“Come on!” I yelled to my small army, and they followed. I got some strange looks from them as I tore away fragments of syntheflesh that still clung, to reveal the me underneath. What they saw was a metal skeleton with white teeth and, when my shutters came up, lidless grey eyes. My rib cage is a solid thing in which most of my systems are contained, and my spine a column ten centimetres in diameter.
We charged to the end of the materials store after the retreating soldiers, then I took them away from that course down service corridors and through a hydroponics section. Beyond this there was more resistance in the form of another twinned machine flack gun. I took them away from this to a central point where the drop shafts had been shut down. All around were corridors and maintenance tunnels spreading into many hydroponics sections. Here I decided what I must do and turned to them.
“You’ve got me this far, and from here I must continue alone. I’ll only get more of you killed if I bring you further. Spread out here and hide, or hunt, whatever you wish. This will be over within the hour,” I said.
“I come with you,” said Gurt.
“You can’t,” I said.
“I come,” he said.
I reached round and grabbed him by the throat. I lifted him off the floor and looked at him, squares fleeing across my vision and error messages flashing up all over the place.
“Where I’m going you won’t be able to survive. Stay here and hold. Trust me.” With that I dropped him and jumped into the drop shaft. He didn’t follow.
* * *
For a thousand years many stations used rotation to simulate gravity. On other stations people adapted and were adapted to live without gravity. There is a whole race of humans in the Sol system who remain apart from Earth-normal humans because a meeting could be fatal. These weightless adapted humans have bones as brittle as egg-shell and severely atrophied muscles. When, as a result of the accruing Unification Formulae, came methods of gravity and antigravity generation, many stations received a radical overhaul. The Enmark station was cylindrical and had once spun around its axis. Its floors had been arranged concentrically having a simulated gravity of one and a half gees at the outside and zero at the centre. With the advent of gravity generators, floors had been put in across the cylinder, so in effect it had become a cylindrical tower. Transport from top to bottom of the tower was by drop shafts. In these, irised gravity fields squirted people in whatever direction they chose. With the shafts shut down there was no gravity field, just weightlessness. I hit the opposing wall of the shaft and, driving the tips of my metal fingers into a ridge, flung myself upwards. I did this again and again until I was travelling at about forty kilometres per hour. Over-spill of gravity generation from each floor tugged at me slightly as I sped past, but did not slow me much. With my weight came a lot of inertia. I turned as I hurtled upwards and readied myself. I hit the top of the shaft about a minute later.
The metal boomed under my feet and I left two foot-shaped dents in it. The rebound had me floating down to the entrance to the top floor. Upside down in relation to that floor, I looked through into the corridor beyond. Standing in the centre of the corridor was a three-barrelled machine gun behind which sat a woman dressed in blue coveralls and mirrored helmet. She must have been Enmark rather than God soldier. She didn’t see me until I waved at her. I must have gone past too fast.
“Jesu!” she said and opened up with the gun. I suppose it must be disconcerting to suddenly see an upside-down metal skull grinning at you from the end of the corridor. I hauled myself out of the way until the firing ceased, then stuck my head down again.
“Missed me!” I shouted. I was feeling a bit flaky after all those ionic bolts. She opened up again and I could hear her yelling into a communicator.
“Missed again!”
She ran out of ammunition on the fourth occasion. I stuck my head round, about a hundred bullets smashed into the back wall of the shaft, then the gun kept making its repeated treble clicks as she refused to take her hand off the trigger. I dropped down through the door to the floor and she sat there behind her gun pale-faced, waiting for me to come and kill her. I clicked one eye-shutter down in a metallic wink, turned, squatted down, then launched myself with my fingers speared, at the back wall of the shaft. The bullets had done what I required of them. The metal gave and I punched a hole, which I then tore wider to get me through. Beyond this I tore through thick insulation to a second thinner skin of metal. I stabbed my hand through this, tore a rent, and stepped through.
Beyond the wall was an apartment. A man and a small boy crouched to one side. The man held a console on his lap and had a laser pistol at. his side. He looked at me.
“Funny man,” said the boy, pointing at me.
“Collector,” said the man. I walked over to him, reached down and picked up the pistol. “Cardinal status,” he said. I nodded to him and headed for the door. He had locked himself in. I decided it best to leave him that safety.
“Code,” I said. He told me, I punched it, and walked out into the corridor.
This upper residential section was separate from where I wanted to go. Here the Director’s staff and wealthier stationers resided. I reckoned there would be more defences between me and Callum Manx Enmark. As a last resort I’d no doubt he had loyal soldiers armed with APWs and the like. I bet on him having every access covered with enough armament to blow the top off the station. He was probably suited now and getting ready to board his personal transport. I also bet on him not covering one other option.
I am not a man. I am metal, nano-circuitry, and syntheflesh, though not the latter at that moment. All that is human of me is a brain and spinal column held at absolute zero in a superconducting grid. Because I normally look like a man people make the mistake of expecting me to have a man’s requirements. I do not need to eat, nor do I need to breath.
The airlock was at the centre of this residential section. I went through into vacuum on the top of the station, fused the locking mechanism with the laser, then walked across the metal surface towards the centre of the station. There I could see the dome of the Director’s apartments and control centre. Next to an extensible airlock was a fast shuttle: a craft shaped like a flattened egg. I walked across to the dome, found a window, and looked inside.
There was much activity in the control centre: people in blue overalls were running about, others in Enmark businesswear were arguing, punching at consoles, and generally looking as if they wished they were somewhere else. I watched this chaos for a moment then moved on to the airlock. Even as I arrived it was being extended to the shuttle. No doubt my presence on the upper floors had been reported and Callum was taking the precaution of getting himself aboard. From there I supposed he could still run things, then run, if it became necessary. I climbed into the extending tube of the lock and hung on.
The tubular corridor hit against the side of the shuttle and locked down. Immediately air rushed in and filled it. I watched frost forming on my hands while I sat on the floor and waited. Eventually the lock was up to pressure and the station door whined and clunked, then opened inwards.
“You can’t mean it,” a woman said.
“I damned well can. I’ve spent years on this project and I’m not having some pre-Convulsion ‘chronism dictating terms. We blow the top as soon as he’s in the control room.”
The second voice I recognised as the voice that had spoken to me before my tank was destroyed by the sun laser—Callum Manx Enmark.
“You can’t do that,” said the woman.
“I won’t let you do that,” said a third voice, that of a man.
“Leave it,” said Callum.
By then the door was halfway open.
“You’ll die,” said Callum.
The door swung full open on a strange little diarama. A short stocky thug in grey businesswear had his hand poised at his jacket pocket. He was facing me. A ginger-haired woman in a clinging wrap and spring heels stood next to him. With his back to me was a tall m
an with long curly blond hair. He held a laser pistol, similar to the one I held, on the two of them. The thug saw me and commendably showed little reaction other than a widening of his eyes. The woman saw me and screamed. I pressed the snout of my recently-filched laser against the back of Callum’s neck.
“Drop it,” I said.
He turned and fired.
The laser scored a groove across my rib cage, then flashed beyond me into the airlock. Of a sudden there was the roar of escaping air. The man and woman held themselves in the station lock as it automatically began to close. Callum was pulled off his feet and slammed into me. As I closed my hand on the edge of the lock he hung onto my arm. I looked at him then released my hold and stepped back into the tunnel. The station lock closed. Callum looked at me in horror as his eyes bulged and air jetted from his lungs. The last of the air gusted from the tunnel and he lay on the floor gulping, water vapour puffing from his mouth and swollen eyes. His body swelled as that of a fish pulled up from deepest sea. It took him about two minutes, I suppose. I wasn’t really counting. I just watched and thought about the slaves of the Army of God, Sophist and those other sauramen that had died, and of David Enmark finally sent into oblivion . . . When it was finished I walked over and knocked hard on the station airlock. About a quarter of an hour later they let me in. An hour after that the remaining sauramen were back on the lifter and certain Enmark activities shut down. I decided that I would stay until the Enmark system was back online and until I had decided who to put in charge. The irony was that the only available memplant for the system AI came from a bloated corpse brought in from outside, and that because I effectively owned the Enmark Corporation, Callum Manx Enmark would spend the rest of his existence with a pre-Convulsion anachronism dictating terms to him.
Table of Contents
part one
part two
part three
part four
part five
part six
the army of god and the sauraman
Neal Asher, Africa Zero
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