Read Online Rites of Passage by Eric Brown - Free Book Online Page B

Algiers. So where did you come from?”
    The silence stretched. Skull used his tongue to work free a strand of fibre from between his teeth. “Okay, okay. I was travelling with some people. Only they weren’t people. Animals more like, monsters. A dozen or so of them. They had a vehicle, a collection of solar arrays lashed together around a failing engine. Anyway, they were heading west, towards Tangiers.”
    Danny nodded. “Why?”
    Skull shrugged. “They didn’t say. They invited me to stay awhile. They needed an engineer to help out, they said. So I travelled with them a few days, a week.”
    “Why did you leave them?” I asked.
    “Because I reckoned that soon, once I’d helped out with the arrays, I would’ve outlived my usefulness and they’d kill me rather than have me using up food and water. They were that kind of people.”
    He looked around at us, then bolted down the last of the food, stood with difficulty and hoiked himself from the lounge.
    “So what do you think?” Danny said. “He telling the truth?”
    Edvard voiced what I was thinking. “I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could spit. Which isn’t far, these days.”
    “We’ve come across gangs before,” I said. “We just have to be careful, that’s all.”
    Kat nodded. “I second that.”
    “What I’d like to know,” Edvard said, “is what’s so important about Tangiers that this mob was heading for it?”
    ~
    I was in the cab with Edvard the following day when we came across the hovercraft.
    It was late afternoon and we were roughly a hundred kilometres north of the trench, our destination. The sea bottom desert stretched ahead for as far as the eye could see, flat and featureless.
    I was nodding off in the heat when Edvard slowed the truck. I sat up and looked across at him. He indicated the horizon with a silent nod.
    I scanned. Far ahead, coruscating in the merciless afternoon glare, was the domed shape of a vehicle, entirely covered by an armature of solar arrays. At this distance it looked for all the world like a diamond-encrusted beetle.
    It was not moving. I guessed its occupants had seen us and halted, wary.
    Edvard brought the truck to a stop and called out to Danny.
    Seconds later Danny and Kat squeezed into the cab and crouched between us.
    “What do you think?” I said.
    “Big,” Danny said under his breath. “Impressive arrays. Of course, they might not all be in working order.” He screwed up his eyes. “I don’t see any evidence of a rig. Wonder what they do for water?”
    Kat said, “What should we do?”
    “Break out the rifles, Pierre. Ed, take us forward, slowly.”
    I slipped from the cab and hurried into the lounge. I unlocked the chest where we kept the rifles and hauled out four. I carried them back to the cab and doled them out as the truck crawled forward.
    The occupants of the other vehicle were doing the same, advancing carefully across the desert towards us. We slowed even further, and so did the other truck. We must have resembled two circumspect crabs, unsure whether to mate or fight.
    “It’s a hovercraft,” Kat said. Despite her years, she had sharp eyes. Only now, with the vehicle perhaps half a kay from us, did I make out the bulbous skirts below the layered solar arrays. As Danny had said, it was big; perhaps half the size again of our truck.
    “Okay,” Danny told Edvard. “Bring us to a stop now.”
    The truck halted with a hiss of brakes. Edvard kept the engine ticking over.
    The hovercraft stopped too, mirroring our caution.
    My heart was thudding. I was sweating even more than usual. I gripped the rifle to my chest. Minutes passed. Nothing moved out there. I imagined the hovercraft’s occupants, wondering like us whether we constituted a threat or an opportunity.
    “What now?” I asked Danny. I realised I was whispering.
    “We sit tight. Let them make the first move.”
    This was the first time I’d seen a working vehicle, other than our own, in more than three