Brisbane already has the deaths of the Ragtime passengers on his conscience. He does not want a single further life. But what can he…

An arm twitches.

Does he still have some control? He never tried before. He focuses his efforts on the arm, and it shifts an inch or so. He thinks of his legs. Move. Move!

“Brisbane, what are you doing?” asks Carmilla.

He doesn’t bother answering, focusing all efforts on his limbs. He – his body – is moving now, and he hooks an arm over the side. He moves his trunk and pushes… something. It takes forever.

“Brisbane, you will kill us. You will die.”

That would be a good thing, you insane demon.

He hurls himself over the edge of the truck, and though he feels nothing he knows further injury will result. The truck was going faster than he thought. The sky inverts, returns, inverts again as he rolls. He blacks out again, perhaps; maybe the last time? No, light floods in the gap between his eyelids.

The owners of the truck are carrying him, concerned looks on their faces. They are talking but he cannot hear.

They’re fucking taking him to hospital, aren’t they? Shit. They are as good as dead.

“I’m concerned about you, Brisbane. I’m disconnecting you from the suit. If you had killed yourself, we would have lost the objective right now that we are so close. A word of caution, remember? Do you not want to see it? Do you not taste the victory?”

Chapter Forty-one

Bloodroot: Shell

“We need to format all your drones to detect Exotics,” says Shell. “You don’t have them here, but Ragtime is aware. You’ll have to extract the data from the Pentagram core.”

Unwin nods. “Do we know this Brisbane is coming here?”

“From what we’ve been able to piece together, he stole a ship, the Clandestine, from the Lagos team,” says Fin. “He had no reason to do that if he wasn’t coming to Bloodroot. And being planetside, he must want to poison the colony.”

Unwin inclines his head. “‘Must’?”

Shell falters. “Er… he’s dying. He wants to take others with him…?”

“Really? He might be looking for a quiet place to die. He might be related to someone on Bloodroot, someone who arrived decades ago, and wish to say goodbye. He might have flown back to Lagos. He might die inside the ship and crash-land.”

Shell says, “Sir, he was homicidal on the Ragtime.”

“I accept that. I don’t accept that someone who could have killed you all at any time and didn’t has such a simplistic agenda. In fact, your data suggests he was trying to escape after killing the first batch of passengers and he only attacked you, Captain Campion, after you attacked him first.”

Shell burns. “Sir!”