The web of brown energy outside the window meant visible light might be untrustworthy, so I concentrated on the monitor tracking the Positionex signal, drumming my fingers on the screen. The indicator light was close now, very close. Ratchet slowed the ship to little more than five miles an hour, and I watched the crosshairs on the monitor bisect the signal.
“We’ve gone past it,” Ratchet said.
“We can’t have.”
“Look at the screen.”
He was right. We were now on the other side of the indicator light. “How can we have missed it? Turn around—look again.”
Ratchet negotiated the ship in an arc and hovered back over the point indicated by the lock. I watched the external monitors, looking for, well, anything at all. The brown light had dissipated enough for me to make out the trunks of the trees around us, but I still couldn’t see Ghuaji. The ship slowed still further, to walking pace, and then stopped.
“We’re directly over it now,” Ratchet said.
There was nothing there, but I’ve seen all those movies and you’re not catching me like that. “Look up,” I said. “Maybe he’s up a tree.”
“I’ve done that already,” Ratchet said, relaying a feed from a camera on top of the ship to one of the screens. The trunk of a tree, like any other, disappearing up into the semidarkness. “There’s no one here even on infrared.”
“Drop down a little.”
The ship descended until the lower fin was resting gently on the ground. “Oh, fuck,” I said then, catching something out of the corner of my eye. “What’s that?”
The thing I thought I’d seen became clearer, as a sheet of the brown light folded away.
Ghuaji’s jacket, hanging over a bush.
I swore long and hard. Either Yhandim had figured out that Vinaldi and I had put a tracer on Ghuaji, or the coat had just been left behind by accident. Thinking back, I couldn’t remember whether Ghuaji had been wearing the jacket when I was in the village with Vinaldi.
It didn’t really matter. It was all over, unless Ratchet had any ideas. I asked him, not really hoping for an answer. It was still disappointing to find he didn’t have one.
“The position remains the same,” he said, apologetically. “Except that we have possibly now gone four miles in an incorrect direction. Sorry.”
I kicked out at the seat next to me. I wasn’t going to find them, and they were all going to die. Nearly would probably be mistreated a little first, but then she would die, assuming she wasn’t dead already. The spares, including Suej, would be taken to whatever fate awaited them. Even Vinaldi, who I now realized I would, on the whole, prefer not to lose as an acquaintance, would be killed. I was stuck in the depths of a forest which stretched limitlessly all around, sometimes in twilight, sometimes in darkness, but always unknowable and unsafe—and I had no way whatsoever of getting out I leaned forward with my head in my hands, eyes looking down at the controls but seeing nothing.
Perhaps, I thought, it was time for some more Rapt after all. Or maybe I should keep it as a little treat for when I’d been here for a hundred years.
“Jack,” Ratchet said quietly. “You may want to look out the window.”
Something in the tone of the computer’s voice made me sit up. The light was blue again outside, and now it wasn’t just trees which stood silently all around us.
The children were back.
They had returned, but this time there was no comfort in their presence. Their eyes emanated coldness, anger—though I didn’t feel either was directed at me. They surrounded the gunship in a circle which stretched in all directions, I couldn’t pick out the boy I’d seen first, but perhaps he was somewhere in the crowd. They were all there, gray-faced and staring up at me, their mouths open as if they were screaming.
“Are they Gap children?” Ratchet asked, even more quietly. I don’t suppose that computers get frightened, but even he sounded pretty spooked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s something odd about them. They brought me to this ship. They led me there and left.”
“What are they doing now?”
The children farthest away from the ship began to move, turning so they were facing in the opposite direction. All their mouths shut at once, and then they started walking away. As they got farther from the ship, others came from behind us to join them. They formed into ranks five across, a column which marched between the trees and into the twilight.
“Follow them,” I said.
Ratchet turned the ship and hovered back up to ten feet in the air. The children didn’t seem put out that we were tracking them. Far from it. Some of them started running, slowly at first, and then much faster. They weren’t running from us. They were leading us somewhere.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s pick up some speed.”
Ratchet accelerated slowly, and the children ran faster and faster like a pack of wolves finding their rhythm. Ratchet put his foot on the gas again until we were slipping along at a good forty miles an hour.
We followed the column of the children as they sprinted through the trees; Ratchet working overtime to avoid the trunks while keeping on the children’s track. At one point we rocketed over something that looked like the shadow of a truck, and I wondered if it was the ghost of the one Vinaldi and I had entered The Gap in. This impression was gradually reinforced as we surged farther through the forest, small hints of familiarity pressing themselves upon me through some sense I hadn’t known I possessed.
Then we flew over the village, and I knew for sure that we were going in the right direction. The gray shadows were streaming through the huts and out the other side like a river of smoke crushing all before it. Sometimes they seemed to blend into one being, at others to be a countless multitude; but they kept pounding forward, pulling Ratchet and me in their wake.
“I’m getting some infrared hits in the distance,” Ratchet said eventually, and I knew everything was about to go down.
“Okay,” I said. “Rack’em up.”
“What armament do you have in mind?”
“Everything we’ve got.”
The space between the trees was greater here, five yards apart in places. This freed Ratchet to increase the gunship’s speed still further until everything outside was a blur; but we didn’t overtake the children. However fast we went, they were still in front—until suddenly they weren’t there anymore and the forest all around us was empty.
I shouted at Ratchet to slow down. He did so immediately, our speed dropping so abruptly that I almost ended up molded to the control panel.
“Where’ve they gone? Can you see anything?”
“No. But there’s a small hill ahead. Could be masking them.”
“Go round it as quietly as you can,” I said. I felt sure there were probably some more technical terms I could have used, but I’d been a foot soldier and I didn’t know them. The words “shoot” and “run” had been the limits of my tactical mastery.
The gunship inched onward, and I had a moment to notice that there was none of the dangerous light here and to hope that they had been here all the time. Ratchet brought the ship in close to the bank of trees. The ship vibrated with the effort, and I felt as if I were in the mind of a stalking cat.