Iain Banks - Against a Dark Background

The tears welled in her eyes. Then the young man let her down and laid her carefully on her back. She had time to see camouflage-suited men with guns slung over their shoulders coming out of the tower’s door carrying boxes, and glimpsed two dark, fatly sleek shapes approaching through the air above the valley; as she saw them they slowed and dropped and she heard the sound of their jets.

As soon as her back pressed into the snow her tongue started to slip down her throat, but then the young man turned her over on her side and she could breathe again.

“Don’t go away, now,” she heard him say. His footsteps sounded in the snow, fading behind her.

He had lain her down where she could see Miz’s face. She wanted to look at it for just a little longer.

Then the one squatting by Miz took out a long viblade knife and put it to his neck. She closed her eyes.

When the humming noise stopped and a few more seconds had passed, she opened her eyes again to see the second young man walk past her, carrying a bag.

The noise of the jets was suddenly very close. Their engines shrieked and a great bustling, tumbling cloud of dusty white rolled across the stone square.

Miz’s beheaded body leaked blood onto the snow.

Her tears trickled onto the snow, too. The paralysis meant that she couldn’t sob.

They put her on a stretcher and carried her towards the bomb-hold of one of the two heavy VTOL bombers, along with their loot from the tower and the equally paralysed body of Feril.

She was still lying on her side when they carried her across the square, so she was the first to see Dloan sitting at the edge of the trees not far from where she, Miz and the android had emerged a quarter of an hour earlier.

Dloan sat observing the scene, out in the open where he was easily visible and apparently unarmed. Even from that distance she thought she saw in the way he sat there, in his posture and bearing, something hopeless and terrified and alone.

She watched him watching them all, with no tears left to cry.

Somebody saw Dloan; she heard shouts. Guns were turned towards him. Dloan stood slowly, as though weary. He took something from his pocket and aimed deliberately at the men on the stone square.

He didn’t have to fire; Sharrow heard projectile rifles and lasers crack and snap all around her, and she saw Dloan jerk and shake and fall in a small storm of kicked-up flurrying snow.

The firing stopped quickly and he lay still.

They carried her into the belly of the great dark aircraft.

“Of course, I personally-the two of us-bore Mister Kuma no personal ill-will. But you know how it is; orders are orders, eh? Shame about the old Solipsists, too, but such is life; they got involved beyond their depth. We only hired them to attack the Land Car but then they went and got ideas about beating you to the Gun. They should have backed out when they were told to. But, hey, there I go; I don’t want to anticipate whatever Molgarin may choose to tell you. That’s where we’re heading now, my lady, to Molgarin’s Keep in the cold desert beyond the Embargoed Areas, in Lantskaar!” he said, pronouncing the word with a kind of hammy relish. “Exciting, isn’t it?”

There were sixteen people secured within the brightly lit bomb-hold of the leading bomber, strapped tightly against its walls in bucket seats: Sharrow, Feril, the two identical young emissaries in their smart red-brown uniforms and twelve effi-ciently anonymous men in blanked camouflage suits, mostly armed with lasers and micro rifles. One carried a stun rifle; presumably that was what they had turned on her. She could see properly only because she was so tightly strapped in, her head held back against the bulkhead behind her by a harness. This was not a special security measure for her; the rest of the hold’s passengers were similarly tied down. Only she and Feril did not have a quick-release handle clenched in their hands.

The booty from the tower sat webbed and tensioned in front of them in the centre of the hold. The boxes and various indecipherable pieces of apparatus bounced and jiggled against their restraints as the airframe around them bucked and swerved and sank and rose, all accompanied by an enormous tearing, screaming noise.

The young emissary had to shout above the racket. “Don’t worry about being intercepted by the Rebel States forces or the Security Franchisers; we have an understanding with the former and the latter can’t track us.” He rolled his eyes to indicate the aircraft. “We’re currently doing over three times the speed of sound at little more than tree-top height. They tell me travelling at this speed so close to the ground is such a terrifying experience for pilots-and the chances of them being able to correct a mistake by the terrain-following automatics so remote-that it’s considered kinder to black out the cockpit screens altogether!”

He was silent for a moment, then chuckled as a particularly violent manoeuvre rammed him and Sharrow hard back against the metal wall. The equipment from the tower seemed to hang above her and the young emissary; she could see the webbing holding it in place going taut and starting to stretch. “Gosh,” the young man said, his voice sounding strained as he fought to speak against the pressing g-force. A roaring noise. louder than the bomber’s engines was drowning him out anyway. “Hope that stuff’s properly secured. Eh, Lady Sharrow? Or we’re both meat paste!”

She was still trying to work out if this meant he wasn’t an android after all, or if it was just an attempt to deceive her, when she blacked out.

She awoke to open air and the jangling sensation of feelings returning; her flesh sparkled with pain, like a million tiny pinpricks. Even her teeth hurt. She was being carried by two soldiers; one held her under the knees, the other under her armpits. One of the young emissaries was at her side, taking deep breaths and slapping himself on the chest, then rubbing his hands together.

She was carried out from beneath the shadow of the bomber. It had landed on a gritty, dusty desert; the air felt powder-dry and bitterly cold. There were low, ash-grey mountains a few kilometres off, forming a bowl round the clinker-dark plain, which was empty save for the two sleek, black aircraft and a few trucks and other vehicles. She saw other, smaller shapes curving through the heavy grey skies above the encircling mountains.

The emissary saw her trying to move her head, and beamed a broad smile at her as the two soldiers heaved her into a small open car.

“Back with us again, Lady Sharrow?” He held his arms out wide and spun round, boot heels grinding on the grit. “Welcome to Lantskaar!” he said. He leant on the side of the little open car. “And to Molgarin’s Keep.”

He watched her trying to look around the featureless desert and the barren hills around it. He laughed. “It’s all underground,” he said, climbing in beside her. She saw Feril being carried out of the bomber’s hold by a quartet of soldiers. “Though there are,” the young emissary said, waggling his eyebrows at her, “some incredibly ancient force-field projector-walls which can spring up to trap the unwary in the event of an attack.” The car jerked and rolled forward, heading for a long rectangular hole in the plain. “Believe me,” the young man said, “you don’t want to be standing astride one of those when they power up, let me tell you.”

He chuckled again as the car angled down a ramp into a dully lit tunnel. The tunnel curved, spiralling down into the ground; a series of huge, metre-thick doors swung or irised open for them. The car’s motor whined; behind, she could hear the deeper notes of what she guessed were the trucks. After a while her ears popped. The young emissary started to whistle.