“It’s only for six hours.”
When she responded she did not sound any calmer, but he could hear the shift in pitch in her voice that meant she had at least accepted the futility of argument. “But if something happens in that time—if you need me, or I need you—we won’t be able to talk.”
“Only for six hours,” he said. “Three hundred minutes or so. Nothing. Be done in a flash.”
“Can’t you drop some relays, so we can still keep in touch?”
“Don’t think so. I could sew some passive reflectors around Haldora, but that’s exactly the kind of thing that might lead a smart missile back to you. Anyway, it would take a couple of hours to get them into position. I could be down under the bridge by then.”
“I’m frightened, Horris. I really don’t want you to do this.”
“I have to,” he said. “I just have to.”
“Please don’t.”
“I’m afraid the plan is already under way,” Quaiche replied gently. “I’ve sent the necessary commands to the Dominatrix. It’s moving, love. It’ll be inside Haldora’s shadow in about thirty minutes.”
There was silence. He thought for a moment that the link might already have broken, that his calculations had been in error. But then she said, “So why did you bother to ask me if you’d already made up your mind?”
EIGHT
For the first day they travelled hard, putting as much distance between themselves and the badlands communities as possible. For hours on end they sped along white-furrowed trails, slicing through slowly changing terrain beneath a sable sky. Occasionally they passed a transponder tower; an outpost or even another machine moving in the other direction.
Rashmika gradually became used to the hypnotic, bouncing motion of the skis, and was able to walk around the icejammer without losing her balance. Now and then she sat in her personal compartment, her knees folded up to her chin, looking out of the window at the speeding landscape and imagining that every malformed rock or ice fragment contained a splinter of alien empire. She thought about the scuttlers a lot, picturing the blank pages of her book filling with neat handwriting and painstaking crosshatched drawings.
She drank coffee or tea, consumed rations and occasionally spoke to Culver, though not as often he would have wished.
When she had planned her escape—except “escape” wasn’t quite the right word, because it was not as if she was actually running from anything—but when she had planned it, anyway, she had seldom thought very far beyond the point when she left the village. The few times she had allowed her mind to wander past that point, she had always imagined herself feeling vastly more relaxed now that the difficult part:—actually leaving her home, and the village—was over.
It wasn’t like that at all. She was not as tense as when she had climbed out of her home, but only because it would have been impossible to stay in that state for very long. Instead she had come down to a plateau of continual tension, a knot in her stomach that would not undo. Partly it was because she was now thinking ahead, into the territory she had left vague until now. Suddenly, dealing with the churches was a looming concrete event in the near future. But she was also concerned about what she had left behind. Three days, even six, had not seemed like such a long time when she had been planning the trip to the caravans, but now she counted every hour. She imagined the village mobilising behind her, realising what had happened and uniting to bring her back. She imagined constabulary officers following the icejammer in fast vehicles of their own. None of them liked Crozet or Linxe to begin with. They would assume that the couple had talked her into it, that in some way they were the real agents of her misfortune. If they caught up, she would be chastised, but Crozet and Linxe would be ripped apart by the mob.
But there was no sign of pursuit. Admittedly Crozet’s machine was fast, but on the few occasions when they surmounted a rise, giving them a chance to look back fifteen or twenty kilometres along the trail, there was nothing behind them.
Nonetheless, Rashmika remained anxious despite Crozet’s assurances that there were no faster routes by which they might be cut off further on down the trail. Now and then, to oblige her, Crozet tuned into the village radio band, but most of the time he found only static. Nothing unusual about that, for radio reception on Hela was largely at the whim of the magnetic storms roiling around Haldora. There were other modes of communication—tight-beam laser-communication between satellites and ground stations, fibreoptic land lines—but most of these channels were under church control and in any case Crozet subscribed to none of them. He had means of tapping into some of them when he needed to, but now, he said, was not the time to risk drawing someone’s attention. When Crozet did finally tune into a non-garbled transmission from Vigrid, however, and Rashmika was able to listen to the daily news service for major villages, it was not what she had been expecting. While there were reports of cave-ins, power outages and the usual ups and downs of village life, there was no mention at all of anyone going missing. At seventeen, Rashmika was still under the legal care of her parents, so they would have had every right to report her absence. Indeed, they would have been breaking the law by failing to report her missing.
Rashmika was more troubled by this than she cared to admit. On one level she wanted to slip away unnoticed, the way she had always planned it. But at the same time the more childish part of her craved some sign that her absence had been noted. She wanted to feel missed.
When she had given the matter some further thought, she decided that her parents must be waiting to see what happened in the next few hours. She had, after all, not yet been away for more than half a day. If she had gone about her usual daily business, she would still have been at the library. Perhaps they were working on the assumption that she had left home unusually early that morning. Perhaps they had managed not to notice the note she had left for them, or the fact that her surface suit was missing from the locker.
But after sixteen hours there was still no news.
Her habits were erratic enough that her parents might not have worried about her absence for ten or twelve hours, but after sixteen—even if by some miracle they had missed the other rather obvious clues—there could be no doubt in their minds about what had happened. They would know she was gone. They would have to report it to the authorities, wouldn’t they?
She wondered. The authorities in the badlands were not exactly known for their ruthless efficiency. It was conceivable that the report of her absence had simply failed to reach the right desk. Allowing for bureaucratic inertia at all levels, it might not get there until the following day. Or perhaps the authorities were well informed but had decided not to notify the news channels for some reason. It was tempting to believe that, but at the same time she could think of no reason why they would delay.
Still, maybe there would be a security block around the next corner. Crozet didn’t seem to think so. He was driving as fast and-as nonchalantly as ever. His icejammer knew these old ice trails so well that he merely seemed to be giving it vague suggestions about which direction to head in.
Towards the end of the first day’s travel, when Crozet was ready to pull in for the night, they picked up the news channel one more time. By then Rashmika had been on the road for the better part of twenty hours. There was still no sign that anyone had noticed.
She felt dejected, as if for her entire life she had fatally overestimated her importance in even the minor scheme of things in the Vigrid badlands.