Teranesia

Prabir heard a dull thud outside the cabin. He peered out on to the deck. The soldier had slumped to his knees; as Prabir watched, he keeled over on to his side.

The sentry on the beach was still standing, facing the jungle, oblivious to his comrade’s fate. Prabir searched the moonlit water, but the cabin was so low that the deck hid most of the view near the boat. The sentry reached back as if to slap away an insect, then staggered. Prabir couldn’t see the dart in his neck, but it could not have been a bullet. Grant must have borrowed a tranquilliser gun, but what had she loaded it with to have such an effect? Strychnine?

The man collapsed face-down in the sand. Grant would probably search him — and it seemed unwise to shout out to warn her not to bother — but neither sentry had the key to the boat: Prabir had seen it passed from hand to hand when his meal had been delivered, it had been brought from the camp and taken back again. There was no point both of them wasting time; he tried his strength against the door of the cabin, but neither the lock nor the hinges gave any sign of yielding. He picked up a stool and bounced it repeatedly against a window, hoping to flex the pane enough to snap the rivets that held it to the frame; the assault was gratifyingly silent, but completely ineffectual.

Someone tapped a staccato rhythm on the window on the other side of the cabin. He put down the stool and turned. Madhusree called out softly, ‘I’m told you can slide this one open from the inside.’

Prabir approached her. She was dripping wet, her hair tied back, long bare limbs catching the moonlight. She hadn’t seemed so beautiful to him since the day she was born, and all the reasons were reversed now: her vulnerability, her ungainliness, her bewilderment, had all been replaced by their opposites. His parents should have seen this transformation, not him, but he savoured the sweet kick in the chest, unearned or not.

He said, ‘I don’t want to infect you. You’d better get off the boat.’

Madhusree sighed. ‘Are you sneezing? Are you covered in pustules? What’s it going to do, launch missiles? It’s a molecule, not a voodoo curse. If you want to be careful you can stand away from me, but I need to come into the cabin and check out the equipment.’

Prabir was mystified. ‘Why?’

‘So I don’t waste time bringing things from the other boat.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Madhusree grimaced with impatience. ‘I don’t know what we’ll need. Martha said I could take whatever’s working from here, so it will help if I know what that is. Now open the window.’

Prabir complied, then retreated to the far corner as she climbed into the cabin and began inspecting the rack of biochemical instruments. The soldiers had attacked the autopilot with a crowbar, and taken away everything organic to be burned, but they seemed to have left these machines untouched.

‘You’ve spoken with Martha?’

‘Yeah, through the wall of a tent. She couldn’t get away herself, but it’s not exactly maximum security back there. They’ve got poor Dr Sukardi tied up somewhere and guarded round the clock, but they seem to think that’s all that matters, as if he’s our own little tinpot colonel and we’re all helpless drones without him.’

Madhusree had a tranquilliser gun tucked into the back of her shorts. Prabir asked nervously, ‘What was in the darts?’

She replied almost absent-mindedly, ‘The normal sedative, but I added something to wreck the catalytic portion. It’s a self-degrading molecule, that’s why it’s safe to use on so many species: half of it forms an enzyme that lyses the whole thing into harmless junk in the presence of ATP, so it doesn’t require anything fancy in the organism to detoxify it. But it breaks itself down so quickly once it enters the bloodstream that if you disable the enzyme, it makes a huge difference: the potency goes up a thousandfold.’ She turned to him and added pointedly, as if she’d finally realised what he’d been fearing, ‘We have enzymes in the liver that can deal with it, though. It’s still not toxic to humans.’

She finished her inventory. ‘OK, this is great. You start unmounting these and stacking them on the deck. I’ll go and get the inflatables. I should be back in about ten minutes.’

Prabir said, ‘I must be slow, but I think I’m missing something. Where are we going with all this? What’s the plan?’

Madhusree smiled, proud and conspiratorial, as if Amita might walk in at any moment and ask why they were whispering.

‘What do you think? We’re heading south.’

Prabir followed his instructions while Madhusree swam out to the expedition’s ship. Then he checked the sentry curled up on the deck; the man was still breathing, slowly and deeply.