He went back to removing the rock he’d replaced to disguise his work. He couldn’t deal with how long he’d been here but he must know. Even I’d started to make sense of the calendar and clock on my IVD.
Rannu ignored me as I stared at him. He finished removing the loose rock and kicked at the vent. It didn’t budge. Rannu lost it. He started screaming, kicking at it wildly. Finally the vent exploded out of the rock and I could see the ultraviolet light of the subterranean night.
There was a flash of red light and a loud bang. It was so unexpected that I jumped. Some hardened combat veteran. It was a point-defence laser taking out the falling vent.
Rannu held up the radio transmitter and pressed the transmit button. Nearby I heard a few pathetic-sounding explosions. Rannu threw the now-infected transmitter past me deeper into the air tunnel before he pulled himself over the ledge and out into the sulphurous night air.
16
Mudge calls it the vertiginous moment. Pulling yourself over the ledge. The ground distant and less fixed in your perception than you like ground to be. It should pretty much be a constant. I was too weak and the tunnel was too cramped to pull myself over properly. I lost some skin and left a bloody smear on the outside of the stalactite. It didn’t matter despite what the warning icons on my IVD said. Like the OILO drop, the ground seemed to want me much more than it ever had on Earth and Sirius.
There was a moment’s free fall and then I pulled the ripcord. The ground wasn’t moving towards me so suddenly. Looked up to see the large canopy they have to use on Lalande fully deployed. Looked down to see the ruins of mansions and huge bonfires casting flickering light over scratch-built bestial statuary. Was where we were going any better? Tailgunner had told me that the End was some apocalyptic religious cult of deserters.
The harsh beam of a spotlight cut through the UV light playing over our parachutes. They’d be scrambling gunships and coming looking for us. I made a decision on the way down: enough of the self-pitying bullshit. I had Rannu to look after. I owed him. I had to get back to the others and see if I could undo some of the damage I’d done. I also had a purpose. I didn’t give a fuck about Earth, the colonies or any of the politics. Mother was right: what difference did it make who was in charge? Rolleston, on the other hand, had to die as hard as possible. Then I could give suicide some serious thought.
The ground came up and hit me hard. I shrugged off the parachute harness and ran out from underneath the canopy. Still some stims left in the reservoir. They’d drained off the painkillers but that’s fine, the pain is fine. We ran in the opposite direction from the most direct route out. Escape and evasion training — go the way they don’t expect you to.
We were running over scarred Earth, through scrub foliage, what was left of landscaped gardens run wild for fifty years, past the rubble of cave-like mansions cut out of the stone, our gauss carbines at the ready. I could hear the gunships and copters in the air now. Just think about the job, nothing else. The Demiurge-controlled remotes would be the biggest threat.
Normally we’d stay away from people but the crowds milling near the huge bonfires were our best hope. I veered across rubble-strewn, battle-scarred ground towards a massive pyre in front of a large mansion of hard stone rising out of the ground. For some reason it reminded me of a burial mound. There was a huge effigy illuminated by the flames, made demonic by the red flickering light. I couldn’t make out what it was but it looked vaguely humanoid with horns. It appeared to be constructed from whatever expensive salvage they could find from the destroyed houses of the rich.
All around the fire I could see the silhouettes of people with their hands held high, swaying in the light to the hypnotic heavy rhythm of some kind of music too contemporary for me to know. The chanting came from them, not the speakers. Still running, I glanced across at Rannu, who shrugged. There were more spotlights now from the searching gunships. It was not the lights that worried me but the thermographics.
Rannu and I ran to the back of the mansion and vaulted in through a hole in the rock that still held the remains of a stained-glass window. No time to check inside — gunships too close. If they came for us then Rannu got a burst in the head before I turned the carbine on myself. It wouldn’t be suicide; it would be a sound tactical decision and a little self-preservation. What we had left of ourselves.
Lowlight illuminated the cavernous room. I’m sure the rich people who owned this place would have been horrified by what had happened to it. There was a noticeable seam of some kind of metal running through the wall. Bits of it had been chipped away over the years. The floor was covered with ground mats and military sleeping bags. There were the remains of food. I was tempted to eat some of it; Rannu was more than tempted. There were empty alcohol bottles and containers that once held narcotics. Slogans had been painted on the wall but a crude mural of a black sun dominated the room. I’d see the black sun before, in my dreams. Below the black sun, in what looked like blood, was scrawled T HE B LACK W AVE. It seemed a little contradictory to me.
Rannu was taking small but eager bites of some vat-grown confection.
‘Rannu?’ I said slowly. He looked up and then saw what I was looking at. Overhead I could hear a gunship. ‘I think these people worship Demiurge.’
‘They are here for you?’
Our carbines swung up to cover the figure in the doorway. Seeing I had him, Rannu swung around to check behind us. More figures appeared at the glassless windows and at the other doorways into the room.
‘We’ll kill a lot of them and then ourselves before they get us — understand me?’ I told Rannu and meant it.
I was suddenly overcome by revulsion and anger towards these people. They had run out on their mates and then voluntarily chosen to worship Demiurge, and they knew it was bad. They called it the Black Wave, not the Freedom Wave.
The man doing the talking was tall and had the solid build of an ex-soldier. He was wearing a long coat, combat trousers and boots, and the rest of him was completely swaddled in old-fashioned bandages. The bandages had symbols written all over them. I’d known enough signal-people to realise that the symbols were religious or occult. He held a staff that looked like it was made out of scrap metal. The head of the staff was beaten into the shape of a goat’s head.
I glanced around at the rest of the people slowly surrounding us, courting gunfire. All of them were swaddled in bandages. At the very least their faces were covered, but many were swaddled from head to feet. Some, but not all, had symbols painted on the bandages.
‘We are not going to harm you. All of us are unarmed,’ he told us.
It was disconcerting. The bandages made him faceless, made him look like an old-fashioned casualty, a ghost from a historical war. Maybe he was. He was right though. The closest thing any of them had to a weapon was the goat-headed staff he was carrying.
‘Fine. Well we’ll just hide here for a bit, you don’t grass us up, and then we’ll move on. Okay?’ I said.
I was still pointing the gauss carbine at his face. He hadn’t wavered. Deserter he may have been, but he wasn’t a coward. I couldn’t say the same for the rest of them. There was a lot of very nervous body language.
‘Why don’t you let us help you?’ he asked. His voice was cultured, educated, privileged. Equatorial Africa, I suspected. It sounded like he came from money.
‘Why would you do that?’ I asked.
‘We help everyone who comes here. We’re the last port of call for the desperate.’ I could hear a degree of self-deprecating humour in what he said. On the other hand, he had described us all right.