The Shadow and Night (109 page)

Merral decided there was a reasonable chance that it connected with the ship's interior. Anyway, there seemed no other option. He planned his actions. A short, rapid dash would bring him to a leg; once there, the leg would give him cover as he climbed, and at the top, the hanging doors would give further protection.

Frankie's voice, now slightly brighter, broke into his thoughts. “Sir, I got through. She'll be with us in fifteen minutes and will off-load the men to the east as close to the ship as she can. I guess we stay down here and wait and fire at the creatures, I suppose.” He seemed to catch Merral's gaze. “Sir, you're not still going to try and get inside?”

“Yes,” Merral answered. “That's what I've been told to do. Can you and the others make a distraction? get those intruders to keep their heads down?”

“Sir, if you think it's wise . . .” Frankie's expression suggested he was of another opinion.

“Wise? I'm not sure,” Merral replied, aware as he spoke that someone had run up to join them from where the men were taking cover. He turned, recognizing Lorrin Venn and feeling a great relief that he was not badly injured. However his pale, fraught, and bloodstained face suggested that what was left of Lorrin's enthusiasm had died in the fighting.

“Sir,” Lorrin spluttered to Frankie, revealing a torn lip and a chipped tooth, “we reckon there are men there. Under the ship. Wearing some sort of armor and with guns.”

As Merral peered into the shadows at the far end of the ship, something whistled past his head. There was a dusty explosion on the cliff wall.

“Lorrin, get down!” he bellowed, ducking down below the sled.

Aware that Lorrin had remained standing, he reached up and jerked the uniformed leg. “Get down!” he repeated.

There was a further whistle and, with it, a soft splattering noise.

The leg shook violently.

Merral stared up to see Lorrin clutching his throat, blood oozing through the closed fingers. With an expression of stupefaction on his face, Lorrin sagged slowly down to his knees as if in slow motion and then collapsed forward. Merral was suddenly conscious of Lorrin's chest heaving under his armor and of Frankie gasping in horror beside him.

Treat it as a logging accident,
Merral ordered himself.
Go into the automatic first-aid mode you have been trained for.

“Lorrin,” he said, his voice thick and distant as he fumbled for his medical pack on his belt, “Perena's going to be here soon.” He tore the pack open, his fingers jamming against each other.
The ship has good facilities, and Felix Azhadi is a trauma-care expert.

As he pulled out the bandage, Lorrin thrashed sideways. Merral knew that it was too late for Felix or anybody to save Lorrin now. All he could do was clutch his thrashing wrist.

An only child,
Merral suddenly remembered with a deep and piercing bitterness, as Lorrin twitched and kicked his way into death.

There were more fierce whistles overhead now. Something hit the cliff and stone chips flew out in a spray of fragments around them. Behind him, Merral saw some of the remaining men frantically digging deeper into the sand with bare hands and improvised tools. Others were heaving up metal struts to give them more protection.

Frankie, his face a ghastly white, was gaping at the body. He looked at Merral. “Sir, Lorrin's dead?” he gasped, swallowing hard and blinking. “O Lord God . . . Sorry, sorry . . .”

“Yes, Frankie!” Merral said, trying to suppress both guilt and anger. “Now get back there and shoot back!”
Return fire,
the manuals had called it.

“And, Frankie, I'm going for that right rear leg and going up in from there. Tell everybody to aim for the men, not the creatures. The men are the ones with the guns. After you start shooting, I'll count to five slowly, then run.” Merral was surprised at how cool his voice sounded. He looked at Frankie, wondering if his words had registered.

“Okay, sir; the right leg. A count of five. And Lorrin?”

Merral stared at the body by him, struck by the bloodied hand lying on the gray sand, its fingers wide open as if ready to receive something.

“Later. He's gone Home.”

“Oh, what a mess. Sorry,” Frankie muttered, his fists clenching and unclenching, and Merral glimpsed tears in his lieutenant's eyes.

“It is, Frankie. Better get back to your men. Stay low, and when I give you a signal, fire at the intruders. The men mainly.”

Frankie seemed to take control of himself. “The men. Okay. Be careful, sir.”

“I will be,” Merral answered automatically before he realized how stupid it sounded.

He saw Frankie touch Lorrin's outstretched hand. “Sorry,” he said in a tone of immense sadness. Then, bent double, he raced back to his men.

Merral stared at the ship, forcing himself to concentrate on the task ahead and not think of Lorrin next to him, dead and silent.

There were shouted orders behind him, and more whistling sounds and small explosions broke out against the cliff. Something, somewhere, clanged off a piece of metal. Merral slung the gun across his shoulder and prepared to run.

He turned and caught Frankie staring at him with an inquiring look from over a bulwark of gray metal plates, stones, and camouflage fabric.

Merral crouched into a running position and raised his thumb.

“Fire!” came the shout, and there was a jumble of hissing sounds behind him. Bitter, angry shrieks came from under the ship. Merral slowly counted to five.

He ran.

He had intended to dodge from side to side, but in the end fear drove him to run as fast and straight as he could. Ducking as low as possible, he raced across the sand, expecting at any moment to feel something hit him. He was aware of the grit under his feet and things whining and whistling past him.

A stone or a ricochet bounced off his armored jacket with a harsh clipping noise. Sand spat up around him. Something seemed to skim by his helmet, and from somewhere there was the smell of burning.

Now, though, the ship's leg was in front of him. Gasping for breath, Merral ran gratefully behind its protective bulk. But he knew he dare not stop.

Urgently, he began pulling himself up the ladder as fast as he could. He was under no illusions that the foot of the leg, midway between his men and the enemy massing around the ramp at the front of the ship, was safe.

Rung by rung, his chest heaving under his armor, Merral clambered upward, aware of the heavy gun tugging at his shoulder and the bush knife clattering against the ladder.

He was no more than a dozen rungs up when he felt the ladder vibrate sharply. He glanced down to see an ape-creature, its black hair lank and wild, climbing up after him with fluid movements of long arms. It turned its face up to him, showing bottomless dark eyes and pale flaring nostrils.

Merral redoubled his speed but, in a second, his ankle was grabbed in a ferocious and tightening grip.

Barely thinking, Merral slipped the gun off his shoulders, grasped the strap and let it drop butt first.

There was the sharp crack of metal on bone as the gun's butt struck the creature's skull. Merral heard a soft groan. The pressure on his ankle was suddenly released, and something large and heavy tumbled down, striking the ladder as it went.

There was a deep thud from the landing leg pad.

Without looking down, Merral shouldered the gun and resumed his hectic scramble upward. Weighed down by his weapon and encumbered by the stiff armored jacket and helmet, he found the climb difficult. Twice he felt his feet slide on the oil-stained rungs. Below him, and from under the ship, he could hear renewed firing and wild screaming in response. Trying to ignore it, Merral kept on climbing.

Suddenly he found himself inside the dark sanctuary of the undercarriage cavity. There, gasping for breath, he paused and listened to the shouts and noises from below. He glimpsed, far below, the still figure of the ape-creature sprawled on the sand at the foot of the ladder. It could almost have been asleep, but the pool of glistening crimson fluid around it denied that interpretation. There had been deaths all round this morning. Merral felt a spasm of pity for the creature he had slain. He wished it were all over. He glanced back to where, beyond the tilted sled and the intruder bodies, he could see his men behind the piles of metal tubing and rocks. They were feverishly scooping and pushing away sand to make their position more fortified. With their backs protected by the cliff, it seemed a reasonably secure position. If there were no further direct assaults, they might be safe until the reserves arrived.

He pulled himself up onto a narrow mesh walkway at the top of the ladder and stood up cautiously, catching his breath and looking around in the gloom. There was a strong smell of grease, and from somewhere came the humming of pumps. Panting from his exertions, he glanced around at the untidy complex of piping and cabling about him. He saw a number of labels in a red spidery script that he had never seen before. Despite the incomprehensibility and ugliness of the lettering, he was struck by what he saw, sensing that there was something about both the writing and the labels that spoke of humanity. Indeed, as he looked around, he felt that the whole structure, with its tubes, pistons, nuts, and bolts, seemed in some way, of human origin. There was nothing here, he was sure, that was alien.
Wrong
perhaps, but not alien.

Pushing such thoughts to one side, Merral concentrated on trying to enter the ship. To his relief he saw that ahead of him the gangway extended to an oval, polished, gray metal door. He approached slowly, fearful that it would be locked or that it might open to reveal attackers. He held the gun at the ready in case the door should suddenly open.

To the right of the door Merral noticed two triangular buttons. A tentative press of one of them caused the panel to slide sideways with a hissing noise. Beyond it was an ill-lit, green-painted corridor that seemed to run sideways across the vessel. As the door opened, Merral was assailed by a stale organic smell, reminiscent of old garden compost but somehow more acrid, that made him wrinkle his nose.

So, I can now enter the ship.
Yet he paused.

Somehow, he was reluctant to trade the fresh air and indirect daylight of the undercarriage bay for this fetid, dark tunnel. He steeled himself to enter, but with one hand gripping the edges of the doorway, a thought suddenly struck him.

He could, he realized, simply place his charge here, trigger it, and slip back down the ladder. With this hatch blasted away or—at very least—rendered useless, the intruders would have to stay in the Farholme atmosphere. To Merral, the idea suddenly seemed a compellingly sensible proposal. It avoided the risk of his entering the ship at all. Indeed, it had the great advantage that he could be back with his men in moments. And wasn't that where he belonged? The only problem was that the envoy had ordered him to enter the ship and do battle with the creatures inside. Yet as he thought about that command, a doubt surfaced. After all, he told himself, the envoy had not stated exactly
when
he had to enter the ship. Could it be perhaps that they were to achieve surrender first?

In a second, his initial doubts had multiplied. Who really was the creature that had appeared to him earlier? In fact, was he so sure it was right to obey him? After all, did not the Scriptures say that the devil himself could appear as an angel of light? Perhaps—and the idea came to him forcibly—it was a trick to lure him to his destruction.

Anyway, even if the envoy was not some demonic phenomenon, Merral told himself that it could not be ruled out that he was merely some sort of vision, a figment of his imagination as it labored under the stresses of the day. As he reflected on the idea that the envoy was either an illusion or a demonic visitation, he became aware of an appealing corollary to such interpretations. In either case, he had no obligation to keep the unwelcome promises he had made concerning Anya and Isabella. It was an attractive idea. And yet—

Torn by uncertainty and trying to stave off a decision, Merral leaned farther inside. As he did, he caught his finger on something sharp and felt a sudden stab of pain. He snatched his hand away and sucked the gashed fingertip.

His attention painfully drawn to the door, Merral glanced around the frame, noticing that there were in fact numerous rough metal edges. He was surprised. Assembly practice was always to round and polish smooth all surfaces, whether visible or invisible. Such carelessly raw edges would never have been allowed on a finished product.

In a moment his perspective changed, and he now realized that there was something about this ship that he hated to an intense degree. Fueling that hatred was a certainty that this vessel was at the heart of the corrupting evil that had descended on his land. And as his hatred blossomed, he felt that every one of the dreadful events that had happened since Nativity had ultimately originated from this ship.

Merral suddenly became aware how strange his delay at entering the ship had been. Could it have been that he had been somehow influenced? tempted? Well, he decided, if that was the case then the attempt had failed.

With renewed determination and a new anger, Merral set the cutter gun beam on wide focus and checked that the status light was on red.

Then with a brief prayer and a final glance at the ground far below, he entered the ship.

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