Engineman - Eric Brown [130]
Ella stared at him.
Kelly said, "Not long after his conversion, the Lho who'd survived the plague summoned him. He had the right contacts across the Expansion, the right kind of knowledge, and the Disciples had the finances."
Ella shook her head. The thought of the Lho and her father, working in alliance...
"What did they want with him?"
Kelly said, "They wanted him to help them save themselves, the last of the Lho-Dharvo people. They took him into the mountains, where the survivors lived in a temple far underground, and they explained their situation..." He paused, considering. "When he came back, your father was a changed man. If anything, he was more committed, more determined to see the end of the Organisation. He never spoke about what he experienced in the temple, but whatever it was moved him profoundly. There were rumours-"
"Yes?"
Kelly gestured. "I heard it from a Lho that he entered into some kind of communion with their holy people - but the Lho I spoke to wasn't very clear what exactly the communion was all about... Anyway, he returned doubly committed to the cause. We were smuggled off the Reach in a container, through the interface to the free planets of the Tyler-McDermott system. We made them our base and worked to save the Lho and bring about the downfall of the Danzig Organisation."
Ella wondered what her father had undergone in the mountain stronghold of the Lho, if it had been anything like the sense of unity she had experienced all those years ago in the cave with L'Endo.
"Where's my father now?" she asked.
"On Earth," Kelly said. "Specifically, in Paris."
"Paris?"
"He sent you a disc a few weeks ago, arranging to meet you in Paris when he arrived. Obviously you never received it."
"I got it, but I was angry. I wiped most of it when I realised who it was from." She shrugged. "Then things happened. I decided I wanted to see him. So I came here."
"And walked right into the lion's mouth," Kelly said. "Fortunately, we can get you out of here."
She stared at him. "But the interface...
Kelly sat up. "There is another way we can get back to Earth."
Ella peered at him.
"Your father's sending a smallship to the Reach to evacuate the Lho from the temple. With luck, we should be aboard it for the flight back to Earth."
"A smallship?"
"Come on, we'd better get moving."
He climbed back into the flier. Ella sat beside him, watching the spur of rock turn away beneath them and disappear. They headed over the jungle towards a jagged, up-thrusting mountain range, skimming low over the tree-tops as the jungle climbed the mountainside and then petered out.
Kelly kept the flier in close to the cliff-face, skirting great planes of rock towering for kilometres above the flier. They wound through a series of pinnacles, each one higher than the last. Ahead, perhaps fifty kilometres distant, was a blunt, rectangular peak Ella recognised as Mt Sebastian.
Ella didn't know which was the most unlikely: seeing her father again after so long, or flying to Earth aboard a smallship. She was twelve when she had last shipped through space, and now smallships seemed an ancient, superannuated form of transport. Compared to the simplicity of the interfaces, the procedure of phasing a smallship into and out of the nada-continuum was complex - not to mention dangerous. So much could go wrong between here and Earth. She would rather have returned by interface... not that she was complaining. It was a miracle, after the events of the past few days, that she had survived and would soon meet her father. She closed her eyes and wished that she was already on board the smallship, en route to Earth.
"Hello," Kelly said.
Something in his tone indicated he wasn't speaking to her.
She opened her eyes. He was leaning over the side, looking back towards the jungle. Ella strained her eyes in the same direction, but could see nothing.
Kelly accelerated and swept the flier in a corkscrew ascent of a lofty pinnacle. At the summit he landed and jumped out. Ella followed, alarmed. Kelly was on his stomach