentions from the look in his eyes. She began to plead with him, but, almost sadly, he shook his head. In the second before his finger pressed the trigger, she imagined that she saw something like pity in his eyes.

She screamed, and Klien fired.

The laser hit Rana in the chest and she fell back against the wall. She slid to the floor, staring at Klien in disbelief. The pain seemed to fill every cell of her body with agonising fire.

He fired again, this time at another security officer in the doorway. He dived across the room, sending a barrage of shots through the wall. He ran to the doorway and scanned the hall, firing all the time. Rana heard another cry.

He paused and looked back at her. His gaze fell to the hole burned in her chest. For a brief second she thought that he was about to fire again and finish her off, but instead he moved through the door and disappeared, and something in his confident dismissal of her fate frightened her even more than the thought of the
coup de grâce.

Rana began to cry. She reached up and fingered the wound in her chest. The skin between her breasts was burned and blackened, and though the pain pulsed through her body in sickening waves, worse than the pain was the thought that she was dying.

It was this knowledge, that after such a short life, at just twenty-three, she was going to die so needlessly, that made her cry like a child.

Rana’s vision blurred. Nascent in her thoughts, but cut short, was the satisfaction that at least Klien had failed to find the softscreen.

* * * *

19

Bennett lay in the command couch and allowed the Cobra to fly itself through the upper atmosphere of Earth. He monitored the screens set into the console that surrounded him, vigilant without a co-pilot to back him up. The ship entered the upper cloud layer, the aluminium blue of the troposphere replaced suddenly by opalescent cloud whipping around the viewscreen. The Cobra hit turbulence and rocked solidly, Bennett swinging in his couch. Seconds later the ship dropped through a raft of cumulus and the desert of northern India seemed to extend forever far below.

He got through to Control at Calcutta spaceport. ‘Ah, Bennett here. Mackendrick/Cobra/7-55.’

A tinny voice replied in the ear-piece of his flight helmet. ‘Ah-cha, Mackendrick/Cobra. You are cleared to land. Please copy these co-ordinates . . .’

For the next five minutes, as the Cobra roared over northern India, Bennett programmed the approach flight-path in the Cobra, then lay back and closed his eyes. His effective involvement in the process of bringing the Cobra to Earth was over.

Twelve hours ago he had awoken for the second time from suspension and climbed from the unit, shaking off images of bloated gas giants, alien statues and militia racing across the purple plain towards him. He had showered and eaten, bringing his body slowly back to life. When the ship phased from the void he had been greeted by a distant vision of Redwood Station, the dozen industrial orbitals winking silver in the sunlight, and he had to smile to himself. It seemed a long time since he had worked there; in real time it was over eight months ago, subjectively something like a week, though to Bennett it felt like years.

He had instructed the ship’s navigation system to program itself a return trajectory, from Earth to Penumbra, ready for indefinite inception.

He considered Penumbra and the people he had left behind. Hopefully by now Ten Lee’s leg wound would have healed and she would be up and walking. And Mackendrick? He had seemed well when Bennett left him with the rebels, but he had an amazing ability to hide the extent of his illness. Nearly four months had elapsed, and it would be at least another four months before he returned. Mackendrick had been given just one year to live, but that had been ten or eleven months ago, now.

He contemplated what Quineau had told Mackendrick, all those years ago. Was it possible that the Ancients had survived in an underground chamber, that they were in possession of some arcane healing lore? It sounded, he admitted to himself, like the stuff of legend. Only when he located the softscreen, and the rebels traced the underground chamber for themselves, would the truth be known.

The ship began the long deceleration burn as it came in on an oblique trajectory towards Calcutta spaceport. In a matter of hours he would be in the city, attempting to locate the softscreen with the help of Hupcka’s receiver. Of course, the screen might be anywhere on Earth, and even if he did locate it, it might not be so easily recoverable.

A voice sounded in his ear: ‘Mackendrick/Cobra receiving.’

‘Ah-cha. Landing clearance, check. Mechanical maintenance and resupply authorised by Mackendrick Foundation, check. We will ready Cobra for immediate turn-around as requested. Ah, security will need to board ship for routine inspection. Also, they will need to interview you immediately after touchdown.’

‘Fine by me, Control.’

‘Ah-cha. Safe landing, Mackendrick/Cobra.’

Through the sidescreen Bennett looked down on the vast sprawling conurbation of outer Calcutta, sunlit beneath wisps of low-lying cloud. He seemed to take long minutes to fly over the city, a vast inland spread of crowded grey concrete. The Cobra banked north, tilting Bennett for a better view of the Ganges delta and the shimmering Bay of Bengal beyond.

The spaceport came into sight, the small shapes of other craft climbing slowly into space. The ship rattled as it decelerated and dropped steeply, giving Bennett a fullscreen view of the wide tarmac apron pocked with blast-rings and stationary ships.

The Cobra levelled out and slowed dramatically, hovering for seconds on its vertical boosters. Bennett watched the control tower and terminal building rise around the ship as it came in to land with a loud impact of stanchions, a diminuendo of engines, and then a sudden and startling silence.

He pulled off his helmet and unstrapped himself from the couch, feeling the tug of the Earth’s gravity as he walked from the flight-deck. He collected the holdall containing his scant possessions and palmed the sensor to lower the ramp and open the exit hatch.

He was greeted with the stench of India: dust and dung, the waft of spices. Strange, alien cries reached him from port workers, the engineers and grease monkeys swarming over the ship like parasites. A squad of blue-uniformed security officials was already striding up the ramp, pushing past him without greeting or acknowledgement before the hatch was fully open.

At the foot of the ramp stood a tall, overweight man in a similar blue uniform, his arms crossed over his chest. He wore his black hair in ringlets, tied back from a plump face glistening with sweat in the heat of the Indian sun.

‘Bennett, isn’t it? Welcome to India. Please excuse the haste of my team - pressure of work, as I’m sure you’ll understand. I’m the chief of security here at the port. If you could spare ten minutes of your time, I’d like to ask a few routine questions. This is purely a formality I go through with all unscheduled landings. If you’d care to come this way.’

Touching the warm oval of the receiver in the pocket of his flight-suit, Bennett followed the perspiring security chief across the tarmac to the control tower. A ten-minute formality he hoped was all it would be; he was more than a little impatient to begin his search.

They entered a small room looking out over the port, furnished with comfortable sofas and chairs. The security chief gestured Bennett to sit, and he sank back into a ridiculously padded sofa. The officer himself elected to perch on the arm of a nearby chair, establishing a positional superiority. He glanced down at the com-board in his right hand. With his free hand he mopped his face with a red bandanna.

‘You’ve come a long way, Mr Bennett.’ He indicated his screen. ‘All the way from the Rim. Do you mind describing the nature of your flight?’

Bennett wanted nothing more than to get away from here. He would answer the questions quickly - and lie, of course.

‘Exploration,’ he said. ‘I work for the Mackendrick Foundation and I was prospecting a number of outlying systems for the usual mineral deposits.’

‘Alone? Without even a co-pilot?’

‘The Cobra’s a good ship,’ Bennett said, and added, ‘and I’m a good pilot. I didn’t need a co-pilot.’

‘No doubt. But you would agree with me, wouldn’t you, that solo flights so far out are a little unusual?’

Bennett shook his head. There was something about the chief of security that he didn’t like, a presumed familiarity beyond the call of duty. ‘I see nothing unusual in it at all. Many ships these days are flown solo.’

‘Then perhaps I’m behind the times. Tell me, which systems were you prospecting on the Rim?’

‘I looked at three systems in the G5 sector.’

‘And you found?’

Bennett returned his stare, considering his reply. ‘That information is confidential and between myself and my employers.’

‘Of course.’ The officer waved a feigned apology. ‘You discovered no habitable planets?’ His smile showed that the question was intended as his little joke.