‘Sixty klicks an hour,’ fumed the drone. ‘Sixty klicks an hour!’
‘To them it’s fast; don’t be so unsympathetic to your fellow machines.’ Sma watched the screen as the vessel a kilometre in front of them burrowed its way through the ocean. The abyssal plain was kilometres below.
‘It isn’t one of us, Sma,’ the drone said wearily. ‘It’s just a submarine; the smartest thing inside it is the human captain. I rest my case.’
‘Any idea where it’s heading yet?’
‘No. The captain’s orders are to take Zakalwe wherever he wants to go, and after giving him this general heading, Zakalwe’s kept quiet. There’s a whole heap of islands and atolls he could be making for, or – several days travel away at this crawl – thousands of kilometres of coastline, on another continent.’
‘Check out the islands, and that coastline. There must be a reason he’s heading this way.’
‘It’s being checked out!’ the drone snapped.
Sma looked at it. Skaffen-Amtiskaw flashed a delicate shade of purple, intimating contrition. ‘Sma; this… man… totally blew it the last time; we’re five or six million down on that last job, all because he wouldn’t break out of the Winter Palace and balance things out. I could show you scenes of the terror there that would blanch your hair. Now he’s come very close indeed to instigating a global catastrophe here. Since the guy suffered what happened to him on Fohls – since he started trying to be a good guy in his own right – he’s been a disaster. If we do get him, and can get him to Voerenhutz, I just worry what sort of chaos he’ll engender there. The man’s bad news. Never mind outing Beychae; offing Zakalwe would be doing everybody a favour.’
Sma looked into the centre of the drone’s sensory band. ‘One;’ she said, ‘don’t talk about human lives as though they’re just collateral.’ She breathed deeply. ‘Two; remember the massacre, in the courtyard of that inn?’ she asked calmly. ‘The guys through the walls, and your knife missile let off the leash?’
‘One; sorry to have offended your mammalian sensibilities. Two; Sma, will you ever let me forget it?’
‘Remember what I said would happen if you ever tried anything like that again?’
‘Sma,’ the drone said tiredly, ‘if you are seriously trying to imply that I might kill Zakalwe, all I can say is; don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Just remember.’ She watched the slowly scrolling screen. ‘We have our orders.’
‘Agreed on courses of action, Sma. We don’t have orders, remember?’
Sma nodded. ‘We have our agreed on courses of action. We lift Mr Zakalwe and take him to Voerenhutz. If at any stage you disagree, you can always butt out. I’ll be given another offensive drone.’
Skaffen-Amtiskaw was silent for a second, then said, ‘Sma, that is probably the most hurtful thing you have ever said to me – which is saying a lot – but I’ll ignore it, I think, because we are both under a lot of stress at the moment. Let my actions speak. As you say; we lift the planetfucker and drop him in Voerenhutz. Though, if this voyage goes on too much longer, it’ll all be taken out of our hands – or fields, as the case may be – and Zakalwe will wake up on Xenophobe or the GCU, wondering what happened. All we can do is wait and see.’
The drone paused then. ‘Looks like it could be those equatorial islands we’re heading for,’ it told her. ‘Zakalwe owns half of them.’
Sma nodded silently, watching the distant submarine creep through the ocean. She scratched at her lower abdomen after a while, and turned to the drone. ‘You sure you didn’t record anything from that, umm, sort of orgy, first night on the Xenophobe?
‘Positive.’
She frowned back at the screen. ‘Huh. Pity.’
The submarine spent nine hours underwater, then surfaced near an atoll; an inflatable went ashore. Sma and the drone watched the single figure walk up the golden, sunlit beach towards a complex of low buildings; an exclusive hotel for the ruling class of the country he’d left.
‘What’s Zakalwe doing?’ Sma said, after he’d been ashore for ten minutes or so. The submarine had dived again as soon as it recovered its inflatable, and taken a course back to the port it had departed from.
‘He’s saying goodbye to a girl,’ sighed the drone.
‘Is that it?’
‘That would appear to be the only thing to draw him here.’
‘Shit! Couldn’t he have taken a plane?’
‘Hmm. No; no airstrip, but anyway, this is a fairly sensitive demilitarised zone; no unexpected flights of any sort allowed, and the next seaplane isn’t for a couple of days. The sub was actually the fastest way of…’
The drone fell silent.
‘Skaffen-Amtiskaw?’ Sma said.
‘Well,’ the drone said slowly, ‘the doxy just smashed a lot of ornaments and a couple of pieces of very valuable furniture, and then ran off and buried herself in her bed, weeping… but apart from that, Zakalwe just sat down in the middle of the lounge with a large drink and said (and I quote), “Okay; if that’s you, Sma, come and talk to me.”‘
Sma looked at the view on the screen. It showed the small atoll, the central island lying green and squashed looking between the vibrant blues and greens of ocean and sky.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘I think I would like to kill Zakalwe.’
‘There’s a queue. Surface?’
‘Surface. Let’s go see the asshole.’
* * *
X
Light. Some light. Not very much. Air foul and everywhere pain. He wanted to scream and writhe, but could find no breath and make nothing move. A dark destroying shadow welled up inside him, exterminating thought, and he lost consciousness.
Light. Some light. Not very much. He knew there was pain, too, but somehow it did not seem so important. He was looking at it differently now. That was all you had to do; just think about it differently. He wondered where that idea had come from, and seemed to remember he’d been taught how to do this.
Everything was metaphor; all things were something other than themselves. The pain, for example, was an ocean, and he was adrift on it. His body was a city and his mind a citadel. All communications between the two seemed to have been cut, but within the keep that was his mind he still had power. The part of his consciousness that was telling him the pain did not hurt, and that all things were like other things, was like… like… he found it hard to think of a comparison. A magic mirror, maybe.
Still thinking about that, the light faded, and he slipped away again, into the darkness.
Light. Some light (he’d been here before, hadn’t he?). Not very much. He seemed to have left the keep that was his mind, and now he was in a storm-struck leaking boat, images dancing before him.
The light grew slowly in strength until it was almost painful. He felt suddenly terrified, because it seemed to him that he really was on a tiny creaking leaking boat, tossed scudding across a seething black ocean, in the teeth of a howling gale, but now there was light, and it appeared to come from somewhere above him, but when he tried to look at his hand, or the tiny boat, he still couldn’t see anything. The light shone into his eyes, but it failed to illuminate anything else. The idea terrified him; the tiny boat was swamped by a wave and he was submerged again in the ocean of pain, burning through every pore of his body. Somewhere, thankfully, somebody threw a switch, and he slipped underneath to darkness, silence and… no pain.
Light. Some light. He remembered this. The light showed a small boat assaulted by waves on a broad dark ocean. Beyond, unreachable for now, there was a great citadel on a small island. And there was sound. Sound… That was new. Been here before, but not with sound. He tried to listen, very hard, but could not make out the words. Still, he formed the impression that maybe somebody was asking questions.
Somebody was asking questions… Who…? He waited for a reply, from outside or from within himself, but nothing came from anywhere; he felt lost and abandoned, and the worst of it was that he felt abandoned by himself.
He decided to ask himself some questions. What was the citadel? That was his mind. The citadel was supposed to come with a city attached, which was his body, but it looked like something else had taken over the city, and there was just the castle, just the keep left. What was the boat, and the ocean? The ocean was pain. He was in the boat now, but before that he’d been in the ocean, up to his neck, waves breaking over him. The boat was… some learned technique which was protecting him from the pain, not letting him forget it was there, but keeping its debilitating effects away from him, letting him think.