Engineman (40 page)

"I am going to ask you a few questions, and I want immediate and truthful answers. If I don't like the answers you give me, I will have you shot." There was something so cold and emotionless in the threat that Mirren didn't for a second doubt the man.

A period of silence, then, "You were found with the Lho in the jungle. What did they want with you?"

Mirren hesitated. Even if he told them the truth, he doubted if it would help the Organisation's cause. But the thought of capitulating, bowing to the coercion of these thugs...

"Go to hell!"

Silence. He trembled with fear.

The blow came, all the more shocking for being unexpected. Pain shot through his jaw.

"We'll try again, Mr Mirren. What did the aliens want with you?"

He heard the percussion of a safety-catch being switched, felt a cold circle of gun-metal against his temple.

He hated himself for giving in, but the instinct for survival overcame his conscience. "They... they wanted to get me to Earth-" He stopped himself.

"Why?"

"To tell the free worlds of the slaughter you're committing here."

Calmly, his interrogator asked, "And what did they tell you of this slaughter?"

Mirren remained silent.

"Did they tell you the reason for our offensive, Mr Mirren?"

He shook his head. "No."

He sensed his tormentors' retreat. A muttered discussion took place at the other side of the cell. Someone returned. Mirren was expecting another blow - not the fine, wet spray that filled his nose with a stinging, antiseptic scent.

He passed out.

When he regained consciousness he felt lethargic, heavy-limbed, and filled with a curious sense of well-being. He also felt amenable. He knew, then, the nature of the spray.

"Glad to have you back with us, Mr Mirren," said the voice from the darkness. "Now, please, tell me who you met in the jungle and what they told you."

He felt as if he had been split into two separate identities. One understood what was happening, and wanted more than anything to resist the drug, to tell his other half not to capitulate - but was prevented from doing so by an overwhelming lethargy. He heard his amenable self talking, telling his interrogator about the crashlanding and the trek through the jungle, his witnessing of the massacre and his audience with the Lho.

"What did they want with you, Mr Mirren?"

"To get back to Earth, to tell the free planets what is happening here. And..."

"And, Mr Mirren?"

"They wanted to take me to their mountain hide, to commune with their Effectuators."

A silence. He could almost sense their anticipation. "Where precisely is their mountain hide?"

This, Mirren felt, was what the Organisation really wanted. He comforted himself that the information he had supplied already would be of little use to them.

He shook his head. "I don't know-"

The interrogator said, "Where, Mirren? Tell me!"

"I said, I don't know. They didn't tell me-"

He sensed their impatience, their anger.

A silence followed, stretched, until it came to him that they must have left the room. Perhaps an hour later, they returned. He guessed he was in for another bout of interrogation. Instead, he felt something being fitted around his head, cold metal bands pressing against his skull, electrodes at his temples.

He knew what was happening to him, and felt relief that they were sparing his life...

He slipped into unconsciousness.

He came to his senses in a hospital bed in a room filled with sunlight. He tried to sit up. An orderly was on hand to restrain him, gently.

"Where am I?"

"On Earth, Mr Mirren."

He fell back, tried to collect his thoughts. His most recent memories were of Paris, the party before his last push for the Canterbury Line.

The orderly was explaining. "Your 'ship crashlanded on an uncharted Rim world, Mr Mirren. You were uninjured, but the trauma of the accident induced comprehensive amnesia..." The orderly went on, but Mirren wasn't listening.

He closed his eyes and tried to remember.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Kelly brought the flier down on a spur of rock overlooking the massed tree-tops of the jungle that extended towards the great ball of the setting sun. Ella stretched, her tired muscles protesting at the effort. The Engineman jumped from the flier and strode across to a rock pool, where he knelt and splashed his face with water.

Ella climbed out. The air was warm, still and silent. Inland, against the twilight, a range of mountains rose grey and imposing, their peaks jagged and faceted like knapped granite.

Kelly made his way back to the flier.

"You're awake at last."

"How long have I been out?"

"Around eight hours," he said. "See the bastards got you with the old incapacitator."

She lifted her arm, peered at it. The skin was red raw and painful, as if boiled. "I'll live." She looked up at Kelly and smiled. "Thanks for saving my life."

"My pleasure, ma'am." He indicated the rock pool. "Water's wonderful if you feel like a swim."

Ella sat on the hood of the flier and held her head in her hands. "I'll pass. Don't think I have the energy."

"Food, then? You must be ravenous."

"Yeah, food'd be great."

She felt as if the trauma of the past two days - her injuries, the torture she had withstood, not to mention the mental torment of not knowing whether she was going to live or die - had finally caught up with her. Every centimetre of her body ached, the pain intense in her jaw, shoulder, and thigh.

Kelly was breaking out rations from the flier. He lifted a cooler on to the hood next to her. "In-flight meals for the Danzig Airways - liberated during a raid last week."

Ella opened a self-heating tray of meat and vegetables. They sat side by side on the flier, eating in silence for a while.

She hadn't introduced herself. "Ella Fernandez," she said through a mouthful of potato. "Pleased to meet you."

"Pleased to meet you, Ella. I'm Kelly. But I know who you are. Why do you think we staged the raid on the Danzig base back there? When we learnt you'd been captured, I thought your father would be grateful if we got you out."

She swallowed quickly. "You know my father?"

"We've worked together with the Disciples and the Lho these past six years. Devising strategy, tactics..." Kelly paused. "Six, seven years ago your father was becoming disillusioned with the Organisation - they'd taken over a couple of worlds further along the Rim and there were rumours of civil unrest and military suppression. He began to look into the Disciples. He read books, made contacts. We were suspicious as hell of him at first. There he was, a Danzig executive, showing interest in Disciples' philosophy, declaring he wanted to join us..."

"But you let him?"

"He supplied information vital to the resistance movement. Over the next few years we worked together, became good friends."

Ella shook her head. "I never think of my father as having friends."

"He has. He's well respected." Kelly paused. "You know, he regretted that you and he weren't closer."

"He told you that?"

"It was always on his mind. He knew he'd made mistakes, but it wasn't easy for him, you know. His work for the Organisation took him away a lot of the time, and you drifted apart."

"You mean he put me in boarding school and forgot about me."

"He was a busy man, Ella."

She laughed. "Yeah - co-ordinating the take-over or destruction of the last of the shipping Lines-"

"That was a long time ago. He's changed. He knows that what he did then was wrong."

Ella whispered, "All I ever wanted was a proper father. He never gave me any affection. It was as if he didn't know how to."

The Engineman shrugged. "Perhaps he didn't," he said. "I think he only came to appreciate you later, once you'd left home. He kept tabs on you, you know? He had people report on how your work was going. He even bought a piece of yours."

"I know. I've seen it." She fell silent, staring at the sunset. At last she said, "Why didn't he tell me about his conversion back then? He could have told me years ago, when it happened." She paused. "If he'd told me six years ago, things would be different now."

The big American leaned back on the hood of the flier, propping himself on one elbow. "It was difficult, Ella."

She looked at him. "Difficult? How come? All it would've taken was a disc, a card even."

"I was with him during those years. We had to be very careful. If the Organisation had had the slightest hint of where we were, more than the liberation of Hennessy's Reach would have been at stake."

Ella stared at him.

Kelly said, "Not long after his conversion, the Lho who'd survived the plague summoned him. He had the right contacts across the Expansion, the right kind of knowledge, and the Disciples had the finances."

Ella shook her head. The thought of the Lho and her father, working in alliance...

"What did they want with him?"

Kelly said, "They wanted him to help them save themselves, the last of the Lho-Dharvo people. They took him into the mountains, where the survivors lived in a temple far underground, and they explained their situation..." He paused, considering. "When he came back, your father was a changed man. If anything, he was more committed, more determined to see the end of the Organisation. He never spoke about what he experienced in the temple, but whatever it was moved him profoundly. There were rumours-"

"Yes?"

Kelly gestured. "I heard it from a Lho that he entered into some kind of communion with their holy people - but the Lho I spoke to wasn't very clear what exactly the communion was all about... Anyway, he returned doubly committed to the cause. We were smuggled off the Reach in a container, through the interface to the free planets of the Tyler-McDermott system. We made them our base and worked to save the Lho and bring about the downfall of the Danzig Organisation."

Ella wondered what her father had undergone in the mountain stronghold of the Lho, if it had been anything like the sense of unity she had experienced all those years ago in the cave with L'Endo.

"Where's my father now?" she asked.

"On Earth," Kelly said. "Specifically, in Paris."

"Paris?"

"He sent you a disc a few weeks ago, arranging to meet you in Paris when he arrived. Obviously you never received it."

"I got it, but I was angry. I wiped most of it when I realised who it was from." She shrugged. "Then things happened. I decided I wanted to see him. So I came here."

"And walked right into the lion's mouth," Kelly said. "Fortunately, we can get you out of here."

She stared at him. "But the interface...

Kelly sat up. "There is another way we can get back to Earth."

Ella peered at him.

"Your father's sending a smallship to the Reach to evacuate the Lho from the temple. With luck, we should be aboard it for the flight back to Earth."

"A
smallship
?"

"Come on, we'd better get moving."

He climbed back into the flier. Ella sat beside him, watching the spur of rock turn away beneath them and disappear. They headed over the jungle towards a jagged, up-thrusting mountain range, skimming low over the tree-tops as the jungle climbed the mountainside and then petered out.

Kelly kept the flier in close to the cliff-face, skirting great planes of rock towering for kilometres above the flier. They wound through a series of pinnacles, each one higher than the last. Ahead, perhaps fifty kilometres distant, was a blunt, rectangular peak Ella recognised as Mt Sebastian.

Ella didn't know which was the most unlikely: seeing her father again after so long, or flying to Earth aboard a smallship. She was twelve when she had last shipped through space, and now smallships seemed an ancient, superannuated form of transport. Compared to the simplicity of the interfaces, the procedure of phasing a smallship into and out of the
nada
-continuum was complex - not to mention dangerous. So much could go wrong between here and Earth. She would rather have returned by interface... not that she was complaining. It was a miracle, after the events of the past few days, that she had survived and would soon meet her father. She closed her eyes and wished that she was already on board the smallship, en route to Earth.

"Hello," Kelly said.

Something in his tone indicated he wasn't speaking to her.

She opened her eyes. He was leaning over the side, looking back towards the jungle. Ella strained her eyes in the same direction, but could see nothing.

Kelly accelerated and swept the flier in a corkscrew ascent of a lofty pinnacle. At the summit he landed and jumped out. Ella followed, alarmed. Kelly was on his stomach at the edge of the rock. Ella joined him and peered down the sheer, dwindling face.