Engineman (41 page)

"What is it?"

"There." He pointed straight ahead at the jungle. "See the road leaving the jungle and winding up the mountainside? Directly beneath where the right hand side of the sun touches the land."

She charted down from the sun's circumference, followed the line down through the massed lobes of the tree-tops. She found the road.

An armoured convoy - perhaps the same one she'd seen enter the interface on Carey's Sanctuary - was making its laborious way up the narrow road that followed the contour of the mountainside. There were perhaps a hundred vehicles in the column, ranging from small trucks to colossal rocket launchers. They moved so slowly that from this distance they seemed to be making no progress at all. At the head of the convoy, Ella made out two fliers, scouting the lie of the road in front. These, she suspected, were the immediate danger.

"Obviously they haven't seen us," Kelly said, "or the fliers would have given chase."

"If they haven't seen us, can't we just... just put the mountain between us and head to our destination?"

He glanced at her, then back to the convoy. "There's a missile launcher in the back of the flier, and enough ammunition to take out half the convoy."

"But they'd come after us. We can't take the risk."

"Technically, Ella, we're expendable." He rolled onto his side and looked at her. "For the past month or so the Organisation's been building up its forces in the higher Torreón mountains. They know there's a 'ship due - they had informants in the Disciples, before we eradicated them - but they don't know when or exactly where. When the 'ship phases in, it'll be sending out an electro-magnetic pulse like a homing beacon. It'll be becalmed for up to two hours while it's serviced and made ready for the return flight. The Organisation'll unleash all hell and more. We're pretty deep, and they'd have to flatten the mountain, but they've got a lot of fire-power up here..." He looked down on the convoy. "What I'm trying to say is, if we can knock out a couple of launchers, then we've done the cause a hell of a lot of good. Even if we get zero'd in the process. Your father wouldn't like it if he found out, but I think he'd understand."

Ella regarded the convoy as it climbed at a snail's pace up the mountain road. She glanced at Kelly, aware of his dilemma. He was miles away, staring down at the enemy. He saw her looking and shook his head.

"I'm sorry, Ella. But family reunions come second to the cause. I'm going to surprise the living Fernandez out of the jokers."

He ran back to the flier, opened the hatch in the rear and returned with a case of shells and the launcher on his shoulder. He lay down beside Ella, peering through an eye-piece and tapping co-ordinates into a keyboard on the shaft of the weapon.

He glanced at Ella. "Open the case and take out a dozen missiles."

"Kelly... I want to get back to Earth in one piece."

He turned and peered at her. Instead of shouting, as she'd expected, he took her hand. "Hey, and so do I, girl. You don't think I'm going to let the bastards get us, do you? But I've got to strike while I can. We knock out a few launchers here, we save lives later. Now open the case and slide the missiles into this chamber, okay?" He squeezed her fingers.

She nervously unlatched the case and counted out twelve missiles. The thought of giving themselves away, of falling once more into the clutches of the greatest evil she had ever known, made her sick with fear.

The missiles were tiny, like pepper-pots. She eased them into the launcher.

Kelly saw her expression and laughed. "You wait till you see the damage they do."

She lay down beside him, peering over the edge. The column had advanced. She counted more than a hundred vehicles. Her palms were sweating at the very sight of the convoy.

"Ready, Ella?" He touched the trigger.

With surprisingly little noise, the first missile zipped from the launcher. There was a delay of ten seconds, and then the leading rocket launcher went up in a roiling bloom of flame like an incandescent rose. Delayed, the sound reached them a second later - a hollow crump and a shriek of torn metal like something mortal tortured. Kelly fired five more missiles.

By this time, the militia were on the defensive. Anti-missile projectiles intercepted Kelly's missiles, detonating them one by one in great bursts of flame. A rocket launcher loosed two long, finned missiles. Ella watched in horrified fascination as they speared towards where they lay - shooting overhead with a deafening roar and exploding in a shower of flame and debris against the mountain half a kilometre beyond.

"Kelly!" she screamed. "Let's get out of here!"

Determined, Kelly fired the remaining six missiles. Five were intercepted, blinding Ella. When her sight returned, she saw a rocket launcher on its side down below, flame licking around its blackened carcass.

"That's it, girl. We're gone."

They jumped aboard the flier and Kelly put the pinnacle between themselves and the convoy. They headed towards Mt Sebastian, a towering grey presence in the distance. Ella turned in her seat, stared at the western sky and the flaming hemisphere of the red giant. Against its brightness, any pursuing vehicles would show as tell-tale silhouettes. All she saw was the tiny, dark disc of an inner planet as it traversed the face of the giant primary.

They passed higher into the mountains, flying up valleys and over peaks. Down below the ground was grey, desolate, with no sign of vegetation. In time they put other mountain peaks between themselves and the red giant, so that only its apex showed above the serried range like shark's teeth. Soon, snow appeared on the flanks of the mountains alongside. The air grew chill, then icy.

Ella had been thinking of her father for some time before she asked, "Kelly, when was the last time you saw my father?"

The Engineman glanced at her. "About three weeks ago. Why?"

"Was he okay? I mean, was he keeping well?"

Kelly considered. "He was under quite a bit of strain. A lot depended on him and he was putting in long hours - but I'd say yes, he was keeping pretty well, considering."

She hugged herself against the cold. "Will he be aboard the smallship?"

Kelly shook his head. "He's co-ordinating things from Earth." He smiled at her. "Don't worry. It won't be long now."

Kelly steered the flier under an overhang and into a lateral crevice hewn from the rock, and Ella experienced relief like the unburdening of a great weight. The crevice was shaded from the light of the sun, and illumination was provided by a flickering brand on the wall beside a rectangular opening let into the rock.

Ella climbed from the flier, and then she saw it.

The Lho-Dharvon appeared in the entrance, and the sight of it brought Ella up short. Years had elapsed since her last meeting with a Lho, and in her memory she had anthropomorphised them, allowed her feelings towards the aliens to colour her objectivity. She was surprised anew at how perilously thin the Lho were, how
alien
, almost insect-like.

The Lho approached Kelly, touched him on his forehead with its middle finger, then did the same to Ella.

"Hunter..." it breathed. "Welcome."

"Is the 'ship here?" Kelly asked.

"No 'ship..." the Lho said. "Come."

It ushered them through the entrance in the rock and down a steep, tight flight of stairs. The steps were obviously made for longer Lhoan legs, high and narrow so that Ella jarred her spine as she followed Kelly and the alien. The passage was low - at times the Engineman had to stoop. For the most part it was excavated through solid rock, but occasionally it followed the course of fissures and natural crevices, and here the steps were even narrower and more precipitous. The way was lighted by flaming torches at long intervals, with stretches of half-light in between. They descended for more than an hour. As they plummeted and wound their way deeper into the mountain, the temperature increased. Ella sweated, feeling faint with the humidity and exertion.

At last the stairway terminated and they came out in a wide corridor, clearly an original part of the ancient temple. The corridor too was illuminated by torches, but set at closer intervals to reveal panels carved into the stone depicting stick figures and symmetrical circle-within-circle symbols like mandalas. Ella had no time to give the panels anything but a passing glance. The alien hurried them along and she found herself jogging to keep up. The wonder she felt at being in the temple of the Lho, the sense of experiencing something alien and
other
, was tempered by exhaustion and the thought of the trip back to Earth.

They turned left and climbed down another steep flight of stairs, this one corkscrewing through the rock until it gave onto a vast cathedral-like chamber. The far regions of the circular chamber were in darkness, but nearby was all light and activity. A generator droned, providing power for fluorescent lights and banks of computer terminals and screens. A dozen Enginemen and Enginewomen monitored the screens and pored over read-outs. Perhaps fifty Lho waited - with all the forlorn apprehension of the refugees they were - to one side, crouching or sitting cross-legged on the floor. With them, Ella made out half a dozen aliens on stretchers.

Kelly led Ella across to a rest area - a crude arrangement of old settees and foam-forms set out in a square. Enginemen slept or rested; others drank coffee or chatted among themselves. Kelly embraced a short, wiry Enginewoman in her fifties.

"This is it, Kelly," the woman said. "This is what we've been working towards..."

For the next hour, Ella stretched out and rested on a foam-form, unable to sleep for the noise of the generator, the tense conversation of the assembled Disciples and the sense of anticipation bursting within her.

From among the banks of computers and monitors, someone shouted. The Enginemen in the rest area stood and rushed out. Ella joined them. They stood around the edge of the chamber, staring into the darkness. Seconds later, a fierce gust of displaced air almost knocked Ella off her feet. Grit and dust stung her face as the gale raged around her, blasting her in the face as she watched the squat, silver smallship flicker into existence in the centre of the chamber like the image on a defective vid-screen. At last it established itself solidly in this reality, the sight of the 'ship made all the more poignant by the awed hush of the assembled Disciples.

Ella stared at the smallship through her tears. She was suddenly overcome with a terrible anxiety that had nothing to do with the safety of the imminent flight. The arrival of the 'ship made real the fact that soon she would be returning to Earth, and she experienced a complex mix of emotions - love and hate and everything in between - at the thought of meeting her father again for the first time in ten years.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Mirren stood in the engine-room of the
Sublime
and stared out through the viewscreen. At first he assumed that the 'ship had materialised during the planet's night, as all was darkness outside. Then, as his eyes adjusted, he realised that the 'ship had phased into a vast chamber. Tall, carved figures, attenuated and alien, demarcated the cavern's perimeter. Beneath them, dwarfed, were a group of humans - some in radiation silvers - standing around banks of computers and monitors in the dim light of a dozen jerry-rigged fluorescents. The men and women were clapping, cheering, hugging each other and exchanging handshakes. As they made their way across the floor of the chamber, they were joined by a group of tall, elongated aliens. They moved towards the 'ship with an unhurried circumspection that reminded Mirren of certain insects. They paused in the wash of light from the engine-room and stared up at Mirren and Dan. One of them lifted an arm in an oddly human gesture of greeting, incongruous coming from a figure so alien. Mirren returned the wave and asked Miguelino to open the hatch.

He left the engine-room and dropped to the lounge, where already Enginemen and -women were carrying aboard computers and other technical apparatus. They stopped and greeted him with handshakes, formal in their statement of name, the Line for which they'd pushed, and rank. The Lho walked up the ramp and settled themselves around the lounge, sitting cross-legged on the carpet in patient groups of three or four.

A big Engineman crushed Mirren's fingers with a welcoming handshake. "Kelly, Dunnett Line, Alpha. Are we glad to see you, man. We have forty-five Lho here, as well as six Effectuators and around thirty Disciples."

"Mirren, Canterbury Line, Alpha. We should be set to phase-out in just under two hours, according to my pilot."

"Expect a few fireworks, Mirren. The Organisation know we're down here, and I don't think they'll sit around playing with themselves while we phase-out."

Kelly had his arm around a small woman, less from affection than the need to keep her upright. She looked frail, pale and beaten. Mirren and Kelly helped her across to a foam-form. She collapsed onto it, smiling as if in apology for her exhaustion.

"Hunter," the woman said, "no Line, no rank, but I'm a Disciple and damned glad to be here."

Kelly explained, "Ella was captured by the Organisation, given a rough time."

"Hunter?" Mirren asked. "Are you related-?"

The woman smiled. "He's my father. How is he?"

"He was well when we left. He'll be a lot better for seeing us return."