Dominion (18 page)

The truck had broken down on the road and it took three hours to repair. It was a credit to Burgess, the mechanic, that he'd managed to get it up and running again, but the delay meant that they would be forced to work in early morning light. They could have waited until dark came again, but Trask was prepared to take the chance on using daylight to complete their tasks. They'd work, then hole up. Once night fell, they'd be ready to move again.

Now the scavenging could begin. Apart from tinned food and medical supplies, petrol and diesel were the main requirements. They were almost down to the last of their reserves, and without fuel they couldn't range, or transport anything too heavy to be moved in a handcart. The risks of using the roads were outweighed by the benefits, and Trask was also determined to continue searching for more survivors. In the early days, they'd picked up communications from Dublin, Cork, and Limerick, where people had made it to Civil Defence bunkers before the spores could get to them, but the Illyri had information on the location of many such refuges, and patrols had been sent down to target them. The Illyri didn't bother trying to break into the bunkers. It was simpler just to drill holes in the doors and pump spores into the chambers.

It still amazed Trask that the Illyri hadn't come knocking on the doors of their own bunker, as they had on most of the ones in England and Scotland. Fremd thought that Meia had probably erased the records of the Irish bunker, along with a handful of others, before leaving Earth. Then again, it might simply not have struck the Illyri that humans could have discovered this old refuge, or found a way through their security systems if they had. Not for the first time, Trask gave thanks for Meia's existence. He wondered where she was now, if she still existed at all. He thought of her often as he looked up at the stars.

The village had one small petrol station. Trask's younger daughter, Jean, who was driving the truck, parked alongside it, and she, Nessa, and Dolan set about accessing its tanks and unloading barrels from the truck bed. Burgess checked the garage at the back of the station for oil and spare parts, while Mackay, who was just nineteen and the son of one of the botanists, kept watch for drones.

Leaving them to their work, Trask got in the jeep with Lindsay, a tiny, round-faced redhead who drove like a lunatic, albeit a gifted one, and they began gathering tins from store cupboards across the village—beans, soup, fruit, even creamed rice, which Trask had hated as a child and still hated now. They did pretty well, and only had to shoot one rat along the way. It was a small one, by their standards: about a foot in length. The really big ones were in the cities, which was another reason to stay away from urban centers.

They then headed back to a little shop just off the main street. Trask had found its address in a telephone directory, and it was one of the reasons why he'd nominated this village for one of their increasingly rare expeditions beyond the immediate environs of the bunker. The sign on the store read graham's hunting & fishing ltd. The door was open and the floor strewn with leaves and litter that had blown inside. A corpse, more bones than anything else, lay behind the counter.

The front of the store was mainly devoted to fishing rods and lures, along with waterproof clothing and nets, but a smaller room at the back proved more interesting. To the right was a glass case filled with knives, and knives never went to waste, while the shelves were lined with boxes of ammunition. At the rear of the room, in a curtained alcove, stood a locked gun safe.

Trask turned back to the corpse, but Lindsay was already searching it. She wasn't squeamish. Few of them were, really, not after all they'd seen.

“Found them,” she said, waving a bunch of keys that she'd taken from the dead man's belt.

The key to the safe was the third they tried. Inside were five shotguns, three rifles, and a pair of target-shooting pistols.

“Not bad,” said Trask.

They had found Illyri pulse weapons in the bunker, but they were coded to prevent humans from operating them, so only Fremd had any use for them, although he spent his spare moments trying to break the DNA locks. They wanted every man, woman, and child to have a gun, but so far there were only two weapons for every three people. The contents of the safe would help to redress the imbalance.

He helped Lindsay to load the weapons into the jeep, and then the two of them worked in relays to empty the shelves of ammunition. Lindsay also took all of the hunting bows, and every arrow she could find. She was one of a number of survivors who had grown adept with a bow, and they were now teaching archery to the children and younger teenagers.

They returned to the garage, and helped to load the cans of fuel onto the truck. They'd filled two with diesel, and one with petrol—a decent yield, given that the Illyri had controlled fuel reserves while they were on Earth, and had done their best to destroy the supplies in as many petrol stations as they could before they left. The village didn't look likely to provide them with much else, so they parked the truck and jeep in the garage, and waited.

This was always the hard part. They all had a bottle of water mixed with protein powder strapped inside their suits, and a tube through which to drink it, but that was the only sustenance they'd enjoy until they returned to the bunker. They replenished their oxygen from the tanks in the jeep, and tried to find somewhere comfortable to lie down. At least the protective clothing left by the Illyri wasn't too cumbersome to wear, which helped a bit. The material adapted to fit the body, so it was rather like wearing a slightly loose-fitting wet suit. A tube took care of toilet needs, and the suit converted urine to vapor, but anything bigger had to be held until the wearer was back in the safety of the bunker. It was one of the reasons why they never ranged for longer than a day, although even that could be a strain.

Trask and Lindsay took the first watch. A couple of books were always kept in the vehicles for situations like this, but Trask had brought his own. He'd come across it by accident on one of their searches. It had been sitting in the window of a charity shop in Galway, and he'd taken it from the display.
The Complete Robot
, it was called, by Isaac Asimov.

Lindsay had found a dog-eared copy of
Middlemarch
by George Eliot beside the oxygen tanks. She looked slightly enviously at Trask's book.

“Want to swap?” she asked.

“I'm nearly finished,” he replied. “You can have it after me.”

He glanced at her book.

“God,
Middlemarch
,” he said. “Nobody will admit to leaving that in the jeep. I think about twenty people have started it, and no one has ever finished it.”

“If I'd known, I'd have brought something else.”

“You'll know better in future,” he said.

“Are you planning to build one?”

“Build what?”

“A robot.”

“It's not a ‘how-to' book. It's a novel.”

“Oh. Why'd you pick that, then?”

Trask marked the page he was on with a finger, and turned to the cover, as though the answer might lie there.

“A friend sort of recommended it to me,” he said.

•  •  •

They stayed quiet after that, because everyone else had fallen asleep. The coms links had to be kept open in case of an emergency, and the rest of their group could hardly doze with Trask and Lindsay babbling in their ears. Trask was absorbed in his book. The hours drifted by. After four had passed, he woke Dolan and Nessa, and they took over the watch. Lindsay fell asleep instantly, but Trask stayed awake for a while. He was thinking about robots, and how rational they were supposed to be, and Meia. Being rational and principled weren't the same thing. If Meia were truly rational, she'd abandon Trask and the rest of humanity and leave them to survive as best they could, or let them die in the process. But if she were principled, she'd come back to help them.

Trask hoped that she was principled. No, he believed that she was. He prayed that God would prove him right.

He laughed. He couldn't help it. He saw Dolan and Nessa staring at him. Look at me, he thought: I'm praying now. That was what hope did for you.

And Meia was his hope.

T
rask was roused from his sleep by Nessa. Years of fighting the Illyri, and of sleeping in strange places while on raids, had trained him to wake silently. Now he looked up at Nessa and saw her right forefinger placed against her mask. He nodded. She pointed straight up, and he heard it: the low hum of a drone.

He wasn't worried about the drone picking up their heat signatures. The biohazard clothing also functioned as darksuits, masking body heat. Neither was he concerned about the drone noticing the truck and the jeep. They were in a garage, and it would hardly be surprising to find vehicles under its roof. Had they left them out in the open, by the pumps, it might have been another matter. Still, this was a small village, and a drone had no business being there. Trask wasn't a great believer in coincidences. Like lottery wins, they were something that happened to other people.

The rest were awake too, but remained motionless. Nobody wanted to move in case they made a sound in the unfamiliar surroundings of the garage, and brought the drone down upon them.

The drone, or worse.

Trask's mouth was dry, but he was too wary even to take a sip of fluid through his straw.

The growling ceased, and the ground beneath them shook as something heavy landed outside. Burgess was closest to the front of the garage, and risked a quick glance through the window.

“Cutter!” he cried, and then the thing was upon them. The garage door buckled under the first impact, and gave way entirely to the second. For a moment Trask saw the Cutter silhouetted against the fading afternoon sunlight. It looked like a great squid, with long flailing tentacles ending in flat, bladelike protrusions that could slice through metal as easily as flesh, hence the name the humans had given to the creature. But those blades could also come apart to form gripping claws, or narrow to sharp points like spears. The tentacles surrounded a beaked mouth in the heart of its yellowish body, ringed with black, spiderlike eyes. It moved on four jointed legs that could be retracted into its torso, allowing it to roll easily, and, regardless of how it landed, those legs immediately appeared again, so it was always upright.

Burgess raised his shotgun to fire, and managed to get off a blast, but the Cutter was too quick for him. It rolled to its right, and one of the blades whipped at Burgess's suit, tearing a line across his chest. Immediately he began to bleed, but he still had enough strength to pump the shotgun and fire again. As he pulled the trigger, the Cutter yanked him from the ground. A tentacle gripped his weapon and flung it away. The beaked mouth opened, and from it emerged a hollow black tube that entered Burgess's body through the hole in his clothing. The rest of the group heard him scream, even as they themselves started firing, and then Burgess's body began to swell, and a cloud of spores burst from his suit as he died.

Chunks of flesh were blown from the Cutter as Trask and the others concentrated their fire on its body, but the wounds were only superficial. They had to try to get behind it, and aim for the vulnerable spot at the base of its skull. In the meantime, all they could do was attempt to keep it at bay as they maneuvered around it, seeking their chance to strike.

The Cutter tensed its body, extended its limbs, and suddenly it was above them, clinging to the steel rafters below the garage roof. With astonishing speed, it jumped from beam to beam until it was directly above Dolan, and then dropped straight down. The four sections of its beaked mouth closed upon him, so that only his legs were visible. This time, there were no spores, and they were all forced to listen to the brief sounds of his dying. The beak locked closed, and the lower half of Dolan's body fell to the floor.

Trask flung himself to the ground and opened fire with his machine pistol, but most of the bullets simply bounced off the Cutter's bony tentacles. At least one shot got through, though, for Trask saw a black eye disintegrate. It would hurt the Cutter, but it wouldn't stop it. The beast had plenty of eyes to spare.

But now Nessa, Jean, and Mackay were moving in on it, simultaneously firing so that its attention was divided between them. Where was Lindsay? thought Trask. Had she been hurt? Then he saw her. She was standing in the shadows near Nessa and Jean, just waiting. What the hell was she doing?

Under pressure from the three shooters, the Cutter was forced to jump for the roof again, and Lindsay made her move. She threw herself to the floor beneath it, landing on her back, one of the hunting bows raised. The Cutter was above her, hanging vertically as it pulled itself to the rafters, and the hollow in its skull was briefly exposed. Lindsay released the arrow, watching with satisfaction as it hit its mark, then swiftly got out of the way as the Cutter fell like a boulder, raising dust from the floor and rattling the old paint cans on the shelves as it landed. Its limbs flailed aimlessly, and yellow fluid shot from its beak, before it let out a single shriek and died.

Trask went to the window. The hollow drone stood on the garage forecourt, a section of it hanging open. It looked big enough to take one Cutter, but not two, and Trask couldn't see or hear any other drones. They were done. He stepped outside, wondering what had brought the drone down on them until, even in the dimming light, he saw a trail of fresh oily footprints leading from one of the pumps to the garage door. He checked his boots, but they seemed clean. The prints were big. Probably not one of the girls or Mackay, then: Burgess, or Dolan. God help them, whichever one of them it was had paid for his mistake.

Back inside, Jean was standing over the Cutter with one of her big knives. That girl and her blades, thought Trask. Still, this was a rare opportunity. They'd only killed a few Cutters so far, and three of them had been too damaged in the aftermath to be of any use.