Miz was crouched down beside Keteo. “Got a communicator?” he asked the youth.
“Yeah!” he said.
“How about using it to tell your pals in the ACV we’re on our way?”
“Good idea!” Keteo said. He pulled a small device from his pink combat jacket. “Solo?” he said.
Miz sidled over to Sharrow, who was taking aim at the hill summit. “Down the stream?” he asked her.
Keteo chattered excitedly to somebody on the Solo.
“Yes,” she said. “Down the stream. Any time you like.” She rose up just enough to fire at the hillside. Some careless soldier skylined, and so died in silhouette. Sharrow ducked back, changing magazines.
“Okay?” Miz asked Keteo, over the sound of bullets thudding into the ground and stones around them.
“Okay!” the boy yelled. “They’re waiting.”
“Let’s go,” Miz said. “Down the stream-bed.” He nodded at Keteo’s pink combat jacket, which even in the gathering darkness looked very pale. “That jacket makes you kind of conspicuous, kid; you might want to ditch it.”
Keteo looked at Miz as though he was mad.
Sharrow declipped the bi-propellants.
Miz watched her, scratching his head. “Will you stop fiddling and fire that damn thing?” he said.
She glared at him. “These are B-Ps,” she said. “No better against infantry and too easy to back-trace.”
“Oh, my mistake,” Miz said, watching her shove a different magazine home. A small explosion threw soil into the air ten metres upstream.
“Rifle-grenade,” Dloan said.
She was ready to fire. She glanced at the others.
“Go!” she yelled. She started firing. Zefla and Dloan-quickly followed by Keteo and then Cenuij-jumped over the stream-side wall of the animal-pen.
Sharrow ducked down again. She changed clips again, her ears ringing again, her wrists aching. Miz was sitting a metre away, his face just visible, grinning at her.
“Get!” she yelled at him.
“You get,” he told her. He held his hand out for the gun.
“No,” she said.
She turned and started firing. Something dropped into the animal-pen a couple of metres away; Miz dived, grabbed and threw the rifle-grenade away towards the road; it exploded in mid air.
She looked round; shrapnel tinkled against the far wall. Bullets sang off the stones they were crouched behind.
“Let’s both get,” Miz suggested.
They leapt the wall, stumbled down across the grass to the shallow river and staggered in, then waded downstream, heads bowed, slipping on submerged rocks, bullets whizzing above.
The Solo was invisible, hidden by the hollow where one of the downed planes had crashed. The ACV’s flashing lights lit up rising smoke in front of them and the grass on either side of the stream ahead. An underwater pulse almost threw them off their feet; a grenade made a white exploding shape in the stream, back near the animal-pen.
They came to the lip of a small waterfall and struggled out onto the grass, running down into the hollow where the wreckage of the aircraft burned in cratered patches and the Solo waited, its slab-sided stern turned to them, rear ramp closed but a small door open above a mesh ladder. Elson Roa was climbing the ladder over the bulge of the hovercraft’s man-high skirt. The Francks were right behind him. Keteo was helping Cenuij, who was limping.
Sharrow and Miz ran down through the big ACV’s prop wash. “Wish they’d put those fucking lights out,” Miz gasped.
They splashed through the stream again as Zefla climbed to the door. Tall splashes in the water announced bullets falling amongst them, and sparks burst off the rear of the hovercraft; air whistled out of small, ragged punctures in its skirt. Dloan waited for Keteo, then picked him up and threw the boy half-way up the ladder. He scrambled the rest.
Cenuij was next, hauling himself hand over hand.
Sharrow and Miz reached the black curve of the ACVs skirt. Dloan made to help her up, but she nodded him to go next. He paused on the way up as something pulled at the dark cloth covering his right leg, then he continued.
“Ah!” Miz said, and whirled round. Sharrow looked back to see him glance at one hand and then stick it behind his back, and look at her. “Nothing,” he shouted above the noise of the engines, grinning. Blood dripped into the water behind him. He nodded at the ladder. “After you,” he yelled.
She stuck the gun in her mouth, gripped the ladder and climbed. Miz was right beneath her.
Cenuij was in the door, reaching down to her. He looked furious.
“Can you believe it?” he said, grasping her hand. “He threw it away! Thought it had stopped working, so he threw it away!”
Cenuij pulled her towards him. Roa was further in, yelling into a communicator. Dloan sat on the floor inside, holding his leg. The ACV was moving. Shots thumped around the opened door.
Sharrow hauled herself into the doorway and turned to reach down for Miz.
At first she thought Cenuij was doing the same thing, then he slumped heavily on top of her and tumbled out of the door.
She grabbed at him but missed; he fell past Miz, bounced off the ACV’s skirt and landed slackly on the grassy bank of the stream, limbs flopping spread around him.
Miz hesitated, looking down and back as spray burst from beneath the hovercraft’s skirt.
Cenuij lay on the grass, staring up at the sky, eyes open, blood pouring from each side of his head.
The ACV moved away and picked up speed, puffing up great shrouding clouds of spray into the hollow in front of the waterfall and punching huge, rolling holes in the smoke from the burning wreckage, all lit by the flames and the hovercraft’s flickering lights. Roa was still shouting. Hands came and held Sharrow’s shoulders.
She saw Miz tense as he looked down at Cenuij, getting ready to leap off the ladder.
“Miz!” she shouted. He looked up at her. The spray rose about him as the ACV accelerated, engines barking and clattering.
Cenuij lay still; ten, then twenty metres away as the pulsing light faded around him. Then the hovercraft’s lights finally flicked off.
“Miz!” she screamed into the shadows.
She reached down, felt his hand and pulled him up.
She and Zefla hauled him in through the door.
The small waterfall reflected the fading flames of the plane-wreck; the hollow became a bowl of shadows as the Solo drew away.
Cenuij’s body lay motionless on the ground, a dark ‘X’, like something pinned out, sacrificed to the encroaching darkness.
18 The Dark City
The android crossed the central plaza and walked along the quiet street through skeins and patches of ground-mist and past the shells of tall, roofless buildings filled with watery morning sunlight. The android was slender and a little below the height of the average Golter male; its outer substance was formed from metal and plastic and it wore no clothes. Its body had been sculpted to vaguely resemble a rather idealised male figure, though without genitalia. Its chest was usually said to remind people of the breastplate from a suit of ancient armour. Its head held two ear-shaped microphones, two eyes like round sunglass lenses, a flat nose with two sensory nostril slits, and a small loudspeaker shaped like a pair of slightly open lips.
Where the buildings gave way to a small park, the android turned and descended a wide set of curving steps, past arcades edged by tattered, faded awnings, down towards the mist-strewn waters of the silent harbour. On the esplanade it turned and made for the Guest’s Quarter. Sunlight threw its long thin shadow behind it, across paving stones that were clean and without litter but cracked and holed.
The android carried a slim plastic folder in one hand; the plastic went slap-slap against its plastic-covered thigh for a few steps as the light breeze caught it, then the tall figure shifted its arm slightly, holding the folder further away from its leg. The noise stopped.