Something Coming Through

45. Honour And Revenge

Mangala | 27–28 July

The road’s straight line unreeled across the flat desert. Red dirt, red rocks. Drifts of grey vegetation. Stands of spiky lattices, like charred cacti. Small fleets of scalloped dunes drifted across salt flats. This had once been the floor of a shallow sea, Cal McBride said. A pinkish tint in the sky. The fat sun sat in a kind of shawl of red haze near the horizon, casting long shadows everywhere.

The RV drove for hour after hour at a steady one hundred and ten kilometres per hour. The road. The desert. The big sky. Traffic scurried past in the opposite direction, heading towards the city. Pickups, cars and 4x4s fleeing the dust storm. Road trains with tractor units hauling eight or nine trailers. A convoy of motorcycles, mostly Harleys, their riders in outlaw leathers. Now and then a low building or a cluster of trailer homes swung past, preceded by big signs advertising petrol, food, a café or a bar.

It was how Chloe had imagined driving across America. The size of it. The emptiness of it.

McBride, chirpy as a tour guide, pointed out alien ruins. Strings of cubical, roofless enclosures shimmering in the sunlight, mostly running along ridges. A tall slender black column stood in the distance — a fascination stone, according to McBride, that could hold unwary travellers in a trance until they died of thirst or were killed and eaten by animals or biochines.

‘You’re kidding,’ Henry said.

‘No, I’m not. There all kinds of traps out here. All kinds of things that can kill you if you aren’t careful,’ McBride said.

He pointed to a salt flat off in the distance, where fossilised vehicle tracks a million years old had been found. ‘Big machines, wide as a city block. Tracked like tanks. Imagine what they must have looked like, trundling around.’

He told Chloe and Henry about the ring sea at the equator, bordered by thousands of kilometres of salt dunes and alkali lagoons. He told them about a permanent waterspout climbing more than two kilometres before topping out in a long feathering of spray, constructed by who knew which Elder Culture for who knew what purpose. He told them about sliding stones the size of cars that drifted across salt flats a thousand kilometres to the south, moving singly or in flocks, never stopping. They were no more than thin shells of crystalline iron that trapped and heated air, yet appeared to possess a certain intelligence and purpose.

‘You remember that old tourist trap on Shaftesbury Avenue? Ripley’s Believe It or Not? That has nothing on this world. It’s fucking magic,’ McBride said.

He was wearing a belted khaki jacket, a black kerchief salted with tiny skull-and-crossbones knotted at his neck. The hems of his khaki trousers were tucked into calf-length brown leather boots. He sat on the sectional couch at the rear of the RV with Chloe and Henry, pointing out marvels as they rolled past. Three burly men, construction-worker or biker types with beards and bushy moustaches, sat up front, pistols holstered on their hips. McBride’s weapon was clipped to his belt. He’d shown them how it worked on the first day of their captivity. Opened it up to show a regular LEAF battery and a thumb-sized slug of grey quasi-metallic metamaterial capped by a crystal nipple. The slug turned an electrical current into a beam of coherent high-energy photons with an efficiency approaching one hundred per cent. At full power, McBride said, you could burn down a house. It was a genuine Elder Culture ray gun — one of a kind, according to him.

Henry shared a look with Chloe. She knew he was thinking about the dead man at the shuttle terminal.

McBride said, ‘You’re lucky you ran into me. I know how to get things done, and I know all there is to know about Elder Culture shit.’

After they’d been ambushed at the farm, Chloe and Henry had been confined in separate bedrooms of a suburban bungalow. McBride’s goons had brought food at irregular intervals and escorted Chloe when she needed to use the bathroom, but had refused to answer any of her questions.

There was sheet metal over the window, sunlight burning at its edges day and night. A flatscreen TV on the wall, a mattress on the floor, no other furniture. Chloe watched TV and slept because there was nothing else to do and she didn’t want to think too much about what might happen to her.

She tried knocking on the partition wall a couple of times, remembering how prisoners had communicated in a movie she’d once seen. Henry didn’t reply.

McBride turned up in the afternoon of the second day, with the gear Chloe had bought in another lifetime. He stood outside the door of the bedroom while she changed, telling her in a loud cheerful voice that he had made a deal with her boss, and now she and Henry were going on a little trip. He said that he hadn’t snatched her friend Fahad, but he knew who had: Danny Drury, a scheming little fucker who’d get what was coming to him soon enough. Told her, when she emerged from the bedroom, that she looked pretty good, asked her where she’d found her camo jacket.

‘It was a present.’

She was wearing it over a thin black roll-neck sweater, Montane Terra pants, her New Balance hiking shoes.

‘I could import them, use you as a model in an ad campaign, sell a fucking ton of them,’ McBride said. ‘I don’t know what they told you about me, but what I really am is a businessman. An entrepreneur, like your boss.’

‘Henry isn’t my boss.’

‘Not him. Dr Morange. Yes,’ McBride said, clearly enjoying Chloe’s surprise, ‘we had a nice chat, she and I, over the q-phone. A very useful chat. What it boils down to is that we’re partners in this enterprise now. I help you and Henry; you and Henry help me. Anything we find we share. Straight down the middle. I help you find the goods; Dr Morange provides the expertise to work out what it can do and how to market it.’

‘What about Fahad?’

‘If you’re worried that I’ll punish him because he ran away from my family back home, I could care less. They fucked me over. They’re dead to me,’ McBride said.

For a moment a hard light entered his gaze and Chloe saw what lurked behind the cheerful cockney-geezer facade.

‘Fuck them,’ McBride said. ‘And fuck Danny Drury too. He killed Sahar, the kid’s father. Did you know that? Sahar had developed a little sideline, dealing in Elder Culture stuff, and he was also going to come back and work for me, after I got over my little trouble with the legal authorities. Well, Drury got wind of all that, and he did Sahar. And not in a nice way, I can tell you. Not because he had it in for Sahar especially, but to teach me a lesson. To show me what I could and couldn’t do. To show me who was boss now. As if he ever could be. I liked Sahar. I really did. He had his problems, he was a gambling fiend, but he was a good man. And skilled. Better than anyone I’ve ever known. I like to think of him as my friend, and he did not deserve to die like that. So I swear to you, Chloe, I will do the right thing by his son. If the kid finds what he promised to find, he’ll go free, and so will you. And you’ll get a cut. Everyone will make on this deal, I promise you that.’

It was hard to tell how much of that was sincere and how much was put on. Chloe suspected that even McBride couldn’t tell. But his deal with Ada Morange was for real. Henry had been allowed to speak to her.

‘She isn’t happy about it, but she’s pragmatic,’ he told Chloe. ‘And if this is the only way to get what she wants…’

‘So he’s our friend now.’

‘Think of him as an unreliable ally. We don’t have to trust him, but he has resources we can use. We’ll go along with his plans, and see what shakes out. Let’s face it, the alternative is much worse.’

‘No kidding,’ Chloe said, remembering Hanna Babbel collapsing with her hair on fire.

They passed a small settlement: huts buried in mounds of red dirt, a prefab industrial building squatting near a great tumble of white blocks, sharp-edged despite millennia of wind-blown dust. Some kind of plastic as hard as diamond, according to McBride. People cut them up using welding gear or lasers, and glued the blocks into storm walls. He pointed to one such wall at the far edge of the next settlement they passed. A snow-white curve that sheltered the huddle of trailers and shacks from winds that mostly blew from the west.

That was where the dust storm was coming from; that was where they were headed. The west. Idunn’s Valley. And that was where the people who had taken Fahad were headed, too. A little convoy about twenty kilometres ahead. McBride said that he could take them down any time he wanted, but couldn’t guarantee the kid’s safety. So his plan was to let them get to the site and find what there was to find, and then he’d pounce.

‘Never mind all that nonsense about the licence expiring a year ago. I found the site; I excavated it. And the bead in question, it came from there, on my watch. Danny Drury had no interest in it until he was given his orders, so fuck him and his crew. They can do the dirty work, and then I’m moving in to take what’s rightfully mine.’

Chloe thought it was typical bluster, but Henry said that it wasn’t a bad plan. He was dressed in a green hunting vest over a black hoodie, grey cargo pants made of some kind of nanotech material with a slippery sheen, and heavy boots. He seemed relaxed, bantering with McBride, generally behaving as if they really were equal partners.

Right now, they were talking about films. Henry liked black-and-white noirs from the 1940s and ’50s. McBride preferred products of the auteur school of the 1970s, and later homages. Both agreed that Altman’s The Long Goodbye had something going for it. ‘But if I had to pick an all-time favourite,’ McBride said, ‘it’s a no-brainer. Revolver. You know it? London gangsters. Hard men making hard choices. Honour and revenge. Danger and redemption. Revolver. It’s a mind-fucker, Henry. When we get back we’ll watch it together. You’ll fucking love it, I guarantee.’

The RV stopped and another man took over from the driver and they went on. It was past midnight, but the sun still sat at the horizon in its permanent sunset. Stretches of concrete alternated with longer stretches of compacted dirt sealed with a polymer derived from Boxbuilder ruins. Chloe lay on the couch and dozed off, woke with a shudder and saw that a range of rounded hills had heaved up from the horizon.

Breakfast was a banana and a pot of strawberry yogurt.

A pass cut through the hills and the road descended in tight switchback loops. A long, long valley stretched below. Sometimes the RV had to pull over on the shoulder, nothing but empty air next to it, to allow articulated lorries and road trains to swing around the tight curves. They crossed a kind of grassland, descended through a strange forest towards a broad river.

Sandwiches and bottles of water were passed around for lunch.

The sky darkened; the sun was a bleary red eye peering above a brown haze that stretched across the horizon. The edge of the dust storm, according to McBride.

There were fields, and then houses and barns and storage sheds at intervals. A busy crossroads with lorries and pickup trucks and 4x4s parked along the streets. Winnetou, the last town on the river, according to McBride. Henry straightened up on the couch, suddenly alert. Chloe felt a quickening in her blood. They were closing in on Site 326.

The RV turned off the road and bucked down a track beside the river, pulled up beside another RV and a jeep with big all-terrain tyres and a rack of floodlights, parked in the lee of a copse of pale, tree-sized things that looked like inverted lightning strikes with feather webs billowing and straining around them. Everyone climbed out into a cold wind choked with scuds of dust. Chloe felt its iron grit between her teeth.

McBride pointed to a wire tether dwindling away into the hazy sky, said there was a balloon up there.

‘For comms. We’re operating a drone, a stealthed quadcopter, keeping watch on Drury. When he sets off downriver, we’re going to follow right behind. Come inside, check it out,’ he said, ushering them into the other RV, where a man nursing a joystick was hunched at a screen that showed a view of wooden docks. Telling McBride that he was just in time, it looked like they were getting ready to go.

The image on the screen zoomed towards two men sitting inside a sleek speedboat; the operator pointed to one of them. ‘That’s Drury, right there.’

McBride peered at the screen. ‘But where’s the kid? Where’s the rest of his crew?’

‘There were three vehicles,’ the operator said. ‘Two pickups towing boats, and a Range Rover. They dropped off the one boat and Drury and the other guy, and left. I guess they took the kid with them.’

‘There’s something wrong here,’ McBride said. ‘The kid is supposed to be going downriver. And what about the pickups and the Range Rover? Not to mention the other boat.’

‘I thought you wanted me to keep watch on Drury,’ the operator said.

‘Fuck. He’s just sitting there.’

‘Maybe he’s waiting for his crew to come back.’

‘Maybe his fucking crew have already slipped past us. Where’s Sammie?’

‘Down by the docks, like you asked.’

‘Call him. Tell him to start looking for Drury’s crew.’

While the operator used his phone, Henry said, ‘If you know where they’re going, why don’t we get ahead of them and set up an ambush at their destination?’

‘You’re a soldier, aren’t you?’

‘Once upon a time.’

‘Then you should know, soldier boy, that you shouldn’t make plans until you have all the facts. And the fact is,’ McBride said, ‘that sneaky fucker Drury came out here a couple of weeks ago, after he heard that something potent had been found at my site. He was hoping to find more of the same, but he didn’t, of course. He isn’t as smart as he thinks he is. He left a party behind, and they’ve been working away ever since. So if I did like you said, I’d have to deal with them first, and that would tip him off as to what I was up to.’

‘Tricky,’ Henry said.

‘We’ll follow him and keep close eyes on him. We’ll let him do the work, and when we’re ready—’

McBride smacked his fist into his palm, smiled at Chloe and Henry.

Behind him, the operator said, ‘The speedboat’s leaving.’

‘Keep the drone on it,’ McBride said. ‘The fucker’s up to something.’

The two men bent close to the screen. Henry leaned towards Chloe and said quietly, ‘Stay alert. We might have to make a move of our own.’

Chloe felt her heart beat high and light. ‘Okay.’

‘Are you scared?’

‘Of course I am.’

‘Me too,’ Henry said, although he didn’t look it. He was his usual self, possessed by a confidence that Chloe hoped she could trust.

The drone operator said, ‘They’ll be going past us in a few minutes, boss. What do you want us to do?’

A moment later, before McBride could answer, the screen went black.