Iain Banks - Against a Dark Background

“There are indeed,” she said, swinging back up into the cockpit. She patted the Lazy Gun. “Though if we can get the lock off this, they won’t be able to stop us.”

“I am not sure that will be easy,” Feril said. “What if we cannot release the weapon?”

She looked into the machine’s sunglass-eyes, seeing herself reflected twice. She watched her tiny, distorted images shrug.

“If they get us they get the Gun too, and everybody gets to go with a bang.” She pushed the Lazy Gun forward into the footwell and sat in the seat, hauling on the harness. “To tell the truth, Feril,” she said, “I really don’t care any more.” She glanced up at the android. “You don’t have to come, though; just point me in the right direction. I’ll let you off wherever. You can say you were abducted; you’ll get home.”

Feril was silent for a second, then said, “No, I’ll accompany you, if you don’t mind. Given that you are prepared to risk your life, it would be lacking in grace of me not to gamble the loss of a week’s memories.”

She shrugged again, then looked towards the sunset, to the pass in the mountains.

The riders had gone. Before she looked away a single, large aircraft powered into the skies beyond and headed north-west, angling across the sunset and dispatching another distantly diving arrowhead shape above as though it was an afterthought.

The monowheel vehicle turned and rolled away down the far side of the ridge, picking up speed as it descended towards a dry valley, then accelerated smoothly away in a trail of chill, falling dust.

The evening light deepened as the monowheel spun quickly down a succession of shallow clinker valleys devoid of snow, vegetation or significant.obstructions towards a range of mountains, then came out into a broad gulf between jagged peaks whose summits still held a snow-pink trace of sunset. They found a wide shelf of till sand and gravel that traced a barren contour on that great valley and drove along it; after a few kilometres its surface bore a dusting of snow that thickened gradually as they drove. The tree line was fifty metres lower down.

“Is this a road?” she said, puzzled, as they headed into and out of a long narrow side-valley she’d have thought it easier to bridge at the mouth.

“I believe it is what is called a parallel road,” Feril said. “Caused by the waters of a temporary lake, probably formed when a glacier block-”

Feril went silent, then said, “Electromagnetic pulse.”

“What?”

The mountain-tops on the other side of the broad valley were suddenly blazing white.

She stopped the monowheel.

They turned and looked behind them, but the snow-caped shoulders of the mountain at their back cut out much of the sky.

“I believe the Keep has been destroyed by a thermonuclear device,” Feril said.

She watched for a moment as high, feathery clouds above the mountains slowly faded yellow-white, then started the monowheel again and powered on along the sand and gravel road.

The ground-shock arrived a little later. The monowheel absorbed the pulse without a murmur but they saw the snow-smothered ground nearby shake and ripple.

Sharrow and Feril looked up the white mountain slopes on their right, to see them covered with hazy white clouds, gradually spreading and enlarging.

“Oh, shit.”

“I believe those are avalanches.”

“So do I. Hang on.”

They raced along the white shelf of the ancient beach to the shelter of an outcrop of rock. The avalanches were a smoothly building roar of noise that terminated in a blast of icy air and a sudden dimming of the late-evening light; the sky above the summit of the outcrop disappeared. A tearing dim greyness flowed all around the sheltering rock-face and a whistling noise came through the throaty bellow of the avalanche. They were suddenly surrounded by their own heavy, swirling snowfall.

A noise like thunder sounded downslope as the tsunami of snow and ice hit the forest.

When the roaring stopped and the last few flakes had fallen around them, they brushed themselves down and went slowly on through a dim white haze across the ice-rubbled mounds of settling snow. She found the cockpit heater control and turned it up.

Feril leant over the side of the vehicle and peered underneath as they traversed one of the house-high pillows of snow.

“Impressive,” she heard the android say. She glanced round. “The wheel beneath has ballooned to this width,” Feril said, spreading its hands over half a metre apart, “and appears to grow spikes where it contacts the surface.” The section of angled wheel protruding behind Feril was thin as a knife.

“Yes,” she said, turning to the front again. “Well, don’t lean back.”

The parallel road had all but disappeared under the icy debris and scattered falls of rock. Downhill, through a haze of settling snow, much of the forest had disappeared under the white flows, the shattered trunks of the trees sticking jumbled from the snow like broken bones.

She kept the monowheel on what felt like the right level until they saw a huge flute of ice and snow like a scree slope leading down through the wrecked forest to the flat valley floor. She swung the vehicle onto it and down while the last of the day’s light leached from the sky.

They followed the frozen river for an hour through the moonlit darkness, then stopped.

She parked the machine off the white highway of river in the shelter of a C-shaped bay of rocks topped by snow-dusted trees. Feril studied the lock on the Lazy Gun while she stretched her legs and inspected as much of the monowheel as she could by moonlight.

The single wheel was angled at about thirty degrees off the vertical; it looked solid but couldn’t be. She remembered the bike back in the warehouse in Vembyr, but even flex-metal couldn’t do what this material seemed to be able to. She got Feril to move the vehicle forward a little. The single wheel seemed to flow rather than merely revolve. It was the colour of dulled mercury; its chevron-corrugated tread looked like a giant gear-wheel.

The cannon muzzle was scooped into the chin of the vehicle on the centre-line. The shining tubes sticking from the rear, which she had mistaken for engine exhausts, were the recoilless weapon’s gas-ports. Feril checked the weapon-state screen and reported that they had another thirty-one shells left of various types.

“I’m afraid the cannon will remain our most powerful weapon,” Feril said sorrowfully, putting the Lazy Gun down and tapping the trigger-lock. “This is a cryptogenetic code-lock. It is impossible to open without the correct base-sequence key.”

“Well, never mind,” she said. “It was always a long shot.”

“I am sorry,” Feril said. “However, I believe I have worked out the link between your interest in the mark on the wrist of the man you looked at earlier and the reason you wish to go to the province of Udeste.”

She hauled herself back into the vehicle. “Took you a while,” she said, yawning.

“Yes,” Fenril said contemplatively. “I am a little disappointed myself.”

“Well,” she said, “you can redeem yourself by taking the night-shift. I’m tired.”

“I shall drive with all due care and attention.”

“Yes,” she said, sliding down into the footwell, yawning. “Lantskaar welcomes careful drivers.”

They put the Lazy Gun in the compartment behind the cockpit; Feril sat on the Gun with its legs either side of the driving seat. After a little experimentation, she found a comfortable way of snuggling down into the footwell while the android leant over to the controls in a position that would have been tortuously uncomfortable for a human but with which it assured her it was perfectly happy.