The boy joined me, followed by the rest of the children. From the way they stood I understood that we had not yet found what I had been brought to see.
About two hundred yards farther on, the boy stopped again, and glanced up at me, expectant. I couldn’t tell what I was supposed to be looking at. One of the little girls broke from the group and walked steadily until she was standing about ten yards in front. She pointed ahead, then returned.
None of the other children seemed able or willing to clarify the matter further. I walked forward alone, peering in the direction she’d indicated. At first I could see nothing except the huge trunks of trees, and then my breath caught in my throat and I knew what I had been brought here to see.
It was a gunship, resting on its side between two of the larger trees and looming out of the blue mist as if lit from behind. I walked toward it, mouth open, wondering how the hell the children had brought it there. I didn’t know why, but I was sure they had, just as I now understood it had been the children who had collected all of the other debris.
The few gunships that were employed in The Gap were of a very unusual design. Because of the omnipresent trees, they were built rather like a flying wing tilted on its side. The nearest comparison lean think of is of a giant angelfish; a shallow triangle bulging out to ten feet in width near the front, but narrowing to virtual two-dimensionality at the nose and along the other edges. Observation windows on either side of the cockpit enhanced this impression, looking like a pair of eyes. The windows were there for little more than cosmetic reasons, because flying the gunships through The Gap had been far too difficult for anything other than high-powered warDroids, which didn’t need windows to see out of. It was about ten meters tall and painted a dark olive green, with insignia stamped large and black on both sides.
And it didn’t look damaged at all.
The children stood in ranks behind me. There was no sign of what they were expecting me to do, so I just did what occurred to me. I climbed the ladder bolted onto the lower wing of the gunship and tugged at the entrance hatch at the top. It opened silently.
I looked down, hoping for some reassurance, but the children had disappeared.
I felt bereft, as if abandoned by everyone I knew, but this must be why they had summoned me. They would only have left because their job was done. I knew next to nothing about gunships, having only set foot in one once to haul out a drunken officer whose so-called expertise was required. He’d tried to bribe me by saying he could get me sideslipped out of The Gap. I threw him out of the ship.
I pulled the hatch wide and climbed inside. The door opened onto a narrow corridor which ran the walk-able length of the craft. To my right it gave almost immediately onto a rounded area slightly smaller than eight feet square. The interior walls were of heavily riveted metal, and stepping into the control area felt like climbing into a kettle which had been left on a hillside for a long time.
The glass in one of the observation windows at the front was broken, but aside from that the bridge seemed miraculously unharmed. Perhaps the gunship had never seen combat, or at least not been shot down. At the front of the open area was an array of computer equipment and monitors, sparsely covered with leaves. Before doing anything else I carefully picked the leaves up and dropped them back out the window. They hadn’t looked as if they were going to do anything, but you can never tell. They’re unpredictable bastards, leaves. The bulk of the floor space was taken up by two rows of three seats, with a little more perching space arranged around the sides. The back wall of the cabin was covered with maps and order sheets—we had to rely upon old-fashioned paper a great deal in The Gap, because computer results were unreliable. The computers that ran the gunships had to be furnished with absolutely enormous power, most of which was burnt up in error checking.
I felt almost nostalgic. Every piece of paper tacked there had the war’s logo printed in the top right corner. It had been a long time since I’d seen that little design. It brought back so many botched orders and flawed commands, each rewritten by the war’s Marketing Department so many times that by the end they didn’t really mean anything. What fun the Generals must have had, sitting back in the real world and directing frightened grunts at one remove. It had been the first chance they’d had in quite a while. Once people had started suing each other for bodily harm and property damage during armed conflict, governments had avoided wars wherever possible. They were just too damned expensive, degenerating into a thousand pitched battles in courtrooms. Often soldiers couldn’t turn up for important offensives because they were giving evidence in court or consulting with their press agents. The whole thing just became unmanageable.
Not so the war in The Gap. The villagers weren’t interested in litigation; they were interested in annihilating the race which had invaded their territory. It was a war out of the old school, and the Generals didn’t even have to provide body bags, because when soldiers died their bodies just disappeared. I lost so many friends, and after they died I had about two minutes to remember them before they vanished, absorbed into the fabric of The Gap.
Eventually, I went and sat at the pilot’s seat. Okay, so I’d found an old gunship. What now?
The children had brought me here for a purpose, but I couldn’t imagine what it might be. I couldn’t fly this thing, didn’t even know where to start. The control panel looked as if it had been stripped at the end of the war. This machine was dead. The most use it would be to me was somewhere to cower when I ran out of Rapt.
Running my eyes over the grimy controls, I noticed an area where something had clearly been taken. A panel marked “IQ” lay open, revealing a small space inside. In the middle was an indentation, about four centimeters by two, with rows of tiny contacts along the edges. They still seemed to be intact, for what difference that made.
A breeze blew in through the window then, and I glanced outside. The mist was still glowering around the trees, but all was quiet. This was the longest period of relative calm I’d ever experienced in The Gap. Maybe things were different now, or perhaps the Rapt was still working. It didn’t feel like it. I felt tired and very nauseous—the familiar Rapt comedown. It was probably time to shoot up again, before anything happened, but I couldn’t face it just yet. There’s such a thing as too much fun. I lit a cigarette instead, thinking that actually there was nothing in the world I wanted so much as a cup of coffee.
I was trying to avoid thinking about Suej, and Nearly, and Vinaldi, and the spares, to find something to occupy my brain while I waited for my subconscious to come up with some probably unworkable plan. Perhaps that’s why it fastened so securely on the idea of coffee, on the notion that if I could just have a cup, my mind would clear and I’d be able to think of something.
Coffee. Just give me a cup of coffee! I could smell it, taste the welcome bitterness at the back of my tongue.
Coffee, I thought. Coffee. Then—
Ratchet.
In the pocket of my jacket was an object I’d trekked about for the last few days without remembering it, which was something to do with a computer, but wasn’t RAM. I pulled it out.
As I ran my fingers over it I realized that the chip Ratchet had slipped into my bag sometime during the last minutes at the Farm was about the right size to fit in the slot in the “IQ” panel. Maybe the number “128” printed on it was a code designation, or even a serial number, rather than a unit of measurement. And perhaps the “IQ” referred to intelligence, or the central processing unit.
I put the chip on the desk and frowned at it for a while. Then I reached forward and gently slotted it into the socket, with the number facing up. It fitted perfectly.