Engineman (30 page)

The flier landed smoothly. The vibration that had shaken the vehicle now ceased. Bobby felt movement beside him, hands on him again. He was assisted from the flier. He passed into the warm night air. Hands on his arms and shoulders guided him at walking pace along what seemed, by their uneven surface, to be cobble-stones. They paused. His leg was lifted, then the other - onto a step? Again, and again. He got the message, and lifted his feet himself up a long, seemingly never ending, flight of steps.

They entered a building - he could tell by the sudden absence of breeze, the cool quality of the air. He was walked straight forward, and then right, and left, forward again. The hands guiding him were gentle, solicitous.

"Where is Ralph?" he asked. "Please tell me where I am? I want to see him!"

No reply.

They paused briefly, then set off again, this time up an incline. The texture of the surface beneath his feet underwent a change. He had been walking on what felt like stone or concrete, now he felt gridded metal underfoot. Its patterning was incredibly familiar.

Fernandez!

He could not believe it. He was escorted forward, then right. He stood on a metal disc with just one other person. They rose, his stomach lurching with the ascent. Then forward, and right, along a carpeted surface. Right again. He could sense by the atmosphere around him that he was in a small, enclosed space.

The hand released its grip on his upper arm.

Bobby stood in the darkness, heart beating wildly, hardly daring to believe where he was - where he
thought
he was. What could it mean?

He held out both arms, took a step forward. His fingers came up against a wall, its surface familiar. He turned to the left, his fingers tracing the shape of the enclosing walls. He found the oval indentation and knew it for a viewscreen.

To his left, if he were correct, would be a bunk, beside it a hammock sling. He moved to his left, sat down abruptly on the mattress.

Why? Why had they brought him here?

He could not believe it, but it was true.

He was in the cabin of a smallship.

Chapter Sixteen

Mirren arrived early at the Blue Shift restaurant-cum-cabaret club. The place brought back memories. Years ago he'd come here to wind down at journey's end. He had never really thought about why it was so popular with Enginemen and -women, but now he realised that the clientele, far from needing a complete change of ambience on their return home, had required familiar surroundings to ease them back into the routine of Earth. Then, as now, it was fitted out in a series of individual dining-booths simulating the lounges, rest-rooms and observation cells of bigships. The semi-circle of open-ended units, like display modules in some vast habitat emporium, faced a circular dance-floor. Beyond was the raised platform where a band played slow music.

He ordered a second lager and sat back in the comfort of the U-shaped couch. That morning he'd fallen asleep with his head full of the fact that he was dying, and the first thing that had come to him on awakening this evening, swooping down to cloak his thoughts in darkness, was the spectre of his illness. It was ironic that, just as he had been promised the chance to flux again, he should be struck down with Heine's. Still, it could have been worse: he could be dying without the promise of the flux to ease his passing. He recalled what Hunter had told him, that after the mission the smallship would be theirs. The thought of being able to flux for four or five years was a great comfort. He considered Bobby, and his inability to tell him about the mission. Maybe later, he thought, when we have the 'ship; maybe I'll be able to tell him then, grant him his desire to achieve the ultimate union he so believes in.

He glanced at his watch. Caroline was fifteen minutes late. He smiled to himself at the thought that she might have stood him up. He drank his lager and watched the choreographed movements of the dancers on the floor, turning to the music like tesserae in a kaleidoscope.

Five minutes later Caroline edged her way around the dance-floor. She saw him and pulled a face expressing her effort at side-stepping through the close-packed bodies. She was wearing a black bolero jacket, tight black leggings and boots. She'd had her hair cut even shorter since yesterday and bleached gold. Facially, she was very much as he remembered her from twenty years ago. He tried to recall what he'd felt for her back then. He must have loved her - whatever that meant - but all he experienced now at the sight of her was a vague familiarity, a few memories dulled by the years and the flux.

He decided to say nothing to her about his illness. He didn't want her sympathy.

"Ralph. Sorry I'm late." She slipped into the booth across from him. "Been here long?"

"About two lagers. Can I get you a drink?"

"The same. One at a time, though."

She watched him seriously as he press-selected a lager from the table-top menu. Thirty seconds later a waiter deposited it before her. Caroline took a sip. Mirren felt himself withdraw, become an observer of the situation.

"I was surprised that you agreed to meet me, Ralph."

Mirren shrugged. He could hardly tell her that he had been as surprised as her. He'd felt guilty about Bobby at the time, which probably explained it.

"You were so bloody distant yesterday-"

"What did you expect? You turn up after twenty years, breeze in..."

"You acted as if I was about to shoot you for walking out."

He grunted a laugh. "I wouldn't have blamed you." He told himself not to be so self-piteous.

She took another sip of lager, quirked her lips at its bitterness. "By the way, what did that off-worlder want yesterday?"

The question took him by surprise. "Oh... he was an old colleague from the Line. He looked me up for old time's sake."

"With two bodyguards?" She sounded sceptical.

"He's a big name in banking now. He's guarded all the time."

Caroline looked at him. He recalled what she'd said yesterday about being able to detect lies. She obviously decided not to press the issue. "Hey, I'm famished. Shall we eat?"

They press-selected their orders from the panel in the table-top, and seconds later the food issued from a slot in the wall just as meals had aboard the 'ships all those years ago. It even came in compartmentalised trays, producing in Mirren the comfortable feeling of nostalgia and anticipation. Unlike the food at the Gastrodome, this was cheap. To Mirren's surprise it was also good.

As Caroline finished her starter, she said, "By the way, I remembered those photos of Susan I told you about."

Mirren smiled. He'd rather she hadn't. He wondered if she was intentionally trying to make him feel guilty.

She took a stack of a dozen pix from the pocket of her jacket and slid them across to him. He pushed his plate away, went through the snaps one by one.

They showed an anonymous, tall, tanned and blonde Australian girl in her early twenties, smiling in all the shots: in one she was wearing the uniform of the KVO Martian division, in another a ski-suit, Another pix showed her on a beach with someone who was, presumably, her boyfriend.

Mirren recalled the baby he'd left in Sydney.

He tried to feel something, some vestige of the love he must once have felt, or failing that some paternal feelings - but he felt nothing, he admitted; not even guilt.

He returned the pictures to Caroline, who had been watching him closely. "You don't want to keep one?"

He tried to seem enthusiastic as he selected a picture: Susan, skiing on Mars.

"I heard from her last night, Ralph. She's visiting me in just over a month. She asked if I was in contact with you."

Mirren could not help but feel that Susan would be bitterly disappointed when she finally met him. "A month? That's great. We'll go out somewhere together."

Caroline smiled unsurely, pushed her plate to one side. "Ralph, I lied yesterday when I said I didn't come to Paris intending to look you up."

Mirren felt something heavy plummet within him. Please, he wanted to tell her, don't let me hurt you again.

He avoided her gaze.

She went on, "After my husband died... I got to thinking about us. We never gave it a chance -
you
never gave it a chance. I decided to come here and see what you were doing. Look, I don't mean I necessarily want us to get back together, but..." She shook her head.

There was a long silence.

"You're not the man I married, Ralph. You've changed a lot, lost something. That might have been the flux... I believe what you told me yesterday, about the flux. I know you aren't to blame. The very fact that you've had no-one since leaving..."

Mirren picked though his meal. He didn't want her sympathy, her spurious attention on the rebound from her dead irrigation scientist.

"What do you feel about it?"

He looked up. "About what?"

"What do you think?" She sounded exasperated. "Us!"

Carrie, he wanted to tell her, I'm dying and I've been promised the chance to flux again... Instead he just shook his head, folding and refolding his napkin and avoiding her stare.

"I don't mean we should get back together again, okay? But there's no reason why we can't meet occasionally, get to know each other again. No commitment, just friendship?" She reached across the table and took his hand. "I need someone, Ralph, and for chrissake so do you."

He wanted to tell her that he needed no-one. "I see no reason why we can't meet socially," he said awkwardly. He saw the pity in her eyes and it burdened him.

They finished the meal in silence.

When Mirren next looked up, Caroline was staring across the dance-floor towards the bar. Her expression hovered between suspicion and alarm.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing," she smiled brightly. "Have you finished? I feel like a long walk."

She paid quickly, inserting her card in the table-top slot before he had the chance to argue. "Come on."

Her haste to be away surprised him. "How about another drink?" The alcohol was nicely dulling his senses.

"No, let's get out of here. Follow me."

She stood and side-stepped from the booth. She took his arm in what would seem to observers like an amorous embrace: she almost dragged him around the edge of the dance-floor towards the main exit. Then, without warning, she steered him quickly through a pair of black-painted fire-doors. He was surprised by her strength.

"What-?"

"Run!" They were in a dim corridor. Mirren ran. Caroline, ahead of him, burst through a second pair of fire-doors. They emerged in a darkened alley.

"Where's your flier?"

"Ah... in the central dome. I came by taxi."

"Shit!"

"What is it?"

She pulled him by his arm and ran along the cobbled alleyway. "You were being targeted. A dozen street thugs. They were watching you."

Mirren felt a hot flush of disbelief, then fear. "
Me
?"

"What did that off-worlder character really want, Ralph?"

Behind them, an explosion shattered the quiet night, echoing deafeningly between the narrow alley walls. Mirren looked over his shoulder. A hole gaped in the brick wall of the night-club. Six thugs leapt through. They knelt amid the tumble of bricks and aimed their weapons. Caroline dragged him to the ground. He heard the air shriek as projectiles sliced overhead, tracer indicating their vector. Caroline pulled a small pistol from her jacket and returned fire. She pulled Mirren upright and hissed, "Run. Turn left at the end!"

She was kneeling, her pistol held in both hands at arm's length, spitting fire. The thugs took cover behind the fallen masonry. Mirren ran, turned the corner and leaned against the wall, panting with a combination of exhaustion and fear. Caroline joined him, tearing round the corner as if all the hounds of hell were on her heels. "Christ, Ralph. You know how to make enemies. These jokers mean business."

The alley terminated in a T-junction with a wider street. Twenty metres to the right was an intersecting main road, full of bright light and pedestrians. To the left, the street descended into shadows and a tangle of alien greenery.

"This way," Caroline said. They sprinted into that section of the street taken over by the alien jungle, Mirren anticipating the lancing pain of bullets between his shoulder blades at any second. Their footfalls no longer rang on the metalled surface; vegetation provided a treacherous carpet underfoot, and overhead the night sky was hidden by a canopy of leaves and vines. A quiet calm closed in around them, reassuring Mirren that the thugs would give themselves away by the sound of their pursuit. At the same time, now that his initial shock at the attack had worn off, it came to him how close he had been to death - and that without Caroline the thugs would have killed him with ease.

If he was being attacked because of his involvement with Hunter... then what about the rest of his team? Dan and Fekete and the others?

Caroline was jogging ahead of him, her breath coming easily. Her whole attitude cried out resolve and Mirren almost wept with gratitude.