Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [113]
“We’re approaching the source of the signal now,” Ratchet said, and I could sense the ship tensing itself around me. “Brace yourself.”
I was already about as braced as I could get, and so I just stared out of the window, searching for some sign of Ghuaji and the others in the murky light. The gunship decelerated rapidly, flicking between the trees with a piscine grace, homing in on the Positionex signal. I pulled my gun out, checked the cartridge. There was a limit to what I could do with it, because if Yhandim and Ghuaji—and anyone else they had with them—really had been taken up into The Gap, then they would have in effect become villagers, and it would need a lot more than a standard bullet to take them down. It would take a pulse rifle, of the kind which was arrayed on either side of the gunship’s midsection. I’d never really understood how the pulse rifles worked, except that someone had once told me that the energy was the same as that generated in an engine propulsion system. It didn’t really matter, as long as they did their job. The gun in my hand was just there to make me feel better. It worked—a little. A Jack Daniels would probably have been just as effective.
The web of brown energy outside the window meant visible light might be untrustworthy, so I concentrated on the monitor tracking the Positionex signal, drumming my fingers on the screen. The indicator light was close now, very close. Ratchet slowed the ship to little more than five miles an hour, and I watched the crosshairs on the monitor bisect the signal.
“We’ve gone past it,” Ratchet said.
“We can’t have.”
“Look at the screen.”
He was right. We were now on the other side of the indicator light. “How can we have missed it? Turn around—look again.”
Ratchet negotiated the ship in an arc and hovered back over the point indicated by the lock. I watched the external monitors, looking for, well, anything at all. The brown light had dissipated enough for me to make out the trunks of the trees around us, but I still couldn’t see Ghuaji. The ship slowed still further, to walking pace, and then stopped.
“We’re directly over it now,” Ratchet said.
There was nothing there, but I’ve seen all those movies and you’re not catching me like that. “Look up,” I said. “Maybe he’s up a tree.”
“I’ve done that already,” Ratchet said, relaying a feed from a camera on top of the ship to one of the screens. The trunk of a tree, like any other, disappearing up into the semidarkness. “There’s no one here even on infrared.”
“Drop down a little.”
The ship descended until the lower fin was resting gently on the ground. “Oh, fuck,” I said then, catching something out of the corner of my eye. “What’s that?”
The thing I thought I’d seen became clearer, as a sheet of the brown light folded away.
Ghuaji’s jacket, hanging over a bush.
I swore long and hard. Either Yhandim had figured out that Vinaldi and I had put a tracer on Ghuaji, or the coat had just been left behind by accident. Thinking back, I couldn’t remember whether Ghuaji had been wearing the jacket when I was in the village with Vinaldi.
It didn’t really matter. It was all over, unless Ratchet had any ideas. I asked him, not really hoping for an answer. It was still disappointing to find he didn’t have one.
“The position remains the same,” he said, apologetically. “Except that we have possibly now gone four miles in an incorrect direction. Sorry.”
I kicked out at the seat next to me. I wasn’t going to find them, and they were all going to die. Nearly would probably be mistreated a little first, but then she would die, assuming she wasn’t dead already. The spares, including Suej, would be taken to whatever fate awaited them. Even Vinaldi, who I now realized I would, on the whole, prefer not to lose as an acquaintance, would be killed. I was stuck in the depths of a forest which stretched limitlessly all around, sometimes in twilight, sometimes in darkness, but always unknowable and unsafe—and I had no way whatsoever of getting out