Against A Dark Background (48 page)

The third jet swept overhead, climbing and turning hard. It too became a vivid ball of light: the explosion shook the ground and the wreckage fell gracefully to the hill in a thousand fiery pieces trailing black smoke like some vast firework gone wrong.

Keteo leapt into the air. `Roa!’ he yelled, flourishing the unused tubeweapon.

Sharrow went to the downhill parapet of the animal-pen. They seemed to be surrounded by pillars of smoke. Down-valley, beyond the rising column left by one of the crashed planes, the Solo was visible, stationary a few hundred metres below, engines droning.

The half-track sat, still burning in the gloom beneath the dark hill. Violet light sparkled just behind it. She turned and looked above the hillside where the wreckage burned. A dot in the distant sky burst with light.

Roa!’ Keteo yelled again. He grinned down at Sharrow, then looked slightly embarrassed, and shrugged.
Me, really,’ he said.

She shook her head.

Wow!’ Dloan said, looking round at them all.
Wow!’

That’s what was in that box,’ Cenuij said crisply. He snorted.
The wonders of ancient technology,’

Oh boy,’ Zefla said.
Is that bozo Roa in trouble now.’

Light ridged the hilltop above the flaming wreckage of the third plane. Ricochets whined off the stones of a nearby wall as the sound cracked over them.

`Paras are here,’ Dloan said, as they all ducked down again.

`I can see Roa moving,’ Zefla said, peeking out of a hole in the wall.

Answering fire from the ACV echoed around the valley. More gunfire came from the ridge of the hill, pattering around them.

Miz was crouched down beside Keteo. `Got a communicator?’ he asked the youth.

`Yeah!’ he said.

`How about using it to tell your pals in the ACV we’re on our way?’

Good idea!’ Keteo said. He pulled a small device from his pink combat jacket.
Solo?’ he said.

Miz sidled over to Sharrow, who was taking aim at the hill summit. `Down the stream?’ he asked her.

Keteo chattered excitedly to somebody on the Solo.

Yes,’ she said.
Down the stream. Any time you like.’ She rose up just enough to fire at the hillside. Some careless soldier skylined, and so died in silhouette. Sharrow ducked back, changing magazines.

`Okay?’ Miz asked Keteo, over the sound of bullets thudding into the ground and stones around them.

Okay!’ the boy yelled.
They’re waiting.’

`Let’s go,’ Miz said.
Down the stream-bed.’ He nodded at Keteo’s pink combat jacket, which even in the gathering darkness looked very pale.
That jacket makes you kind of conspicuous, kid; you might want to ditch it.’

Keteo looked at Miz as though he was mad.

Sharrow declipped the bi-propellants.

Miz watched her, scratching his head. `Will you stop fiddling and fire that damn thing?’ he said.

She glared at him.
These are B-Ps,’ she said.
No better against infantry and too easy to back-trace.’

`Oh, my mistake,’ Miz said, watching her shove a different magazine home. A small explosion threw soil into the air ten metres upstream.

`Rifle-grenade,’ Dloan said.

She was ready to fire. She glanced at the others.

`Go!’ she yelled. She started firing. Zefla and Dloan - quickly followed by Keteo and then Cenuij - jumped over the streamside wall of the animal-pen.

Sharrow ducked down again. She changed clips again, her ears ringing again, her wrists aching. Miz was sitting a metre away, his face just visible, grinning at her.

`Get!’ she yelled at him.

`You get,’ he told her. He held his hand out for the gun.

`No,’ she said.

She turned and started firing. Something dropped into the animal-pen a couple of metres away; Miz dived, grabbed and threw the rifle-grenade away towards the road; it exploded in mid air.

She looked round; shrapnel tinkled against the far wall. Bullets sang off the stones they were crouched behind.

`Let’s both get,’ Miz suggested.

They leapt the wall, stumbled down across the grass to the shallow river and staggered in, then waded downstream, heads bowed, slipping on submerged rocks, bullets whizzing above.

The Solo was invisible, hidden by the hollow where one of the downed planes had crashed. The ACV’s flashing lights lit up rising smoke in front of them and the grass on either side of the stream ahead. An underwater pulse almost threw them off their feet; a grenade made a white exploding shape in the stream, back near the animal-pen.

They came to the lip of a small waterfall and struggled out onto the grass, running down into the hollow where the wreckage of the aircraft burned in cratered patches and the Solo waited, its slab-sided stern turned to them, rear ramp closed but a small door open above a mesh ladder. Elson Roa was climbing the ladder over the bulge of the hovercraft’s man-high skirt. The Francks were right behind him. Keteo was helping Cenuij, who was limping.

Sharrow and Miz ran down through the big ACV’s prop wash. `Wish they’d put those fucking lights out,’ Miz gasped.

They splashed through the stream again as Zefla climbed to the door. Tall splashes in the water announced bullets falling amongst them, and sparks burst off the rear of the hovercraft; air whistled out of small, ragged punctures in its skirt. Dloan waited for Keteo, then picked him up and threw the boy half-way up the ladder. He scrambled the rest.

Cenuij was next, hauling himself hand over hand.

Sharrow and Miz reached the black curve of the ACVs skirt. Dloan made to help her up, but she nodded him to go next. He paused on the way up as something pulled at the dark cloth covering his right leg, then he continued.

`Ah!’ Miz said, and whirled round. Sharrow looked back to see him glance at one hand and then stick it behind his back, and look at her.
Nothing,’ he shouted above the noise of the engines, grinning. Blood dripped into the water behind him. He nodded at the ladder.
After you,’ he yelled.

She stuck the gun in her mouth, gripped the ladder and climbed. Miz was right beneath her.

Cenuij was in the door, reaching down to her. He looked furious.

Can you believe it?’ he said, grasping her hand.
He threw it away! Thought it had stopped working, so he threw it away!’

Cenuij pulled her towards him. Roa was further in, yelling into a communicator. Dloan sat on the floor inside, holding his leg. The ACV was moving. Shots thumped around the opened door.

Sharrow hauled herself into the doorway and turned to reach down for Miz.

At first she thought Cenuij was doing the same thing, then he slumped heavily on top of her and tumbled out of the door.

She grabbed at him but missed; he fell past Miz, bounced off the ACV’s skirt and landed slackly on the grassy bank of the stream, limbs flopping spread around him.

Miz hesitated, looking down and back as spray burst from beneath the hovercraft’s skirt.

Cenuij lay on the grass, staring up at the sky, eyes open, blood pouring from each side of his head.

The ACV moved away and picked up speed, puffing up great shrouding clouds of spray into the hollow in front of the waterfall and punching huge, rolling holes in the smoke from the burning wreckage, all lit by the flames and the hovercraft’s flickering lights. Roa was still shouting. Hands came and held Sharrow’s shoulders.

She saw Miz tense as he looked down at Cenuij, getting ready to leap off the ladder.

‘Miz!’ she shouted. He looked up at her. The spray rose about him as the ACV accelerated, engines barking and clattering.

Cenuij lay still; ten, then twenty metres away as the pulsing light faded around him. Then the hovercraft’s lights finally flicked off.

‘Miz!’ she screamed into the shadows.

She reached down, felt his hand and pulled him up.

She and Zefla hauled him in through the door.

The small waterfall reflected the fading flames of the planewreck; the hollow became a bowl of shadows as the Solo drew away.

Cenuij’s body lay motionless on the ground, a dark `X’, like something pinned out, sacrificed to the encroaching darkness.

The android crossed the central plaza and walked along the quiet street through skeins and patches of ground-mist and past the shells of tall, roofless buildings filled with watery morning sunlight. The android was slender and a little below the height of the average Golter male; its outer substance was formed from metal and plastic and it wore no clothes. Its body had been sculpted to vaguely resemble a rather idealised male figure, though without genitalia. Its chest was usually said to remind people of the breastplate from a suit of ancient armour. Its head held two ear-shaped microphones, two eyes like round sunglass lenses, a flat nose with two sensory nostril slits, and a small loudspeaker shaped like a pair of slightly open lips.

Where the buildings gave way to a small park, the android turned and descended a wide set of curving steps, past arcades edged by tattered, faded awnings, down towards the mist-strewn waters of the silent harbour. On the esplanade it turned and made for the Guest’s Quarter. Sunlight threw its long thin shadow behind it, across paving stones that were clean and without litter but cracked and holed.

The android carried a slim plastic folder in one hand; the plastic went slap-slap against its plastic-covered thigh for a few steps as the light breeze caught it, then the tall figure shifted its arm slightly, holding the folder further away from its leg. The noise stopped.

Vembyr was a city of many towers and spires and fine, ancient buildings that curved round a picturesque bay backed by tall forested hills in south-west Jonolrey. It had been abandoned by humans five millennia earlier after a nuclear power plant further down the coast had blown up and the winds had been blowing from that direction. The fall-out had covered the city, forcing its evacuation. It had lain abandoned for centuries, slowly falling into disrepair and only ever visited by scientists or their remotes monitoring the slowly decreasing radiation levels, until the androids had finally won their legal battle for civil rights, and started looking for a homeland on Golter.

The android separatist faction took out a ten-thousand year lease on the whole city for a sum little more than nominal.

On the other side of the harbour, the android left the esplanade and climbed another broad curved set of steps, through a slowly rising cloud of mist. About half way up it stopped to watch another android who was walking along a single step with a halting, shuffling gait, crossing from one side of the tall flight to the other. The android walking along the steps passed a metre away from the other; it gave no sign of noticing it, but continued its hesitant walk to the far edge of the steps, then turned and walked slowly back the way it had come. The first android watched it pass again, then continued up the flight. A shallow groove had been worn in the step’s white marble a centimetre or so deep.

The android with the plastic folder walked away along the deserted arcade at the top, and disappeared into the silent mist.

In the street that housed the Irregular Embassy a group of androids of various model-types were dismantling a shining metal tube that crossed the street ten metres up, between two ornately decorated stone buildings which had been recently restored. A couple of large dump trucks sat in the middle of the street, their cranes lifting sections of the transit system tube away as the pieces were freed. An android with a welding arm was cutting at the tube’s shiny surface, producing a waterfall of sparks that descended through the light, golden mist at the end of the street like pieces of splashing, fading sunlight.

The android entered the embassy. Its client was waiting in the courtyard garden.

She sat on a small stone bench by a tinkling fountain. She was artificially bald, a little over average height, and sat more erect than most humans did. She wore heavy boots, a thick, dark-green pleated skirt, a pale hide riding-jacket and a white shirt. A fur hat lay on the stone bench at her side with a pair of hide gloves on top of it.

She rose to meet it when it entered the courtyard.

`Lady Sharrow,’ it said. It caught the hint of movement in her arm and duly extended its own, to shake hands with her.
My name is Feril,’ it said.
I am to represent you. Pleased to meet you.’

`How do you do,’ she said, nodding. They sat on the stone bench. The fountain played with a quiet, pattering noise. In the misty light the small garden seemed to glow around them; they sat surrounded by a precise profusion of tiny, brightly coloured flowers.

I have news of your friends,’ Feril told her.
Their court hearing seems to be going well.’

She smiled. Her face showed traces of having been altered recently; there were hints of inflammation in the corner of her eyes, where the skin had been stuck down, and her blonde eyebrows showed a fraction of a millimetre of dark growth at their roots. The android had seen a picture of her on the city news service when she had arrived a week earlier, and it thought her nose looked different, too.

Is it?’ she said.
Good.’

`Yes. Ms Franck is an able advocate, and Mister Kuma was allowed to use his extensive personal wealth to employ some fine legal brains. The nature of the witnesses will be their greatest asset, I believe, as courts are not often inclined to trust the evidence of hired security personnel. The trial has been fixed for Bihelion next year.’

The woman looked surprised. `Taking their time, aren’t they?’

`I believe that is because you are also indicted, but cannot be brought to trial until the Huhsz Passports have run out.’

She laughed lightly, putting her head back and looking up past the gleaming slates of the embassy roof to the gauzy bright sky above. `That’s very sporting of them.’ She looked back at it. ‘Will the trial be in the jam, or Yada?’

`Ms Franck is attempting to have the venue moved to Yadayeypon.’

She smiled. `Judges named?’