Even when the other suited forms appeared between the spiky pillars, I couldn’t get up. First there was one . . . then two . . . then half a dozen. I saw the nearest one pull up, turn, and go down on one knee, firing twice before hurling aside what was presumably an empty rifle and coming on toward me. I saw one of the others fall, and two or three others returning fire, but there was no sustained firing, and some of the pursuers were hanging back. Obviously, the shortage of ammunition was universal.
The first one to reach my side was Susarma Lear. She took one look at me, and then reached down to grab the club from my hand. I could barely lift it to meet her partway. When she turned back, I realized that she was the only good guy who had made it through. Serne was not with her, nor Finn. There was no sign of the two Tetrax. All the other suited figures I could see were the enemy.
Now they knew they had us cornered they were not chasing . . . instead they were fanning out, and approaching very slowly indeed. I realised that they were waiting for further support. There were five of them, but they were staying thirty or thirty-five metres away, awaiting reinforcements. I didn’t take any pleasure in the implied compliment they were paying to my heroic commander.
Seconds drained by, and nothing happened. The approaching Neanderthalers had all stopped, apparently just as drained by it all as we were. I stayed sitting down. Susarma Lear stood beside me, battleaxe at the ready. I wondered whether she would carry the fight to them, if discretion kept them back for too long.
Then I saw the tank, manoeuvring round one of the pillars. It was a great ugly thing, with caterpillar tracks and an absurd plastic-shielded turret. Forty metres away, it stopped. The turret-hatch opened, and a suited man climbed down, followed by two others. They carried pistols, and they began to walk in a leisurely manner toward us. I watched them approach, their lazy, measured strides in sharp contrast to the staggering steps their companions had been able to manage at the end of the long chase.
She waited, without moving a muscle, until they were only three or four metres away. She stood in a slightly slumped position, as though she had given up.
But she hadn’t.
She hurled the battleaxe with all her might at one of the approaching men, and it took him full in the chest. He fell backwards, spilling his pistol. She hurled herself at the next in line, and though she moved faster than I could have imagined possible after everything she had been through, it had all taken just a little too much out of her. He was too quick on the trigger.
The shot, fired without aiming, must have gone through the flesh of her thigh, and I saw blood gush out into the cavity between her transparent plastic suit and the leg of her pants. I heard her scream of anguish, and I dived after her, trying to get my hands around her leg, in a desperate attempt to seal the rent in her suit. I knew that she’d be dead in a matter of minutes, even disregarding the bullet-wound, if the suit wasn’t patched.
My own attempts were futile anyway—it didn’t matter that the guy who’d been hit in the chest by her missile came to his feet in a temper and lashed his pistol across my helmet. In fact, if they’d been ready with some kind of patch or tourniquet, it might even have been the best thing for them to do, to clear me away while they took effective action.
But they weren’t interested in applying any first aid. They were more than happy to see us both die. The blow landed just about where Trooper Blackledge’s punch had landed, and this time I felt as if it had really broken my jaw. I sprawled over, while he got ready to hit me again, and I saw that they weren’t going to do a damn thing for the colonel. In fact, one of them tried to roll her away with his foot. I was watching him and not the man who was hitting me, so the second blow came right out of the blue, smashing into the other side of my helmet.
If the plastic had been rigid, it would have cracked, but the soft suit could take any number of blows like that. Unfortunately, the recycling apparatus inside the suit couldn’t. I heard a kind of splintering sound, and I knew that the next few breaths I took would be the last ones from which I’d get any real benefit.
I lashed out with my foot, but didn’t connect with anything, and then was flat on my back, gasping for air that wasn’t coming through. Above me, silhouetted against the glowering sky, I could see three helmeted heads—our murderers.
And then, in what I thought at the time was a vengeful hallucination, I saw those three helmeted heads dissolve into murky black vapour.
For a few seconds there was nothing but the sky, and then something else floated into view. It was silvery and even in the faint light of that dreadful underworld it gleamed and glittered like something magical and marvellous.
Mori dieuf I thought. There is light beyond death after all!
And then, it seemed, I died.
25
You, of course, will not be in the least surprised to discover that I did not die. I would hardly be telling you the story if I had. I, on the other hand, was in no position to prejudge the issue. It came as something of a surprise to me when I woke up again, and the shock was most definitely not ameliorated by the circumstances in which I found myself.
I was floating.
At first I thought this was a purely subjective impression; I leapt from that idea to the conclusion that I was in zero- gee. Eventually, though, the tactile messages arriving in my brain sorted themselves out into reluctant coherency, and I knew that I was literally floating on some kind of thick liquid that did not wet me. The only kind of non-wetting liquid I knew was mercury, but I was too deeply immersed for it to be mercury.
There was sound in my ears, but it was only the thin hiss of white noise, completely featureless.
I tried to open my eyes, and found it difficult—not because there was any tiredness left to make me want them shut, but because there were two wire-ends stuck to my eyelids. I had to pull my right hand out of the glutinous fluid to snatch them away. There were other wires secured to my forehead, and more on my skull. They were not just glued down—in some peculiar fashion they seemed to be extending roots into my skin. I ripped them all away, not caring what kinds of sensors were on the ends. The “roots” snapped easily, causing no more than mild discomfort, and leaving only a faint itching sensation in my skin.
The white noise ceased when I pulled the wires from my ears, and I was left in silence.
Opening my eyes brought me little immediate profit, because the light was as nebulous and informationless as the sound in my ears. My visual field was filled with grey. I reached forward with my hand, and touched a surface about fifteen centimetres in front of me—above me, that is, given that I was floating on my back. The surface was concave.
I knew where I was, now. Not in Hell, and certainly not in Heaven. I was in a sensory deprivation tank.
I pushed at the concave surface, which was neither warm nor cold to my touch. The force of the push sent me back into the liquid, in accordance to Newton’s third law, and then the liquid buoyed me up again, sloshing around the interior of the tank. The surface above me didn’t yield.
I made a fist of my hand, and rapped on what I assumed to be the lid of my tank. The non-wetting liquid slopped around me, agitated by my movements. I tried to change my attitude, thrusting my leg down, and touched the floor of the tank, also concavely curved.
I’m shut up in a bloody egg! I told myself, with deliberate vehemence. Or in some kind of hi-tech make-believe womb!
I remembered, then, that I ought not to be feeling too good. I moved my jaw from side to side, and touched my fingertips to the place that should have been injured. There was no break, and no sign of a bruise.