‘Give me back my mother!’
Had he lied, then, earlier? Was Sandrine on board? No: she couldn’t be, because this would not retrieve her. If the boy had been genuinely trying to save his mother from this ship, he would have done things differently. Lester Ferris tried to wrap his head around the bigness of the plan.
They cannot give him what they do not have. They cannot produce her, ever.
But when the dust settles, it will be seen that she was the woman who was kidnapped.
The woman Tigerman had chased.
A victim of the Discharge Clouds whose body might yield secrets.
It would seem inevitable that they must have taken her.
If they found her on the island and produced her, it would simply be proof that they had had her all along. The accusation would persist for ever, the investigations would go on, and the cruelty of killing her son would seem exceptional.
And when the Sergeant, or Tigerman, or both of them, delivered Inoue’s papers to the wider world, the story would compound, becoming the story of how the Fleet had stolen a child’s mother and then slain him, how even Tigerman could not stop it, how the great powers of the world had conspired to murder a boy in furtherance of their wretched, meaningless agendas.
Game over.
If anything could save Mancreu, it would be that scandal at fever pitch, delivered with perfect visuals through the news organisations and the Internet, scouring the world. Leaving the island unburned would seem a meagre enough first act of contrition.
The stunned men were extras, there to absorb the boy’s accusations. The real antagonists in his story must be seconds away, a fire team who would be armed and very frightened, riding the fear with long practice and established orders, and the boy would provoke them, he would die, and it would begin. The Sergeant couldn’t think of any way to deal with that, couldn’t see a path which would get them both out alive, let alone uncaptured.
He felt footsteps in the decking, the vibration of booted feet.
His first instinct was to give himself up, explain that the boy was no actual threat – or, not on a physical level – and let the whole thing crash down. He might be able to salvage something from it. The surrender of Tigerman on live TV – by now, he had no doubt, this was on every station – ought to be worth some good ratings, and his notoriety might protect them both.
But they would not hear him. Keyed up and afraid, in the blinding rain – even assuming that they didn’t shoot him down – they would not credit his assurances regarding the remote. And why should they? Out there somewhere a Fleet ship was taking on water, and there had been columns of fire in the night, and now Tigerman was on their ship, and the boy with him, and the whole operation was fucked up at best.
Lester Ferris could not prevent the fight. But he could draw fire.
So when the men barrelled past him towards the bright lights of the foredeck, he waited, then stepped into the middle of them and did all he could to take them down. He fired the taser again, then stamped and used his fists. He dropped two of them and then the remainder swamped him and they fell forward in a seething pile onto the deck, in the midst of the lights.
He felt a fist rebound off his armour and heard a shriek. He drove his forehead up into a man’s face, rolled away as one of them finally started shooting, threw a gas grenade back the way he’d come. It was useless in this wind but they had no way of knowing what it was. They scattered, and he got to his feet and charged. He lashed out with the sharkpunch and it went wide, struck metal and the cartridge went off, sending shot zinging everywhere. A piece of it pinged into his shoulder and lodged in the meat and he yelled. He saw a man go down clutching at his leg. Then the aluminium tube went spinning away, and he walked into a succession of sharp blows like a drum tattoo, powpowpowpowpowpow, that went on for ever against his sides. Someone was hitting him, and doing it right. He dropped to slip a scything punch and weaved away, breath rasping, making space.
His opponent skipped after him, whip-lean and fast, and he realised it was a woman with a fine, peaceful face and short brown hair. He tried to circle and her knee moved, faster than he would have imagined possible, shot like a piston into his liver. She snapped away, off-axis, guard up to deflect his counter. She moved with the ship, her back upright and supple as the deck shifted. Naval training, and a lot of it.
One counter. A single punch in the time she took to land five. She’s better than me. She’s so much better.
Away towards the front of the ship the boy was playing to the crowd. He was good at it. He kept his face well lit, his body filled with hope, tension and need. Give me back my mother. She is nothing to you. She is my life. Why would you take her? Will you sell her? She is very sick. Sell her to me! I will give you everything. Or take me instead! I am young, I can work, she is sick. Please. Why would you do this thing? Please, please, please.
Give me back my mother.
The Sergeant felt more blows on his body, his legs. The peaceful woman was trying to numb the muscles in his thighs. Already the left one was agony. It would freeze soon, but if she hit the sweet spot he would just fold, and that would be that.
He was old and clumsy. He just didn’t have the training for this. She was far, far beyond him. He wanted to tell her so, to give due respect to her skill and to buy her a drink. In another place, he would have asked her to teach him, just whatever she would for however long they had. But he was here and now, and the boy needed him, and skill was never the end of it. You could always shoot somebody who outdrew you. You just had to be ready to get shot. And he could see it in her, the faintest hint of frustration. He was armoured, yes, but even so he should have gone down by now. No one could soak this up for ever. Why wouldn’t he go down? He wanted to tell her to take it easy, just wait, she was doing fine.
Instead he put his hands up like a good boxer, then when she came in he shunted forward stupidly, rode out the punches. When he lunged on his good leg, she was just a little too close. Fumbling, he seized her body beneath her arms, lifted. She was slight. He felt her tense.
You silly sod, he thought, vaguely, if I was really your enemy you’d be up the creek now.
She knew it, too, hammered at him violently, elbows and fists coming down onto his neck and back, but nothing like hard enough, not when a sergeant has put his mind to something. He looked for something to smash her against.
She reared up.
Just as the deck did, too.
She got the strike exactly right, deep into the muscle of one arm.
A second wave, out of rhythm with the rest of the sea, smashed into the ship and threw her high in the air towards the prow. She twisted, landed hard and rolled, came to her feet in the midst of the boy’s perfect tableau, arms spreading in an arc like a seabird as she caught her balance.
As she collided with the one thing between her and the abyss.
And that one thing – small and lighter even than she, still holding the camera remote – staggered backwards and over the edge, and was snatched away by the wind.
The moment lasted for ever, and after it, nothing else mattered; not when Lester Ferris fell down on his knees and tore the Tiger mask from his face and screamed and screamed; not when they surrounded him and took him into some approximation of custody, marvelling and bewildered at who he was, and what was he doing here, and was this an operation they had somehow not been briefed on? Not even when they realised sickly that the camera had never stopped running, that the boy’s extinguishing and the Sergeant’s revelation had been beamed across the water to the shore and streamed live to a YouTube channel and gone out around the world, the most unrecoverable of security breaches contrived on the boy’s own terms, delivering the best possible iteration of the scenario he had set out to achieve.