Engineman

by Eric Brown

  “Pleased to meet you, Ella. I’m Kelly. But I know who you are. Why do you think we staged the raid on the Danzig base back there? When we learnt you’d been captured, I thought your father would be grateful if we got you out.”

  She swallowed quickly. “You know my father?”

  “We’ve worked together with the Disciples and the Lho these past six years. Devising strategy, tactics...” Kelly paused. “Six, seven years ago your father was becoming disillusioned with the Organisation—they’d taken over a couple of worlds further along the Rim and there were rumours of civil unrest and military suppression. He began to look into the Disciples. He read books, made contacts. We were suspicious as hell of him at first. There he was, a Danzig executive, showing interest in Disciples’ philosophy, declaring he wanted to join us...”

  “But you let him?”

  “He supplied information vital to the resistance movement. Over the next few years we worked together, became good friends.”

  Ella shook her head. “I never think of my father as having friends.”

  “He has. He’s well respected.” Kelly paused. “You know, he regretted that you and he weren’t closer.”

  “He told you that?”

  “It was always on his mind. He knew he’d made mistakes, but it wasn’t easy for him, you know. His work for the Organisation took him away a lot of the time, and you drifted apart.”

  “You mean he put me in boarding school and forgot about me.”

  “He was a busy man, Ella.”

  She laughed. “Yeah—co-ordinating the take-over or destruction of the last of the shipping Lines-”

  “That was a long time ago. He’s changed. He knows that what he did then was wrong.”

  Ella whispered, “All I ever wanted was a proper father. He never gave me any affection. It was as if he didn’t know how to.”

  The Engineman shrugged. “Perhaps he didn’t,” he said. “I think he only came to appreciate you later, once you’d left home. He kept tabs on you, you know? He had people report on how your work was going. He even bought a piece of yours.”

  “I know. I’ve seen it.” She fell silent, staring at the sunset. At last she said, “Why didn’t he tell me about his conversion back then? He could have told me years ago, when it happened.” She paused. “If he’d told me six years ago, things would be different now.”

  The big American leaned back on the hood of the flier, propping himself on one elbow. “It was difficult, Ella.”

  She looked at him. “Difficult? How come? All it would’ve taken was a disc, a card even.”

  “I was with him during those years. We had to be very careful. If the Organisation had had the slightest hint of where we were, more than the liberation of Hennessy’s Reach would have been at stake.”

  Ella stared at him.

  Kelly said, “Not long after his conversion, the Lho who’d survived the plague summoned him. He had the right contacts across the Expansion, the right kind of knowledge, and the Disciples had the finances.”

  Ella shook her head. The thought of the Lho and her father, working in alliance...

  “What did they want with him?”

  Kelly said, “They wanted him to help them save themselves, the last of the Lho-Dharvo people. They took him into the mountains, where the survivors lived in a temple far underground, and they explained their situation...” He paused, considering. “When he came back, your father was a changed man. If anything, he was more committed, more determined to see the end of the Organisation. He never spoke about what he experienced in the temple, but whatever it was moved him profoundly. There were rumours-”

  “Yes?”

  Kelly gestured. “I heard it from a Lho that he entered into some kind of communion with their holy people -but the Lho I spoke to wasn’t very clear what exactly the communion was all about... Anyway, he returned doubly committed to the cause. We were smuggled off the Reach in a container, through the interface to the free planets of the Tyler-McDermott system. We made them our base and worked to save the Lho and bring about the downfall of the Danzig Organisation.”

  Ella wondered what her father had undergone in the mountain stronghold of the Lho, if it had been anything like the sense of unity she had experienced all those years ago in the cave with L’Endo.

  “Where’s my father now?” she asked.

  “On Earth,” Kelly said. “Specifically, in Paris.”

  “Paris?”

  “He sent you a disc a few weeks ago, arranging to meet you in Paris when he arrived. Obviously you never received it.”

  “I got it, but I was angry. I wiped most of it when I realised who it was from.” She shrugged. “Then things happened. I decided I wanted to see him. So I came here.”

  “And walked right into the lion’s mouth,” Kelly said. “Fortunately, we can get you out of here.”

  She stared at him. “But the interface...

  Kelly sat up. “There is another way we can get back to Earth.”

  Ella peered at him.

  “Your father’s sending a smallship to the Reach to evacuate the Lho from the temple. With luck, we should be aboard it for the flight back to Earth.”

  “A smallship?”

  “Come on, we’d better get moving.”

  He climbed back into the flier. Ella sat beside him, watching the spur of rock turn away beneath them and disappear. They headed over the jungle towards a jagged, up-thrusting mountain range, skimming low over the tree-tops as the jungle climbed the mountainside and then petered out.

  Kelly kept the flier in close to the cliff-face, skirting great planes of rock towering for kilometres above the flier. They wound through a series of pinnacles, each one higher than the last. Ahead, perhaps fifty kilometres distant, was a blunt, rectangular peak Ella recognised as Mt Sebastian.

  Ella didn’t know which was the most unlikely: seeing her father again after so long, or flying to Earth aboard a smallship. She was twelve when she had last shipped through space, and now smallships seemed an ancient, superannuated form of transport. Compared to the simplicity of the interfaces, the procedure of phasing a smallship into and out of the nada-continuum was complex—not to mention dangerous. So much could go wrong between here and Earth. She would rather have returned by interface... not that she was complaining. It was a miracle, after the events of the past few days, that she had survived and would soon meet her father. She closed her eyes and wished that she was already on board the smallship, en route to Earth.

  “Hello,” Kelly said.

  Something in his tone indicated he wasn’t speaking to her.

  She opened her eyes. He was leaning over the side, looking back towards the jungle. Ella strained her eyes in the same direction, but could see nothing.

  Kelly accelerated and swept the flier in a corkscrew ascent of a lofty pinnacle. At the summit he landed and jumped out. Ella followed, alarmed. Kelly was on his stomach at the edge of the rock. Ella joined him and peered down the sheer, dwindling face.

  “What is it?”

  “There.” He pointed straight ahead at the jungle. “See the road leaving the jungle and winding up the mountainside? Directly beneath where the right hand side of the sun touches the land.”

  She charted down from the sun’s circumference, followed the line down through the massed lobes of the tree-tops. She found the road.

  An armoured convoy—perhaps the same one she’d seen enter the interface on Carey’s Sanctuary—was making its laborious way up the narrow road that followed the contour of the mountainside. There were perhaps a hundred vehicles in the column, ranging from small trucks to colossal rocket launchers. They moved so slowly that from this distance they seemed to be making no progress at all. At the head of the convoy, Ella made out two fliers, scouting the lie of the road in front. These, she suspected, were the immediate danger.

  “Obviously they haven’t seen us,” Kelly said, “or the fliers would have given chase.”

  “If they haven’t seen us, ca
n’t we just... just put the mountain between us and head to our destination?”

  He glanced at her, then back to the convoy. “There’s a missile launcher in the back of the flier, and enough ammunition to take out half the convoy.”

  “But they’d come after us. We can’t take the risk.”

  “Technically, Ella, we’re expendable.” He rolled onto his side and looked at her. “For the past month or so the Organisation’s been building up its forces in the higher Torreon mountains. They know there’s a ‘ship due—they had informants in the Disciples, before we eradicated them—but they don’t know when or exactly where. When the ‘ship phases in, it’ll be sending out an electro-magnetic pulse like a homing beacon. It’ll be becalmed for up to two hours while it’s serviced and made ready for the return flight. The Organisation’ll unleash all hell and more. We’re pretty deep, and they’d have to flatten the mountain, but they’ve got a lot of fire-power up here...” He looked down on the convoy. “What I’m trying to say is, if we can knock out a couple of launchers, then we’ve done the cause a hell of a lot of good. Even if we get zero’d in the process. Your father wouldn’t like it if he found out, but I think he’d understand.”

  Ella regarded the convoy as it climbed at a snail’s pace up the mountain road. She glanced at Kelly, aware of his dilemma. He was miles away, staring down at the enemy. He saw her looking and shook his head.

  “I’m sorry, Ella. But family reunions come second to the cause. I’m going to surprise the living Fernandez out of the jokers.”

  He ran back to the flier, opened the hatch in the rear and returned with a case of shells and the launcher on his shoulder. He lay down beside Ella, peering through an eye-piece and tapping co-ordinates into a keyboard on the shaft of the weapon.

  He glanced at Ella. “Open the case and take out a dozen missiles.”

  “Kelly... I want to get back to Earth in one piece.”

  He turned and peered at her. Instead of shouting, as she’d expected, he took her hand. “Hey, and so do I, girl. You don’t think I’m going to let the bastards get us, do you? But I’ve got to strike while I can. We knock out a few launchers here, we save lives later. Now open the case and slide the missiles into this chamber, okay?” He squeezed her fingers.

  She nervously unlatched the case and counted out twelve missiles. The thought of giving themselves away, of falling once more into the clutches of the greatest evil she had ever known, made her sick with fear.

  The missiles were tiny, like pepper-pots. She eased them into the launcher.

  Kelly saw her expression and laughed. “You wait till you see the damage they do.”

  She lay down beside him, peering over the edge. The column had advanced. She counted more than a hundred vehicles. Her palms were sweating at the very sight of the convoy.

  “Ready, Ella?” He touched the trigger.

  With surprisingly little noise, the first missile zipped from the launcher. There was a delay of ten seconds, and then the leading rocket launcher went up in a roiling bloom of flame like an incandescent rose. Delayed, the sound reached them a second later—a hollow crump and a shriek of torn metal like something mortal tortured. Kelly fired five more missiles.

  By this time, the militia were on the defensive. Anti-missile projectiles intercepted Kelly’s missiles, detonating them one by one in great bursts of flame. A rocket launcher loosed two long, finned missiles. Ella watched in horrified fascination as they speared towards where they lay—shooting overhead with a deafening roar and exploding in a shower of flame and debris against the mountain half a kilometre beyond.

  “Kelly!” she screamed. “Let’s get out of here!”

  Determined, Kelly fired the remaining six missiles. Five were intercepted, blinding Ella. When her sight returned, she saw a rocket launcher on its side down below, flame licking around its blackened carcass.

  “That’s it, girl. We’re gone.”

  They jumped aboard the flier and Kelly put the pinnacle between themselves and the convoy. They headed towards Mt Sebastian, a towering grey presence in the distance. Ella turned in her seat, stared at the western sky and the flaming hemisphere of the red giant. Against its brightness, any pursuing vehicles would show as tell-tale silhouettes. All she saw was the tiny, dark disc of an inner planet as it traversed the face of the giant primary.

  They passed higher into the mountains, flying up valleys and over peaks. Down below the ground was grey, desolate, with no sign of vegetation. In time they put other mountain peaks between themselves and the red giant, so that only its apex showed above the serried range like shark’s teeth. Soon, snow appeared on the flanks of the mountains alongside. The air grew chill, then icy.

  Ella had been thinking of her father for some time before she asked, “Kelly, when was the last time you saw my father?”

  The Engineman glanced at her. “About three weeks ago. Why?”

  “Was he okay? I mean, was he keeping well?”

  Kelly considered. “He was under quite a bit of strain. A lot depended on him and he was putting in long hours—but I’d say yes, he was keeping pretty well, considering.”

  She hugged herself against the cold. “Will he be aboard the smallship?”

  Kelly shook his head. “He’s co-ordinating things from Earth.” He smiled at her. “Don’t worry. It won’t be long now.”

  Kelly steered the flier under an overhang and into a lateral crevice hewn from the rock, and Ella experienced relief like the unburdening of a great weight. The crevice was shaded from the light of the sun, and illumination was provided by a flickering brand on the wall beside a rectangular opening let into the rock.

  Ella climbed from the flier, and then she saw it.

  The Lho-Dharvon appeared in the entrance, and the sight of it brought Ella up short. Years had elapsed since her last meeting with a Lho, and in her memory she had anthropomorphised them, allowed her feelings towards the aliens to colour her objectivity. She was surprised anew at how perilously thin the Lho were, how alien, almost insect-like.

  The Lho approached Kelly, touched him on his forehead with its middle finger, then did the same to Ella.

  “Hunter...” it breathed. “Welcome.”

  “Is the ‘ship here?” Kelly asked.

  “No ‘ship...” the Lho said. “Come.”

  It ushered them through the entrance in the rock and down a steep, tight flight of stairs. The steps were obviously made for longer Lhoan legs, high and narrow so that Ella jarred her spine as she followed Kelly and the alien. The passage was low—at times the Engineman had to stoop. For the most part it was excavated through solid rock, but occasionally it followed the course of fissures and natural crevices, and here the steps were even narrower and more precipitous. The way was lighted by flaming torches at long intervals, with stretches of half-light in between. They descended for more than an hour. As they plummeted and wound their way deeper into the mountain, the temperature increased. Ella sweated, feeling faint with the humidity and exertion.

  At last the stairway terminated and they came out in a wide corridor, clearly an original part of the ancient temple. The corridor too was illuminated by torches, but set at closer intervals to reveal panels carved into the stone depicting stick figures and symmetrical circle-within-circle symbols like mandalas. Ella had no time to give the panels anything but a passing glance. The alien hurried them along and she found herself jogging to keep up. The wonder she felt at being in the temple of the Lho, the sense of experiencing something alien and other, was tempered by exhaustion and the thought of the trip back to Earth.

  They turned left and climbed down another steep flight of stairs, this one corkscrewing through the rock until it gave onto a vast cathedral-like chamber. The far regions of the circular chamber were in darkness, but nearby was all light and activity. A generator droned, providing power for fluorescent lights and banks of computer terminals and screens. A dozen Enginemen and Enginewomen monitored the screens and pored over read-outs. Perha
ps fifty Lho waited—with all the forlorn apprehension of the refugees they were—to one side, crouching or sitting cross-legged on the floor. With them, Ella made out half a dozen aliens on stretchers.

  Kelly led Ella across to a rest area—a crude arrangement of old settees and foam-forms set out in a square. Enginemen slept or rested; others drank coffee or chatted among themselves. Kelly embraced a short, wiry Enginewoman in her fifties.

  “This is it, Kelly,” the woman said. “This is what we’ve been working towards...”

  For the next hour, Ella stretched out and rested on a foam-form, unable to sleep for the noise of the generator, the tense conversation of the assembled Disciples and the sense of anticipation bursting within her.