The machine purred out of the water, rose smoothly up the muddy bank and entered the forest again.
“Great toy,” she said.
“Quite.”
They returned through the concentric layers of surfacetravelling civilisation to forest paths, then tracks, then winding metalled roads in the foothills, then a narrow turnpike, heading arrow-straight through the plantations of low crop-forests. Vapour trails wove a net through the clear blue sky, and twice again they heard low-flying jets.
A third group of jets went right over them; this time there was no warning build-up of noise, just an impression of their shadows-a single flicker across the road-followed by a stunning, titanic slap of sound and the scream of their engines fading in both directions at once while the trees on either side of the road whipped back and forth in the sudden storm, losing scales, twigs and whole branches. The monowheel reacted to the gust by squatting slightly, but otherwise remained level.
They rolled on.
She had never seen a turnpike in Caltasp so deserted.
“Where is everybody?”
“It’s a little worrying,” Feril said above the slipstream noise. “I’ve been monitoring the public broadcast channels, and several of them appear to consist only of a soundtrack of what I believe is called martial music. Other channels have been showing nothing but old entertainments. There have been a couple of weak EMPs in the last hour, too.”
She looked round at it. “You mean nukes?” she asked.
“Perhaps not; they may have been caused by charged-particle weapons.”
She turned back, watching the trees stream past on either side. “Either way,” she said.
They side-stepped two military convoys by taking once to the forest and once to the hummocked tundra. The turnpike avoided towns and other settlements as a matter of course.
The tundra became huge prairies of grain.
They ploughed a course through one vast field to avoid a road block, then on an ordinary but straight road accelerated to out-pace a helicopter that seemed to be trying to follow them.
She switched roads several times immediately after that, always heading north or west through the dying light of the cold afternoon.
Finally the military traffic became too thick, and they left the metalled ways altogether. They took to tracks and forest fire-breaks, old drove-ways and canal tow-paths. They passed hill villages and dark-looking towns, old orchards and walled compounds; the monowheel rose and fell and banked and paced through the gloaming.
She thought she smelled something in the air as they rolled down the bed of a half-dried river, over water-meadows and sand banks and through clear shallows between hills bright and clear in the winter dusk. The river splayed out, deepening to become a tree-studded estuary; they took to the bank, then summited a sand dune.
They were facing the sea.
Feril drove through the depths of the night, once she had gone to sleep. They had made good time along the cold beaches of the coast and watched the skies to the south and east flicker and pulse with different-coloured lights. Feril picked up officially sanctioned broadcast reports of limited engagements taking place between Security Franchise units-backed by World Court licensed forces-and the armed services of Lantskaar, following acts of aggression and an invasion by the latter; the situation was being contained and there was no need to worry. The broadcast ended abruptly in another, strong, electromagnetic pulse.
Stretched forward over the cockpit, Feril only glanced at the monowheel’s nightsight display now and again to check on its sensitivity. Sea, surf, beach and dunes were bright in the moonlight. The strand was flat and smooth in places, strewn with braided streams and shallow pools in others; the monowheel thrummed across it all as though over glass.
She was on a station platform, in the middle of a snowy plain. An old steam train huffed behind the crowd of people. The Gun was there again, but it wasn’t saying anything this time; it stayed in the background while she said good-bye to Miz and Dloan and Zefla and Cenuij. They were whole and fit and well, as she’d have liked to remember them. She tried not to cry as she hugged them and said good-bye. She kept thinking there was somebody else there, too; somebody she could only see from the corner of her eye, a faceless figure in a wheelchair, but whenever she turned to look at the figure, she disappeared.
Then she saw Froterin and Cara and Vleit standing behind the others, and they looked great and hadn’t aged at all, and she laughed and cried and hugged them too, and they were all talking at once and everybody was hugging everybody else, all so glad to see one another after all this time, but soon it was time for them all to go, and her eyes filled with so many tears she couldn’t see properly as they all boarded the train, waving and smiling sadly as the old engine went huff, huff, and gradually pulled the dark carriages away from the little station in the snow.
She and the Gun watched the train disappear into the white distance. Then she looked at the Gun and It smiled.
The sleeping woman stirred beneath the android, sighing and turning over in her sleep. Feril pushed the speed up as they flashed past a town, burning in the darkness. More lights flared in the sky to the south, and the broad band of junklight sparkled intermittently.
The monowheel forded two rivers and swam three.
Lady Sharrow woke with the dawn.
The sky was a shroud of low cloud; light drizzle fell. They zipped along the tide-wet shore, leaving their single cryptic track behind on the winter beach. The sky ahead looked dark, solid and certain after the hollow blueness and the overcast’s grey indeterminacy.
The beach went on into the distance, and she let the speed climb until the monowheel would go no faster. The cockpit closed right over and the noise was still colossal. The streaked sand and water flashed at them and beneath them to be pressed and flung, arcing and falling into the whirling vortex the vehicle left behind as it screamed along the shore, its whole body humming, vibrating like a tensed, quivering animal, their speed so great that its suspension was finally registering bumps and small shocks. She smiled. The dunes to her right were a blur. The velocity read-out indicated that they were travelling at about seventy per cent of the speed of sound.
Feril was hunched over the rear of the liquid glass. She risked a glance. The android’s expressionless face gave no hint of its emotions.
The beach became uncomfortably bumpy and changed to a mixture of sand and gravel; drizzle sounded on the screen like blasted shot. She relaxed and slowed the car until the cockpit glass opened a hole above her head. The roaring noise was still terrific.
“You okay?” she shouted.
“Extremely!” Feril said loudly, and sounded as though it meant it. “What an exhilarating experience!”
She drove on; three hundred kilometres an hour suddenly seemed terribly slow. Surf boomed to their left as the drizzle became rain and the cloud overhead thickened. She took the monowheel into the dunes in the cloud-dark noon.
On the far side of a stinking marsh guarded by ancient, crumbling concrete monoliths and a series of weed-scummed lagoons, they came to the fence. It looked dilapidated but still strong. There was a guard tower nearby but it was unoccupied and strung with blow-weed.
The cold wind moaned through the hexagons in the fence and the metal support legs of the tower.
They got out of the vehicle. Feril could detect no surveillance devices. She considered using the cannon just for speed, but it would be noisy; she cut the fence’s steel mesh strand by strand with the laser instead. The monowheel curtsied through the hole and they rolled on through the chill levels of marshland beyond.