‘How’d she manage it?’ Janer asked.
‘Not sure, but I’d bet she’s now not wearing the face I knew her by.’
Janer brooded on that as he rushed to wake Erlin up and to find Pland. Anne had by now joined Ron and Ambel on the cabin-deck.
For the next hour, there was a continuous flurry of activity as supplies were brought on deck and weapons were taken out of waterproof packaging to be checked over. Keech cut the lines holding his scooter to the deck. From its baggage compartment he took out his attaché case and opened it.
As Janer approached him, Keech tossed him an item from the case. Janer nearly dropped it, finding it heavier than he’d assumed.
‘Never seen one of these in real life,’ he muttered.
‘Give your handgun to one of the crew. You won’t be needing it now. That’s a QC laser carbine. Half an hour continuous fire, thousand-metre kill range, and auto-sight.’
Janer handled the weapon as if it had suddenly turned into a snake. ‘Bit drastic,’ he said.
‘You might well need it,’ said Keech.
Janer turned to Forlam, who at that moment came up beside him.
‘Here,’ he said, passing over his handgun. Forlam stared at the weapon for a moment, then suddenly looked pleased and thrust it into his belt. Janer thought it was rather a strange grin the crewman wore.
Forlam pointed at the weapon Keech was quickly assembling from the case. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.
Keech clicked the twin barrels — as of a shotgun — into place, then the folding stock, before opening out the fan of cooling fins from the main body of the weapon. He gave it a slow visual inspection then carefully took up a gigawatt energy canister and screwed it into place underneath.
‘This,’ he murmured, ‘is completely OTT.’ With that, he mounted his scooter, pulled the leg straps across his thighs and secured them in place, then slammed his vehicle up into the sky. He gave no one time to ask where he was going. No one needed to ask.
Amazingly, one of the juniors, who had either somehow survived the burst of rail-gun fire or had gone over the side during the attack, now yelled nearby as darkness seeped out of the sky. Before dawn, one of the mercenaries, perhaps out of boredom, finally shot a shell into him. Roach wished they would do the same to him.
Through a haze of pain, he tried to concentrate on what she was saying.
‘Now I want to be utterly sure of this. Think about it a little before you reply,’ said the woman he now knew was Rebecca Frisk.
He’d thought about it a little when she’d asked him the last time, and the time before — and on every occasion he’d told her the truth. She didn’t care about truth, though. She wasn’t doing this for truth. She was doing it because she liked to see suffering. Roach bit on his tongue as she played the laser, on wide beam, over his feet and legs. He’d screamed the third time she’d done this, in the hope that would satisfy her. But it hadn’t. She’d just go on until there was nothing left of him to scream. It was Frisk’s way, just as it was the way of her husband, or what was left of him.
‘Think carefully now,’ warned Frisk.
She seemed oblivious to everything else — had a crazy look in her eyes and jerky shudders running through her body with metronomic regularity. Roach did pretend to think carefully, while he listened to the low conversation going on behind her.
The mercenary woman was speaking to the Prador. ‘… time for this?’
‘Delay… Convocation… does not matter.’
‘Fucking lunatic’ That last came from the male mercenary. He seemed to find Frisk’s pursuits contemptible, but then his kind tortured people only for business, not for recreation.
‘Tell me again about Jay,’ demanded Frisk.
Roach leapt at the chance. At least while he was speaking, she wasn’t burning his legs.
‘Ambel… y’know, Balem Gosk, kept the head in a box in his cabin. I reckon Peck musta — aaaargh!’
‘Oh I know all about that. Tell me something new, something interesting.’
‘AG vehicle approaching.’
Roach could not identify from where that voice had come. The others were blanks, so perhaps it was their master speaking. He knew that this Prador on board wasn’t an adult. It still had all its legs.
‘Rebecca Frisk, we must return to our vessel,’ grated the translator box of the same Prador.
Roach prayed that this would mean the end.
Frisk stood up and confronted the Prador, angry that her little game had been interrupted.
‘I want to take him with me,’ she spat.
‘We do not have time. To the vessel — now.’
The Prador turned away. The blanks were already leaping from the Ahab, ahead of it. Frisk seemed about to rebel. Abruptly she turned, walked up to one of the mercenaries, and snatched his weapon from him and thrust her carbine into his hands instead. This is it, thought Roach. This is when I end up spread all over the deck.
Frisk, though, did not shoot him. She moved to the deck hatch, kicked it open releasing gouts of smoke, and then fired shot after shot below. Roach could feel the ship shuddering. When she was finished, she grinned at him with satisfaction, before following the Prador from the ship. The mercenaries went last, and without looking back.
Roach couldn’t believe it: he was going to survive. All he had to do was work on these ropes tying him to the mast… It was then that he realized what the smoke meant, and what Frisk had been doing. He saw how smoke was also wisping up through the holes in the deck and could hear the crackle of flames from below. He continued to struggle at his bonds, but the torture had weakened him too much and he only had one arm to work with — his broken arm still being dead meat from the shoulder down. He listened to the sound of the Cohorn pulling away, its flaccid sail booming in the wind of its passage, and wondered which would get him first: the fire or the sea.
‘You bitch!’ he yelled, and heard her laughter growing distant. He sat panting for a while, then had another go at his bonds. Doing so, he heard sounds coming up from beside the ship, and had a horrible vision of prill clambering aboard. He stared over at where the ship’s boat had been suspended and saw a rope there jerking. The sound, he began to realize, was a continuous cursing monologue. Shortly after, Boris hauled himself over the rail, the bottom half of his body covered by a writhing mass of leeches. With further cursing and the occasional yelp, Boris began to detach them, one by one. Roach didn’t even have the energy left to yell at him to hurry up, even though he could feel the deck getting hot underneath him.
Keech stared down at the wrecked and burning ship, and the two figures remaining on its deck, then he turned his image intensifier to examine the second ship. Over there, a Prador and a number of humans — any of which might be Frisk herself. He set his scooter on hover, took up his weapon, and aimed. Half charge: he’d flame the deck.
Keech pulled back one of the three triggers, and lit the air between himself and the target ship with a line of purple fire. Seawater erupted and flashed into a ball of flame that splashed across an invisible disk.
‘Shields,’ was all he managed to say before his scooter dropped out of the sky. Letting his APW hang by its strap, he grabbed the controls, and saw the message flashing up on the screen: ‘EMERGENCY DIVE: EVASIVE’.
A missile screamed past overhead and made a slow turn beyond him. Keech slammed the control column forward and put all the scooter’s power into the dive. Gs threatened to steal his hands from the controls, and tried to drag him from the seat, but his leg straps held him in place. He went into cyber mode as his flesh began to fail, and used his arm motors to pull the scooter out of the dive at the last moment. The missile streaked past two metres below him, entering the sea with a crack. An explosion lit the underside of the waves, with a rapidly spreading disk of light. He was a hundred metres up from the surface when it erupted. No time for self-congratulation, he told himself, as another two missiles sped towards him.