"Ye kill the world. Ye kill our children. Damn ye to hell."
The survival of the English language was one of the notable surprises, but I wasn't thinking about that because the man sighed, closed his eyes and died. Melanee lowered him to lie back on the ground and stood, looking rather stricken. "He remember." She whispered.
He couldn't have, he was a hundred generations after the event but clearly someone passed down the memory from father to son. This was no savage, this was a well-informed man who knew what had been done to his race and he hated us for it - and he was right.
Mary gazed down at the body but started when I heaved Mike up into the fireman's lift, accompanied by a loud groan. The wounds in his chest were taking much of his weight as he slumped over my shoulder but there was no other way to carry him. Mary led off, slithering down the steep slope with no very sure balance. The blood from her hair had trickled down her face and dried there, giving her a dramatic look. Melanee, inexpertly clasping my rifle with Mike's slung over her shoulder, clattered behind me. The further down we went the thicker the forest became and the rougher the ground got. Twice I lost footing and collapsed onto my knees, stopping Mike from departing with an effort that took more out of me than I liked. Melanee helped to heave me up but Mary was having trouble, her face white with beads of sweat on her forehead.
It took us three hours and I had to stop every fifty yards or so by the time we arrived back at the car. Remembering just in time to tell the security monitor not to fire the main guns at us we sank down on the shore of the loch while I offered up a silent prayer of thanks that no more locals had decided to interfere because sure as hell that would have been the end of us. Getting him on board was almost the last effort I could manage but the hatch sighed down as darkness arrived in my head. There were dreams, dreams of eyes that hated us.
Chapter 21
DOWN SOUTH
Mike's leg wound was bad. The chest wounds hadn't gone in more than half an inch or so, painful and very messy but none of them had penetrated the ribs, thanks to his jacket which must have been rhinoceros hide and damned nearly bullet proof. He protested loudly against my first aid ministrations, proof to my mind that he was on the mend, but Melanee shushed him in the intervals of seeing to Mary who had subsided into a white-faced heap.
Unfortunately, we had no diagnosis program in our all-seeing computer so we had no means of finding out just what was wrong with her. The head wound didn't seem too awful but she was drowsy and listless. Melanee looked at me but I'm no doctor so we just tucked her up in the spare seating and left her. Concussion, I thought, calming Mike down. His upper thigh had a deep incision which wouldn't stop bleeding and there was nothing we could do but put a pressure pad over the wound, make him comfortable with his feet up.
All that night Melanee and I hovered over them. Mary sank into a deep sleep at last, breathing easily, the blood from her head wound drying on her face, looking alarming. It seemed she was on the road to recovery, physically at least. Mentally was a different matter but Melanee glared at me and radiated some kind of superior female confidence. As for Mike, the bleeding stopped finally. I gave them both shots from the store of anti-biotics Marie had supplied us with when we started on this ill-starred expedition. I hoped they did something good, feeling deeply skeptical about ten-thousand-year-old anti-tetanus.
The short night had gone, the faint glow of a coming day creping over the mountains before Melanee and I could relax. The casualties were both asleep, Mike stuffed full of drugs, his leg elevated, Mary still slumped in the deep coma like sleep. Melanee peered at me, looking strained in the faint pink light from the coming dawn and near to panic, nearer to losing her new found all conquering superior persona than I liked. She kept gazing nervously at me, glancing out of the forward screens frequently, no doubt expecting to see hordes of vengeful latter day Scots. The tiredness and tension prevented me from working out what she was worrying about until she told me.
I was a killer, still am I suppose, it was why they picked me for that furtive and inglorious role on the ship to Centauri, and Melanee had seen me at work the day before. Of course, I'd retired several other inhabitants of this odd world in her presence previously so she knew what I was like, but yesterday I had clicked into the machine like routine the special boys had drummed into me and eight men had died in the space of half a minute. She was sitting there, her hair a tangle, her shirt sweat stained, her face pale and her hands shaking, staring at me with an expression on her face which I remembered from Linda when she first discovered who I was.
I couldn't help her. She had to come to terms with it, to know me as I am, know that I can't change, just as most people can't. It's a mistake to think that anyone can change their inner spots, leopards into lambs, you can't. You can be astounded to find people who seemed frightened to say boo to the proverbial goose turn into efficient and suicidally brave men or women under stress but that only means that their inner spots were there all the time, you just couldn't see them. My spots were on display and it was getting to her. The question was, what were her spots like? She had belted that guy round the head without a second thought, so she was no pacifist mutant. I watched as that splendid brain of hers slowly regained control over emotion. I'm not a man who takes to turning the other cheek, not a candidate for the Beatitudes, but I have other qualities, loyalty for example plus a strong and maybe illogical feeling of right and wrong, seeing the world in black and white, a tendency that my commanding officer had warned me about several thousand years ago. Bad guys get their comeuppance, the man in the white hat always wins, that's my view and to hell with expediency, political or otherwise. There are no shades of grey.
"Your world, the world you thought you were coming back to, it must have been..." she frowned and tried to pick a word to fit her feelings. "A place of dread. Yes? Dread, fear of others, fear of not mm succeeding? Everyone watching all others to find weakness, watching to try and get better than others. And the millions you tell me, millions who watched other millions, waited for them to make mistake and then...?" Her dark eyes asked for an explanation for human evolution into killer apes that I didn't have.
"Complicated." I agreed, waiting for her decision.
The lines on her brow deepened as she absorbed the unfamiliar word. "And you are like the people of your world." She added, sadly it seemed.
"Oh no." I disagreed. "Most of them were like Mike and Mary. They don't kill unless they have to, they want to find things out, they want to have kids, friends. Maybe they want to be famous," her frown appeared again at the concept of newspaper headlines. "But mostly they would buy you a drink or tell you the latest joke." I leaned back in the pilot's seat and let weariness creep over me. "They're not like me or maybe I should say I'm not like them." I stared at the cold light spreading over the woods, yellow beams filtering through trees. "Sometimes, I wish I was." I whispered, telling myself what I already knew.
I woke hours later to find myself laid out with my feet on the co-pilot's seat with most of Melanee's spare clothing over me and Mary standing close, leaning to see out of the screen. She looked down and smiled a sorry smile, a sad copy of her usual cheerful grins.
"Quiet." She muttered. "Melanee's asleep and so is Mike."
Sitting up and removing my feet from the seat I waved her to sit. "How's the head?" I enquired softly.
"Need an aspirin but OK." She murmured. "What do we do? I've been running through all that survey we made and it's depressing. There's hardly any human population below the fortieth parallel and in the south there's just a few above the thirtieth."
"Nothing in the tropics?" It certainly seemed odd. "Why?"
She shrugged. "The ship doesn't know but it thinks disease."
"Disease? What disease? Some kind of epidemic?"
She shook her head slowly. "No, David, not that. When it happened we had a clinical world, you remember? No smallpox, only tiny areas for malaria, no cholera, no typhoid, the list is long. But suddenly, all
our bio controls stop working and the population that survived, they had no resistance to malaria say and it would have spread."
The picture she was painting formed in my head. A panic stricken and devastated sprinkle of survivors with no protection and nature had jumped in to fill the gap. "Wait a bit, what about those pills? They're supposed to give disease immunity, yes?"
She nodded. "They do, but how long do you think it took for this obscene balance to become fact? A hundred years? Two hundred? By then it was too late for most of the tropics. The people there, they had no natural resistance like their ancestors. Then, you see, people died, yes, but most didn't because natural immunity was in the population. Not anymore."
It was a bleak and depressing vista. The vulnerable apes had been too clever and now they were paying. "We've got to get into that complex." I muttered.
"And do what?" She stared at me, cold eyed. "Kill all those unborn children? That seems to be your panacea for all ills."
So, my habits had been getting at her as well. The repressed but clear distaste, almost fear, that peeped out of her eyes was eloquent. "Mary, I'm selective. Maybe you've noticed? What do you think I am, a upas tree?" I gazed wearily out of the forward screen. "Should have asked Jules about upas trees." I muttered inconsequently. "Never seen one."
In truth I didn't know what we were going to do, what we should do, what indeed we could do. Max Sorenson and his fanatical mate Selena asked for eventual retribution but then what? Do we press the button, supposing we could find it, and let loose thousands of budding slaves on the world? How could we cope with a multitude of children? The dead millions of my memory pressed down on me, a world gone for good, a world we could not recreate. The Sorenson club wanted to repopulate the earth with mindless slaves, presuming we had worked it all out right, but why they had this vision of eternal servitude defied rational explanation, or at least my mind refused to accept that any man or woman would take pleasure in such a prospect. I knew, as Mike had told me emphatically, that the human race was sprinkled with utter nutters, but this was on a scale that reduced reason to madness. Perhaps we deserved extinction, clever naked apes that liked blood.
My depressed musings were interrupted by Mary's hand which rested on my shoulder lightly. "I didn't mean that, fella." She whispered. "You just don't compromise, do you? Sometimes you have to give a little, but not every time and maybe now is one of the exceptions, eh? We'd all be dead without you but...just give a little, huh? Let us see that you're just as weak and stupid as the rest of us." She gazed at me with a half smile. "I guess you are, but the British stiff upper lip is still working well." She turned her eyes to the empty landscape outside. "It gets to me as well as you. Yeah, I could see what you were thinking." Her smile turned to a wider, deeper grin. "Just look after that girl of yours, she really is special and I think she's going to come up with the sixty-four-dollar answer."
Maybe she was but in the meantime we had to think about where we go next. This damned tub wouldn't fly or at least we daren't try it in case the suspect engine blew up. So we skim. Mary put her head close to mine as we pored over the maps printed out for us. Sure, there had been a canal at the end of Loch Ness, no doubt to let monsters in and out, but was it still there and did it have some immovable obstruction? Skating around the Irish Sea, plus a hair-raising trip around the Cornish peninsula, seemed to give the navigation computer indigestion. Masses of warning flags shot up all over the screen, making Mary smile and scratch her head where the scab was itching.
"Jesus." I muttered. "There has to be another way."
Another hand landing on my shoulder made me look up sharply to find Melanee's piercing gaze frowning down on us. "I am better. Think mm carefully, yes?" She produced a blinding smile. "David, you are right, we must finish what we start and I see now." She looked down at me with that frightening intelligence that seemed to be growing all the time. "Mm, understand you. Know you do not wish to kill but..." She put her head on one side, leaving her analysis of my character unfinished.
"Yeah, but." Mary supplied, but she smiled as well.
"We should go look for way out of this lake." Melanee pronounced, pointing her finger at the line where the canal was supposed to be.
"Yeah, I go along with that but don't forget there's a canal at both ends or there was." Mary said. "Be a lot safer if we could get out that way."
"Hm." I grunted. "We can find out." The car had skirted close to the ruins of Inverness, following the contours, so we had recordings. Flashing these up and running them slow time soon confirmed there was no exit that way. The canal was blocked solid, the course of it obscured by thick vegetation and high lumps, almost hills, thickly wooded.
The full morning was here now, bright sunlight flooding down on to a scene which had brought visitors to this enchanted spot for centuries but thrusting this gloomy thought out of my head, I became decisive. "Right, Melanee go and collect our mooring rope, Mary you begin the engine startup check list, only the port engine remember. I'm going to check on Mike."
He was still out, looking awful, bloodstains nearly all over him, but he was breathing steadily and the drugs were keeping him under. The longer they did that the better, I thought, sliding back next to Mary as Melanee came back with the mooring line. The hatch hissed shut just as Mary completed the check. The instrument display was blazing at us, lines of data running down telling us what we already knew.
"Starting port." I announced and pressed the switch. The slow whine of the turbine built up to its normal rumble, but it was an odd unusual sound, only the one engine giving a sense of vulnerability. Mary glanced at me as Melanee settled down to her favourite spot just behind me where she could watch what I was doing and tell me to do it another way.
The Loch was like glass, not a whisper of air breaking the mirror like surface. Backing us slowly out into clear water, I ran up the engine and set course for the far end of Loch Ness, hoping that no monsters would pop up to find out what all the noise was about.
"Just over twenty miles." Mary said. "I'll watch the fuel flow."
Our one engine was working hard as the speed built up steadily to fifty knots where I held it. Optimum power settings, according to the computer, should give us nearly sixty knots on a calm sea, skimming over the surface like the hovercraft of old but fifty was fast enough for this short hop. The steep hills rising from the lochside were clothed in greenery, faint mist hiding the summits producing a mysterious and romantic vista. No signs of any of the works of man appeared until, magically, like a vision of the past the outlines of a castle slowly crystallised on the starboard side, standing on a promontory as if it had been there forever.
"My God." I muttered. "Castle Urquhart. Ten thousand years."
"Plus another seven hundred or so." Mary added. "It looks...well, like a fairy tale, like dragons should be there and knights in armour and... and..."
"Fair maidens." I finished for her. "Only they're in here."
She laughed, the first for a long time. The castle slid away behind us as Melanee commenced to satisfy her thirst for knowledge by interrogating Mary about Knights, armour and maidens, subjects that the American persona of Mary had trouble in dealing with.
We were there. The Loch narrowed down to nothing, a nothing clothed in dense pine forest. We coasted up to the end where the water gave way to what might have been a passage, but a passage that was covered in low ferns and tall reeds that shot seed heads up like spears. The car nosed gently into the bank as I let the engine idle while we peered gloomily out of the forward screen.
"There's no going through that." Mary said tautly.
"No." I agreed heavily. We were trapped, this was what the scene in front of us was telling us.
"I put the spare bleeder air through the starboard engine." She said, biting her lip.
Nodding, I ran through the engine graphics on our display screen, Melanee breathing down my neck to see the magic pictures. It all depended on just what the hell was stuck in the innards of t
hat turbine. Mary looked at me, waiting for the decision but we had no choice. The map showed a succession of canals before the channel came to Fort William, a ten mile barrier that we could not hope to clear on one engine.
"Starting starboard." I said calmly. "Mary, watch that engine panel like a hawk."
With the port engine still running we had ample power to jerk the other engine out of its metal sleep. My fingers hovered nervously over the engine cut out control as the car trembled with fresh vibration when the starboard engine caught and whined itself up to idle.
"EPR going up." She said sharply. It should not have been going up like that after just a few minutes idle. The EPR ratio was a monitor of engine power, a measure of pressure plus temperature telling us if the machine was happy. "The computer says another twenty minutes and it'll be off the clock." She added, glancing at me.
"Yup." I agreed and turned us away from the shore, using the port engine to swing us in a wide arc, gathering speed. The car jerked lumpily, the ground effect making it wallow. "I'm going to shove both into full power. We need to jump for twenty-eight miles."
Mary tapped rapidly at the computer navigation interface. "Eleven minutes thirty-two seconds from cold start." She informed me tonelessly. Melanee flicked her eyes from me to Mary before peering at the mass of green figures rolling across the screens.
"If engine get too hot..." She said frowning.
"Yeah." We would have a very long walk.
The car floated indecisively, its nose pointing towards Fort William over the horizon. We had to do it. Flexing fingers and wiping the sweat away from my palms on the legs of my trousers, I grasped the throttle control firmly and shoved it all the way. Both engines came to life with a roar, the car bounding forward, pushing us back in the seats. After fifty yards I applied lift and swung the wings out, seeing out of the corner of my eye Mary staring fixedly at the engine panels. The overgrown canal flashed past underneath us as I put us into a slow climb, levelling off at a hundred feet. Slowly, I took my hands from the control and let the auto pilot take over. One hundred and ten knots, the wings were working now, one fifty, one eighty, the ground screaming by under us.
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