Flute grasses rustled behind him – something big moving – and he felt his skin crawl, didn’t really relish the idea of lying in the Technician’s path. Shree’s eyes grew wide. She shoved the cylinder back in her coat, took a firm grip on her gun again.
‘Shree—’
A big long leg ending in a three-toed webbed foot came down from overhead, crunched against the ground only a few metres ahead of him, a shape blotted out the sun above. She began firing, pumping shot after shot into that shape. The second foot came down just in front of the first. The heroyne emitted a cawing ululating shriek, its long neck a curved arc against the sky. The beaked and eyeless head seemed just a two-metre extension of that neck, and the beak gaped wide. Shree turned to run, but the heroyne’s head darted down, the beak closing on her like a giant pair of blunt scissors. It snatched her up; a wading bird snapping up a frog.
Grant stayed utterly frozen, still as he could be. The heroyne straightened its neck against the sky, opened its mouth and tossed her up, screaming, caught her and did it again, her screams muffled when her head entered its gullet, then it gobbled her down whole. In utter horror Grant watched her slide into the creature’s neck. It convulsively swallowed, shoving her deeper, but she was still struggling. The heroyne raised its head again, shrieked again, then raised one of its webbed feet off the ground and like someone troubled with reflux rubbed at the lump in its neck.
Grant turned his head slightly to locate his gun. The heroyne swung towards him and he froze, and fought an old urge to pray. The heroyne took one slow and short pace in his direction, halted, tilted its head as if listening. Long painful moments passed, during which Grant saw the still struggling lump that was Shree traverse the last length of neck down into the creature’s stomach. Next it abruptly straightened, lifted a foot off the ground and began grooming its head, scraping one toe down the edge of its beak. When it finally realized there was nothing to clean off, it lowered that leg, tucked it underneath itself and just stood there on the other leg. Its head nodded, slowly started to droop. It looked like the damned thing intended to take a nap.
Go away! Go away!
Something snapped the creature’s head back up. Had it actually heard him thinking?
‘Jain technology,’ a voice ghosted in his comunit.
A tentacle whickered through the air, wrapped around the heroyne’s neck for a moment then retracted. The creature’s head, and a yard of neck, toppled like a scythed weed, thudded to the ground, the beak opening and closing spasmodically. Orange liquid squirted from the stub of its neck protruding from its body, and it began to lash back and forth. Its raised leg went down and it started high-stepping in a tight circle. The tentacle lashed out again, cracking this time. It sliced down at an angle through the back of the creature’s body, separating its main body from the saddle of bone and muscle above its legs. Body and remaining neck thumped to the ground, the neck still writhing. The legs, and the muscle above them, squatted and frog-leapt into the air, came down ten metres away, staggered on for a little while then came to a swaying stop. They didn’t fall, just stood there.
‘Distributed neural tissue,’ said that voice in Grant’s ear.
‘Get her out!’ Grant shouted. ‘Get her out of there!’
Penny Royal passed over him like a cloud of black knives and descended on the heroyne’s body, which rose into the air, a cage of lines drawing across it. The outside fell into segments like an orange, revealing a multicoloured mass of internal organs. These abruptly spread to the limit of their connections to each other. One big maggot-like sac split, spilling Shree onto the ground, then Penny Royal tossed the rest over by the still-standing legs.
By now Grant had retrieved his gun. He began crawling over. Penny Royal had yet to finish. It opened Shree’s coat and extracted the cylinder, then entirely shed its chameleonware as it enwrapped that in one tentacle.
‘Jain technology,’ it repeated.
The black AI rose up off the ground, supported on a pillar of tentacles, its upper part divided into three masses of spines, each mass aligned and each pointing in one direction only. As Grant reached Shree, a shadow fell across and he looked up – he preferred not to look at Shree anyway.
‘Great, just perfect,’ he said.
The black AI’s spines were pointing at the source of that shadow, risen up out of the flute grasses like a titanic cobra made of bone. The Technician had finally arrived and Grant lay between it and Penny Royal, between it and the cylinder.
‘Eight?’ said Penny Royal out loud.
The Technician slid closer, the movement of its massive body now clearly audible. The air seemed to be charging up with something. Grant closed his eyes, expecting to die any second now and just hoping it would be quick. But nothing happened. Finally he opened his eyes again, now to see Penny Royal extruding a tentacle with the cylinder attached to the end of it as if by glue. The Technician tilted its hood up like an animal ready to receive some treat, extended complex glassy manipulators, accepted the cylinder and transferred it inside itself. Then it turned, and in one massive wrench that shook the ground, it was gone.
The moment stretched taut, then Grant broke it. ‘Can you do anything for her?’
Penny Royal directed one clump of spines down towards Shree, then flipped up two stalked eyes, red as hell, as if to make a closer inspection. The orange bile covering her from head to foot had rotted her clothes and burnt away much of her skin. One of her eyes was gone, the other lidless in its socket. The lips on one side of her mouth were gone too, exposing ridiculously white teeth, and the flesh had been scoured from one of her hands. Hideous damage, but a bubbling wheezing issued from her mouth. She still lived and Grant knew that this damage was not beyond Penny Royal.
‘No,’ the AI said.
‘What do you mean “no”?’
‘It is just.’
The thing folded its eyes back inside and began to turn away.
‘Wait! Where are you going!’
‘Eight,’ it replied, and flowed away like darkness.
Grant returned his attention to Shree, and in horror realized she had turned her head towards him, gazing at him with her remaining eye.
‘Do . . . it,’ she managed.
He could lie there pretending he didn’t know what she meant, allowing her to suffer for longer. He could kid himself that he wouldn’t hand her over to the Polity, and that mind-wipe or some other execution of a death sentence would not then ensue. He did none of these.
Grant put the barrel of his disc gun against her temple, fired twice.
A ball of fire rose from the point of impact, throwing into silhouette the new disruptor to appear over Zealos. The thing hardly moved – solid in the sky as if nailed to the fabric of the universe – but in the city below the shock wave picked up ATVs, aerofans and gravcars and tumbled them along the streets like polystyrene models.
The red attack ship, Corpuscle, threw itself into a hard turn, then dipped low to the ground as some sort of surface extended from the disruptor – a three-dimensional ripple spreading from the fabric the thing had been nailed to. Where the lower edge of this shaved the city, it peeled up roofs and knocked over buildings. But this was no hardfield, Ergatis realized, everything falling from the point of contact seemed shredded. An aerofan rising into its path fragmented: in one twisting wrench it separated into all its individual components, and they fell. Nuts and bolts, cowlings, armature windings, spindles, computer chips and seat padding, all mixed with other components: bones, bleeding organs, soggy sheets of fat and lumps of muscle.
No connection with Amistad, Scold had been obliterated, and Cheops knocked out of the fight, and now the mechanism was visible in the Masadan sky. Also, the disruptor above was one of five presently materializing, messing up coms so badly that Ergatis couldn’t even pull the trigger on the geostat weapon Amistad had returned to it. Things did not look so good.
The planetary AI watched the attack ship flying low between buildings – it
s passing flipped over further cars and blew out glass windows in the street behind it. It ducked right underneath the field the disruptor had emitted, leaped an old church, peeling up tiles as it went, then stood on its tail and hurtled up towards the device, its megagun firing. The disruptor spewed fire, even shifted slightly from the impact, then cracked like an egg full of magma, its two halves beginning to fall. Again there would be the problem of all that weight coming down on the city raft. The attack ship would need to . . .
Positioning itself for that underside shot, Blood must have known the likely result. It tried to turn using gravmotors, side-blast fusion and by detonating one of its own weapons nacelles. Not enough. It hit one half of the disruptor and bounced off, its entire body bent at the middle so it looked almost like a boomerang. Completely out of control it tumbled in an arc over the city and came down in the Market District, cut a burning swathe before coming to rest, almost indistinguishable from the ruination it had created.
The two halves of the disruptor slammed down, both on one half of the cracked city raft. They didn’t break it further, nor did they cause it to start tilting; instead that half of the city just began to sink at a rate of half a metre a minute.
No way of moving those immensely heavy objects now. Through all available com systems in that half of the city, Ergatis ordered evacuation to the other half. Would that save lives? Perhaps, but maybe only for a short while. Another disruptor had begun to slide in this direction. It had materialized in the sky fifty kilometres away, and all data feed from the small town under its shadow had blanked. But now, with the disruptor here destroyed, data began coming in. Fires were visible in the town, massive damage, building collapses, and people staggering and crawling through the wreckage, just one look at their dumb imbecilic faces enough to tell nothing intelligent remained behind them. That could happen here in Zealos, soon, unless . . .
Connection.
If Ergatis had possessed a face it would have smiled at that moment, a tight humourless smile. A simple digital instruction set the doughnut fusion reactor of the geostat weapon winding up to full power, but enough energy was available in super-capacitor storage for three full-power shots. No point using any less than full power – those things in the Masadan sky were tough.
Perfectly targeted, the proton beam appeared like a blue pillar in the sky, its base on the approaching disruptor. The energy flash blanked those cams pointing at the thing, but the last microseconds recorded a spray of something issuing from its underside. New cams swung to bear as the beam blinked out, leaving a black trail of quickly dispersing smoke. The disruptor itself tilted and the ground underneath it burned with the orange flames of some sort of chemical-isotope fire. Its progress had halted, but now it began to move again, now in a wavering spiralling course spreading more of that fire.
Great, thought Ergatis. The thing had turned into ground fuser with its operator dead at the controls.
Cam eyes averted for another shot, then back again. The thing flipped over onto its back, spewed a cloud of glowing matter into the sky, but remained intact. A third shot, straight down its throat, and now the thing was gone, the blast wave of a massive explosion rolling towards Zealos, chunks of super-dense shrapnel leading it.
Ergatis sent what warnings it could, targeted another disruptor and waited with the patience of a machine for the geostat weapon to reach full charge.
‘The Technician freed itself of the Weaver by placing it inside me so it could reformat itself for war,’ said Tombs, his voice hollow and his expression lost. ‘Whether I returned to sanity or not was irrelevant – I was just a safe storage vessel. After a countdown, using penny mollusc shells, a twenty-year countdown.’ He glanced at Sanders, who smiled, remembering the quiet of the asylum terrace and her stripping off to go for a swim. It seemed an age ago.
‘Why did it need to do that?’
‘It has been like a soldier hampered with a civilian – never able to fight without reserve, always needing to protect the civilian.’
‘But twenty years?’
‘Twenty years ago the Technician would not have been ready for it, but now it is. That is why the Weaver first rose up in my mind, so as to lure the mechanism here. Now it has departed my mind to give the order of battle.’ He shook his head, sad, puzzled. ‘Though I don’t think its physical presence here is necessary, rather it wanted to be in at the kill – it is a predator after all.’
‘But Amistad’s manipulation of you gave the Weaver freedom to do that, surely?’
Tombs smiled without humour. ‘Amistad and Penny Royal, representing the Polity, did precisely what was expected of them by Dragon. They kept me alive and they kept me here. Everything else they did was irrelevant. They kept me safe until the time was right.’ He paused, checking about himself as if for something lost. ‘And now it is gone, and I am a broken bottle.’
‘But why download to a Human?’
Tombs shrugged, looked tired. ‘Because Dragon wanted the mechanism physically present here at Masada. Placing the Weaver inside a Human being ensured the mechanism took note of the Human race, and recognized it as a danger sufficient to impel it to come here.’
‘You are not broken,’ said a voice. The words were perfectly enunciated, yet definitely did not issue from a Human mouth.
‘I feel empty,’ Jem replied.
‘Yes, but now you can fill yourself.’
The skin on her back crawling, Sanders looked round. The gabbleduck had moved with utter silence and now squatted just a metre away from them. She had never been this close to one of the creatures. It produced a smell, cinnamon apple pie, but with an underlying hint of carrion. Its skin looked like rhinoceros hide, but blotchy purple and green with a glint as if lightly sprayed with gold paint. One composite forearm was closed up, the other partially open, and she could see how its six-talon claw could divide into two claws each with three talons. It held the two of them fixed in its emerald gaze for a short time, then turned and went down on all fours to saunter off out of the side of the building. Why should she be surprised that an Atheter spoke to them with such ease? Gabbleducks had been speaking Human words ever since Humans came here to Masada.
‘It’s here,’ said Tombs, and started trying to get up.
Sanders resisted him for a moment, pressing her hand against his chest, but he seemed utterly determined and brushed it aside, so she helped him as best she could, though her own body was bruised and battered.
A strong wind seemed to be blowing through the flute grasses, rushing, impatient, then the Technician surged into view, circumventing the building then circling round it, its hood catching up with its own tail to form a ring. The ring tightened, the Technician travelling steadily faster and faster, and the hood finally closed over the tail.
‘What now?’ asked Sanders, having to raise her voice over the noise.
‘Now it receives its orders!’ Tombs replied.
Sanders gazed down at the gabbleduck, at the Atheter named the Weaver. It was squatting again, arms folded across its chest like some self-satisfied Buddha. It showed no sign of giving any orders, but how was she to judge?
Tombs reached out to a pillar, took the weight off his legs for a moment then sat down. Sanders sat beside him.
‘This could be dangerous!’ he shouted, not seeming to care.
‘I’ll stay here!’ she replied.
The rushing wind sound grew to the roar of a gale, and then steadily transformed into something more intense. The air movement it generated blasted across before them, swirled around them and seemed to be creating a vacuum in the building behind, constantly trying to drag them in. In a minute Sanders realized the creature had started to glow, and felt the heat of that on her face. No doubt now that the Technician was moving faster than any hooder had ever moved – whirling like a machine component rather than something living. Sanders wanted to ask Tombs about this, but now it wasn’t possible to speak.
Another sound then, more a feeling; the deep resonant
toll of a bell. Sanders looked up straight into the throat of one of the mechanism’s disruptors, poised over them like a capture cup ready to slam down. Glowing an intense eye-aching white, the Technician now spun about the building a couple of metres off the ground. Suddenly it tilted, and only as it did so did Sanders see the Weaver raise one claw and gesture. The Technician tilted further, a burning wheel against the sky, its lower rim skidding on the ground and spraying smoking debris. The air seemed to thicken and Sanders suddenly felt a panic, unable to remember why she was here, the noisy chaos around her becoming meaningless, confusing, frightening.
Then the wheel broke and the Technician speared into the sky. It hit the disruptor like an arrow going through an apple, but with the sound of mountains falling. Sanders averted her eyes from the sudden raw glare. From horizon to horizon, the flash leached the landscape of colour, rendered it only in white and shades of sepia. The domed roof above slammed down, then back up and flipped away. A pillar to their right tilted out, then snapped off to tumble end over end into the distance. Only upon seeing this did she realize that she was now pressed down on her back, and that the same force-fields that had prevented Shree from killing her and Grant were now preventing them both from being tossed about like leaves in a hurricane.
A second detonation turned the sky into a pink backdrop etched with streaks of yellow lightning. Pressure waves rolled out from the impact site above, across the sky and down to the ground. The whole landscape jumped, smoked and steamed, shifted sideways. Something massive thundered down to the left, and the ground surged up and forwards into a wave that wrenched the building up until the floor stood near-vertical for the seconds it took to pass underneath it. Another cataclysmic impact surged a wave in from the side, and at once the building turned right over. Sanders found herself still pinned in place by force-fields, facing down towards the ground, one side of the building swamped, the open side revealing in a devastated landscape fires which, because of its lack of oxygen, shouldn’t be burning.