The recoil kicked me backwards and sent me sprawling under a bush, where a congregation of giant cockroaches was wailing away like a choir of demented sirens. When I landed in their midst they wriggled away as fast as their scrawny legs could carry them.
When I was able to stand up again, the star-captain was holding her gun before her, covering Jacinthe Siani, who was pressed back against the wall with hands thrown wide, looking terrified. Serne was emerging from the bushes to one side, Crucero from the other. There was no sign of Heleb or the last vormyran.
I didn’t expect ever to see either of them again.
The noise of the insects was beginning to die down, and by the time we were all together it was possible for us to speak and be heard.
“Nice move, Rousseau,” said the star-captain. “Maybe you’ll make a starship trooper after all.”
“I grew up in low-gee,” I said, by way of explanation. “Never did any real fighting, but I played a lot of games. Guur lived all his life on planets, and he was careless enough to let me know it. I knew he’d be a sitting duck once he was off-balance.”
I looked down at Guur’s shattered body. There was blood everywhere. It looked no different from human blood—even the stink was the same.
“I could have taken all three of them,” said the star-captain, matter-of-factly. “But it was nice of you to help, considering. I suppose you didn’t believe me, though, when I said that he was welcome to you.”
“I figured you were marginally less likely to gun me down than he was. You always intended to blast him, though, didn’t you? All the stuff about co-operating was just to gain time while these two tidied up Heleb and the last vormyran, wasn’t it?”
“Right,” she said, already turning away to face Crucero.
“The predator is clever,” I murmured. “The predator deceives.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Just a little motto I picked up,” I told her. “You were bluffing too, I hope, when you mentioned charging me with cowardice and desertion?”
“It had crossed my mind,” she said. “But when poor Kally started screaming, I guess we all thought we were dead. I’ll trade off that one against the fact that you backed me up here—okay?”
She didn’t seem exactly over-generous, but I figured that the result was acceptable.
“What do we do with her?” asked Crucero, waving his flame-pistol at Jacinthe Siani.
“Kill her,” advised Serne casually. For a moment, he reminded me very strongly of Heleb.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “She might be useful to me. She’s probably the only one left who can tell the Tetrax the whole truth about my being framed. I need her.”
“That’s okay,” said the star-captain. “She’s harmless now, and she isn’t going to give us any trouble—are you?”
Jacinthe Siani shook her head enthusiastically.
“If you want her,” said Serne, “you can look after her.” He slapped a gun into my hand—a needier, which he’d recovered from one of the dead bodies.
I took it, and glanced at the part of the forest from which he’d emerged. The noise of the insects hadn’t died away, and seemed to be increasing again. I suddenly realised why. The moment I saw what was happening, the stink of it cut through the riot of odours like a knife, and my heart skipped a beat.
“Merde!” I said, too softly to be clearly heard.
They saw from my expression that something was wrong, and the star-captain turned quickly to look at whatever it was that had alarmed me.
The billowing smoke was gushing furiously now, filling the margin between the topmost leaves and the twelve-metre sky, already beginning to blot out the vivid electric lights, bringing night to the jungle for what might have been the first time in thousands of years.
“Oh shit,” she said. “I told you to be careful.”
“I couldn’t get close enough to use the wire,” Serne complained. “I had to take the bastard out with the flame.”
“Let’s hope they have a fire brigade,” I said.
The star-captain didn’t want to wait. “This way,” she said, pointing along the curving path which ran its narrow course round the edge of the burning garden. She began to run. Crucero didn’t hesitate, and neither did Serne. Jacinthe Siani was still backed up against the wall, and though her eyes were fixed upon the smoke rising from the bushes she didn’t seem inclined to move.
“Come on!” I said, grabbing her arm. I pulled her away from the wall and pushed her in the direction which the others had taken. “Run!” I commanded.
At last, she ran. I ran behind her, taking great bounding strides. Unused to the gravity, she fell over three times, but I kept picking her up and urging her on, thrusting her forward along the curve of the featureless wall. We both bumped into the wall more than once, because the path was so narrow, and the reaction of our bouncing confused even me. We must have fallen thirty or forty metres behind the others within three minutes.
The fire hadn’t seemed to be spreading very quickly, and we soon outran the smoke, but I couldn’t help remembering the way that the door had closed behind me. As far as we knew, we were in a sealed cylinder, and we had no real reason to believe that the people who’d put us there would be inclined to let us out. They hadn’t lifted a finger to interfere when we’d started slaughtering one another—why should they intervene now to save the killers from the consequences of their shooting party? I hoped that they might at least care about their hothouse plants, and would put out the fire if only to save the forest.
I was so preoccupied with hustling Jacinthe Siani along the narrow track, and with worrying about the fire, that I didn’t realise when the star-captain and her merry men stopped. I had to bring myself up short when I saw Seme’s broad back in front of me, and even my long experience in low gee wasn’t sufficient to cope with the problem. I missed him, but I ended up sprawled full-length under yet another bush, away to one side of him.
When I crawled out, feeling as if there were bruises all over my body, I saw that he’d gone into a defensive crouch, and that his gun was once again in his hand. Crucero had already faded into the undergrowth. When I tried to stand up my shoulder was grabbed by the star-captain, who forced me down again, pulling me sideways into the cover of a broad-leaved plant.
“What is it?” I asked, trying to make myself heard over the racket of the insects without actually shouting. “More vormyr?” I realised that no one had ever specified exactly how many men Amara Guur had had with him when he was ambushed, or how many had survived to be captured by robots.
But it wasn’t more vormyr. She didn’t reply to my question, but I was close enough to her to see the avid glint in her eye. I knew then that she’d seen Myrlin.
She let go of my shoulder, but I promptly grabbed her arm, causing her to look round at me with a furious countenance. As she tried to shake me off, her lips drew back from her teeth in a kind of snarl that I’d never before seen on a human face.
“Don’t do it,” I said. “He isn’t any danger to you. I swear it!”
She tried to shake me off, but the angry oath that was on her lips suddenly died as the implications of what I’d said sunk in.
“What the hell do you know about it?” she demanded. Her face was close to mine; otherwise I would never have been able to hear the words, which came out in a forceful hiss.
“I was with him,” I told her. “After we got split up. He told me everything. He isn’t any danger!”
“He told you that, I suppose!” she retorted.