by Iain Banks
The three men fell in a heap into the bows, gun still firing, then cutting off.
The flare had been hit.
The holed parachute sank through the air, ripped and fluttering. The white blaze of the magnesium charge plummeted to the brown surface of the lake.
They stopped, again. Frozen by the impending heat, like a photograph; three crumpled in the boat, in the act of scrabbling back up again; the one in the oil on the water like a dirty brown sculpture, one arm raised. All looking at the flare. The flare sank, diving; met the oil and disappeared. The tattered remnants of the parachute flopped into the greasy surface as the oil ignited.
She stood and watched.
The fire spread at a fast walk, blossoming outwards from the point of its birth in an ever-widening circle like a slow ripple on that thick brown tide. The flames were yellow and orange and red, the smoke dense and black.
One soldier went back to the outboard, stabbing at it again. The man in the lake did what looked like butterfly strokes towards the stern of the boat. One just looked at the spreading field of flame, the fourth one took up an oar again, screamed at the man still standing and looking, and with one foot kicked guns and missile launchers out of the bottom of the Gemini, sending them bouncing over the side, sliding into the brown surface without a splash.
She ran a hand through her hair, thinking how greasy it had become.
The boiling mass of yellow rolling flame expanded, smoke cutting off the view of the nearest island. The thick black billows rolled as high as the tanker's bridge, then its masts. The man in the lake reached, found one conical end of the inflatable's double stern; slipped off.
They were probably still yelling and shouting, but the noise of the blaze was starting to take over; roaring. Gradually, gradually increasing in volume.
The smoke was way above.
She took up the flare pistol, leant over the side, and fired directly down, the pistol jumping in her hand.
The flare burst upon the water to the stern of the canted pontoon, bursting fire around the impact point.
The smoke was starting to blank out the horizon, while the fire ate up the distance between it and the black Gemini. The man in the water reached between the stern hulls of the craft, grabbing at the outboard engine just as it fired. He was flicked round, oil splashing brown metres into the air; if he made a noise, she didn't hear it.
The outboard died; the man in the water floated broken behind the boat while the soldier at the Gemini's stern stabbed again at the engine casing and the other two rowed, trying to angle the boat away from the flames. But the fire was sweeping quickly round and past them, closing in on their bows, and the secondary wave-front was heading out towards the Gemini from the ship itself, sending billows of acrid, stinging black smoke up in front of her, blanking out the view.
She walked towards the stern of the lifeboat deck, to see.
When the fire was almost on them, one of the rowers took a pistol from his belt and put it in his mouth; his head jerked back and he flopped over the bows of the inflatable just as the flames got there.
The smoke swam up in front of her, hiding them. It was hot and windy now, even up where she was, and fire was almost all she could see.
She went back along the deck, ducking through the black clouds of smoke to the bridge.
Philippe's cabin; nothing.
The store where they usually left the gear; nothing.
Sweating, running and clattering down companionways in a daze, she burst into the engine room, through it to the engineering workshop.
Am I praying? she thought. No, I'm not, she decided.
The workshop.
There.
She hefted the gear. Full tank.
By the time she got out on to the starboard deck, the fire was closing round under the stern of Le Cercle, swinging in like a bright wave of cavalry wheeling for the final attack. She buckled in, checked her valves and gauges.
Glanced down. It was a long drop.
She looked up at what there was of the still unsullied sky, waited for her life to pass before her and decided that could wait, then climbed up and over the rail.
She hung there for a moment, gazing down at the flat shadow surface of the oil-carpeted lake. She put the mask over her eyes and nose, and held it there.
Ah, what the hell, she thought, and let go.
She dropped, crouched, foetal. She heard the wind whistle, increasing. The impact slammed her, made her think she'd somehow dropped off the wrong side and hit something solid; the pontoon; a boat; rock. The mouthpiece burst from her as her breath flew out. She was suddenly nowhere, struggling and bereft and windless, flailing for the metal and the rubber, surrounded by coolness and pressure going tic tic tic.
She righted, flapped round, found the mouthpiece and rammed it in, sucked and spat, sucked again and found air; opened her eyes. The mask was still there, but the view was black.
Well, what else?
Tic tic tic. She sank, gathering herself
Light from one side, slowly spreading. She drew on the air in the mouthpiece, then realised this was not her first breath. She calmed, swallowed a little water, tasting oil but finding clean sweet air after it. She was still sinking, so swam up a little, found a level, and stroked out, wishing for flippers.
The light spread over her. She kept her level by the clicking noises in her skull, unable to see the surface apart from the dimly burning orange light above, and without a torch to inspect the depth gauge. The current of air from the cylinders on her back was strong and sure, and the water coursed past, slower than with flippers but there… and the fire above covered the surface of the lake.
She waited for whatever had been wrong with the gear when Philippe had last used it to reassert itself, to stop and choke her — ha ha; not just a faulty needle after all; take that — but it didn't happen. The fire glowed overhead and she swam beneath it. She even rolled over at one point, and saw the burning oil above, and could have laughed.
Near to the edge where the ordinary light of day filtered down like a great gauzy curved curtain sheltering some vast and unseen stage Hisako Onoda looked back, and saw the blind spot, the black hole; the eye of the storm at the heart of the universe.
The fire was complete; it had covered all there was within its scope to cover (the water pulsed around her, and she guessed a tank on Le Cercle had blown, or some of the armaments still left on the husk of the soldiers' Gemini had exploded), and when the encircling arms of the blaze had joined, and the whole brown coin of oil was alight, there was no airspace left in or near its centre to feed any fire there, and all there was was the oxygen at the limit of the slick, round the circumference… so of course only the fringes burned; only the edge of the great circle could combust into the clear, isthmian air of Panama; a kilometre-wide ring of fire, enfolding and enclosing a dark and lifeless heart.
Hisako Onoda watched for a moment, then turned away, and swam on towards the distant falls of light, beneath a burning sky.
END
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