Stanislaw Lem - Mortal Engines

“Don’t you dare shoot, do you hear me?! Put away that laser!”

And before the cadet, turning on his side, began to look around in bewilderment—for the voice had come from his earphones, giving no indication of the direction or place in which Pirx was located—Pirx had already run on; afraid that he was wasting precious time, he hurried as much as he could, till he found himself facing a broad crevasse, which opened up a sudden view all the way to the bottom of the basin.

It was a type of tectonic trench, so old that its edges had crumbled, lost their sharpness, and resembled a mountain gully widened by erosion. He hesitated. He didn’t see the Setaur, but then it was probably impossible to see it anyway from this vantage point. So he ventured into the gully with laser ready to fire, well aware that what he was doing was insane, and yet he couldn’t resist whatever was driving him; he told himself that he only wanted to take a look, that he would stop at the first place where he could check out the last section of the outcrop and the entire labyrinth of rubble beneath it; and perhaps, even as he ran, still leaning forward, with the gravel shooting out in streams from under his boots, he actually believed this. But at the moment he couldn’t give thought to anything. He was on the Moon and therefore weighed barely fifteen kilograms, but even so the increasing angle tripped him up, he went bounding along eight meters at a time, braking for all he was worth; already he had covered half the length of the slope, the gully ended in a shallow pathway—there in the sun stood the first masses of the lava flow, black on the far side and glittering on the southern, about one hundred meters down. “I got myself into it this time,” he thought. From here one could practically reach out and touch the region in which the Setaur was at large. He glanced rapidly to the left and to the right. He was alone; the ridge lay high above him, a broiling steepness against the black sky. Before, he had been able to look down into the narrow places between the rocks almost with a bird’s-eye view, but now that crisscross maze of fissures was blocked out for him by the nearest masses of stone. “Not good,” he thought. “Better go back.” But for some reason he knew that he wasn’t going back.

However he couldn’t just stand there. A few dozen steps lower was a solitary block of magma, evidently the end of that long tongue which once had poured red-hot off the great crags at the foot of Toricelli—and which had meandered its way finally to this sinkhole. It was the best cover available. He reached it in a single leap, though he found particularly unpleasant this prolonged lunar floating, this slow-motion flight as in a dream; he could never really get used to it. Crouched behind the angular rock, he peered out over it and saw the Setaur, which came from behind two jagged spires, went around a third, brushing it with a metal shoulder, and halted. Pirx was looking at it from the side, so it was lit up only partially, only the right arm glistened, dully like a well-greased machine part—the rest of its frame lay in shadow. He had just raised the laser to his eye when the other, as if in a sudden premonition, vanished. Could it be standing there still, having only stepped back into the shadow? Should he shoot into that shadow, then? He had a bead on it now, but didn’t touch the trigger. He relaxed his muscles, the barrel fell. He waited. No sign of the Setaur. The rubble spread out directly below him in a truly infernal labyrinth, one could play hide-and-seek in there for hours—the glassy lava had split into geometrical yet eery shapes. “Where is he?” he thought. “If it were only possible to hear something, but this damned airless place, it’s like being in a nightmare… I could go down there and hunt him. No, I’m not about to do that, he’s the mad one after all… But one can at least consider everything—the outcrop extends no more than twelve meters, that would take about two jumps on Earth; I would be in the shadow beneath it, invisible, and could move along the length of it, with my back protected by the rock at all times, and sooner or later he’d walk out straight into my sights…” Nothing changed in the labyrinth of stone. On Earth by this time the sun would have shifted quite a bit, but here the long lunar day held sway, the sun seemed to keep hanging in the very same place, extinguishing the nearest stars, so that it was surrounded by a black void shot through with a kind of orange, radial haze… He leaned out halfway from behind his boulder. Nothing. This was beginning to annoy him. Why weren’t the others showing up? It was inconceivable that radio contact hadn’t been established by now… But perhaps they were planning to drive it out of that rubble… He glanced at the watch beneath the thick glass on his wrist and was amazed—since his last conversation with McCork barely thirteen minutes had elapsed.

He was preparing to abandon his position when two things happened at once, both equally unexpected. Through the stone arch between the two magma embankments that closed off the basin to the east, he saw transporters moving, one after the other. They were still far away, possibly more than a kilometer, and going at full speed, trailing long, seemingly rigid plumes of swirling dust. At the same time two large hands, human-looking, except that they were wearing metal gloves, appeared at the very edge of the precipice, and following them came—so quickly, he hadn’t time to back away—the Setaur. No more than ten meters separated them, Pirx saw the massive bulge of the torso that served for a head, set between powerful shoulders and in which glittered the lenses of the optic apertures, motionless, like two dark, widely spaced eyes, together with that middle, that third and terrible eye, lidded at the moment, of the laser gun. He himself, to be sure, held a laser in his hand, but the machine’s reflexes were incomparably faster than his own, and anyway he didn’t even try leveling his weapon—he simply stood stock-still in the full sun, his legs bent, exactly as he had been caught, jumping up from the ground, by the sudden appearance of him , and they looked at one another: the statue of the man and the statue of the machine, both sheathed in metal. Then a terrible light tore the whole area in front of Pirx; pushed by a blast of heat, he went crashing backwards. As he fell he didn’t lose consciousness and—in that fraction of a second—felt only surprise, for he could have sworn it wasn’t the Setaur that had shot him, since up to the very end he had seen its dark, blind laser eye.

He landed on his back, for the discharge had gone past—but clearly it had been aimed at him, because the horrible flash was repeated in an instant and chipped off part of the stone spire that had been protecting him before; it sprayed drops of molten mineral, which in flight changed into a dazzling spider web. But now he was saved by the fact that they aimed at the height of his head and he was lying down—it was the first machine, they were firing the laser from it. He rolled over on his side and saw then the back of the Setaur, who, motionless, as if cast in bronze, gave two bursts of lilac sun. Even at that distance one could see the foremost transporter’s entire tread overturn, together with the rollers and guiding wheel; such a cloud of dust and burning gases rose up there, that the second transporter, blinded, could not shoot. The two-and-a-half-meter giant slowly, unhurriedly looked at the prone man, who was still clutching his weapon, then turned and bent its legs slightly, ready to jump back from where it had come, but Pirx, awkwardly, sideways, fired at it—he intended only to cut the legs from under it, but his elbow wavered as he pulled the trigger, and a knife of flame cleaved the giant from top to bottom, so that it was only a mass of glowing scrap that tumbled down into the field of rubble.