by Patty Jansen
We glided lower and lower. The building site and the square building both slid from view to be replaced with sand dunes and rocky outcrops.
“I’m going to put down there.” Henri pointed. There was a sandy valley that looked quite long.
He turned and lined the plane up.
We went lower and lower.
“What about the wheels?” I asked.
He said, while concentrating on the valley, “No wheels. It will slide over the sand. The solar sails won’t fold back in, so they will drag us. It will be a bit rough, but if I use wheels, it will flip. I’ve done this before.”
I hoped so, but damn.
Lower we went, and lower. Henri pointed the nose up. I balled my fists.
Touchdown.
The plane bounced, thudded back onto the sand. The sound of it sliding along the bottom was like a crashing ocean wave. We bounced again, back onto the sand, with a brrrrrr over sand rills. The sand dune at end of the valley was coming alarmingly close.
Henri swore. Tried to pull the nose up, but we didn’t have enough speed.
The plane slid up the dune, hit a patch of deep sand and stopped abruptly. The force of movement brought the tail up—which fell back down, and the plane tilted sideways so that one wingtip rested on the sand. The solar sail trailed from the wings like an empty sack and it settled around the plane like a deflating balloon. The material was grey and silver on top. It let through some light, but only at particular angles. Draped down from the wings to the ground was not one of those angles, so it grew quite dark in the cabin.
Silence.
Holy shit. There was an exercise I wouldn’t be in a hurry to repeat.
“Everyone all right?” Henri asked, looking over his shoulder. His face was shining with sweat.
Everyone did seem to be all right, if shaken.
I undid my seat belt. The back of my shirt stuck to the seat with sweat.
We clambered up the sloping floor to the door. Nicha opened it. When he jumped out, he disappeared up to his chest. He helped Evi out, and then me. I sank to my ankles in the sand. It was hot and stuffy in the space under the sail. I went forward underneath the wing into searing desert air.
“Urgh,” Thayu said, coming up behind me. She wiped her face. She wasn’t one to show concern, but she had looked quite worried back there.
Evi had walked a little way up the sand dune and I struggled up in his footsteps. The sand was orange-pink and the air cloudless and blue. Those were the only colours in the surreal landscape. The valley had been pristine until the plane cut a deep scar through the delicate patterns sculpted in the sand by the wind.
A breeze whipped up a tiny wisp of sand from the top of the dune. The air was hot. No, it was fucking hot.
The heat of the sand radiated through the soles of my shoes. They were good shoes, too.
If I’d thought it was hot at the research station, it was nothing compared to this.
Thayu was staring at something at the horizon. “I thought you said that this world was nothing like Asto. You could take a picture here, make the sky a bit paler and show it to a bunch of Coldi people, and all of them will tell you that it was taken somewhere near Beratha.” Where she had grown up.
We went back down where Henri and Telaris were inspecting the damage to the solar sail: there was a rip in the right-hand sail which made the plane unstable. The projectile had missed us by a hair.
“Can you fix it?” I asked Henri. He and Telaris had taken our things out of the luggage compartment and had unpacked the repair kit.
“We’ll have to, right?” He wiped his face. “Yeah, I think we can fix it.” He held up a length of new sail sheeting with creases showing where it had been folded in the emergency kit. “We got this patch. It’s not quite big enough, so we may have to cut it.”
“Stick the whole thing on. Glue works better. Use tape for the smaller rips,” Telaris said in his typical clipped accent.
“How come you’re so familiar with this type of plane?” I asked him in Coldi.
“Everyone uses these on Indrahui.”
“Is this plane imported?”
“No, but the technology is.”
Well, that was . . . disturbing. Here was I thinking that only illegal Coldi technology had infiltrated Earth’s remote areas.
Evi started unscrewing the solar sail’s attachment points from the wings of the plane. Thayu and Nicha went to help him, while Telaris pulled the entire sail so that it lay neatly spread out on the sand. I went to help, but they sent me back to the shade.
“I don’t want to let you do all the work,” I protested.
“You’ll get your chance,” Nicha said. “Let us do this, because it’s too hot for you and we don’t want to have to do the work and try to get your body temperature down to stop you from dying.”
I sat down in the shade of the plane, but it wasn’t very cool. After a while, they sent Henri to sit with me. He slumped down, wiping his face.
“Dunno how hot it is, but they just keep going,” he said.
“They grew up in a place where it’s very hot.” That was true only for Thayu. Nicha had grown up in London, and Evi and Telaris had grown up on Indrahui; and although there were lots of deserts there, the climate was overwhelmingly cool.
“They’re from the same place as Mr Kray, right?” he said, his tone hesitating.
“Not really.”
“The black ones are. They’re not African. They’re from . . .” He turned is eyes to the sky.
“Do you know this warlord Mr. Kray?”
“Well enough that I know I want nothing to do with him. And that’s not fair, I was asking you questions.”
“You can ask questions, but most of my answers would be long and boring. Some people find geology interesting, but most do not.”
He gave me a yeah, right look that told me not to push my luck. I changed the subject before he started questioning my identity. “I like your plane. I’d never seen one of these before.”
“These are made in Sudan. They’re a real African design.” And he was proud of it, too.
Was he putting on an innocent face as much as me?
We went back to watching Telaris direct Thayu and Nicha. They lined up both sides of the ripped sail and put them where they would belong if they sail had been intact. A strip of fabric was missing, but that didn’t matter, Telaris said. As long as the patch covered enough of the surrounding fabric.
Thayu went to spray foamy glue over the ripped wing, and then they allowed me to help lowering the patch in place. When rubbing it so that the two layers lay over each other as smoothly as possible, I had to stop because the fabric burned my hands. Henri was carefully crawling over the glued material to snap in tiny rivets that would make sure that the two solar layers were connected, while Telaris used tape made from the same material to fix a few smaller rips.
“That’s done,” he said when he finished. “Ready to go.”
“The glue needs to dry for an hour or so,” Henri said. “Otherwise it will come apart when we try to fold the sail. Let’s see how we can best take off from here. If we can push off from a hill, the hot air will give us extra lift.”
Jerking his head at the dune where we had been stranded, Telaris said, “Maybe have a look around what the other side of the hill looks like. Maybe we can drag the plane up there and slide down if that side is steeper.”
We left Evi and Nicha with the plane just in case there was trouble and trudged up the hillside to the top. By now it was midafternoon, the hottest time of the day. I was sweating so much that whenever sand whipped up from someone ploughing through in front of me, it stuck to my arms and face.
At the to
p of the hill, a welcome breeze made me shiver. There was another valley on that side, and it was not as wide as ours, but the dune that we stood on was much higher than those on the other side.
“This is perfect,” Henri said. “We push off. We use the engine. We fly in that direction—”
He stopped talking.
A vehicle crested the hill and came into the valley, followed by another one.
Henri yelled, “Run!”
CHAPTER 20
* * *
HENRI RAN, TRAILING a spray of sand down the dune, but Thayu dropped to the ground, pulling me down with her, and aimed her gun. . . .
But another truck came over the hill, and another one. There was a whole convoy of tank-like vehicles, carrying rocket launchers on the roof.
They were huge things, solid square looking things painted in the same colour as the sand.
They had huge wheels with deep-threaded tyres that churned up clouds of sand and dust.
Thayu put her gun away. She elbowed me in the side. “Come on. We have to go back.”
But a couple of trucks had come into that valley as well.
They stopped next to the plane, where Nicha and Evi had been folding the repaired solar sail ready for take-off. The truck doors opened and a number of soldiers carrying big guns jumped out. They shouted in a language that I couldn’t make out.
One ran after Henri, who turned around again and set off in a panicked run back to us. The soldier following him must have springs in his shoes because the deep sand didn’t slow him down at all. He caught Henri by the back of his shirt. Henri squealed.
Of course they had seen us. Thayu stood next to me, all her muscles tense. I didn’t need the feeder—which didn’t work right now—to realise the precarious situation we were in, and that we didn’t have the reserves or the position to fight back.
A fool is the person who starts a fight without being certain of victory. A Coldi proverb, and I couldn’t remember who first said it. Why did I even think of this shit?
They came closer, pointing guns at us. They were all local men, mostly very dark-skinned. They spoke with Henri, not in a friendly way. He whimpered.
Another man gestured with his gun and yelled something at us.
I presumed it to mean “get in the truck”.
They opened the back door of the closest truck.
A couple of others came forward to search us. None of the ones I could see were Coldi. They were all locals, Africans or descendants of Arabs.
They checked us for weapons. When Thayu yelled at them not to dare feel her up, they backed off a bit. Thayu was not normally the type to request special consideration—Coldi women were at least as strong and often stronger than men—but it was my guess that she probably had a weapon stashed away somewhere that she wanted to escape attention. Was it in her belt buckle? In her socks? Thayu could hide weapons anywhere. They got my gun, and divested Evi and Telaris of their weapons. All the various guns and knives made an impressive pile in the sand.
The soldiers pushed us up a narrow ladder into the back of the truck. I expected it to be hot inside the cargo hold, but the air was quite cool.
Henri was yelling at the men in a local language, but they didn’t react at all. They simply left the cargo hold and shut the door.
Henri banged his fists on the metal panel that made a loud, hollow sound.
Telaris told him to calm down. Henri looked up at him—since Telaris was about a head taller than he was and probably twice his age.
“They can’t take me!” Henri squealed.
“It looks like we have little choice in the matter.”
“But my plane!”
I said, “You are not getting out of here by making a lot of noise and breaking your hands.”
Henri looked at his hands. He shrugged. Leaned against the wall and let himself slide to the ground with a theatrical sigh.
“I have a wife and three little boys. Who is going to look after them?”
He did? He looked barely old enough to have finished high school.
He spread his hands and looked at the ceiling. “Come on, what is this? Don’t they know who I am? Everyone knows Henri the pilot.”
Apparently not.
The only light in this cargo compartment came in through a tiny window in the front of the cabin. Thayu stood on her toes to look out through it.
“Swanky,” she said.
She stepped aside to let me have a look. The cabin had a number of rows of seats with small tables between them. The seats were covered in leather and the men—I counted eleven including the driver—sat there laughing and talking, oblivious to us behind the little window.
The vehicle started moving. I sank down on the hard metal floor with my back to the wall.
Henri sat swaying from side to side. His eyes were wide. “They will destroy my plane. I won’t be able to work anymore. It’s my complete life savings. I wanted to buy my wife a shop.”
The truck kept going for quite some time. It powered up sandy hills with the engine churning and slid down on the other side.
“Wonder where they’re taking us,” I said in Coldi to Thayu.
Nicha stood watching through the little window. “I can’t see anything out there except desert.”
It took about twenty minutes before the truck stopped.
“We’re at the white house,” Nicha reported.
Henri whimpered. “That’s what I was afraid of. They’re taking us to Mr Kray.”
The driver spoke to someone outside and then we kept going.
“We’re going up the driveway,” Nicha said.
“No, please,” Henri moaned.
“We’ve done nothing wrong. We’re researchers and we’ve got the documents to prove it,” I said. “There is no need to be afraid.”
It was the biggest nonsense ever and no one replied to that statement. Only Evi nodded, his face serious. He held his right hand clasped over the empty bracket on his belt where he normally held his gun. Clearly he wanted to see Mr Kray, because he wanted to kill the man who had cruelly killed his sister. Whatever was going to happen in that house, one thing I knew: only one of the two men—Evi or Mr Kray—would make it out alive.
The truck stopped. The men got out and a moment later the back door opened. One man shouted something that probably meant “get out”. He was an African man with a bald head shining with sweat, little piggy eyes and a round face. He wore a sand-coloured military-style outfit with lots of pockets on his trousers and a flak jacket. He had no front teeth.
Thayu went down the ladder at the back of the truck first. She faced the guard, giving him a hard stare. He was taller than she was, but I thought I saw him retreat ever so slightly.
I clambered down the ladder next, emerging in the hot brightness of midmorning. Sunlight belted onto the white walls of a blocky, two-storey house. Ouch, my eyes.
A few more military-style guards waited in the shade under the awning that sheltered the entrance of the house. They were all locals, looking dapper in their desert-coloured camouflage gear.
Evi came out of the truck behind me. He yanked his arm free of the grip of the man who held his uniform. He yelled. “No need to nanny me. I can walk myself.”
The guard reached for his belt—
“Mashara. That’s not necessary.”
“My apologies, Delegate.” Telaris wormed himself between me and his brother and pushed Evi back from the nervous guard. While Nicha came out of the truck, Telaris spoke to Evi in Indrahui on a low voice. Evi jerked his head, his expression angry. Telaris spoke more calming words.
The guards indicated that I should go up to the door. On both sides, Roman-s
tyle marble pillars supported the awning. A red marble ramp led to the entrance, a glass door in a wall made from glass floor to ceiling. The hall was sterile, near-empty. White marble on the floor looked bright and there was a pond in the hall where a couple of lazy goldfish swam about. The far wall was made of glass as well so that we could see through into a lush green garden with a swimming pool and tall date palms in the courtyard.
A little African boy in a white uniform with gold piping opened the door for us. He looked like an absurd living doll, bowing and smiling. In the middle of the fucking desert. The whole charade was ridiculous.
“Is anyone going to tell us why we’re here?” I asked. “We were simply doing our work.”
The boy bowed again. “Go see Mr Kray, sir. Come inside. Mr Kray knows everything.”
The difference in temperature between outside and inside was incredible. The house was spotlessly clean, too, and the air was fresh and cool.
A couple of couches surrounded the pond in the hall, with cushions of white leather. White marble lined the floor, the walls that were not made of glass were also white, the ceiling was white. There were a couple of giant pots with palms. The leaves were green, but the glaze on the outside of the pots was white, of course. Three statues of stylised cats, also white, were each almost as tall as a person. On one of the couches lay a real white cat, its tail curled around its body. As we came in, it raised its head, rose to its feet and jumped soundlessly to the ground.
A second young boy in white uniform came out of a hall to the left.
He bowed. “Come, sirs. You must get changed, be clean and rested, sirs, before Mr Kray will see you.” He looked pointedly at the floor, where we had left a trail of dried mud that had come off the soles of our shoes. My clothes were indeterminate grey with dried mud from our escapade on the shoreline. My hands were caked with grime, which had found its way under my nails. There were stripes over my arms from where drops of sweat had run down. Nicha had also taken a tumble in the water and looked similarly dishevelled.
We followed the boy into the passage, tracking more bits of dried mud across the floor. To the right stood a small table with on it a bowl of decorative squash. Next to it stood an empty vase. The whole arrangement was not dissimilar to the tables that influential Coldi people displayed in their halls to inform visitors of their mood. If it stood here with that intent, then what did it mean?