Hilldiggers

  ‘That went right over my head, Rhodane.’

  The ship juddered violently. She tilted her head for a moment, then gestured towards the corridor beyond the door and led the way out.

  ‘What would you say is the average incidence of mental illness among any normal human population?’ she asked.

  ‘Define “normal human”.’

  She gave me an annoyed look. ‘On Sudoria, three out of four people end up having treatment for some kind of mental illness. Most Sudorians are meanwhile on some kind of drugs regimen to control one mental malady or another. There are more asylums on Sudoria now than there are schools.’

  This was complete news to me, yet something Geronamid and Tigger had to know about. So why hadn’t I been told? Probably because by knowing I would not necessarily respond as Geronamid required me to.

  Rhodane went on, ‘The Shadowman is a common hallucination of some of those conditions. Since Uskaron’s book came along our rate of mental illness has been attributed to societal guilt, and the Shadowman is considered the manifestation of the Sudorian conscience. But quite evidently you’re not guilty of involvement in a genocidal war, nor are you even Sudorian, so why then are you seeing him?’

  We reached the ladder leading up out of the spin section, and Rhodane climbed it ahead of me. I felt a resurgence of nausea as soon as we reached the nil-gee part of the ship. As we propelled ourselves along one of the intestinal corridors corkscrewing into the bowels of the vessel, I asked her, ‘What was the explanation for the Shadowman, before Uskaron’s book appeared?’

  She glanced back at me. ‘There were so many of them. To some he was the manifestation of the War dead, to others he was some dark angel who had somehow brought about the War. The explanations given by the Churches varied from complete denial of his existence to the claim that he was evil incarnate and only when all Sudorians bow to their doctrine will he be driven away.’

  ‘Do you see the Shadowman, Rhodane?’

  ‘Only in paintings.’

  ‘Do your three siblings see him?’

  ‘No more than I do.’

  ‘Perhaps he is not required by you?’ I suggested.

  Her reply was a blank look, no more.

  The corridor opened out into an oblate chamber in which the Combine shuttle rested like an ingot inside something’s gut. The vessel’s airlock was open and Yishna floated beside it gripping one rung of the steps curving round the shuttle’s outer skin. She was clad in an insulated suit similar to Rhodane’s, gloved and hooded but with no mask across her face. On seeing us, she pushed herself free, drifted over to the chamber wall, then propelled herself from there towards us. She was smiling at first, but the moment she caught hold of a nearby organic protuberance to halt herself, the smile faded and her eyes dulled as their nictitating membranes closed.

  ‘Rhodane,’ she studied her sister, ‘like Harald you have mutilated yourself.’ Her face had suddenly turned ugly with anger.

  ‘Perhaps I am merely expressing my inner self, Yishna.’

  ‘You make no sense,’ Yishna snapped. ‘Am I to believe the supposed reason for your presence here when you deliberately make no sense?’

  Why was she so angry? She had already seen Rhodane on the display when we arranged for her to come here, and she had been smiling at us but a moment ago. Now she turned towards me.

  ‘Consul Assessor,’ she said tightly, ‘you have been unwell?’

  I could see the shape of things now, but there were still some details I needed to slot into place. I said to her, ‘The Shadowman doesn’t need to reveal himself to you, Yishna.’

  With her gloved hands Yishna fumbled a control baton from her belt. The nictitating membranes had lifted from her eyes, and now they glistened with tears. My shoulder slammed into her chest, flinging those tears free to glitter alone. As we tumbled through the air I managed to wrest the baton away from her.

  I think she let me take it.

  Orduval

  With a hand pressed against the comlink in his ear, Reyshank skidded the car to a halt, raising a cloud of dust. ‘Damn, madmen,’ he growled. Leaning over and searching through the pack at Trausheim’s feet, he pulled out a coms helmet, stepped out of the car and walked a little distance away while fitting it on. Following the others from the car, Orduval gazed up and took a shaky breath of the cool night air.

  Scarves of glowing gas spread across the firmament and bright explosions lit high up in orbit. Shooting stars cut across almost perpetually, and occasionally something would take longer to burn up in atmosphere as it descended, echoing distant sonic booms through the darkness and leaving a glowing trail. It was a stunning and awesome sight, but Orduval found difficulty connecting it with suffering and death, and he felt ashamed.

  They were parked next to an abandoned desert farm, around which an underground network of water pipes supported a small oasis. Reyshank muttered and exclaimed in the background, while Trausheim and the two other wardens took their packs from the car and began delving after flasks of cold tea or bars of biltong and dried fruit. Finally the Chief removed the coms helmet and returned to them, looking pale and ill. He gazed around at his men, focused on Orduval for a moment, then addressed them all.

  ‘We nearly lost the capital,’ he said. ‘In fact we have effectively lost the city centre and an entire outlying district.’

  ‘My apartment is in Gaskell Street,’ said one of the men, almost in a whisper. That street was somewhere in the mid-city, Orduval recollected, though he wasn’t exactly sure where. ‘What happened?’ the shocked man finished.

  ‘They’re not sure who did it yet,’ said Reyshank, ‘but someone tried to detonate a nuclear warhead from a wartime defensive missile. Luckily, being over twenty years old, it didn’t go fissile, but the chemical explosive brought down the administration tower and has spread radioactives all across the city. The estimate is of a thousand dead, though we probably won’t know the real cost for some time yet.’

  ‘What happened to Parliament?’ asked Orduval.

  Reyshank held up a hand to silence him, then continued to address the warden whose home was in the stricken capital. ‘You’ve a wife and children back there, haven’t you?’ The man nodded tightly. ‘Take the car,’ said Reyshank, ‘but stay out of the other cities. It’s getting bad.’ The warden hesitated and seemed about to say something else, but Reyshank just gestured sharply towards the vehicle. After a moment the man nodded then hurried over and climbed in. When the car had disappeared in its own cloud of dust, Reyshank turned back to Orduval. ‘Fifteen parliamentary members were killed, the rest have been evacuated. Just as most of the population there who are still listening to instructions are being evacuated.’

  Orduval gazed after the departing car. Why had Reyshank let it go?

  ‘Listening?’ wondered Trausheim. ‘You said those who’re listening are being evacuated.’

  ‘We’ve got martial law in place but it seems few people are taking heed of the wardens. We’ve had to pull out of twelve major cities because arms caches have been broken into and the only targets all the rival factions can agree on are the GDS wardens. Some idiots – we assume in the Orchid Party – have also decided that a good way of stirring things up further has been to open the asylums.’

  The remaining warden, whose name Orduval had yet to learn, gazed after the vehicle, now in the distance. ‘What are our chances of getting this back under control?’

  ‘Not the greatest.’ Reyshank hauled his pack up off the ground and gestured to the abandoned farmhouse. ‘We’ll wait in there.’

  Following them, Orduval wondered about the importance of his own concerns now. ‘Why did you let that car go?’ he asked, gazing round at the desolation.

  ‘Have patience,’ said Reyshank. ‘We’re going to be picked up here.’

  Trausheim kicked in the door of the farmhouse, releasing a cloud of glimmer bugs and the overpowering smell of decay. They decided instead to wait under some nearby acacia trees, around a fire f
uelled by the farmhouse door and some rotting furniture found inside the building. The rumbling from the sky continued, but seemed to descend to a background murmur as Orduval thoughtfully chewed on a piece of biltong. At one point they heard the sound of lunatic bellowing, but when Trausheim grabbed his weapon and stood up, Reyshank ordered him to sit down again. After they had eaten and drunk their fill they sat there in silence, then Reyshank suddenly got up and moved off through the trees towards the desert’s edge. After a brief hesitation, Orduval followed him.

  ‘Fleet have destroyed two Defence Platforms,’ said the Chief, gazing out across the empty sands. ‘The plan of attack seems quite simple, though what their final aim is I don’t know. However, I do know that Harald will need to neutralize the Corisanthe stations, no matter what else he’s after.’

  ‘There’s over a quarter of a million people aboard those stations,’ Orduval noted.

  ‘Maybe more . . .’

  Having originally noted Reyshank’s queue and the scar on his face, Orduval suggested, ‘You were in Fleet?’

  ‘I trained during the last years of the War, and went down to Brumal during the occupation.’ He turned his face into view, pointing to the scar on it. ‘I got this from a quofarl before I managed to blow its head off. But I feel no loyalty to Fleet now, and no agreement with what they’re doing. What about you, then? The Admiral is your brother, after all.’

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘Harald Strone and Orduval Strone? I had my suspicions, and Duras confirmed them for me.’

  ‘You spoke to Duras?’

  ‘Oh yes, he chose me to pick you up, when we still only knew you as Uskaron, because he and I knew each other from our service days. He became very interested indeed in you when we later learned your real name.’

  Out over the desert, Orduval saw a constellation of lights that seemed to make no sense to him. Other stars weren’t visible there, and those lights seemed too constant to be the result of explosions. After a moment he realized they were just below the horizon. Buildings maybe? But there was nothing out there, and anyway these lights seemed to be on the move.

  ‘Here comes Parliament,’ explained Reyshank.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s of Combine manufacture.’ He smiled wryly at Orduval. ‘GDS has three of them: mobile incident stations in the event of planetary disaster. It seemed safest to take Parliament aboard this one, so at least the chance of us losing the rest of the planetary government has been reduced.’

  The lights were now revealed as windows in some enormous floating structure: like a tall city building turned on its side and floating a few thousand feet above the dunes.

  ‘They brought this out here for me?’ Orduval asked.

  ‘It would be nice to think so,’ replied Reyshank, ‘but no. We’re only a few hundred miles from the landing site.’

  ‘What landing site?’

  ‘For the Brumallian ship that’s arriving here with the Consul Assessor and your two sisters aboard.’

  Orduval swore, but then he smiled.

  Harald

  He opened his eyes to the aseptic look of scoured aluminium in Ironfist’s medbay, the taste of copper in his mouth and the astringency of antiseptic in his nostrils. With his head throbbing unremittingly, he tried to remember which particular operation this was, which surgical enhancement he had just undergone. Only after a moment did he remember that all those he had planned had been carried out many months ago.

  ‘Try to take it easy,’ said Jeon, leaning over him.

  Harald tried to sit upright but felt incredibly weak. He kept his face empty of expression, not wanting her to see the panic he felt, for he did not recall why he was in this place. Turning his head so as not to meet her eyes, he gazed steadily across at an instrument trolley, observed the bloody wadding and soiled instruments.

  Noting the direction of his gaze, Jeon said, ‘I did the best I could after you told them all to get out.’ Harald could remember nothing about that. She stepped over to the trolley and picked up a steel dish in which lay a lump of grey metal with shallow flanges spiralling round it. ‘You were lucky really. This is an explosive slug but it failed to detonate. It lifted a piece of your skull and lodged next to your brain. Had it gone off there wouldn’t be anything left of you above the neck.’

  Someone had tried to kill him – that much was clear, if all the details were not. He felt a sudden surge of rage, which he immediately fought, disliking such lack of control.

  ‘You do understand me, don’t you?’ she asked.

  ‘I unnerstan yo per . . .’ He stopped talking, horrified that his mouth was mangling the words, like on the first and last time he had got drunk on going to his first ever party aboard Ironfist. He could feel one side of his mouth twisted down and wondered if he looked like someone who had suffered a stroke.

  ‘What – is – happening?’ he articulated carefully.

  ‘Franorl took command in your absence and pulled the fleet back. All ships are holding station, safely out of range of beam weapons. We’re maintaining a bombardment and we’re still taking hits from Combine’s rail-guns, but we can sustain that.’

  What was she talking about? And what was Admiral Carnasus up to?

  ‘Admiral, what are your orders? Do we continue with this? I can give you something now to keep you on your feet, but I don’t know how long it will last.’

  Admiral?

  ‘We – must not – withdraw.’ The words seemed to come out of him automatically, even though he had no clear idea what she was talking about. Summoning some core of will, he took command of his body and sat upright. Dizziness assailed him, and in the fug that billowed through his mind he recalled feeling the warm grip of a small Combine handgun, and saw the slugs from it smashing into Admiral Carnasus’s skull. Sudden grief clutched at his throat, and tears began to run down his cheeks. He reached up to wipe them away, then tried to put that memory into context. He had killed the Admiral and, from what Jeon had just told him, he realized his plans to move against Combine must be well advanced.

  But only vague details punctuated by the odd disconnected sharper scene floated up into his consciousness. He recollected the fleet being gathered around Carmel, but did not know if that was something recent or went back to a time when Carnasus was in command. He also recollected giving the order to fire on a Brumallian city. Something else of importance had happened then, but he could not recollect it. He slotted these events into his initial plan, which he remembered clearly, and found that they fitted in well. However, he needed to know if anything had not gone to plan, he needed to know what had happened to him, and most importantly he needed to feel some genuine commitment to what he had been doing, for it seemed strangely lacking at that moment.

  ‘My . . . memory of recent events is unclear,’ he said. That was a victory of will for he hardly slurred the words at all.

  ‘That’s totally understandable,’ Jeon replied. ‘I’ve injected drugs into you to limit the concussion and some powerful anti-inflammatories, but the trauma to your brain . . .’

  He tried something he thought might be safe. ‘Was my assailant captured?’

  ‘Your guards killed him. He was a subaltern from Engineering,’ Jeon supplied. ‘He probably bought into that offer made by Parliament. There will probably be many others like him in Fleet, so perhaps you were right to send all the surgeons away and insist on being treated by only me.’

  What offer from Parliament?

  Even though possessing no knowledge of what Jeon referred to, Harald thought it through and concluded: Parliament must have rejected Fleet’s claim on the Defence Platforms and sided instead with Orbital Combine. Knowing Harald to be the main instigator of the present crisis, they must have offered some sort of reward or even just amnesty to anyone in Fleet who managed to bring him down. Parliament’s offer would be recorded. He looked around the room, vainly trying to locate his com helmet.

  ‘My helmet?’ he demanded.

&nbs
p; ‘You weren’t wearing it.’

  Harald nodded, then wished he hadn’t. He reached up and felt the hard line of surgical glue and the stiff blood-crusted hair above. The skin there felt dead to him, probably because of the anaesthetic Jeon had used. He carefully swung his legs to the side of the surgical table and just sat there motionless knowing he wasn’t ready to stand yet.

  ‘Earlier you said . . . you can give me something?’

  ‘I’ve some Vrastim and Tenoxalate,’ Jeon replied, picking up a small box plastered over with old-style storage labels. ‘Obviously, you are aware of the risks?’

  Of the drugs suggested one was a battlefield stimulant and the other a cocktail of enzymes, endorphins, vasoconstrictors and sugar accelerants. The Tenoxalate cut down on pain and could force continued usage out of the most damaged tissues, but could also result in dangerous formations of scar tissue prone to turn gangrenous, and also in extreme weariness. The Vrastim served to counter the last effect, so combined the two drugs could even put someone with multiple gunshot wounds back on their feet. Staying on these drugs for too long would result in dependency, followed shortly afterwards by organ failure. Even coming off them before they got their hooks into you would result in shock, then the probable requirement of further surgery to remove dead tissue, after which recovery would be long and slow.

  Harald gazed at Jeon, it suddenly occurring to him that she could give him any drugs she might choose, and he wouldn’t know the difference until they were in his veins. Could he really trust her?

  Then the illogic of his paranoia struck him. She had just cemented his skull back together. Why would she now bother to do that?

  ‘Okay, give them to me,’ he told her.

  Jeon opened the box and removed twinned glass vials, one containing a clear fluid and the other something peaty. She clipped them to the access port in a tube trailing from Harald’s arm to a nearby pressurized saline feed – pressurized because gravity feeds weren’t used in ships where gravity could fail. Harald watched the twin vials slowly emptying, felt a sudden fizzing in his limbs, and a lightness of breathing resulting from an adrenal surge. Suddenly he felt a great urge to get out into the ship’s corridors and run. Instead he carefully pushed himself off the surgical table and stood up.