It was almost as if he was looking for permission. As if he wanted to be told that what he’d done was sufficient.
‘I think you’ve done your bit,’ I told him. Though I still needed him to help me kill Rolleston.
We lapsed into silence again. I feared sleep. I feared the Black Sun. I feared the replay of Morag’s death that I knew was waiting for me just beyond consciousness.
I took another sip of the fermented engine oil. Let it burn. I was hoping it would destroy some of my taste buds. Get rid of the constant taste of battery acid and rotten eggs. I wondered how long my lung filter had to go before it needed replacing. I wondered how long Rannu’s had — surely much less time if it hadn’t already expired. Were his lungs being burned with every breath as we spoke? I was sure there would be more symptoms if this were the case. If nothing else, then coughing and rasping when he breathed.
Eventually Rannu tried to sleep. It looked fitful. I just watched him, wishing I couldn’t think.
17
We were running on cheap stims and home-made amphetamines. We ran when we could, walked when we couldn’t run and staggered just before we crashed. We kept going. I didn’t want to sleep anyway. Sleep was a nightmare transformation of a healthy young woman to meat in the space of two gunshots.
We were living in the green light of our lowlight optics, far away from any other sources of illumination. Soon sensory deprivation, lack of sleep and bad drugs took me to a place I knew well from Sirius, that sort of twilight, half-dead, unreal feeling. I started to see fractals of light. My mind started to fill in the gaps in my perception, ghost images given fear and form in the corner of my eye.
I was finding the miles of rock above us more and more oppressive. It seemed to be weighing down on me. Crushing me like the high G. I missed the sky. I really wanted to see the sky again before I died. I didn’t think it was likely.
Always moving until we couldn’t any more. Eking out the food that the End had given us. They’d given us the drugs as well. They might be deserters and a suicide cult but they’d done all right by us.
I was almost completely healed now, one of the benefits of having what were effectively tiny little aliens throughout my body; the other of course was not dying from radiation poisoning. Rannu was weaker than he’d been for a long time but that was still pretty strong. He’d lost a lot of weight but he was keeping up.
We’d made it back to the pa by trial and error. All the maps had gone when I’d triggered the firestorm in my internal memory and wiped it, although I needn’t have bothered when I was going to spill my guts like I had. We’d taken a lot of wrong turnings but at least when we’d found the cave we knew it was the right one.
They’d left in a hurry and blown all the tunnels that would have enabled Rolleston to follow them easily. The problem was this made it almost as difficult for us. When we’d been camped here I’d studied the maps trying to commit as much of them to actual meat memory as possible in case I needed the info for E amp;E. I was pretty sure that I knew the long way round. The route that Rolleston and his people would have had to take. Then we could try and pick up the trail of either Rolleston or Mother’s people. Or we’d end up wandering Lalande 2’s Deep Caves until we died of hunger.
The one thing we did have going for us was our tracking ability. I’d grown up tracking and had been taught by one of the best, my dad. 5 Para Pathfinders had continued my training, as had the Regiment. Rannu had also grown up tracking and it was emphasised in Ghurkha training as well. That said, lightless caves were not the environment we were used to.
Day and night cycles were pointless in darkness and on stims. The time and date facility on our IVDs had become meaningless and I don’t think either of us was paying any attention to them. So I’ve no idea how long it took us to find the tracks. Maybe I’d remembered the complex cave system correctly or maybe it was just luck.
When two hundred people camp it is difficult to erase all the signs. The trails of crushed or grazed stone the mechs left were the easiest to follow. The mechs were not what you would call stealthy, particularly the Bismarck-class Apakura.
What I didn’t see was Rolleston’s trail. Either his force was using some other route or his people were good enough for Rannu and I not to find their tracks in this environment, which was a possibility. I knew, however, that he was down here.
It felt like I hadn’t seen light, let alone sky, for a very, very long time. The glow in the distance hurt despite the flash compensation on my optics. It hurt in my head. It hurt as a new and disorienting sensation. I had to remember what it was, what light looked like. All I’d seen was Rannu and rock in green for a good while now.
Of course we were too late. How could we not be? Still it looked like they’d put up a fight. Rolleston’s people were clearing it up. Looking for a way to spin it. Make this into good propaganda. Make us the bad guys. We got as close as we could.
The new pa was a large area of rock the colour of sun-bleached bone. Naturally occurring columns of rock ran between cave roof and floor at almost regular intervals. The cave floor was a series of pitted basins filled with the foul-smelling, salty sulphurous liquid that passed for water on Lalande 2. Much of it was red and steaming from where the acid content was eating away at the bodies floating or lying half in the pools.
Regular NZ army guarded the perimeter but it looked like a relatively small Black Squadron force had done most of the damage. They were checking the bodies for life and identity. Magnifying my optics I saw my friends, smoking as they were eaten away or just lying in piles of other corpses.
I saw Pagan face down in the water. I didn’t recognise him until one of the women in the Black Squadron turned him over. The acid had gone to work on his face but it was unmistakably him. He looked old, tired and in pain. As if death had come as a relief.
Cat was in a pile of corpses. We’d fucked her life up completely. If not for us she’d still be in a cushy job as head of the Atlantis Spoke C-SWAT team. I couldn’t see her face. I don’t think I wanted to. She was wearing the gyroscopic rig for her railgun. I hoped and was reasonably sure that she would have given them hell before they got her. Though I did wonder whether the members of the Black Squadron were like Rolleston and couldn’t be killed.
Mother, Tailgunner and Dog Face were in the same pile of bodies as Cat. Maybe they’d been together because it had been a last stand. I think they were fucked as soon as they chose to resist. Still they would have lasted a little longer if I hadn’t ratted them out.
Big Henry was lying dead quite close to us. I reckoned he’d been on sentry duty. He’d been taken quietly and quickly judging by the blade wound in the back of his skull and the look of surprise on his face.
I didn’t see Mudge, Merle or Strange. I was pretty sure that Merle had died when the Walker blew in the Rookery. He’d been too close. Mudge and Strange weren’t necessarily alive; they could be at the bottom of a pile of bodies. I hoped that neither of them had been captured. If any of them had got away then my money would be on Merle, if he’d made it out of the Rookery.
Then the thought occurred to me. Two people had betrayed us. Two. Could it have been two of those three? Not Mudge, never Mudge. I didn’t know Strange well enough. She had seemed too fucked in the head to sell us out. On the other hand that could just mean that nobody knew what she would do, but she had seemed very loyal to the whanau.