Strata (25 page)

In the distance she saw him hacking at cables. This wasn’t action to attract attention – this was Marco vs The Universe.

What was happening up on the surface? A plague of flies? A rain of frogs? All the seas running dry? The extinction of the dodo?

Now she was running. Marco was a terrible figure wreathed in smoke, hacking at a solid cliff of planet-sized circuit. There was a jerkiness about his movements that told Kin all she needed to know. Marco had gone mad. Or at least gone kung.

She stopped when his blade swept a few inches from her throat.

‘They want to play games, eh?’ he croaked. ‘Put us on the spot, watch our reactions, eh?
I’ll
show them.’

One free hand swept his club into a circuit board, which exploded.

‘I’ll show
them
.’

Kin swayed back, her eyes on the tip of the blade. Then a movement to the right of Marco’s private smoke cloud made her look away. Marco saw her expression, and hesitated for a fraction of a second too long.

Silver leapt. Marco disappeared as the huge paddle-like arms swept round in a bone-grinding hug, then appeared again with three arms flailing at the shand’s head. Silver screamed, and one foot came up with claws out to disembowel the enemy. Marco’s bowels had already gone with the rest of him for Silver’s eyes. While the shand staggered across the floor clawing at the demon atop her, Kin saw Marco’s fourth arm swing up with his pike.

It twirled gracefully, the blade drifting through the hot air like the scythe of death. Then it buried itself in a power cable.

There was a sound like the snapping of locusts. Silver and Marco appeared for a moment like a tableau, Silver a big fluffy ball as every hair stood out from her body.

Kin scrabbled on the floor for Marco’s anti-disc weapon with its insulated handle. It took all her strength to knock the vibrating pike out of his hand. When it came away, the two aliens collapsed.

Aliens, she thought. I called them aliens. Oh, shit. She knelt down and sought for signs of life. Something vague was happening in Silver’s chest, but she didn’t know where even to begin looking for either of Marco’s hearts.

The lights overhead dwindled to a sickly orange glow. There were footsteps behind Kin – strange, rattling steps. She turned, still crouching, to see the tall figure that had appeared behind her.

The most obvious thing was the weapon that was sweeping down towards her. Instinctively she flung up an arm, which was still holding Marco’s club. The scythe hit it hard, and shivered into pieces.

Kin started to laugh. The thing in front of her was a skeleton in a black bathrobe, grinning perplexedly at a wooden handle that now had no blade. Who were They trying to scare?

The scythe handle in Death’s white claws
flowed
. What it became was at least appropriate to the age of genocide, and Kin had time to wonder where They had found the pattern. There were two rows of oscillating teeth and a brisk little engine.

A power-scythe. Kin had used them herself to clear scrub on new worlds.

Death advanced. Had he lunged Kin wouldn’t have survived, but ancient habits die hard. He swung, instead. And Kin dived forward. She heard the power-scythe crash down behind her and gyrate across the floor as she stared up into eyeless sockets. Struggling, she brought one knee up – a pointless tactic that merely jarred her kneecap. Death had no balls.

A necklace of bony fingers closed round her throat. She lashed out with the back of her hand, willing the blow home. It hit Death in the face, and then there was something like an explosion in a domino factory.

Kin was standing alone. There was a black robe on the floor in front of her, and a few pieces of bone scattered around. They disappeared in a series of small thunderclaps. A larger one marked the disappearance of Marco and Silver.

Kin disappeared, too.

A minute later a couple of cuboid robots trundled along the tunnel and started to clean up the mess.

Now she was in a—

‘No,’ she said. ‘No more. I give in. Do you know how long it was since I last had a drink?’

A glass of water appeared hovering in the air in front of her. Kin wasn’t particularly surprised. She caught it gingerly, and drank it. When she tried to hang the glass in the air it plummeted down and smashed.

Now she was in a – call it a control room. The disc control room. This had to be it.

It was surprisingly small. It could have been the flight deck of a medium-large ship, except that a ship would have more screens and switches. This had one screen and one bank of switches, in front of a deep black chair. Over the chair was what could have been a computer-link helmet.

‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Not me. I’m not putting that on.’

The screen flickered and a word appeared.

BETS
?

Kin moved forward and got a better view of the chair. It was a disturbing complicated shape, and looked almost alive.

Its occupant was dead. Not offensively dead, because the air in the room was crisp and dry and had expertly mummified him, but undeniably dead. If he had believed in reincarnation, he’d come back as a corpse.

There was an old wound on one withered arm. It didn’t look fatal, but there were antique blood stains on the floor. He could have bled to death but that seemed a derisive death for a disc master.

If he
was
a disc master. Somehow Kin had never brought herself to think of the disc’s overlords as human, but the man in the chair was human enough. Given a heavy shave and a fresh skin he could have called anyone cousin.

The screen in front of the chair blurred, then produced a word. It hung in front of Kin, glowing pitifully.

HELP

Marco crouched in the semi-darkness when he next heard the voice.

After a while he surfaced from the mists of rage enough to realize that it was talking to him. It was familiar. The ape-descended woman?

‘Kin Arad?’ he croaked.

‘Marco, where’s Silver?’ the voice insisted.

Marco’s eyes felt like fire pits, but the light from the millions of red glows around him suited his vision. He saw a shape a few metres away, eclipsing a constellation on the floor.

‘The bear thing is here. She is breathing.’

‘Marco,’ said the air. ‘I don’t know how good I am at this thing. You’ll have to help. Don’t move.’

The air stirred in front of the kung, and there was a knife. Three of Marco’s hands caught it before it hit the ground. In the red light, he stared dully at the jewel-encrusted handle.

‘Don’t waste time,’ said the ape voice. ‘I want you to cut a piece out of Silver. Don’t be too enthusiastic. Hide will do, but the flesh would be better.’

Memories were dripping into Marco’s mind. He looked at the knife, then thought about Silver.

‘Not on your life,’ he said flatly.

‘Do it. The next knife will arrive at speed if you don’t, and you’d better believe me.’

With a roar of rage and frustration Marco bounded forward and slashed at Silver’s arm. The big body may have quivered slightly.

‘That’ll do. The blood on the knife will do. Let go the knife, Marco. Let go of the knife. Let-go-of-the-knife.’

Marco was thirsty. He hadn’t eaten in memory. His skin itched in the warm dry air. He was damned if he’d let go of a weapon. If he thought about it at all, that was what he thought.

‘Okay. We’ll do it the hard way.’

There was just something about the voice that made Marco loose his grip on the handle. Thus it was that, when the knife popped out of existence, it merely stripped the flesh of his palm instead of taking his hand off at the wrist.

Methodically he gripped his wrist to stop the blood flow, and let the pain batter outside his brain. He was still staring at the wound when a rush of air and a thump made him look up.

Something long and bloody was lying on the floor beside Silver. And the shand’s arm was moving slowly. It fumbled around the meat, gripped it, pulled it dreamily to a mouth strung with saliva.

Silver ate.

‘Where are we?’ said Marco at last.

Kin’s voice said, ‘I’m not entirely sure. Are you okay?’

‘I should like a drink. And some food. You had me slice the shand to get a protein sample?’

‘Yes. Don’t move.’

Something like a squashy bulb of water appeared beside Marco, and bounced limply on the floor. He picked it up and bit into it with shameful haste.

‘Food now,’ said Kin. Another bulb, filled with red sludge, rolled obscenely across the floor. Marco tried it. It tasted like solid boredom.

‘It’s the best I can manage,’ said Kin. ‘About the only damage you did was upset the disc master’s dumbwaiter circuits. I’ve got robots repairing them, but until then the menu can just about manage to be unexciting.’

‘Silver has fared better,’ said Marco indistinctly.

‘I told you I hadn’t got time for niceties,’ said Kin. ‘She’s eating shand, cultured from her own cells. Don’t ask me how it was done in seconds, I only gave the order. It might be an idea not to tell her, though.’

‘Yes. You are in a position of influence?’

‘You could say that.’

‘Good.
Get me out of here!
’

There was a pause. Then he heard Kin say, ‘I’ve been giving a lot of thought to that.’

‘
You’ve been giving a lot of thought to it?
’

‘Yes. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to it. You’re in a sort of hold-for-study chamber. There’s no way in or out except by teleportation, and if you knew what I know about that you’d rather stay in there and starve. I daren’t cut in in case you’re harmed. So, all things considered …’

A long shape exploded into being a metre from Marco, and landed heavily. He picked it up and looked at it suspiciously.

‘It looks like an industrial molecule stripper,’ he said.

‘It is. I suggest you use it with caution.’

Marco grimaced in the hellish light and pointed the thing.

A section of chamber wall became a fine fog. He switched off hastily, and looked round for Silver.

The shand was kneeling, holding her head.

‘How do you feel?’ said Marco, in a concerned tone. He held the stripper lightly, not quite pointing it at Silver. The shand squinted at him vaguely.

‘Odd things been happening …’ she began.

Marco helped her to her feet, a more or less token gesture since she weighed ten times his weight – and he needed one hand to keep the stripper not quite pointing at her.

‘Right now, can you walk?’

She could stagger. Marco peered out of the chamber, into a dimly-lit tunnel. Two small cuboid robots were fretting over the still-settling dust of the wall. He glanced back at Silver, and opted to point the stripper’s flared nozzle at a questing waldo.

‘Lay off the hardware,’ said the robot, backing away.

‘Kin Arad?’ said Marco.

‘Marco, that weapon is for your own peace of mind. But if you use it, I’ll rip your arms off from here. And I can.’

Marco considered this for several moments, while Silver climbed laboriously out of the chamber. Then he shrugged with all four shoulders, and let the weapon thump on the floor.

‘Monkey logic,’ he said. ‘I’ll never understand it.’

‘I thought you thought you were human,’ said the robot with Kin’s voice.

‘So? All the thinking in the worlds doesn’t change some things.’

‘
Cogito ergo kung,
’ said the robot. ‘Follow me, please.’

They fell in behind it as it rolled off along the tunnel.

An hour later they were still walking. They had crossed wide metal chasms on lattice bridges and crouched in alcoves as giant machines thundered down side tunnels. On one occasion the little cube had beckoned them to follow it on to a lift platform. At the next level down the lift had stopped again and a dozen humming golden cylinders had drifted on, smelling of ozone.

They followed narrow walkways between topless towering machines, which boomed. ‘Krells,’ said Silver.

‘Huh?’

The shand grinned. ‘Didn’t you ever see “Forbidden Planet”? Human movie. They remade it five, six times. I had a walk-on part in one, before I went to college.’

‘Can’t say I recall anything.’

‘… I had to thump doors, mostly, and roar … had to share my dressing room with the robot, too. He was human.’

‘A human robot?’

‘The rest of the cast were actor-robots, you see. But there was this robot in the plot, and they couldn’t find a robot who could act … robotlike. They had to hire a human. There was a very impressive scene inside a big machine built by the Krells, I think it was. Just like this. Krells, you understand, being fictional creatures invented for the purposes of the movie …’ Silver broke off when she saw Marco’s face.