‘Are you positive you don’t want Skaffen-Amtiskaw to come with you?’
‘Absolutely positive; keep that air-borne asshole to yourself.’
‘Some other drone?’
‘No.’
‘A knife missile?’
‘Diziet; no! I don’t want Skaffen-Amtiskaw or anything else that thinks it can think for itself.’
‘Hey; just refer to me as though I’m not here,’ Skaffen-Amtiskaw said.
‘Wishful thinking, drone.’
‘Better than none at all, so above par for you,’ the machine said.
He looked at the drone. ‘You sure they didn’t issue a factory-recall on your batch number?’
‘Myself,’ said the drone, sniffily, ‘I have never been able to see what virtue there could be in something that was eighty per cent water.’
‘Anyway,’ Sma said. ‘You know all the relevant stuff, yes?’
‘Yes,’ he said tiredly. The man’s tanned, smoothly muscled body rippled as he bent, securing the plasma rifle in the capsule. He wore a pair of briefs. Sma – hair still tousled from bed, for this was early morning by ship time – wore a jellaba.
‘You know the people to contact?’ she fretted. ‘And who’s in charge and on what side…’
‘And what to do if my credit facilities are suddenly withdrawn? Yes; everything.’
‘If – when you get him out – you head for…’
‘The enchanting, sunny system of Impren,’ he said tiredly, in a sing-song voice, ‘Where there are lots of friendly natives in a variety of ecologically sound space Habitats. Which are neutral.’
‘Zakalwe,’ Sma said suddenly, taking his face in both hands and kissing him. ‘I hope this all works out.’
‘Me too, funnily enough,’ he said. He kissed Sma back; she pulled away eventually. He shook his head, running his gaze down and up the woman’s body, grinning. ‘Ah… one day, Diziet.’
She shook her head and smiled insincerely. ‘Not unless I’m unconscious or dead, Cheradenine.’
‘Oh. I can still hope, then?’
Sma slapped his backside. ‘On your way, Zakalwe.’
He stepped into the armoured combat suit. It closed around him. He flipped the helmet back.
He looked suddenly serious. ‘You just make sure you know where -‘
‘We know where she is,’ Sma said quickly.
He looked at the floor of the hanger for a moment, then smiled back into Sma’s eyes.
‘Good.’ He clapped his gloves together. ‘Great; I’ll be off. See you later, with any luck.’ He stepped into the capsule.
‘Take care, Cheradenine,’ Sma said.
‘Yes; look after your disgusting cloven butt,’ Skaffen-Amtiskaw said.
‘Depend on it,’ he said, and blew both of them a kiss.
From General Systems Vehicle to very fast picker to small module to the lobbed capsule to the suit that stood in the cold desert dust with a man encased inside it.
He looked out through the open faceplate, and wiped a little sweat from his brow. It was dusk over the plateau. A few metres away, by the light of two moons and a fading sun, he could see the rimrock, frost-whitened. Beyond was the great gash in the desert which provided the setting for the ancient, half-empty city where Tsoldrin Beychae now lived.
Clouds drifted, and the dust collected.
‘Well,’ he sighed, to no-one in particular, and looked up into yet another alien sky. ‘Here we are again.’
* * *
VIII
The man stood on a tiny spur of clay and watched the roots of the huge tree as they were uncovered and washed bare by a gurgling wash of dun-coloured water. Rain swarmed through the air; the broad brown swell of rushing water tearing at the roots of the tree leapt with thrashing spray. The rain alone had brought visibility down to a couple of hundred metres and had long since soaked the man in the uniform to the skin. The uniform was meant to be grey, but the rain and the mud had turned it dark brown. It had been a fine, well-fitting uniform, but the rain and the mud had reduced it to a flopping rag.
The tree tipped and fell, crashing back into the brown torrent and spraying mud over the man, who stepped back, and lifted his face to the dull grey sky, to let the incessant rain wash the mud from his skin. The great tree blocked the thundering stream of brown slurry and forced some of it over the clay spur, forcing the man further back, along a crude stone wall to a high lintel of ancient concrete, which stretched, cracked and uneven, up to a small ugly cottage squatting near the crown of the concrete hill. He stayed, watching the long brown bruise of the swollen river as it flowed over and ate into the little isthmus of clay; then the spur collapsed, the tree lost its anchorage on that side of the river, and was turned round and turned over and transported bodily on the back of the tumbling waters, heading into the sodden valley and the low hills beyond. The man looked at the crumbling bank on the other side of the flood, where the great tree’s roots protruded from the earth like ripped cables, then he turned and walked heavily up towards the little cottage.
He walked round it. The vast square concrete plinth, nearly a half-kilometre to a side, was still surrounded by water; brown waves washed its edges on every side. The towering hulks of ancient metal structures, long since fallen into disrepair, loomed through the haze of rain, squatting on the pitted and cracked surface of the concrete like forgotten pieces in some enormous game. The cottage – already made ridiculous by the expanse of concrete around it – looked somehow even more grotesque than the abandoned machines, just because of their proximity.
The man looked all about as he walked round the building, but saw nothing that he wanted to see. He went into the cottage.
The assassin flinched as he threw open the door. The chair she was tied to – a small wooden thing – was balanced precariously against a thick set of drawers, and when she jerked, its legs rasped on the stone floor and sent chair and girl sliding to the ground with a whack. She hit her head on the flagstones and cried out.
He sighed. He walked over, boots squelching with each step, and dragged the chair upright, kicking a piece of broken mirror away as he did so. The woman was hanging slackly, but he knew she was faking. He manoeuvred the chair into the centre of the small room. He watched the woman carefully as he did this, and kept out of the way of her head; earlier when he’d been tying her up she’d butted him in the face, very nearly breaking his nose.
He looked at her bonds. The rope that bound her hands behind the back of the chair was frayed; she had been trying to cut through the bindings using the broken hand-mirror from the top of the set of drawers.
He left her hanging inertly in the middle of the room, where he could see her, then went over to the small bed cut into one thick wall of the cottage, and fell heavily into it. It was dirty, but he was exhausted and too wet to care.
He listened to the rain hammering on the roof, and listened to the wind whining through the door and the shuttered windows, and listened to the steady plopping of drops coming through the leaking roof and dropping onto the flagstones. He listened for the noise of helicopters, but there were no helicopters. He had no radio and he wasn’t sure they knew where to look anyway. They would be searching as well as the weather allowed, but they’d be looking for his staff car, and it was gone; washed away by the brown avalanche of river. Probably, it would take days.
He closed his eyes, and started to fall asleep almost immediately, but it was as though the consciousness of defeat would not let him escape, and found him even there, filling his nearly sleeping mind with images of inundation and defeat, and harried him out of his rest, back into the continuing pain and dejection of wakefulness. He rubbed his eyes, but the scummy water on his hands ground grains of sand and earth into his eyes. He cleaned one finger as best he could on the filthy rags on the bed, and rubbed some spit into his eyes, because he thought if he allowed himself to cry, he might not be able to stop.
He looked at the woman. She was pretending to come round. He wished he had the strength and the inclination to go over and hit her, but he was too tired, and too conscious that he would be taking out on her the defeat of an entire army. Belting any one individual – let alone a helpless, cross-eyed woman – would be so pathetically petty a way of trying to find recompense for a downfall of that magnitude that even if he did live, he would be ashamed forever that he had done such a thing.