“It’s the only way I can live with it.”
They both fell quiet. There wasn’t much else to say.
* * *
They were passing over a forested area when Kara came to life.
“What’s down there?”
“Forest of Bowland. Wild enclave. Has a lot of wild boar.”
“Find a clearing. I need to pee.”
The SUT was equipped with urine and faecal disposal tubes. A one-size-fits-all design, meaning everyone found it uncomfortable. For an unlucky few – too fat or too thin – it leaked.
“Me too,” he said and took the jitney down.
It was more glade than clearing, grass and bushes surrounded by mature trees.
“Watch out for wild boars,” he called as she walked towards the trees.
There was a faint rustling from within a thicket. Kara chose a tree several metres away. She finished, used a wet-wipe then walked back to the jitney where Greenaway was waiting.
“I can’t be professional about the call-out fees,” she said calmly.
He nodded, face neutral.
“I don’t blame you. But you were part of it.”
He nodded again.
“Part of me would like to kill you.” She was clear in her mind what had to be done. “That wouldn’t get Marc and Tatia back. Wouldn’t destroy the alien pre-cogs.”
Curiosity in his eyes.
“Tension is not good.” She undid her trousers for the second time. “I think we better fuck.” It was the only way to preserve a bond between them. More, it was what she needed, physically and emotionally. Was it betraying her sister? Not if it meant either finding or avenging her.
It wasn’t about her sister. Or saving the world.
It was what Kara needed. Reasons or consequences didn’t matter.
Yet that rut against the side of the jitney – any watching wild boar would have been impressed by the ferocity – morphed into something altogether richer. At the end they clung to each other. What had begun as a fuck ended as making love.
“It’s so bloody stupid,” Kara said as the jitney rose in the air. She leaned across and kissed him behind the ear. “We fight to prevent a super-ordered world. Where everything is pre-ordained. Yet we never had any choice, you and I. Now we follow the plan to defeat the plan. Maybe this is all part of some game that far more intelligent aliens play. Do you ever think that our alien pre-cogs could be as much victim as us?”
Greenaway laughed. “Only at least every day. That way leads to god.”
“You’re religious?” She’d never have thought so.
“I accept there are things I’ll never know, wouldn’t understand if I did. I’d never worship them.”
“Not even on the battlefield?”
He laughed again. “Soldiers make pacts with anything to keep safe. No difference between god and a lucky charm.”
“I feel safe with you.” She closed her eyes and dozed on and off for the rest of the journey. Not from tiredness, but to avoid thinking about what she, what they had done. Anson Greenaway was not her commanding officer (no jokes about being commanded, girl. This is too important). If anything he was more client (makes me a whore? Not charging enough). Not good enough to say there’d been sex because she needed it. She’d also wanted him, Anson Greenaway. Just as he’d wanted her, Kara Jones. The link was there and it shouldn’t be.
They reached Jeff’s house just before noon.
Or what was left of it.
* * *
They landed next to the lake. The area had once been idyllic. Now it looked like a battleground. Tyre marks scarred the soft grass. An old tree had been used as target practice, the ground next to the scorched trunk littered with smashed branches. Rockets had been fired at the mill house, making holes like open mouths with broken teeth. A curtain drooped from a smashed window.
Closer to the water’s edge a Wild SUT, fifty metres long and twenty wide, shaped like a fat tube pointed at both ends, stood parked and waiting for them.
“Efficient,” Kara commented as she stood stretching her legs. “And by the way: what the hell happened here?”
Greenaway looked at the half-wrecked mill house a hundred metres away. “Last night. Jeff was killed.” He saw the question in her eyes. “My AI just told me. No one knew until they brought the SUT here. The area’s safe now.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t know him that well. Why is this place so important to you?”
“It’s about Marc,” she said. “I took him climbing on Dartmoor, around when you got kidnapped. We saw... an entity on Haytor... weird and wonderful colours, sense of power. Similar to the one you and I saw last night. And Marc saw... the way he told it, was possessed by something similar here, as arranged by the Wild. But you knew that, right?”
“That last part,” he admitted. “Last night, of course. But not Dartmoor.”
“Is it to do with boojums?”
“UPINs.”
“What?”
“Unexplained Phenomena In Netherspace. Pronounced yew-pin. We think Marc has an affinity with the infinite.”
She shook her head sadly. “The man is a walking cliché.”
“Won’t happen again.” I was trying to forget that sigh you make after orgasm, such a deep, happy satisfaction, but it’ll be with me forever.
“You okay?” she said with the innocence of a woman who intuits what a man is thinking. Who’d a thought he’d be so good in bed? And she let it show in her eyes.
“Thinking I prefer boojum.” It sounded like buj’m. He coughed and looked away.
“Mmmm. Anyway, I’m assuming they’re linked to these entities?”
Greenaway took a deep breath. “Probably. No idea how, though. So we’re here because it’s linked to Marc?” Saw her nod and asked the obvious. “Now what?”
“We’re here because I had to be,” she corrected. “We look around. Then I go Up and listen to my empathic voice, I guess. That sound like a plan?”
< Sounds like desperation to me, Ishmael said in her mind.
> Stop being so nervous.
< Easy for you to say. You were never dead. Ishmael thought
