Blue Remembered Hills (ch16)

[igenlode]

Female protagonists in the B7 universe don't usually wait around for someone else to rescue them...

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Chapter 16: Mistress of Her Own Fate

Cris slid her boot back on and tried to get a grip on herself, shivering. Her hair was escaping from its loose plait; she pulled it down across her shoulder and began braiding it again properly, the fierce grip of each strand upon her scalp a source of reassurance and strength. It was an armour against the world... and it was a defiance of Erik. She was not going to be his damsel in distress, or his veiled doll in soft colours and pretty tunics. He would have to take her as she was, not treat her as he pleased.

She drew in a long breath, leaning back against the hard surface of the computer cabinets in the corner where she had found refuge. Nowhere in this great hall could be any real escape from him, she knew that; but if he came after her she would at least see him coming, while she could duck back into hiding at a moment’s notice and dodge away round the far aisle. It was an illusion of safety, but it made her feel a little better.

There was a long access handle mounted below the row of lights on the cabinet opposite, where a recessed panel was designed to open out. Cris bit her lip, looking closely at it, and tested the edge of one of the buckles on her tunic against the slot in the fitment screws. She twisted, carefully. The first fitment loosened a little.

A few minutes later, and the handle came away in her grasp. She weighed it cautiously in one hand, striking out in her imagination; the idea made her feel rather sick, but she could not help seeing Captain Philp’s blackened face. It might have been Rall. When the Ghost grew tired of his twisted game, she thought, it would be Rall.

Their only hope was somehow to find the humanity that lay behind the mask: the warmth that her Angel had given her, and the great power for beauty that she knew he held. Erik was broken, perhaps beyond healing — but in the distance even now she could hear the sounds of his desolation, the hopeless keening of a wild thing wounded by a world beyond its understanding. Surely no creature that suffered so could be entirely without understanding for the hurt of others?

She was stronger than he. She could give pity, and open her heart to those in a world of hate. She could comfort poor arrogant Carla, who did not know she needed a friend, and forgive the thoughtless jostling of boys who had never thought that they might frighten her.

And she loved, and was beloved. Whatever Erik might do, he could not take that memory from her. He could wreck their future, but he could not touch the certainty of their past. She set the thought of Rall carefully within the walls of her heart like a tiny warm glow, and held it close.

The long handle she slipped within the tight undersleeve of her tunic, where it lay stiff and heavy against chilled flesh. The wide cuffs that flowed down across her wrists hid it altogether.

She would seek out the good within Erik to which she might appeal; but if that appeal should come too late — or fail — then this time she had a weapon of last resort. It was not much, but from her it was one thing he would not suspect.

Yesterday she would not have dreamt of it either. A tear that she had thought conquered spilled suddenly down her cheek. Cris wiped it away and stood up.

He had not moved from where she had left him. A terrible thin moaning still came from his throat, and he was crouched on the floor, long arms locked around his knees as he rocked himself backwards and forwards like a child. The back of his scalp was exposed, pathetic somehow under its few lank strands, but his face was buried somewhere in that huddled mass of limbs. His naked face: the white mask lay upturned beside him like a worn-out casing. Cris shrank from looking more closely at its workings. It felt too... intimate, somehow.

At first glance she’d assumed he’d unmasked himself in some gesture at conciliation, stripping away his own shields as she had rewoven hers. A moment later — as he snuffled wetly — she understood, with a shamed, distasteful jolt, why.

Wearing the mask of the Ghost, he was a burning, terrible monster. Without it, his monstrosity had a pitiful aspect, but she could not forget his eyes and the sound of his chuckle as he had killed that man. It had not been an act of war; it had not even been hate that she’d heard in his voice to terrify her so. It had been gloating satisfaction...

And without the mask — would he have done the same? Did the Ghost rule weeping Erik with the iron cruelty that kept Newparis quailing before his name? Was the scarred creature as much a victim as the rest?

Slowly, reluctantly, Cris had to dismiss the impulse of mercy that had prompted the idea. The masked Ghost had grovelled and pleaded in the same words as Erik; the unmasked face had screamed and clawed and sneered. The mask shielded him from the world, but Erik in all his moods was the same man. He ruled his own actions, and he must answer for them. It was not the ruined face or hands that froze her with revulsion at his fondlings. It was the twisted incomprehension of his mind. Even now — even as he wept — she did not think he had any realisation of what he had done.

Surely he must know she was here? “Erik—”

She crouched down beside him and steeled herself to lay a hand on blotchy flesh. The muffled breathing quietened as he grew very still; she took his head between her hands and lifted it, holding her gaze steady on the swimming sockets of those eyes.

“Erik”—she spoke quietly, but insistently—“this won’t work. You have to let me go.”

“If you loved Erik...” Two more tears slid down twisted flesh, and he flinched as if in pain; one, channelled sideways, splashed hot against her hand. “If you loved me — I would be so gentle. We could go anywhere, any world you liked. It would all be different. You would be so happy, Cris, the happiest of women... but you’re still afraid! You don’t believe me — you don’t love me!”

His hands tightened over hers, dragging away their grasp, and laid them both together against the thick, constricting fabric across his chest. Her fingers were as icy cold now as his own.

Rall’s heart had leapt just as wildly under her exploring touch... The hesitant flutter crawled there beneath her palms and she recoiled, conscious in the next appalling moment of the sliding chill of metal within her sleeve. If he should move his grip—

Cris snatched her hands back and sprang to her feet, cradling her forearm against her breast. There must have been guilt in her eyes; she saw the hurt in his, followed by a flash of fury. Erik unfolded himself slowly, rising jerkily to his full height.

“It beats only for you — and you shudder.” His voice was dead, and Cris drew a breath with increased urgency.

“Erik, you have to let me go. Can’t you see it’s no good?” She swallowed. “I’ll— I’ll stay with you till Rall comes. But when he leaves, I’m going with him.”

“Till he comes — when he leaves? And she will stay... so very kind!” Anger brought life and resonance back into his throat, and he crossed his arms as if in mimicry of her stance. “Then if the boy comes, he will never leave. Perhaps for his sake he will never come.”

“He’ll come — he’ll find a way. You know he will.” Out there — somewhere — alone, without the aid his rank and service could have given him, without the chance to pass on the message she’d tried to send... with his own side hunting him. Rall would never go back until he believed her safe. What chance did he have against Erik? An ache rose in her throat. She had to find some key to this, for all their sakes.

“Oh Erik, please—”

But that brought only a fresh wave of invective, of pleading and of anger against Rall, and despite all her resolutions she could not close her ears to it and let the pain roll off a shield of indifference. It was the voice, still, of Angel Six, held leashed — when he remembered it — in conscious power, though she knew that role now for the hollow thing that it had been. She had seen his files on her father, and glimpsed the layers of contrivance that were the stock in trade of the Newparis Ghost. The Cris who had trusted and followed her Angel implicitly had been an innocent child... and she knew better now. Erik’s own actions had seen to that.

But neither could she forget those hours of comfort and affection. His face was hideous, but it was no longer a thing of horror; his tentative caresses repelled her, but he could so easily have forced them upon her, and he had not. She could not ever love him — she could not fill the hungry desolation of emptiness that threatened to devour her. If she left him now, he might do his utmost to destroy her, and everything she loved... and equally destroy everything in himself that still reached for the light: that crippled, tender thing that opened out so fearfully and shrank at a careless touch.

“I would be so gentle,” he had begged of her. With all hope once gone, she did not think the breaking storm would leave anything in him that could ever be gentle again. If she and Rall, clinging blindly together, were sucked into its sands, then the last of Erik’s humanity would go down with them, and the creature that raged unchecked would have consumed them all.

She hadn’t asked for this — not for any of it. Why did it have to be her? And what, oh what, was she to do?

Erik’s passion of words swept over her in battering gusts that left them both shaking, and she cried out at last. “Erik, I can’t. Don’t you understand? I just can’t. It’s not me you want. It’s not real. I can’t be all those things to you — no-one can. You have to find them for yourself—”

The blank loss and incomprehension in the sockets of that waxen face was worse than any fury. With a sob, she turned and ran, down between silent screens and vented casings, past the great power conduits and down to the only illusion of liberty that remained: the sweep of the long viewport at the entrance to the gallery. Locks and traps she dared not touch barred her from the unknown passages beyond, but the peaks behind the swirling veils outside shouldered aside the sky, limitless and majestic and free.

Somewhere beyond, in her childish imagination, had lain the land of blue remembered hills, where her mother and then her father waited; out of the ruin of that dream she and Rall had found ardent foothills of their own, and the promise of deeper desire. And then a blinding, scouring gale had ripped her from that life, and left her rootless and tumbling amid relentless sands that burned and scarred, on and on without understanding and without hope of escape.

Escape... The valley was sheltered, but storm-haze still filled the air. Even for a Newpie such as herself, a few minutes in that atmosphere was all it would take.... It was a thought that had never crossed the threshold of her mind; an end that no-one sane would seek. She’d seen men who’d died in breather failures. Everyone on Newparis had. It was neither a quick death nor a merciful one.

“No—” She backed away a little, shuddering, as if the idea itself could reach out and seize her. “No— not like that—”

Erik’s hands on her shoulders from behind were hesitant, as if in fear of a recoil. She had not known he was there; but his arms came around her, and she found herself leaning back into the rigid angles of his body, huddling at all costs against another living thing.

“No, not like that.” It was almost a lullaby, crooned in that deep voice of his, with an unsettling little quiver of eagerness. “Erik has those thoughts too... But not like that, not for you. I know better ways, swifter, kinder.... it can be so easy, Cris. Why not? I’m so tired — so tired of this life, after all.”

The light pressure of his touch against her hair grew heavier, as if he had pillowed his cheek there. The grip that had seemed a refuge tightened, and she could feel him trembling.

“So easy, Cris... just the two of us... and it can be over. Erik has thought about it for so long, planned the grand gesture, to go out with a thousand lives for one... but if you want it too, it can be so gentle... we’ll go together...”

“No!” Pure panic; his hold had pinioned her in tremors like a forcewall on the point of implosion, and the intoxication of oblivion reached out. “Erik, no! Stop it—”

Cris jerked hopelessly against the iron grip of those hands, and almost fell as she was abruptly released. She swung round to face him, heart pounding. “I don’t want us to die, Erik. Do you understand? I don’t want anyone to die!”

A thousand lives — she felt sick. What had he planned? What would it take to set it off? One word out of place; one more loss of control?

Hours stretched away in front of her, hours lived from moment to moment in the dread of some false step, and she felt desperation rise in her throat. And when Rall came? And... if he didn’t come?

She laid both hands on Erik’s sleeve and tugged, pleading. Any distraction would do. Anything, to turn his mind.

A familiar face flickered on a screen in the distance, glimpsed in passing on a camera somewhere in the city. The view wavered and was gone; formed again as the scanner unit swept steadily back and forth. Cris frowned, her attention caught in a moment’s genuine puzzlement. It wasn’t the city, after all — but it was a scene she knew very well, and one where that face surely didn’t belong.

Another man beside him now, a Newpie she didn’t know. Dar turned for a moment, gesturing straight up into the screen... and then there was nothing, as a brief flare died away into static. Burned out, a part of her mind noted automatically; an instant later, memory supplied the glimpse of a snub-muzzled weapon in that last moment.

“It’s Dar—” She’d pulled Erik with her almost unheeding; now the ghost of his face stared back beyond hers in the reflection from the blank screen, both of them distorted into shared abnormality by the curved glass. Without conscious thought, she’d reached out to set the systems scanning for the next working circuit — here it was, a perimeter view this time, blurred with dying wisps of the storm passing now overhead and far across the planet. “They’re in the dockyards — it must be the raid—”

In the grainy distance, a clump of figures swirled around the tripod foot of a big freighter’s landing gear. Two fell, soundlessly. The rest broke and fled from unseen opponents, leaving only crumpled bodies behind. Dust eddied, and the ship structure lurched.

Crooked white hands reached over hers and set an intercept running on the neighbouring screen, pulling up channel status across the military spectrum. Erik’s breath hissed in what might have been contempt. “The fool — to go in blind, without so much as a jammer active! He’s left the comms wide open... they’ll have a planet-wide alert at any moment, and enough troopers pulled in to rip the whole raid apart...”

“Then block it!” A saving jolt of outrage broke her gaze free at last from those crumpled figures — one moved weakly still, to sprawl horribly, finally back... Cris tore herself away from the sight to face down Erik. “You’re the Ghost of the Operation — you rule every network on the whole planet. If you can’t do it, who can?”

She bit her lip. “I was supposed to be in there, helping them... you taught me, Erik. And now Dar’s all on his own, without my access, or codes... Isn’t that what he wanted, this morning, with all those messages you wouldn’t even open? You set up the whole Operation — you can’t just sit here and let them die!”

Too late, she remembered his cold tone at the name of Dar Ogar. The ice with which he’d pronounced, once, that Dar had no business to set the timing of this very raid. Child that she was, she’d never guessed, then, that her teacher was himself the Ghost from whom Dar’s orders came. And he hadn’t ordered Dar to go ahead this morning — he hadn’t even known. If he’d been that angry before, what would he do now?

But he was looking down at her with an almost pitiful hope in his eyes. “This would make you happy, Cris? If I do it for you?”

Betrayal opened before her, but she nodded, contriving a smile. “Yes, dear Erik. Please. Quickly.”

His answering smile could never be anything but grotesque; but she could not bear to see it now.

~o~

In the time that followed, she watched his hands instead, flowing with remorseless skill over the instruments of his power. Communications were cut off, sealed down, blanked out and even set looping, as machines at either end repeated the same blind protocol in mutual reply. She’d heard it boasted that if he chose, the Ghost could single-handedly censor a continent; she’d never seen it done. One operator within the besieged dockyard clung on grimly, re-routing his calls for assistance in the face of what he must have realised at last was an actively hostile block, and it became a duel between them — a duel in which a single slip on Erik’s part would have let loose the genie trapped so skilfully within the bottle, and yet a duel which he was winning effortlessly and without question, countering every move on the Federation side before it could be made. The lipless grin danced with fierce satisfaction, and Cris, hovering breathless at his elbow, met his gaze with unfeigned eagerness and shining eyes.

He’d tapped into the shielded circuit the raiders were using. The audio feed was a fuzzed overlay of hard breathing and snapped commands, with the brutal reality behind it of men in battle, visceral sounds that caught in her throat and painted worse images when she closed her eyes. The grainy visuals showed mercifully little.

She ran the tracking data; watched Dar and the rest overrun ship after ship within that guarded perimeter, wider clustered spots closing in around the Borda as final objective as the day wore on. The storm was ebbing over the peaks beyond the viewport. In the dockyard far across the plains, the haze had already settled, and Cris glimpsed unmasked Newpie figures darting bareheaded alongside their off-planet fellows as snatched camera views flashed across her screen. Federation uniforms made a brief, disciplined sortie, and there was a glare of heavy weaponry that drove back the Operation with losses; a wounded man cursed on and on, trailing a long ramble of groaning obscenities across the transmission, until someone slapped a tranq pad across bare flesh and he slurred into merciful silence.

The Borda’s defenders rallied again, beating back the lightweight stinging assault. Half-powered and vulnerable, the great ship was an ungainly harvest ripe for the plucking, with her loss or capture the symbol of vast humiliation. The firefight was fierce.

Rall could have been there — should have been there. Some of those distant, black-clad figures would be his classmates; perhaps his comrades. Boys who’d crowded into Ogar’s Bar, fresh-faced and swaggering — boys he’d eaten with, lived with, fought for her sake. The thought twisted painfully at her sympathies, hammering home the gulf between them that she had almost forgotten. Rall’s duty lay there among the rest, defending his ship for the Federation... and shooting down her friends.

Her fingers had faltered on the controls, and a hideous squeal of feedback hit as the D-converter crystal took the full load. Flinching, Cris cut power quickly, with a sidelong glance at Erik. But her ears still rang, and the Ghost’s glare had swung round from abused equipment to a panel across the room that pulsed a steady alarm.

“The siren...” Erik said softly, his words barely audible beneath the shrill sound that filled the room. He chuckled suddenly, without mirth. “The siren, Cris! Do you know what it means? Shall I tell you?” He did not pause. “It means we have callers at the door, digging and delving beneath the basement where no callers should be...”

Swift as a nightmare, he had crossed to the central console, threading through the grey-walled maze of his domain with long-limbed stalking grace. One hand stabbed down at an unseen control, and the siren died. But the steady threat flashed on... off... on... off... on...

“Come in, come in!” He was grinning at her, a death’s-head smile, and she shrank from the change in him. “Now who can it be? Erik has no neighbours, and the paths to his door are not so friendly. Shall we watch, or would it be kinder for Cris not to see? For it seems her young man has found some friends to help him slip in, while she keeps Erik’s back turned with her pleading and her smiles...”

“No— I—” Too late, she understood the blaze of anger in his face; knew, in sick numbness, that if only she had thought of it she would have carried out indeed the very betrayal he believed of her. What was the use of protest?

“No time for that!” His tone was almost jaunty now, horribly incongruous with the distortion of that grin. “They are almost on the first trap now, you know... or shall we let them pass? Erik has seen the first trap work before, and the second trap is so much more entertaining...”

He made an adjustment on the panel in front of him. “Yes, the first trap is so tedious, so messy... but the second trap. that will be exquisite...”

She had no idea what he meant. She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to know how a life of torment could make a man’s face light up like that with hunger at the thought of suffering as sport...

“Please—”

“‘Please, Erik’? Again?” He mocked her, the deep voice rising to an uncanny echo of her own. “Oh no, my love, you shall watch — you shall have the most splendid view!”

Rall’s life — the lives of those strangers — hung in the balance, and she was helpless to save them, bound hand and foot by her own choices; she could find no words, no promise now that he would believe—

The images in front of her shifted, and those on the screens to either side, all data blurred out of relevance in a single dizzying shift. Row after row, every display within sight showed the same darkened view now, without escape: three dim, foreshortened figures moving in shadow, repeated again and again everywhere her eyes might pass. Two big offworlders, burly-shouldered and dressed alike — one a real giant whose cropped dark head brushed the roof of the cramped passageway as he stooped — and a fair-haired boy, bruised and dust-spattered, whose face was as achingly familiar as her own. Her insides turned over, in a lurch she hadn’t expected. Rall— oh, Rall—

The jerky impatience of his movements showed even in that poor light, and she longed to cry out a warning; but the big man behind him said something sharply and gestured upwards, and Rall followed suit. She could not recognise the device he held in his hand, but Erik all too clearly could.

“Dar!” It was a harsh outcry; he crashed his hand down on the controls again and again, as if the very force of that onslaught could bring down retribution on the invaders. “Curse you, Dar Ogar — curse you and your interference. What gave you the right to meddle in Erik’s home and his private business? When Erik’s secrets are no longer his own, then promises are only for fools!”

Not understanding, Cris stared round wildly, pinned beneath the flame in those eyes. Three figures came cautiously onwards across endless screens and trap after trap failed to trigger under Erik’s impotent fury. And high above in the Garnier Complex and far away across the plains, alarms flooded out across the airwaves and barracks were mustered into sudden, urgent alert as the Ghost in his rage brought down the Federation upon those who had betrayed him. The genie was out of the bottle — with a vengeance.