‘This’ll do,’ Solace decided. ‘In.’
‘The scientist in me,’ remarked Trine, ‘protests against using a once-in-a-lifetime discovery as a defence against gunfire. But not too much.’ And they were hurrying themselves inside even as they said it.
Solace found a breach in the wall at around the right height and was ready when the first of their pursuers could be glimpsed through the trees. She sent off three pellets one after another, the retorts hanging in the air.
‘How many of them left?’ Kris asked.
‘At least seven.’ Solace sighted, but didn’t shoot. ‘You hear a ship out there?’
‘Not yet. And even if Olli can get the Joan down here through the EM, she’d go for the dig site.’
‘We can find some way to signal her. We can set fire to the jungle?’
‘Jerichan substances don’t burn, my friend. They desiccate without even smoke,’ Trine remarked.
‘This planet really is good for absolutely nothing,’ Solace growled. She sent out one more shot and was rewarded by some alarmed shouting. ‘Well, they have us pinned here. The walls are good, but not a permanent solution.’
‘Wait, listen,’ Kris was saying. To Idris, it seemed as though she was receding. Not physically, but along some other axis entirely . . . they all were. Which meant, of course, it was him not them. Something to do with the structure around them was screwing with his head, expanding his consciousness and he wasn’t comfortable with that at all. He sat down, back sliding down the abrasive structure of the wall, ripping up his tunic. None of the others noticed.
‘Is that the Joan now?’ Kris was saying. ‘I wish all these fucking monsters would shut up for a second.’
They shut up.
Idris whimpered, because he’d done that. Not intentionally. But Kris’s demand had passed through his brain, into the building around them and then out – into the world. He’d somehow turned it into a shout, and every single bloody denizen of this monstrous jungle had stopped in mid-croak, mid-bellow, mid-shrill . . . because it wanted to know what he was and precisely how edible.
‘Um . . .’ Kris started. But the Voyenni had taken the quiet as the cue for an attack. In response, they were now rushing through the last few metres of tree cover, shooting as they came. Solace drilled one through the head, then dropped Mr Punch because a big Voyenni had surprised them. He’d ducked around the wall with a magnetic pistol raised before him. Solace went for the barrel, twisting it from his hand with servo-enhanced strength. He picked her up and slammed her against the wall; he was tall and broad enough that she looked like a toy in his grip. Then she rammed an armoured knee into his sternum and chopped at his neck with the blade of her hand. He dropped her but another man was behind him, then another. Idris stared down the barrel of a massive projectile gun and literally couldn’t move. His body was frozen with fear, his mind away with a multitude of horrible alien fairies.
Kris knifed the gunman in the hand and the gun went off – bullet ricocheting back and forth within the walls before spanging off Trine’s body, its momentum almost spent. Then the knifed Voyenni had his own blade out, something closer to a machete, and hacked murderously down at Kris. She dodged in the limited space, feinting at his face to keep him back.
Idris felt as though he was watching a mediotype of unlikely events, things that had happened to someone else. His mind was filled with a thousand living things, linked through the broken tower to the whole electromagnetic life of the jungle. The jungle was like a brain, he thought, but a brain at war with itself, fighting for dominance, neuron against neuron. Feels like my brain, then.
This forested brain wouldn’t do what he wanted though. It had its own business, after all. Except this tower was something like a transmitter station. Not in any way the operator back at Anchortown would have recognized, but it had been raised to boost and send signals. And right now the only signal was him.
Perhaps there were ways that his wishes and the drives of the biosphere outside might coincide.
Hold them off, he tried to say to it, but knew that no words had escaped his clamped-tight jaws. Solace had sent her opponent into Kris’s Voyenni, then swept the pair of them out of the entryway. They were coming right back in with reinforcements, but she was keeping them out. Idris could only wonder at the economy of her movements. The Voyenni were trained thugs, the products of expensive schools in brutality and intimidation. Solace had been engineered as a soldier, mind and body. She was also encased in top-flight Partheni armour and trained from childhood to fight. There were too many of them for her to go on the offensive, but she was holding, holding.