“Now what?” Sal Yong asked bluntly.
Horst looked at him in some puzzlement. “We must go back to them in your hovercraft,” he said simply. “I fear my poor old horse can travel no further. Why? Have you some other mission?”
The combat-adept mercenary kept still. “No.”
“Where exactly is this homestead?” Reza asked.
“Five or six kilometres south of the jungle,” Horst replied. “And forty minutes’ walk east from the river.”
Reza datavised his guidance block for a map, and ran a search through LDC habitation records, trying to correlate. “In other words, under the red cloud.”
“Yes, that abomination spread at a fearsome rate yesterday.”
“Reza,” Jalal said. “The hovercraft can’t possibly carry that many people. Not if we’re going to keep ahead of the cloud.”
Horst looked at the hulking combat adept in growing amazement. “What is this you are saying? Can’t? Can’t? They are children! The eldest is eleven years old! She is alone under that Devil’s spew in the sky. Alone and frightened, holding the others to her as the sky turns to brimstone and the howling demon horde closes in. Their parents have been raped by unclean spirits. They have nothing left but a single thread of hope.” He stood abruptly, clamping down on a groan as his ride-stiffened muscles rebelled against the sharp movement, face reddening in fury. “And you, with your guns and your mechanoid strength, you sit here thinking only of saving your own skin. You should run to embrace the possessed, they would welcome you as their own. Come along, Russ, we’re going home.”
The boy started sobbing. He struggled in Kelly’s grip.
She climbed to her feet, keeping her arms protectively around his thin frame. Quickly, before she lost all courage, she said: “Russ can have my place on the hovercraft. I’ll come with you, Father.” Retinas switched to high resolution, she looked at Reza. Recording.
“I knew you’d be trouble,” he datavised.
“Tough,” she said out loud.
“For a reporter you have very little understanding of people if you think I’d desert his children after all we’ve seen.”
Kelly pouted her lips sourly and switched her visual focus to Jalal. That exchange would have to be edited out.
“Nobody is going to leave the children behind, Father,” Reza said. “Believe me, we have seen what happens to children driven away by the possessed. But we are not going to help them by rushing in blindly.” And he stood, rising a good thirty centimetres higher than the priest. “Understand me, Father?”
A muscle twitched on Horst’s jaw. “Yes.”
“Good. Now they obviously can’t stay at the savannah homestead. We have to take them south with us. The question is how. Are there any more horses at the homestead?”
“No. We have a few cows, that’s all.”
“Pity. Ariadne, can the hovercraft carry fifteen children apiece?”
“Possibly, if we ran alongside. But it would put a hell of a strain on the skirt impellers. And it would definitely drain the electron matrices inside of six or seven hours.”
“Running like that would drain us too,” Pat said.
“I can’t even recharge the matrices, not under this cloud,” Ariadne said. “The solar-cell panels don’t receive anything like enough photonic input.”
“We might be able to build some kind of cart,” Theo suggested. “Hitch it up to the cows. It would be better than walking.”
“It would take time,” Sal Yong said. “And there’s no guarantee it would work.”
“Tow them,” Sewell said. “Slap together a couple of rafts, and tow them back up the river. All you need is planks, we can get them from the homestead itself if need be.”
Ariadne nodded her rounded head. “Might just work. The hovercraft could handle that. We could certainly get back here by the middle of the afternoon.”
“Then what?” Jalal said. “Look, I’m not being a downer. But just getting them back here isn’t the solution. We have to keep going. Wallace says the cloud is going to cover the whole planet, we have to find a way to outrun it, or this will all be for nothing.”
Reza turned to look at the possessed man who had kept silent and unobtrusive up until now. “Mr Wallace, will your kind know if we return to the homestead?”
“Aye, Mr. Malin,” he said sorrowfully. “That they will. The cloud and the land are becoming one with us. We can feel you moving inside us. When you pass back under the cloud the sensation will be like treading on a nail.”
“How will they react?”
“They’ll come after you, Mr. Malin. But then they’ll do that anyway if you stay on this world.”
“I think he’s speaking the truth,” Horst said. “One of them came to the homestead two days ago. She wanted me and the children. Our bodies, anyway.”
“What happened?” Kelly asked.
Horst forced a vapid smile. “I exorcised her.”
“What?” Kelly blurted in greedy delight. “Really?”
The priest held up his bandaged hand. The dark strips of cloth were stained with blood. “It wasn’t easy.”
“Shit Almighty. Shaun, can you be exorcised?”
Shaun Wallace had locked his gaze to that of the priest. “If it’s all the same to you, Miss Kelly, I’d be obliged if you didn’t try.”
“He can,” she subvocalized into her neural nanonics memory cell, “he really can! You can see it in his eyes. He fears the priest, this ageing worn-out man in shabby clothes. I can barely believe it. A ceremony left over from medieval times that can thwart these almost-invincible foes. Where all our fantastic technology and knowledge fails, a prayer, a simple anachronistic prayer could become our salvation. I must tell you of this, I must find a way to get a message out to the Confederation.” Damn, that sounded too much like Graeme Nicholson’s recording.
For a moment she wondered what had happened to the old hack.
“Interesting,” Reza said. “But it doesn’t help our present dilemma. We have to find a way of keeping ahead of the cloud until Joshua comes back for us.”
“Christ, we don’t even know when he’s coming back,” Sal Yong said. “And taking a bunch of children through these mountains isn’t going to be easy, Reza, there are no roads, no detailed map image. We’ve got no camping equipment, no boots for them, no food supplies. It’s going to be wet, slippery. I mean, God! I don’t mind giving it a go if there’s even a remote chance of pulling it off, but this . . .”
“Mr Wallace, would your kind consider letting the children go?” Reza asked.
“Some would, I would, but the rest . . . No, I don’t think so. There are so few living human bodies left here, and so many souls trapped in the beyond. We hear them constantly, you know, they plead with us to bring them back. Giving in is so easy. I’m sorry.”
“Shit.” Reza flexed his fingers. “OK, we’ll take it in stages. First we bring the children back here, get them and us out from under that bloody cloud today. That’s what is important right now. Once we’ve done that we can start concentrating on how to get them through the mountains. Maybe the Tyrathca will help.”
“No chance,” Ariadne said flatly.
“Yeah. But all of you keep thinking. Mr. Wallace, can you tell me what sort of opposition we’ll be facing? How many possessed?”
“Well now, there’s a good hundred and fifty living in Aberdale. But if you race in on those fancy hover machines of yours you ought to be away again before they reach you.”