Against A Dark Background (43 page)

The crawler which had brought her here rumbled back on its tracks, over the clinker and the wind-drifted ramps of ash, reversing into the snow-tunnel. She watched its glinting metal carapace and maser-nostrilled snout slide back into the base of the snow-cliff and trundle back and up until the slope of the tunnel removed it from her view.

She turned and looked up the barely discernible slope of the volcano through veils of lifting steam and vapour towards the tumbled remains of the old geothermal station buildings, a set of fractured concrete blocks strewn haphazardly across the darkly gleaming lava field. Snow-covered pools dotted depressions in the lava, and in the distance - maybe twenty kilometres away the latest of the volcano’s vents piled white steam and smoke into the sky. She looked straight up. Overhead, the gas giant Nachtel hung hemispheric, pale gold and hazy orange in the sky, filling a quarter of it.

She pulled the hood of her jacket tighter against the thin, freezing wind, and set off across the fractured, grey-black lava field towards the ruined concrete buildings up the slope, clutching the empty book to her chest.

She was breathing hard when she got to the smashed blockhouses; the atmosphere was desperately thin, even though comparatively little effort was required to walk in the Ghost’s weak gravity. Agoraphobia was endemic in visitors to the planet-moon who ventured into the open; the air felt so thin and Nachtel could loom so huge above that it seemed each floating step must send the walker bounding away from the surface altogether, swept away into the green, subliming sky.

`Hello?’ she called.

Her voice echoed round the concrete walls of the first collapsed concrete building. Quakes had left all the thick-walled, windowless structures canted and listing, and the concrete apron they had been built upon had split and sundered, leaving jagged chunks of material sticking up like broken teeth, their rusted reinforcing rods tangling or torn out like failed brace-work.

She held the book to her chest and walked over the tilted slabs of concrete from building to building, having to stoop and use her free hand in places where the fractured geography of the ruins made walking, even in that low gravity, impossible.

The building furthest upslope was the largest in the complex; she stepped over the fallen lintel of its broad doorway.

Though the structure’s walls were intact, its roof had folded in the middle, then caved in and fallen to produce a shallow `V’ of concrete which slanted down into an ice-rimmed pool of standing water, which - perhaps still connected to the network of abandoned thermal pipe-work buried in the volcano - was warm enough to produce lazy strokes of steam in the calm, sub-zero air.

There was a narrow beach of black clinker gathered in one corner of the ruin, against the far wall.

There were two men there. She recognised them.

They were dressed only in swimming trunks and sat in the same two deck-chairs she remembered from the tanker. A flowery parasol stuck at a jaunty angle out of the black beach behind them, and between their seats there was a small folding-table holding bottles and glasses.

The one on the right stood up and waved to her.

`Delighted you could join us!’ he called, then took a couple of steps forward to the water and dived lithely in with barely a splash. The waves looked tall and odd as they moved across the pool.

She stuck her left hand in her pocket and walked along the gentle slope of the collapsed roof. The young, bald-headed man who’d dived into the water swam past her, grinning and waving. The other was drinking from a tall glass. He watched his companion as he reached the far end of the pool, where the doorway was, and then turned and started on his way back.

`Have a seat, doll,’ the young man said pleasantly, pointing at the deck-chair his twin had vacated. She looked at it, then looked around and sat. She kept her left hand in her pocket. The book was on her lap. She pushed the jacket’s hood back.

Ah; red,’ the young man said, smiling at her hair.
Very attractive; it suits you.’

His pale body looked trim and well muscled. She couldn’t see any cold bumps. His trunks were opti-cloth, and showed a few seconds of a tropical beach scene; golden sand, a single big roller and one graceful. surfer, forever climbing up onto her board and riding into a curling blue tunnel in the wave.

The other young man rose dripping out of the water and strolled up the beach, his skin steaming. His trunks showed somebody heli-diving, throwing themselves from a helicopter into a great fissure on some rocky coast, just as a huge pulse of surf surged frothing up the channel.

The surfer-trunked man reached under his deck-chair and threw his companion a towel. He dabbed at himself, then sat cross-legged on the dark clinker of the beach in front of them with the towel draped over his shoulders. He grinned at the other man.

`A pleasant journey here, I trust, Lady Sharrow?’ the one in the deckchair said.

She nodded slowly. `Acceptable,’ she told him.

I’m sorry,’ he said, tapping his forehead. He lifted a glass from the tray of spirit bottles on the table between him and her.
May I offer you a drink?’

`No, thank you,’ she said.

`May I . . .?’ the other one said, leaning forward and nodding at the book on her lap.

She tipped the thick book in her lap so that she could hold it with one gloved hand, and then handed it to him. He smiled tolerantly and accepted it.

It’s all right, Lady Sharrow,’ he said, opening the book’s metal casing.
You won’t be needing your gun.’

She left her hand in her pocket anyway, gripping the HandCannon. The one sitting on the beach looked briefly at the interior of the book, studying the title page and the diamond-leaf plates for a couple of seconds each. He smiled as he read the words engraved in the back of the casing, and held the book up so that his companion in the deck-chair could read the inscription too. They both laughed lightly.

Terrible, isn’t it?’ the one in the deck-chair said to her.
Such a waste. Ah well.’

The one holding the book tipped it upside down so that the paperdust fell out and drifted down to coat the black beach with a single swirled streak of grey.

`We are so careless with our treasures,’ he said. He closed the book and set it to one side.

`We mistake the priceless for the worthless,’ agreed the one in the deck-chair, topping up his glass from a bottle of trax spirit.

`I must say,’ the one on the beach said.
You don’t seem terribly surprised to find us here, Lady Sharrow.’ He sounded disappointed. He accepted a tall glass from his twin, then drank and smiled up at her.
We’d rather hoped you might be.’

She shrugged.

Typical, isn’t it?’ said the one in the chair to his twin.
Women only go quiet when you’d actually quite like to hear what they have to say.’

The other one looked at her and shook his head sadly.

Anyway,’ the man in the deck-chair said,
on behalf of the agency, and our clients - the Sad Brothers, in this case - thank you for the book. But now, as you can probably guess, we want you to look for the final Lazy Gun, if you don’t mind.’

She looked at him.

`No questions?’ he asked her. She shook her head. He laughed lightly.
And we thought you’d have so many. Ah well.’ He smiled broadly, waving his glass.
Oh, by the way, you did get our message, back in . . . ?’ He frowned, looked at the other young man.

`Pharpech,’ the one on the beach provided.

Ah yes, Pharpech,’ the young man said, pronouncing the word with exaggerated care and a sort of conspiratorial grimace.
Was our signal received?’

She thought before answering.
The necklace?’ she said.
Yes.’

The young man in the chair looked happy.

Super,’ he said.
Just so you didn’t think that being off-net meant being out of touch with us.’ He put his drink down and lay back in the chair, hands behind his head. His underarms were bare and smooth. The hairs on the rest of his body looked thin and white; only his blond eyebrows held any hint of colour. She looked at the one on the beach. Sunlight gleamed on the dome of his skull. He didn’t seem to have any cold bumps, either.

Well, don’t let us detain you, Lady Sharrow,’ he said. He patted the book.
Thank you for delivering the piece, as per contract. We’ll be in touch, perhaps. Perhaps not.’

`Try not to take too long,’ the one in the deck-chair said, still lying back soaking up the sparse sunlight, eyes closed.

`And don’t get caught,’ the other one chipped in.

She rose slowly to her feet. The one with the girl surfing on his trunks lay there, hands behind his naked scalp, eyes closed, legs slightly spread. The one sitting cross-legged on the beach leant forward, whistling, and started trying to build a little tower of black clinker, but it kept falling apart.

`Bon voyage,’ the one on the deck-chair said without opening his eyes.

She walked away for five steps, then turned. They were as they had been. She drew the HandCannon out and pointed it at the one with the hell-diving scene, which was playing across the stretched rear of his trunks just as it had been across their crumpled front.

She stood like that for nearly half a minute. Eventually the one she was aiming at glanced round at her, did a double-take and swivelled to face her.

He shaded his eyes, looking up at her. `Yes, Lady Sharrow?’

The one on the deck-chair opened his eyes, blinking and looking mildly surprised.

She said, `I was thinking of finding out the messy way whether you’re both androids.’

The two young men looked at each other. The one on the chair shrugged and said, `Androids? Why should it matter whether either of us is an android?’

She pointed the gun at him.
Call it simple curiosity,’ she said.
Or revenge for what happened in the tanker, and in Bencil Dornay’s house.’

`But we only hurt you,’ the one on the deck-chair protested.

Yes, and you were so rude to us in Stager,’ the beach one said, frowning tight-lipped at her and nodding emphatically.
All we’d been going to tell you was that we’d acquired the contract from the Sad Brothers and you’d be seeing us here if you got the book, but you were so horrible to us we didn’t.’

She kept the gun pointing at the one in the chair, then lowered it.

She aimed deliberately at the book, slowly closing one eye.

The man on the beach threw himself in front of the metal casing. The one in the chair leapt up, arms out towards her and his hands spread. He stepped over his twin, lying hunched up over the book.

Now, now, Lady Sharrow,’ he said.
There’s no need to turn vandal.’ He smiled nervously.

She took a deep breath, then pocketed the gun.

`I really can’t work you people out at all,’ she said.

The one standing facing her, trunks repeating the surfing scene, looked puzzled and pleased at the same time. She turned on her heel and walked away across the flaking concrete, back to the doorway.

Her skull and back tingled the whole way there, again waiting for a shot, or for the pain, but when she turned round in the doorway they were still in the same positions; one curled up, fetal, round the book casing, the other standing in front of his twin, watching her.

She walked down through the shattered ramps of concrete and the wilderness of fractured lava, back to the snow-cliff and the tunnel where the crawler was waiting.

The crawler took her back to Mine Seven; the weather stayed clear enough for her to take a flight to Trench City, where the hired spacecraft was waiting. She used its terminal to get in touch with the others. She couldn’t contact them directly, but there was a filed message from Zefla reporting all was well in SkyView. She left an entry in the personal columns of the Net Gazette letting them know she had made the delivery. Thinking of cryptic messages, she checked up on the Tile race results for the past week.

There had been one winner called Hollow Book, three days earlier, the day she’d left from Miykenns.

She scanned the other mounts mentioned, wondering if it could just all be coincidence. Shy Dancer? Wonder Thing? Little Resheril Goes North? Sundry Floozies? Borrowed Sunset? Molgarin’s Keep? Right Way Round? Mash That Meat? Scrap The Whole Thing? Crush That Butt? Bip!? . . . None of the other names seemed to mean anything. Unless Shy Dancer was another reference to Bencil Dornay, of course . . . and Wonder Thing could refer to the Lazy Gun, and . . . She gave up; if you thought hard enough there could be significance in every name or none, and there was no way of knowing where to draw the line.

She kept thinking about the crash and the time she’d spent in the mining hospital. She tried hacking into the relevant data banks from Trench, but the war-time records weren’t accessible from outside the mining complex where they were held. She left the meter running on the hired spacecraft Wheeler Dealer (and left its two-woman crew, Tenel and Choss Esrup, to lose more money in Trench’s casinos and game-bars) and took a tube train to the First Cut mine, where she’d been hospitalised originally, after the crash.

The First Cut mine had been the first large-scale mining operation to be set up on the Ghost. The supply of heavy metals in its immediate area had been mostly worked out millennia earlier and the big companies had moved to lusher pastures, leaving smaller concerns to work the thin veins of ores still left. First Cut’s accommodation warrens had been largely abandoned, an underground city reduced to the population of a town.

Ysul Demri,’ she said, sitting in the seat the clerk indicated.
I’m interested in the part the Ghost played in the Five Per Cent War and I’d like access to the complex records for the time.’

The clerk was a big, blotchily skinned woman who ran her section of the First Cut warren’s administrative affairs from a booth in a small, steamy cafe in Drag Three, one of the warren’s main hall-streets. People walked past outside, some pushing trolleys and stalls; in the centre of the street, small cars hummed past, warners chiming. The clerk watched her with one eye; the other was kept closed while she lid-screened.