50 Avril 1896 A.D. The Raw: Cerelon’s Air Base XXI
It was 4:15 P.M. and the remaining lieutenants of 130 Squadron—Smith, Dixon, Carnation, and Kimbrough—had just left Crispin’s office. After he described the multiple disasters of the day, there had been a long interval during which no one said anything much. Perhaps their stunned silence had been due in part to Mickey’s presence. Crispin had kept trying to catch his eye and indicate that it was inappropriate for him to be at an officers’ meeting; but he had hovered, mixing drinks, like a self-appointed waiter.
Crispin went into the bedroom and sank down on the edge of his bed. Mickey stood before him, tail flicking. Over one shoulder he had slung a carpetbag, a Jimenez relic, into which he had packed what he must have assumed were Crispin’s most treasured possessions. In fact, Crispin owned nothing that he treasured—nothing that had not once been somebody else’s. Soon, shorn of his rank and his Gorgonette, he would be as free of material ties as a newborn baby. The few things he’d taken from Smithrebel’s that had survived his flight through the Wraithwaste had been lost forever in Chressamo. He had emerged from the toothlike tower with a shaved head, a cast-off uniform, a kit bag, and a resolve to do right for the first time in his life—not by the law of the land, which had given him up before it gave him a chance, but by the law of the armed forces, which was firmer, cleaner, and based on survival of the fittest, not the petty concerns of respectable people.
But he had not known that at a certain level of the hierarchy, military law, too, stopped applying—or at least, became fuzzy. The tensions of power, ambition, and greed warped pure survivalism into neo-aristocratic immorality. Murdering one’s personal enemies and expecting to get away with it was not a practice of soldiers, nor of the right-living masses. It was a practice of the gutter, and also of the Ferupian nobility—who, Crispin thought now, must surely be the most desolate people on earth.
All was quiet outside. The base had sunk into a torpor, stunned by the loss of a third of its men. It would not be much longer before the jeeps rolled up. Even taking into account the fact that Sarehole was a forty-five-minute drive from Cerelon, Burns would not need more than five hours, if he was hurrying. And Crispin guessed he would hurry. The possibility that Crispin might not try to escape wouldn’t even cross that sneaky half-Wraith mind.
It had been three and a half hours.
“You’ve got to get away,” Mickey said, breaking the silence.
“No, no. No.”
“If you don’t get out of here, they’re going to court-martial you! You’ll be in front of a firing squad before you can say it wasn’t me!”
“Leave off, Mick. I did it. I’ll have to pay for it.”
Insidiously, perhaps while he flew over the Raw, perhaps while he drank whiskey with the stoic lieutenants, shouldering their silent blame—guilt had infiltrated Crispin’s heart. The idea of fleeing his fate had become unacceptable. He had fired on Vichuisse a split second before Burns did. It had almost certainly been one of Princess Anuei’s screamers that had eaten Vichuisse’s vital organs. And how could a traitor get off by complaining that he had been betrayed?
“There’s such a thing as being too scrupulous,” Mickey said urgently.
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Since I’ve known you, Captain, you haven’t been prone to stupid heroics! What’s happened?”
“You yourself said that I was the very embodiment of grace and selflessness and bravery. And all the rest of it.”
“Yes, but it’s gone beyond that now! That stuff is fine, but none of it applies anymore! It was all very well to risk your life and your reputation for the good of six squadrons—”
Just a personal vendetta, Crispin corrected him silently.
“But now it’s gone beyond that. It’s got personal.”
It always was personal! Why, oh why does he think so highly of me?
“Burns isn’t an abstract cause, he’s an ambitious, treacherous, double-crossing bastard. They’re all double-crossing bastards! Are you going to die for them?”
“Someone’s got to carry the can!”
“They could say Vichuisse was shot down by the enemy. If they wanted. But you’re a danger to them now, Captain. They want to take you out. Of course you know that, too, now. But I saw it even back then, the way Burns looked at you. You have to desert! Take Princess Anuei and fly back across the Wraithwaste! Put her down in an empty field in western Ferupe—”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“It’s the only possible—
Crispin looked up. “I haven’t told anyone this in three years. But I don’t suppose it makes any difference now. I got into trouble with the police in Lovoshire. I stole a truck. And I was fingered for arson. That’s a serious crime—a hanging crime, if anyone was killed, which I don’t know. What I do know is that the white-coats had it in for me. If they found out about the man I did kill, after I got away from them the first time round, in all likelihood they circulated my description to the cities. It’s been three years—they probably wouldn’t come down on me right away—but I can’t even contemplate spending the rest of my days on the mud-show circuit with military and civil charges hanging over my head. I wouldn’t be able to perform; I might get to drive trucks if I could find an owner who’d overlook my sketchy history; but I’d probably end up as a laborer. I’d rather die.”
Even to him, it sounded melodramatic. But then he remembered Vichuisse saying I’d rather die than go home... even though I sense my last days approaching...
At the time, he had thought the commandant a fool, but now he understood, because he stood in the very same trap that had been closing on Vichuisse three days ago. Anyone for whom heroism—or even the belief in heroism—had been a way of life was inevitably ambushed at the end, even after he had discarded his pretensions to glory, by his own pride. His own need for a heroic end. Vichuisse’s talk of being ill had been his way of saying that he was going to go out in a blaze of glory—a final, visible commitment to the ideals he had lived for. During his career, he had failed to be a hero. But a noble death was within the grasp of even the chronically cowardly. It required nothing except determination.
But Vichuisse had been prevented from whatever apotheosis he had planned for himself. He had died in the least noble way possible. By Crispin’s hand.
Did Crispin himself, therefore, deserve the end he had denied the commandant? Was heroism his lot in life—as he had assumed, as he had hoped it was? Or had he already, back in Jevanary when things first “got personal,” slipped without knowing it out of the plane in which heroes moved?
He massaged his eyes hard, his head spinning with unwelcome yet unexpectedly appealing logic.
Desertion. Yes... it would have to be. But where, when, and how?
Possibilities opened up before him, very quickly shedding their disguise of self-abnegation.
He shook himself and ran his hands over his scalp and down his neck, locating an incredible number of bruises and sore muscles.
Mickey still looked stunned by Crispin’s revelation. Never broke a law in his life, Crispin thought contemptuously.
Then he remembered that Mickey had been a deserter and a traitor to his own long before Crispin so much as set foot in the Raw.
“Well?” he snapped. “Anything to say to that?”
Mickey swallowed and said, “There’s another possibility. You could go to Kirekune.”
Crispin said nothing. Mickey rushed on.
“If you make it across the Raw, you can make it to Okimako. The first bit will be the hardest, not to get shot down. Then you can hop, skip, and jump. Load up on splinterons; there are no daemons to be had in the plains, they’ve all been requisitioned. I’ll give you my family’s address in Okimako, they’ll help you out if you say you’re a friend of mine—I mean, I know you might not want to say you’re a friend of mine, but I promise they’ll help you out, if you’ll try.” He paused again, obviously taking Crispin’s silence as rejection of his suggestion. “Look, you’ve got to—if you ever I—if you ever took me seriously—please—”
Crispin reached out and took his sleeve, pulling him closer. “You knew about Burns, didn’t you?” he said softly, looking up into the worried face. “Isn’t that what you said?”
Something had shifted inside him: something, he did not know what, was changing. Vichuisse’s death had not been the solution, but the catalyst. He felt as if he were about to explode, or fall to pieces. And no one was near to help, or to bear the brunt, except Mickey. “You knew!”
Slowly, Mickey said, “I guessed.”
“When?”
“When you told me what was going on. After we talked to him that night, I was practically sure of it.”
“How could you have been sure?”
Mickey tossed his head. “I dunno... the way he looked at you.”
The way he looked at me! “Then why the hell didn’t you say anything?”
Mickey closed his eyes. “You wouldn’t have believed me. You wanted to think they were... ”
“Stop right there!” Crispin’s voice cracked out like a whip. “Not another word! Not another fucking word, all right?”
“Then I’m sorry,” Mickey whispered. “Significant.”
The sunlight coming in the window slanted onto the bare wooden floor and the carpetbag. Dust danced in the rays. An air patrol churned noisily by, flying low. Crispin closed his eyes.
I can’t go on, he thought in a moment of absolute clarity.
When he opened his eyes again the world looked different: sharper-edged, multidimensional, unknowable. The air patrol passed overhead and was gone. The only sounds were Mickey’s breath and the wind outside rustling over the grassy rise. Freed from the manacles of false humility, Crispin’s thoughts hurtled ahead, out of control. Minutes, hours, days. The Blacheim, and its daemon of dubious health. The explanations he would concoct to put the riggers and lieutenants off the scent. Provisions. Weights. Splinterons. Maps. Money. The Kirekuni Raw. Okimako, the city of fire. There were so many unknowns it made his head hurt even to think about it. And underneath, of course, the blank gray horror that Mickey’s suggestion of flying to Kirekune had seeded, which had bloomed when Crispin realized there was no real reason not to go. There is nothing quite as unnerving as seeing a component of a hallucination tumbling out of the world of dreams, into possibility, crossing a gulf which nothing should be able to survive undamaged.
Crispin braced himself and forced a grin. “I apologize!”
He rose and clapped Mickey on the shoulder.
“It’s no business of mine grilling you about something that’s in the past! Especially when you’re my ticket out of here! Queen, I should be thanking you on my knees!”
“That won’t be necessary,” Mickey said stiffly, obviously suspecting another outbreak of sarcasm.
Crispin grabbed him by the arm and swung him around. “Listen, don’t be a fucking prima donna!” He kept the false grin plastered on his face. “Time’s passing! And we have to think of some pretext for getting the Blacheim out and having her checked over!”
“The Blacheim?”
“She’s the only two-man kite on base. She’s old, but as far as I know, her daemon is still alive—I’ve been having them feed it, no point letting it die.” He swooped the carpetbag up off the floor and took a look inside. Mickey seemed to have an eye for anything which might possibly be of monetary value—that, at least, was the only explanation for his egregious taste in souvenirs. Crispin went to Jimenez’s wardrobe and stuffed a dress suit and a smoking suit into the bag. Jimenez had been a big man; Crispin had had his clothes altered to fit. They would crumple, but it didn’t matter. Such garments were ubiquitous the world over, and so were hot irons.
Mickey stood unmoving in the rhomboid of sunlight on the floor. “Captain?”
“Call me by my name! We’re partners now!”
“You’re not suggesting... ”
“Suggesting?” Crispin caroled.
“That I... ”
“That you come with me? I wasn’t aware there was any question of your not coming!”
“Someone’s got to cover for you,” Mickey said desperately.
Crispin turned on him. He felt disgustingly incapable of matching Mickey’s capacity for self-sacrifice. “What do you think I am? A snake like Burns? A daemon in human form? Has it slipped your mind that you fired on Burns, not me—as far as he’s concerned, you’re a worse traitor than I am! Talk about treachery! Talk about firing squads! You wouldn’t even get the travesty of a trial. You’re coming, no question about it.”
“But... but! I can’t! Not to Kirekune!” Mickey looked as if he were about to break down.
Oh, Queen, Crispin thought. “Look, we’re in this together. I pulled you in. That means I’ve got to pull you out.”
The sun highlighted the meaningless tattoo patterns on Mickey’s lashing tail. “You’re not responsible for me! I can take care of myself!”
“Don’t be childish. If it weren’t for you, I might already have flown into Cerelon and given myself up. I owe you that much, at least.”
“You don’t understand... ”
His voice was halfhearted. Crispin pressed his advantage. “I need you. There’s no guarantee I’ll even make it over the Kirekuni Raw. And if I get shot down on my own, I’m dead.”
“You’ll have more of a chance on your own than you would with me,” Mickey whispered.
Crispin ignored him. “And supposing I make Kirekune; it might as well be the dark side of the moon for all I know about it! Just how far d’you think I’d get in Okimako without someone who speaks the language?” Galvanized by the thought of danger, both distant and impending, he chivvied Mickey across the room and through the office. “The Blacheim’s in Hangar Four. You deal with the riggers—tell them it’s my say-so, we have to make a trip to Cerelon, tell them the commandants are recalling all the antiquated bombers, tell them what you like. I’m going to say good-bye to the lieutenants. There are a few things... I have a few apologies to make. Then I’ll come back here and pick up some maps. Make sure to get as many barrels of extra splinterons into her as she’ll hold. Use the bomb holds. Food isn’t that important. But water is. If we’re flying for long stretches at a time, the radiator will blow if we don’t cool down the engine. Got it?”
“Got it, sir,” Mickey said sadly.
He saluted. It should have been an ironic, even humorous gesture; but when Crispin glanced at his face, he saw a look of—fear? longing? craven terror? A look such as he had never seen before.
Why had Mickey overreacted so violently to a plan that was, after all, his own? Was there something Crispin did not know?
There was a great deal, Crispin thought, that he did not know.
No time to ponder. Five hours, and four of those were gone. They went out into the summer evening.
Delight to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him.
—Herman Melville, Moby Dick
THE END
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*clears throat* Hi! Your humble author here. Thanks for reading! Crispin’s in a bit of a spot, eh? I’m afraid to guess how he will cope in Okimako, if they even get that far (I practically had one hand over my eyes while I was writing that part). At least he has Mickey with him ... which may turn out not to be an advantage.
Find out what happens next in The Daemon in the Machine, the next book in the EVER trilogy! Available now from all good booksellers. A quick Google search will get you set up. You can also click through to my website for a handy-dandy collection of buy links: http://felicitysavage.com/books/the-daemon-in-the-machine/
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