‘It will be all right,’ she said, with savage self-assurance. ‘Do not think to fight these men. You cannot beat them.’
‘Do you know where they’re taking us?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Kalis said. ‘I know. And it will still be all right.’
So she is insane after all, he thought. Even now, with the threat of death closing in on them, she still clung to her delusion. He began to wonder if the mark on Kalis’s head was of her own doing, part of the web of self-deceit she had spun around herself. She was truly, tragically deranged, in that case. Under better circumstances he would have been sorry for her, and even sorrier for her daughter, who had to labour under her mother’s warped view of the world.
The steam-truck swerved off the road, the ride becoming bumpier again. Its lanterns swept ahead, glancing off featureless, frost-mottled terrain, only the occasional rock or boulder serving to give a sense of scale. The driver might have been steering a random course, were it not for the visible marks in the ground, wheel ruts criss-crossing each other, showing that the steam-truck had come this way more than once.
They had gone perhaps a league at little more than walking pace when the driver brought the snorting machine to a halt. Nothing about the location suggested anything significant, but here the confusion of earlier wheel marks curved around, turning back on themselves.
The leader stepped down from the platform and walked to the rear of the flatbed. He kept glancing over his shoulder at something in the distance. For all the ferocity of his mask and armour, there was something nervous about him now. Quickly he flipped down the ramp and thrust his rifle up at the prisoners.
‘Surprised you didn’t try shooting your way out and making a run for it, back when we cornered you.’
‘Futile gestures aren’t really my style,’ Quillon said. ‘And it would have been futile, wouldn’t it?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘There you go then. We’ve saved ourselves a lot of fuss and bother for nothing.’
‘You know, you being a medical man and everything - maybe you’re worth more to us alive than dead.’
‘Hurt my friends and you’ll get nothing from me.’ With Nimcha in earshot he had been careful not to talk of killing. He hoped that when death came for the girl it would be fast and painless. He didn’t want her knowing what was going to happen ahead of time.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ the leader said. ‘We can be persuasive.’
‘You’d be surprised how little good that would do you.’
‘Think you’re strong-willed?’
‘No stronger than the next man. But how much trust would you place in a doctor if you’d given him reason to hate you? The drugs in my bag all look remarkably similar, to the uneducated. Would you trust me not to reach for something that might kill you, when you think I’m going to help you?’
‘Saying we’re uneducated?’
‘Not to put too fine a point on it, I think you’re as dumb as rocks.’
‘Far be it for me to agree with Cutter,’ Meroka said, ‘but the man’s got a point there.’
‘Well, it was just a thought.’ The Skullboy fell silent for a moment, and then in one easy movement swung the stock of his rifle into Quillon’s face. He felt it mash against his nose, breaking something. He felt his spectacles crunch as the glass in one of the lenses shattered. He fell back, staggering into the flatbed’s slatted side, Meroka making an effort to arrest his fall, but uselessly so with her hands tied, Quillon slumped to the ground, the pain arriving belatedly in his skull, all lit up and electric like a late-running commuter train.
‘They’re here,’ one of the other Skullboys said.
Meroka, Kalis and Nimcha were herded out of the steam-truck. Quillon watched them through a gauze of pain. Their hands were untied, then Quillon’s. At gunpoint, Meroka was made to remove her backpack and coat. The leader spread the coat open on the ground, beaming at the vicious delights it held. Someone grabbed Quillon’s coat by the collar and hauled him roughly to his feet. The ruined glasses slid from his ruined nose. He wanted to grab for them but his hands were still tied. He watched as a booted foot pulverised them to mangled metal and brilliant blue shards.
‘You too, city boy.’
Quillon was too stunned to speak, even if he’d had something to say. Blood drooled from his nose into his mouth. All he could do was submit to the men with guns and allow them to poke and prod him down the ramp, until he stood on the ground next to the other three prisoners.
‘Walk,’ the leader said.
There was something in the distance, picked out in furtive glimpses by the wavering lanterns. At first he thought it was a copse of silvery trees, standing alone in the emptiness. Then he realised that it was a huddle of steely figures, perhaps a dozen in all, some of them standing, some of them on the ground. For a lulling moment Quillon thought he was looking at armoured men, another party come to take them away from the young thugs with guns. Not that that would necessarily improve their situation, but at least it would delay the ultimate outcome. Yet as they covered the ground and the lantern light fell more strongly on the assembled group, he saw what he had been dreading.
They were not people. They were not human. They were not even, properly speaking, living things.
‘Vorgs,’ Meroka said.
CHAPTER TEN
The machines were man-sized, more or less man-shaped, with legs and arms and heads. Some of them stood erect, some of them crouched on all fours, while others sat on their haunches like trained dogs. There was indeed something canine or vulpine about them, something of the night and the wolf. Their bodies and limbs were little more than skeletal chassis, with their internal workings disgustingly visible. He recalled the severed limb Meroka had found by the crashed steam-coach, the vile melding of metal and meat: chrome-coloured joints and pistons, the liverish contamination of muscle and sinew and living nervous system, the one entwined with the other. Now he saw the creatures in their entirety and it was no better.
Organs and machines glistened under their chrome ribcages. Lunglike things, veined and wired, bellowed slowly in and out. Steel hearts pumped and whirred. There was even some kind of hideous digestive system, a tight-packed biomechanical nightmare of scarlet tubes, purple kidneys and silvery valves. The only thing protecting these delicate assemblies from damage was a thin, perforated meshwork.
It was their heads that he liked least of all. They were elongated, tapering frames, more like the skull of a horse than a man. They ended not in mouths but in a complex mechanism of drills, cutting tools and probes. They didn’t seem to have living eyes, rather goggling masses of camera lenses. He could see something grey and doughy inside the framework. The carnivorgs’ head-mechanisms were constantly clicking and swivelling, devices extending and retracting, as if the machines were going through some nervous autonomic anticipation, dogs drooling at the bell.
Most of them, anyway. One of the carnivorgs was already engaged in its business. It was crouched on the ground, neck stretched forwards like a dog drinking from a bowl. It was eating someone’s brain, one of its head-probes sunk into the victim’s skull. It was a middle-aged woman, her greying hair fanned on the ground under her head. Her body twitched as the carnivorg extracted the neural material it needed for its own functioning. Quillon hoped the woman was dead, and that the movements her body made were merely a side effect of the extraction process. But he wondered. At one time, the treatment for a certain kind of psychosis had been to push an ice pick up through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobe; the ice pick was then stirred around until it reduced the problematic brain tissue to non-functioning porridge. If a person could live through that, then Quillon thought it entirely likely that someone could live through the far more precise and directed extraction of tissue by a carnivorg.
Abruptly the machine withdrew its probe, rising on its rear legs, its forelimbs reaching up in an oddly endearing fashion as it cleaned the human contamination from its snout.
‘Keep walking,’ the Skullboy leader said, jabbing his rifle into the small of Quillon’s back.
‘Don’t give them the girl,’ Quillon said, finding the strength to speak at last. His tongue was thick, each utterance costing him pain. ‘They won’t miss her, will they? At least let her go, even if you give the rest of us to the machines.’
‘Sorry,’ the man said. ‘Got ourselves an arrangement here. It’s all meat to them.’
Two of the machines - including the one that had just stood up - moved to the body and hoisted it aloft, carrying her between them as if she were no more substantial than smoke. The party halted. The two machines walked to meet the waiting humans, while the other vorgs clicked and whirred their snout-mechanisms. They moved like puppets, gliding across the ground with feather-light footfalls as if they were being worked by hidden strings. Up close, they had the rank odour of a butcher’s shop on a hot day, mingled with something acrid and mechanical, like an overheating axle-box.
‘Vorgs/give/this/one/back,’ said the vorg that had just finished dining. Its voice was crudely synthesised and atonal, no better an approximation of human speech than the buzzing drone of an artificial larynx. Together with its silent partner, the vorg knelt to place the woman on the ground. ‘Vorgs/take/what/vorgs/need/now. This/one/still/good. Humans/bring/ back/later. Vorgs/need/more/brain.’
Quillon’s hopes crashed. She was still breathing.
‘Take her, boys,’ the leader said to his companions. ‘But go easy; it’s just a loan.’
‘I see,’ Quillon said, watching as two of the thugs took the woman back towards the steam-truck. ‘Easier to rape her after she’s been lobotomised, I suppose. Puts up less of a fight.’
‘You’d be happier if the boys had their fun first?’ the man asked.
No answer seemed adequate, but Quillon couldn’t remain silent now. ‘Why do you do this? Are you so scared of the vorgs that you have to do their work for them?’
‘Nothing about being scared. It’s all about reciprocity.’ He said the last word slowly, as if he had been practising it. ‘We’re not friends. Just ... business partners.’ He turned to face the vorg that had spoken. ‘We got four subjects for you here.’ Held up a hand with his fingers outstretched. ‘Four. With the woman we got you last time, that brings us up to five again. Does that mean we have us a deal?’
‘Vorgs/happy. Bring/first/donor. Vorgs/want/brain.’
‘You can see they’re alive and healthy. How about you give us a little sample of what you promised first, so we can see if it’s as good as before?’
At first the vorg did not seem to understand the Skullboy. Quillon had the sense that something had stalled, some decision-action impulse blocked in the butcher-shop horror of its half-cybernetic, half-organic mind. If the vorg was in any sense intelligent, it was the opportunistic slyness of an organism that had learned to live on scraps, without ever thinking to improve its station.
Then the vorg said, ‘Vorgs/make/good/drug. Vorgs/give/gift. This/one/ time/only. Bring/human/for/gift.’
The leader began to undo the clasp of his helmet. ‘That’ll be me, boys, if none of you has any objections.’
‘Vorgs/make/drug. Human/accept/gift.’
The leader tugged his helmet off. He was thick-necked, his thuggish head bald, the cranium scarred and pocked like one of the Moon’s two halves. His ears were tiny and piggy. He knelt and the skeletal machine towered over him. Its snout-mechanisms swapped around, different devices clicking into position before being swivelled or retracted, as if the vorg could not quite remember what it was meant to do. At last a syringe-like needle emerged, long and gleaming. With the swiftness of a striking snake the vorg plunged the needle into the leader’s neck. A pump whirred. The leader grunted and stumbled back, the needle popping free. He cuffed his hand over the puncture wound in his neck.
‘Still hurts like a bitch, boys!’ he declared, with a kind of wild glee at his own discomfort. ‘But the fog’s lifting already! Looks like we’ve got us a deal, vorg.’
‘Give/vorgs/brain.’ The machine’s buzzing inflection was unchanged from before.
What was the least cruel? Quillon wondered. Let Nimcha go first and be spared the sight of the others becoming food for the carnivorgs, especially her mother? Or should he put himself forward, offering himself as a sacrifice before the machines worked their way to the girl? She would die either way, but there seemed a special evil in the adults watching the child be taken first of all.
‘Get out of my way,’ Meroka said, barging free of the men with guns.
‘Give/vorgs/brain.’ The machine-creature tracked her with its eyeless head.
‘You think I’m going to give you the satisfaction of pleading or running?’ Meroka said, kneeling down on the ground.
The other vorg - the one that had not been feasting when they arrived - stalked over to her. They had tails, Quillon realised for the first time - segmented counterweights, spined with the same kind of blue-metal material as their claws. The tails swished and swayed with a life of their own. It was as if the vorgs were hungry and excited, prey animals at the kill.
‘Meroka,’ Quillon said. ‘I’m sorry it came to this.’
She looked up at him, cupping her hands around the back of her head. ‘Me too, Cutter. But you don’t have to apologise. It’s me who fucked things up, not you.’
‘It’s no one’s fault.’ He turned to look at Kalis. ‘Forgive us. It wasn’t meant to end like this.’
He had expected Nimcha to be screaming in terror by this point, but the girl looked through him as if he were made of glass. Perhaps, after all, there was just as much wrong with the daughter as the mother.
Never mind, he told himself. It was hardly a problem now.
‘Now, Nimcha,’ Kalis said. ‘Now.’
Nothing happened.
The vorg knelt down facing Meroka, still leaning over her. It reached out with its clawed forelimbs, bracing her into position like a lover about to plant a kiss. Meroka lifted her chin, a last act of defiance before the vorg did its work. Its mouthparts swivelled and clicked, the thick chromed tube of its skull-opening apparatus locking into position. The tip consisted of three intermeshing circular drills. They began to rotate as the apparatus telescoped slowly out from the head. If the other vorg had moved quickly to inject the antizonal drug into the Skullboy, this machine felt no need to hasten its work.
‘Now!’ Kalis said, with increasing shrillness. ‘Do it, Nimcha!’ Quillon’s attention flicked back to the girl. She looked confused, her eyes wide and uncomprehending.
He felt the faintest ghost of something skirl through his mind, the flutter of a moth’s wing across his cerebellum.
There was a shot, then another.
The vorg keeled over, a hole punched right through its abdomen, a gory tapestry of organs and machine parts splattered on the ground behind it. The drill kept whirring, the telescoping apparatus moving in and out with neurotic repetition.
The other vorg, and the party of machines waiting in the distance, became agitated. They all sank onto their forelimbs, taut as springs, tails lashing back and forth. Their heads gyred from side to side and their mouthparts moved furiously.
The Skullboys pointed their rifles into the darkness. There was another shot and one of them dropped to the ground, screaming at the fist-sized hole that had just appeared in his shin.
Six people came out of the night. They were not Skullboys. They were uniformed, with black body armour over dark uniforms, five of them with helmets on their heads, carrying heavy machine guns slung from shoulder straps and gripped two-handed, with curving magazines and thick, perforated barrels.
The sixth member of the party was a woman, her helmet in one hand, a small service revolver in the other. She had very dark skin and was taller than most men Quillon had met. ‘Take out the vorgs,’ she said, her voice calm with the confidence of authority. ‘Leave that one alive for Ricasso. It’ll make his day.’
One of her par
ty swung his machine gun and discharged it, blue-pink muzzle exhaust flaring out like a flamethrower. He doused the vorgs, the machines exploding apart under the impact of the bullets. Two of them sprang away, jaguaring into the darkness. The others writhed and thrashed, even as they were reduced to bloody scrap. Then the shooter selected semi-automatic fire and delivered a volley of shots into the one remaining vorg, the one that had spoken, blasting away one leg and one forearm. The vorg keeled over and pawed at the ground ineffectually, unable to achieve locomotion.
‘The rest of you can surrender,’ the tall woman said, before turning to examine Meroka. She had elegant, birdlike features, the whites of her eyes flashing bright in the gloom. ‘You, kneeling on the ground: get up. This isn’t the day you die.’
Without raising herself Meroka said, ‘And who the fuck are you?’
‘You imagine I owe you an introduction, after rescuing you?’
Meroka stood to her full height, fixing the woman with insolent disregard. ‘If I’m being rescued, why am I being told what to do?’
The woman holstered her service revolver, evidently satisfied that her men had the situation within control. ‘Because you are now under our jurisdiction. I am Captain Curtana of the rapid scout Painted Lady. You are now clients of Swarm.’
‘What if we’d rather not be clients?’
‘You are now clients of Swarm,’ Curtana repeated. ‘And that’s a Spearpoint accent if I’m not mistaken, which puts you considerably out of your depth.’ She nodded curtly at her men. ‘Take them to the ship. There’s no fuel to be had here.’
‘And the prisoners, Captain?’ one of the men asked.
‘Which ones? Theirs or ours?’
‘The Skulls, Captain. Do you want them executed, or brought aboard as prisoners?’
‘We don’t need any more ballast than we already have.’
‘I’ll have them shot, then.’
Curtana appeared to weigh the decision before answering. ‘No, we can spare the bullets tonight. Take their weapons and anything else useful they have on them, then let them go. They’ll be dead by morning anyway; we don’t need to help them on their way.’