Something Coming Through

52. Local Grid

Mangala | 30 July

Vic saw it all. Saw Nevers grasp Cal McBride’s hand and jerk him forward, saw Nevers place his left hand on McBride’s breast pocket. A flare of light like a door opening onto summer sunshine; then three gunshots. McBride was down, twisting on the ground, and one of his goons was also down, two bloody holes ripped in the chest of his pea coat. Nevers was aiming the gun he’d grabbed from McBride at the second goon, who let his pistol drop and spread his hands.

‘Take care of him,’ Nevers told Vic. ‘And be quick. We have an appointment with a ghost.’

Vic moved forward and scooped up the goon’s pistol; when he stepped back, Nevers was gone. Vic searched the goon and hogtied him by cuffing his right ankle to his left wrist, checked the one Nevers had shot — no pulse, fixed dilated pupils — and tossed his pistol over the edge of the drop. McBride was clasping his knee, blood oozing around his fingers, face tight with pain. He wasn’t going anywhere, poor guy. A glint of gold on the ground nearby. Vic scooped up the thread and took off downhill, after Nevers.

There was a kind of track winding down the steep slope, the bed of an old stream. Vic saw a fugitive gleam below: Nevers at the bottom of the slope, following a star that drifted through the air ahead of him. Vic pulled off his face mask and shouted Nevers’s name, but his voice was torn away by the wind and Nevers didn’t look around as he disappeared into the tumble of house-sized boulders at the base of the slope.

Vic picked his way down dry stone chutes, falling several times, once sliding a long way down a slant of wind-polished rock and slamming against a boulder at the bottom. The impact bruised his hip and knocked the breath out of him. As he lay there, sweating inside his down jacket, one elbow throbbing where he’d banged it, he heard three gunshots, hard and distinct above the whine of the wind.

He pushed to his feet, danced down a gravel slope, and followed the stream bed’s meandering path through the chaos of boulders, tracking bootprints and a muddle of small and large gouges he supposed had been made by biochines. He glimpsed two prone shapes through the blowing dust, raised his pistol and advanced cautiously, found two men in red quilted jackets, one on his back, one curled up, both dead.

An assault rifle lay nearby, a military model with a skeletal carbon-fibre stock and vents in its short barrel. Vic scooped it up and went on, climbing a sand dune that crossed the stream bed, following the deep bootprints in its concave surface. At the crest, he saw a cluster of little flat-topped hills ahead, ghostly in the haze and blowing clouds of dust. Mounds. The Elder Culture site.

Vic slid down the face of the dune in a welter of sand, sand in his pockets, in his boots, picked himself up, and saw someone crouched behind a shelf of rock about a hundred metres away.

It was Nevers, squatting on his haunches with an assault rifle laid across his thighs, field glasses in his right hand. As Vic came towards him, he looked up and said, ‘The bad guys are definitely having a spot of bother with the local fauna. Biochines all over the shop.’

‘Where’s your friend?’

‘In the local grid. We can put an end to this now,’ Nevers said. He stuffed the field glasses into a pocket and stood, his right hand gripping the barrel of the assault rifle.

Vic eased off the safety of his own rifle. ‘We’re not going anywhere until you tell me exactly what’s going down,’ he said, and there was a flash in the distance, a lightning track leaping up into the sky, there and gone. Shazam. A fucking magic trick. He blinked searing green after-images from his eyes, saw a tiny spark falling.

The drone. He’d left it on autopilot and someone had spotted it and shot it down.

Nevers was running towards the mounds. Vic raised the rifle, sighted on his back. But he wasn’t that kind of guy. The kind who shot down fleeing suspects. He took a deep breath and ran too.