Len opened the top drawer next to the fridge, and pulled out the 9mm, semi-automatic pistol he kept for emergencies. He never had trusted lasers and magnetic rifles, not exposed to the Juliffe’s corrosive humidity. If anyone came aboard looking for trouble after a deal went sour, or a village got worked up about prices, he wanted something that would be guaranteed to work first time.
He flicked the safety catch off, and swung the heavy blue-black gun around to point at Yuri.
“No,” the lad’s malaised voice croaked. He brought his hands up in front of his face, cowering back.
Len fired. The first bullet caught Yuri on his shoulder, spinning him round and pushing him into the wall. Yuri snarled, furious eyes glaring at him. The second was aimed at Yuri’s heart. It hit his sternum and the planks behind him were splashed with crimson as two of his ribs were blown apart. He began to slide down the wall, breath hissing through feral teeth. The lighting panel jumped up to its full brightness.
Len watched with numb dismay as the shoulder wound closed up. Yuri squirmed round, trying to regain his feet with slow tenacity. He grinned evilly. The grip on the pistol was growing alarmingly warm inside Len’s hand.
“Kill him, Lennie!” Gail shouted. “Kill, kill!”
Feeling preternaturally calm, Len took aim at the lad’s head and squeezed the trigger. Once. Twice. The first punched Yuri’s nose into his skull, ripping through his brain. He sucked air in, warbling frantically. Blood and gore slurped out of the hole. The second shot caught the right side of his temple, driving splinters of bone into the wood behind like a flight of Stone Age darts. His feet began to drum on the deck.
Len was seeing it through a cold mist. The punished, mutilated body just refused to give up. He yelled a wordless curse, finger tugging back again and again.
The pistol was clicking uselessly, its magazine empty. He blinked, trying to pull the world back into focus. Yuri had finally fallen still, there was very little left of his head. Len turned aside, grasping the side of the basin for support as a flush of nausea travelled through him. Gail was whimpering softly, a hand stroking the terrible blisters and long blackened burn marks that mottled her shoulder.
He went over and cradled her head with a tenderness he hadn’t shown in years.
“Get us out of here,” she pleaded. “Please, Lennie.”
“Darcy and Lori . . .”
“Us, Lennie. Get us out of here. You don’t think they’re going to live through tonight, do you?”
He licked his lips, making up his mind. “No.” He brought her the first aid kit and applied a small anaesthetic patch to her shoulder. She let out a blissful little sigh as it discharged.
“You go start the engines,” she said. “I’ll see to this. I’ve never held you back yet.” She started to rummage through the kit box, hunting for a medical nanonic package.
Len went out onto the deck and untied the silicon-fibre cables mooring the Coogan , slinging the ends over the side. They were expensive, and hard to come by, but it would take another quarter of an hour if he went stumbling round the banks coiling them all up properly.
The furnace was quite cool, but the electron-matrix crystals had enough power to take Coogan an easy seventy kilometres downstream before they were drained. He started the motors, shoving the trader boat out from under the lacework awning of cut branches veiling it from casual eyes. As if there were any of those left on the river, he mused.
Getting underway was a miraculous morale booster. Alone on the lively Zamjan amid the first tinges of dawn’s grey light he could almost believe they were trading again. Simple times, watching the wheel-house’s basic instrumentation, and enjoying the prospect of milking another batch of dumb dreamers at the next village. He even managed to keep his mind from the macabre corpse in the galley.
They had gone six kilometres almost due west, helped by the broad river’s swift current, when Len saw two dark smudges on the water up ahead. Swithland and Hycel were steaming towards him. A great cleft had been made in the Swithland ’s prow, and the superstructure was leaning over at a hellish angle; but neither seemed to be affecting her speed.
The short-range radio block beside the forward-sweep mass-detector let out a bleep, then the general contact band came on. “Hoi there, Captain Buchannan, this is the Hycel . Reduce speed and prepare to come alongside.”
Len ignored it. He steered a couple of degrees to starboard. The two paddle-boats altered course to match. Blocking him.
“Come on, Buchannan, what do you hope to gain? That pitiful little boat can’t out-race us. One way or the other, you’re coming on board. Now heave to.”
Len thought of the burns the lad had inflicted with his bare hand, the flickering lighting panel. It was all way beyond anything he could hope to understand or resolve. There was no going back to life as it had been, not now. And in the main it had been a good life.
He increased the power to the motors, and held the course steady, aiming for the Hycel ’s growing prow. With a bit of luck Gail would never know.
He was still standing resolutely behind the Coogan ’s wheel when the two boats collided. The Hycel with its greater bulk and stalwart hull rode the impact easily, smashing the flimsy Coogan apart like so much kindling, and sucking the debris below its hull in a riot of bubbles.
Various chunks of wood and plastic bobbed about in the paddle-boat’s wake, spinning in the turbulent water. Thick black oil patches welled up among them. The current slowly pushed the scraps of wreckage downriver, dispersing them over a wide area. Within quarter of an hour there was no evidence left to illustrate the trader boat’s demise.
Swithland and Hycel continued on their way upriver without slowing.
Chapter 18
Joshua Calvert was surprised to find himself enjoying the train journey. He had almost expected to see a nineteenth-century steam engine pumping out clouds of white smoke and clanking pistons spinning iron wheels. Reality was a sleek eight-wheel tractor unit with magnetic axle-motors powered from electron matrices, pulling six coaches.
The Kavanaghs had provided him with a first-class ticket, so he sat in a private compartment with his feet up on the opposite seat, watching the sprawling forests and picturesque hamlets go past. Dahybi Yadev sat next to him, eyelids blinking heavily as a mild stimulant program trickled through his neural nanonics. In the end they had decided that Ashly Hanson should remain behind to operate the Lady Mac ’s MSV as the crew emptied the mayope from her cargo holds. Dahybi had volunteered to take his place quickly enough, and as the nodes had been glitch free on the trip to Norfolk, Joshua had agreed. The rest of the crew had been detailed to maintenance duty. Sarha had sulked at the prospect, she’d been looking forward to an extended leave exploring the gentle planet.
The train compartment’s PA came on to announce they were pulling in to Colsterworth Station. Joshua stretched his limbs, and loaded a formal etiquette program into his neural nanonics. He had found it in Lady Mac ’s memory cores; his father must have visited the planet at some time, though he had never mentioned it. The program might well turn out to be a saviour, country-dwelling Norfolk was supposed to be even more stuffy than swinging cosmopolitan Boston. Pursing his lips at the prospect, Joshua shook Dahybi Yadev’s shoulder. “Come on, cancel the program. We’ve arrived.”
Dahybi’s face lost its narcotic expression, and he squinted out of the window. “This is it?”
“This is it.”
“It looks like a field with a couple of houses in it.”
“Don’t yell that kind of comment about, for God’s sake. Here.” He datavised a copy of the etiquette program over. “Keep that in primary mode. We don’t want to annoy our benefactor.”