Chapter 13.
It was the same prison cell. Manda was sure of it: the same redbrick walls, the same dull globe of light set into the high ceiling. That alone was enough to raise a sick feeling of panic in her stomach.
She glanced at the p.r.o.ne form of the Doctor. "Shouldn"t we be trying to get away, or something?"
The Doctor slowly raised his knees to the level of his chest, held them there with his arms and began rocking back and forth. "I think they"ll come to us, in time."
As he spoke, the light in the ceiling flickered and went out again. Manda shivered, though it wasn"t cold. "What did you do to the Recruiter?" she asked.
The faint sound of the Doctor"s body rocking back and forth continued in the darkness for a while. Then he said, "I was trying to reprogram it. Or at least, a part of it."
Manda frowned. "What"s "reprogram"?"
"Something you do to a certain type of machine to make it do what you want it to do, instead of whatever it was doing in the first place. Unfortunately in this case the operation didn"t work." He paused. "Actually it usually doesn"t work, but there you are."
The light came back on again: Manda heard footsteps outside, followed by shouts. The Doctor sprang up and leaped towards the door. He stood there for perhaps half a minute, with his ear against the metal, then frowned, sprang back, and stepped quickly across the cell to Manda.
He grabbed her arm, put his face close to hers. "It"s your brother, but don"t show him that you recognize him!" he whispered urgently. Manda opened her mouth to object, to question why, to question how it could be Charles, but the Doctor only repeated, "Just don"t say anything! It could be-"
He broke off as the door swung open. Manda saw a man in a uniform standing there. His uniform was spattered with blood, as was his face. There was a revolver in his hand.
Manda had stared at him for a full five seconds before she realized that beneath the blood and the dirt and the uniform was indeed her brother Charles.
She opened her mouth to call his name, but the Doctor squeezed her arm, hard enough to hurt. Don"t show him that Don"t show him that you recognize him. you recognize him.
"Sergeant-Doctor" began Charles.
"I"m afraid not," said the Doctor. "The uniform is borrowed.
As is Manda"s."
"Borrowed?" Charles rubbed his forehead, looked at the blood and grime on his hand. "Why are you here? Why did you attempt to destroy the Recruiter?"
"We"re trying to end the war."
Charles rubbed his forehead again. "End -? You can end a battle. How can you end a war? War is a permanent condition." He looked around the cell, stared at Manda. She stared back, desperately wanting to speak, but afraid to say anything. Finally Charles said, "You"ll have to come with me.
The Recruiter wants to see you. It wants an explanation."
The Doctor smiled and doffed his hat. "I"ll be very pleased to give one," he said. "And I"ll be very pleased to meet the Recruiter."
They were marching through the streets of a dead city.
It had been dead a long time, Benny decided. The buildings were not so much ruined, as eroded. Mounds of vegetation, damp with morning dew, half-concealed the lines of brickwork underneath them. Wind-sculpted outcrops of grey rock, examined closely, showed the marks of earlier, less random, sculptors, faces which might have been insectoid or human, Biune or Ogron, the details sanded away by time.
The city had been constructed on a triumphal scale: a viaduct ran for kilometres, slowly fading into the grey dawn mist; something that might have been a stadium, its walls reduced to a circle of irregular hummocks decorated with purple-leaved creepers, would once have held hundreds of thousands; a branching structure of high walls made of glinting black obsidian covered an area as large as the average s.p.a.ceport. The walls were full of holes, but they were too round and regular to be the work of random erosion.
Benny turned to one of her skeletal captors. "What are those?" she asked, pointing.
"Walls with holes," said the insectoid. "They provide good cover for defenders."
"Yes, I can see that. But what were they before?"
"Before what?"
"Before the war started?"
"How can a war start?"
Benny stared at the pale, bony face of her captor, the bulging forehead and the bulbous cherry-coloured eyes. She suddenly became aware of how tired she was, how thirsty, how much her legs ached. "The war must have started some time," she said carefully. "It can"t have gone on for ever."
Her captor tilted his head to one side, apparently considering this complex remark. Finally it said, "The period of time is fourteen hundred years."
Benny swallowed. She wondered how long a local year was: the usual range for habitable planets was between six months and three years, Earth time. But at the minimum estimate it was far too long, impossibly long for any war of this type to continue, even with an endless supply of recruits.
Yet the time period the alien had given agreed with the evidence provided by the state of the city: it looked as if it had been ruined for several centuries at least.
"Why doesn"t the war end?" she asked at last.
"It will end when one side is totally destroyed. Then we, the True People, will supervise the victory arrangements."
Benny frowned. The answer wasn"t really a reply to her question. But it was interesting.
"What victory arrangements?" she asked.
"The departure of the Recruiter."
"So when the Recruiter departs, the war will end?"
Again the insectoid tilted its head on one side. "No," it said after a while. "When the war ends, the Recruiter will be able to depart. The means to end the war will be the means for the Recruiter to depart."
"What means?"
"The successful weapon."
"What successful weapon?"
"The weapon that is defined by the Recruiter as being successful."
Benny shook her head slowly. This conversation was making less and less sense as it went on. It reminded her of something, but she couldn"t think what. If she could have a drink - preferably something with at least thirty per cent alcohol - she"d probably be able to work it out. But as it was, all she wanted to do was sit down and go to sleep.
She glanced over her shoulder, saw Gabrielle trotting along, cradling her injured hand, her brown eyes watching the landscape carefully. Perhaps she was hoping to escape.
Having seen the way their captors handled the primitive rifles they carried, Benny didn"t fancy her chances.
Ahead, a hill-sized mound appeared out of the mist.
Shadowy objects that might have been giant guns projected from the top of it. In front of it were two large buildings on stilts, with smoking chimneys. As she got close to them, Benny realized with a shock that they weren"t buildings, but machines: two mammoth ground-engines, six-legged, each with a gun turret mounted on top of the boiler.
The guns were both pointing directly at her.
She stopped dead in the middle of the track. One of her captors prodded her in the back with a rifle. "You won"t be attacked. The machines are ours: they protect the Recruiter."
Benny watched the guns on the ground-engines swivel to follow her as she walked between them. Steam hissed from the top of the huge legs. She stared at them, muttered, "Wouldn"t take many of those to finish the war."
Then the sense of what the insectoid had said came through to her. "The machines are yours, and they guard the Recruiter?" she asked. "So you work for the Recruiter?"
"No," said the insectoid instantly. "We are the Q"ell. We are the True People. The Recruiter works for us."
"This is fantastic!" yelled Chris, for at least the fourteenth time since the beginning of the flight. He leaned over the side again, looked at the ground below, the moonlit fields broken by pools of silver mist, the lights of the city glittering ahead. "I can"t believe it!" He leaned forward, yelled into Roz"s ear.
"This is much better than a flitter! You can sense the motion - the open air - "
"The freezing cold!" Roz yelled back. "The stink of petrol!"
Chris frowned at her, and pulled at the strap of the flying helmet that the pilot had given him, which was a little too tight. He looked over the side of the plane again, then up at Martineau"s friend Emile Chevillon in the c.o.c.kpit, perhaps three metres forward and above them, below the upper wing.
The "pa.s.senger compartment" was nothing more than the old gunner"s nest on the plane, with the gun removed to make way for the extra seat. Roz in fact had the better position, facing backwards, protected from the worst of the slipstream by the bulk of the fuselage.
"Don"t you think it"s exhilarating?" he shouted. "I feel -"
He broke off as Roz jumped forward against her straps, pointed over the side. "What the h.e.l.l"s that?"
Chris looked down, but couldn"t see what she was pointing at.
"Another plane! It just appeared out of thin air!" She took hold of the cord that Chevillon had told them to pull in an emergency. Looking up, Chris saw the pilot look over his shoulder at them, then sharply up in the direction that Roz had been pointing.
The plane tilted to one side, giving Chris a dizzying view of the landscape below, and of the other plane, uncomfortably close. A machine-gun mounted on its wing flickered briefly. There was a series of metallic thuds, and Chris saw a line of dark holes appear on the sloping metal of the fuselage between the pa.s.senger compartment at the c.o.c.kpit.
The last two holes were in Chevillon"s back.
Chris heard a m.u.f.fled scream of pain. The plane lurched even further to the side, and the dark bulk of the other plane pa.s.sed overhead, no more than fifty metres away. Chris looked frantically round for a weapon - any weapon - but there was nothing.
Then the plane was gone. Chevillon, incredibly, was still struggling with the controls, or appeared to be: the plane swung back into an approximation of level flight.
There was a rainbow flash ahead, like coloured lightning, and another biplane appeared, the propeller facing them, the machine-gun sparking to life even as Chris instinctively tried to dodge aside.
Bullets whistled past his ears, then their own plane began to climb and the enemy disappeared below. Chris looked up at Chevillon, saw him hunched forward with blood trickling from his back.
"Chevillon"s hurt," he yelled at Roz. "If he loses consciousness we"ll crash."
Roz stared at him for a moment, then began unbuckling her straps.
"What ?" began Chris. Then he realized, and pushed her back. "Let me do it. I flew something like this once." Not much like this, he thought. A Zlifon box-kite, solar-powered, slow and lazy. But it had at least had a propeller.
Before Roz could argue, Chris had unstrapped himself and was climbing over her seat, scrabbling to find purchase in the bullet-holes in the sloping fuselage.
The plane rolled to one side; Chris slid across the smooth metal and almost fell. He wrapped one arm around a wing strut and at the same instant felt Roz"s hands clamp around his ankles. He found himself looking down at the lights of the city, now directly below. He could see one of the enemy planes, wings pale in the moonlight, climbing towards them. Fighting against the buffeting wind and the slow heaving of the plane, Chris hauled himself across the fuselage and grabbed two of the wing struts. Ahead, Chevillon was hunched forward over the controls, the top of his head resting against the frame of the c.o.c.kpit, his face looking down.
"Let me go!" he shouted back at Roz.
But Roz didn"t hear him, and didn"t let go: Chris struggled, kicked, at last felt her hands release his ankles.
Quickly he hauled himself into the c.o.c.kpit, cramming his body alongside Chevillon"s. The wooden frame dug into his back.
Chevillon was still gripping the stick, his hands shaking.
He put his mouth close to Chris"s ear, said, "Climb! Climb!"
Then he broke into a fit of coughing. Chris could see blood dribbling from his mouth. Helplessly, he patted the man"s shoulder, then took a grip on the stick, placing his own hand over Chevillon"s. He noticed that Chevillon"s free hand was loosely gripping a gun; he touched the gun, glanced at the man, who nodded weakly, then sagged against the side of the c.o.c.kpit.
Chris took the gun and quickly put it away in an inner pocket, then turned his attention to the controls. The nose of the plane was already pointing upwards: they had been climbing for some time. He peered over the side and saw the two other planes, more than a thousand metres below and visibly receding. Either they"d given up or - more likely - they simply couldn"t climb as fast as this plane. He saw now why the pilot had told him to climb.
"How are we going to land?" he shouted at Chevillon.
There was no response. Chris looked at the man"s head, hanging slackly over the side, at the same moment felt Chevillon"s grip on the stick loosen. Chris"s stomach churned as the plane began to drop.
He tried to get a proper grip on the stick, but ChevilIon"s hands were in the way. He pushed them away and felt the pilot"s body flop back in its straps. With a sick feeling, Chris realized that Chevillon was probably dead.
The plane was still dropping, and was now beginning to roll. Desperately Chris pushed Chevillon"s feet aside from the floor pedals, tried to put his own in their place. There wasn"t room. The plane began to tip to one side.