Dan Abnett - Border Princes

‘What do we do?’ James asked Jack.

‘I guess we… find out if it’s inside,’ said Jack. He took a step forward.

The shed juddered violently. It stopped shaking for a moment, and then juddered again.

‘Get down,’ said Jack.

The shed blew apart. It came to pieces in a flash of yellow light. The panelled walls burst out in all directions in a flurry of splintered boards. The pitch-treated roof ascended, in one burning piece, and crashed over into a plot two allotments away.

Swathed in flames, the Serial G turned and looked at them. It was standing on a scorched rectangle of ground that had been the floor of the shed. The downpour sizzled as it fell around it.

‘Keep your heads down!’ Jack yelled, on his belly in the soaking grass. James was face down with his arms over his head. Toshiko was trying to get the old man into the cover of a compost bunker.

‘Tosh! Get him out of here!’

Toshiko replied something inaudible. Jack was well aware how impractical his last instruction to her had been.

The Serial G took a step forward off the burning patch of shed floor. Its long, thin legs extended slightly, taking it up to over ten feet tall. The huge steel hooks that formed its hand opened and closed with a noise like a luxury liner’s anchor chain running out. It turned its head to the left, then to the right, and took another step. It hummed. Rain streamed off it.

It was coming towards them. With a curse, Jack got up and ran, head down, through the rain, between rows of cold frames and bean poles.

‘Jack!’ James yelled.

The Serial G turned its head to follow Jack’s movement. There was a yellow pulse.

Jack had thrown himself headlong into a bed of wet brambles and elephant ear rhubarb leaves. He felt the scorch of the heat cone as it shaved the air above him. The blast exploded up a patch of ground in a great, muddy divot, and crushed a galvanised water tank with a kettle-drum bang. The water inside evaporated instantly in a screaming belch of steam.

The Serial G began to trudge towards the spot where it had seen Jack drop down. Jack heard its steps pulping vegetables and snapping canes. He heard the drum of raindrops. He couldn’t get up. That would be suicide. He rolled instead, scrambling through the soaking undergrowth, twigs and nettles scratching his face.

The Serial G fired again, but its blast fell short, violently excavating a cabbage patch and turning a large cold frame into a blizzard of glass and wood chips.

Jack winced and tried not to cry out. One flying chunk of glass had stabbed into his upper left arm, and another had cut his cheek on the way past.

The Serial G took another two steps.

Jack sprang up, wincing at the tight pain from his upper arm, and started to run for better cover.

The Serial G turned immediately, its torso rotating. It raised its left arm to shoot it out and snatch Jack off his feet.

‘Oi! Buggerlugs!’ James yelled. He came up from behind a composter and emptied the clip of his side-arm at the metal figure.

His distraction worked. Too well.

The Serial G ignored Jack and turned to face him instead.

It all happened very fast.

James ducked back down behind the composter. The rain was hammering down. The Serial G pulsed its dull yellow glow and the brick composter pulverised. Toshiko glimpsed James’s body cartwheeling backwards in the storm of flying brick fragments and flaming hanks of compost mulch.

She yelled his name. He was dead. He was so surely dead-

She saw him get up, unsteady, dazed, his hair matted and his shirt torn. He looked around, as if trying to remember who he was, where he was.

She watched him see the Serial G. It took a stride towards him. Pieces of burning mulch were still fluttering down to the ground in the rain.

James turned to run.

The Serial G snapped out its left arm in another lashing, hyper-extension. It failed to grab James cleanly, but the steel hooks crashed into his shoulder and the side of his head like a punch, and spun him wildly around, his skull smacked around to the left. He fell hard and crooked.

The limb retracted as rapidly as it had extended.

The Serial G took two more long steps forward through the rain and tilted its head down-

— and rocked backwards suddenly. It rocked again, arms swinging, its legs forced back several steps, as if it was suddenly trying to walk head-on into a force seventeen wind.

It shuddered as though it had been struck. It recoiled another step.

There was a dull yellow pulse where its eyes should have been.

A flash and a thunderclap of splitting air followed as the blast cone detonated less than two metres in front of it. The beam of energy simply splashed apart as if encountering some barrier in mid air directly ahead. The backwash of the blast caused the Serial G to sway on its heels yet again.

From her vantage point behind the eggshell-blue potting shed, Toshiko stared in wonder and fear, not really understanding what she was seeing. She wiped rain out of her eyes.

‘It doesn’t like that,’ said Davey quietly. ‘Oh, it doesn’t like that at all.’

‘What?’ she asked distractedly, unable to tear her gaze away.

The space where the Serial G’s eyes should have been glowed dull yellow again, and again, and then again. Three blasts in quick succession. Each one detonated in turn right in front of it. The pressure crack of tortured air was so fierce, Toshiko had to clap her hands over her ears. She felt each quake of discharge in her diaphragm.

For a nanosecond, as the third pulse went off, she thought she glimpsed something haloed in the glare, a moving shape much smaller than the Serial G, illuminated for a moment in the light storm breaking around it.

‘What the hell is that?’ she whispered.

‘Tough little devil, isn’t he?’ asked Davey.

‘Who? Davey, what are you talking about?’

Davey got up and pointed. He pointed very specifically at nothing at all in front of the Serial G.

Jack rose to his feet, clutching his injured arm. It throbbed wickedly, but he barely noticed. His entire attention was on the Serial G and what the Serial G was doing.

Out there in the rain, it appeared to have gone mad, or at least a good deal madder than the Melkene had made it. It was thrashing its arms, stumbling back pace after pace, as if it was experiencing a fit or-

A dent, a clear, solid dent, suddenly appeared in its chest plating. The Serial G shuddered and swung its right arm like a wrecking ball. The arm came to a violent dead stop in mid air, as if blocked, as if held in place. Indentations began to appear in the smooth, oiled alloy of its broom-stick forearm. The steel hooks of its hand opened and closed spasmodically, chewing the air.

The arm was suddenly free again. It sailed back, straightening and righting.

‘Oh my God…’ Jack gasped as he began to realise what he had to be witnessing.

‘Jack?’

He turned. Gwen had crept up behind him, hunched low. Her eyes were wide.

‘Not a good place to be,’ Jack said.

‘I did all I could in the street. I could hear these noises. I couldn’t just stay put-’

She paused. ‘What the bloody hell is that?’

There was another thunderclap burst of phasic discharge. Gwen jumped.

‘Get down,’ Jack said, pulling her towards an old tin bath serving as a water butt. Rainfall speckled the surface of the bath’s contents. ‘The technical name for it is very bad news. It’s real nasty. A twenty-seven. Scratch that, it’s a one hundred and twenty-seven. It’s way out of Torchwood’s class. We’re just bystanders.’

‘Christ…’

‘But look at it, Gwen. Look at it and tell me what you think it’s doing.’