by Gary Gibson
Luc stood where he was and made no effort to escape. There was no point in running any more.
‘Sir!’ the Sandoz yelled, staring around at Luc. ‘It’s a data-ghost!’
Luc ignored him, stepping over to the balustrade. Cripps came darting out of a doorway, pistol in hand, and stared up at him.
‘Very clever,’ said Cripps, his voice echoing as he re-holstered his weapon. ‘But wherever you’re hiding, you must know you’re only delaying the inevitable. You can’t escape through the Hall of Gates now.’
‘Why did you kill Maxwell?’ Luc demanded.
‘Because he’d become too dangerous for his own good,’ Cripps snapped.
Another Sandoz came running over to Cripps and whispered something in his ear. Cripps whipped around to glare at Luc, his face full of hatred.
‘Turn that goddamn flier back!’ Cripps screamed up at him.
‘And get my head blown off like Javier Maxwell did?’ Luc shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. Sevgeny Vasili knew who was coming to kill him – and I’m pretty damn sure you’re the one who pulled the trigger.’
Luc dropped the connection before either Cripps or Eleanor could say anything else.
He found himself back in his own body, staring up at the curved hull of the flier’s cramped cockpit.
Eleanor’s betrayal had shaken him to the core. He felt more alone than he had ever felt since he’d lost everything back on Benares as a child. The nearest thing he had left to a friend or ally was Zelia de Almeida, and he still wasn’t sure if that was better than having her for an enemy.
Still nothing. As he’d expected.
He had gained, at most, a few minutes head-start – and even then, he still didn’t have an answer to the question he’d asked Maxwell: where the hell could he even go?
He was alone, on a hostile world, with no way home. All he could really do until he figured something better out was find somewhere to hide where Cripps might never find him.
Switching to the flier’s external senses, he saw Vanaheim’s sun burst over its horizon, making the oceans below looks like pools of golden fire, and remembered what Maxwell had said: if his lattice could bypass the encryption on the books in his prison, what else could it achieve?
Still no answer.
He had the flier dip back down into the upper atmosphere, soon feeling it shudder around him as it bit into denser air. Before long a steady rumble sounded through the tiny vessel’s hull. He’d picked his next stop at random – an archipelago of islands dense with forest, just off the coast of a minor continent, black smoke trailing from one peak that was clearly volcanic.
Most importantly, the flier’s records indicated the archipelago was entirely uninhabited, and rarely visited. He had no idea whether Cripps or anyone else would be able to track him there, but he was all out of any better ideas.
The flier made landing in a clearing about forty minutes later, dirt and leaves tumbling down after it as it broke through the forest canopy. The soil beneath the canopy was filled with a half-light that filtered down from above.
Sweat prickled his skin the moment he exited the flier. Luc stumbled over to a boulder thick with moss and sat there for a few minutes, trying to will his heart to slow down and his hands to stop shaking. The air was thick with small, buzzing things, and all he could do was hope that none of de Almeida’s surveillance mechants were amongst them.
Thank God he’d taken the opportunity to eat something at Maxwell’s library. If he was going to hide out here for any significant length of time, his first priority would have to be locating a source of fresh water, followed by trying to work out what, amongst Vanaheim’s bio-engineered flora and fauna, might be edible.
And after that . . .
Maybe it was better not to think about after just yet.
He went exploring, making his way to the edge of a deep gorge that fell away to a river sluicing between dark granite walls on its long descent from the island’s central peak. He worked his way deeper into the forest, keeping the gorge to one side, taking care not to stumble or fall in the permanent twilight beneath the canopy.
After a while he came across a shallow cave, and had an idea.
Making his way back to the flier, he guided the vehicle back above the canopy until it spread out below him like a sea of green, then flew low until he was hovering above the river gorge. He followed the river upstream, then carefully manoeuvred the flier back through the canopy; and before long, he had parked it just inside the mouth of the cave. Even with the canopy covering the flier over, it had still felt somehow exposed. There were no guarantees the Council didn’t also have access to surveillance technology that could see through rock, but he’d take that chance.
He slept fitfully inside the flier, and found himself troubled by dreams in which he argued with Winchell Antonov. When he awoke, he could remember nothing of what they had said to each other. Staggering back outside, he worked his way downstream until the gorge flattened out sufficiently that he could cup the lukewarm water in both hands, drinking down as much of it as he could.
Upon his return to the flier, tired, grubby and still hungry, he failed at first to register that a light on one of the cockpit’s virtual panels had begun to blink. He stared at it for several moments, fatigue making him unsure if it had been blinking the whole time and he’d only just noticed it.
Tentatively, he reached out and touched the panel with a finger.
Luc let himself fall into the flier’s crash couch, a fat grin spreading across his features. It was Zelia.
she sent back.
There was a brief pause before she replied.
Luc listened to the buzz of life from outside the flier’s open hatch, the wind rattling the high branches of the trees shielding the mouth of the cave from view.
He remembered the fleeting vision he’d had of her wearing a contamination suit, and walking through a biome filled with corpses.
she hissed.
Luc’s fingers reached out and touched the edge of the book he’d taken from Maxwell’s prison, still tucked inside his jacket. He’d save the revelations about the Founder Network for the moment.
He waited a long time before her response came. So long, in fact, he was starting to think she had cut the connection.
Luc let out a breath he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding.
He waited in silence.
Luc reached Vasili’s island a little under two hours later, having travelled more than a third of the way around Vanaheim’s circumference. The flier dipped back down through the cloud cover and dropped towards storm-tossed cliffs he had first set his eyes on just days before.
Words materialized in the air before him, floating against the dim light of the cockpit. UNAUTHORIZED APPROACH. PLEASE TURN BACK OR SEEK CLEARANCE.
Ignoring the warning, he guided the flier to a landing on a rocky beach by a cliff on one side of Vasili’s island before disembarking. He squinted into bright sunlight, then looked around until he saw the steps cut into the cliff that he’d spotted on the way down.
Just before Luc reached the top of the cliff, something dark passed overhead. Immediately he froze, afraid he might have triggered the house security systems.
The dark shape resolved into a large craft, nearly twenty metres in length. It came to a halt over the roof of one of the buildings comprising Vasili’s home, turning through one-third of its circumference before drifting a few metres to one side and settling down on a flat grassy area at the top of the cliff. The craft, he saw, had Zelia’s livery painted on its hull.
Luc pulled himself up the last of the steps and found himself standing at one end of a gentle, boulder-strewn slope, leading upwards from the cliff towards the nearest of the buildings. As he watched, the rear of Zelia’s ship slid open, and over a dozen of her walking dead experiments emerged unblinking into the sunlight, shambling down a ramp.
Luc’s skin crawled at the sight of so many of them. He found he could make out subtle differences between each of them, although they all followed the same basic pattern: most of their primary sense organs had been replaced; all had pin-studded structures where their eyes should have been; all wore loose, filthy clothing little better than rags. But they were also, Luc noted with a mixture of alarm and relief, heavily armed.
He turned towards Vasili’s home in time to see one of the house mechants come rocketing over a rooftop. Before he could so much as react, one of Zelia’s monsters had fired off a shot. The mechant wobbled in the air, then span hard as a second shot hit home.
Zelia was creating a diversion.
He ran upslope towards a narrow alleyway separating two buildings and ducked down it, emerging a moment later into a smaller version of the courtyard Zelia’s flier had brought him to on his first visit. He glanced behind himself to see Zelia’s creations were now following him down the alleyway.
Two more mechants hovered into view above the courtyard, their weapons swivelling in different directions. Luc saw an open door to his left and threw himself through it, into a gloomy, unlit hallway thick with dust, its walls damp and streaked with mould.
Explosive fire flared through the doorway behind him, and he made his way deeper into the building with considerable haste. He passed through room after room, each more desolate and ruined than the last, making it obvious that outside of the library and perhaps a few other rooms, Vasili had let most of the island’s buildings fall into a state of considerable disrepair.
Luc came to a dirt-streaked window and peered out. A narrow strip o
f beach to his left was partly obscured by wild-growing bushes, but almost directly below his vantage point was a walled garden in far better condition than anything else he had seen so far, and a set of patio doors that were immediately familiar. By the look of it, the drop to the ground was no more than a couple of metres.
He looked around, then jogged into the next room to the left, finding a chair lying on its side. Carrying it back through, he slammed it against the window. The glass fractured and bowed outwards, but it took several more attempts before it finally shattered.
Salty air flowed in through the window, stirring up dust and dirt. Something hummed from one of the other rooms, sounding like it was coming nearer. Luc used his elbow to knock out a couple of shards of broken glass still sticking out of the frame, then scrambled over the window ledge, dropping down to land in the walled garden.
The landing knocked the wind out of him. Shots echoed over the rooftops, followed by the hum of another kind of weapon; light flashed in the air above a rooftop, and a thin trail of greasy dark smoke rose up, only to be rapidly dispersed by the wind. He pushed himself to his feet and staggered towards the patio doors leading into Vasili’s library.
Vasili’s body was long gone, as was the carpet his body had lain on, but the floor where he had fallen was still charred. Luc stared around the towering bookcases receding into the library’s dim recesses with a feeling of hopelessness. The bookcases were arranged in orderly ranks, a dozen or so on each side of the library, with couches and low tables arranged in the empty space between.
There must have been thousands of books there – even more than Luc remembered from his previous visit. It hit him how little time he really had to try and find the book Maxwell had given to Vasili, assuming it hadn’t simply been thrown out by the mechants charged with removing his corpse.
He heard the hum of an AG field through the closed door, beyond which lay the hall where he’d first met Zelia. Something then bumped against the door, and Luc instinctively ducked between two bookcases, making his way to a corner of the library that was hidden in deep shadow. His fingers itched for lack of a weapon of some kind.