Free By Light Alone by Adam Roberts Page B

cannot fly high enough to evade evil people and their weapons.’
    ‘Is it a war zone?’ barked George, his chest tinkling with excitement, or fear (as if there is really any difference between those two emotions!). He no longer knew what he was saying, exactly. Standing in the direct sunlight. The iCar Armoured pulled up in front of him and the nearside passenger door clicked open and swung wide. Sweat was needling his face and torso. ‘Is that why she was kidnapped? Is it something to do with war?’
    ‘It is nothing to do with war,’ said the commissioner, climbing into the iCar. ‘There is no war here, although there are some bad people, and some of them have guns.’
    ‘Leah is in Khoduz?’
    ‘Let us get into the Car please,’ said the Captain.
    George stood looking at the cavernous cavemouth of the open passenger door. The whole machine was twice the length of a flitter, massy and ponderous, more like a house than a vehicle, from its broad domed snout to its room-sized trunk. Its paintwork was white as snow. It hurt the eyes to look directly at it, even through shades. George got in. The inside was cool, and the seat adjusted itself beneath him.
    ‘Away!’ said the commissioner.
    They rolled for ten minutes along a rod-straight road of spongy tarmac; and then turned off onto a road of compressed dirt. An angled plume of pale dust shot from the back of the vehicle, like a rocket exhaust. George stared through the tinted glass. Where the canals ran, the land was scrubby with weeds. In between the zones of irrigation, sun and dryness had extirpated all life. The mountain dominated the distance, one big peak and an eastward downward slope to another, smaller peak. It looked like the profile of a mighty crocodile basking on the horizon. Objects near-to – parched trees, solitary buildings, discarded tractors – bulleted by, but the mountain was too huge and solid to move so much as a centimetre.
    George peered through his window. He pressed his face to it, to look ahead. The road was taking them towards a small hill, scaled all over with single-storey buildings. They were in the outskirts already. People lounged on the ground, or sat on the roofs, with their hair out.
    At a bend in the road just outside this village the car slowed to take the turn, and George saw two women in a dusty field, digging a trench, their arms glisteningly bare, their long black hair swaying with the motion of the spades.
    Supine on the ground, a few metres from them, was a line of half a dozen shop-front dummies: every brown head bald as an egg, and far too skinny to be actual human bodies. George might have speculated on what these manikins were doing in this remote village, or why the women were burying them, but his mind was too agitated by the thought that Leah was in one of these very houses! That he was only moments from being reunited!
    ‘This is Khoduz?’ he asked.
    They rolled through the place. The car pulled up in a narrow town square, with a central drinking fountain the shape of a rocket, and a couple of bang-haired palm trees. Men and children sat on the unshaded side of the square, letting the sunlight get to their hair.
    The commissioner climbed out of the car, telling everybody else to stay where they were. George watched proceedings through the tinted window. The commissioner was standing in the sunlight, talking to two bulky men, one long-haired, one fuzz-headed. The conversation went on for many minutes. That insectile look of a human head wearing dark glasses. Abruptly the exchange became more heated. The commissioner threw both his arms in the air, and strode back to the iCar. When he opened the door, a palpable wash of heat poured inside.
    The door closed with the thud of a guillotine blade hitting its stock.
    ‘My apologies,’ he said, calmly, to George, meeting his eye. ‘This has proved to be – the English, I think, is wild-goose chase . We have chased the wild goose.’
    From where he was sitting, in