by Roger Levy
‘Halfjut,’ he said.
‘He’s ours. We know it.’
‘Yes, Alef. But he’s expensive. I think I’ll bring him in, after the vote.’
‘Why?’
‘There’s a matter I think he can help me with. Something personal. There’s a shipment for the Darwin. He can join them.’ He looked at me, waiting, his face bearing some new, unreadable expression, and I felt as if I had missed something vital and that the world was about to change.
I said nothing but felt myself trembling.
He said, ‘Don’t you want to know what I’m talking about?’
‘You said it was personal, Pellonhorc.’
I knew he meant that he was going to kill Halfjut, who was a corrupt and greedy man, but Halfjut was no different from so many others, so there was no great significance that I could see in this. Pellonhorc had always been a killer. As a child, dismembering animals had been as natural to him as eating. I had imagined that by performing necessary business operations, he was fully satisfying this urge. Now I was realising that it was the other way round, that his need to kill was paramount. And I remembered his killing of Madelene, the way he had put his tongue to the jet of her blood.
He said, ‘It is personal, yes. Do you know something?’
‘What?’
‘I couldn’t live without you, Alef.’
Was he just saying that the organisation wouldn’t work without me? That was probably true. I was horribly aware of the degree to which we were bound together and had always been. But why say this now? My head was spinning. Every time I thought I understood what we were talking about, I was wrong.
‘You’re the only one, Alef. I can’t talk to anyone else.’
‘Oh.’ I knew that intimacy was a threat to him, and I felt extraordinarily unsafe, as if I were being shown the smile before the knife.
‘Do you think about Gehenna, Alef?’
I thought perhaps the mood had changed, though I could never really trust my understanding of such things. I said, carefully, ‘Sometimes. It was a long time ago.’ I could see my answer wasn’t enough, so I added, ‘Do you mean your mother?’
He looked out of the window where the low sun had turned the bellies of the clouds to gold. ‘She’s in heaven,’ he answered.
For a moment I didn’t think I’d heard him properly.
He looked straight at me. ‘She’s with your mother. I don’t know about your father. What do you think?’
‘I – I don’t think about it.’ I had no idea what else to say.
‘Do you believe in hell, Alef?’
I was suddenly a child before Father Grace, knowing every answer was wrong and that the question was the prelude to a beating. My head swirled. The best thing was to say yes and suffer only merciful pain.
Pellonhorc repeated the question very softly. ‘I said, do you believe in hell, Alef?’ He put his lips together and made a small kissing sound.
I tensed, knowing I couldn’t lie to him. I had stood in that room and watched him interrogate people like this, the whispered question repeated and the small kiss. It had astonished me that, under no duress, they told him things that they clearly knew would mean their death. Now I felt it for myself.
‘No. I don’t.’
‘You can’t have heaven without hell, Alef,’ he said mildly.
I could hardly hear him. Everything was roaring.
‘You aren’t making sense, Alef. That isn’t like you.’
‘I need to sit down,’ I said.
He gestured to a chair and I slumped into it. My heart was thumping and I felt sick. I could see my death here.
I was conscious of his hand going to his pocket. I did my best to concentrate. He brought out his knife, the small red pocketknife he had had on Gehenna. He turned it over in his hand, the flat spine of the closed blade glinting. ‘What will happen, Alef?’
‘What do you mean?’ I couldn’t look away from the knife. In a moment he would open it. It was a ritual. The showing of the blade, the initial small cut on the right cheek.
‘When I die. What will happen to me?’
‘Nothing,’ I said, holding my voice as steady as I could, staring at the knife. ‘That’s it. The end.’
‘No. What we learnt on Gehenna. Father Grace. You remember that. I know you do.’
‘Stories, Pellonhorc. Death is like sleep, that’s all.’
The knife was still in the flat of his hand, unopened. ‘My father gave me this.’
‘Yes. You were so happy. I remember you opening the package.’
‘Of course you do.’ He closed his hand around the knife and stared out the window. The sun had dropped away and the clouds were lifeless. ‘He gave me it. My father.’ He took a long breath and turned back to me. ‘You can’t give anything back, Alef. You can’t ever.’ He squeezed his eyes closed. ‘Not blood. That’s for sure.’
‘Pellonhorc –’
‘It’s like sleep, you say?’ His face twisted in the force of emotion. ‘I have dreams. I don’t want those forever.’ He was opening his hand and closing it, over and over.
I said, ‘You only know the dreams when you wake up. In this sleep, there’s no waking. It will be all right. It isn’t like hypersomnia.’ I was trying to comfort him, and I was waiting for him to open the knife.
‘No,’ he said.
He turned his back on me again and stared at the window. Night was falling and the city lighting up, as if pixel by pixel. The upper atmosphere was strained out there, the air faintly bruised. It was mask weather. I watched his face reflected in the glass, as I had watched his father’s face there. He opened the knife and turned the blade over and over. The sky grew dark, his face in the window becoming clearer and clearer. Time passed.
I tried to say something but my throat was clogged. I couldn’t even swallow.
He held the knife out towards his own reflection in the window and made a sharp flicking movement, and then touched a finger to his cheek, brought it away and looked intently at it. He turned and held the finger out to me, saying, ‘See? Do you see, Alef?’
Not knowing what else to do, I nodded. The knife was still open, though his hand had dropped slackly to his side. I waited for him to speak again, but he said nothing more. He moved to his desk and sat down at it, put the knife aside and laid his head in his hands. After a while, his breathing became slow and even.
I sat motionless, sweat gathering under my arms, for a long time, and then I began to stand up. The chair made a small noise and I stopped, crouched midway between sitting and standing. Pellonhorc’s breathing coarsened, then settled again. I remained still until my back was aching. Pellonhorc didn’t move any more. Eventually I straightened and left.
Twenty-nine
RAZER
Bale said, ‘See him?’
Razer twisted her head and saw a man wearing the same black suit as Bale. As he side-scythed in their wake, she caught the burnished heelflash of the NTGs. Despite her suit, the wind suddenly seemed cold.
Bale said, ‘So?’
‘It isn’t like you think.’
‘How is it, then?’ Without letting her answer, he was gone in a blur of fins and a flicker of gold, and in his wake, shooting past her, was his gold-heeled double.
Before he slipped out of capture range, she snapped her suit to mimic and felt her fins fold down almost flush with the suit as she slammed forward in Millasco’s wake, the acceleration dizzying. Her suit wasn’t as good as theirs, though, and she started to fall behind Millasco, and the mimic program cut off as he was out of range and a moment later gone altogether. Bale too.
The Chute straightened out. She kept going fast and saw two gold pinpricks ahead, and then another pair, the two sets interweaving. She swore to herself. Bale would be convinced she was allied to Millasco. It wouldn’t strike him to consider that maybe Millasco was going to kill them both, that it would make sense to finish Bale first and then come back for the easier kill.
Stupid, stupid Bale.<
br />
They shot down a small tributary pipe to the left, cutting away so quickly that she almost failed to notice the jink, and even from back here and with time to set herself for it, she nearly missed the turn, thumping heavily off the wall and shaken badly.
There were flashes of fire between them, now. She thought it was the boots trailing light but it couldn’t be that; they had weapons.
So Bale had been quite sure of this, and had been right. She shouted to him but he was well out of comms range, and which one was he, anyway?
The pipe was narrowing and she switched the suit to auto, settling into the node and concentrating on the riders ahead. Her arm was starting to stiffen and ache. She must have hit that wall really hard. She felt stupid for shouting, as if shouting would override the commstech.
She still couldn’t tell which was Bale. There was a great round of solid dark ahead, and the wind was slowing. The Chute must be opening out. Ahead of her, the two riders parted left and right towards opposite walls, still firing at each other. And then it was just one of them firing.
She closed in on them, but couldn’t tell which was which. Then, to the left, she saw a line rip wide and thought it was Bale. She pulled in her fins and headed for him. A tube along his upper arm flicked out and she glimpsed the small black o of a weapon settling on her. She slammed away, the lineburst of light barely missing her hip.
Not Bale. She started to head for the other rider and yelled at him, ‘It’s all right. I’m with you!’
‘That’s good to know,’ came back to her through the comms, only it wasn’t Bale’s heavy drawl.
She fell back. Bale had been firing at her.
What was happening? Maybe Bale had just been warning her away.
For a moment, she imagined she could tell them apart, but they crossed and she lost any certainty.
There was a long curve ahead. One of them threw out a line and took to the inner wall, tumbling through a skim of scree and straightening again, holding close to the wall, while the other held to the centre of the pipe and pulsed light at him. The scree degraded the beam to brilliant embers.
The curve was tightening and Razer went wide, using her ankle fins to cut her speed and letting out a line to drag her further back. This was dangerous. She felt her chest pump against the pressurised suit. She’d left the manoeuvre late and was barely slowing. The inside rider was a shuddering blur accelerating away from the midliner, who was still gaining distance from Razer.
The insider had already vanished beyond the curve.
Darkspeed, Razer thought, and whispered to herself, ‘No.’ She cut the line and finned desperately, trying to keep up with the midliner.
The curve seemed to take forever. She straightened out of it and saw Bale – it had to be Bale – way ahead of the midliner and rocketing into the straight. She remembered what he’d told her about darkspeed and death. She could see it happening. His exitline was a few degrees out. He was headed for the wall. She screamed, pointlessly, ‘Bale!’ as the midline rider released a steady coil of fire towards him.
Against the wind, the looping cord of fire gained slowly on Bale. He wasn’t correcting his line, was heading straight, neither finning away from the wall nor cutting clear of the approaching stream of pulser fire.
He’d darkspeeded and jumped the edge, lost consciousness. He was going to die.
She screamed again, ‘Bale!’ as he and the whipping string of light hit the wall at the same time, and he was gone in a brilliant explosion of debris and fire.
The midliner shot past the rushing bloom of rubble and swung round, threw out a handful of lines and finned, it seemed, almost to a halt, though the walls were sweeping past them both.
He was waiting for her. Ahead of them, the tumbling detritus was losing coherence. Streaks of fire sparked and died within it.
Bale, she suddenly thought, sure and unsure of it. This was Bale.
She drifted close to him, desperately calling his name. Bale had to be alive. She couldn’t lose him. ‘Bale, it’s okay. I’m with you. I need to tell you something.’
No answer. She had to be closer for the comms to cut in.
He was finning against the current, making it look effortless. She was suddenly unsure. Was that Bale’s suit? The wind blurred its detail. The only sharpness was the twin flicker of gold.
She said, ‘I need to say something about that night, but I am with you, Bale.’
The comms hissed contact. ‘Not yet, you aren’t.’
‘Millasco,’ she whispered.
Beyond him, the splintered rock had all but vanished in the flow, and there was just a fog of powder. She and Millasco hurtled past it.
Razer threw all her lines to her right and finned away from him, turning hard enough to feel faint. Millasco’s pulse of light skimmed past her suit. Bale had drummed into her that it only had to pinprick the flysuit for the wind to open the whole thing up. If that happened she was dead faster than darkspeed.
Millasco swung into her wake. She spun and twisted, watching lightpulses slash the wind torrent around her, but couldn’t shake him. He was close enough for her to hear his breathing through the comms as he settled his aim.
And then over the comms she heard someone say, ‘On your tail, Millasco.’
Not a shadow, but another rider, sweeping away from the dispersing wash of powder along the wall. And like a fairytale prince, there was gold on his boots.
‘Bale,’ she yelled.
His voice came back, ‘Now we believe each other, yes?’
She screamed, ‘Yes, Bale.’
Millasco was finning round, and Razer realised Bale couldn’t shoot him for fear of hitting her. But she could see that if Bale didn’t go for the kill now, Millasco would have a free shot at him.
‘Bale! Shoot!’
Bale held off, cutting across to find an angle at Millasco that wouldn’t risk her, but Millasco moved with him, using Razer as a backshield while steadying his arm. He was ignoring her otherwise, assuming she was no threat.
We’ll see about that, she thought, and locked her mimic onto Millasco, knowing he wouldn’t expect that. His arm shook as he compensated for the faint judder as the lock fixed, and he whispered, ‘Clever, but that just keeps you where I want you.’
‘Bale,’ she yelled. ‘Move now.’
But he didn’t. She could save them both, though. She knew it. She raised her cutter, setting it at Millasco’s gun arm.
Millasco was too fast, firing at Bale before she could release her line. She steadied it again, and released it.
Other than the rush of air, there was no sound as Bale’s chest came open. In an instant, his body seemed to expand out of the suit and disintegrate in a puff of blood and flesh. And then there were just two golden beads, falling away and gone.
She realised that Bale had sacrificed himself to set Millasco up for her, but Millasco was already turning, aiming his own streamer to neutralise her released cutter line.
She jerked away, still mimicked to him, and the faint tug was enough to disturb his streamer’s path, which missed her line. Millasco swore as it coiled round his wrist. He began to spin.
Yes, she thought. She felt herself going with him, and nilled the mimic control to let him tumble away on the end of her line.
He was still with her. ‘Not so easy,’ he grunted.
Unless she released her cutter line, she had no chance against him. But that would free his gun arm.
She had no choice. She cut the line loose.
Millasco began to work the head of his weapon through the turbulence towards her. She was close enough to see his expression through his visor. Indigo eyes and a thin smile. In the corner of her vision she could see the gun swinging towards her, the obtuse angle of the barrel moving towards the acute, approaching zero.
‘That’s it,’ Millasco said. ‘Nowhere to go.’
It seemed so very slow. The gun was almost there. His arm was straight, hardly wavering in the airstorm.
‘No,’ she said, and let everything go at him, a blizzard of every remaining cutter and streamer.
And then she did the one thing he wouldn’t anticipate. She finned straight for him.
Millasco flailed as she swung her gauntlets at his face, his gunstock thumping her visor. He got a grip at her waist and kicked at her, but his thin NTGs were ineffectual.
Then she felt his hand fumbling at the emergency valve closure of her flysuit.
She felt herself yanked so hard the breath went out of her.
‘One,’ Millasco whispered.
She immediately knew what he meant. It would take three pulls to release the suit. He’d just primed the safety release. She tried to push him away, but his grip was relentless. A cloud of dusty scree rolled slowly past. She had a sense of intolerable speed, and at the same time, absolute stillness.
She pulled up her arm and backhanded Millasco. His head jerked and he flinched momentarily, then he grinned and steadied himself. The scree was gone. ‘Sure. Slap me. Give me something to remember you by.’ He jerked the valve at her waist once more. This time she felt something yield.
‘Two,’ he said. ‘Safety’s gone. Say goodbye.’
She swung her arm round hard again, putting her shoulder into the blow and this time flicking out the damaged wristfin.
Millasco couldn’t see the fin’s serrated edge. Razer felt his hand confirm its grip on the valve.
They were tumbling together in the node of a pipe, over and over like crazy lovers. Razer grunted, all her strength focused as the wristfin smashed into Millasco’s visor and slid down it. Nothing happened. The visor was too hard. The momentum of the blow took her forearm across the helmet’s slick metalled cheekplate and carried it on down his chin, the fin failing to penetrate any part of the helmet.
His hands were braced. He said, ‘Th –’
Almost without her realising it, her wrist slipped further until the fin hit the suit’s throat cuff, and sliced through it and into the side of his neck.
Millasco froze. His eyes widened. The pressure on Razer’s waist vanished.
She kept her position for a moment, the pressure of her wrist the only thing that held Millasco together. In his wide eyes she could see his perfect understanding. The pipe whirled madly around them.