Hands gripped at her arms from behind. Lori yelped in shock. Nobody should be there. But reflexes took over, a fast back-kick
which connected with a thigh, and she completed the turn with her arms locking into a defensive posture in time to see the
woman staggering back. She blinked in incomprehension. The woman had blood pouring out of her mouth, her throat was severely
disfigured from the first blow. As she watched, the skin inflated out, Adam’s apple reappearing. The gush of blood stopped.
Sweet shit, what does it take to stop them?
The two men Darcy had knocked over were regaining their feet. One had a shattered shin bone, its jagged end protruding from
the flesh just below his knee; he stood on it and walked forwards.
Electrodes,
Darcy ordered. The first of the men was reaching for him, the side of his face caved in where Darcy’s boot had impacted,
eyeball mashed in its socket, shedding tears of syrupy yellow fluid, but still smiling. He deliberately stepped inside the
groping embrace, bringing his hands up, fingers wide, and clamping his palms on either side of the man’s head. The long cords
of eel-derived electroplaque cells buried in his forearms discharged through organic conductors that emerged from his fingertips
in the form of tiny warts. The man’s head was crowned with a blinding flare of purple-white static accompanied by a gunshot
crack as the full two-thousand-volt charge slammed into his brain.
A vicious tingling erupted across Darcy’s hands as some of the current leaked through the subcutaneous insulation. But the
effect on the man was like nothing Darcy had ever seen before. The discharge should have felled him instantly, nothing living
could withstand that much electricity. Instead he lurched backwards clutching at his mangled head, emitting a soprano keening.
His skin began to glow, shining brighter and brighter. The shirt and jeans flamed briefly, falling away from the incandescent
body as blackened petals. Darcy shielded his eyes with his hand. There was no heat, he realized, with a light so bright he
ought to feel a scorch wave breaking across his chameleon suit. The man had become translucent now, so powerful was the surge
of photons, revealing bones and veins and organs as deep scarlet and purple shadows. Their solidity dissolved, as if they
were different coloured gases caught in a hurricane. He managed one last wretched wail as his body gave a massive epileptic
spasm.
The light snuffed out, and the man fell flat on his face.
The other four assailants began to howl. Lori had heard a dog lamenting the death of its master once; their voices had that
same bitter resentful grieving. She realized some of her hardware units were coming back on-line, the disruption effect was
abating. Her chameleon suit circuitry sent psychedelic scarlet and green fireworks zipping over the fabric.
“Kelven!” she shouted desperately.
Alone in his darkened office a thousand kilometres away Kelven Solanki jerked to attention behind his desk as her static-jarred
voice crashed into his neural nanonics.
“Kelven, he was right, Laton was right, there is some kind of energy field involved. It interfaces with matter somehow, controls
it. You can beat it with electricity. Sometimes. Hell, she’s getting up again.”
Darcy’s voice broke in. “Run! Now!”
“Don’t let them gang up on you, Kelven. They’re powerful when they group together. It’s got to be xenocs.”
“Shit, the whole village is swarming after us,” Darcy called.
Static roared along the satellite link like a rogue binary blitzkrieg, making Kelven wince.
“Kelven, you must quarantine…” Lori never finished, her signal drowning below the deluge of rampaging whines and hisses. Then
the racket ended.
TRANSPONDER SIGNAL DISCONTINUED, the computer printed neatly on Kelven’s desk screen.
“I told you we shouldn’t have come up here, didn’t I?” Gail Buchannan said. “Plain as day, I said no, I said you can’t trust
Edenists. But you wouldn’t listen. Oh no. They just waved their fancy credit disk in front of your eyes, and you rolled over
like a wet puppy. It’s worse than when she was on board.”
Sitting on the other side of the galley’s table, Len covered his eyes with his hands. The diatribes didn’t bother him much
now, he had learnt to filter them out years ago. Perhaps it was one of the reasons they had stayed together so long, not from
attraction, simply because they ignored each other ninety per cent of the time. He had taken to thinking about such things
recently, since Marie had left.
“Is there any coffee left?” he asked.
Gail never even glanced up from her knitting needles. “In the pot. You’re as lazy as she was.”
“Marie wasn’t lazy.” He got up and walked over to the electric hotplate where the coffee-pot was resting.
“Oh, it’s
Marie
now, is it? I bet you can’t name ten of the others we ferried downriver.”
He poured half a mug of coffee and sat back down. “Neither can you.”
She actually stopped knitting. “Lennie, for God’s sake, none of them had this effect on you. Look at what’s happened to us,
to the boat. What was so special about her? There must have been over a hundred brides in that bunk of yours down the years.”
Len glanced up in surprise. With her bloated features rendering her face almost expressionless it was difficult to know what
went on behind his wife’s eyes, but he could tell how confused she was. He dropped his gaze to the steaming mug, and blew
on it absently. “I don’t know.”
Gail grunted, and resumed her knitting.
“Why don’t you go to bed?” he said. “It’s late, and we ought to stay awake in shifts.”
“If you hadn’t been so eager to come here we wouldn’t have to mess our routine up.”
Arguing just wasn’t worth the effort. “Well, we’re here now. I’ll keep watch until midmorning.”
“Those damn Ivets. I hope Rexrew has every one of them shot.”
The lighting panel screwed into the galley’s ceiling began to dim. Len gave it a puzzled glance; all the boat’s electrical
systems ran off the big electron-matrix crystals in the engine-room, and they were always kept fully charged. If nothing else,
he did keep the boat’s machinery in good order. Point of honour, that was.
Someone stepped onto the
Coogan
’s deck between the wheel-house and the long cabin. It was only the slightest sound, but Len and Gail both looked up sharply,
meeting each other’s gaze.
A young-looking teenage lad walked into the galley. Len saw he was wearing a sheriff’s beige-coloured jungle jacket, the name
Yuri Wilken printed on the left breast. Darcy had told him about the invaders using sequestration techniques. At the time
he’d listened cynically; now he was prepared to believe utterly. There was a vicious wound on the lad’s throat, long scars
of red tender skin all knotted up. A huge ribbon of dried blood ran down the front of his sleeveless shirt. He wore the kind
of dazed expression belonging to the very drunk.
“Get off my boat,” Len growled.
Yuri Wilken parted his mouth in a parody of a smile. Liquid rasps emerged as he tried to speak. The lighting panel was flashing
on and off at high frequency.
Len stood up and calmly walked over to the long counter fitted along the starboard wall.
“Sit,” Yuri grated. His hand closed on Gail’s shoulder. There was a sizzling sound, and her dress strap ignited, sending licks
of yellow flame curling round his fingers. His skin remained completely unblemished.
Gail let out an anguished groan at the pain, her mouth yawning open. Wisps of blue smoke were rising from below Yuri’s hand
as her skin was roasted. “Sit or she’s dead.”
Len opened the top drawer next to the fridge, and pulled out the 9mm, semi-automatic pistol he kept for emergencies. He never
had trusted lasers and magnetic rifles, not exposed to the Juliffe’s corrosive humidity. If anyone came aboard looking for
trouble after a deal went sour, or a village got worked up about prices, he wanted something that would be guaranteed to work
first time.
He flicked the safety catch off, and swung the heavy blue-black gun around to point at Yuri.
“No,” the lad’s malaised voice croaked. He brought his hands up in front of his face, cowering back.
Len fired. The first bullet caught Yuri on his shoulder, spinning him round and pushing him into the wall. Yuri snarled, furious
eyes glaring at him. The second was aimed at Yuri’s heart. It hit his sternum and the planks behind him were splashed with
crimson as two of his ribs were blown apart. He began to slide down the wall, breath hissing through feral teeth. The lighting
panel jumped up to its full brightness.
Len watched with numb dismay as the shoulder wound closed up. Yuri squirmed round, trying to regain his feet with slow tenacity.
He grinned evilly. The grip on the pistol was growing alarmingly warm inside Len’s hand.
“Kill him, Lennie!” Gail shouted. “Kill, kill!”
Feeling preternaturally calm, Len took aim at the lad’s head and squeezed the trigger. Once. Twice. The first punched Yuri’s
nose into his skull, ripping through his brain. He sucked air in, warbling frantically. Blood and gore slurped out of the
hole. The second shot caught the right side of his temple, driving splinters of bone into the wood behind like a flight of
Stone Age darts. His feet began to drum on the deck.
Len was seeing it through a cold mist. The punished, mutilated body just refused to give up. He yelled a wordless curse, finger
tugging back again and again.
The pistol was clicking uselessly, its magazine empty. He blinked, trying to pull the world back into focus. Yuri had finally
fallen still, there was very little left of his head. Len turned aside, grasping the side of the basin for support as a flush
of nausea travelled through him. Gail was whimpering softly, a hand stroking the terrible blisters and long blackened burn
marks that mottled her shoulder.
He went over and cradled her head with a tenderness he hadn’t shown in years.
“Get us out of here,” she pleaded. “Please, Lennie.”
“Darcy and Lori…”
“Us, Lennie. Get us out of here. You don’t think they’re going to live through tonight, do you?”
He licked his lips, making up his mind. “No.” He brought her the first aid kit and applied a small anaesthetic patch to her
shoulder. She let out a blissful little sigh as it discharged.
“You go start the engines,” she said. “I’ll see to this. I’ve never held you back yet.” She started to rummage through the
kit box, hunting for a medical nanonic package.
Len went out onto the deck and untied the silicon-fibre cables mooring the
Coogan
, slinging the ends over the side. They were expensive, and hard to come by, but it would take another quarter of an hour
if he went stumbling round the banks coiling them all up properly.
The furnace was quite cool, but the electron-matrix crystals had enough power to take
Coogan
an easy seventy kilometres downstream before they were drained. He started the motors, shoving the trader boat out from under
the lace-work awning of cut branches veiling it from casual eyes. As if there were any of those left on the river, he mused.
Getting underway was a miraculous morale booster. Alone on the lively Zamjan amid the first tinges of dawn’s grey light he
could almost believe they were trading again. Simple times, watching the wheel-house’s basic instrumentation, and enjoying
the prospect of milking another batch of dumb dreamers at the next village. He even managed to keep his mind from the macabre
corpse in the galley.
They had gone six kilometres almost due west, helped by the broad river’s swift current, when Len saw two dark smudges on
the water up ahead.
Swithland
and
Hycel
were steaming towards him. A great cleft had been made in the
Swithland
’s prow, and the superstructure was leaning over at a hellish angle; but neither seemed to be affecting her speed.
The short-range radio block beside the forward-sweep mass-detector let out a bleep, then the general contact band came on.
“Hoi there, Captain Buchannan, this is the
Hycel
. Reduce speed and prepare to come alongside.”
Len ignored it. He steered a couple of degrees to starboard. The two paddle-boats altered course to match. Blocking him.
“Come on, Buchannan, what do you hope to gain? That pitiful little boat can’t out-race us. One way or the other, you’re coming
on board. Now heave to.”
Len thought of the burns the lad had inflicted with his bare hand, the flickering lighting panel. It was all way beyond anything
he could hope to understand or resolve. There was no going back to life as it had been, not now. And in the main it had been
a good life.
He increased the power to the motors, and held the course steady, aiming for the
Hycel
’s growing prow. With a bit of luck Gail would never know.
He was still standing resolutely behind the
Coogan
’s wheel when the two boats collided. The
Hycel
with its greater bulk and stalwart hull rode the impact easily, smashing the flimsy
Coogan
apart like so much kindling, and sucking the debris below its hull in a riot of bubbles.
Various chunks of wood and plastic bobbed about in the paddle-boat’s wake, spinning in the turbulent water. Thick black oil
patches welled up among them. The current slowly pushed the scraps of wreckage downriver, dispersing them over a wide area.
Within quarter of an hour there was no evidence left to illustrate the trader boat’s demise.
Swithland
and
Hycel
continued on their way upriver without slowing.
Joshua Calvert was surprised to find himself enjoying the train journey. He had almost expected to see a nineteenth-century
steam engine pumping out clouds of white smoke and clanking pistons spinning iron wheels. Reality was a sleek eight-wheel
tractor unit with magnetic axle-motors powered from electron matrices, pulling six coaches.
The Kavanaghs had provided him with a first-class ticket, so he sat in a private compartment with his feet up on the opposite
seat, watching the sprawling forests and picturesque hamlets go past. Dahybi Yadev sat next to him, eyelids blinking heavily
as a mild stimulant program trickled through his neural nanonics. In the end they had decided that Ashly Hanson should remain
behind to operate the
Lady Mac
’s MSV as the crew emptied the mayope from her cargo holds. Dahybi had volunteered to take his place quickly enough, and as
the nodes had been glitch free on the trip to Norfolk, Joshua had agreed. The rest of the crew had been detailed to maintenance
duty. Sarha had sulked at the prospect, she’d been looking forward to an extended leave exploring the gentle planet.