Spares

It took only a few minutes to give Ratchet the bones of the situation. During that time I heard distant rattlings and whirrings as the computer ran checks on the gunship’s propulsion systems and collision detectors. He also tried to make some coffee in the ship’s minuscule galley, but the grounds were moldy and rotten so I made do with a cup of hot water instead. There didn’t seem to be any provision for the manufacture of cheeseburgers, unfortunately.

“I have no way of finding these people,” Ratchet said eventually. “By the sound of it they could be anywhere, and you don’t know how you came to be here.”

“Shit,” I said. I waved my hands vaguely. “Can’t we just, I don’t know, troll around until we find them?”

“The Gap is infinite, Jack, because the gaps between people are always unbridgeably wide. Searching an infinite space would take—”

“An awfully long time. I understand. Hang on—can you trace Positionex signals?”

“Yes. Not from the satellite, because it isn’t in The Gap, but I can lock onto the impulses from the unit. Why?”

“Ghuaji may still have the Positionex on him,” I said. “Let’s go.”

I strapped myself hurriedly into the pilot’s seat. As the engines thrummed into life I considered whether now might be a good time for taking some Rapt, but in a tiny, tired reprise of what I’d felt so many years ago, I decided I was going to do this one straight.

The hum of the engines climbed and then sank again, as the systems settled into flying mode. And then, like a sleepy movement of the Earth, the ship righted itself, and lifted off the ground.

I have to admit that I whooped. It had been a while. I enjoyed it.

I watched out of the window until the gunship was hovering about ten feet off the ground—standard flying height. One of the control panel monitors winked on, showing a blue dot in the middle of a schematic map of trees shown in cross-section.

“Found it,” Ratchet said. “It’s about four miles.”

“Full speed ahead,” I said, savoring the moment. “And don’t spare the ammo when we find him.”

The ship shifted unsteadily, then seemed to get into its stride. It slipped into a small clearing, then turned on its vertical axis until it was facing back the way I’d come.

“Okay,” said Ratchet. “I’m going to have to concentrate for a while. Catch you later.”

We started moving again, at first slowly, then faster and faster until the trees were slipping past the window like brown ghosts running the other way. There was barely any sound apart from the wind, and the cabin was eerily quiet. I held on tightly to my seat, trying to avoid being slung from side to side as the ship dodged and wove. I’d seen one of the gunships flying past once, and marveled at the way the computers steered through the trunks like an enormous fish darting through seaweed.

I’d also seen one crash, so when we reached maximum velocity I just shut my eyes.

Not being able to see was even more nerve-racking, so in the end I opened them again, and watched white-knuckled as the ship sped closer and closer to the position indicated by the flashing light on the monitor. At one point we swam through a few hundred yards of The Fear, but we were back out the other side before I’d had time to reach for the needle and undo my resolution.

After a couple of miles the light outside changed. The pure blue turned muddy, and I began to get worried. My suspicions were confirmed when I felt a sudden twinge at the bottom of my eyes, like a scalpel being slipped under the lids.

“Oh shit,” I said. “Ratchet, how far away are we?”

“About half a mile,” the computer replied tersely. “Why? You want to go to the bathroom?”

“Vinaldi doesn’t have the Bright Eyes anymore.” Out of the window on my side I saw brown tendrils of luminescence interlaced in the spaces between the trees. People had thought they were thin branches or shoots of some kind, until soldiers had been attacked by them and gone staggering off with twigs of light sticking out of their burning eyes. Unless Vinaldi was inside somewhere he was in big trouble—as were Suej, Nearly, and the rest of the spares, assuming they were here at all. “We’ve got to hurry”

“We’re approaching the source of the signal now,” Ratchet said, and I could sense the ship tensing itself around me. “Brace yourself.”

I was already about as braced as I could get, and so I just stared out of the window, searching for some sign of Ghuaji and the others in the murky light. The gunship decelerated rapidly, flicking between the trees with a piscine grace, homing in on the Positionex signal. I pulled my gun out, checked the cartridge. There was a limit to what I could do with it, because if Yhandim and Ghuaji—and anyone else they had with them—really had been taken up into The Gap, then they would have in effect become villagers, and it would need a lot more than a standard bullet to take them down. It would take a pulse rifle, of the kind which was arrayed on either side of the gunship’s midsection. I’d never really understood how the pulse rifles worked, except that someone had once told me that the energy was the same as that generated in an engine propulsion system. It didn’t really matter, as long as they did their job. The gun in my hand was just there to make me feel better. It worked—a little. A Jack Daniels would probably have been just as effective.

The web of brown energy outside the window meant visible light might be untrustworthy, so I concentrated on the monitor tracking the Positionex signal, drumming my fingers on the screen. The indicator light was close now, very close. Ratchet slowed the ship to little more than five miles an hour, and I watched the crosshairs on the monitor bisect the signal.

“We’ve gone past it,” Ratchet said.

“We can’t have.”

“Look at the screen.”

He was right. We were now on the other side of the indicator light. “How can we have missed it? Turn around—look again.”

Ratchet negotiated the ship in an arc and hovered back over the point indicated by the lock. I watched the external monitors, looking for, well, anything at all. The brown light had dissipated enough for me to make out the trunks of the trees around us, but I still couldn’t see Ghuaji. The ship slowed still further, to walking pace, and then stopped.

“We’re directly over it now,” Ratchet said.

There was nothing there, but I’ve seen all those movies and you’re not catching me like that. “Look up,” I said. “Maybe he’s up a tree.”

“I’ve done that already,” Ratchet said, relaying a feed from a camera on top of the ship to one of the screens. The trunk of a tree, like any other, disappearing up into the semidarkness. “There’s no one here even on infrared.”

“Drop down a little.”

The ship descended until the lower fin was resting gently on the ground. “Oh, fuck,” I said then, catching something out of the corner of my eye. “What’s that?”

The thing I thought I’d seen became clearer, as a sheet of the brown light folded away.

Ghuaji’s jacket, hanging over a bush.

I swore long and hard. Either Yhandim had figured out that Vinaldi and I had put a tracer on Ghuaji, or the coat had just been left behind by accident. Thinking back, I couldn’t remember whether Ghuaji had been wearing the jacket when I was in the village with Vinaldi.

It didn’t really matter. It was all over, unless Ratchet had any ideas. I asked him, not really hoping for an answer. It was still disappointing to find he didn’t have one.

“The position remains the same,” he said, apologetically. “Except that we have possibly now gone four miles in an incorrect direction. Sorry.”

I kicked out at the seat next to me. I wasn’t going to find them, and they were all going to die. Nearly would probably be mistreated a little first, but then she would die, assuming she wasn’t dead already. The spares, including Suej, would be taken to whatever fate awaited them. Even Vinaldi, who I now realized I would, on the whole, prefer not to lose as an acquaintance, would be killed. I was stuck in the depths of a forest which stretched limitlessly all around, sometimes in twilight, sometimes in darkness, but always unknowable and unsafe—and I had no way whatsoever of getting out I leaned forward with my head in my hands, eyes looking down at the controls but seeing nothing.

Perhaps, I thought, it was time for some more Rapt after all. Or maybe I should keep it as a little treat for when I’d been here for a hundred years.

“Jack,” Ratchet said quietly. “You may want to look out the window.”

Something in the tone of the computer’s voice made me sit up. The light was blue again outside, and now it wasn’t just trees which stood silently all around us.

The children were back.

They had returned, but this time there was no comfort in their presence. Their eyes emanated coldness, anger—though I didn’t feel either was directed at me. They surrounded the gunship in a circle which stretched in all directions, I couldn’t pick out the boy I’d seen first, but perhaps he was somewhere in the crowd. They were all there, gray-faced and staring up at me, their mouths open as if they were screaming.

“Are they Gap children?” Ratchet asked, even more quietly. I don’t suppose that computers get frightened, but even he sounded pretty spooked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s something odd about them. They brought me to this ship. They led me there and left.”

“What are they doing now?”

The children farthest away from the ship began to move, turning so they were facing in the opposite direction. All their mouths shut at once, and then they started walking away. As they got farther from the ship, others came from behind us to join them. They formed into ranks five across, a column which marched between the trees and into the twilight.

“Follow them,” I said.

Ratchet turned the ship and hovered back up to ten feet in the air. The children didn’t seem put out that we were tracking them. Far from it. Some of them started running, slowly at first, and then much faster. They weren’t running from us. They were leading us somewhere.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s pick up some speed.”

Ratchet accelerated slowly, and the children ran faster and faster like a pack of wolves finding their rhythm. Ratchet put his foot on the gas again until we were slipping along at a good forty miles an hour.

We followed the column of the children as they sprinted through the trees; Ratchet working overtime to avoid the trunks while keeping on the children’s track. At one point we rocketed over something that looked like the shadow of a truck, and I wondered if it was the ghost of the one Vinaldi and I had entered The Gap in. This impression was gradually reinforced as we surged farther through the forest, small hints of familiarity pressing themselves upon me through some sense I hadn’t known I possessed.

Then we flew over the village, and I knew for sure that we were going in the right direction. The gray shadows were streaming through the huts and out the other side like a river of smoke crushing all before it. Sometimes they seemed to blend into one being, at others to be a countless multitude; but they kept pounding forward, pulling Ratchet and me in their wake.

“I’m getting some infrared hits in the distance,” Ratchet said eventually, and I knew everything was about to go down.

“Okay,” I said. “Rack’em up.”

“What armament do you have in mind?”

“Everything we’ve got.”

The space between the trees was greater here, five yards apart in places. This freed Ratchet to increase the gunship’s speed still further until everything outside was a blur; but we didn’t overtake the children. However fast we went, they were still in front—until suddenly they weren’t there anymore and the forest all around us was empty.

I shouted at Ratchet to slow down. He did so immediately, our speed dropping so abruptly that I almost ended up molded to the control panel.

“Where’ve they gone? Can you see anything?”

“No. But there’s a small hill ahead. Could be masking them.”

“Go round it as quietly as you can,” I said. I felt sure there were probably some more technical terms I could have used, but I’d been a foot soldier and I didn’t know them. The words “shoot” and “run” had been the limits of my tactical mastery.

The gunship inched onward, and I had a moment to notice that there was none of the dangerous light here and to hope that they had been here all the time. Ratchet brought the ship in close to the bank of trees. The ship vibrated with the effort, and I felt as if I were in the mind of a stalking cat.

But then I remembered: I was in a machine, and we were doing this all wrong. This wasn’t some movie, where people somehow don’t hear the slicks before they rise up over the trees. “Of course they can fucking hear us,” I shouted, more to myself than Ratchet. “Come on—just go in!”

Ratchet seemed to have anticipated the command, and the ship darted around the mound before I’d even finished yelling. We accelerated so fast that the lower portion of the ship drifted beneath us, and we came round on an angle. Only my seat belt prevented me from slamming to the floor and I kept my eyes locked out of the window.

In a flicker of an eye I saw Nearly and Vinaldi. Both looked as if they’d been nailed to trees. And Yhandim, who was holding Suej by the arm and staring straight at us. There were a couple of other soldiers in the clearing, one of whom was Ghuaji. That’s all I had time to see before the first bullets started hammering into the ship, one coming straight through the window to embed itself in the wall behind me.

Ratchet hurtled the gunship directly over the clearing, and into a tight turn. I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to fire out of the window without getting shot, and that everything was now out of my hands.

“Kill everyone you can,” I said. “Except Suej and the two people nailed to trees.”

The gunship roared as it banked, virtually turning in its own length. Then it tilted forward and Ratchet brought it in low and fast, pulse rifles scything out the one form of energy the Gap villagers hadn’t been able to survive. On the monitors I saw one of the unknown soldiers go down, caught in the back by an orange needle of light.

You’re very welcome, I thought.

The ship rocketed past within yards of Nearly and I caught a glimpse of her face; she looked terrified but was still alive. For once in my life I felt like giving thanks to God, but then realized I didn’t have his E-mail address.

At the other side of the clearing Ratchet brought the ship into a screaming turn again, this time dropping lower and slowing down. The five remaining soldiers were now running away from us, but still holding combat formation. Yhandim and another soldier each had one of Suej’s arms, and were dragging her with them. Ghuaji and the other two were facing us as they ran backward, firing a constant stream of bullets into the gunship. The noise was like being in a tin can which has been left outside in a violent hailstorm. Bullets tend to make me want to hide, and I wanted so much to just hit the floor, but I knew I couldn’t. I had to see what was going on. Glass was shattering all around me, and the air was all ricochets and flames. It was getting hotter, and some part of the gunship was on fire, but I tuned it all out and watched grimly as Ratchet bore down on the fleeing men.

I had time for a brief warmth of smugness—Weren’t expecting me to come back in a gunship, were you, guys?— and then I saw something bad was happening. The soldiers were darting and running through the trees in a complex pattern, heading directly for areas where the trunks were too close together for the gunship to follow. Worse still, their outlines were becoming less distinct.

“Hurry!” I shouted to Ratchet. “They’re fading out!”

Ratchet couldn’t go any faster without killing us both, and concentrated instead on refining his fire; constant needles of pulse energy rocketed out from either side of me and into the darkness. They maimed trees, hit the ground, even perforated falling leaves; but still the soldiers evaded them.

Yhandim was now little more than a flicker, and Ghuaji was disappearing with him. The hands holding Suej’s arms were barely visible, but they weren’t letting go.

“Ratchet, you’ve got to stop them,” I screamed, “Or they’re going to take her away. They’ll turn her into one of them.”

The soldiers took a sudden right turn and ran down a steep bank, heading down onto the frozen bed of a stream. Our ship wobbled as it tried to follow them, overshot, and crashed through a copse of enormous bushes which clawed and snatched at us. A sudden burst of speed and a spine-tingling slalom brought them back into range again, and with horror I saw that Suej too was beginning to fade.

Nearly and Vinaldi were forgotten, along with the other spares and everything I had ever seen and done. All I could think of was Suej.

I saw her face turn back to us then, distorted with terror and tears. She stumbled and tripped as she was dragged down the rocky slope. She had no idea what was going on. As far as she knew we were another enemy, one that was simply bigger and more dangerous. Maybe she even welcomed being dragged away.

“Ratchet, KILL THEM!” I shouted, yanking my seat belt off and hurling myself up to the window. I stuck my face out and called Suej’s name, shouting it into the trees like a desperate prayer.

She looked! confused for a moment, then she saw me. For the merest of instants there was something like relief in her eyes, and she looked solid again.

I saw her ragged blond hair, inexpertly cut by me back at the Farm in an attempt to make her look like someone she once saw on the television; her pale blue eyes, wide with fear, face slack with confusion and dread; and a summer dress, splattered with mud, but still carrying with it something of the afternoon on which it had been bought.

As she stared at me she tripped, staggering into the space where the remaining shadow of Yhandim ran.

Two bolts of orange light flew from the gunship like angels going home. One went through the space where the other soldier was, and the hand on her right wrist seemed to disappear.

The other hit Suej full in the chest.

“No!” I screamed. “No! NO!”

Yhandim’s hand slipped off Suej’s arm as she fell, and he disappeared off into space, the wraith of a smile the last thing to go. I lost sight of Suej for a moment, as Ratchet fought to turn the gunship round. I howled and smashed my fist against the side of the cabin, the other soldiers forgotten, the smoke and noise around me forgotten, the world nothing but a shout of denial.

Ratchet juddered the ship down to the ground and I leaped up and waited for it to land. I opened the door and fell down the ladder, not knowing or caring if any of the other soldiers were still visible.

When I crashed to the bottom I looked up the hill, my vision blurred, almost unable to see what we had wrought. And, perhaps because of the tears, I thought I saw something.

I thought that I could see the children again, standing around Suej’s fallen body. The boy was there, and all the others, looking down with compassion in their faces. I stood there, throat clenched, too afraid to move, as the children bent over her, hands reaching as if to help her up. Then they started to disappear, but one at a time, hundreds of lights going out until there were no lights at all.

I climbed as fast as I could, scrambling over slippery rocks and tangled roots, but by the time I made it to the top of the bank, Suej’s body had vanished.