She kept the monowheel on what felt like the right level until they saw a huge flute of ice and snow like a scree slope leading down through the wrecked forest to the flat valley floor. She swung the vehicle onto it and down while the last of the day’s light leached from the sky.
They followed the frozen river for an hour through the moonlit darkness, then stopped.
She parked the machine off the white highway of river in the shelter of a C-shaped bay of rocks topped by snow-dusted trees. Feril studied the lock on the Lazy Gun while she stretched her legs and inspected as much of the monowheel as she could by moonlight.
The single wheel was angled at about thirty degrees off the vertical; it looked solid but couldn’t be. She remembered the bike back in the warehouse in Vembyr, but even flex-metal couldn’t do what this material seemed to be able to. She got Feril to move the vehicle forward a little. The single wheel seemed to flow rather than merely revolve. It was the colour of dulled mercury; its chevron-corrugated tread looked like a giant gear-wheel.
The cannon muzzle was scooped into the chin of the vehicle on the centre-line. The shining tubes sticking from the rear, which she had mistaken for engine exhausts, were the recoilless weapon’s gas-ports. Feril checked the weapon-state screen and reported that they had another thirty-one shells left of various types.
“I’m afraid the cannon will remain our most powerful weapon,” Feril said sorrowfully, putting the Lazy Gun down and tapping the trigger-lock. “This is a cryptogenetic code-lock. It is impossible to open without the correct base-sequence key.”
“Well, never mind,” she said. “It was always a long shot.”
“I am sorry,” Feril said. “However, I believe I have worked out the link between your interest in the mark on the wrist of the man you looked at earlier and the reason you wish to go to the province of Udeste.”
She hauled herself back into the vehicle. “Took you a while,” she said, yawning.
“Yes,” Fenril said contemplatively. “I am a little disappointed myself.”
“Well,” she said, “you can redeem yourself by taking the night-shift. I’m tired.”
“I shall drive with all due care and attention.”
“Yes,” she said, sliding down into the footwell, yawning. “Lantskaar welcomes careful drivers.”
They put the Lazy Gun in the compartment behind the cockpit; Feril sat on the Gun with its legs either side of the driving seat. After a little experimentation, she found a comfortable way of snuggling down into the footwell while the android leant over to the controls in a position that would have been tortuously uncomfortable for a human but with which it assured her it was perfectly happy.
She slept while Feril drove through the night.
So far, so good.
Eh? What?
I said, So far, so good.
The man who was really the Lazy Gun was sitting in the monowheel cockpit alongside her. There wasn’t room for him, but he was there.
What do you want now? she asked the Gun. I want to sleep.
I beg your pardon. I just wanted to say, well done. Sorry I can’t do any destroying yet, but like I said, we’ll see what we can do…
Yes, yes, she said. Now go away, I’m tired.
All right. Good-night, Lady Sharrow.
Good-Fate, I don’t believe this; I’m saying good-night to my own subconscious.
Of course you are, the Gun said.
Now sleep.
The air was warm around her as she spun through it, safe in the midst of the surrounding cold. The android was at the controls. The antique machine hummed beneath her, transporting her among reflections.
In her dream she hugged the broad neck of the trafe bird.
The sky was an insane blue; an endless curve of land died before the wheel, forever reeling away towards an expanding horizon. The mountains became snow-dusted hills, which became tundra. They rolled across the plains of frozen lakes among the mountains, found old tracks through the hills and skirted the marshy tundra until they found an old turnpike, its metalling cracked like the surface of an ancient painting and dotted with the erupted blisters of ice hummocks.
They avoided settlements and once swung off a better-maintained length of the tundra road to let a military supply road train pass, but otherwise saw no sign of people. Feril’s internal knowledge of Golter’s geography didn’t cover northern Lantskaar and the Embargoed Areas in great detail, and the monowheel seemed to have no strategic navigational systems whatsoever, but the android was what it described as cautiously certain they were now around the centre of the Areas, near the Farvel coast, a thousand kilometres due west of the fjord where they had found the Gun. They had travelled approximately seven hundred kilometres from the Keep.
They saw many aircraft contrails, and on one occasion heard but did not see low-flying jets while speeding through a low forest by the side of a long lake.
The monowheel absorbed the shock of potholes and boulders, leapt larger depressions, and turned its wheel into a tall ellipse to ford rivers. Once, when she was driving quickly up a shallow slope on a hillside towards a long bridge that had fallen into a ravine, the vehicle slammed to a stop as she was still squinting at the revealed rim of broken concrete and thinking about braking.
She turned round to Feril.
“Did you do that?”
“No,” the android said. “The vehicle would appear to be what is sometimes called ‘smart’.” Feril sounded slightly condescending. “Though not sentient, of course.”
“Of course.”
“I myself was just about to suggest braking.”
“Right,” she said. She looked for a way down into the ravine, then whirled the monowheel around towards a hairpinning side-road descending into the forest.
She walked, windmilling her stiff arms, by the side of a waterfall in low hills they thought must be near the north-western limits of the Areas. The android stood in the pool at the foot of the waterfall, waves lapping round its thighs. She was determined not to ask it why it was doing this.
“Hey,” she said, peering under the rear of the vehicle. “There’s a mark, a gouge or something here.” She looked at the android. “What happened to the due care and attention?”
“Oh,” Feril said quietly, staring into the water. “That will be a bullet mark.”
“A bullet mark?” she said.
Feril nodded slowly, still staring at the water. “We picked that up last night at the Lantskaarian border.” It looked at her briefly, head turning smoothly to and fro. “It all happened very quickly,” it said reassuringly. “By the time I had an opportunity to waken you, we were out of danger. I thought it best to let you sleep.” Its voice was soft.
She was not sure what to say.
Feril stooped, dipping suddenly, one hand flicking into the water, then it straightened and walked towards her, a half-metre-long fish flapping powerfully in its hand.
She looked at it.
“You said you were hungry,” Feril explained. “I suggest we grill the fish with the laser.”
She nodded, wondering why they had not thought to ask the android’s help when they had all been starving at the fjord.
“Thank you, Feril,” she said. She no longer felt hungry, but she supposed she had better eat. “I’ll get the gun.”
They reached the Security Franchise strip that afternoon, traversing several military roads in the forested hills while Feril monitored leakages of comm and sensory wavelengths. It guided them away from the roads and the areas where the electromagnetic clutter was thickest; they took to tracks, then paths, then the forest floor, thick with rotting leaf-scales and mosscovered boulders.
They crossed what they guessed was the border into Caltasp by wading the monowheel through a rushing stream beneath a ramshackle, electrified fence; the vehicle reduced the portion of the wheel under its body almost to nothing at one point, and at another was actually afloat, in a dark pool under the everleafed trees. Even then, it remained perfectly stable and level in the water, gyros whining distantly. A light flashed on the instruments and Feril suggested pressing the glowing area; when she did the monowheel surged forward through the water, leaving a foamy wake.