Stone Clock by Andrew Bannister

Author:Andrew Bannister
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK
Published: 2018-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

Sholntp (vreality)

THE HIGH SQUARE window was plain glass. There was a diagonal crack in it, and the blue-white beam of the street lamp outside threw a slanted square of light across the face of the woman sitting on the other side of the table. The shadow of the crack looked like a scar.

The woman was thin and elderly and pale, and her voice sounded thin and pale too.

‘You must understand,’ she said. ‘You said there would be a crash, a short time before the two ships impacted. What happened may well wipe out life on this planet. How did you know?’

It was Zeb’s third day in the cell. He had woken there, they had treated him there, and now they were questioning him there. Politely, but insistently. He was answering – uselessly.

They told him it was a miracle that he had survived. His rescuers had not, and nor had ninety million people so far. The count was rising, they said. He must be able to shed some light, they said.

It wasn’t in their nature to resort to indelicate methods, they said, when he continued not to help. And paused just long enough for him to imagine what they meant.

The thin woman was a recent arrival. He suspected she was their last throw, before they overcame their natures and got indelicate with him.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, for the hundredth time. ‘I can’t help you.’

They had dragged him, in a charred medical pod, out of the remains of the low-atmosphere flyer that had somehow made it nearly two hundred kilometres from the crash site before the plasma storm of the old warship’s dying engines had whipped it out of the sky. They had told him it was by luck that he had been found in the first place; it was luck the pod had protected him; it was luck that someone alive had been close enough to the wreck of the flyer to find him over again. He had been luckier than his rescuers, who had not survived.

He didn’t feel particularly lucky.

Eventually the thin woman seemed to run out of different ways of asking the same question. She sat frowning at him, and he returned the frown as levelly as he could until she shook her head slightly, stood up and left. Zeb watched the door close behind her and listened for the quiet snick that meant locking. Then he stood up himself, stretched, and winced as the movement tightened half-healed skin. His ankles were encased in cylinders of barely yielding foam-heal, which meant that he walked stiffly but without pain. The foam would be removable tomorrow, they had told him.

Apart from the table and two chairs, the world of his cell contained an electro-san that was the highest-tech thing he had seen here, and a cot which was much more primitive. He had little idea of the world outside his cell, except that it often contained sirens and sometimes the sound of crowds. He lowered himself on to the cot, pulled the discoloured cover over himself and got ready to wait.

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