Dan Abnett - Border Princes

But not all of it had been. Something was loose and live, aware and predatory. The lift had about five metres still to descend, but Mr Dine stepped off it. He landed on the grille decking with a quiet clank , and walked across the basin board-way towards the concrete platforms where the work stations flickered and hummed.

Two humans lay in a tangle of limbs on the floor, twitching, comatose. The loosed thing, the exotic tech, was a tiny object, revolving in a field of blue light. It felt him, read him and began to mew and wail in his mind.

Mr Dine’s systems were robust enough to deny its initial advances. Shield buffers rose automatically to screen him. He assessed. No match. The technology was not known to the First Senior data-archive. He filed his findings for future reference. Product of an unknown species, origin/manufacture unknown. Tech level sixty-plus. Powerful suggestion fields. Hazard (type 2) grade persuasion/manipulation protocols enabled by a quasi-sentience. Aggressive intercourse.

He took another few steps towards it. The tiny object began to spin more rapidly. To his surprise, his outer sets of shield buffers impacted suddenly and shattered. The inner sets held. Mr Dine accessed reserve investment and erected a custom barrier shield to bolster his defences.

‘What are you?’ he asked.

It answered in a rattling string of colours, lights and concept impressions. Abstract numbers. It was as swift and ferocious as a hail of gunfire. Abstract numbers. Two blue lights, moving.

Mr Dine winced. His inner shields exploded without warning. Instinctively, he set a second custom barrier behind the first.

‘So, you want to play, do you?’ he asked.

Gwen found herself sitting in her Saab, turning the engine over. The starter motor gagged and wheezed. She flooded it.

How long had she been sitting there? How long had she been trying to-

She got out of the car. She felt like a zombie that barely, just barely, realises it is a zombie. She tottered back into the adjacent warehouse.

James was sprawled on the ground. He looked distressingly dead. The ring of scanners was whirring. She remembered her intention. She’d been trying to drive back to the Hub. The Hub, from where the Amok was calling to her.

‘Oh my God,’ she mumbled. Her head hurt like it had been crushed between cymbals. She could barely walk straight. There was a ringing in her ears.

Her phone. Her bloody phone.

She took it out, opened it upside down, turned it over.

‘Yeah?’

‘Gwen? For God’s sake, help us! We can’t find-’

‘Jack?’

She heard muffled voices, agitation, extraneous noises. Then, suddenly, clearly, she heard the footsteps again.

‘Jack?’

A scream. Toshiko, screaming. Gwen went cold. The repeated booming of a revolver, straining the limits of her phone’s speaker.

Laughter. Satanic, psychotic laughter.

Gwen squealed and hurled the phone away. It bounced across the ground, chipping and cracking.

‘Gwen?’

She looked around.

Jack was standing in the middle of the ring of sensors. He was holding Toshiko to his side with one arm. She was clinging to him, weeping. Jack’s face was drawn and haggard. He was shaking. His hair was lank with sweat. In his right hand, his Webley wavered, uncertain, smoke coiling from the long barrel.

‘Oh my God, Gwen,’ Jack stammered. He sat down on the ground, and Toshiko folded up beside him.

One by one, in sequence, the six stand-mounted scanners exploded, their cases bursting open in clouds of sparks. Two of the tripods toppled. The master control box began to smoke and then caught fire.

Her own brain ablaze, Gwen tried to speak, but nothing came out.

The Amok spun around even more furiously, and then stopped.

‘Yes,’ said Mr Dine. ‘Clever. But I believe I win.’

The Amok rotated left for two turns, then right for three.

‘No, I do not want to play again,’ said Mr Dine.

The Amok pulsed out a field of violet sulk.

Mr Dine reached forward and took hold of it. He grimaced as it burned his palm.

‘Still fighting?’ he asked.

It was. Mr Dine cried out as pain flared along his arm and into his head. The last of his custom barriers fell.

‘You are tenacious, but I am of the First Senior. I am not impressed by your spite. I have given you fair warning. Accept the consequences.’

Mr Dine squeezed his hand. The Amok winced and shattered. Mr Dine toppled backwards and sat down hard. It had been tough. Astonishingly tough. Almost a match.

He let the powdered fragments of the Amok slide out of his hand and then began to try healing the grievous damage he had sustained.

Owen woke up. He looked around, aware that he was on the floor with Ianto crumpled on top of him.

‘Hello?’ he called. ‘Hello?’

Something was sitting on the floor next to him. It was the size and shape of a man, but it was matt-grey, its bodywork comprising odd grey thorns and overlapping, segmented layers. A monster.

Owen had seen a fair few monsters in the course of his work. Weevils, for a start. This was altogether more nightmarish. So sleek, so machined, so artfully designed.

He felt funny. Muzzy. Sick. Maybe he was seeing things. Maybe there wasn’t a monster there at all.

The monster turned its extended, streamlined, recurve head and noticed him.

There was an expression on its vaguely human face. An expression of pain and torment. It pointed a long, thorny finger at him.

‘You will not remember me,’ it said, its voice as level and heavy as the speaking clock.

‘OK, fair enough,’ said Owen, and allowed unconsciousness to carry him away again.

‘Look, I’m all right. Really,’ said James.

‘No, you’re not.’

‘Owen, really, I-’

‘Am I a doctor?’ Owen asked. ‘Am I?’

‘You remind us often enough.’

‘Then I ought to know, didn’t I?’ Owen replied smartly. ‘And you know what’s also true? You don’t have to be a doctor — like me — to know that you’re not at all all right. None of us are all right. We just took a damn serious seeing to. One of the worst I can remember since I started this bloody job. So sit still and shut up and let me do my thing.’

It was eight o’clock at night. Two hours earlier, a terrific storm, the second in two straight nights, had blown up out in the Bristol Channel and come swirling inland. High above their heads, Mermaid Quay was empty. Driving rain pummelled the dock walks and lamp-lit boards.

‘How is everyone?’ James asked, as Owen continued to examine him with the medical area’s suite of instruments.

‘Far as I can tell, sore, exhausted and traumatised,’ said Owen, ‘and we can be pretty damn thankful that’s all we are. I haven’t found anything more… serious. But I’m going to be checking everyone every day for as long as it takes to make sure there’s no lasting damage.’

James nodded. He’d been told that he, Owen and Ianto had all fugued out, and that he had been unconscious the longest. Gwen had come close to joining them, but she’d kept it together, just about. Jack and Toshiko had said very little about what they’d experienced, and it seemed likely that they had suffered the effects of the Amok the least, insulated to some extent by… by wherever they had been.

Gwen walked into the medical area. Her face was drawn with fatigue, and there were dark shadows under her eyes. Unabashed, she went over to James and kissed him.

‘I’m the doctor,’ grumbled Owen. ‘I’m the one who kisses things better.’

‘Jack wants us in the Boardroom in ten,’ said Gwen.

‘OK,’ said James.

‘All of us,’ said Gwen.

Owen nodded.