Come Back

by George Erlynne

  "Don't give it a thought." I told her, wondering if I had enough ammunition.

  Devious. I remembered explaining the word to her long ago. I shouldn't have bothered. She was being torn by her logic and her love for her friends. She knew that if they were caught it would not be pretty. Folding her into me as close as I could, I walked us to the bank of that cool, peaceful river and sat her down on the water's edge.

  "They will understand." I said, thinking that it would dawn on them soon enough. But understanding was not the same as forgiveness. We were leaving them as bait to convince Max that we were really here and willing to talk about a new world. Melanee shuddered because she knew about betrayal and she knew it was the only way. She was more human than she wanted to be, clearly her programming was defective, a sad reflection on the efficiency of the Max/Selena axis. If they couldn't get this right then they had bigger problems than they knew.

  Comforted by this piece of distorted logic I tightened my grip on Melanee and listened to the river which was talking to me about calm and constancy. Overhead, a warm sun filtered through the tree tops, brilliant diamonds of light switching on and off as the small breeze waved leaves to and fro. It was a peaceful place only spoiled by sounds of two legged animals approaching. Pressing Melanee flat, hissing at her to stay still, I rolled away into the thick undergrowth breathing quietly. Whoever they were, there were two of them and it wasn't Mike and Mary. They were no woodsmen either, the noise they made was enough to wake a hibernating bear.

  The rifle was warm under my hand, a faint smell of gun oil wafting up my nostrils. Melanee, ten yards off, gave me a demonstration of superior intellect by raising her head and sitting up with a frown of disapproval. She was unhappy with unforeseen complications buggering up the master plan. Join the club, I told her silently, every war plan goes wrong, people shoot the wrong way, whole regiments get lost, ships collide with islands...

  My musing on past follies was interrupted by the whiplash crack of a passing high velocity rifle round which very nearly parted Melanee's hair. She fell flat, letting out a yelp of terror while the round whanged against the aircar casing behind her where the hull was close to the bank. Cuddling the rifle like a new girlfriend, I slithered forward. Two figures were flitting from tree to tree inexpertly. A yellow flash, the loud report muffled by the heavy forest, came from the taller of the two so I shot him first with a short burst, three rounds. Thirty yards off, the figure was flung back, a crashing thud proclaiming his acquaintance with shrubs. The second figure, smaller and quicker disappeared from sight but not sound.

  "Non!" The scream echoed with throbbing despair. "Mon dieu, non!"

  The words shot at me like bullets. There was no mistaking who she was. Melanee jumped up, white faced, just as I stormed out of my lair and charged. Jules was tangled in low ferns, Marie kneeling over him. I got within ten yards before she started to wave the gun, her face distorted, her screams beating against my head. Behind me, Melanee had worked up speed and was close, but the gun in Marie's hands was not pointing at me, it was pointing at her, at Melanee, and the rage in Marie's face turned her into a sobbing, crying, screaming animal.

  I didn't want to kill her but no one, no one, was going to fire guns at Melanee and get away with it. The first shot took her in the arm, the second hit the receiver of her rifle, the third somewhere high up in her shoulder. The rifle fired as she fell back, a long burst, the rounds screeching into the tree canopy. Kicking the weapon away I fell on my knees beside her as Melanee arrived with a run, panting, hyperventilating, gasping, staring at her hands where she had touched Jules, the red startlingly bright, shining and liquid. Her face turned paper white with a tinge of green, her breathing increased. She was going to pass out on me and we couldn't afford it, so I shook her until her teeth rattled.

  "Melanee! Look at me!" I yelled it at her. "We've got a job to do!"

  The long, dark hair fell in untidy waves over her shoulders, her body felt limp, unresponsive. Gripping her chin, I made her look at me and slowly, slowly, sentience and intelligence returned. The horror didn't go away but sense arrived. She choked back her sobs and held on to my arm like a dying sailor.

  "Why?" She gasped. "Is he...is she?"

  It was a question I was asking myself as I turned Jules over and the answer was regrettably clear enough. Two rounds had gone through his chest, right through, the exit wounds big enough to put your fist in. He must have been dead before he hit the ground but Marie was still with us. Her arm was messy but not serious, the bone was untouched and the blood did not suggest arterial damage although the shoulder was not so good, the bullet had hit just under the collar bone and exited in her back. Tearing away her shirt, I peered at the wound, Melanee going pale again as she saw the damage.

  "We cannot leave her." She gave me a frightened look. It was a conclusion I had already arrived at with appropriate gloom. She was going to be a worry and a danger. Sitting back on my heels, I ran a hand over what had become a very tired face, the bristles rasping on the skin.

  "It was you they were shooting at." I said soberly. "Even when I was galloping at them, Marie tried to aim at you, not me."

  Melanee drooped her head and regarded her folded hands in her lap. The blood had transferred itself from her hands to her skirt but we both had the stuff all over us, the floor of the forest was soggy with it. She didn't answer me, indeed there wasn't much to say but she put her bloodstained hand lightly on mine. Taking her hand, I tried to tell her without words what she meant to me, how she was not just the saviour of the world to come, but the girl who shared my life, who made me think of Linda with reconciled sorrow, who saved me from bitterness. We were a team and we were going to win the cup. A hesitant smile arrived, tremulous but understanding.

  "Jules." The word was a pain filled whisper, making us start and stare down at a pair of dark eyes watching us. "Jules do it for me." Marie said, tears and blood mixing on her face.

  "I know." I said shortly, picked her up and started to walk us back to the car. "Melanee, bring their rifles and packs."

  There was nothing for it but to dump her in the back of the car, stuff her full of such drugs as we could spare, bandage her up and hope she didn't make a mess in the car. We could only improvise a shell dressing, tight bandage and lay the patient down. Marie had let out moans of pain as this treatment session progressed, but she was falling down a long tunnel of her own making, you could see the growing despair behind the pain.

  Melanee, too bright for her own good, worked out what was wrong with Marie, apart from bullet holes that is. Marie had as good as killed Jules by egging him on to attack Melanee. They had heard the aircar come down, we knew they were flitting about somewhere around here. Why she decided to assassinate Melanee we didn't yet know but poor Jules had been besotted with Marie. I recalled his protective displays from times past. Neither of them liked me but they must have known that where Melanee was, I was going to be close by. In fact, Marie had made Jules commit suicide by urging him to fire at Melanee. And Melanee had brought this all about by not doing what I had told her to do and keep her bloody head down. If she hadn't sat up and made herself a target Jules would never have...

  It was pointless thinking such stupid thoughts. We have to deal with things as they are, and that gunfire would have told anyone within a couple of miles, Mike and Mary for example, that nasty happenings were creeping around the forest. They would have got the message clearly enough, but it was odd that they had not bumped into the French axis. Maybe Jules and Marie waited for their departure, maybe they were nearby and watched us land, maybe a lot of things...

  "Come on." I grunted, steering Melanee to the co-pilot's seat. "We have to go. We've already paid part of the price, a deposit against what you can do, so you'd better do it."

  She gave me a stricken look, shuddered and retreated into a despairing silence as I ran through the startup list. Engine noise arrived with the usual whistle and whine, the instruments telling me we were ready to go. Spr
ay misted across the front screens, blown up by the engine wash, the whine rising to a scream as we lifted off. By now, the nervous procedure of starting and stopping one engine before it exploded was almost second nature. At five hundred feet the course for Quissac automatically swung us on to one eight five magnetic which took us close to that clearing we had all talked about. Peering down, a regular shape revealed itself, a silvery winged aircraft, stubby and menacing with three dots standing by it. The dots moved even as we howled over, running on urgent legs. If we hadn't left all our cannon ammunition back in Portsmouth I could have strafed the bastards and solved our problems then and there. As it was we had to run for our lives.

  "So they are here." Melanee came to life again.

  "Not for long." I said tersely. "You'd better tell me just what it is you want to do when we get down there." I added, thinking that if they got that interceptor off the ground quick enough we could have a slight delay.

  She frowned, gazing at the view of the endless forest rushing towards us three hundred feet under our nose. "It is difficult." She said somewhat hesitantly.

  "You mean I'm too dim to understand?"

  The frown smoothed away and her smile reappeared. "Mary was telling me all about a quality called tact. I do not understand because it seems more complicated than biology. She says you do not have enough of it."

  I grinned. "Tell me. Never mind the tact."

  She sat herself back and stared into the middle distance, her mind far away. "All those embryos in suspension are under very precise control. Temperature, cell activity, cell replication rates and so on, they all require extreme exactness if the embryo is to mature to the adult it is designed to be." She reeled this off in a clinical voice, cold and analytic. The brain was getting more and more like a computer every day. I wondered if it would take over all her emotions eventually leaving a lovely shell, a living machine. Suppressing a shudder at this nightmare notion I watched her near perfect profile and waited for the mutant intelligence to tell me what to do.

  "Yeah, I get that. All those clones of Robin Hood waiting to rush off to the forest."

  "Robin Hood? " The frown came back. "Is he a biologist? You are making the joke." She added severely. "When the clone is brought to sentience, the brain development has to be controlled. You understand that normal development cannot be allowed? A baby has neural circuits that form as soon as he is born, they begin to accumulate information, to create an individual and the permutations are huge. This cannot be permitted if free will is to be restricted. The DNA has to be corrected and it must be done at the precise moment of sentience so that he or she responds to certain stimuli."

  My frown was getting painful. "So they all need the light switched on?"

  "I can prevent this happening. I can ensure that any child which comes to life after ten thousand years will be a normal child, a child that needs love and care and parents. It can be a genius or a saint, but it will not be up to us to choose."

  "Bloody hell." I whispered. "No wonder they don't like you." It wasn't that she could gum up the works, she could completely obliterate their whole idea, destroy their lives by making them impotent to stop the reversal of a fanatical conviction of rightness. They would see the world they wanted to create thrown away and the world that they themselves had murdered, yes, I was convinced they had done it somehow, this world would come back. It would make them even more insane than they were now, if that was possible. "You can do that in Quissac? What about the other places?"

  "The machines in Quissac will tell them what to do. It is what I put into that terminal up near Argonne. The instructions to commence are shown there now."

  "But...but, if the instructions are there, then the bastards will do it, surely?"

  "Oh no. They think they can but only I can alter the programs."

  The conversation came to an end because I couldn't think of anything intelligent to add and what was more, horrible complications were multiplying in my head, just like all those embryos she was telling me about. Did she realise just what she was saying? Apart from converting Selena, Max and the rest of their happy band into maniacs frothing at the mouth who would drink our blood if they got the chance, what about several millions of budding children? Fathers and mothers? Food? Shelter? Schools? It was impossible.

  This bout of depression was interrupted by the master alarm going off.

  Chapter 28

  REVELATIONS

  The shock wore off after ten seconds, ten very long seconds during which my past life flitted in front of my eyes, reminding me of decisions I would rather not have taken. We had bandits on our tail and there could only be one reason. But the bastards daren't shoot us down because Melanee was the only one who could unscramble whatever junk she had put into their control system and they must guess she was on board or at least they couldn't take the chance she wasn't. Comforted by this piece of logic which I hoped was shared by the deranged mob coming up behind us, I sat back and started to review options.

  "What is Bible?" The question seemed grossly irrelevant and unanswerable. Casting a stony look in her direction, I groped wildly for a reply that would seem reasonable to the brain of the universe.

  "It's a book, an old book from the earliest times of the human race, telling us what is right and what is wrong." I felt quite proud of the definition and hoped she didn't start asking about New and Old Testament, my knowledge of Holy Writ being strictly limited.

  "This Max and Selena, they have Bible? They do what Bible tells them to do?"

  The intruder behind us was further back than I had feared, they must have played a hand of bridge before taking off. The ship's link told me it was over a hundred miles away but coming up fast. We had been making steady progress while I had been sunk into near terminal depression, but we had three hours plus to go and that meant that our friends would be on top of us pretty damned quick. Of course, that machine of theirs, it was not designed to dawdle along scraping the top of the forest like we were doing, it was a super atmospheric war wagon and they would have to go way up to thirty thousand plus or they would have a fuel flow problem like water over Niagara. But, and this was the cruncher, they would be able to focus all their scanning eyes on us and count the hairs on Melanee's head, should she poke it out of the hatch in a spirit of enquiry, a quite likely action, considering her mindset.

  "Godammit." I muttered.

  "Which God?" She enquired, still obsessed with theology.

  "Bacchus!" I snarled. He was obviously annoyed with the human race because there was no alcohol left on this damned planet, a chastisement by the God of wine for sins past and present.

  Melanee did not pursue her Biblical enquiries because she had finally noticed the ominous information scrolling across our navigation screen. They were well up to us, overtaking fast, five miles up, still climbing. They had us on their target grid, our screen was showing a mass of warning signs telling me how many missile lock on beams were scanning us.

  "They will not fire." She said with a certainty which I almost shared.

  "Where exactly do you want me to put this thing down?" I enquired, a question I should have asked some time ago.

  "The place where we met Jules and Marie, you remember? It was a clearing and we all sat round the fire in the evening."

  The scene came back to me vividly. Jules with his smooth Gallic chat and Melanee without her shirt on, a combination that seemed natural in France. Twisting round, I regarded Marie's bloodstained figure with a grimace. It had all come apart and I didn't see what we could have done but what we did. "Yeah, I can put you down there." I nodded gloomily. "We'll have to take her with us."

  Melanee's eyebrows, delicate and sexy, raised themselves haughtily. "Oh? And why? She will be cooler and resting in here."

  "Because as soon as we go out the door, Max is going to blow this heap to bits."

  It was obvious. They weren't going to let us have an escape vehicle and once we were on foot they could hunt us down, that would be the t
hinking. Melanee had the combined knowledge of all the science text books ever written to torment schoolchildren but she knew nothing about misbegotten religious nuts and assorted homicidal fruitcakes. The shock on her face as the probabilities sank in was proof enough.

  "But… but, Mary... Mike. If the car is gone how can we get back to them... I mean...?"

  Ignoring her appalled realisation of what she had done, I subsided into brooding mode. Arms and ammunition, as much as we could carry, first aid package, food, water. Could Marie walk? If not, matters would get terminally worse. "Go look at her." I grunted. "Patch up the arm, shoot her full of pain killer again."

  She nodded, I didn't need to explain. We would have a minute, perhaps two and we had to get at least a hundred yards away. Could they land their contraption in a small clearing? I wished Mary was here, with her knowledge of American war wagons. Obviously it didn't need a long runway but it was much bigger than an aircar. Melanee returned from heaving Marie about in the back, slumping down into the co-pilot's seat after a while, looking glum. "She will walk, I think, but not for long and not fast."

  "How far do we have to go from that clearing?"

  "Not far, perhaps a mile, yes? Marie used to talk to me about kilometres, much more logical."

  "Sod the logic." I muttered, thinking about having to carry a badly wounded woman through dense forest with a swarm of bloodthirsty exterminators on our heels. The only trump card we had was the fact that they daren't kill Melanee, at least not yet. "Can you fire a gun? No, forget it." Images of Melanee pointing gun barrels in unlikely directions destroyed that idea. Besides, to do her justice, I didn't think she would kill, even if I told her to. Under us, the trees merged into a green rug which slowly grew darker as the day started to die. Great, now we were going to have to land this thing in the dark. A cessation of conversation arrived, Melanee sitting upright with an expression of contrition fixed on her features while I muttered phrases to myself which I hope she didn't understand. Two hours to go, it was time to get Marie into the equation. Leaving the car in charge of the auto-pilot with considerable hesitation, I stood over her and gripped her undamaged arm, shaking her firmly. She was full of ten-thousand-year-old analgesic, plus a cocktail of other drugs with very long names, but she had to walk or I would be forced into a decision I wasn't going to tell Melanee about.