Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [119]
Kadiatu took a smart card from her belt. It had a small still hologram of Zak on the front by the STS logo, his name and a twenty-digit number underneath. She opened the brass plaque by the pine. Inside were two more smart cards in military khaki. Zamina saw that the two faded holograms were of a man and a woman. Kadiatu put Zak's card beside them and closed up the plaque. She straightened up and looked at Zamina.
'You religious?' she asked.
Zambia shook her head.
They stood together at the foot of the grave.
'Here he is, father,' said Kadiatu. 'My lover, my friend, my comfort of a few hours, my sacrifice. I'm burying him with you and mother because I think you would have liked him. Just like you he was too stupid to be afraid.'
Kadiatu stopped talking and took a deep breath. Zamina reached out and took her hand.
'I wanted him to live forever,' said Kadiatu, 'but the universe doesn't listen to us.'
Zamina felt her hand being squeezed so tightly that it was painful but she didn't dare say anything. Kadiatu's shoulders were hunched over, her mouth open in an expression of pain, breathing in short gasps, tears were wrung out of her eyes.
The scream seemed to come from deep inside Zamina, from some buried female reservoir of grief and pain. She screamed for herself and for Zak, for all the dead children and for Kadiatu who couldn't give her pain the voice it deserved.
They clung to each other afterwards, for a moment closer than lovers. When they put the soft earth back into the hole the spade handles were wet with their tears. When it was full they turned their back on the grave and walked out of the forest hand in hand.
The cool Martian sun was close to the canyon rim. Kadiatu wiped her eyes with the trailing edge of her dress and then offered it to Zamina.
'I'm dying for a drink,' she said. 'How about you?'
Arsia Mons
Francine put her new jet over the pit at an altitude of twenty metres. The wrecked dustkart that Kadiatu had reported was missing, Old Sam felt that this was probably significant.
Francine stayed on the station, ready for a fast dust-off in case something went wrong. Old Sam shouldered the long case and jumped from the belly hatch. A touch from the backpack thrusters put him softly on the pit's floor.
The entrance was just as described: a dark hole winding into the ground. He shivered involuntarily as he stepped inside. There had been battles in places like this. Sharp and nasty firefights fought with IR, motion trackers and heat-seeking bullets. The smell of fear that no recycler could scrub from the air.
The barricade was placed around the curve of the tunnel, jusi out of sight of the entrance. Metal cut from the abandoned dustkart with water jets and welded together with sonic torches. When he touched it. Old Sam could feel a faint vibration through his gloves.
Old Sam placed the case on the tunnel floor in front of the barricade. The case was a little over a metre long, made from polished rosewood coated in linseed polymer to protect it from the near-vacuum. Getting in wasn't going to be easy. The instructions had been handwritten in a long looping script on the back of a hardcopy of this week's Harare Herald. The torn scrap of paper was folded into a sealed pocket of his gauntlet. He didn't need to check. Old Sam had memorized the words.
He opened the long case.
Inside was a twelfth-century Japanese katana.
'Why this sword?' Old Sam had asked as they left the museum.
'If you humans have a strength it lies in your diversity,' the Doctor had said. 'Your culture is prolific and multifaceted. When it comes to an interaction with an alien culture there is always a facet of your own culture that puts you closer to the alien. Perhaps closer than you would like.'
'Lucky us,' said Old Sam.
'The problem,' said the Doctor, 'is that you are astonishingly bad at utilizing this diversity. Faced with an agrarian culture with a non-linear temporal perception, do you send in a