Inoue touched him on the shoulder and he lurched away from her, hands almost coming up in a fighter’s guard, but he restrained the impulse and waved away his own reaction with a sharp ‘Sorry’. A moment later he was running to the Xeno Centre to do what he should have done five minutes ago: he called Jed Kershaw and told him he’d been the victim of a direct and possibly politically motivated minor assault on the property of the UN-sanctioned Japanese scientific mission. If Kershaw had any assets which might reasonably be brought to bear on the situation – any American satellites or high-altitude drones doing atmospheric research or weather balloons which just happened to have a camera pointing at the ground – now would be the time for that happy accident to be shared with the mother country in the name of brotherly love and the avoidance of a Total Goatfuck. He saw Inoue watching from the doorway and realised that she was seeing him as he had earlier seen her, doing something that actually came naturally, that was his strength. She smiled in recognition of the same truth, then took her cue from him and went to boss her swots in whatever direction she felt best.
Kershaw told him to stay the fuck where he was. A rapid reaction force arrived twenty minutes later and secured the perimeter while insisting that everyone sit tight and await reinforcements. Privately the Sergeant found this was a little bit funny and a perfect example of what happened when you put a civilian in charge of military personnel.
The full force took four hours to arrive, by which time it was getting dark, so the drive back across the island was a stern, halogen-lit convoy with the Sergeant’s bloodied Land Rover occupying a slightly off-centre position in the traffic. The Sergeant wasn’t allowed to travel in it in case the vehicle was marked out for follow-up attack. According to NatProMan’s standard operating procedure, the possible object of guerrilla activity – there had never actually been any before – was to be protected both by ‘direct target obscuration’, which meant ‘getting in the way’, and deception. He told Kershaw’s myrmidons that no formal escort was necessary. The officer in charge, who was all the blond, muscular things a Pennsylvania Dutch quarterback should be, told him that he knew that – of course he did – but that Jed Kershaw had been pretty agitated and would the Sergeant consent this one time to being treated like he was made of glass? Because just between the officer and the Sergeant, who was a pro and that’s why the officer could lay it out like this and not screw around – it would sure as hell make life that much easier.
Having used a similar form of words himself from time to time, the Sergeant recognised this as soldier-to-VIP speak for ‘get your fucking arse in the car and quit pretending you’re bulletproof so we can all go home’, and so he did, wondering greatly at a universe in which he could be on the receiving end of such polite flannel. They made their way rapidly along the boring coastal route, outriders ahead ushering the few other cars off the road. The searchlights scoured the countryside around, making a small circle of effective daylight two hundred metres across and a penumbra beyond it of mottled day and dark which was almost harder to resolve than ordinary night. Mancreu looked, by this scorching illumination, all the more desolate and sorrowfuclass="underline" the stark actinic glare picked out old farm equipment, crumbling houses and rusted automobiles, jagged trees and lonely, deserted livestock. Nothing happened to justify the extreme caution, and they arrived at Brighton House in an hour with no more serious injury than a foggy motion sickness which came from rounding corners at speed. The Sergeant politely but firmly declined a NatProMan guard and invoked his status as Brevet-Consul of a friendly nation to make the rejection stick. The cavalcade rolled away, reluctantly extinguishing the big lights as they headed down towards the town.
The Sergeant let himself in, and the first thing he saw was the boy, sitting in livid silence on the bed in which he had slept, with his back to the door.
7. Bruises
THERE WAS NO way of knowing how long the boy had been sitting there. It was theoretically possible that he had only just arrived, or that he had been, until he heard the key turn in the lock, reading quite cosily in the corner chair – but there was an air of self-mortification about him, a sense that he had selected this posture in the knowledge that it would be uncomfortable, and his long wait with aching muscles was part of the bill which would now come due.
The Sergeant knocked on the doorframe, then cleared his throat. When this elicited no response, he experienced a strange, appalling hallucination or imagining: that the boy had died and was slowly freezing in place owing to rigor mortis. He saw himself realising and leaping up, pounding on the boy’s chest like a madman and giving him mouth-to-mouth – much too late – then carrying the tiny corpse in his arms all the way to Beauville, weeping and weeping and weeping and none of it doing any good. And what was the point of that? What was the point of being a soldier, of being a human being in a world which could work wonders with medicine, if affection – he had almost called it love, but that was a presumption, wasn’t it, because the boy wasn’t his flesh, his son, and while that was something which could be negotiated it hadn’t been negotiated, not yet – what was the point of affection, then, if it didn’t exert any traction on the universe? If it didn’t heal or protect or do anything at all except hurt? In his nightmare he begged the Witch to help him and she did, she duped him and sedated him and while he was asleep she made the dead boy disappear and when he came to himself he thanked her and then they never spoke again.
But when he risked a glance, ridiculously frightened that he would this time turn out to be right, he could see the boy’s chest moving, so that much was good. Still, he knew he was the focus of this frigid rage.
It was new ground. They had never fought before. The Sergeant had never fought in that sense with anyone – and if he had, no one had ever before occupied the strange, vexed, desperate space in his life which now belonged to the boy.
So he advanced, slowly, as if probing for mines with his voice.
‘Sorry I wasn’t around. I had to go over to the Xeno Centre.’
The boy’s face remained firmly turned away. If anything, the ramrod back seemed to grow more disdainful. Instinct told the Sergeant that this was not a bad thing; that it amounted, contrary to appearances, to permission to continue.
‘Inoue wanted to tell me some things. And when we got there, there was a sort of… well, an attack, I suppose. A gang.’
No answer. No shift. Did that mean rejection, or interest? Was it possible that the boy himself did not know? The silence stretched.
‘And I suppose technically I solved the dog thing. I mean, they killed him. Threw him on my car. It’s a mess – you should see.’
No, that was a mistake. Too much, too soon. A hiss of affront. He hurried on.
‘But I’ve got a new case now: the masked men. On quad bikes, if you please. Bloody expensive for Mancreu. Can’t be too many, so I expect I can find them.’ A case you can be part of. A real gang case, pow pow pow. And: I’m sure we talked about this. I’m sure I was allowed.