India noticed that there was water flowing freely beneath the surface of the ice. ‘Thaddeus! The ice is too thin here, it isn’t safe.’
‘Your tricks won’t work on me. Nothing’s going to get in the way of my plans now.’ He pulled her closer and felt a strand of her hair between his fingers. ‘Oh yes,’ he murmured. ‘You’ll fetch a good price in the flesh markets of New Peking. Before long you’ll look back on my offer of marriage and wish you’d taken it when you had the chance.’
She tried to pound him with her fists but he just laughed at her. Before he realized what was happening she had slipped her hand into his pocket and pulled out one of the gold ingots. Summoning every ounce of strength she had left, she hefted the bar in a wide arc at the side of his head. If it had connected it would surely have knocked him out cold, but it didn’t.
Clench stepped nimbly out of the way and laughed pitilessly. ‘Is that it?’ he sneered. ‘Is that the best you’ve got? This is going to be easier than I thought.’
She leaned on her knees for support. ‘I’m not afraid of you,’ she gasped. ‘You’re just a bully.’
He looked taken aback. ‘What did you call me?’
You’re only brave when you can make other people scared of you, people who are smaller and weaker than you are. But whenever you’re not in control you’re just a snivelling little creep!’
His eyes narrowed. ‘I’m in control now though, aren’t I?’ he said. He pulled the silver pistol from his pocket. ‘So you’d better do what I say, India Bentley, and give me back my gold:
She looked at the gun and knew there was nothing else left to do. She held out the ingot and he grinned, showing his yellow teeth. But as he reached for it, she let it slip from her fingers. It fell in slow motion, tumbling end over end before passing straight through the frozen surface of the lake like a cricket ball through a pane of glass. The thin ice immediately caved inward and they both plunged into the black water. Panic consumed her as the raw, biting waters closed over her head and the freezing pain took hold of her. She burst back to the surface, flailing and gasping for breath.
‘I can’t swim,’ squealed Clench. He thrashed around the frozen pool, churning the waters to foam and grasping at the brittle edges of the ice.
‘Thaddeus!’ she shouted. ‘Stop panicking and drop those bags. The gold is dragging you down.’
‘Never. It’s mine. I’m never letting it go, never!’
He lunged forward and wrapped his arms tightly around her in an attempt to stay afloat. She tried to scream but the water rushed into her mouth as she was dragged under. Her lungs heaved desperately for air and when she opened her eyes she could see the bright light of the ice hole receding above them.
Just as quickly, the panic left her, to be replaced by a sense of deep calm. She no longer cared that they were sinking or that Clench was still clutching her tightly. Even dying didn’t seem so bad.
‘Be awake, India.’ Nentu’s voice was close by and harsh.
India closed her eyes and tried to ignore it. ‘I have to go now,’ she said in her mind.
‘You do not have the luxury of dying. You are a soul voyager?
‘I can’t be a soul voyager any more,’ she said listlessly.
‘You still have work to do, soul voyager, and now is not your time to die. Before this story is over it will take you to the ends of the earth. Then you will really know what it is to face death:
The severity of Nentu’s voice disturbed her sense of peace and she tried to push it away. But at the very moment she thought she was about to die, there came a tug at the back of her shirt and she found herself being hauled back to the surface. She slipped free of Clench’s grasp, bringing one of his bags with her as she was pulled from the sinister waters. She burst back into the light as though being reborn.
Pain reawakened her desperation to survive. She clawed at the brittle edges of the hole and through sheer force of will, pulled herself on to the ice, dragging the bag after her. She looked around to see who had pulled her out but there was no one there. She was alone.
A sudden bump beneath her made her look down and she recoiled from the terror-struck face of Thaddeus Clench, trapped beneath the ice, his face contorted into a soundless scream. She watched in horror as he slid slowly along the underside of the ice until his body was finally dragged down into the blue depths.
‘Rich for the rest of your life,’ she murmured.
By now her body was drained of any last dregs of energy. She collapsed on to the frozen lake and stared up at the glittering jewel of Nibiru, shot through with the colours of a diamond. It no longer seemed threatening: it was beautiful. She closed her eyes.
Time passed; she wasn’t sure how long. But then, once again, her peacefulness was disturbed. Someone was shaking her and calling her name.
‘India, can you hear me? Please speak to me.’
She looked up into intense blue eyes that mirrored her own.
‘Dad?’ She could see he was weeping.
‘I was afraid I’d lost you.’ He clutched her tightly and shouted to someone unseen. ‘She’s here, come quickly.’
And then there was another noise, a fierce rumbling that vibrated the ground, accompanied by an acrid smell. Her eyelids flickered and she caught a glimpse of something large and familiar. A battered white hulk, crashing its way through the trees towards them, tracks biting deeply into the snow.
She remembered the rest in bursts of images. There was more shouting, people crowded around her, then she was lifted up and wrapped in something warm.
‘India, don’t go to sleep!’
Something vaporous was held under her nose and her eyes popped open. She winced under the bright cabin lights and the harsh noises that crashed in on her. ‘Dad?’ she murmured again.
‘Right here, sweetheart,’ said Bentley. ‘You’re safe now.’
Verity’s face moved into view ‘Well done, kid,’ she said. ‘I knew you’d make it. Did you . . .’ Her voice dropped. ‘Did you speak to Calculus?’
She nodded weakly. ‘Where are we?’ she said.
‘You’re on The Beautiful Game,’ said Verity. ‘I don’t know how Bulldog managed it but they got here just in time.’
Bulldog appeared with his arm in a sling. The colour had returned to his face as though he was drawing energy from his beloved rig, and he wore an ear-to-ear grin. ‘Never underestimate the Captain, ladies. I’ve always got a plan, me.’
India sat up painfully. Now she was back in the warmth, her hands and feet felt like they were on fire and her knee was sending bolts of pain up her leg.
Tashar stuck her head out of the cockpit and gave India a cursory nod. ‘We’re not out of the woods yet, Captain,’ she said. ‘Rat says the seismic readings have gone off the scale. Something huge is happening right underneath our feet. And the lake – it seems to be draining away.’
From the window they could see the water level in the lake had dropped and the icy surface was now thin and translucent. Wisps of steam curled into the air.
‘It’s starting!’ said Bulldog. ‘Better get moving, we don’t want to be anywhere near that machine when it goes off.’
‘Machine? What machine?’ said Tashar. ‘What have you got us into now?’
‘I’ll explain later,’ he said with a grin. ‘Right now we need to make some distance, Tash. My guess is this whole area will be completely devastated in about, ooh I dunno, ten minutes?’
Tashar’s eyes widened. ‘My God, Bulldog,’ she said. ‘You are a total madman. We should never have come back here for your crazy ass!’ She fled to the cockpit.
‘Er, that’s Captain Bulldog to you,’ he called after her.
The giant engines fired up and Tashar twirled the rig expertly on its tracks. She pressed on the drive levers and they leaped forward up the forested slopes. The Beautiful Game carved a straight line up the mountainside, cutting a deep swathe through young pine trunks, and the deck-plates rattled and groaned as though they would
shake apart. But as they ploughed up the mountain they became aware of another, more powerful vibration that could be felt over the roar of the engines. It was like a surge of energy deep in the earth that peaked and died away like a giant pulse that was getting faster and faster.
‘Step on it, Tashar,’ shouted Bulldog. ‘Give it everything she’s got.’
‘What do you think I’m doing?’ she yelled back. ‘Taking in the damned scenery?’
India shrugged off her blanket and limped to the window Outside the sky had turned black and thin, with silvery clouds forming concentric circles over the lake. A great booming filled the air and a crack ran down the hillside like a tear in a sheet of paper. The water had completely drained from the lake now, leaving a circular pit that glowed with a ghostly blue light.
‘Make for the ridge,’ shouted Bulldog as they neared the top of the slope. ‘Get the mountain between us and that damned lake.’
The glow brightened and a vast pillar of blue energy began to rise from the pit carrying a white sphere on its summit that pulsed and arced like the cauldron in the cavern. A monstrous howl filled the air, drowning out the engines and making them press their hands over their ears. As The Beautiful Game crested the ridge, India looked back to catch a last glimpse of the brilliant sphere, spinning rapidly on top of a flaming blue column a hundred feet high. She thought the noise of it alone might split the world in two.
‘It’s going to blow!’ shouted Bulldog. ‘Brace yourselves!’
At that very moment, in a chamber deep beneath the ground, the android stood alone before the machine, bathed in its intense white light as he reached out his hand to touch it. And, in the instant before the energy field vaporized him in a flash of radiation, he was joined with the ancient machine and all the knowledge of other worlds filled his mind.
‘My God!’ was all he said.
And then he was gone.
CHAPTER 33
THE PRAYING TREES
For a moment, the cabin of The Beautiful Game was filled with a brilliant white light that bleached all the colour from the room. An instant later a colossal explosion lifted the rig high into the air and flung it back down with a crash that shattered windows, burst deck-plates and broke open steam pipes. The crew tumbled around inside the broken rig like dolls in a box, and India pressed her hands over her ears as the almighty noise seemed to roll on and on.
Gradually the roar diminished. An uneasy silence fell over the rig, save for the hiss of escaping steam. India brushed away the debris as the others picked themselves out of the mess of glass and splintered furniture.
‘Bit of a nasty bump back there,’ said Bulldog, clambering from the cockpit. ‘Everyone still in one piece?’
Miraculously, no one was injured save for a few minor cuts and bruises, but Tashar climbed from the cockpit with a face like thunder. ‘Damn it, Bulldog!’ she yelled. ‘What have you done to my rig?’
‘Not yours yet, Tash,’ he said, ‘we had a deal, remember?’
‘Which you haven’t kept.’
‘In good time,’ he said casually. ‘Well, that thing certainly went off with a pop. Shall we have a look around outside?’
The nose of the rig was buried in a mound of snow and rock and the forward doors were jammed shut. They followed Bulldog through the tangle of wires and pipes to the rear hatch, where he had to apply all of his weight to the door to shift the debris behind it. One at a time, they squeezed through the narrow gap and stood on the top deck in awed silence.
The clouds had cleared and the scene was lit by the sharp silver light of the moon. In the valley below, the lake had been completely gouged out as though by a giant hand. The steep sides of the crater dropped away into a vast black pit and the meltwaters ran over the sides in gushing waterfalls, sending clouds of steam into the night air. Most astonishing of all, every tree in the valley, and for as far as the eye could see, had been knocked flat, each one perfectly aligned with the direction of the blast so that they looked to India like praying multitudes, honouring the spot where the great machine had been beneath the ice.
‘Look,’ said Verity. ‘The asteroid, it’s gone.’
Nibiru had disappeared and in its place a million tiny shooting stars streaked across the sky from horizon to horizon.
‘Very pretty,’ said Tashar drily. ‘But what exactly do we have to show for all of this, Captain? You promised that if we met you here you would make us rich or the rig would be ours. A rigger’s promise! Now all I can see is a wrecked rig and no money.’
‘Have a bit more faith, Tashar,’ he said, grinning.
He pulled something heavy from inside his coat and two enormous gold ingots dropped with a resounding clang on to the deck, where they gleamed dully in the moonlight. They crowded around the treasure and Rat let out a low whistle.
‘Holy mother of all riggers,’ said Tashar. ‘There’s enough gold there to buy three new rigs.’
‘This one will fix up just fine,’ said Bulldog. ‘And afterwards we’ll split what’s left between all of us – including you too, ladies,’ he said to India and Verity.
‘Wait a minute,’ said Verity. ‘That gold must weigh forty pounds. Was that in your pockets all the time we were carrying you around down there?’
Bulldog looked sheepish. ‘Yeah, well, I never quite found the right moment to tell you.’ He broke into another grin. ‘Come on, we’ve got a bit of clearing up to do.’
Sometime later, India sat wrapped in a blanket on the top deck of The Beautiful Game, watching Bulldog build a fire in an upturned oil drum. Tashar and Rat were inside, fixing the heating with some well-meaning advice from India’s father, and Verity was investigating the galley.
‘What will happen now?’ she asked him. ‘Do you think the crew will stay?’
Bulldog looked serious as he stared into the flames. ‘Difficult to say,’ he said eventually, ‘but Tashar’s not nearly as hard-nosed as she makes out and Rat’s pretty much family. So my guess is we’ll all be back next season after the money’s gone, looking for something to turn up.’ Then he grinned. ‘And you know me, something always turns up.’
After he had gone to check on the repairs, Verity returned from the galley and gave India a mug of hot milk with some of Bulldog’s chocolate grated on top. India sipped it gratefully.
‘How did you manage to live with these people?’ said Verity, holding out her hands to the fire. ‘Bulldog’s barking orders like a madman, Tashar keeps looking at me as though I’d crawled out from under a rock, and Rat is showing your dad his collection of pressure gauges.’
India grinned. ‘Oh dear, do I need to go and rescue him?’
‘No, you’re all right,’ said Verity. ‘Actually. I think he’s quite interested.’
India giggled and clapped her hand over her mouth. Then they both convulsed with laughter until the tears rolled down their cheeks.
‘It’s a total mess down there,’ said Verity when she had recovered. ‘Bulldog’s pretty confident he’ll have it in some sort of working order by morning, although, to tell you the truth, I think Rat’s the one doing all the hard work.’
They gazed at the fire for a while.
‘What do you think you’ll do when you get home?’ said Verity.
India shrugged. ‘I’m looking forward to spending some time with my dad and Bella.’ She grinned. ‘I think we’ll both have some great stories to tell her. But, after that I don’t really know. Maybe I’ll buy that scavboat and see if I can dredge up any interesting old-tech.’ She looked down at the lake crater. ‘Although anything I find is going to seem a bit tame after all this.’
Verity nodded knowingly and they fell quiet again. ‘You really did it, India,’ she said after a while. ‘You saved all of us.’
India smiled. ‘Not just me,’ she said. ‘You, me, Bulldog . . . even Sid. It was down to all of us in the end.’ She stroked the dull steel bracelet on her wrist. ‘And Calc of course.’
They looked up as a solitary shooting star
streaked its way across the sky and fell to Earth.
CHAPTER 34
ON LONDON SHORES
It was the first day of May when the ancient motorcycle and sidecar pulled up to the top of the hill overlooking Highgate Village. The three passengers stretched their limbs and looked down on the smoky stone cottages where the junk piles gleamed in the late afternoon sun and long shadows crept across the grass. A small crowd gathered at the bottom of the hill and began to point up at them.
‘I never thought of this place as beautiful,’ said John Bentley. ‘Functional maybe, but never beautiful. But there were times, under that wretched mountain, when I longed to see Highgate again.’
India smiled and put an arm around his shoulder, and Bentley was struck by how much taller she had become. Several weeks of Mrs Chang’s home cooking had put some muscle back on her bones, her limp was mostly gone, and she looked strong, lean and brown-skinned. And there was something different about her eyes.
‘Mrs Brown,’ he said, ‘thank you for everything you’ve done.’
‘The thanks go to India,’ said Verity. ‘There wouldn’t be much of anything left if it hadn’t been for her.’
‘If you don’t mind, India,’ he said, ‘I think I’d better go on to the house first. Roshanne and I are going to have a serious discussion.’ He grinned. ‘Mostly about where she’s going to live from now on.’
They all laughed.
‘Any ideas what you’re going to do now, John?’ said Verity. ‘Will you go back to the oil fields?’
He shook his head. ‘No, I’m finally done with that,’ he said, patting his shoulder sack. ‘After India rescued these seeds, I knew I had the chance to do some good here. I’m going to become a farmer. I’ll use the spare land around here for fields, and we’ll grow the crops with the highest yields. In no time we’ll be able to feed everyone on these shores, northsider and southsider alike.’
‘I’m not sure what Mehmet will have to say about that,’ said India.
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