Blue Remembered Hills (ch15)

[igenlode]

I was a bit stuck on a title for this chapter, but it was of course inevitable once I'd remembered my Blake's 7!

Thoughts on my 'Swedish story' still ticking away and not quite at a halt, although not going so far as encompassing a title; I wasted a vast amount of time trying to establish whether Raoul and Christine would be able to wed hastily in Sweden under 19th century law (historical studies from the English-speaking world being obsessed with divorce and the Status of Women to the exclusion of providing any useful information on what conditions you had to fulfil in order to get married in the first place), and decided they almost certainly couldn't. And apparently the widespread belief in historical fiction that a ship's captain could marry people outside the three-mile limit was just that -- fiction...

I was -- shamefully -- taken aback to learn that Sweden and Norway were in fact a single kingdom throughout the 19th century, which accounts for Leroux treating them as interchangeable in the novel; not a case of his ignorance, but ours :-(

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Chapter 15: Rumours of Death

MURDER.

Communications buzzed with it. Alerts ran out across the planet. Dispatches were encrypted to Space Command. Sentries neglected their duties to discuss it; surveillance officers, chasing shadows, missed the purposeful movement of bodies of men. Dar Ogar, moving among them, heard the news and had no reason to doubt it. A Federation commander meant nothing to him, and he spared a moment’s wry gratitude for the distraction — the boy had just made his life a great deal easier.

He was sorry, in passing, for Cris and her gentle heart. But he regretted far more the loss of her insider access to the dockyard systems which left him doing the same job himself, by brute force, from the outside. The storm was beginning to pass over already in its journey up towards the mountains. The optimum moment for the attack was soon. His attention was taken up almost entirely in engineering the necessary security breach, and Cris and her affairs could occupy no more than a fleeting thought.

MURDER.

The casual disappearance of known trouble-makers was one thing. The occasional trooper who went space-happy and shot up his messmates was another. A little quiet poisoning among the upper echelons on a domestic basis was... not exactly expected, but tolerated discreetly when it occurred. The violent murder of a senior officer as part of a blatant breach of security, however, was quite another matter. The Federation could not be seen to be vulnerable, least of all within its own ranks.

But personnel on the spot had panicked. The news was out beyond the possibility of a cover-up, and giving birth to its own embroideries and conspiracies as it spread.

The Liberator’s exhausted crew, gleaning unencrypted transmissions from the inner system, came to natural but erroneous conclusions of their own as to the true agency behind it all; but as Blake’s name was nowhere mentioned, it was safe to assume he was lying low.

“You shouldn’t let him out on his own, Avon...” Vila, roughly woken to hear the news, was still irrepressible. “Half a day left to himself down on a planet, and look what happens!”

“If it is Blake,” Avon said, and Vila stared at him.

“Of course it’s Blake! Who else is going to be running round causing havoc?”

That won him a rare genuine smile. “For once, you have a point.... At any rate, somebody — probably Blake — has stirred up the Ghost. We need to get in contact and establish the situation.”

“But not right now,” Jenna said sharply, and raised her chin in defiance of Avon’s lifted eyebrow and Vila’s frank gape. “There’s no danger, we need the rest, and frankly I can’t face the thought of two sets of explanations; we’ll sort the whole thing out face-to-face once we’ve picked Blake up — and Gan.”

“Leaving them in the meantime in a state of happy ignorance as to our intentions,” Avon murmured, but raised no further objections. “Far be it from me to interfere in such a delicate matter.... No, I’ll sleep here; I’ve done it before.”

He was pulling off his boots as he spoke. “One of us at least should stay on the flight deck.... Zen, call me in three hours, or earlier if there is the slightest change. Is that clear?”

“CONFIRMED.”

Jenna cast a glance of suspicion up at the computer, but to all appearances it sounded exactly as it had done before. A jaw-breaking yawn overcame her, prompting a somewhat shamefaced grin as she turned to leave. “All right.... Come on, Vila.”

Vila cast a final glance back at Avon, busy disposing himself along a seat, and followed her off the flight deck, yawning prodigiously in his turn. “And you can start wondering exactly what you’re going to say to Blake,” he added cheerfully in Jenna’s direction, and got an all too candid glare to confirm the accuracy of his guess.

MURDER.

The involvement that the others had assumed had not, after all, been wrong; merely premature.

Blake and Gan, retrieving Federation-issue breath masks from under the seats in the little seven-man flyer and switching them into the comms system according to Rall’s instructions so that they could talk, heard the same broadcasts as the rest.

“Channel Five.” The young pilot’s voice was muffled by his own mask — the canopy on these ground-level craft was not airtight — and he turned and held up five fingers, stabbing his hand jerkily into the air to make the point. “Testing... confirm.”

“I hear you,” Blake said, raising his voice as the engine note gathered, and Gan added confirmation of his own. He was still adjusting the seat buckle on a harness that looked frail in his hands.

“Confirmed,” Rall said tensely, and turned back to the controls, preparing the little craft for lift-off. His mouth, still tightened with distress, was set resolutely.

The broadcast on Channel One was silenced now, but they’d all heard it. To the two who had glimpsed the arrest alert on the guard-room screen, it was nothing new. To the one who had left the man living — as he’d thought — it was a bitter jolt.

It was a death he’d hoped to avoid; but it was one he’d been prepared to encompass, if he must. He had cut himself off already from all chance of return. This made no difference.

The hangar door opened to the standard code — lax security, he noted drily out of distant habit — and the baffles beyond rose automatically for a downwind launch.

“Better hold onto your seats,” Rall said into his mask, easing the flyer gently from her position in the rank of craft and aiming up for the exit; they had a minute before the recirculating systems would close the hangar again on automatic. “This could get rough for the first hour or so.”

He looked back one last time to check that the offworlders had secured themselves properly, settled deeper into his own seat, and let the flyer bolt out from underground in a text-book duststorm launch. Visibility was zero, but he’d flown on instruments since his first year in the Academy. The blast caught them and flipped them sideways; a red light on the local remote showed the hangar doors sealing behind them. Rall corrected the craft’s attitude almost without thinking, took her up in a steep climb until they were above the worst of the dust, and re-aligned on local landmarks.

“We’ll follow the Orbital up to DepCol Two,” he said above the noise within the canopy. “That’s those pylons — you can just see them now. We’ll have the storm behind us most of the way, and the tail end should overtake us around the time we get to the mountains.”

Those blue remembered hills.... But that thought had lost its sweetness now. It was the Ghost who had sought refuge in a private valley of his own; had tried to evoke a secret retreat in which two alone could be sealed away from pursuit and persecution. He’d taken Cris and Rall’s childhood dream and made a nightmare net of it to snare them with.

Rall held the flyer steady as the winds fought to tear her from his control, forcing her onwards at utmost speed towards the guidance beacon on the Servin Range, far ahead. ‘It was an ideal — an idea,’ Cris said softly in memory, her face buried against him for comfort. ‘You can always believe in ideas...’ And the ghost of that slight body pressed so vividly against his own that he caught his breath, hands wavering on the controls for a moment. To hold her close, slim and trembling and infinitely precious in his arms, to feel that shy response grow eager, warm hands drawing his head down to meet her own, until he was drowning in her—

The flyer’s nose dipped and swerved violently, heavier grains spattering across the flight shield in front of the canopy in a stinging storm, and Rall was jerked abruptly back into the present, scarlet at his own lapse. He would die willingly for Cris, if that was what it took — but not here. Not now. Not stupidly, pointlessly, with other men’s lives entrusted to his.

He set himself, grimly, to do the job at hand.

MURDER.

It was a mute accusation in the girl’s eyes as she sat huddled and trembling where he had left her. She would have to get used to it, Erik told himself again and again, flinching from that wounded gaze. Did she think that her dear friend Dar had clean hands? Oh, he could tell her a tale or two... did she think that the Operation was all speeches and high words and noble suffering, like that father of hers? Did she suppose for one moment that her downy-cheeked young lover had never taken lives in the name of the Federation?

That aching stare gave him back no answer; its suffering flayed his soul in abasement, laying bare bleeding swathes to her judgement and leaving them raw. He would not beg her forgiveness. He would not. He would not howl at her feet like a whipped slave, pleading for the mercy of his mistress’ foot upon his own abased flesh in token of pardon...

Would she permit Erik even to touch her? Her flesh was rigid, doll-like to his hand as he knelt and reached out, loosening the fastenings of one boot and drawing it gently free. Her feet were so small, so perfect... the arch of her instep quivered a little as he brushed it, revering each curve with his own crooked thumb, and he felt her shrink yet further within herself with a tiny hitch in her breath.

“Cris must not be afraid.” His own breath was thick with tears behind the mask, and one fell and then another, sliding painfully hot across ravaged flesh to dampen the pads below. His throat tightened, struggling to draw in air. For Erik to weep, masked, meant he could not breathe. He must focus on that. He must not lose control.

He touched the slender foot in his grasp again with infinite worship and reverence. Yet she had gone away from him. He could sense it. It was a cold synthetic model that he held, a replica that sat so stiffly before him as he knelt, with bloodless skin over plastic joints that flexed as he caressed them, one by one...

She was not breathing at all. Erik felt a stab of wrenching panic. Had she found some pill of his? Had the boy forced some drug upon her to save her from imagined violation?

He sprang to his feet and caught her in his arms, meaning to search for a heartbeat; but air came out of her in a great sobbing rush, and she was fighting him, beating against his hold with tears streaming down her face in a sudden passion of terror. “Don’t touch me! I can’t bear it — let me go, let me go! Let me go!”

“Cris must not be afraid,” Erik pleaded again helplessly, watching her scrabble wildly away from him across the floor, one arm cradling the dropped boot, her bare toes streaked already with dust. “Erik wants only to keep her safe, to adore her—”

Words tangled on his tongue with the force of his need, trapping him cruelly into grotesque limping speech. Angel Six could have soothed her, enchanted her, swayed the willing pupil with eloquence and power. In time she would have loved her Angel, he knew. Why could she not love Erik? Why could Erik not find the right phrase to make her understand?

Cris had reached the corner of the computer banks. She clawed unseeing behind her for support, stumbling to her feet with wide, fixed eyes that never left his own. Then she turned and fled away into the room, her pale head bobbing unevenly along aisles between equipment and doubling back from blind ends. Erik, in turmoil, let her go.

She shrank from him still. His heart raged in its agony, and he cried out, moaning aloud. She shrank from his utmost worship and respect with horror and revulsion. In that moment he would have destroyed, if he could, the Federation and rebellion both that between them had made him what he was.

Had they not?

The question hung as unmoving as the memory of the accusation in those eyes. Erik tore free his mask, and wept.

MURDER.

Five buttressed levels of foundations above supported the basement of the Garnier Entertainment Complex, alive with the news. Bulletins flashed in, were amplified and boosted on across the continent along all the trunk routes. Data clerks processed old footage pulled in from Space Command records, traced the suspect’s family line on Newparis back through the generations, and duly fed back salacious detail for decorative purposes.

Two levels further up, in the vast rehearsal space of the main livecast studios, the story was discussed, scoffed at, and dismissed as cheap distraction by Chev Whitker, renowned purveyor of highbrow pap for the masses. The big production going out that day had been planned for weeks: rehearsed separately in a dozen places across the planet for days. It would be the event of the season, with artistes flown in across three continents. The studio sets and holoshow would dazzle all eyes. Cast, crew and their guests were already arriving upstairs at the main airlocks. Chev had not the slightest intention, dear boy, of worrying his head over some sordid portside shooting.

On the top floors six hundred office cubicles buzzed with routine labour. The Administration’s political censors skimmed a weary eye across screens and screens of undemanding communiqués and propaganda vids, signing off each for transmission with brief stylus jabs. Planetary Met tracked the progress of the current storm and updated the forecast for the southern regions, where methane ice was gathering on the high peaks.

The lights of the great building shone out through the storm-haze in the valley, haloing it in a luminous glow. Its prow thrust bluntly towards the plains, cresting level upon level of blascrete and boridium plating like a great hull crashed sidelong on the wing of the mountain. Its tail cut off abruptly in a cliff of pipes and access ductwork, swirled now with the faint eddy from the ventilation tubes. And down at its root, five stories high, stood a honeycombed maze of buttresswork holding the whole vast mass stable against the slope. Countless hollows and crawlspaces ran through that support, and here and there caverns vast and unknown opened out beneath soaring struts.

It was a burrowing kingdom secret from those above, and the wide viewport concealed in the mountainside at its foot was not to be found in any official plans. In that hidden sanctuary at this moment lay enough lethal power to destroy every one of those lives in the hive overhead.

The Garnier Complex hummed steadily as the wind swept up from the plains, carrying with it a thousand debris fragments of no account. Data streamed through wide arteries and on across the planet. The Complex waited.