‘So you are fucking him?’
Again there was just a flicker of something. Sadness? Anger? Go on, piss off the Grey Lady. Actually that wasn’t a bad idea. Maybe she’d kill me. I’d been thinking a lot about the afterlives all the signalmen I’d ever worked with had told me about. But they were just hopeful fantasies, dreams of seeing Morag again.
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she told me.
I sighed. ‘Why are you here?’
‘Because you smell.’ It was delivered with monotone honesty but the childishness of the statement from the Grey Lady’s lips made me laugh. It was a bitter laugh. It sounded like somebody choking. I was sure she was right. It felt like I’d been lying here for days. The only concession to hygiene was some kind of suction/cleaning device strapped uncomfortably over my groin and arse.
‘So?’
Even through the numbness and pain, the Grey Lady carefully and thoroughly giving me a sponge bath rated as deeply surreal. She was thorough. She even shaved me and put some kind of small machine in my mouth that brushed my teeth, then washed and deodorised my mouth.
‘You’re healing quickly,’ she said, examining my many wounds.
That’s the Themtech, I thought. That’s what makes Rolleston and me so close. I’d not been paying any attention to my wounds but there was a lot less red on my IVD and the pain was subsiding. I think I would have preferred being able to concentrate on physical pain.
When she was finished I asked, ‘Why did you do that?’
She didn’t answer. She leaned forward and kissed me. I snapped my mouth shut like a trap. She straightened up. Again there was a flicker of something there. Hurt?
‘What the fuck!’ I shouted.
I was feeling again. I’ll give them credit, these people liked to push the boundaries. She undressed. Her naked body was wiry, hard but surprisingly petite for a frame that contained so much power. She stood in front of me, somehow vulnerable.
‘Don’t you understand?’ I asked. Desperate.
Steely fingers calloused from years of martial arts practice touched me. She knew how and where to touch me.
‘Don’t…’ I begged.
My body was already starting to betray me. A single dry sob painfully racked my frame. She gracefully swung a leg over the couch I was strapped to and straddled me.
‘Please don’t hurt me,’ she said, sounding vulnerable as she looked down on me. It was the one thing she could have said. She leaned forward to kiss me. This time I let her. This time I reciprocated. She was real. It was something. It was more than the constant feeling of numbness.
When she left I wept. Now part of the cell seemed haunted. I couldn’t make my eyes go there. I had betrayed everything else, why not her? And still nobody would kill me. Was leaving me here wretched like this part of Rolleston’s punishment? I knew exactly what I was. Rolleston was wrong: I wasn’t an animal. That was too noble. I was scum. When sleep came it was fitful. I wanted my dreams to punish me.
It was a plain of black glass over fire. In the distance the jagged knife points of mountains. Protruding from the plains were obelisks like the stone cairns of the Highlands writ large and made of the same black glass. Alien-looking glyphs of orange light played over the surface of the obelisks. The landscape was somehow familiar to me. A black sun burned in the sky. I didn’t want to look at it. I couldn’t look at it. There was something terrible about it.
There was movement next to me. I swung around, the sensation of fear an almost welcome return of feeling. I was staring at the hood of a black-robed figure floating above the ground. The figure was moving towards me but didn’t seem to notice me. I stepped to one side and it ignored me as it floated past.
I looked down at myself. I was naked and whole. But naked and whole as the machine I was. All components of the weapon were present and correct. The glyphs from the obelisk seemed to be playing over my pale skin like a projection.
In the distance I could just about make out two flying creatures of some sort, high in the air. It looked like they were circling. Somehow they felt like judgement. I started to walk towards them.
I woke up on the couch. My face distended, pulled forward. Black liquid tendrils, like one of Them. Instinctive hard-wired fear and loathing at this. The tendrils extrude from my flesh, my mouth, my face, piercing part of it, part of me.
I woke for real. Screaming. I was no longer strapped to the couch. I was free. The cell door was open. Rannu was standing over me. He looked awful, gaunt and wasted. Despite having black lenses for eyes there was something haunted about his expression. Something new. He looked afraid.
He was wearing combat trousers but was barefoot. He had on a filthy greying T-shirt and was carrying a gauss carbine in one hand, another slung across his back. In his other hand was a severed hand hooked up to some kind of miniaturised device that pumped warm blood through dead flesh.
‘Did you undo the straps?’ I asked inanely.
He shook his head. Did she do it?
‘Can you stand up?’ he whispered urgently.
If I could betray my dead lover and fuck the Grey Lady then I could stand up. I climbed off the couch and almost collapsed. Maybe I could have stood up in Earth gravity. Rannu helped me stand.
‘She’s dead,’ I told him, feeling my face crumple as if I was about to start sobbing again.
He looked into my lenses. ‘I know.’
Did he? How much? Did he know what I’d done? There’s always time for self-pity. I hugged him and started to sob. He hugged me back, unconcerned that I was naked.
‘We need to go. You’ll have to walk yourself.’ He sounded nervous. I don’t think I’d ever heard Rannu sound nervous before.
I let him go. I could just about stand. I noticed that he was missing the tip of his forefinger on his right hand. It made sense that they’d remove his weighted monofilament garrotte.
‘Can you hold a gun?’ Rannu asked. I nodded.
I wasn’t weak from my incarceration, just numb and not used to being on my feet again. Rannu handed me the gauss carbine and unslung the one across his back. We looked at each other for a while. I was so glad to see him, but maybe dying or even being brainwashed, if it meant forgetting, would have been better.
Selfishly, irrationally, I was suddenly angry at him. Where was he when Rolleston shot Morag? Why didn’t he rescue me before I disgraced myself with Josephine? Then I knew that he couldn’t have done anything about the first and the last was all on me, piece of shit that I am.
He turned and headed out the door, looking like a tired soldier. He moved more slowly and with less grace than before. I followed him out. He closed the cell door and pressed the still-warm severed hand on the biometric lock. The cell door locked behind us.
We played hide and seek in corridors lasered out of the huge stalactite decades ago. He took me up into the vents, also carved out of stone, to an automated machine room for the air-handling equipment. It was full of the detritus of his fugitive life.
He sat down with his head in his hands and shook. In a quivering voice he asked me to go on guard. Only then did I see how much coming to get me had cost him.
Then I noticed the corpse in the corner of the room. A squat, powerfully built man with the endomorphic body type I’d come to connect with Lalande 2 colonists. He had a screwdriver sticking out the back of his skull. One of his hands was missing. Still he had clothes. Getting the clothes off the corpse seemed to require a lot more effort than it should have. I got out of breath quickly and could feel the planet pushing down on me again. I hated this place.
‘I needed to get you out of the cell,’ he said, explaining the corpse.
‘Is he Black Squadron?’ I asked.
Rannu shook his head. His hair was a matted mess.