I looked farther into the mist, and realized that all of the other larger shapes bulking between the trees were also vehicles of one kind or another. A couple of hospi-Vans, a few of the small armored motorcycles that the villagers had found so easy to destroy, and maybe three more jeeps in various states of repair. I pulled at a hospiVan’s back doors, and they opened with a rusty squeal that seemed grotesquely loud in the silence. Rotting pieces of medical equipment lay broken and abandoned in the dark and musty interior. They hadn’t been able to use telesurgery in the Gap war, because the signals couldn’t make it across the divide, and so the banks of remote surgeons used in normal wars hadn’t been available to us. We’d had to make do with the hospiVans, staffed with terrified medics who were all at least as Rapt as we were and driven to vomiting panic at the sight of blood. I could almost hear the screams of the men who’d lain in the van, trembling and crying as people leaned over them with shaking hands.
None of the vehicles looked remotely functional, but that wasn’t the point. Someone had been traveling around The Gap collecting this stuff and bringing it here.
It was a memorial, a silent monument dedicated to a war which should never have happened.
The boy joined me, followed by the rest of the children. From the way they stood I understood that we had not yet found what I had been brought to see.
About two hundred yards farther on, the boy stopped again, and glanced up at me, expectant. I couldn’t tell what I was supposed to be looking at. One of the little girls broke from the group and walked steadily until she was standing about ten yards in front. She pointed ahead, then returned.
None of the other children seemed able or willing to clarify the matter further. I walked forward alone, peering in the direction she’d indicated. At first I could see nothing except the huge trunks of trees, and then my breath caught in my throat and I knew what I had been brought here to see.
It was a gunship, resting on its side between two of the larger trees and looming out of the blue mist as if lit from behind. I walked toward it, mouth open, wondering how the hell the children had brought it there. I didn’t know why, but I was sure they had, just as I now understood it had been the children who had collected all of the other debris.
The few gunships that were employed in The Gap were of a very unusual design. Because of the omnipresent trees, they were built rather like a flying wing tilted on its side. The nearest comparison lean think of is of a giant angelfish; a shallow triangle bulging out to ten feet in width near the front, but narrowing to virtual two-dimensionality at the nose and along the other edges. Observation windows on either side of the cockpit enhanced this impression, looking like a pair of eyes. The windows were there for little more than cosmetic reasons, because flying the gunships through The Gap had been far too difficult for anything other than high-powered warDroids, which didn’t need windows to see out of. It was about ten meters tall and painted a dark olive green, with insignia stamped large and black on both sides.
And it didn’t look damaged at all.
The children stood in ranks behind me. There was no sign of what they were expecting me to do, so I just did what occurred to me. I climbed the ladder bolted onto the lower wing of the gunship and tugged at the entrance hatch at the top. It opened silently.
I looked down, hoping for some reassurance, but the children had disappeared.
I felt bereft, as if abandoned by everyone I knew, but this must be why they had summoned me. They would only have left because their job was done. I knew next to nothing about gunships, having only set foot in one once to haul out a drunken officer whose so-called expertise was required. He’d tried to bribe me by saying he could get me sideslipped out of The Gap. I threw him out of the ship.
I pulled the hatch wide and climbed inside. The door opened onto a narrow corridor which ran the walk-able length of the craft. To my right it gave almost immediately onto a rounded area slightly smaller than eight feet square. The interior walls were of heavily riveted metal, and stepping into the control area felt like climbing into a kettle which had been left on a hillside for a long time.
The glass in one of the observation windows at the front was broken, but aside from that the bridge seemed miraculously unharmed. Perhaps the gunship had never seen combat, or at least not been shot down. At the front of the open area was an array of computer equipment and monitors, sparsely covered with leaves. Before doing anything else I carefully picked the leaves up and dropped them back out the window. They hadn’t looked as if they were going to do anything, but you can never tell. They’re unpredictable bastards, leaves. The bulk of the floor space was taken up by two rows of three seats, with a little more perching space arranged around the sides. The back wall of the cabin was covered with maps and order sheets—we had to rely upon old-fashioned paper a great deal in The Gap, because computer results were unreliable. The computers that ran the gunships had to be furnished with absolutely enormous power, most of which was burnt up in error checking.
I felt almost nostalgic. Every piece of paper tacked there had the war’s logo printed in the top right corner. It had been a long time since I’d seen that little design. It brought back so many botched orders and flawed commands, each rewritten by the war’s Marketing Department so many times that by the end they didn’t really mean anything. What fun the Generals must have had, sitting back in the real world and directing frightened grunts at one remove. It had been the first chance they’d had in quite a while. Once people had started suing each other for bodily harm and property damage during armed conflict, governments had avoided wars wherever possible. They were just too damned expensive, degenerating into a thousand pitched battles in courtrooms. Often soldiers couldn’t turn up for important offensives because they were giving evidence in court or consulting with their press agents. The whole thing just became unmanageable.
Not so the war in The Gap. The villagers weren’t interested in litigation; they were interested in annihilating the race which had invaded their territory. It was a war out of the old school, and the Generals didn’t even have to provide body bags, because when soldiers died their bodies just disappeared. I lost so many friends, and after they died I had about two minutes to remember them before they vanished, absorbed into the fabric of The Gap.
Eventually, I went and sat at the pilot’s seat. Okay, so I’d found an old gunship. What now?
The children had brought me here for a purpose, but I couldn’t imagine what it might be. I couldn’t fly this thing, didn’t even know where to start. The control panel looked as if it had been stripped at the end of the war. This machine was dead. The most use it would be to me was somewhere to cower when I ran out of Rapt.
Running my eyes over the grimy controls, I noticed an area where something had clearly been taken. A panel marked “IQ” lay open, revealing a small space inside. In the middle was an indentation, about four centimeters by two, with rows of tiny contacts along the edges. They still seemed to be intact, for what difference that made.
A breeze blew in through the window then, and I glanced outside. The mist was still glowering around the trees, but all was quiet. This was the longest period of relative calm I’d ever experienced in The Gap. Maybe things were different now, or perhaps the Rapt was still working. It didn’t feel like it. I felt tired and very nauseous—the familiar Rapt comedown. It was probably time to shoot up again, before anything happened, but I couldn’t face it just yet. There’s such a thing as too much fun. I lit a cigarette instead, thinking that actually there was nothing in the world I wanted so much as a cup of coffee.
I was trying to avoid thinking about Suej, and Nearly, and Vinaldi, and the spares, to find something to occupy my brain while I waited for my subconscious to come up with some probably unworkable plan. Perhaps that’s why it fastened so securely on the idea of coffee, on the notion that if I could just have a cup, my mind would clear and I’d be able to think of something.
Coffee. Just give me a cup of coffe
e! I could smell it, taste the welcome bitterness at the back of my tongue.
Coffee, I thought. Coffee. Then—
Ratchet.
In the pocket of my jacket was an object I’d trekked about for the last few days without remembering it, which was something to do with a computer, but wasn’t RAM. I pulled it out.
As I ran my fingers over it I realized that the chip Ratchet had slipped into my bag sometime during the last minutes at the Farm was about the right size to fit in the slot in the “IQ” panel. Maybe the number “128” printed on it was a code designation, or even a serial number, rather than a unit of measurement. And perhaps the “IQ” referred to intelligence, or the central processing unit.
I put the chip on the desk and frowned at it for a while. Then I reached forward and gently slotted it into the socket, with the number facing up. It fitted perfectly.
Nothing happened. I waited for five minutes, finishing my cigarette, feeling slightly foolish. Of course the chip had nothing to do with a gunship. How could it? Which left me still sitting in a piece of archaeology, with no idea what to do and with time running on and on. I ground the cigarette butt out on the floor with my boot, abruptly deciding to just get out, shoot up, and go running into the forest like some chicken gone berserk.
“Initial checking procedure completed,” said a voice, scaring the living shit out of me. I glared wildly round the cabin to see who’d spoken. There was no one to be seen, but a small camera in one of the top corners suddenly swiveled its beady eye toward me, and lights came on across the whole control panel.
Then the voice spoke again.
“Hello, jack,” it said.
My brain tried to crawl out of my ears.
“Fuck!” I said, when I could breathe again. “How do you know my name?”
“It’s Ratchet, Jack,” the voice said calmly.
“Ratchet,” I said, as my brain had another crack at escaping, presumably in a bid to find somewhere more explicable to live. I considered jamming my fingers in my ears, to firmly block that route, but then realized I wouldn’t be able to hear anything.
“Yes. It’s good to see you. I gather we’re in The Gap.” With a quiet whirring sound the camera zoomed in on my face. “Your pupils are pinned. Have you been taking Rapt again?”
“Fuck that,” I said. “Screw what I’ve been up to. What are you doing here?”
“I don’t know,” said Ratchet. “I assume you brought me.”’
“Well,” I said, “yes, I did. But how did you get in my bag? You were still at the Farm when I left.”
“I was running on a back-up processor. When it became obvious that the events at the Farm were unlikely to have a uniformly positive conclusion, I put my main CPU somewhere safe, so you were likely to take it with you.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t want to die,” he said, simply. “Also, I hoped I might come in useful someday. Why are you in The Gap?”
“Oh, Christ,” I said. “It’s kind of a long story. But how come you can run this gunship?”
“That’s what I was built for in the first place. Not this ship, but another like it. At the end of the war the CPU’s were salvaged. Arlond Maxen bought up a job lot of them. I ended up on the Farm.”
“You were a warDroid?”
“Yes. I was.”
I stared at the camera, mind whirling, picturing war-scarred computers running traffic control and electronic toasters all over the country. It could explain a lot. “Why didn’t you tell me? You knew I’d been a Bright Eyes. Why didn’t you tell me you were here?”
“You didn’t ask—and I wouldn’t have told you anyway. The last thing you needed at the time was to remember the war. It wasn’t relevant.”
“Jesus,” I said. “That’s why you were so stupidly powerful. That’s why you were so weird”
“What—compared to you?” Ratchet asked, and I suddenly realized just how much I’d missed him.
Then I remembered the overall position, my global world view at that time, and the mood transformed into panic.
“Look,” I said. “Weird or not, we need your help.”
It took only a few minutes to give Ratchet the bones of the situation. During that time I heard distant rattlings and whirrings as the computer ran checks on the gunship’s propulsion systems and collision detectors. He also tried to make some coffee in the ship’s minuscule galley, but the grounds were moldy and rotten so I made do with a cup of hot water instead. There didn’t seem to be any provision for the manufacture of cheeseburgers, unfortunately.
“I have no way of finding these people,” Ratchet said eventually. “By the sound of it they could be anywhere, and you don’t know how you came to be here.”
“Shit,” I said. I waved my hands vaguely. “Can’t we just, I don’t know, troll around until we find them?”
“The Gap is infinite, Jack, because the gaps between people are always unbridgeably wide. Searching an infinite space would take—”
“An awfully long time. I understand. Hang on—can you trace Positionex signals?”
“Yes. Not from the satellite, because it isn’t in The Gap, but I can lock onto the impulses from the unit. Why?”
“Ghuaji may still have the Positionex on him,” I said. “Let’s go.”
I strapped myself hurriedly into the pilot’s seat. As the engines thrummed into life I considered whether now might be a good time for taking some Rapt, but in a tiny, tired reprise of what I’d felt so many years ago, I decided I was going to do this one straight.
The hum of the engines climbed and then sank again, as the systems settled into flying mode. And then, like a sleepy movement of the Earth, the ship righted itself, and lifted off the ground.
I have to admit that I whooped. It had been a while. I enjoyed it.
I watched out of the window until the gunship was hovering about ten feet off the ground—standard flying height. One of the control panel monitors winked on, showing a blue dot in the middle of a schematic map of trees shown in cross-section.
“Found it,” Ratchet said. “It’s about four miles.”
“Full speed ahead,” I said, savoring the moment. “And don’t spare the ammo when we find him.”
The ship shifted unsteadily, then seemed to get into its stride. It slipped into a small clearing, then turned on its vertical axis until it was facing back the way I’d come.
“Okay,” said Ratchet. “I’m going to have to concentrate for a while. Catch you later.”
We started moving again, at first slowly, then faster and faster until the trees were slipping past the window like brown ghosts running the other way. There was barely any sound apart from the wind, and the cabin was eerily quiet. I held on tightly to my seat, trying to avoid being slung from side to side as the ship dodged and wove. I’d seen one of the gunships flying past once, and marveled at the way the computers steered through the trunks like an enormous fish darting through seaweed.
I’d also seen one crash, so when we reached maximum velocity I just shut my eyes.
Not being able to see was even more nerve-racking, so in the end I opened them again, and watched white-knuckled as the ship sped closer and closer to the position indicated by the flashing light on the monitor. At one point we swam through a few hundred yards of The Fear, but we were back out the other side before I’d had time to reach for the needle and undo my resolution.
After a couple of miles the light outside changed. The pure blue turned muddy, and I began to get worried. My suspicions were confirmed when I felt a sudden twinge at the bottom of my eyes, like a scalpel being slipped under the lids.
“Oh shit,” I said. “Ratchet, how far away are we?”
“About half a mile,” the computer replied tersely. “Why? You want to go to the bathroom?”
“Vinaldi doesn’t have the Bright Eyes anymore.” Out of the window on my side I saw brown tendrils of luminescence interlaced in the spaces between the trees. People had thought they were thin branch
es or shoots of some kind, until soldiers had been attacked by them and gone staggering off with twigs of light sticking out of their burning eyes. Unless Vinaldi was inside somewhere he was in big trouble—as were Suej, Nearly, and the rest of the spares, assuming they were here at all. “We’ve got to hurry”
“We’re approaching the source of the signal now,” Ratchet said, and I could sense the ship tensing itself around me. “Brace yourself.”
I was already about as braced as I could get, and so I just stared out of the window, searching for some sign of Ghuaji and the others in the murky light. The gunship decelerated rapidly, flicking between the trees with a piscine grace, homing in on the Positionex signal. I pulled my gun out, checked the cartridge. There was a limit to what I could do with it, because if Yhandim and Ghuaji—and anyone else they had with them—really had been taken up into The Gap, then they would have in effect become villagers, and it would need a lot more than a standard bullet to take them down. It would take a pulse rifle, of the kind which was arrayed on either side of the gunship’s midsection. I’d never really understood how the pulse rifles worked, except that someone had once told me that the energy was the same as that generated in an engine propulsion system. It didn’t really matter, as long as they did their job. The gun in my hand was just there to make me feel better. It worked—a little. A Jack Daniels would probably have been just as effective.
The web of brown energy outside the window meant visible light might be untrustworthy, so I concentrated on the monitor tracking the Positionex signal, drumming my fingers on the screen. The indicator light was close now, very close. Ratchet slowed the ship to little more than five miles an hour, and I watched the crosshairs on the monitor bisect the signal.
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