Iain Banks - Against a Dark Background

“You crewed on an anti-Tax cruiser operating out of TP 105, a moon of Roaval, then-along with a group of seven other junior officers-became one of the first humans for three hundred years to take the then newly re-released symbiovirus SNBv3. With you as leader, you and your fellow synchroneurobondees flew a squadron of single-seat modified excise clippers out of HomeAtLast, a military-commercial habitat stationed in near-Miykenns orbit, becoming the most successful squadron of the seventeen operating in the midsystem.”

“Please; I’m blushing.”

“Three of your team died in your last action, at the very end of the war while the surrender was being negotiated. Your own craft was seriously damaged and you crash-landed on Nachtel’s Ghost, suffering near-fatal injuries on top of the extreme irradiation and already serious wounds you had sustained during the original engagement.”

“Nothing by halves; should be the family motto.”

“You were cut from the wreck and treated under the warinternment regulations in the Tax-neutral hospital of a mining concern on Nachtel’s Ghost-”

“Ghastly food.”

“- where you lost the fetus of the child you were carrying by another of your team, Miz Gattse Ensil Kuma.”

She stopped for a moment and looked up to see the hydrofoil, twenty metres away. She pursed her lips, breathed deeply and walked slowly on. “Yes; terribly complicated way of going about getting an abortion. But then I was sterilised at the same time, so it was practically a bargain.”

“You spent the months immediately after the war in Tenaus prison hospital, Nachtel. You were liberated-on your twen-tieth birthday-under the terms of the Lunchbar Agreement; you and the four surviving members of your team formed a limited company and undertook occasionally legal commercial surveillance and industrial espionage work, then branched out into Antiquities research and retrieval, a profession you shared with your sister, Breyguhn.”

“Half-sister. And we never got caught.”

“Your team’s last successful contract was the location and disposal of what is believed to have been the second-last Lazy Gun, which resulted in the Gun’s auto-annihilation while under deconstruction in the physics department of Lip City University.”

“Their methodology had been suspect for years.”

“The resulting detonation destroyed approximately twenty per cent of the city and resulted in the deaths of nearly half a million people.”

She stopped walking. They had arrived at the piece of roughly cylindrical wreckage embedded in the fused silicate of the beach to which the hydrofoil was moored. She stared at the dark lump of half-melted metal.

“Your team split up immediately afterwards,” the machine went on. “You currently own one third of a tropical fish breeding and retail business on the island of Jorve.”

“Hmm,” she said, thoughtfully. “Sounds so banal, that last part. The approach of middle age; I’m losing my panache.”

She shrugged and waded into the water, waves washing around her boots. She unlocked the hydrofoil’s painter and let the rope reel back into its housing in the stem.

She looked at the beachcomber. “Well, thanks, but I don’t think so,” she said.

“You don’t think what?”

She climbed onto the hydrofoil, slung her legs inside the footwell and pulled the control wheel down. “I don’t think I want your services, machine.”

“Ah, now, wait a moment, Lady Sharrow…”

She flicked a few switches; the hydrofoil came to life, lights lighting, beepers beeping. “Thanks, but no.”

“Just hold on, will you?” The machine sounded almost angry.

“Look,” she said, starting the hydrofoil’s engine and making it roar. She shouted: “Tell Geis thanks… but no thanks.”

“Geis? Look, lady, you appear to be making certain assump-tions about the identity of-”

“Oh, shut up and push me out here, will you?” She gunned the engine again, sending a froth of foam from the stern of the little boat. Its front foil levered down, knifing into the waves.

The beachcombing machine nudged the hydrofoil forward into the water. “Look, I have something to confess here-”

“That’s enough.” She smiled briefly at the beachcomber. “Thank you.” She switched the boat’s main lights on, creating a glittering pathway which swung across the waves.

“Wait! Will you just wait ?”

Something in the machine’s voice made her turn to look at it.

A section of the beachcomber’s battered front casing swung up and back to reveal a red-glowing interior bright with screens and read-outs. Sharrow frowned; her hand went to her jacket pocket as a man’s head and shoulders appeared from the compartment.

He was young, muscular-looking in a dark T-shirt, and quite bald; the red light threw dark shadows across his face and over eyes which looked gold in the half-light. The skin on his smoothly reflecting head looked coppery.

“We have to-” he began, and she heard both the mechanised voice of the beachcomber and the man’s own voice.

He plucked a tiny bead from his top lip.

“We have to talk,” he said. There was a slick bassiness about his voice Sharrow knew she’d have found immensely attractive when she’d been younger.

“Who the hell are you?” she said, flicking a couple of switches in the hydrofoil’s cockpit without taking her eyes off him, or her other hand from the gun in her pocket.

“Somebody who needs to talk to you,” the young man said, baring his teeth in a winning smile. He gestured down at the casing of the beachcombing machine. “Sorry about the disguise,” he said with a slightly embarrassed, deprecating gesture. “But it was felt-”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “No; I don’t want to talk to you. Goodbye.”

She tugged the controls, sending the hydrofoil nudging round on a pulse of foam, swamping the front of the beachcomber; water splashed over the hatch’s lip into the machine’s interior.

“Careful!” the young man shouted, leaping back and glancing down. “But, Lady Sharrow!” he called desperately. “I have something to put to you-”

Sharrow pushed the throttle away from her; the ‘foil’s engine rasped and the little boat surged out from the glass shore. “Really?” she shouted back. “Well, you can put it-”

But something obscene was lost to the thrashing water and the screaming exhausts. The craft roared out to sea, rose quickly onto its foils, and raced away.

Issier was the main island of the Midsea archipelago, which lay a thousand kilometres from any other land near the centre of Phirar, Golter’s third largest ocean.

The little arrowhead hydrofoil swung out from the island’s glass western shore and headed north, for Jorve, the next island in the group. It docked half an hour later in a marina just outside Place Issier II, the archipelago’s largest town and administrative capital.

Sharrow woke an apologetic guard in the marina office and left a note for the harbour master telling him to put the hydrofoil up for sale. She collected her bike, then took the east coast road north. She left her helmet off, driving in plain goggles with the wind fierce in her hair; the cloud overhead was fraying, letting moonlight and junklight spread a grey-blue wash over the fields and orchards outside the town.

She switched the bike’s lights off, driving fast and leaning hard round the open, sweeping curves of the gradually climbing road, its surface a faint snaking ribbon of steel blue unwinding in front of her. Ravines beyond the crash-barriers gave brief glimpses of the rock-ragged coast beneath, where the ocean swell terminated in glowing white lines of surf. She only put her lights on when other traffic approached, and thrilled each time to the heart-stopping sensation of total darkness in the instant after she killed the old bike’s lights again.