Spares (39 page)

My brain tried to crawl out of my ears.

“Fuck!” I said, when I could breathe again. “How do you know my name?”

“It’s Ratchet, Jack,” the voice said calmly.

“Ratchet,” I said, as my brain had another crack at escaping, presumably in a bid to find somewhere more explicable to live. I considered jamming my fingers in my ears, to firmly block that route, but then realized I wouldn’t be able to hear anything.

“Yes. It’s good to see you. I gather we’re in The Gap.” With a quiet whirring sound the camera zoomed in on my face. “Your pupils are pinned. Have you been taking Rapt again?”

“Fuck that,” I said. “Screw what I’ve been up to. What are you
doing
here?”

“I don’t know,” said Ratchet. “I assume you brought me.”’

“Well,” I said, “yes, I did. But how did you get in my bag? You were still at the Farm when I left.”

“I was running on a back-up processor. When it became
obvious that the events at the Farm were unlikely to have a uniformly positive conclusion, I put my main CPU somewhere safe, so you were likely to take it with you.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t want to die,” he said, simply. “Also, I hoped I might come in useful someday. Why are you in The Gap?”

“Oh, Christ,” I said. “It’s kind of a long story. But how come you can run this gunship?”

“That’s what I was built for in the first place. Not this ship, but another like it. At the end of the war the CPU’s were salvaged. Arlond Maxen bought up a job lot of them. I ended up on the Farm.”

“You were a
warDroid?”

“Yes. I was.”

I stared at the camera, mind whirling, picturing war-scarred computers running traffic control and electronic toasters all over the country. It could explain a lot. “Why didn’t you tell me? You knew I’d been a Bright Eyes. Why didn’t you
tell me
you were here?”

“You didn’t ask—and I wouldn’t have told you anyway. The last thing you needed at the time was to remember the war. It wasn’t relevant.”

“Jesus,” I said. “That’s why you were so stupidly powerful. That’s why you were so
weird”

“What—compared to you?” Ratchet asked, and I suddenly realized just how much I’d missed him.

Then I remembered the overall position, my global world view at that time, and the mood transformed into panic.

“Look,” I said. “Weird or not, we need your help.”

It took only a few minutes to give Ratchet the bones of the situation. During that time I heard distant rattlings and whirrings as the computer ran checks on the gunship’s propulsion systems and collision detectors. He also tried to make some coffee in the ship’s minuscule galley, but the grounds were moldy and rotten so I made do with a cup of hot water instead. There didn’t seem to be any provision for the manufacture of cheeseburgers, unfortunately.

“I have no way of finding these people,” Ratchet said eventually. “By the sound of it they could be anywhere, and you don’t know how you came to be here.”

“Shit,” I said. I waved my hands vaguely. “Can’t we just, I don’t know, troll around until we find them?”

“The Gap is infinite, Jack, because the gaps between people are always unbridgeably wide. Searching an infinite space would take—”

“An awfully long time. I understand. Hang on—can you trace Positionex signals?”

“Yes. Not from the satellite, because it isn’t in The
Gap, but I can lock onto the impulses from the unit. Why?”

“Ghuaji may still have the Positionex on him,” I said. “Let’s go.”

I strapped myself hurriedly into the pilot’s seat. As the engines thrummed into life I considered whether now might be a good time for taking some Rapt, but in a tiny, tired reprise of what I’d felt so many years ago, I decided I was going to do this one straight.

The hum of the engines climbed and then sank again, as the systems settled into flying mode. And then, like a sleepy movement of the Earth, the ship righted itself, and lifted off the ground.

I have to admit that I whooped. It had been a while. I enjoyed it.

I watched out of the window until the gunship was hovering about ten feet off the ground—standard flying height. One of the control panel monitors winked on, showing a blue dot in the middle of a schematic map of trees shown in cross-section.

“Found it,” Ratchet said. “It’s about four miles.”

“Full speed ahead,” I said, savoring the moment. “And don’t spare the ammo when we find him.”

The ship shifted unsteadily, then seemed to get into its stride. It slipped into a small clearing, then turned on its vertical axis until it was facing back the way I’d come.

“Okay,” said Ratchet. “I’m going to have to concentrate for a while. Catch you later.”

We started moving again, at first slowly, then faster and faster until the trees were slipping past the window like brown ghosts running the other way. There was barely any sound apart from the wind, and the cabin was eerily quiet. I held on tightly to my seat, trying to avoid being slung from side to side as the ship dodged and wove. I’d seen one of the gunships flying past once, and marveled at the way the computers steered through the trunks like an enormous fish darting through seaweed.

I’d also seen one crash, so when we reached maximum velocity I just shut my eyes.

Not being able to see was even more nerve-racking, so in the end I opened them again, and watched white-knuckled as the ship sped closer and closer to the position indicated by the flashing light on the monitor. At one point we swam through a few hundred yards of The Fear, but we were back out the other side before I’d had time to reach for the needle and undo my resolution.

After a couple of miles the light outside changed. The pure blue turned muddy, and I began to get worried. My suspicions were confirmed when I felt a sudden twinge at the bottom of my eyes, like a scalpel being slipped under the lids.

“Oh shit,” I said. “Ratchet, how far away are we?”

“About half a mile,” the computer replied tersely. “Why? You want to go to the bathroom?”

“Vinaldi doesn’t have the Bright Eyes anymore.” Out of the window on my side I saw brown tendrils of luminescence interlaced in the spaces between the trees. People had thought they were thin branches or shoots of some kind, until soldiers had been attacked by them and gone staggering off with twigs of light sticking out of their burning eyes. Unless Vinaldi was inside somewhere he was in big trouble—as were Suej, Nearly, and the rest of the spares, assuming they were here at all. “We’ve got to
hurry”

“We’re approaching the source of the signal now,” Ratchet said, and I could sense the ship tensing itself around me. “Brace yourself.”

I was already about as braced as I could get, and so I just stared out of the window, searching for some sign of Ghuaji and the others in the murky light. The gunship decelerated rapidly, flicking between the trees with a piscine grace, homing in on the Positionex signal. I pulled my gun out, checked the cartridge. There was a limit to what I could do with it, because if Yhandim and
Ghuaji—and anyone else they had with them—really had been taken up into The Gap, then they would have in effect become villagers, and it would need a lot more than a standard bullet to take them down. It would take a pulse rifle, of the kind which was arrayed on either side of the gunship’s midsection. I’d never really understood how the pulse rifles worked, except that someone had once told me that the energy was the same as that generated in an engine propulsion system. It didn’t really matter, as long as they did their job. The gun in my hand was just there to make me feel better. It worked—a little. A Jack Daniels would probably have been just as effective.

The web of brown energy outside the window meant visible light might be untrustworthy, so I concentrated on the monitor tracking the Positionex signal, drumming my fingers on the screen. The indicator light was close now, very close. Ratchet slowed the ship to little more than five miles an hour, and I watched the crosshairs on the monitor bisect the signal.

“We’ve gone past it,” Ratchet said.

“We can’t have.”

“Look at the screen.”

He was right. We were now on the other side of the indicator light. “How can we have missed it? Turn around—look again.”

Ratchet negotiated the ship in an arc and hovered back over the point indicated by the lock. I watched the external monitors, looking for, well, anything at all. The brown light had dissipated enough for me to make out the trunks of the trees around us, but I still couldn’t see Ghuaji. The ship slowed still further, to walking pace, and then stopped.

“We’re directly over it now,” Ratchet said.

There was nothing there, but I’ve seen all those movies and you’re not catching me like that. “Look up,” I said. “Maybe he’s up a tree.”

“I’ve done that already,” Ratchet said, relaying a feed from a camera on top of the ship to one of the
screens. The trunk of a tree, like any other, disappearing up into the semidarkness. “There’s no one here even on infrared.”

“Drop down a little.”

The ship descended until the lower fin was resting gently on the ground. “Oh, fuck,” I said then, catching something out of the corner of my eye. “What’s that?”

The thing I thought I’d seen became clearer, as a sheet of the brown light folded away.

Ghuaji’s jacket, hanging over a bush.

I swore long and hard. Either Yhandim had figured out that Vinaldi and I had put a tracer on Ghuaji, or the coat had just been left behind by accident. Thinking back, I couldn’t remember whether Ghuaji had been wearing the jacket when I was in the village with Vinaldi.

It didn’t really matter. It was all over, unless Ratchet had any ideas. I asked him, not really hoping for an answer. It was still disappointing to find he didn’t have one.

“The position remains the same,” he said, apologetically. “Except that we have possibly now gone four miles in an incorrect direction. Sorry.”

I kicked out at the seat next to me. I wasn’t going to find them, and they were all going to die. Nearly would probably be mistreated a little first, but then she would die, assuming she wasn’t dead already. The spares, including Suej, would be taken to whatever fate awaited them. Even Vinaldi, who I now realized I would, on the whole, prefer not to lose as an acquaintance, would be killed. I was stuck in the depths of a forest which stretched limitlessly all around, sometimes in twilight, sometimes in darkness, but always unknowable and unsafe—and I had no way whatsoever of getting out I leaned forward with my head in my hands, eyes looking down at the controls but seeing nothing.

Perhaps, I thought, it was time for some more Rapt after all. Or maybe I should keep it as a little treat for when I’d been here for a hundred years.

“Jack,” Ratchet said quietly. “You may want to look out the window.”

Something in the tone of the computer’s voice made me sit up. The light was blue again outside, and now it wasn’t just trees which stood silently all around us.

The children were back.

They had returned, but this time there was no comfort in their presence. Their eyes emanated coldness, anger—though I didn’t feel either was directed at me. They surrounded the gunship in a circle which stretched in all directions, I couldn’t pick out the boy I’d seen first, but perhaps he was somewhere in the crowd. They were all there, gray-faced and staring up at me, their mouths open as if they were screaming.

“Are they Gap children?” Ratchet asked, even more quietly. I don’t suppose that computers get frightened, but even he sounded pretty spooked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s something odd about them. They brought me to this ship. They led me there and left.”

“What are they doing now?”

The children farthest away from the ship began to move, turning so they were facing in the opposite direction. All their mouths shut at once, and then they started walking away. As they got farther from the ship, others came from behind us to join them. They formed into ranks five across, a column which marched between the trees and into the twilight.