Page 84 of Enthraller

It was obvious they hadn’t, so Wren didn’t know why Linao had even asked. To point out to him that it was his fault, probably, rather than hers.

This was looking less and less well planned by the moment.

They hoped she could find the wreckage, but if they’d been looking for it for all the time she’d been away from Ytla, how did they think she’d be any better at finding it?

“We provide your supplies, we’re offering you a place in our arrangements,” Linao said. “You’re the ones who know this terrain, the distances, and what equipment we need and I expect a little advance warning about those things.” She was holding her laz now, pointing it right at Renard. “Are we going to be trying to get back in the dark?”

Renard stared at the laz. “I know what happened to your last fake cult set-up. The one on Cepi?” Renard said. “Don’t think I don’t know you’d do the same to me when I’ve served my purpose.”

Linao looked at him for a long moment. “Cepi didn’t go to plan. We put people in place who made some very strange decisions. Some of it wasn’t their fault, I grant you, but some of it was. We were operating on the very edge of the blade there. There were very real time limits that made it tricky. If there had been another way, we’d have gotten them off Cepi, rather than blown it all up.”

“That was back in the good old days, over a year ago now, wasn’t it?” Ed spoke for the first time in a long time. “When Garmen and Lassa were still breakaway planets and your Core Companies still controlled money and influence.”

Linao looked over at him, and there was some anger in that look. “Yes. So you can imagine if we were desperate then, how much more desperate we are now that we no longer hold Garmen and Lassa.”

“Now that you’re hunted,” Wren said.

In response to that, Linao shifted the angle of her arm, pointing the laz at Ed’s chest. She flicked some setting on the side. “Unless you make some progress in the next minute, your Halatian friend here will be killed. I’ve upped the settings.” She flicked out her comms set and looked down as if checking the time.

Wren didn’t want to cooperate, because like Renard, she felt they would be killed when their usefulness was over, but it was better than being killed right now.

“I said this place looks familiar, didn’t I? Those trees look like some I might have gone through.” She pointed.

“Go look,” Linao told Navar and Fenton, and they jogged away.

There was silence for long minutes. Ed held himself still, but he was more watchful now than recuperating.

Renard, obviously sensing he no longer needed to worry about a laz blast to the chest, took out some water and drank, and his two sidekicks did the same.

A shout rose up from deep within the trees, and then Navar came jogging back. “She’s right. It’s there.” He looked over at Linao as if waiting for orders, and she flicked her gaze behind the sidekicks as if to tell him to take up the rear. He gave a nod, and then they all went into the forest.

The wreckage was less than a five minute walk away.

Well done, she told the nanos.I think you saved Ed’s life.

Linao had kept her laz on Ed, but when they stepped out into the long, wide scar the wreckage had carved for itself all those hundreds of years ago, she let her arm drop.

It looked different to how she remembered it, but the weather had been wild and she’d been running for her life. She’d caught glimpses of a massive, rotting hulk of metal, but now she could see just how big it really was. And this was only part of the original ship.

Steel girders rose like the ribs of a gigantic beast from the ground, and over time, sand and foliage had covered the base, so it looked as if it was planted in the ground—some strange, organic structure.

A forest had grown up around it, or it had landed in the forest, which had slowly reclaimed its space, with the canopy of the massive trees completely hiding all sight of the wreck from above.

Wren glanced back, checking to see who had eyes on her and Ed, to see if they could maybe disappear into the brush, but Renard was looking straight at her.

“How?” he asked.

“I thought I recognized the trees,” she said, with a shrug.

“This is what your people found while they were here?” Linao asked, gesturing, and Wren looked over to see a small pile of items set in the lee of one of the curved metal girders.

Renard glanced back to his side kicks. “Kine?”

The dark-haired one nodded. “Looks about right.”

“He was one of the people chasing Thorakis?” Linao focused on the unfortunate Kine.

Kine lifted his chin in assent.

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