Engineman - Eric Brown [44]
She heard voices, men's voices, outside the room. She opened her eyes, and the illusion of her lucid dream was shattered. Paris, her years as a struggling artist, and Eddie - images came rushing in to fill her mind. She relived Eddie's suicide and her flight to the Reach, the old woman and the Disciples. Her last recollection was of the cold, bitter coffee they had made her drink on the boat last night, quickly followed by her fight against unconsciousness.
She was in a rough stone-walled bedroom. Open shutters overlooked a steep hillside and the distant coastline. Birdsong and honeysuckle brought back poignant memories. She struggled upright, lethargic with the effect of the drug.
Her bag lay on the floor beneath the window. Its contents had been removed and placed neatly on a rough timber table. No sooner had she noticed this invasion of privacy than she realised that her silversuit was open, the zipper pulled down to her crotch. She pulled it quickly to her throat, as if her nakedness were still under scrutiny. A slow, hopeless resentment burned within her.
She stood shakily, found her moccasins beside the bed. She moved to the door and lifted the latch. A little girl with big eyes and a mass of black curls sat on a chair across the corridor. As soon as Ella showed herself, the girl jumped down and ran into the next room. She was barefoot and wore a dirty smock open down the back to reveal the dimples at the base of her spine.
"Mama!" Ella heard her cry. "The senorita is awake!"
The girl was clinging to her mother's legs, staring out from behind the folds of her skirt, when Ella entered the room.
The three Disciples sat around a table, their conversation suspended as they regarded Ella.
"I hope you bastards enjoyed yourselves last night," she said.
The elder of the three men - the one-armed man who had checked Ella's tattoo in the hotel last night - gestured with his fork to the dark-haired woman, now holding the girl on her hip. "Conchita searched you. It was a precaution we felt we had to take, under the circumstances."
His tone was apologetic. Ella judged him to be in his sixties, a big European with a grey crew-cut and the far-away, longing, lost look of all ex-Enginemen in his eyes. His left arm was missing from the shoulder, the inside-out sleeve tucked back into his shirt.
Ella waved a hand in a don't-mind-me gesture to excuse her accusation, then walked past the men to the door. The smell of cooking from the kitchen reminded her that she hadn't eaten for more than a day.
She stepped outside. The building was exceptionally crude, brick-built and roofed with terracotta tiles. It stood in the foothills of the mountain range that ran the length of the continent parallel to the coastline. Ella made out the spaceport perhaps twenty kilometres to the north, the deactivated interface at this angle no more than an oblique lozenge, like a sapphire on a ring held at arm's length.
In a cleared, sandy area before the building, an old motorbike stood on a spread tarpaulin. Its engine-casing had been removed, and components laid out in neat rows next to a tool-box. Ella knelt beside the bike, inspecting the damage.
She returned inside.
"Whose bike is it?" Ella asked the one-armed Engineman.
"Mine - or rather it was until this happened." He indicated his shoulder. "Please, take a seat... Do you ride?"
"I've had a bike since I was eighteen." She sat across from him, the two others on her left and right. Conchita placed a bowl of rice in the centre