Inkers (31 page)

“Hi,” Amber said, wrapping her arms around her knees. She was shaking so hard it felt like her bones would shatter.

“Sorry to get straight into bossing you around, but you need to get moving. Hypothermia and all that.”

“Oh, god,” Amber said, trying to stand up and falling back down onto her hands and knees. “We need to find the girl, stop them killing her…”

“You’ve still got that watch you took from the guy, permission to use it?”

“Granted,” Amber said, looking down at the black thing on her wrist, wiping the moisture off its screen. It lit up obligingly. ITSA watches were notoriously destruction–proof, and an indeterminate length of time in the channel did not seem to have done it any harm.

“You don’t need to ask me before you do stuff like that, you know,” Amber said. “I trust you.”

“Technically I do,” Emily said. “Might be able to bypass it, but I suggest we focus on finding the girl for now. Now then: OK, she definitely has a singularity in her, and ITSA are well aware. She’s killed about twenty–five soldiers, and teleported another two hundred down to London, they materialised naked in some warehouse. She completely cleared the island, but more are coming, they’ll be here in less than half an hour. All ITSA’s drones in the area have been destroyed, although they’ve got some massive heavy–duty ones flying in fast from the US with micronukes and nanoslammers, they’ll be here inside an hour too. They tried to nuke from space, too, but it didn’t work. And things are going tits–up everywhere else, there are rumours of grey goo in China.”

“Where is she?” Amber said, already crawling up a shallow bank off the beach and onto the grassy patch that ran around the edge of the island.

“Last seen to your right,” Emily said, ‘down near that lighthouse.”

Amber staggered to her feet.

Amber ran, skidding through mud spattering up onto her legs, falling and getting up again, trying not to bleed too much. Emily was dampening the pain where she could. The trees were thick and the undergrowth dark.

There were two of them.

“Full–quiet mode,” she said, inside.

She was slipping between trees a hundred metres behind them, Emily and her implants picking out optimum foot–fall and hand–print locations and projecting them onto her retinas. The two noisy ones were talking, and she tuned in as best she could to what they were saying.

“We’re pretty close,” one said, South African.

“How close?” another said.

“Half a mile. It is half a mile – uh – that way.”

“You said that half an hour ago.”

“Well she is moving, OK?”

“Ret, can you see anything?”

Amber did not hear a response, but the questioner seemed to hear one.

“There you go, then. Either this ink–carrier leaves no trace, or your machine has broken. Maybe all that ink at the farm knocked it out–”

There was a brief moment of silence, then, “How close? Where?”

But Amber could not hear who or what the man was responding to. And after that the voices were silent and she could pick up only two pairs of feet trotting away through the forest. She guessed what had happened: they had a hunter with them, and somehow he had detected her. And now she was being hunted. She veered off their tracks and ran right, holding herself up between high trunks, weaving to try and lose him. She came across a stream and half jumped, half–fell right into it, pulling herself upstream to try and lose the infrared trail. It would be an obvious ploy but it might buy her a few seconds. But then he would also know he was up against a hunter.

“They’re after the girl,” Emily said.

“Duh,” Amber said, running down a bank.

“And they can track her. And you.”

“Also obvious. What on earth happened to you?”

“I think we’re a bit out of sync.”

Amber focused on running for her life.

“Sorry. Watch that root,” Emily said, a moment after Amber had hooked it with the top of her foot and fallen hard. Up once again.

They were after the girl, that was certain, and they had a way of tracking her and Amber. This put her at a terrible disadvantage. But the technology was also perhaps her only chance of finding the girl before ITSA’s reinforcements arrived.

She was moving up the base of a narrow valley, thick with trees lower down, rocky and exposed higher up. If she were to try and avoid the hunter, double back and skirt around the trees to find the noisier men, she would be almost completely exposed. Had he done this on purpose? Was she in a trap?

She’d have to kill him, if she could; if the pair were tracking the escaped inker from the farm, for bounty or glory or god knew what, singularity–power even, then this was almost certainly the hunter she had fought before. Their accents all but confirmed it. Not only was he one of the more impressive hunters she’d seen in the field: she had shot him in the back.

He was a killer with a grudge.

She made her decision and began to run back the way she had come, towards the beach, reaching in her pocket to pull out the pack of tiny sticky grenades she had taken from the soldier at the hospital and zigzagging, sticking them on trees.

Jupiter was blazing ever brighter above, looking four or five times brighter than the moon now, its great face uniform and grey, a few gargantuan scars just visible, picked up on its impossible dash across the solar system.

She stuck up the final grenade and sprinted straight ahead. She threw herself over a large rock, recovered her breath. Then, with a monumental final effort, she clambered up and stood on top of the rock. She would have to time it perfectly. It was not a tactic you would expect an immune to use, she hoped. That was really her only chance. She counted down from twenty, as slowly as she dared, trying not to look up at the drones appearing high overhead. She said
five
and stepped backwards off the rock, crouched down into a ball and said “Now.”

The flash was brighter than Jupiter. Emily deadened all their senses but Amber was still stunned by the blast and the air rushing outwards crushed her into the ground. She opened her eyes, checked that she was not actively on fire and then scrambled to her feet, staring at the burning valley, waves of heat rolling up onto her. She could not see anything except burning trees: she walked towards the flames, and then turned before she reached them to climb onto the exposed rocky side of the valley and avoid the worst of the heat.

If he had seen the trap, or if she had mistimed it, he would be able to take her out with a single shot.

When she was almost past the inferno, acrid smoke clogging the air, she saw a dark shape moving on the edge of the flames, crawling towards the scorched bushes and undergrowth. She drew her gun and dropped down, approaching slowly along the edge of the fireline.

It was unmistakably him. His equipment and skin was melting, and he seemed to have lost his left leg below the knee, but he was still moving, pulling himself along with still–strong arms.

“Hey,” she said, quietly, when she was almost on top of him, and then when he didn’t respond, did not look up, but continued pulling himself towards the unburning bushes, more loudly – “hey.”

He stopped and turned his face towards her: it was now blacker than hers, but almost featureless, nose gone and eyes melted out, lips burned away so that his teeth were showing. He snarled and turned his destroyed face back towards the treeline, pulled himself on. He had almost reached the cool of the trees. Amber shot him once in the head and went after the others.

The two men were running together, panting
for oxygen, when the light from the explosion illuminated everything. As one they stopped and turned to look, and the heat hit them both in the face, making them stumble back.

“Yoh – was that her?” Lwazi said, lowering his arms, watching the rising flames.

“I don’t know,” Hardwick said. “Immunes tend to be quieter than that.”

“Holy god, if that was her, she must be angry,” Lwazi said, shaking his head.

“I think that’s a good assumption. How close are we?”

Lwazi checked his watch.

“We are close. Just up there.”

Lwazi pointed up the stony side of the mountain.

“She is not moving any more,” he said. Hardwick peered up, but he could not see anything amongst the walls of rock except bracken and short trees. There was a narrow waterfall cutting through one of the cliffs, the water a white spray in the light breeze. There was no way up the cliff that Hardwick could see.

“We have to find a way up,” Hardwick said. “God knows what’s happened to ITSA, but we’ve got a chance now. If we get there before the immune we might be able to double back around, or use the girl as a hostage, or something.”

“Will she just kill us?”

“Let’s hope not.”

They came to the lighthouse, tripped over empty uniforms lying on the ground like discarded skin.

Lwazi bent and picked up a belt of grenades and ammo.

“She did this,” he said.

Hardwick nodded and picked up the biggest gun he could see. They began to climb the hill.

Drones were beginning to build up again, coming lower, gradually, cautiously. Jupiter was a great white presence in the sky. It was so bright that it was getting hard to keep their eyes open. Hardwick thought he could see dark shapes charging around in the trees below them. Occasionally there were bursts of small–arms fire, but nothing like the explosion in the valley.

They were high on the hill and the wind was picking up.

Down below Hardwick saw a figure charging up the hill towards them, her shouting lost as noise in the wind. Somehow she was still here, somehow she had survived the destruction of every other ITSA soldier on the island. Mary.

Hardwick raised his huge gun to his shoulder, waited until she looked up to see him aiming at her, and then fired. She disappeared in a blaze of earth and dust.

“Should’ve let us stay,” Hardwick muttered. Out at sea, more boats were approaching.

“Where is she?” Hardwick said.

“Right here!” Lwazi said. “I swear, we are on top of her!”

Hardwick did not reply, roving about, searching. Then he saw her, just a few yards away, hidden in a rock formation. At first Hardwick saw a young immune, and raised his gun, but he realised she was too young, not dark enough. He had never seen anyone so skinny. Her bones were showing through her arms. Her grey skin was patchy with bright splashes of ink dermalling scars. Her face was half covered by filthy black hair. He could see she was grimacing in pain. She was heavily pregnant.

“Hello,” he said, walking towards her, lowering his heavy gun. She looked up at him and flinched, and then shut her grey eyes tight as if trying to block him out. Then her whole body stiffened and her eyes were open again, wild with pain.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, crouching to her level. She did not look like she believed him.

“Is it inside you?” he said. She shook her head vigorously and withdrew, protecting her swollen belly with her hands.

“Come out here,” Hardwick said, beckoning to her. He glanced back at Lwazi, who crouched down next to him.

“Come on, girl. We won’t hurt you,” he repeated.

The girl shrank back further into the stone overhang.

Without warning, gravity failed. Everything suddenly lifted into the air, Hardwick and Lwazi both hitting their heads hard on the overhanging stone. Half a second later the universe seemed to remember what it was doing and they all slammed back into the ground, the girl crying out in pain.

Hardwick lunged forward, using the opportunity to pull her out a short way before she realised what he was doing and kicked him off, hard. She was strong.

“Leave me alone!” she shouted, and then she screamed, contorting forwards over her torso.

“Her baby is coming,” Lwazi said, untangling himself from where he had fallen.

“You ever delivered a baby before?” Hardwick said.

“No!” Lwazi said.

They observed the writhing girl for a moment. Hardwick looked back down the hillside. There were more dark shapes amongst the trees than ever, and most of the boats he had seen were just reaching the shore. Hardwick reached over, grabbed Lwazi’s shoulders and spoke into his ear so that the girl could not hear him. She was still hunched over, moaning.