Against a Dark Background Read online

  “Well, indeed. Allow me to introduce myself…” The machine made a whining noise and lurched toward her, the rubber treads on its left-side tracks splashing through the small waves.

  She backed away; two quick, long steps. The machine stopped suddenly. “Oh; I beg your pardon. I didn’t mean to startle you. Just a second…” The machine trundled back a couple of meters to where it had been. “There. As I was saying; allow me to introduce myself; I am a—”

  “I don’t care who you are; what are you doing spying on me and my cousin?”

  “A necessary subterfuge, dear lady, to ensure that I had the relevant personages—namely yourself and Count Geis—correctly identified. Also, having unintentionally found myself in such close proximity to your conference, I thought it prudent and indeed only polite to delay making myself known to you until the said noble gentleman had bade you farewell, as—considerations of good manners apart—my instructions are to reveal myself to you and you alone, initially at any rate.”

  “You’re hellish talkative for a beachcomber.”

  “Ah, dear lady, let not this rude appearance deceive you; beneath my tatterdemalion disguise lurk several brand spanking new components of a Suprotector (TradeMark) Personal Escort Suite, Mark Seventeen, Class Five, certified civil space legal in all but a handful of jurisdictions and battlefield limited in the remainder. And I—that is the aforesaid system, in full, combined with the services of various highly trained human operatives—am at your service, my lady, exclusively, for as long as you may desire.”

  “Really?” She sounded warily amused.

  “Indeed,” said the machine. “A mere beachcomber—for example—would not be able to tell you that the gun which you are currently holding in the left-hand pocket of your jacket, with your index finger on the trigger and your thumb ready to flick the safety catch, is a silenced FrintArms ten-millimeter HandCannon with eleven ten-seven coaxial depleted-uranium-casing mercury-core general-purpose rounds in the magazine plus one in the breech, and that you have another—double-ended—magazine in the opposite pocket, containing five armor-piercing and six wire-flechette rounds.”

  Sharrow laughed out loud, taking her hand from her pocket and swiveling on her heel. She walked away down the beach. The machine lumbered after her, keeping a handful of paces behind.

  “And I feel I must point out,” the machine continued, “that FrintArms Inc. strongly recommends that its hand weapons are never carried with a round in the breech.”

  “The gun has,” she said tartly, glancing behind as she walked, “a safety catch.”

  “Yes, but I think if you read the Instruction Manual—”

  “So,” she interrupted. “You’re mine to command, are you?” she said.

  “. . . Absolutely.”

  “Wonderful. So who are you working for?”

  “Why, you, mistress!”

  “Yes, but who hired you?”

  “Ah, dear lady, it is with the greatest embarrassment that I have to confess that in this matter I must—with a degree of anguish you may well find hard to credit—relinquish my absolute commitment to the fulfillment of your every whim. Put plainly, I am not at liberty to divulge that information. There, it is said. Let us quickly move on from this unfortunate quantum of dissonance to the ground-state of accord which I trust will inform our future relationship.”

  “So you’re not going to tell me.” Sharrow nodded.

  “My dear lady,” the machine said, continuing to trundle after her. “Without saying so in so many words…correct.”

  “Right…”

  “May I take it that you do wish my services?”

  “Thanks, but I don’t really need any help when it comes to looking after myself.”

  “Well,” the machine chimed, with what sounded like amusement in its voice, “you did hire an escort unit the last time you visited the city of Arkosseur, and you do have a contract with a commercial army concern to guard your dwelling house on Jorve.”

  She glanced back at the machine. “Well, aren’t we well informed.”

  “Thank you; I like to think so.”

  “So what’s my favorite color?”

  “Ultraviolet, you once told one of your tutors.”

  She stopped; so did the machine. She turned and looked up at the beachcomber’s battered casing. She shook her head. “Shit, even I’d forgotten I said that.” She looked down at the glass beach. “Ultraviolet, eh? Huh, so I did.” She shrugged. “That’s almost witty.”

  She turned and walked on, the beachcomber at her heel. “You seem to know me better than I do myself, machine,” she said. “Anything else about me you think I should know? I mean, just in case I’ve forgotten.”

  “Your name is Sharrow—”

  “No, I rarely forget that.”

  “—of the first house of Dascen Major, Golterian. You were born in 9965, in house Tzant, on the estate of the same name, since sold along with most of the rest of the Dascen Major fortune following the settlement required by the World Court after the dismemberment of your grandfather Gorko’s—unhappily illegal—commercial network, rumored to be the greatest of its day.”

  “We’ve always thought big, as a family. Especially when it comes to disasters.”

  “Following the unfortunate death of your mother—”

  “Murder, I think, is the technical term.” She slowed her pace and clasped her hands behind her back.

  “—murdered by Huhsz zealots, you were brought up by your father in a…peripatetic existence, I think one might fairly say.”

  “When we weren’t making a nuisance of ourselves at the homes of rich relations, it was equal parts casinos and courts; father had an obsession with screwing money out of one of them. Mostly they did it to him.”

  “You had…various tutors—”

  “Singularly lacking in a sense of humor, all of them.”

  “—and what might most charitably be called a checkered school history.”

  “A lot of those records really shouldn’t be trusted.”

  “Yes, there is a quite remarkable disparity between the written reports and most of the associated computer files. Several of the institutions you attended seemed to feel there might be a causal link between this phenomenon and your uncharacteristic keenness for the subject of computing.”

  “Coincidence; they couldn’t prove a thing.”

  “Indeed, I don’t think I’ve heard of anybody suing a school yearbook before.”

  “A matter of principle; family honor was at stake. And anyway, litigiousness runs in our family. Gorko issued a writ against his father for more pocket money when he was five and Geis has almost sued himself several times.”

  “At your finishing schools in Claäv you developed an interest in politics, and became…popular with the local young men.”

  She shrugged. “I’d been a difficult child; I became an easy adolescent.”

  “To the surprise of everybody except, apparently yourself, you won entrance to the diplomatic faculty of the University of Yadayeypon, but left after two years, on the outbreak of the Five Percent War.”

  “Another coincidence; the professor I was fucking to get good grades died on me and I couldn’t be bothered starting again from scratch.”

  “You crewed on an anti-Tax cruiser operating out of TP 105, a moon of Roaval, then—along with a group of seven other junior officers—became one of the first humans for three hundred years to take the then newly re-released symbiovirus SNBv3. With you as leader, you and your fellow synchroneurobondees flew a squadron of single-seat modified excise clippers out of HomeAtLast, a military-commercial habitat stationed in near-Miykenns orbit, becoming the most successful squadron of the seventeen operating in the mid system.”

  “Please; I’m blushing.”

  “Three of your team died in your last action, at the very end of the war while the surrender was being negotiated. Your own craft was seriously damaged and you crash-landed on Nachtel’s Ghost, suffering near-fatal injurie
s on top of the extreme irradiation and already serious wounds you had sustained during the original engagement.”

  “Nothing by halves; should be the family motto.”

  “You were cut from the wreck and treated under the war-internment regulations in the Tax-neutral hospital of a mining concern on Nachtel’s Ghost—”

  “Ghastly food.”

  “—where you lost the fetus of the child you were carrying by another of your team, Miz Gattse Ensil Kuma.”

  She stopped for a moment and looked up to see the hydrofoil, twenty meters away. She pursed her lips, breathed deeply and walked slowly on. “Yes; terribly complicated way of going about getting an abortion. But then I was sterilized at the same time, so it was practically a bargain.”

  “You spent the months immediately after the war in Tenaus prison hospital, Nachtel. You were liberated—on your twentieth birthday—under the terms of the Lunchbar Agreement; you and the four surviving members of your team formed a limited company and undertook occasionally legal commercial surveillance and industrial espionage work, then branched out into Antiquities research and retrieval, a profession you shared with your sister, Breyguhn.”

  “ Half-sister. And we never got caught.”

  “Your team’s last successful contract was the location and disposal of what is believed to have been the second-last Lazy Gun, which resulted in the Gun’s auto-annihilation while under deconstruction in the physics department of Lip City University.”

  “Their methodology had been suspect for years.”

  “The resulting detonation destroyed approximately twenty percent of the city and resulted in the deaths of nearly half a million people.”

  She stopped walking. They had arrived at the piece of roughly cylindrical wreckage embedded in the fused silicate of the beach to which the hydrofoil was moored. She stared at the dark lump of half-melted metal.

  “Your team split up immediately afterward,” the machine went on. “You currently own one third of a tropical fish breeding and retail business on the island of Jorve.”

  “Hmm,” she said thoughtfully. “Sounds so banal, that last part. The approach of middle age; I’m losing my panache.”

  She shrugged and waded into the water, waves washing around her boots. She unlocked the hydrofoil’s painter and let the rope reel back into its housing in the stem.

  She looked at the beachcomber. “Well, thanks, but I don’t think so,” she said.

  “You don’t think what?”

  She climbed onto the hydrofoil, slung her legs inside the footwell and pulled the control wheel down. “I don’t think I want your services, machine.”

  “Ah, now, wait a moment, Lady Sharrow…”

  She flicked a few switches; the hydrofoil came to life, lights lighting, beepers beeping. “Thanks, but no.”

  “Just hold on, will you?” The machine sounded almost angry.

  “Look,” she said, starting the hydrofoil’s engine and making it roar. She shouted: “Tell Geis thanks…but no thanks.”

  “Geis? Look, lady, you appear to be making certain assumptions about the identity of—”

  “Oh, shut up and push me out here, will you?” She gunned the engine again, sending a froth of foam from the stern of the little boat. Its front foil levered down, knifing into the waves.

  The beachcombing machine nudged the hydrofoil forward into the water. “Look, I have something to confess here—”

  “That’s enough.” She smiled briefly at the beachcomber. “Thank you.” She switched the boat’s main lights on, creating a glittering pathway which swung across the waves.

  “Wait! Will you just wait?”

  Something in the machine’s voice made her turn to look at it.

  A section of the beachcomber’s battered front casing swung up and back to reveal a red-glowing interior bright with screens and read-outs. Sharrow frowned; her hand went to her jacket pocket as a man’s head and shoulders appeared from the compartment.

  He was young, muscular-looking in a dark T-shirt, and quite bald; the red light threw dark shadows across his face and over eyes which looked gold in the half-light. The skin on his smoothly reflecting head looked coppery.

  “We have to—” he began, and she heard both the mechanized voice of the beachcomber and the man’s own voice.

  He plucked a tiny bead from his top lip.

  “We have to talk,” he said. There was a slick bassiness about his voice Sharrow knew she’d have found immensely attractive when she’d been younger.

  “Who the hell are you?” she said, flicking a couple of switches in the hydrofoil’s cockpit without taking her eyes off him, or her other hand from the gun in her pocket.

  “Somebody who needs to talk to you,” the young man said, baring his teeth in a winning smile. He gestured down at the casing of the beachcombing machine. “Sorry about the disguise,” he said with a slightly embarrassed, deprecating gesture. “But it was felt—”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “No; I don’t want to talk to you. Goodbye.”

  She tugged the controls, sending the hydrofoil nudging round on a pulse of foam, swamping the front of the beachcomber; water splashed over the hatch’s lip into the machine’s interior.

  “Careful!” the young man shouted, leaping back and glancing down. “But, Lady Sharrow!” he called desperately. “I have something to put to you—”

  Sharrow pushed the throttle away from her; the ’foil’s engine rasped and the little boat surged out from the glass shore. “Really?” she shouted back. “Well, you can put it—”

  But something obscene was lost to the thrashing water and the screaming exhausts. The craft roared out to sea, rose quickly onto its foils, and raced away.

  2

  The Chain Gallery

  Issier was the main island of the Midsea archipelago, which lay a thousand kilometers from any other land near the center of Phirar, Golter’s third largest ocean.

  The little arrowhead hydrofoil swung out from the island’s glass western shore and headed north, for Jorve, the next island in the group. It docked half an hour later in a marina just outside Place Issier II, the archipelago’s largest town and administrative capital.

  Sharrow woke an apologetic guard in the marina office and left a note for the harbor master telling him to put the hydrofoil up for sale. She collected her bike, then took the east coast road north. She left her helmet off, driving in plain goggles with the wind fierce in her hair; the cloud overhead was fraying, letting moonlight and junklight spread a gray-blue wash over the fields and orchards outside the town.

  She switched the bike’s lights off, driving fast and leaning hard round the open, sweeping curves of the gradually climbing road, its surface a faint snaking ribbon of steel blue unwinding in front of her. Ravines beyond the crash-barriers gave brief glimpses of the rock-ragged coast beneath, where the ocean swell terminated in glowing white lines of surf. She only put her lights on when other traffic approached, and thrilled each time to the heart-stopping sensation of total darkness in the instant after she killed the old bike’s lights again.

  An hour after she had stood on the glass shore of Issier, she arrived at the solitary, turreted house on the cliff where she lived.

  “Sharrow, you can’t do this!”

  “You mean, you can’t do this to me,” she muttered.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” She took a camera the size of a little finger from a dressing-table drawer and clipped it into an interior pocket of the bag she’d packed.

  “Sharrow!”

  She frowned, turning away from the bag lying open on the big round bed in the big round bedroom which faced out to sea. “Hmm?” she said.

  Jyr looked distraught; he had been crying. “How can you just leave?” He threw his arms wide. “I love you!”

  She stared at him. The pale areas of his face looked reddened; the fashion on the island that summer had been for black-white skin like camouflage, and Jyr—convinced he suited the
style—seemed determined to remain two-tone for the whole year.

  She pushed past him, disappearing into her dressing-room to reappear with a pair of long gloves which she added to the pile of clothes in the overcrowded bag.

  “Sharrow!” Jyr shouted, behind her.

  “What?” she said, frowning, one hand at her mouth tapping her teeth as she looked down at the bag, deep in thought. She had booked a ticket on a westbound flight leaving early the next morning, called her lawyer and her business partners to arrange a meeting, and contacted her bank to rearrange her finances. Still, she was sure she’d forgotten something.

  “Don’t go!” Jyr said. “Didn’t you hear what I said? I love you!”

  “ Uh-huh,” she said, kneeling on the bed to pull the bag closed.

  “Sharrow,” Jyr said quietly behind her, a catch in his voice. “Please…” He put his hands on her hips. She knocked his hands away, grunting as she struggled with the catches on the bag.

  She forced the bag closed and stood up. Then she was whirled round as Jyr grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “Stop doing this to me!” he shouted. “Stop ignoring me!”

  “Well, stop shaking me!” she shouted.

  He let her go and stood there, quivering, his eyes puffy. His hair, all white, looked disheveled. “At least explain,” he said. “Why are you doing this? Why do you just have to go?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Tell me!”

  “All right!” she snapped. “Because,” she said, talking quickly, “once upon a time, long ago and far away, there was a young girl who’d been promised to a great temple by her parents. She met a man—a duke—and they fell in love. They swore nothing would separate them, but they were tricked and she was taken to the temple after all.

  “The Duke came to rescue the girl; she escaped and brought with her the temple’s greatest treasure. They married and she bore the Duke twins: a boy and a girl. In an attempt to get the treasure back, agents of the faith killed the Duke and his son.

  “The treasure was hidden—no one knows where—and the Duchess swore she’d avenge the deaths of her husband and child in any way she could, and to oppose the faith at every turn. She swore the surviving twin, a daughter, and all her descendants to the same oath.