‘Oh, I’ll survive,’ she said.
‘What the hell?’ said Lellan, stepping forward to prevent what she could only perceive as suicide.
Cormac caught her arm. ‘She doesn’t need the oxygen we need out there.’ He gestured to the pack Uris held. ‘That thing’s been empty since this morning.’
‘But how the hell does she . . .’ Lellan fell silent as both the dracoman and Mika exited into the night.
‘We, however’ – he gestured to himself and Thorn – ‘do need oxygen. We’ll need enough to get us to your brother’s ship. We’ll also need transport to get us there quickly.’
‘What – so you can escape, Polity agent?’ spoke up a man who was obviously a prisoner – his wrists were bound, and he wore Theocracy uniform. There was also a dressing behind his ear where his aug should have been.
‘No,’ said Cormac, aware that everyone nearby was much interested in his answer. ‘But so I can deal with our friend up there.’
The prisoner snorted.
Lellan asked, ‘And how do you propose to do that?’
‘Too many ears and eyes here,’ said Cormac, taking in the soldiers, ex-pond workers, and prisoners all jammed into this one airtight building. ‘You’ll just have to trust me on that.’
‘I should trust you,’ Lellan repeated leadenly.
Cormac replied, ‘I am Polity, and in the end that has always been your only choice. Tell me, what other options have you ever had, and what options do you have now?’
Lellan fell silent for a moment, then said, ‘There’s an oxygen refill tank in the building next door, and we have two working aerofans – enough to carry six people. We also have those two war drones that shepherded you in. When do you want to move?’
Cormac thought about that: once upon a time he’d enjoyed an utterly human pastime called ‘sleep’, but to indulge in that now was madness as Skellor could decide at any moment that he had been playing mortal games for long enough, and that it was time to totally flash burn the planet. Without thinking about it, he took out the reel of stimulant patches Mika had given him, tore one off and, reaching inside his shirt, stuck it to his torso.
‘Right now,’ he said.
There was almost a feeling of disappointment in having located Ian Cormac so easily, but then locating was one thing and apprehending another – as Skellor had discovered the last time he’d nearly had the man in his grasp. With a thought he shut down the lasers that had been searing the plain and focused all his instruments upon the small compound itself. The destruction had raised clouds of smoke and steam that did nothing to improve his view, and anyway the dracomen had successfully dispersed, disappearing like fog in a hurricane. But they would go with the rest of the planet, once he had Cormac up here in his bridge pod to watch the show.
Alerted by the movement of people coming out of the barracks buildings, Skellor closed in the focus of a scope so he could see each individual clearly. It annoyed him that he did not have any weapon accurate enough to target any individual from up here. Most of the Occam’s armament was apocalyptic – the smallest smart missiles aboard, with the appropriate range, delivered enough of a punch to take out a tank. With the right weapon he could have stripped Cormac of all his companions, before taking him; as it was, Skellor’s remaining creatures on the surface would need to prove adequate to the task.
About to send his calloraptors down from the mountains, Skellor observed Cormac and some others taking off on a couple of aerofans, warded on either side by the two war drones, and heading in that same direction. All so easy, Skellor felt, and in a flush of boredom felt the urge to just wipe it all away – burn it all and move on. But then, deep in those alien structures of himself, he heard an echo of Aphran’s laughter, and his vision settled clearly for a moment on Cormac turning to look up towards him. And Skellor decided to stay his hand.
The firing from orbit had been ceased for some minutes now, but Stanton was not going to head back to Jarvellis until he had drunk at least one celebratory cup of coffee laced with brandy.
‘Whoever said vengeance is sweet certainly knew what they were talking about,’ he said, trying to put the other two at their ease.
‘He killed your parents,’ said the boy, Apis, who claimed to be an Outlinker. ‘He probably killed more than them.’
Setting a tin cup on the red-hot grid of his little stove, Stanton grinned to himself, then searched his utility belt for the coffee essence and a miniature bottle of brandy. The boy was groping for justification. He had obviously been as shocked by the duration of Aberil’s agony as the girl had been. Though these two had reasons for vengeance themselves, they did not find it as sweet as did Stanton himself.
‘Why did it take so long?’ Eldene said at last, choking a little on her words. ‘Did it enjoy . . . torturing him?’
Stanton shook his head. ‘He could have shortened it all by taking off his mask and suffocating. Perhaps he didn’t really think he was going to die,’ he said. Then, after studying his two charges for a moment, ‘There’s no deliberate torture, really. Hooders just eat that way in order to survive. Their main diet is the grazers living in the mountains, which feed on some poisonous fungi there. The grazers’ bodies are layered through with black fats that accumulate toxins. When the hooders capture them under their hoods, they need to slice their way through their prey very meticulously, to eat only what are called the creature’s white fats.’
‘Why not kill first, though?’ Apis asked.
Stanton tipped coffee essence into the rapidly heating water, then a handful of rough sugar crystals. Glancing at the boy he answered, ‘Apparently it’s all due to the flight response. When the hooder goes after a grazer, the grazer immediately starts breaking down the black fat to provide itself with the energy to flee, and then its blood supply and muscles become toxic, too. So any serious damage to either could release poisons into the uncontaminated white fat.’
‘So it can’t let them bleed?’ Apis gaped in disbelieving horror.
‘What about humans, then?’ asked Eldene.
Stanton tested his coffee with his finger, then rocked back on his heels and opened his pack. For a moment the two forgot their morbid curiosity as he handed out potato bread and preserved sausage.
‘Humans get treated just like the other kinds of grazers they occasionally catch,’ said Stanton, himself munching on a piece of sausage. ‘The hooder has to make the assumption that they are fungus grazers, so dissects them as meticulously, even though discovering no black fat in them. You heard the results of that.’ Stanton tipped some brandy into the coffee, then after taking a sip from the mug, he offered it around. He was glad when both the youngsters showed a disgust at its taste and declined more.
‘That seems to be all finished now over there.’ He gestured over his shoulder to where the plain had earlier been boiling with fire. ‘We’ll finish up here, then head on in. I’d stay longer, just to be sure, but’ – he gestured to the remaining two oxygen bottles resting on the aero-fan’s floor – ‘we don’t have that luxury.’
‘Where will you go now – to the Underground?’ asked Eldene.
‘My ship first,’ Stanton replied. ‘That’s where I keep everything that’s precious to me.’ He looked around. ‘I don’t think there’s much more I can do here. Hopefully ECS will come soon, and perhaps it’d be better if I were not around when it does.’
‘What about us?’ asked Eldene.
‘You go underground,’ he said, staring at them directly, ‘and you wait for the Polity.’ He could see that they were curious to know why he should not hang about when the Polity arrived, but he did not feel inclined to give any explanations. For a minute he just sipped his way down through his cup of coffee, listening for sounds of movement in the surrounding vegetation. The laser strikes had driven away much of the local fauna, but most certainly the smell of broiled meat would bring the said fauna back, and he did not care to be around when that happened.
‘Of course, you know w
hat the irony is?’ They looked at him attentively and he went on, ‘Eating human flesh just makes hooders, and the rest of them, sick. It’s the oxygen I think – too rich for them.’
‘Yes, that is ironic,’ said Apis, exchanging a look with Eldene.
After packing away his bits and pieces, Stanton stood and gestured them back to the aerofan. Soon the three were settled on board, hurtling over a charred landscape below a black sky bright with a surplus of moons.
It was a bright and beautiful night to be skimming over the foothills, their two aerofans warded on either side by the battered and fire-blackened cylinders of the war drones. It was a fantastic night to be alive, and Gant wondered if he would have appreciated it any more by being so.
‘There are creatures in the sky ahead of us,’ said Rom, its voice coming surprisingly loud to them in the roar of the wind, it being sent by directional beam.
‘Probably kite-bats,’ Lellan said, turning towards Cormac. ‘Don’t worry about them, they’ll get out of the way.’
Gant noted Cormac’s quick glance, but did not have to be told to keep alert. He nodded and patted his pulse-rifle. Slung across his back was the APW he was saving for any situation warranting artillery. Focusing ahead, with his vision set to infrared, Gant made out a great flock of flying creatures circling the mountain peaks. Some of them were even roosting on peaks, turning them into a bluish melee of angled limbs and wing fabric.
‘How far to the entrance?’ Cormac asked Lellan.
‘A couple of kilometres yet,’ the rebel leader replied. She pointed down with her thumb. ‘There are breakout caves all across here, but there’s no point even trying them. Aberil was so keen we shouldn’t escape that he bombed every one of them during his landing.’
Gazing out into silvered night, the agent said, ‘You know, Skellor will be watching us right now.’ He gestured towards the war drones. ‘We’re probably about the only mechanical things airborne, and with those two along . . .’
‘Well,’ said Lellan, ‘unless he can also track you through stone, we’ll soon frustrate him.’
‘He may even possess that ability,’ murmured Cormac.
Something was tickling the edge of Gant’s memory. He knew that he could easily run a program in his head to track down that memory, but that would make him more Golem and less Gant, so he wanted to retain his imperfect recall. The flying creatures did not seem to be dispersing, in fact more were taking to the air, and now the whole flock was swirling in this direction. He could now see them much more clearly, and some of the others must already be able to see them through their night visors. There was something familiar . . .
‘These kite-bats,’ he said, ‘is it the mating season or something?’
‘They don’t have a mating season.’ Lellan was leaning forwards to peer into the darkness. After a moment she pulled back on the steering column, abruptly slowing the aerofan so that Rom and Ram, and the other fan carrying Thorn, Carl and Fethan, shot ahead – then had to turn to wheel round to come back.
‘Those are not kite-bats,’ Lellan decided.
Glancing at the agent, Gant asked him grimly, ‘Were there any winged calloraptors on Callorum?’
Reluctantly, it seemed to Gant, Cormac donned the night glasses Lellan had provided, and replied, ‘Never really looked into that. Mika would be the one to ask.’
Just then, Carl brought the other aerofan alongside, and Fethan shouted across, ‘What are those things?’
Speaking into the comlink hooked at her neck, Lellan replied briefly, ‘The enemy, I think.’ She looked to Cormac and Gant for confirmation.
Cormac pulled up his sleeve and fingered in some complex attack programs on his lethal little weapon’s holster console. Shuriken started clunking in its holster, as if eager to get out. Cormac withdrew it, and held it in the palm of his left hand. With the right hand he drew his thin-gun. He turned to Gant. ‘How many of them, do you estimate?’
Without even resorting to any of the counting programs that were available to him Gant said, ‘A couple of thousand visible. There may be more.’
‘Use the APW – I think the need to conceal our presence became superfluous long ago,’ said Cormac. Then to Lellan, ‘We need to get to that cave as fast as we can. Just burn through them and keep going . . . agreed?’
Lellan had no better suggestions so she nodded, even though Gant guessed she resented the agent usurping her authority.
Cormac went on, ‘Does the cave have defences and, if so, what kind?’
‘In the entrance we’ll be using there’s one pulse-cannon in the shaft leading down, and another one in the lower tunnel, then armoured doors guarding the main cavern. They just won’t get through,’ she replied.
‘Don’t bet on it,’ said Cormac, gazing at the boiling cloud of creatures ahead. ‘These fuckers don’t die all that easy.’
Lellan stared at him for a moment then looked across to see she had Carl’s attention, before making a chopping motion with her hand for them to move ahead.
‘We go straight through,’ she informed them all. In reaction there came the cycling whine of U-chargers operating inside the war drones as they brought their energy-profligate weapons systems online. Lellan tilted her joystick forward and Carl followed suit. Both aero-fans tilted and accelerated. Moving ahead, the war drones turned in midair from floating pillars to rollers barbed with weapons. Then suddenly they were into a thunder of flapping wings, amid horrible cawings and hissings issuing from triple-jawed mouths opening all around them like satanic fuchsias. Cormac tossed Shuriken over the side, as the two drones opened up on the creatures. Swathes of violet fire left green afterimages across their night-vision glasses and visors. Gant and Thorn had also opened up with APWs, burning into this sky of moving flesh. Screaming, half-incinerated raptors dropped out of this turmoil – their wing skin seared away to leave nothing but black spiderish bone slashing at the air. Smuts of soot clouded the air like negative snow, and the flames raised a stench as of burning sesame oil. As he selectively fired into the huge flock of creatures wherever it seemed thickest, Gant saw a half-burnt raptor land on the rail and Cormac emptying the entire clip of his thin-gun into its visage to prevent it scrambling aboard. When it became evident that the creature would just not die, Gant himself turned and blasted it – and most of the rail – burning down into its fellows underneath, where Shuriken shimmered back and forth, slamming through any that tried to attack them from below.
Lellan was yelling something, but Cormac could not hear her above the racket as he removed the empty clip from his gun and replaced it with another. He leaned closer.
‘I’m taking us lower!’ she shouted.
Cormac nodded and hit Shuriken’s recall. The device shot up from below the aerofans, where now lack of clearance from the ground gave no room for the raptors to manoeuvre, and it held station just out from Cormac’s shoulder. Selecting a different attack program, he sent Shuriken off and running again. The difficulty he was finding with it was compensating for the two war drones. Shuriken’s micromind possessed adequate facility to factor in the presence of ‘friendly fire’ from armed humans or the equivalent, but since war drones of this sophistication were a recent invention, it had no set program blocks to account for them. Cormac found that the nearest he could achieve was by describing the two drones to Shuriken as human exotroops with AG packs and heavy weapons. This seemed to be working so far, though he noted some hesitation in Shuriken’s flight when it came close to either of the machines. The drones, being technically more sophisticated, ignored the throwing star as they continued to incinerate flying calloraptors.
Drawing his thin-gun again, Cormac aimed single shots at the calloraptors’ wing joints; these hits, when he managed them, proving more effective than any number of impacts on the creatures’ heads or bodies. These calloraptors were clearly not direct kin of those that Scar had shot on Callorum – but they did possess the same miraculous ability to heal themselves as the hybrid he had encountered
in Skellor’s laboratory. Nevertheless, even ability to heal did not negate the effects of gravity once a wing-joint shattered and the wing collapsed. The ones he thus crippled soon ended up far behind and out of the chase.
‘We’re coming up on it now!’ Lellan yelled. She was flying one-handed, holding a pulse-rifle in her right hand, its light stock resting in the crook of her arm.
‘Call the drones in behind us!’ Cormac shouted back, then found himself knocked to his knees as a raptor, its wings burned down to the bone, crashed down on top of him. Like a bird the creature had no arms, so it grabbed at him with its powerful foot claws and tried to close its two remaining jaws on his shoulder. Even in such an extremity, Cormac realized the creature was not actually trying to kill, but merely immobilize him. The aerofan lurched aside as Lellan was nearly knocked over during the ensuing struggle. Cormac caught a glimpse of a rockface speeding past him to the left, then one of the drones dropping back overhead. With his hand gripping his attacker’s throat he fired repeatedly into its skull, hoping the raptor’s brain would not heal as quickly as the rest of it. Just then Gant grabbed the creature from behind and wrenched it upright, tearing away one wing and snapping its double spine. The broken bone in its back quickly realigning, it turned to attack Gant instead.
A sudden impact slid Cormac along the floor of the aerofan, now tilting at thirty degrees. He caught what remained of the rail on that side, his legs lunging out into empty space over rock speeding by. Then they were dropping down into a shaft, screaming raptors all around them still. Behind them flashed the arc-welder stuttering of a pulse-cannon, and they spun out of the main shaft into another tunnel. Struggling to climb back on board, Cormac spotted Gant and the calloraptor tearing at each other with hideous ferocity as they sailed past him. He glanced back to see a war drone, clad in a skin of attacking raptors, hit the cavern floor and bounce end over end. While avoiding this, the other aerofan clipped stone and flipped over, three bodies disappearing amid the mass of wings and nightmare mouths just as Gant had.