Something Coming Through

53. Cavalry Charge

Mangala | 30 July

Chloe and Fahad crawled down the tunnel and tumbled into the trench. Cold wind, blowing dust, the shadows of monsters lurching past as they circled the mound. Individuals and loose groups travelling clockwise and anticlockwise, appearing out of the haze and going past and disappearing.

Fahad, crouching beside Chloe, asked her if she thought it had worked.

‘There’s only one way to find out,’ she said, and switched on the walkie-talkie.

Drury said at once, ‘You fucked with the comms.’

Chloe felt a freezing disappointment. She really had been hoping that Ugly Chicken would come through for them, that it would have aimed the biochines at Drury and his men. But there he was, unruffled, unharmed.

She said, ‘Something in the black room must have blocked the signal.’

‘You’re outside now.’

‘Of course.’

‘Do you have the kid?’

‘He agreed to come out.’

‘Stand up so I can see you,’ Drury said.

‘Wait a sec. He’s having last-minute nerves,’ Chloe said. She switched off the walkie-talkie and told Fahad to crawl.

‘This is your plan?’

‘Ugly Chicken didn’t send the biochines after Drury, but he can’t get at us inside their cordon. We can slip away before he realises what’s happening.’

Fahad shook his head. ‘We bring him all this fucking way! We bring him home, and he won’t do us one little favour!’

He sounded about half his age, his voice cracking with fury and frustration.

‘It was always a long shot.’ Chloe said. ‘If we want to escape, we’re going to have to do it on our own.’

They crawled to the end of the trench and clambered out and ran, bent low, following the curve of the mound. They passed something the size and shape of a fat woman sprawled in the dirt; it was coated in pale bristles that stirred with independent life. A heap of scaly pine cones scattered. A knee-high stool whirled by. It was like navigating a Disney animation of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Chloe’s heart kicked when clumps of scarlet spikes bounced away like demented jack-in-the-boxes, vanishing into a squall of dust.

No blue ray-gun flash. No rockets. Would she hear the bullet that hit her? Probably not.

When she judged that they had put the mound between themselves and Drury and his soldiers, she told Fahad that all they had to do now was circle back and steal one of the boats.

‘Or we could find somewhere to hide,’ Fahad said. ‘The spaceship will be here soon. I know it.’

‘How long can we hide from Drury and his goons, with no food and no water?’ Chloe said. ‘We have to go, Fahad. We have to get out of here. When this is over, you can come back. I promise. I’ll come back with you.’

They dashed across an open space, dodging between monsters, and reached the shelter of another mound. Chloe got her bearings from the low red sun and told Fahad that all they had to do was work their way around it and head for the river.

They circled the mound, started across the open space beyond. The sun at their backs, the river ahead of them. Chloe clutched Fahad’s arm when two shadows appeared in the haze ahead of them. Monsters, she thought. Please let it be only monsters.

She and Fahad knelt. The shadows faded and Chloe was beginning to think they could move on when footsteps crunched behind them and they were seized and pulled up and turned around.

The soldiers frogmarched Chloe and Fahad back to the trench and shoved them in. Chloe landed hard, and as soon as she got to her feet Drury was in her face, pushing her against the wall of the trench, pinning her with his weight, his hand at her throat, saying, ‘What the fuck?’

His voice was high and hoarse with fury; dust stuck to a wet patch in the middle of his face mask.

Chloe met his angry gaze. ‘We were trying to find a way back through the biochines.’

‘No you weren’t. You were trying to find your friends.’

‘You shot my friend.’

‘Don’t you fucking lie,’ Drury said. ‘We spotted their drone. Up there. Look,’ he said, and wrenched Chloe around, pointed.

Chloe sighted along his arm, saw something that might have been a bird, a black speck there and then not there as wind thickened the blowing dust.

‘Quadcopter,’ Drury said. ‘Tommy picked up the C-Band signal; my guys pinpointed its infrared signature. Who does it belong to?’

‘I have no idea. Really.’

‘McBride. Cal McBride and his fucking drones.’

‘He isn’t a friend of mine.’

’You came here with him.’

‘He took me prisoner. Me and Henry.’

Drury ignored that. ‘I think he took down two of my men. Patrice and Niles, out on the northern perimeter. We can’t fucking raise them. You talked to him, didn’t you? You talked to McBride while you were in there with the kid.’

His face was close to hers again, blue eyes sharp behind his goggles. Chloe met his stare, said, ‘How could I talk to anyone? All I have is the walkie-talkie you gave me.’

‘You switched it off. And then tried to sneak out. Did you really think I wouldn’t anticipate that? Frankly, I’m disappointed.’

‘I did what you asked me to do. I persuaded Fahad to come with me.’

‘I should shoot you dead,’ Drury said, pulling the ray gun from his belt and pointing it at Chloe.

She flinched, turned her head from the black circle of its maw, and Drury shoved her away and aimed into the sky, bracing his right hand with his left.

A thread of intense blue light angled across the ochre sky; a swift parabola of sparks rained down and winked out.

‘All right,’ Drury said, with grim satisfaction.

‘Now they know we know they’re here,’ Tommy said.

‘They already know,’ Drury said. ‘But now the ball’s in their court…What the fuck’s that?’

Off in the distance, a clattering percussion had started up, and things were whooping and whining and hooting like a demented factory.

Tommy leaned at the lip of the trench and peered out. ‘Looks like the monsters didn’t like your fireworks.’

Drury turned to look, and someone sang out ‘Incoming!’ and started firing, and then the other men were firing too, a fierce crackle of gunshots. Chloe found a foothold and boosted herself up, caught a glimpse of shapes trundling out of the murk before Drury pulled her away and sent her sprawling. He aimed the ray gun at something beyond the trench and nothing happened and he shook it and aimed it again. Nothing. He strode over to Fahad, who all this while had been sitting quiet and still, knees drawn up and arms wrapped around them, trying to make himself as small as possible. Shouting now in fear and surprise as Drury yanked him to his feet.

‘You,’ Drury said, shaking him, ‘will explain exactly what you did.’

‘You shouldn’t have used Elder Culture tech,’ Fahad said. He was trembling with fear and anger. ‘Ugly Chicken didn’t like it.’

‘Bullshit. You called those fucking monsters down on our heads. Now you can make them go away.’

Gunfire on either side, the sudden thump of high explosive. A man laughed. Another man was shouting: ‘Get some! Get some!’

Drury jammed the ray gun under Fahad’s chin. ‘You want to live, you’ll find a way to unfuck this right now.’

Fahad struggled in his grip, managed to get a hand loose, tried to punch Drury’s face. The man blocked it with his forearm and whacked Fahad with the ray gun. The kid sat down hard, blood running from his nose; Drury kicked him in the ribs and sent him sprawling. Stood over him with the sole of his boot on his neck, saying, ‘You finally found your dick, kid. Shame it was too little and too late. Any last words?’

He wasn’t even out of breath.

Fahad was choking, trying and failing to pry the boot away. Drury pulled his pistol from his belt and aimed it at Fahad’s face, and Chloe ripped out the strip of memory plastic concealed in her cuff and shook it with a snap of her wrist to make it rigid and ran at Drury, springing onto his back, locking her left forearm under his jaw to force it up, sawing at his throat with the sharp-edged blade.

He clawed at her, then swung around and ran backwards, smashing her against the side of the trench. A terrific blow against the back of her head numbed and dazed her; she couldn’t resist as Drury grabbed her collar and belt and swung her through the air. She flew across the trench and smacked into its wall. Drury was on his knees, hands pressed to his throat, blood spreading across the front of his white coat, blood pouring between his fingers and pattering on dry red dirt. He raised his pistol and something punched Chloe in the side, a hard blow echoed by the hard sound of the shot.

They looked at each other. Blood slicked the front of Drury’s coat and he was having trouble breathing. He wrenched off his face mask, coughed a spray of blood and smiled redly at Chloe. Blood pulsed from the wound in his throat. He tried to raise the pistol again, and Fahad stepped up, clutching the ray gun. There was a flare of blue light and Drury fell forward, his coat and hair on fire. Fahad turned to Chloe, and Tommy loomed behind him and knocked him down.

Chloe tried to push to her feet. A weight shifted in her belly and a pure white moment of agony wiped her clean and she sat down. Tommy was shouting something lost in gunfire and the shouts of men and the howls of monsters. Something sleek and cat-shaped, a cat sculpted out of needles and spines, struck a man and he screamed and tried to bat it away and it bit off his fingers. Tommy loomed over Chloe. She stared at him, stared at his pistol, and then he was down, tearing at a crumpled leather bag fastened over his face.

Biochines were pouring into the trench. Chloe saw a man throw away his rifle and try to scramble out, saw black shapes swarm over him and drag him down. She tried to get up again, and another pure moment of pain blanked out the world.

Fahad was kneeling beside her. Blood drying under his nose, his gaze anxious. He said, ‘He helped us after all. You see? He helped us.’

‘I see.’

The biochines were gone. Ruined bodies lay scattered along the trench.

‘Drury shot you.’

‘Yes. Yes, he did.’

‘Can you walk?’

‘I don’t think so. Find help, Fahad. Find the people who were flying that drone…’

A shadow fell across them. A man stood at the lip of the trench, aiming a combat rifle at them as he looked all around. Then he reached up and pulled off his face mask.

‘Chloe Millar,’ Adam Nevers said. ‘What have you done now?’