Mindgames: Fool's Mate (13 page)

The Clown had told him that the steel plain was a gigantic matter converter
– a tool used for the building of the solar disc, and by the way he had said it Carroll guessed it was not a permanent fixture. That must be what was happening: the Clown was moving the steel plain. Carroll slammed the joystick forwards. He had things to do.

T
he hexagons sped underneath him and for a time he felt as if he were flying high over a patchwork of fields in England. Soon he caught sight of the mount he had fought his way to the top of. It looked like an ants nest, a termite’s hill, but those were people down there. But as far as he could see no game was in progress, no pillars of smoke were visible, so what were they doing?

He came in low over the top of the mount and saw that the people were gathered closer
around it. Closer, and he saw that they were all armed and that a number of them had gathered in a cordon around the Clown's soul disc. These men, fifteen of them in all, were armed with what looked like three-foot long toothpicks. In a gout of smoke ruby light flashed on his arm. With a flick of his wrist Carroll sent the craft high into the air with red light flashing and splashing ineffectually against its underside. He then sent it hurtling away from the mount until the firing stopped. Tearing open the fabric of his shirt he peered at a pencil-sized hole cut and cauterised through his left bicep.

His arm
felt stiff but hardly hurt at all.
Adrenalin,
he decided – it would hurt later on, if he was still alive.

The men had obviously been placed there as a precaution. It was not their fault. They could not be blamed for not knowing he was seeking to end the game.
They can be resurrected though
, he rationalized, and turned his craft back towards the mount.

On his first pass he fle
w high and slow above the mount, the bottom of the craft continuously being struck with laser fire. He turned and circled and, with his arm beginning to ache, clumsily dropped CS gas canisters over the side to confuse matters below. Once all these were gone, he moved the craft aside to let it cool, watching as the mount became shrouded in tear gas cut through with random stabs of red light like needles in cotton wool. They couldn’t see him now, it seemed.

With his left hand resting on the controls that fired
his missile launchers and machine guns he came in low over to one side of the cloud of tear gas, and opened fire with the guns on one side of his craft. No single shot could be heard – the sound like that of a wave hitting a shingle beach, only much amplified. As the belts chattered through cartridge cases swamped the deck and rattled off the side. The sound of the missiles going seemed like the concerted hiss of a disturbed snake pit.

Two explosions lit the
cloud of tear gas, roughly on either side of the top of the mount. Carroll knew that the soul disc was indestructible but did not want to blow it from its position there. It would be rather stupid to go through all this and then be unable to find the damned thing. He next turned his craft and ran through the same routine with the machine guns and missile launchers on that side. Finally, when there was nothing left to fire, he donned a gas mask and spiralled his craft down into the smoke.

Th
ose shooting at him from below had ceased to do so either because they could no longer see him, or because there was no one below to shoot at him. In moments he found the top hexagon and came in to land. Moans and screams issued from the smoke all around, but he ignored them. This was the business he had been in all his life. All around the craft lay bodies peppered with bullets, but he took no chances, climbing from his craft with his Uzi in his good hand and grenades on his belt.

T
he Clown's soul disc was difficult to locate in the smoke. Twice he nearly stepped off of the edge of the hexagon and innumerable times he slipped in blood and stumbled over corpses. Eventually it loomed out of the smoke at him, swaying in its contorted silver frame. At the foot of it, like bloody offerings, lay two men, still clutching their laser weapons to their mutilated bodies. Carroll stepped over them and tugged at the clasps that held the disc in place, then he whirled around when he thought he saw a shadow moving through the smoke. No shadow. He turned back to the disc and inspected the clasps, which were supported by thin chains. He put the barrel of the Uzi against one of the chains and squeezed off a shot. The chain parted and the disc fell against its support and tolled like a doom bell.

C
arroll holstered his Uzi then yanked the chain from where it had been fed through the frame. The disc came free and fell against his leg. He swore. It weighed about as much as a car wheel. He began rolling it back towards his craft thinking it might make a suitable wheel for some chariot of fire.

Ahead of him, t
he now thinning smoke was lit by a flash of red. A laser firing, but not towards him. He halted, lowered the disc to the ground, and drew his Uzi. The sounds of abrupt movement impinged. He waited, sweat running like ants through his hair. Finally he decided he could wait no longer, since the Four were probably on their way back even now. He unhooked a grenade from his belt, pulled its pin, and tossed it ahead of him, then crouched down using the Clown's soul disc as a shield. The detonation was sharp and powerful; a bright flash lighting the smoke before brushing it aside. Carroll stood in time to see the deadly scene before him.

The android with blind eyes was running
towards him at phenomenal speed. In no way could this one have been mistaken for the man Carroll had fought and killed. This was the machine that had taken his head off with his own sword. It was not his only worry either. Off to one side, two men were levelling lasers in his general direction. He lifted his Uzi and fired as he dived to one side. The shots thwacked into the android but to no effect. Carroll dropped his Uzi, groping for a grenade. Suddenly the android became blackly silhouetted against this flare of red. Hissing, bubbling and boiling smoke the android flew in half along a line from its shoulder to its groin, showing sparks, cogs, and metallic bones all about.

Carroll
pushed himself upright and watched in stunned amazement as a pair of legs kicked round in circles like an unwinding clockwork toy. He gazed at the metal skull attached to a shoulder and arm, the fingers of the hand still flexing. Then he looked up from these macabre debris to the two Egyptians striding towards him.

‘
He thought us naive enough to believe this part of the game. We allowed him to think that,’ said one of them.

Carroll
thought he recognized the manner of speech even though translated, and was not surprised when a passing band of smoke finally revealed Ramses.

‘
Anubis?’ Carroll asked, standing up and removing his gas mask.

The two Egyptians came to halt before him, their eyes streaming but their
expressions determined. For a moment he could not tell them apart until Ramses spoke again.

‘
I will have my treasure and my slaves yet,’ he said, his eyes locking with Carroll's. Then he and the other Egyptian stooped down, took up the Clown's soul disc and carried it to the craft. No more was said for a moment, and Carroll, acting as vanguard, saw no further movement in the smoke. Once they had loaded the disc Carroll stepped aboard and strapped in before turning to Ramses and his twin.

‘
Thank you,’ he said.

Ram
ses reply was, ‘Serve Osiris well soldier. I would burn no more.’

Carroll
nodded in understanding and with no more to say took his vessel up and out of the smoke. It could have been his imagination, but as he came up into clear air he thought he heard a wild yell, and he thought he saw two flashes of red.

♠♠♠

Once up and out of the smoke Carroll sent his craft speeding in the direction of the Reaper's old base again. He could not return directly to the ship with the Four likely returning from there. All he could now do was go into hiding and await further instructions from the Clown, or until he knew for certain it was safe to return to the ship. And so he flew on, continually searching the sky for the four black specks that would mean failure and death for him. It seemed to take forever for the building to come into sight, but eventually it did. Gratefully he spiralled the craft down and taxied it within.

As soon as the craft settled to the floor
Carroll opened up the medical kit he had brought along, since his arm was beginning to hurt rather badly now. He first injected a heavy dose of local anaesthetic, then he packed the plasma-seeping wound with cotton wool soaked in an antiseptic and bound it up tightly. By the time he had finished dressing it his arm was going dead and hung like something separate from him. He made a sling to support it then quickly moved to the partition and wrestled it into place.

Now as safe as he could be he
went to inspect his cargo. It was, as he had thought from his first glimpse of it, just like a huge coloured CD. However, it was not made from plastic but the same material as the other discs – translucent and red and the texture of glass. It was a yard across, an inch thick, and had a hole at its centre an inch in diameter. Gazing at this recording of fantastic life, this prison, Carroll wondered not for the first or last time about the Clown. He took his own disc from his pocket and pressed it against the Clown’s disc. These things were made from a single information-carrying molecule, the Clown had told him. What information makes me what I am? All he knew and all he had experienced, was part of it, obviously. But he realized that stored on this disc must be the blue-prints for his body.

Carroll
leant back against a table and flipped his disc like a coin. It was pertinent to remember that the being he would resurrect, of which the Clown was ghost, a mere trace, was older than human history, older in fact than the planet the human race had evolved on. The Clown was a being capable of engineering a construction beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend. And, shortly, he, Jason Carroll, would resurrect it. He flipped his disc again and pocketed it, wondering if he would regret what he intended to do. Four black shapes crossing the sky visible beyond the doors reminded him that he had few choices really.

‘
Are you ready?’ came the Clown's voice from behind him.

He turned to view the innocuous spectre.
‘How can I be anything else?’

The Clown tilted his head and regarded him for a moment.
‘If all goes well, Jason Carroll,’ he said, ‘you and many others will be free of the Four.’

‘
Yes, but will I be
free
?’ Carroll asked as he climbed into the seat of the craft.

‘
Define freedom,’ said the Clown.

Carroll
remained silent as he manoeuvred the craft to the wall partition. As it fell like a drawbridge before him he chuckled. ‘That's a difficult one. No one's free, I suppose.’ He turned to peered at the Clown, now hovering behind his seat. ‘I was just wondering what comes after the Four.’

The Clown replied,
‘When the Four are neutralised I shall finish the project I began. This solar disc will be made habitable and the human race will be resurrected to live upon it.’

‘
Seems almost too good to be true,’ said Carroll.

‘
You do not like happy endings?’

‘
No, just a pessimist I suppose.’

They flew on, out over the steel plain and its abrupt ending, then out of the landscape of grey and red.
Carroll had other questions he could have asked but he felt no inclination. The Clown would have answered him, but he knew he could never be sure of those answers until they were proven true or otherwise. He was tired now; tired of the fantastic and the strange. He wanted events brought to their resolution, to see the Four gone and to know the truth about the Clown. So thinking, he increased their speed towards the ship.

Pillars of smoke again
, he thought, when at last the ship came into sight. Then, irrelevantly,
Pillars of Hercules
. Of course, the Four had been here.

‘
What attracted them here?’ he asked.

‘
The steel plain, as you call it, I shifted by the action of one of the ship's motors. They came here to destroy the motor and the one they thought to be the culprit.’ Carroll thought back to the five black specks and the one that fell.

‘
The robot,’ he guessed. The Clown nodded in reply.

Closer to the ship and
Carroll saw that the smoke was coming from the fused remains of the massive turbine he had walked under before entering the ship. It was now an empty, holed and sagging husk, sitting in a pool of glass. He thought that a shame.

‘
How did this motor shift the steel... the matter converter?’ he asked.

‘
It generated a displaced gravity field,’ replied the Clown.

‘
Oh, right,’ said Carroll, aware now that perhaps there were some things that could not be explained to him. In silent contemplation of gravity fields and matter converting machines the size of the isle of Wight he brought his craft down to the hole torn in the top of the ship and eventually to the chamber at its heart. Since he had left this place, and until the time of its destruction, it seemed the robot had been very busy.