‘But they’re your friends. They’re willing to stay at your side. They have a reason that my men don’t.’
‘Trinica, look at my hand,’ he said, holding it up.
‘I’ve seen it.’
‘Look again!’ he snapped. face="Times New Roman"›She glared at him sharply, then did as he asked. She couldn’t do it for long.
‘There’s no other way,’ he said slowly. ‘If you say no, I’m gonna die. It’s that simple.’
She didn’t say anything. Her jaw was clenched, the muscles of her neck tight.
‘It’s only a few aircraft,’ he said, softening his tone. ‘Your men won’t even have to break a sweat. Shoot ’em down. Drive ’em off. Whatever. We’ll be doing the dirty work on the ground.’
‘Don’t ask me to do this, Darian,’ she said. ‘Don’t make me choose between my crew and you.’
He closed his hand. ‘I don’t want to die, Trinica,’ he said. ‘The question is, do you want me to?’
Thirty-One
The fouled air stirred and turned in slow coils. Overhead was a dirty yellow murk, thickening as it descended until it lay leaden on the ground in a soupy mist. The earth was poisoned and dead. Sulphurous vents were open wounds, seeping fumes; geysers and craters were smoking pustules. There were sad marshes, their waters streaked with metallic greens and greys. The silence was huge, broken only by dull and distant booming sounds.
The Choke Bowl.
Frey lay on the lip of a desolate ridge, squinting through the spyglass. It was hard to see through his goggles, but taking them off would only make his eyes itch and tear. His breather mask was sweaty and uncomfortable, rubbing at the bridge of his nose and rasping against the stubble on his chin. Everything reeked of rotten eggs.
‘They couldn’t have built it somewhere a bit less horrible, then?’ he asked.
Ehri was lying next to him on the ridge. ‘Sulphurous lowlands. Only place for mining allium. Rare and expensive. They use it for jewellery.’ The sneer in her voice was detectable even through her mask.
Beyond her was Fal, and on Frey’s other side was Silo. The Rattletrap that had brought them here was parked downslope. A klom away, on a flat and desolate plain, was Gagriisk.
The compound encompassed dozens of buildings and a small quarry, surrounded by a high wall dotted with guard-posts. It was roughly divided into three sections. The first looked like administrative buildings and guards’ quarters and so on. The second was the pens, a compound within tehe compound. There he could see rows of long buildings: sleeping quarters for the slaves. The third section was the quarry, which was almost invisible at this distance, a kidney-shaped smear that took up three-quarters of the space inside the wall. Standing amidst the buildings was a tall metal tower, a gas derrick, surrounded at its base by a complex apparatus of pipes and enormous tanks.
A frigate hovered at anchor on the far side of the compound, a hulking shadow at the limit of his vision. There was a landing pad outside the walls with a cargo freighter sitting there, but no sign of the fighters Ashua had mentioned. Presumably they were stashed in the belly of the frigate, ready to deploy.
It was hard to make out detail, even with a spyglass. The drifting yellow vapours turned everything to a haze. But as he scanned the compound there was something that caught his eye and made him frown. He passed to the spyglass to Silo.
‘Left side, just inside the wall,’ he said. ‘What d’you reckon?’
Silo took a look. ‘Anti-aircraft gun,’ he said at length.
‘That’s what I thought.’ Frey swore under his breath. ‘What the spit do they need an anti-aircraft gun for? Apart from, y’know, shooting down aircraft.’
‘This place ain’t just a work camp,’ said Ehri. ‘It’s a prison. Always the chance someone’ll try ’n’ rescue whoever.’
‘I thought the Sammies just executed anyone they didn’t like.’
Fal raised his head. ‘There’s always exceptions, for one reason or another. People they don’t want to be found, people too valuable to kill, people they just wanna punish slowly, interrogate, torture. They get sent here.’
‘Course, they don’t send ’em out to work down in the quarry with the Murthian slaves,’ said Ehri, bitterly. ‘That’d be too shameful, even for a criminal.’
Frey still couldn’t get used to the way that Ehri and Fal spoke Vardic with the same Draki accent as Silo did. He checked his pocket watch.
‘What time do you have, Silo?’
Silo checked his own pocket watch and called the time, which matched with Frey’s exactly. It was late afternoon, although it was difficult to tell in the unsettling gloom of the Choke Bowl. The sun was a dim disc, and most of its scorching heat had been swallowed, leaving the air tepid and cloying.
A series of low booms sounded in the fog.
‘What is that?’ he asked.
Fal said a word he didn’t recognise. ‘They live in the marshes,’ Ehri added.
‘There’s something out there that can breathe this shit?’ Frey asked in amazement.
Ehri shrugged. ‘They don’t give the slaves masks. Too expensive to keep replacin’ the filters.’
‘And what happens?’
‘They last a year. Fifteen months at most, before they’re too broken down to work. Then they get shot.’
Her tone was matter-of-fact, but Frey could hear the thrumming anger underneath. She took the spyglass from Silo and trained it on the camp.
‘The pens,’ she said. ‘The gates gonna be guarded, but if we can get through them, we can let out the slaves. That’s the priority.’
‘That’s your priority,’ Frey said.
‘We let the prisoners out, they overrun the camp,’ Fal reasoned. ‘Gotta be three times as many slaves as guards.’
‘And while you’re doing that, we’ll be looking for Ugrik.’
‘While we’re drawin’ their fire, you mean,’ said Ehri.
Frey was unmoved. ‘We’ve both got our reasons for doing this.’
Ehri snorted and looked off into the distance. ‘Your woman better show up,’ she said.
‘She’ll be here.’
‘On time?’ Fal asked. ‘They’ll hear us approach. If she’s not on time…’
‘She’ll be here,’ said Frey irritably. He was annoyed at the implied doubt, doubly so because it touched his own. He wasn’t at all sure of her.
In the water garden in Shasiith, she told him she’d be there. But the way she said it, it felt like a goodbye. Things had been going so well between them – barring his minor lapse of judgement in her cabin on the Delirium Trigge r – but it occurred to him now that he was placing an awful lot of trust in her. It had only been a few months since she’d been merrily betraying him left, right and centre. Wasn’t it naive to expect her to change now? The same kind of naivety he scoffed at when pretty girls gave themselves up in the hope that they could change him?
No. He’d seen it in her eyes, when he showed her the black spot o black sn his palm. She was afraid for him. She wouldn’t let him die.
He was certain.
Kind of.
He brought out the compass from his pocket. Over the last few months it had become a habit to stare at it while he was blissed out on Shine. It was a connection to her, always pointing to where she was. It made him feel closer to her, knowing she was wearing the ring he gave her.
It was pointing north, which told him nothing. He had no idea how far away she was. Shasiith was north: she might never have left. Or she might have left, and she might never have found the coordinates he’d left at the rendezvous, even though he’d daubed the chest in ghostlight paint, which was invisible to the naked eye but showed up brightly through polarised goggles.
He’d been forced to do things in an infuriatingly roundabout way. Ehri wouldn’t give up the coordinates of Gagriisk until she had the medical supplies, but without them he couldn’t tell Trinica where to go. Trinica couldn’t come with him to Ehri’s camp because the Delirium Trigger was too big to conceal anywhere nearby. And there was no time to go back to Shasiith. So he’d been forced to give Trinica a rendezvous point just north of the Choke Bowl, where she could pick up the exact location of Gagriisk.