‘What the hell?’ he shouted, and that was the cue for the others to come, all at once. Hundreds of beetles crawled, leaped or skittered down his thighs, up and around his erection, beneath his scrotum and between his legs. They were all over his stomach now, inside his navel and crawling under his sweater, digging for his chest and neck.
‘What is this? Jesus, help me! Hannah, what is this?’
Sitting naked, one hand splayed across her lower stomach, Hannah said, ‘You have to wake up, Steven. Wake up!’
‘What?’ He couldn’t hear her. Terror paralysed him as he felt the swarm – not stinging yet, still deploying – crawling over his body.
‘Wake up!’ Hannah insisted.
He screamed, losing himself to panic, swatting at hundreds of mutant spider-beetles, nightmare insects with hairy, spindly legs and coloured constellations dotting their tiny thoraxes. Steven’s mind ran away from him, left him stranded, half-naked with a hard-on in a parking lot, screaming as a regiment of tiny demon sentries explored every inch of his pallid flesh.
His hand was bleeding, as if something had bitten it, puncturing a vein. The blood ran in a stream, not pumping, like it would from an artery, but rather, pouring out, like water through a hose. Then his neck bled, and it was worse. Trying to brush away legions of bugs, Steven swathed himself in blood, spreading it over his body like a balm, but nothing did any good.
The dog, still watching from the far side of the lot, trotted around the car and bit Steven just above his left ankle. The pain was astonishing, a white-hot needle of agony, but it shocked Steven awake. ‘Ah! Jesus Christ, help me!’ he screamed before falling backwards to the pavement.
‘Ah! Jesus Christ, help me!’ Steven screamed, rolling over before slipping back into a stupor.
‘I’m losing him,’ Gilmour muttered. ‘This isn’t good.’ The Morning Star took another wave badly, crashing hard into the trough.
‘Marrin,’ Captain Ford whispered, ‘what in the names of the Northern Gods are you doing up there?’
Gilmour looked up at him. ‘Go; it’s all right. There’s nothing you can do for him. Send Garec down, or Kellin or Brexan – I need some water and some bedding, anything to make him more comfortable. But you see to the ship.’
‘The spell you mentioned, the one keeping us…’
‘Out of their attention?’
‘Yes, that one.’ He made certain to step on the spider-beetle at least once more. ‘Will it keep going? Or did our plans just go exceedingly wrong?’
‘We should be fine,’ Gilmour said. He didn’t want to sound insecure, not this close to Pellia. Get them going, and they’ll go on for ever, like the Twinmoon. He cradled Steven’s head in his lap. ‘It’ll be all right, Captain.’
Steven had rolled in the puddle of his own blood, and now looked as though he had been dipped in crimson paint. Captain Ford backed against the bulkhead, sidling towards the stairs through the main hatch. ‘Good luck,’ he said softly, heartfelt.
‘It’ll be all right, Captain,’ the Larion Senator muttered, wiping Steven’s face.
Captain Ford nearly crashed through the handrail as the Morning Star lurched over a wave. As he fought to keep his balance, he shouted, ‘Marrin! Will you rutting well watch where you’re going!’ He reached daylight, and stopped short. Marrin was at the helm, as ordered, but there was something very definitely wrong. Garec, the partisan killer, had an arrow drawn full, aimed right at his first mate.
Garec was shouting, ‘Correct our course, Marrin, now!’
Confused, Captain Ford started to reach for Garec, then he checked their heading. The Morning Star was bearing down on a Malakasian fishing trawler, the biggest one they could see working the shallows. It looked horribly like Marrin meant to ram them.
‘What are you…’ He was stunned. Should he tackle Garec and try to disarm him? Or mount the quarterdeck and slap some sense into his first mate?
Garec shouted again, ‘Correct our heading, Marrin! Do it now!’
Steven was running. It was the day of the half-marathon, his favourite day of the year, and he, Hannah and Mark had joined the four thousand other runners to do the thirteen-mile course from Georgetown, down the canyon, to Idaho Springs. Each summer, he tried to improve on his previous time. Despite the altitude – the Georgetown starting line was almost 9,000 feet above sea level – after a two-mile loop through Georgetown, the rest of the course was little more than eleven miles of downhill running, making this one of the easiest half-marathons on Steven’s dance card. All he did was get to the initial slope, point himself downhill and let go. Gravity did most of the work. The only drawback was the sun. Running east down the canyon, there was nothing between the runners and the morning sun rising over the prairie east of Denver, and it was a merciless running partner. Every year, it seemed, Steven managed to run beside some fool who had forgotten sunglasses, some complainer determined to ruin the race by bitching about it all the way down the hill.
This year, it was his turn.
‘I can’t believe I forgot the goddamned things,’ he muttered, looking down to avoid being blinded. ‘This is no kind of view to have, eleven miles of macadam. Christ.’
He had left Mark back about a mile. His friend was an accomplished swimmer, but he was no competitive runner. He didn’t enjoy long races like Steven did, but came along for the workout, and the view – not the spectacular natural beauty of the canyon; rather, the appreciation of the number of healthy, trim, female backsides that filled the course.
‘There’s never a bad one,’ he always said, ‘it’s a goddamned summer camp for great tail. Follow one for a while, get bored with it and pick another. Sometimes she’s up ahead a bit; other times, I slow down and let her pass. It’s worth all the training, all those miles and all that pain just to be able to jog along behind this crop of perfectly formed women. There’s not an excess ounce of fat for thirteen miles.’
‘What about your own?’ Steven asked. ‘Do you imagine any of those women – or men, for that matter – are out there jogging along behind you, taking in your caboose? How does that make you feel, Mr Politically Incorrect?’
‘Goddamned great!’ Mark didn’t hesitate. ‘Let ‘em look – if they enjoy the view, hey, it’s a party! If we all find someone to follow out there, it’ll be a raving hootenanny!’
Thinking about Mark and his voyeuristic urges made Steven speed up. Ahead, a hundred yards or so, he thought he caught sight of Hannah; she’d left him and Mark at mile eight, determined to cut time off her personal best. Steven dropped his hands, squinted into the sun and ran to catch up.
He couldn’t. A quarter-mile further on, she was still a hundred yards out. ‘Yikes, Hannah, but you are motoring today,’ he panted.
She was running alone. With her hair pulled into a ponytail and looped through the one-size-fits-all band on the back of her baseball cap, Hannah looked like ten thousand women Steven had followed along dozens of courses over the past five years. Even from this distance, running hard and sucking wind, Steven loved the look of her: the way her clothes fit, the way her hair bobbed up and down, the delicate taper of her tanned legs. Wearing a cropped T-shirt that just brushed the waistband of her shorts, Hannah was an unreachable mirage in the distance, lost periodically in the glare. When he could find her without squinting, Steven did stare, watching her run, wanting to feel her press against him as she slept. He was getting horny; that had never happened during a race before.
‘Get your head on straight, dipshit. Pay attention to what you’re doing,’ he chided himself. ‘Catch up to her if you’re that hot and bothered.’ He dropped his hands, lowered his shoulders a bit and speeded up. He would be near death at the finish line, blind and dehydrated, but he wanted to catch her. Panting, he cursed the sun for rising and cursed himself for forgetting his glasses. ‘When you’re running, run,’ he said, and thought that notion felt somehow familiar, like an old blanket he might have thrown over himself, over his friends and their ship.