‘No kidding,’ Chloe said, remembering Hanna Babbel collapsing with her hair on fire.
They passed a small settlement: huts buried in mounds of red dirt, a prefab industrial building squatting near a great tumble of white blocks, sharp-edged despite millennia of wind-blown dust. Some kind of plastic as hard as diamond, according to McBride. People cut them up using welding gear or lasers, and glued the blocks into storm walls. He pointed to one such wall at the far edge of the next settlement they passed. A snow-white curve that sheltered the huddle of trailers and shacks from winds that mostly blew from the west.
That was where the dust storm was coming from; that was where they were headed. The west. Idunn’s Valley. And that was where the people who had taken Fahad were headed, too. A little convoy about twenty kilometres ahead. McBride said that he could take them down any time he wanted, but couldn’t guarantee the kid’s safety. So his plan was to let them get to the site and find what there was to find, and then he’d pounce.
‘Never mind all that nonsense about the licence expiring a year ago. I found the site; I excavated it. And the bead in question, it came from there, on my watch. Danny Drury had no interest in it until he was given his orders, so fuck him and his crew. They can do the dirty work, and then I’m moving in to take what’s rightfully mine.’
Chloe thought it was typical bluster, but Henry said that it wasn’t a bad plan. He was dressed in a green hunting vest over a black hoodie, grey cargo pants made of some kind of nanotech material with a slippery sheen, and heavy boots. He seemed relaxed, bantering with McBride, generally behaving as if they really were equal partners.
Right now, they were talking about films. Henry liked black-and-white noirs from the 1940s and ’50s. McBride preferred products of the auteur school of the 1970s, and later homages. Both agreed that Altman’s The Long Goodbye had something going for it. ‘But if I had to pick an all-time favourite,’ McBride said, ‘it’s a no-brainer. Revolver. You know it? London gangsters. Hard men making hard choices. Honour and revenge. Danger and redemption. Revolver. It’s a mind-fucker, Henry. When we get back we’ll watch it together. You’ll fucking love it, I guarantee.’
The RV stopped and another man took over from the driver and they went on. It was past midnight, but the sun still sat at the horizon in its permanent sunset. Stretches of concrete alternated with longer stretches of compacted dirt sealed with a polymer derived from Boxbuilder ruins. Chloe lay on the couch and dozed off, woke with a shudder and saw that a range of rounded hills had heaved up from the horizon.
Breakfast was a banana and a pot of strawberry yogurt.
A pass cut through the hills and the road descended in tight switchback loops. A long, long valley stretched below. Sometimes the RV had to pull over on the shoulder, nothing but empty air next to it, to allow articulated lorries and road trains to swing around the tight curves. They crossed a kind of grassland, descended through a strange forest towards a broad river.
Sandwiches and bottles of water were passed around for lunch.
The sky darkened; the sun was a bleary red eye peering above a brown haze that stretched across the horizon. The edge of the dust storm, according to McBride.
There were fields, and then houses and barns and storage sheds at intervals. A busy crossroads with lorries and pickup trucks and 4x4s parked along the streets. Winnetou, the last town on the river, according to McBride. Henry straightened up on the couch, suddenly alert. Chloe felt a quickening in her blood. They were closing in on Site 326.
The RV turned off the road and bucked down a track beside the river, pulled up beside another RV and a jeep with big all-terrain tyres and a rack of floodlights, parked in the lee of a copse of pale, tree-sized things that looked like inverted lightning strikes with feather webs billowing and straining around them. Everyone climbed out into a cold wind choked with scuds of dust. Chloe felt its iron grit between her teeth.
McBride pointed to a wire tether dwindling away into the hazy sky, said there was a balloon up there.
‘For comms. We’re operating a drone, a stealthed quadcopter, keeping watch on Drury. When he sets off downriver, we’re going to follow right behind. Come inside, check it out,’ he said, ushering them into the other RV, where a man nursing a joystick was hunched at a screen that showed a view of wooden docks. Telling McBride that he was just in time, it looked like they were getting ready to go.
The image on the screen zoomed towards two men sitting inside a sleek speedboat; the operator pointed to one of them. ‘That’s Drury, right there.’
McBride peered at the screen. ‘But where’s the kid? Where’s the rest of his crew?’
‘There were three vehicles,’ the operator said. ‘Two pickups towing boats, and a Range Rover. They dropped off the one boat and Drury and the other guy, and left. I guess they took the kid with them.’
‘There’s something wrong here,’ McBride said. ‘The kid is supposed to be going downriver. And what about the pickups and the Range Rover? Not to mention the other boat.’
‘I thought you wanted me to keep watch on Drury,’ the operator said.
‘Fuck. He’s just sitting there.’
‘Maybe he’s waiting for his crew to come back.’
‘Maybe his fucking crew have already slipped past us. Where’s Sammie?’
‘Down by the docks, like you asked.’
‘Call him. Tell him to start looking for Drury’s crew.’
While the operator used his phone, Henry said, ‘If you know where they’re going, why don’t we get ahead of them and set up an ambush at their destination?’
‘You’re a soldier, aren’t you?’
‘Once upon a time.’
‘Then you should know, soldier boy, that you shouldn’t make plans until you have all the facts. And the fact is,’ McBride said, ‘that sneaky fucker Drury came out here a couple of weeks ago, after he heard that something potent had been found at my site. He was hoping to find more of the same, but he didn’t, of course. He isn’t as smart as he thinks he is. He left a party behind, and they’ve been working away ever since. So if I did like you said, I’d have to deal with them first, and that would tip him off as to what I was up to.’
‘Tricky,’ Henry said.
‘We’ll follow him and keep close eyes on him. We’ll let him do the work, and when we’re ready—’
McBride smacked his fist into his palm, smiled at Chloe and Henry.
Behind him, the operator said, ‘The speedboat’s leaving.’
‘Keep the drone on it,’ McBride said. ‘The fucker’s up to something.’
The two men bent close to the screen. Henry leaned towards Chloe and said quietly, ‘Stay alert. We might have to make a move of our own.’
Chloe felt her heart beat high and light. ‘Okay.’
‘Are you scared?’
‘Of course I am.’
‘Me too,’ Henry said, although he didn’t look it. He was his usual self, possessed by a confidence that Chloe hoped she could trust.
The drone operator said, ‘They’ll be going past us in a few minutes, boss. What do you want us to do?’
A moment later, before McBride could answer, the screen went black.
46. We’re Here To Help
Mangala | 30 July
Vic had never before seen a Jackaroo avatar in real life. The aliens had made contact because humanity had been about to fail and fall short of their full potential, as so many other intelligent species had failed and fallen, but they did not want to control or direct what people did with their gifts. It was not their thing, they said, to interfere. Kind of like the prime directive in that old TV show. They kept their presence on Earth to a minimum and had no contact at all with the people on the fifteen worlds they had gifted to humanity. They had even written it into the treaty with the UN.