Читать книгу Moonsteed - Manda Benson - Страница 5

Chapter 1

It’s easy to fall off a horse in three twenty-fifths g. Verity dug knees hard into the saddle as the horse veered and leapt to clear a crater. On the other hand, at least hitting the ground doesn’t hurt so much.

Gibbous Jupiter cast its ruddy, mucky light over Callisto’s black plain. Three-hundred-foot towers gleamed like obsidian, their blunt edges eroded by eons of sublimation. The lamps on the horse’s breastplate and Verity’s helmet cast a quivering figure-of-eight on the ground ahead. It was difficult to see the other horse and its rider lost in the dark terrain and the oblique shadows of the ice protrusions.

The research base’s ANT was tracking the spy and informed Verity his horse still ran toward the scarp. She looked over her shoulder at the base on the horizon and the man riding beside and slightly behind her. His name was John Aaron, a dull, ordinary name which suited him. Verity didn’t know him, but she’d noticed him staring at her on several occasions during training sessions. Something about him creeped her out.

Verity shouted back to him after checking the ground ahead of her horse was free of obstacles. “It looks like we’re in for a hard ride. Whatever happens, we mustn’t shoot him. The voltage to the nervous system will mean the Inquisitor won’t be able to get anything out of him. Ideally we need him alive.”

Aaron yelled, “Understood!” He sat hunched forward, his weight not in the stirrups properly, and behind the visor, his skin was ashen.

“Are you all right?”

He inclined his head to show his eyes, triggering an uneasy sense in Verity, and nodded.

“Keep close to me.”

She pressed her heels in and urged the horse faster. Clouds of vapor rushed from its nostrils with each exhalation, sweeping behind and forming ice on Verity’s knees and the armor protecting the animal’s neck. The fleeing horse raced far ahead toward the edge of the scarp. The spy was taking the long way around. Verity knew the region well. This was not the only route.

“You follow him,” Verity ordered Aaron. “I’m going to see if I can cut him off.”

She turned the horse toward the base of the scarp. This area was geologically newer than the old, dark plain behind her. An impact soon before the moon had been terraformed had blown a crater in the top of the scarp and forced liquid water up through the surface of the surrounding area, freezing it into jagged ice formations. A pale mountain reached into the sky ahead. Facets of jutting ice glittered from the heights in the russet light. She braced herself again as the horse jumped a crack in the stratum. The lamps illuminated more cracks, some of them wide and sprouting ice spears. The horse cleared them easily. Verity began to calculate the course up through obstacles she could barely discern.

At her thought-prompt to the horse’s cybernetic armor, razor-sharp crampons extruded from the shoes to grip the stratum. Verity seated herself firmly, digging knees in as she gave the thought-prompt for the horse to jump. The first leap carried them twenty feet up to a ledge above some pointed stalagmites. A few beats of a canter, then the next jump, and the next, and in this way Verity guided the horse toward the summit. The horse moved as one with her, and she felt the ice under its feet and saw the world through its eyes, a wide, panoramic vision strangely devoid of red hues. The horse could feel no fear, for the part of its brain that processed fear had been cauterized. It would never refuse a jump, but it relied on Verity’s leadership and judgment to keep them both safe in doing so.

Higher now, the crest must be close. Cold, arid air cut into their lungs. Another jump to a narrow track leading up. Spindles of pale ice blocked the way over to the other side and their descent. Verity pushed the horse forward and gave the command to jump, making it tuck its forelegs in close to its breastplate and pull back its head. Ice shattered with a noise like breaking glass, fragments bouncing off the armor and spinning through the air like tiny daggers. As the horse extended its forelegs for the landing, a disembodied pain lanced up from somewhere below and forward of where she sat. A splinter of ice must have found its way through the front left shoe’s protection, into the tender frog.

They landed on a narrow area, momentum still carrying them forward. Verity had to calculate the next jump immediately to a ledge thirty feet down. Upturned icy knives sailed below. Verity fought to suppress the pain, reassuring the horse and supporting it with the strength of her mind. Hoofs down, throwing her forward in the saddle, leaving just enough time to recover before the next jump. There lay the track, a hundred or so feet below, and along it raced another rider. She couldn’t get down there without another jump. She found a place and directed the horse to it. Turning toward their quarry, they made the final leap toward the path that ran along the top of the scarp and the edge of the crater. They landed running, the man on the fleeing horse yards ahead. Adrenaline surged, setting up a pounding in her chest and an aching rush through limbs as Verity focused on the spy’s back, the bleed-back through her connection sustaining the horse against its pain a little longer. White ice and black dust raced by, each stride bringing them closer to him.

Verity sat forward in the saddle and gripped with her knees. “Halt! In the name of the Meritocracy!”

The man’s long, loose hair obscured his face as he crouched over his horse’s neck, his thighs tensing. Verity realized what he was doing and swerved her own horse aside as the other pivoted and kicked out, its hoofs missing Verity’s horse’s ribs by six inches.

Unbalanced by the maneuver, Verity clutched at the reins with her left hand while her right flailed for balance as the ice rushed under the horse. Its hogged mane offered no purchase. She gave the thought-prompt and the horse made a short jump in the direction she leaned, resettling her in the saddle and drawing level with their quarry.

“I’m armed!” Verity shouted. “Stop and you won’t be hurt!”

The man’s shoulders twisted. His hand stretched toward something on his belt, a weapon. Without thinking, Verity reached to her left hip and grabbed the handle of her katana. The man’s head turned at the ring of steel. The blade rushed through the air, and Verity caught only a glimpse of the man’s fearful expression before head and shoulders parted company and the face disappeared under a whirl of hair and blood. The horse under the man’s body stumbled, its head falling and its legs giving way under it. It fell on its side to crash into the wall of sharp ice bordering the rim of the crater, and the man’s body flew out of the saddle and disappeared over the edge. The horse screamed.

Verity pulled on the reins and leaned back, giving her horse the signal to stop as the fallen one lashed out with its feet, fearing its flailing hoofs would foul with her own animal’s legs and bring it down too.

The horse had come to a stop lying on its side, and it made no attempt to rise. Its head twisted on its neck, ears back, eyes rolled to the whites. It groaned. A terrible broadcast of pain penetrated her senses. Verity kicked her feet out of the stirrups and dismounted. Her katana was too bloodied to be re-sheathed, so she laid it on the ground before approaching.

Blood spread rapidly across the ground beneath the horse, solidifying before Verity’s eyes. She pulled off her helmet, the skin of her face tightening as sweat froze where its cheek plates had been. She severed her connection to her horse before bending to unlatch the faceplate on the injured one’s armor, revealing the gem-like surface of the neural implant in the center of the forehead. Reaching her other hand to the implant on her own forehead, she tuned herself to the horse’s signal.

A torrent of pure agony assailed her. She fell on one knee with a sudden intake of breath, and fought to see through the pain to run diagnostics. Right lung: punctured. Ribs: broken. Blood loss... The damage was too severe. She had only one thing left to offer this horse: mercy.

She pulled the gun from her belt and put her finger to the trigger. Gasping and doubled over from the icy spasms that convulsed through the horse, she got to her feet and pointed the gun at the implant in its head.

The gun discharged with a snap and the horse’s neck fell limp. Electricity crackled briefly through the cybernetic armor. The horse’s signal went out and the pain stopped. Verity dropped the gun and stood bent forward with her hands on her knees, a horrible, guilty relief overwhelming her. She closed her eyes and her breath came out as a whimpering sob. That fool of a spy. Why had he not stopped when she had warned him? Now both he and the horse–an innocent who had not asked for this–were dead because of his choice. What could it be he had taken that was worth that? She’d have to find his head and take that back. Farron could still retrieve whatever information he needed, provided she hurried.

“Don’t move.” The voice came from behind her. “Stand up and turn around slowly.”

Verity opened her eyes. Her hunched-over shadow stood out against a trembling cone of light from a source behind. She looked over her shoulder. John Aaron stood there, her katana in his hand and pointed at her. Frozen blood coated its blade. Beyond him her horse still stood, and his horse a little farther back along the path. She had disconnected from hers when she’d connected to the injured animal. She couldn’t sense it or use it now.

She remembered all the times she’d noticed him staring at her. He must have been assigned here around the same time as her, although she’d never met him properly before. What was he doing? She couldn’t recall ever having had dealings with him before, only those cold looks from a distance. Could it be something she’d done that had affected John Aaron in some way she’d not realized? Verity knew Sergeant Black didn’t like her, but that was because of what had gone on in the base and when their paths had crossed before she’d been transferred here. With this man, no such history existed.

She straightened slowly and turned to face him, trying to keep her voice steady. “I’m your sergeant. That’s my sword. Is there a problem?”

“You’re the problem, that’s what.” His eyes burned with righteous passion behind his visor. “You and those scientists who think they’re gods. I wasn’t alive to stop the four that came before you, but I’ve stopped him.” He gave a brief jerk toward the path behind with his head. “And I can stop you, and after you, I’ll stop however many more it takes. Destiny has decided that your life ends here and now, Zeta.”

Verity forced saliva into her suddenly dry mouth. It wasn’t something she’d done. It was something she was. How had he found out? She put the question aside for now and thought quickly through what her training had given her. He was some sort of extremist, a denier of science, an idealist. He had not killed her when he had the opportunity, when she stood with her back to him to deal with the horse. Even now, rather than shooting her with his gun, he was possessed with the irony of killing Verity with her own katana. He was an idiot who valued ideas before practicality. He didn’t have the training the Magnolia Order had given her. Words would unnerve him. Tactics could unhinge him.

“That sword’s main strength is in one’s opponent not seeing it until it’s too late.” Her voice quavered when she spoke. Did he hear her fear?

Aaron’s eyes narrowed. “Lofty words for one so young.”

“I am the child of Caleb. I trained in Torrmede. I’m Pilgrennon’s blood and Blake’s direct descendant.” If she could remain calm while intimidating or angering him, it would make things easier for her. An irrational mind does not fight rationally.

“Jananin Blake was the Antichrist! Lucifer’s daughter! And Torrmede is on another world!” He raised the sword and Verity brought up her arm, blocking the blade with the bracer protecting her forearm as it came down. She twisted toward him, using the motion of her shoulders to launch a punch into his chin, dislodging his helmet and exposing his throat. He reeled back and Verity sensed a tremor through the ground, a shadow over her. His horse reared, hoofs kicking out for her. She grabbed his armor at the collar and spun on her heel, interposing his body between herself and the horse. It swerved too late, and its hoof struck him in the chest with a crack of ribs. Verity hurled him to the ground, landing with her knee on his diaphragm. She drew her wakizashi from under her right arm and pressed its edge against his neck. Her thumb dug into the tendons of his wrist as she fumbled at the fastening of his gauntlet until he cried out and dropped the katana.

She punched him in the jaw so his helmet fell off and she could see his shameful face. Tears welled in his eyes and his skin was a bloodless white. Vapor left his nostrils in short, rapid breaths. Verity put her thumb to the neural shunt in his forehead, disconnecting him from his horse.

Verity’s knees trembled as she got up from him. She took a deep breath and said, “Iaido means ‘the way of drawing the sword,’ not ‘the way of parading about waving a sword.’ Now put your hands together!”

“If I don’t succeed here today, someone else will finish the job for me.” John Aaron snarled, but he lifted his hands weakly and clasped them, fingers interlocked. Verity picked up her katana and tried to wipe it on her cloak, but the blood had frozen to the blade. She re-sheathed it, making a mental note that she needed to take it out and clean it before the stain had time to thaw. There was a climbing rope in the gear bag behind her saddle, so she used it to tie Aaron’s hands together.

Verity picked up her helmet and searched for the spy’s head, sighting it some distance away, hair splayed out on the ground. She ran to it in great leaping strides. The cheek had frozen to the ice and left a graze on the skin when she pulled it up. Already the eyes had become glazed and vacant, lids drooping. He would have lost consciousness probably seconds after his head hit the ice. For how long could a brain be subjected to ischaemia before permanent damage started to occur? She remembered learning something like that in Torrmede. It seemed a long time gone. Verity put the question to the base’s ANT, through its radio mast somewhere behind the ice spire. It retrieved the data from its banks almost immediately: four minutes maximum, assuming optimum reperfusion.

Arrays of Neuro Technology could get information for her, or run probability calculations, but they couldn’t make decisions. She would have to choose what was best. Killing him had not been an ideal contingency, but running through what had happened again as she strode back to John Aaron, she still saw no alternative. She’d told him to stop, twice. He’d reached for a weapon. It had been her or him.

Aaron whimpered like a six-year-old when she grabbed him by the neck of his cloak and ripped through the fabric of it with her wakizashi. Turning to a stand of ice spikes, she raised her knee to her chest and brought her heel down hard into the heart of the formation, smashing it. She gathered the shards into the cloak, placed the head in the center, and folded the cloth around it to form an ice pack. Incorrect freezing damaged cells, but she hoped the ice would only chill the brain, with bone and skin insulating it.

Her horse stood with its right front hoof lifted slightly. Aaron’s horse was uninjured and would be faster. Verity synced herself to it. She put the cloak with the man’s head in it in the bag behind the saddle. Now she had a problem. Leading the injured horse back with John Aaron on it would slow her. She needed to get the spy’s head back to the base as fast as possible. Leaving the horse here in a sweat where it would freeze to death would be irresponsible, and she couldn’t abandon Aaron to the same fate, even if his actions made him a criminal.

“Stand up and come over here!” Verity moved to the injured horse and reached across to take hold of its bridle.

Aaron’s mouth distorted with pain as he struggled to his feet, a tear dribbling from his eye and freezing as it tracked down his face.

He came forward, holding up his clasped and bound hands as though he were praying to his magic god. Verity lashed his wrists to the pommel of the injured horse’s saddle.

“Now get on and take the horse back to the base! Let them deal with you there when it’s done.”

He got into the saddle as Verity returned to the other horse. “But I’m not calibrated to this horse! I can’t ride it with no interface on this terrain.”

“Then learn to like people did in the old days, or fall and die.” As she adjusted the stirrups, Verity glanced at the dead horse’s bulk and the sheet of frozen blood under it. “Noble death is for the noble.”

She jumped up, caught the front and back of the saddle and swung her leg over. The horses were all eighteen hands high, and she’d never have mounted them on Earth without standing on something.

From behind her, Aaron shouted, “Waste of time expecting compassion from you! You’re made by man and not by God. You don’t have a soul!”

Verity turned her horse and set off back along the track around the spire. She urged the horse to as fast a gallop as she dared on this narrow path with sharp ice debris bordering its edges. For what seemed like an age they weaved along the path, concentrating so fiercely it felt dangerous even to risk an instant to blink. At last the shard-like outcrops of ice dwindled, and the treacherous terrain of the eruptions around the newer crater gave way to the older dark plain of the great Valhalla crater with its knobbly spires blunted by erosion. The horse galloped flat out toward the research base on the horizon. Verity counted seconds.

The gates and the walls of the compound loomed ahead. Verity rode straight through the courtyard and into the stables. Hoofs thundered on the flooring in the main corridor. A bespectacled man stood ahead of her, a hold-all in each hand. He was young, broad framed, tall and slightly plump with a sickly demeanor and an expression suggesting he was about to throw up.

“Get out of my way!” Verity drove the horse into the man’s shoulder, knocking him against the wall. She didn’t look back. She would have felt it had the horse trampled the man, and it was his fault for obstructing the corridor.

A woman in a lab coat met her at the corridor junction. “Take this to Inquisitor Farron, at once!” Verity pulled the head in the cloak out of the bag and slung it at her. The woman turned and ran down the corridor toward the laboratories.

Her connection with the ANT told her the four minutes was up just about now. The brain should still be in reasonable enough condition for Farron to get the information from it, whatever information that was. Perhaps he would also find why the spy had been prepared to lose his own life and kill a perfectly good horse over it. Now the race was over, her and the horse’s breathing came loud and fast in the corridor, and the heaving of the animal’s ribs pushed her feet out with each breath.

An uncomfortable tension knotted her stomach, refusing to be reasoned away. Aaron’s words returned to her: If I don’t succeed today, someone else will finish the job for me. What did that mean? Was it something to do with the spy? Could he have been involved too? Could it be that a conspiracy was afoot, and some unknown number of people on this base plotted against Verity just because of the way she had been born? She queried the ANT for John Aaron’s location and it came back negative. He shouldn’t be out of range. He should at least be off the scarp by now, so where was he? There was no record on the ANT’s database of any thought-prompts having been received from him since she’d left him, and the ANT’s scanning equipment could not locate him or the horse anywhere within its range.

Why had the spy not surrendered? What secret was so vital it could be worth dying over? Verity was tired. She would have liked to have seen Farron and found out if the data in the man’s brain had survived and could be extracted, but attending to the horse took priority. She flicked her feet out of the stirrups and slid off. Taking hold of its bridle, she headed back toward the stable block.

It was times like this she missed Gecko most. His name was Lieutenant Dwayne Uxbridge, but everyone called him Gecko after some incident in his past of which Verity had never discovered the full details. Probably it was to do with his controlled, patient manner, what his squadron members called cold bloodedness. Verity had always suspected that whole squadron laughed at her behind her back. They seemed to find endless amusement in the phenomenon of someone like Gecko carrying on with the likes of her.

At the time Verity had never thought of her arrangement with him as being anything more than two people scratching one another’s mutual itches, and there had never been any expectation from either of them for it to last–it never did in the Sky Forces. Her area of expertise had been in animal handling, so after she’d been promoted to sergeant, she’d been relocated to the new base on Callisto. Gecko’s specialism was machines, and the Dennis Terraforming Company was paying him to oversee a survey of one of Saturn’s moons.

She stroked the horse’s neck, now wet with thawed sweat and condensation as they passed through the stable doors.

It wasn’t just the sex Verity missed, although Gecko had turned out to have surprising stamina and appetite for it, given the impassive attitude he presented to the outside world. Since they’d parted, Verity had come to miss his great tolerance for being shouted at–an ability to sit calmly and humor her while she raged and lost her temper at him over something that always seemed trivial afterward. Other people, it seemed, so easily took umbrage over a harsh word or an abrupt comment, but not Gecko.

Verity wanted to send word to him, to tell him what had happened here. Perhaps he could give some words of reassurance that would make what had happened feel less of a shock. She had already sent him two messages in the three months she’d been on Callisto, but he’d replied to neither. She sometimes worried about something having befallen him out there on Titan, but more often she feared he had simply moved on from the past, and his refusal to contact her was merely a hint to her to do the same.