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  When he was only a few metres away Stanton lifted his gun and fired his remaining shots. Crane leant into them. Each pulse of ionized aluminium just caused a momentary glow on his armoured chest, maybe a little pitting in the surface, but the glow quickly disappeared as the heat was dispersed through the s-con network imbedded in his armour. When the gun was empty, Stanton threw it at the android. A brass hand snatched the weapon, shattered it, and tossed the pieces aside. This was it. Crane stepped in and Stanton tried a stamp kick on his knee. He might more easily have tried to knock over an oak. Crane grabbed the front of his jacket, hoisted him into the air, and threw him. Stanton came down on his back in the shallow water with slimed rocks cracking against his spine. Crane came striding in again as he tried to stand. A backhand slap laid Stanton across the damp needles on the shore. What was the use? A boot like a ram flipped him over onto his back. Crane stooped over him, black eyes giving nothing. It might as well have been a slab of metal that was killing him. A huge brass hand closed around his throat and he was lifted once again.

  Maybe the eyes. Maybe he could at least damage this toy of Pelter’s? Stanton flicked the Tenkian ring round with his thumb. He felt the tug at his trouser leg as the dagger came out through the rip it had made before. Forest light glittered off the yellow chainglass blade and the handle slapped into his hand. He swung at Crane’s eyes, and the android’s other hand snapped up and caught his wrist. The point of the blade was a hand’s breadth from those black eyes. Crane blinked and did nothing while Stanton choked. Abruptly, he released Stanton’s throat. Stanton yelled as all his weight came down on his right shoulder. Crane pulled the blade from Stanton’s hand and then, in a moment, just discarded him.

  The lights in the Tenkian were flickering as it no doubt tried to give Mr. Crane a shock. Crane was oblivious to the electrical charge, but not oblivious to the pretty lights and the beauty of the weapon. He held it between his two forefingers and studied it for a long time. Stanton just lay there, recovering his breath. His right shoulder felt like it was dislocated, and he’d definitely cracked a few ribs. There was no point in running now. He just waited for the inevitable.

  Crane finished his long study of the Tenkian dagger, then slipped it into the pocket of his coat. He glanced at Stanton, lifted a forefinger up to his metal mouth, held it there for a moment, before stepping over him and walking off into the forest.

  * * *

  Her left leg hurt like hell, and felt warm and sticky inside the suit. In a way she wished that the sealant layer sandwiched between the armour and the inner suit had not done its job so well. Had it not, she would not face the prospect of suffocating in about twenty minutes from now. The Lyric was gone, John was either dead or soon would be, Pelter would see to that, and the safety lock on her suit even precluded her opening the helmet to vacuum. Jarvellis hung in space over Viridian and watched pieces of her ship flaring in atmosphere below her—when she could see through her tears.

  The old ring station was perhaps a few hundred metres away behind her. Straining round she could see a light deep inside it, behind exposed structural members. That option was closed to her as well. She had used up all the fuel in the suit’s impellers in order to escape the blast. ‘Get out,’ John had said. She had heard him clear, even as she had blown the airlock door and fired-up the impellers. The disc of fire had cut below her, then the debris cloud riding the blastwave had slammed into her back and tumbled her over and over. No doubt the piece of the Lyric that had punched into her thigh had been a fragment of chainglass. It had been one of many hits she had felt, and nothing else could have penetrated the ceramal armour.

  Eventually her tears dried and Jarvellis tried her comunit again. Again she just got silence. The EM pulse from the explosion must have burnt out the suit’s radio. Planar explosives had been used, and they did not produce such a pulse. It had come from one of the secondary explosions, either when the pile went or when the disc cut the underspace engine in half. There would be recovery ships up from Viridian in time, but they would come too late for her. Rescue was not an option, and only two others remained: either she died slowly in the suit or . . . Jarvellis reached down and unclipped the solid-state laser clipped to the suit’s utility belt. It wouldn’t work through the helmet, as the chainglass would automatically polarize. She needed to hold it over her heart. She estimated it would take about a minute to penetrate the suit.

  No more grief now. Everything was gone and now there was just her. Then . . . then she remembered the other life starting inside her, and that only made everything seem worse. She looked down at the laser in her heavy glove. It was just a matt cylinder with a button on one end.

  Oh, John . . .

  She put the business end of the laser against her chest and pressed the button. Red light ignited at the point of contact and vaporized ceramal flared away in an orange fog. Any moment now she would be through. There would be sudden pain, then quick death. The laser broke through, but there was no expected pain. The explosion slammed at her chest and flung her hand away. As she hurtled back, she saw the laser tumbling through space on a trail of glittering fragments.

  ‘Oh, fuck you. Fuck you!’

  Fifteen minutes of air left, and the display was still heading down. She had achieved the end she required, though not by the expected method. She knew exactly what had happened. The sealant had hardened on exposure to vacuum. The laser had cut through it and then it had broken under the air pressure in her suit. But it went further than that, which was the reason these old suits had been replaced. The epoxy-based sealant, once hardened, lost its flame-retardant properties. Under the blast of air, white-hot epoxy had exploded.

  ‘Goodbye, John,’ Jarvellis said, and thought that perhaps the shadows she was seeing at the edges of her vision were due to the sudden drop in air pressure. Abruptly she realized this was not so, she was seeing a framework of structural members silhouetted against Viridian, a second before she slammed into a wall inside the ring station. As the counter dropped to zero, and she gasped on nothing, she had enough humour left to appreciate the irony of it all.

  21

  Antiphoton Weapon (APW): In this case the term ‘antiphoton’ is a misnomer attributable to the propaganda core of the Jovian Separatists (either that or hopeful thinking). The beam projected from this weapon is a proton beam, the protons having been field-accelerated to near-light speed. The distinctive purple flash or beam, is not, as some fictional sources would have us believe, the fabled ‘darklight’. It is fluorescence caused by proton collision with air molecules. In pure vacuum the beam is invisible. The aforesaid fictional sources would also do well to remember that the firing of a proton weapon is a serious matter, the usual result of which is isotope contamination. The bad guys don’t just disappear in an elegant purple flash.

  From How It Is by Gordon

  Mika was watching a screen showing a view down the shaft towards the artefact. In the picture Cormac recognized the rear view of Carn, Cormac himself, Gant and Cento. The guardian creature was coming up the shaft.

  ‘Jesus!’ yelled Gant.

  Cormac waited for his shouted instruction for them to ‘Hit it’. Mika froze the picture at the point when the creature was in fullest view. Cormac’s recorded shout was stillborn.

  ‘I downloaded this copy from Aiden’s memory,’ said Mika, without turning.

  ‘What do you make of it?’

  ‘Terrifying, fascinating.’

  ‘All of that,’ said Cormac dryly.

  She turned to him. ‘If I hadn’t known the shaft had been made by melting and rock-compression, I would have said that creature hollowed it out somehow; that it was its natural home before the temperature dropped. The shaft is perfectly designed to accommodate it. But for the ice, it would have moved up much faster.’

  ‘And you are saying?’

  ‘The reverse: the creature was specially designed for the shaft. It was a guardian created for that place.’

  She walked past him to
a bench on which were laid the pieces of the creature which Thorn had brought back. She picked up the end of one silvered leg.

  ‘There is no real defence against energy weapons, but what defence there is this creature had: reflective skin and an effective method of heat dispersal. It was also armoured enough to deal with most projectile weapons.’ She pointed at the screen. ‘Its dimensions were perfect for the shaft.’

  ‘Machine or living thing,’ said Cormac, remembering a previous conversation, ‘it didn’t evolve.’

  ‘No, it has no means of reproduction. It was definitely made.’ She glanced at him again. ‘And its construction is strikingly similar to that of the dracomen. It does not have DNA; it used protein replication.’

  Cormac thought about that for a moment.

  Dragon again?

  ‘You just said, “Its natural home before the temperature dropped.” What did you mean by that?’

  Mika put down the silvered leg and picked up another piece of the creature: a flattened ovoid with ribs along one side. ‘This is one of its feet. It’s very like one of the toes of such lizards as the gecko on Earth or the srank on Circe. It would have been perfectly designed for gripping onto the rock of that shaft if there was no ice there.’ She dropped the foot. ‘Also, from what I have discovered thus far, it was reaching the edge of its survivability. Had the temperature gone below one-sixty Kelvin it would have become somnolent. Much lower than that and it would have died.’

  ‘But the dracomen were managing,’ said Cormac.

  Mika gazed at her collection of body parts. ‘This creature was not so complex as them. It did not have the ability to adapt . . .’

  ‘Questions occur,’ said Cormac, looking back at the screen. ‘Why was that artefact being guarded? And what put the guard there? Whatever did, it did not know the temperature was going to drop. The creature was placed there before the runcible went down. Yet, the dracomen . . . Were they sent here to retrieve the artefact? Was that Dragon’s purpose?’ He shook his head. ‘If so, why was the runcible destroyed?’

  ‘I believe some other alien is involved,’ said Mika.

  Cormac turned to her. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of the artefact. I’ve been checking through the Dragon / human dialogues and other papers. Remember, when you went to Aster Colora—that two-kilometre perimeter? Dragon has no use of machines. Everything it makes is more complex—living. That artefact is not a product of Dragon’s technology.’

  ‘Yes . . . may be . . . but the guardian? We run in circles. Every clue leads to more questions . . . Hubris, what is Dragon doing now?’

  ‘Dragon is still destroying things on the planet. We have no picture now, since one burst destroyed the probe.’

  To Mika, Cormac said, ‘That’s where I hope to get some answers, no matter how cryptic they may be.’

  ‘Dragon tells lies,’ Mika observed.

  ‘You can learn something even from lies,’ said Cormac, then left her to her work.

  * * *

  Cormac looked down into the huge main bay, at the rows of bubble-metal crates, superconductor cable and sheet, in reels and rolls, the massive shapes of the Skaidon horns in their shock packaging, one of which had killed the technician working on it, and at the two hemispheres of the containment vessel. He watched the technicians moving about the bay, checking this, taking readings here. They were not checking the runcible itself—as that would not be necessary until it was assembled—rather, they were checking the huge amount of equipment that would be used to install it. Most of these technicians carried notescreens. Others carried esoteric equipment, or were followed by robots doing so. The belly of the giant heavy-lifter, its loading hatches open, walled the back of the bay.

  ‘Bloody Dragon,’ said Chaline. By her expression when he asked her how things were proceeding, Cormac had already surmised she was not happy.

  ‘Was there damage?’

  ‘No damage to the runcible,’ she said, glaring at him.

  Cormac cursed himself. Was he so inured to death? ‘I was sorry to hear about . . . the—’

  ‘Her name was Jentia. She was a bloody good technician.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘What are you going to do? Do you actually care about anything? It killed her—as good as murdered her. It could have killed us all, and it may well have killed the inhabitants of Samarkand. That Darson was probably right.’

  ‘How would you suggest I go about arresting a half-million-ton alien psychopath?’

  Chaline turned away for a moment. When she turned back again, it was with a deprecatory smile twisting her lips. ‘That was irrational of me,’ she said.

  ‘Understandable, but you see the problems I am faced with? I . . . it’s part of the reason I—’

  ‘Yes,’ Chaline interrupted. ‘You and me both. Let’s leave it . . . Do you know what we saw Dragon doing before the probe was destroyed?’

  ‘Throwing a tantrum, blowing mountains apart,’ he replied with some relief.

  ‘Yes, and everything else down there. It is geostationary over the blast-site. I had hoped to use some of the remaining installations there. Last we saw, it was destroying them.’

  ‘By accident?’

  ‘You could say that, I suppose. That shaft was hit as well: sealed under a pile of rubble and molten rock.’

  Was Dragon really just throwing a tantrum?

  Whatever it was, it ceased twenty hours later.

  * * *

  ‘Weapons charged and ready to fire,’ said the innocuous voice of Hubris. Those weapons were what Carn had hinted might be used to excavate the artefact: to blow away two kilometres of rock. They were now directed towards the curve of Samarkand from where Dragon approached, silhouetted against the dim sun like some fighting machine from Earth’s bloody past. The weapons could be used now; at this distance it was possible to prevent impact and not be damaged by flashback.

  ‘Open a channel,’ said Cormac. ‘Let’s see what it wants.’

  ‘Dragon accelerating at three Gs,’ said Hubris.

  ‘We can’t stand another collision yet,’ said Chaline.

  ‘Dragon, if you come closer than one hundred kilometres we will fire on you. This is our perimeter,’ said Cormac.

  ‘Dragon slowing . . . two hundred and seventy kilometres . . . two hundred and fifty . . .’

  ‘If it looks as if it’s building up to let loose another charge, fire on it anyway,’ Cormac told Hubris, leaving the channel open so Dragon would hear.

  ‘Where is it? Where is it?’ boomed Dragon’s voice over the speakers.

  ‘Where is what, Dragon?’

  ‘The criminal! Where is the criminal?’

  ‘We do not know about any criminal. We came here to investigate the destruction of the Samarkand runcible, and the consequent deaths of ten thousand people.’

  ‘—one hundred and fifty kilometres . . . one hundred and forty . . .’

  When Dragon spoke next, its voice had dropped to a conversational level. ‘It killed your people. I tried to stop it, Ian Cormac, but it escaped and killed your people. The confinement vessel should have held it.’

  Cormac turned and looked at Carn. ‘Confinement vessel?’

  Carn shrugged. ‘What the hell would have needed adamantium to confine it? It must have been quite something, and to break out . . .’

  Dragon answered his question. ‘The creature confined was a Maker. Its kind made me. It is a criminal . . . In your limited way, you would call it psychopath. It is an energy creature.’

  Cormac looked at Chaline. ‘Psychopath,’ he said.

  To Dragon he said, ‘This Maker, it made the nanomycelium that damaged the runcible buffers?’

  ‘It did. I picked up readings that indicated anomalies in this sector and, knowing the confinement vessel was here, I sent my creatures, by way of your runcibles, to investigate. They came here after the Maker escaped its vessel. It left the mycelium to destroy your runcible and prevent them following.’

&nbs
p; Cormac closed the channel momentarily. ‘It ties with what you found out about that guardian,’ he said to Mika. ‘Same technology as Dragon uses. That’s plausible if its kind made Dragon.’

  Mika said, ‘Plausibility does not denote truth.’

  ‘It does not, and of course there are your thoughts on what Dragon might or might not make,’ said Cormac, looking at her meaningfully.

  ‘That was . . . speculation,’ Mika admitted, a pained expression on her face. ‘A confinement vessel for some kind of energy creature would of necessity not be biofactured.’

  ‘By any method we know,’ Cormac added.

  Mika’s pained expression became one of annoyance. ‘Quite,’ she said, not meeting his eyes.

  Cormac nodded and opened the channel again. ‘What do you mean by “energy creature” and where is it now?’

  ‘Its substance is mainly gaseous, and it is held together by lattices of force much like your shimmer-shields. I do not know where it is now. It has escaped via your runcibles.’

  Cormac closed the channel again. ‘Do you notice a certain lack of resemblance to previous Dragon dialogue?’ he said to them all.

  Mika said, ‘It is answering your questions directly.’

  ‘Precisely. That makes me very suspicious.’

  He reopened the channel. ‘Dragon, there is little we can do about this creature now. We came here to install a new runcible, and we wish to set about this work. Have you finished scorching Samarkand?’ He could not keep the sarcasm from his voice.

  Dragon took a long time replying. ‘The criminal must be found. The danger to your kind is great. It has taken ten thousand lives. Next time it might take millions.’

  ‘I repeat: there is little we can do about this now. We need the runcible installed so that communications can be opened with the grid. Then perhaps some way can be found to trace this Maker. Tell me, in what ways is it vulnerable?’

  ‘You have devices . . . Your proton weapons, contra-terrene bombs . . .’

  ‘These will kill it?’