"I want you to walk down to the other end of the street," he told Gabriel.
She didn't reply, standing with shoulders drooping, arms dangling at her side. Her left hand looked appalling, tumescent and inflamed. Mud had dried and cracked on it, as though she was shedding a hardened outer skin, allowing new, blue-tender flesh to break through. He refused the impulse to check his own.
"Listen, Gabriel. You must walk down the street. And when the hovercraft comes, you fall down. OK? That's all. Can you manage that for me?"
A confused frown puckered her forehead. "Walk?"
"Yes." Greg pressed his hand on her back, starting her off. "And when the light shines, you go for cover."
Gabriel's feet had found a shuffling rhythm. "Fall down?"
"That's right."
"Orders," she mumbled vaguely. "I won't let you down, Greg. I won't."
Greg left her doing her apathetic sleep walk, feeling a prize turd for using her as bait; and headed back up the street towards the wide beam of light which kept shooting out, documenting the hovercraft's progress. Algae foamed around his knees. Slithery mud tried to pull his feet from under him. Sometimes he thought he could feel the hardness of the tarmac.
The light shone out of the gap in front of him. Greg stood still, listening to the drone of the propeller growing louder, echoing back and forth across the street. The light was extinguished. A faint trace of it rippled along the roof of the house.
Toby's hovercraft drew level with him. Light slammed out of the gap, transfixing him like a rabbit in a headlamp.
A scream of ecstatic triumph burst from Toby's mind. Greg's vision was wiped out in a sparkling pink mist as his retinas were overwhelmed by a targeting laser. He lurched forwards. The warbling of electromagnetic rifle fire punctured the night. Bullets stitched a line of small craters in the algae behind him. The propeller drone rose to a crescendo as the pilot fought to turn the hovercraft.
Greg was dumped into the darkness again. The laser impact abated, and he saw a smattering of stars through the shredded gauze of cirrus clouds. He could hear the ripping sounds of the hovercraft riding roughshod over fences.
Greg felt his nerves cooling, heartbeat slowing, tension abating. Going with the flow.
He sensed the hovercraft racing down the gardens, heading back the way it'd come.
A final visual check on Gabriel showed him a forlorn figure bumbling through the mire. His espersense showed her mind was operating with cyborg simplicity, completely absorbed by the mechanics of walking.
He lowered himself into the algae.
The hovercraft had reached the end of the gardens now, rounding the last house in the row. Greg caught a glimpse of its insect-eye array of lights sliding into view as he dropped below the surface.
Espersense revealed all he needed, real and hypersense universes entwining smoothly. Toby leaning against the prow, fists clenched, eyes bugging, slipstream plucking at hint. The merciless lights finding Gabriel. Her legs buckling, sending her toppling forwards. Toby's howl of revenge consummation.
Greg could hear a throbbing sound transmitted through the filthy water, getting louder.
Toby's mind was a lurid spew-point of animus thoughts zooming towards him.
Greg pressed his feet down hard as the hovercraft rumbled directly overhead. He broke surface, bringing a cloying cone of algae with him. A blast of desert-air wind escaping from beneath the hovercraft skirt ablated the mucus from his face. He kept rising like a shabby tenth-rate Neptune, galvanised spear in his hand, already drawn back for the throw. Aiming. The pole steady. And fling.
It shot through the wide mesh of the protective carbon fibre grille at the rear of the hovercraft, hitting the spinning propeller full on. The trajectory bent then as the tip was chopped by the blade's leading edge, tugging it down and round. That, by itself, wasn't disastrous, the blade edge was designed to handle bird impacts. But the length of the pole meant it was deflected right into the mounting. The propeller's axle-bearing sheared off instantly under the terrible impact stress. And a two-metre-diameter five-hundred-R.P.M. buzz-saw exploded out of the grille to digest the rear of the pneumatic hovercraft.
There was a thunderclap blow-out, and the prow of the hovercraft bucked up into the air, losing rigidity, light beams strafing the sky. Three bodies and pieces of loose equipment were catapulted in a short arc. A tremendous spume of water jetted up as the propeller hit the algae, chewing through. One of the bodies fell into its base. The shredded hovercraft hull flopped back down. The lights went out, and the spume died.
It began to rain gobs of mud and algae, pattering down over a wide area.
One mind had survived, the body which housed it writhing feebly. Another body was facedown in the water, Toby. Of the third there was no sign.
Greg waded forward. It was easy going. A vast patch of the street had been stripped of its covering of algae.
Gabriel was floating on her back, half submerged. Greg got his hand under her head and lifted her. She coughed weakly. "I did it, didn't I, Greg? Just like you wanted."
"Sure did, and no messing."
"Did you get 'em?"
"Yeah, they aren't going to hazard anyone again."
Four light beams pinioned him. Kendric's hovercraft was turning down into the street. He froze into place. Too exhausted to run. Besides, he could never have left Gabriel.
The hovercraft approached at a cautious unhurried pace. Greg shielded his eyes against the glare. Kendric was standing in the prow, in front of the Perspex windscreen. The epitome of the great white hunter, electromagnetic rifle cradled in a light grip, one foot on the gunwale.
Greg saw it coming, reading it straight from Gabriel's mind. Genuine telepathy. His mouth gaped, and he pointed high into the western sky.
Kendric's mind registered sublime contempt that Greg would try such a pathetic stunt. Then vacillation set in, precisely because it was so unlikely. He looked round to follow the direction of Greg's accusing finger, just in time to see a frigid saffron dawn expand across the sky above Wisbech.
The light source was directly above them, a cold dazzling star which crawled through the genuine constellations at an infinitesimal pace. Its radiance was throwing shadows as sharp-edged as daylight. Greg could see wisps of fluffy cloud gusting high overhead, they must've been kilometres away.
Gabriel began to laugh.
The false star was as intense as noonday sunlight, then brighter. It began to elongate. Brick walls glared scarlet. Dew-mottled algae sparkled like a diamanté ice floe.
Intuition whispered into Greg's brain. He knew. The Merlin. Then his far-flung espersense delivered the final shock, a single band of incendiary thought originating from the spaceprobe's bioware nodes: Philip Evans's unholy vengeance glee as he hurtled inexorably towards Leopold Armstrong.
The Merlin descended at orbital velocity, boring a vacuum-tunnel through the lower atmosphere. A purple-white plasma comet with a rigid incandescent tail of superionised air, stabbing down like some monstrously overpowered strategic defence laser.
Greg flung his arms desperately over his face, trying to save his eyes. There was carmine blood-light, then sable blackness.
The blast wave was a white-noise tsunami. It plucked Greg out of the mire and sent him spinning through space. He could see the street's houses disintegrating, slates taking flight, bricks avalanching. The air had become a blizzard of giant splinters and powdery fragments.
He saw the tower. Rather, where the tower had been: a thick column of fusion-hot air fountaining up into the darkening sky. Its flickering vermilion fluorescence was sheathed by ragged braids of ebony soot-clouds. Garish blue-green static webs discharged around its mushrooming crown.
For a liquid, the water was incredibly hard.