It would take days for her to shake the hideous memory of the avatar’s corpse from her restless dreams.
The Piri hove closer, changing from a dull silhouette barely visible against the stars to a grey hull comprised of three joined-up sections. From a distance it resembled a fat metallic insect. From the ship’s underbelly, a forest of grapples extended, seeking her out.
Dakota fell into her ship’s machine embrace, like a swaddled child falling into the arms of its mother. At that moment she became aware of the Shoal’s gift still clutched, by some miracle, in one black-slicked hand.
Five
Freehold Democratic State
Redstone Colony, 82 Eridani
Lucas Corso blinked, trying to stay alert, and focused again on the bleak landscape beyond the windscreen. He was getting tired after the long drive, the snowy vastness merging into an unending pale void as he aimed the tractor transport at a point midway between two distant volcanic peaks from which thin trails of smoke dribbled.
Fire Lake was visible to the east, spreading beyond the horizon, its icy foam-topped water crashing against a desolate shore. Canopy trees towered in the near distance, like black umbrellas sprouting from the corpses of buried giants. The largest and oldest of them easily reached fifty or sixty metres into the air. One-wings circled around the high, veined shrouds of the trees, their organic photovoltaic upper-wing surfaces sparkling as they circled in the fading light.
Corso checked the co-ordinates they’d been given: almost there now.
Sal was asleep beside him in the passenger seat, arms folded over his chest, head back, occasionally blinking awake and peering around for a few moments as they trundled across the frozen landscape. He’d long since given up arguing with Corso, of trying to prevent him -as Sal put it-from committing suicide.
‘Nothing you do will bring Cara back or get your father out of jail,’ Sal had repeated for the hundredth time. ‘Not even murdering Bull Northcutt. God knows I’d like to see the psychotic son of a bitch dead and skewered, but the fact is, if either one of you is going to wind up in a coffin, it’s probably not going to be him.’
Corso had slammed the wheel with the heel of his hand, angry at Sal, but also with himself for letting Bull manipulate him so transparently. Bull had murdered his fiancйe, knowing Lucas would inevitably call him out on a challenge. Lucas Corso, the son of a liberal Senator who’d renounced the whole system of challenges, before expediency and war had forced the Senate to outlaw them anyway.
Cara had disappeared on her way back from the medical facility in a small mining community south of Fontaine, where she’d been working on loan. A few weeks later, her remains had been found in the burned-out wreck of a short-haul landhopper on the road to Carndyne Valley. Her teeth had been pulled out and her fingers cut off-the trademark of Senator Gregor Arbenz’s death squads. Her face had been so badly mutilated they’d had to identify her from DNA records.
It was all Corso had been able to think of for a month now, that same floating image imposed between his eyes and the rest of the world: his Cara, not smiling but mutilated, torn, destroyed.
He couldn’t prove that Bull Northcutt had done it, but Bull liked to boast. And Senator Northcutt’s son was widely known to be in charge of one of the death squads.
Then one day a few weeks before, Corso had been on his way back from the research library in Carndyne Valley’s East Tent and come across Bull Northcutt lounging outside the hydro farm with several other off-duty police, standing around a couple of tractor vans, getting drunk.
Corso kept walking, and tried to ignore the leering, grinning faces that turned to follow his progress. There was no one else around. They were here solely because they knew he came this way, every day. They fell silent, while watching him pass.
‘By the time it was my turn to stick my dick in her,’ Corso heard Bull say loud and clear, ‘she was pretty good and loose. I don’t think she’d ever been fucked properly in her life. What do you think, Corso?’
Corso had stopped, fists clenching at his sides, any last remaining scrap of doubt concerning the identity of Cara’s murderer suddenly vanished. That was when he had challenged Bull. They could have easily arrested him there and then: since the Freehold had found a real enemy to fight in the Uchidans, the challenges had been outlawed. Too many soldiers were dying in duels when they were needed on the front.
But Bull had just kept grinning, and accepted.
Sal snapped awake as the tractor rolled down and then back up the banks of a stream, before Corso finally hit the brakes.
‘Oh shit, I’m still here,’ Sal yawned, blinking sleepily and staring around. ‘Guess that means you’re still going to get yourself killed, huh?’
Corso shot him a sharp glance, and Sal shrugged, turning to look out at the lakeshore, falling silent again.
Senator Northcutt, Bull’s father, was in charge of the Senate investigation against Lucas’s father, Senator Corso. Murdering Cara was Senator Northcutt’s way of sending a violent message, not just to Lucas but also to his old man. Witnesses had already been bribed or coerced into claiming Senator Corso had organized secret meetings with the Uchidans; that he’d supplied them with vital military information and worked against the Freehold in order to destroy it; that he’d kidnapped Freehold children, handing them over to the Uchidans for mind-control experiments.
Men and women, friends and confidants, all frightened, all bruised and bloodied from long, violent hours in Kieran Mansell’s police cells. All had testified against Senator Corso and his supporters, before the assembled Senate.
Lies, all lies.
A brief squall of icy rain spattered across the windscreen. Corso peered into the distance, and saw a couple of black dots standing around another tractor, a couple of flares driven into the hard icy soil, marking the site of the challenge by the shores of the lake.
‘We’re here,’ Corso muttered, surprised at how calm he sounded.
Corso pulled on his winter gear before following Sal from the cabin, dropping several metres down the ladder to snow churned up by the tractor’s tracks. He checked the seal around his breather mask one last time, then looked around. They stood on loose shale and rock dotted with tiny green and blue growths that pushed through the permafrost. The cold burned his skin wherever it was exposed, 82 Eridani’s orange-red orb dropping towards the horizon as evening descended on Redstone.
Corso rubbed at the red fuzz of his beard where it was uncovered by his breather mask. Its protection was essential because the partial pressure of the nitrogen in the air was enough to cause a potentially fatal case of the bends after just a few moments of unaided respiration. It was possible to talk through the mask, which had built-in electronics that processed the voice, but what emerged sounded flat and metallic, like a robot speaking.