I didn’t need to. When it was no more than a metre away, a thin beam of liquid light leapt out of Seme’s flame-pistol and drilled a hole right through its head. The creature was light enough to be hurled sideways by the impact, and its ability to flow through the gaps in the forest abruptly deserted it. It crashed into a bush, sending splinters flying in every direction.
“Hey!” I said. “That was a little too close for comfort.”
“No trouble,” he said, just as if I’d thanked him kindly.
For a moment, I thought the dead thing was vaguely humanoid, but it was just that it had reared up on its hind legs to attack me and had been jerked rigid by the shock of having its brain instantaneously spit-roasted. It was more like a cat—except for the spikes.
Susarma Lear and Khalekhan had their guns out too. They had formed a triangle, each covering a hundred and twenty degrees of arc, as if they expected a horde of naked savages to leap out of ambush brandishing spears. They seemed so purposeful that I’d gladly have laid a thousand to one against the horde.
The animal’s skin was smooth and hairless. Its feet were large, with splayed toes as long as the claws that projected from them. Its shoulders seemed ridiculously large until I realised that it had some kind of extendable frill draped like a cloak about its upper torso. The spikes on its head didn’t look like horns, until I’d figured out how it held its head when it was charging, and then they did. I doubted that they’d have been able to penetrate my cold-suit, even if I hadn’t been ready to fend off the attack with my brawny arms, but I was glad that I hadn’t had to wrestle with the beast.
“Well,” I said, “it’s not quite as big as a man, but if there are things like that around, there could be humanoids too.”
“Let’s get moving,” Susarma Lear said. “The android’s getting further away. He’s a lot faster than we anticipated, and he just keeps on going.”
She had had enough of letting me lead. She set off in front herself, striding out purposefully.
“We could get Crucero to send more equipment down,” I suggested—but she wouldn’t hear of it.
“No time,” she said.
I fell into step at the rear of the group. I couldn’t see her, but I could talk to her easily enough over the radio link. “Keep a sharp lookout,” I said. “Logic says that there must be worse things than that around these parts.”
“I didn’t think the spikes on its head were for decoration,” she retorted. “And I saw how fast it moved. Natural selection doesn’t favour agility like that unless it’s a matter of life or death. When it saw you, it charged—no time wasted in hesitation. I can read the signs too, Rousseau. Trust me.”
“You’re in command,” I said a trifle resentfully.
“That’s right,” she said. “There must have been a path here once, Rousseau, if not a road. That place we just came from was built to last, and it’s lasted, but the infrastructure supporting it has been obliterated. Maybe if we stripped this glutinous carpet we’d find the roadway with all its markings intact, but it wouldn’t tell us much more than we already know. Nobody like us has been this way for a very long time—except for the android.”
“You’re right,” I conceded. “But there’s built to last and built to last. The station up on four has been deep-frozen, but this one hasn’t. I doubt that we’re talking about an ecosystem that ran wild a million years ago, let alone hundreds of millions. This is degeneracy of a more recent vintage.”
“I’ll let you worry about the implications of that,” she said.
“Thanks. What did you make of the frill?”
“What frill?” she said, before she realised what I meant.
“Sorry, Rousseau—I don’t read frills. Arms and armour, speed and skill are my things. What did you make of the frill?”
“It could have been an arbitrary embellishment, used in sexual display,” I said. “On the other hand, it could have been a mechanism for radiating excess heat. If so, keeping warm is no problem hereabouts—quite the reverse, in fact.”
“So the power’s still on, and the provision it makes for life-support is generous. Big deal. Try to keep up, will you?”
“I am keeping up,” I assured her. What she meant was: Don’t even think about deserting. I wasn’t intimidated. If I were to set off in the opposite direction to the one Myrlin had gone, she’d keep chasing Myrlin—but I had to pick my moment. If they weren’t sufficiently distracted, they might just decide to shoot me.
When we finally paused to rest, though, the star-captain made a gesture of trust that I hardly deserved—she offered me a gun. I hadn’t accepted the one Serne had offered me, but this one seemed far more significant. I took it, and thanked her for the kind thought.
Now that I had my very own flame-pistol, I felt that I had finally been awarded full membership in her gang. That, I supposed, was how she’d intended me to feel.
“Try to use it wisely,” she said. “And whatever else you do, make sure that none of us is in the line of fire before you set it off.”
“I’ll do my best,” I promised.
26
I had expected to find water, and it didn’t take long for the expectation to materialise. There was a lot more of it than I had anticipated, in fact. It didn’t look deep, but it looked distinctly noisome—stagnant was too weak a word to do it justice.
Myrlin’s trail led us straight to it, no more than six hours’ march from the bottom of the dropshaft. Perhaps, once upon a time, it had been a system of reservoirs or a vast hydroponic farm. Now it was a swamp whose waters were as thick as soup, choked with drifting mats of vegetation and pockmarked with small islets crowded with skeletal dendrites decked out with the usual anaemic tinsel. The air was thick with flying insects. Every now and again marsh gas would bubble to the surface, sending slow ripples across it.
“Pity we didn’t pack a boat,” I murmured, as we stood contemplating the dimly lit vastness of the swamp. Our eyes were well-accustomed to the twilight, but the visibility was a lot poorer over the still water.
“Shut up, Rousseau,” said the star-captain. What she meant was: don’t bother to tell us that we’ve lost any chance we ever had of finding him.
I didn’t have to. “We couldn’t track a bulldozer across that,” Serne observed.
“Shut up, Serne,” said the star-captain. “We’re not giving up. We are not going back to report that we simply stopped trying. When our life-support systems reach the limit of their range, we can turn back. Not before.”
It was obvious, though, that she no longer expected to catch up with Myrlin. He must be extremely weary by now, but he’d done it. He’d beaten her.
“Follow me,” the star-captain said, in her most determined tone.
She was out of her mind, but I hadn’t the courage to tell her so. She walked slowly into the water, testing its depth as she went, heading directly away from the shore. I assumed that she would try to guess as best she could which way Myrlin would turn, given that he’d have to avoid the islets and the floating mats.
She was no more than thigh-deep when the bottom leveled out.
“Look!” she said, triumphantly, pointing at the fringe of one of the fibrous masses; it had certainly been disturbed, probably by Myrlin. I had to grant that we might not be entirely lost, until we got far enough out to find larger expanses of open water.
I sighed, and walked into the water after the others, still content to bring up the rear but not yet ready to turn tail and run. It was laborious ploughing through the murky water, but I wasn’t afraid of getting out of my depth. If necessary, I could have walked along the bottom in my cold-suit with a metre of water over my head. I did pause to wonder whether there might be creatures lurking below with teeth like sharks or crocodiles, or drilling worms, but I figured they’d just get toothache if they tried to get through the fabric.