"How long will we be on this barge?" I asked Rhodane.
"An hour and a half."
I moved back and plumped myself down with my back resting against the deck cabin. "Wake me up when we arrive. It's been a rather busy day for me and I need my rest."
I closed my eyes, expecting to find sleep a problem—ever since being infected by the Spatterjay virus I had never needed more than a few hours a night, and sometimes neglected even those. While I waited hopefully for sleep, it crept up behind me with a heavy club. The next thing I knew Rhodane was shaking me by the shoulder, and I opened my eyes to a Brumallian morning.
The spaceship crewmen made a considerable racket as they disembarked. I blinked, feeling listless and heavy and wanting to close my eyes again. I gazed at the back of my hand and flexed it. A scab lifted to expose scar tissue, pink and new, again something not produced by my body in a very long time. Heaving myself upright, I looked around.
Our barge was now moored by one bank of a watercourse perhaps a mile across. To my left it stretched to the misty horizon—a smooth gilded snake. To my right it seemed some structure had been built across it—docks or a pier—but on closer inspection I realised I was gazing upon the front end of an immense barge nearly a mile wide. Upon the deck of this rested one of the spacecraft I had seen below. It looked less like a living thing now., its surface a bland grey with many additional protuberances and steely triangular section bands caging its surface. Huge pylons reared around it, conveying immense pipes and elevators to various openings in its hull, and probably also preventing the vessel from rolling away.
We followed the crew ashore, then along a path running between the canal bank and a wide concrete road along which presently cruised a low heavy truck consisting of three carriages—probably carrying further supplies for the vessel. Beyond the road rose mountain slopes cloaked with forest cut through by many churned mud tracks, on one of which had been parked a large treaded vehicle. Was it pure luck or providence that made me upgrade the magnification of my eyes to take a closer look at this machine? In doing so I identified wide pincer jaws, a saw tongue and logs stacked behind. Then I spotted something sprawled in the mire before it: a Brumallian, the mud all around him bloody, half his head missing. Just back from him, by the machine itself, something glinted in the hands of a crouching figure.
Turning I shouted, "Get to cover!"
Rhodane looked at me blankly, and I then realised I had used my own language. As I stepped forward to push her down, a bullet smacked me hard in the back. I staggered forward, something spraying out ahead of me…pieces of me. Rhodane jerked back and made a horrible grunting sound, then dropped and rolled neatly over the bank into the water. As I came upright another shot cracked viciously past. It is not a sound you forget and one I had heard many times before. Squatting, turning. A spray of automatic fire lifted two crew off their feet, chunks of their bodies flying away like confetti dropped before a fan. I forgot about mortality, vulnerability, and launched myself across the road. Hitting a hedge of green twigs and spade leaves, I pushed through to land between clumps of multiple trunks supporting a canopy like the scaled underside of a lizard. Shortly afterwards two figures crashed through to either side of me: Flog and Slog. They scanned around, peering down the sights of their heavy rifles—stooped low, bestial..
"This way," I signed, and ran diagonally upslope to the left, where lay the track leading up to that tree-felling machine.
We reached the track, but did not step onto it, since that would expose us out in the open.
"What have you seen?" asked Slog.
I signed, "One figure by a machine up at the top of this track." Delving into the front pocket of my dungarees I took out the gift Duras had given me, and loaded it. Slog grunted noncommittally, then set out upslope, Flog behind him. At no point did they take their eyes from the sights of their rifles—the weapons seemed sealed in place and they perfectly comfortable with them. I coughed, breathing raw, spat blood and mucus, then looked down at the fist-sized hole below my collar bone. Blood seeped, and raw flesh layered with purplish woody bands lay exposed. It felt numb, as such wounds had felt for me for a long time, but I knew this one would not heal in just a matter of hours, and that at some point it would begin to hurt like hell. I followed them.
The two quofarl obviously possessed some idea of the machine's location since, as we drew close, they began advancing one at a time, covering each other with professional care. Then there, glimpsed between the tree clumps, loomed open metallic jaws and that saw tongue. A whistling crackling caused me to fling myself to the ground. Pieces of brown and yellow bark rained down. I looked around for my companions but could see no sign of them, so crawled on towards the machine. A low drumming thump sounded. A tree clump exploded and a human figure spun away, loose-limbed and broken. A human figure—but not quofarl-shaped.
Reaching the forest edge, I dropped down onto the track and ran towards the logging machine, automatic held out in front of me. A figure darted out and, identifying it as one of the attackers, I tracked it across, firing all the time. Returning fire spewed up gravel towards me, then Slog appeared and hit the figure from one side. The attacker shrieked, slammed into the logging machine's cowling, and bounced away. Then, on all fours, Slog disappeared into the trees again. Running up, I glimpsed the man on the ground. He wore an insulated suit—Sudorian—one of his arms was missing and his throat was torn out down to the spine. More firing from all around. Back in the trees I crouched behind a woody clump.
Brumallian speech, mandibles only, a woodpecker clattering: "One left—do we want him alive?"
The reply, "Yeah."
That familiar sickening squirming began inside me, and looking down at my wound revealed the sensation to be utterly accurate, for my flesh was shifting and shuddering. More firing from an automatic weapon, followed by a thoroughly human bellow. I stood and headed towards the source of the sound, soon finding Flog suspending a Sudorian up off the ground by his ankle, and Slog standing to one side picking gobbets of flesh from his mandibles.
"How did we lose against these?" wondered Flog.
"They got lucky," Slog replied.
I found myself down on my knees, everything seeming to grow dark around me. Next I was hanging over Slog's shoulder, in such pain I felt sure I was dying. Then the blackness became entire.
Orduval—in the Desert
The corpse lay spread-eagled on the rock, anchor bolts driven through between the bones of the forearms and of the lower legs. It had been stripped naked, and had not decayed, but dried out—skin and flesh turned hard and woody, eyes sunk away. Orduval rapped a knuckle against the victim's chest and was rewarded with a hollow thunk.
A piece of history, he thought.
Here lay one of those who had dragged them into the War against the Brumallians and benefited as a result rather too much…initially. He, yes a he, had been bolted here to the stone probably seventy or eighty years before Orduval was born, and just after the economic collapse resulting from the first two decades of the War. He wondered who this person had been, an industrialist or one of the politicians in the pay of the industrialists? The collapse, he recollected, resulted in a putsch—the old oligarchy being ousted and replaced by people's representatives from the various Sudorian states, from Fleet and from the then-nascent Orbital Combine. Only the threat from Brumal had prevented a total collapse of the civil system too. Orduval now knew a great deal about all this, though some years back had not known nearly so much. But then, since being in the desert he had needed to learn how things were before the War, right from the beginning, so he could translate it in full, make it contemporary, enable people to understand. He remembered a conversation with Tigger, back then.