Against a Dark Background

by Iain M. Banks

  Then it was above her, the carriages flicking past just a couple of meters over her head; the train’s sleek nose hit the second foil screen and held it, tearing it from its stays so that the glistening membrane wrapped round the snout of the front carriage, snapping and cracking around it until the train drew to a stop.

  She was just behind the rear of the last carriage; it hung, swinging slightly from the white line of track. She ran on, jumping ridges in the limestone and following Zefla, her gun out ready in front of her. Zefla glanced back.

  Suddenly something dropped out of the train from the second-last carriage, between Sharrow and Zefla. In the same instant as it came fluttering down from the still-swinging hatch she recognized the gold and black shape as a Huhsz uniform. Sharrow knew Zefla would dive for cover just there. Sharrow went in the same direction, dropping into the cover of a corrugation in the karst, her gun tracking the falling uniform.

  The Huhsz officer’s cape hit the ground as empty as it had been when it left the train. Dust rose. She aimed at the opened hatchway. A hand gun and face appeared. She waited. Hand gun and face withdrew again.

  A movement to her right made her heart race briefly before she realized it was the shadow of the train on a long ridge of karst by the track-side; she was seeing what must be Dloan and Cenuij’s shadows as they got into position above the train.

  Sharrow shifted her position a few meters along the shallow trench into better cover.

  Something else fell from the train, at its nose; the foil screen flashed and glittered, rustling to the ground.

  “Shit,” Sharrow breathed. She touched the side of her mask. “Foil’s fallen off,” she broadcast. “Break something.”

  “Right,” Dloan’s voice said.

  They’d smeared the second foil with glue so that it would stick to the front of the train, but obviously it hadn’t held; now the railway’s technicians and controllers back in Yada yeypon would be looking at their screens and read-outs and seeing a clear view in front of the train and probably no indications of damage. Soon they would start thinking about letting the train continue on its way again.

  There was a pause, then a loud bang from above. Sharrow relaxed a little; that ought to be Dloan and Cenuij doing something terminal to the train’s power supply. A brief grinding noise overhead, and the sight of the second-last carriage settling down a little lower and sitting very still while the other carriages swayed slightly, confirmed that its superconductors were no longer holding it up inside the monorail; the train was trapped.

  She glanced back, down to the end of the train and beyond. A line of dust a kilometer or so away was Miz in the All-Terrain. She looked back to the hatch; a larger gun appeared, and a face; the gun sparkled.

  The ridge of karst Sharrow had been crouched behind earlier dissolved in an erupting cloud of dust and a rasping bellow of noise as a thousand tiny explosions tore through the brittle, eroded stone. Sharrow was too close to do anything but curl up and try to shield herself from the shrapnel slivers of stone whirling away from the devastation. Debris pattered against her back; a couple of the impacts stung like needles. She tried to roll further away, then when the noise stopped but she could hear rifle shots, leaped up, firing.

  Bullets sparked round the empty hatch; the hatch cover itself clanged and jerked and swayed as Zefla’s fire hit and pierced it from the other side.

  There was a percussive thump from the hatch; something flashed into the ground and exploded. The air was filled by a crackling noise and the ground under the hatch leaped and danced with tiny explosions, all raising dust about the initial impact site; there was an impression of blurring, buzzing, furious movement in the air.

  Sharrow ducked down, cursing. She pulled a small flare from her satchel, lit it and lobbed it to one side of the spreading ripple of explosions.

  They’d fired a flea-cluster round. The individual micro-grenades each had twelve random, explosive bounces to find the heat signature of a human being nearby, then they would blow up anyway. Properly used they were devastating, but the canister was designed to be lobbed, not fired straight down into the ground; she guessed less than half the micro-grenades had survived the initial shock.

  Sharrow kept down, waiting for one of the deadly little pebbles to land at her feet, doubting that any of them would be distracted by the burning flare. Then a stuttered ripple of noise announced the tiny grenades had self-destructed. She peeked up, gun ready.

  A head appeared looking down from the hatchway. She shot it. The man’s head jerked once, as though nodding at something; then it hung there, and a limp arm flopped out of the hatch. Blood started to fall toward the dark cape lying on the karst. The arm and head were pulled away inside. She fired the rest of the magazine, watching most of the bullets spark and ricochet off the train’s underside.

  “Fuck this,” Sharrow said. She kept the rifle trained on the hatch one-handed, reloaded it, then pulled the HandCannon out of her pocket, put it to her mouth and sprang the magazine, catching it in her teeth; she turned it round with the hand holding the pistol, pushing the magazine home again. She tight-beamed to where she thought Zefla was. “Zef?”

  Nothing.

  “Zef?” she broadcast.

  “Morning,” Zefla drawled, almost lazily.

  “Cover.”

  “Okay.”

  Zefla started firing at the hatch door again. Sharrow fired too, then scrambled out of the karst trench and ran, leaping over the corrugations, toward the small crater where the flea-cluster round had landed. She got almost underneath the hatch; Zefla stopped firing. Sharrow aimed the rifle at the underbelly of the train carriage just in front of the hatch, then fired a dozen rounds into the metal. Some ricocheted; one whined past her left shoulder. She took out the HandCannon and fired into the same area, the recoil punching back into her hand and shaking her whole arm as the gun bellowed; the A-P rounds left neat little holes in the carriage skin.

  Something moved in the hatchway; she loosed the rest of the pistol’s rounds into the hatchway itself, the noise changing from the sharp crack of the Armor-Piercing shells to the whine of the flechette rounds. Then she ran, back and to one side, out from under the train. She rolled into cover, crying out as a sharp edge of karst sliced through her jacket and cut her shoulder. She sat up, quickly rubbed her shoulder, then reloaded while Miz pulled up the All-Terrain directly under the train’s last carriage.

  From here she could see the top of the train and the monorail itself. Dloan and Cenuij had disappeared; there was a hint of an opened section on the roof of the last carriage.

  Suddenly the Huhsz carriage shook; its windows shattered and burst, spraying out. There was a sharp, manic buzz of noise she recognized, and a series of popping, crackling noises; a couple of the flea-rounds jumped out of the shattered carriage and leaped around like tiny firecrackers on the karst surface for a few seconds, then they detonated. The wrecked Huhsz carriage stayed silent; gray smoke drifted from it.

  “What the fuck was that?” Miz broadcast from the All-Terrain.

  “ Flea-cluster,” Sharrow said. “Cenuij? Dloan?” she called urgently.

  “Here.” Cenuij sighed.

  “You guys all right?” Zefla’s voice said.

  “Both fine; they tried to roll a flea-cluster at us. Our large friend rolled it straight back in at them and closed the door. He’s just gone in for a look round.”

  “Yeah, Dloan!” Zefla whooped.

  “This might be them,” Dloan said. Sharrow saw him at one of the blown-out windows in the Huhsz carriage; he was fiddling with something.

  “What are you doing now?” Sharrow said, puzzled.

  “Tying a bit of string to this briefcase,” Dloan said, as though it should be obvious. “Nobody underneath this carriage?”

  “All clear,” Sharrow told him. Dloan threw the large briefcase out of the smashed window; it jerked open as the string tied inside the carriage came taut; there was a crack and the whine of flechettes; the briefcase
bounced into the air on a cloud of smoke, then fell back, swaying on the end of the string; a series of what looked like large, black books tumbled out of it and thumped dustily to the karst.

  “Ah-ha,” said Sharrow.

  She stood on top of the waste silo; a dusty yellow mound on the side of a dusty yellow hill with the karst desert behind them, a field of pale, frozen flames in the fierce glare of the afternoon sun. Miz sat in the All-Terrain, talking on the transceiver. The silo’s valve-heads were protected by a small blockhouse covered in ancient, fading radiation symbols and death-heads. Dloan attached a thermal charge to the door’s lock; the charge burned brighter than the noon sun and Dloan kicked the door open.

  The interior of the blockhouse was black after the glare of the burning charge and the blinding sunlight; it was roastingly hot, too. Sharrow held the five Passports. They were solid and heavy, even though they were fashioned largely from titanium and woven carbon fiber. The external text, addressed to officials and responsible individuals everywhere, commanding their complete cooperation under the laws of the World Court, and threatening untold punishments for anybody who tried to destroy the Passports, was engraved on thin, flat sheets of diamond secured to the covers. The matricial holes were blue carbuncles embedded in one corner of each of the solid documents; a sequence of recessed buttons along their spines controlled the Passports’ circuitry, which could produce a hologram of the World Court judges and a recording of their voices, also commanding complete cooperation from all and sundry before going into the details of their pan-political authority and legal provenance.

  Cenuij swung the meter-long, bullet-shaped slug away from the top of the silo’s access shaft. The radiation monitor cuff on his wrist whined quietly.

  Cenuij and Dloan together heaved the shaft lock open; the massive shutter made a protesting, creaking noise and the radiation cuff sirened louder. Sharrow approached the dark well of the shaft.

  “Well,” Cenuij said to her, “don’t stand there admiring the damn things; chuck them down before we all get fried.”

  Sharrow dropped the Passports into the shaft. They made a vanishing, clunking noise. She helped Cenuij hold the shutter; Dloan primed the bundle of explosive, thermal charge and assorted ammunition rounds, sealed them inside the inspection slug and then maneuvered the bullet-shaped slug into place above the shaft while Cenuij’s radiation monitor warbled away.

  The slug slid into place, securing the shutter; they let it go while the slug disappeared down the shaft, cable unwinding from a reel in the ceiling.

  “Okay,” Dloan said, heading for the door.

  They got back into the cool interior of the All-Terrain.

  Miz grinned at Sharrow. “Done it?”

  “Yes,” Sharrow said, wiping sweat from her face.

  “Great,” Miz said, pulling on the car’s controls to take them away from the silo. They bumped off its domed top and back onto the track leading into the hills.

  “Is that plane on the way yet?” Cenuij demanded from the rear of the bouncing All-Terrain.

  “Pilot had a problem with customs in Hapley City,” Miz said. “Sorted out now; meeting us two klicks north of here. She’ll be keeping low to stay out of surface radar; there’s a bit of fuss about the train.”

  “What about satellites?” Cenuij said.

  “By the time they process what they’ve got, we’ll be away,” Miz said. “Worst happens, the plane’s impounded.” He shrugged. “We’re leaving it at Chanasteria Field anyway.”

  “Five seconds,” Dloan said. Miz stopped the All-Terrain on the track just before it entered a shallow canyon; they all watched the bulge of the waste silo.

  There was an impression of noise; an almost sub-sonic concussion in the air and from the ground. A little dust drifted from the door of the blockhouse.

  “That ought to slow the bastards down,” Miz said, restarting the vehicle.

  Sharrow nodded. “With any luck.”

  “I hope it was worth it,” Cenuij said.

  “Well, yahoo for us.” Zefla yawned. “This calls for a drink.”

  “Maybe Bencil Dornay’ll fix you a cocktail if you ask him nicely,” Miz told her, gunning the All-Terrain’s engine as they rumbled into the canyon.

  Sharrow looked out of the window at the drifting dust.

  8

  The Mortal Message

  She swam above the landscape. The water was a quiet milky-blue; the landscape below glowed green. Diving toward it, she could see tiny roads and houses, glittering lakes and patches of dark forest. She touched the cool crystal, her naked limbs pulsing, forcing, keeping her down; her black hair floated around her head, a slow could of darkness, swirling languidly.

  She stilled her arms and legs and rose gently upward through the warm water.

  On the surface she rolled over and lay floating, watching the vague shadow her body cast on the pale-pink tiles of the ceiling. She shifted her limbs this way and that, watching the fuzzy figure on the ceiling respond. Then she kicked out for the side, pulled herself out and took a towel from a table. She went to the parapet, where a breeze from the valley blew in, bringing a scent of late summer richness. The cool air flowed over the parapet and round her wet body, making her shiver. She put her arms on the wooden rail of the glass-fronted parapet and watched the hairs on her forearms unstick themselves from the beads of moisture there and rise, each on its own tiny mound of flesh.

  The view led across the valley to evergreen forests and high summer pasture. The mountains above held no trace of snow yet, though further on, beyond the horizon, the center of the range held peaks with permanent snow-fields and small glaciers. Beyond the lip of rock above, high streaks of clouds and vapor trails crossed the pale-blue vault like spindrift.

  She put the towel round her shoulders and walked to the edge of the pool, looking down into the gradually calming, green-glowing waters. The landscape below trembled and shook, as though convulsing in the throes of some terrible quake.

  The house of Bencil Dornay was built under an overhang on a great mountain in the Morspe range overlooking the Vernasayal valley, three-and-a-half thousand kilometers south of Yadayeypon, almost within sight of Jonolrey’s western coast and the rollers of Southern, Golter’s fourth ocean. The house clung beneath an undercut buttress like a particularly stubborn sea crustacean determined to stay clamped to its rock even though the tide had gone out long ago. The house’s most unsettling feature was its swimming pool, which was on the very lowest of the dwelling’s five floors, and which was glass-bottomed.

  Faced with the green glow rising from the pool and the dim but otherwise unobstructed view it offered of the valley far below, people of a nervous disposition being shown round for the first time had been known to turn a remarkably similar shade. Hardier, more adventurous guests willing to display their trust in modern building techniques rarely missed an opportunity to take a dip in the pool, even if it was just to say they’d done it.

  Sharrow stood there and waited for some time, until the water beading her skin had mostly dried and the chopping water in the pool had stilled completely, so that the view of the valley five hundred meters below was clear and distinct and heart-stopping, then she dived gracefully back in.

  The pain came while she was swimming back to the side; just under her ribs, then in her legs. She tried to ignore it, swimming on, gritting her teeth. She got to the pool-side, put her hands on the ridged tiles, tensing her arms. Not again. It couldn’t happen again.

  The pain slammed into her ears like a pair of white-hot swords; she heard herself gasp. She tried to clutch at the pool-side as the next wave hit, searing her from shoulders to calves. She cried out, falling back in the water, coughing and choking as she tried to swim and to curl up at the same time. Not all of it again. What came next? What did she have to prepare for now? The pain ebbed; she grabbed at the pool-side again. She was suddenly weak, unable to pull herself out; she felt to one side with her foot, seeking the steps. Her right hand found a ha
ndle recessed in the tiles. She gripped it, knowing what would happen now; her body convulsed as the agony tore through her, as if her body was a socket and the pain some huge, obscene plug, transmitting a vast and terrible current of agony.

  She doubled up in the water, concentrating on her grip on the tile handle, terrified of letting go. She felt her face go underwater, and tried to hold her breath while the pain went on and on and a low moan escaped her lips in a string of bubbles. She wanted to breathe but she couldn’t uncurl herself from the fetal position she’d assumed. A roaring noise grew in her ears.

  Then the pain eased, evaporating.

  Spluttering, coughing, spitting water, she pulled on the tile handle and felt her head bump into the pool-side. She surfaced, breathing at last, and put out her other hand, found the handle, found both handles. One foot slotted into an underwater step. She kept her eyes closed and dragged herself upward with the dregs of her strength. She felt the edge of the pool against her belly, and collapsed onto the warm plastic tiles at the edge of the pool, her legs still floating in the water.

  Then strong hands were pulling her, lifting her, holding her, arms enfolding her. She opened her eyes long enough to see the worried faces of Zefla and Miz, and started to say something to them, to tell them not to worry, then the great sword smashed into her backside, and she spasmed, collapsing; they held her again, taking her weight, and she felt herself lifted, one toe sliding over the tiles, and then she was laid down on something soft, and they held her, warm against her, whispering to her, and were still there when the last brief instant of agony burst again inside her head, ending everything.

  She woke to the sound of birdsong. She was still lying by the pool-side, covered by towels. Zefla lay beside her, cradling her head, gently rocking her. A bird chirped and she looked round for it.