Dan Abnett - Border Princes

‘Scaring the crap out of me is what.’

‘No, look at it! What does it look like it’s doing?’

‘It’s fighting,’ whispered Toshiko. ‘It’s fighting something we can’t see.’

‘Speak for yourself, Miss,’ said Davey. ‘Oh, it doesn’t like it. Not at all.’

‘Mr Morgan? Davey? Please tell me right now what you think you can see.’

‘That bloke, of course. That bloke there in grey, giving it what for.’

Move. Don’t lie there. It’s not safe .

James woke up. Pain flared through his shoulder and neck and jaw. His mouth was full of blood. He stirred. He was vaguely aware of a huge din close by, metal on metal, whoops of superheated air. The ground shook. Rain soaked him.

Move. Get up and move now. It’s not safe .

‘What?’ he murmured. He raised his head slightly and blood ran down his chin from his mouth, and down his upper lip from his nose. He couldn’t focus properly.

I will not ask you again. Get up and move .

The voice was gentle, and oddly unaccented. It lacked even the slightest trace of region or background.

Get up and move .

James blinked and shook his head. He felt the downpour on his scalp. He knew he was hurt, quite badly hurt. His vision cleared slightly.

He saw the Serial G.

It was facing him, less than twenty yards away. It was behaving oddly, swinging its arms, its legs braced. It was the most active and mobile James had seen it, almost urgent.

He got up very shakily, soaked to the skin. He’d lost a shoe somewhere, and his shirt was ripped. There was blood down the front of it. His own blood.

He started to move. He broke into a limping run, hobbling up towards the northern limits of the allotments, away from the Serial G. The allotments ended in a bank of thick bushes, then a wall, behind which were the backs of houses. If he could get as far as the wall…

He fell twice. He felt stricken and woozy. He spat out more blood and part of a tooth and ran on.

‘James!’ Gwen cried. ‘It’s James!’

‘Get down!’ Jack bellowed, and jerked her back into cover.

‘He’s hurt!’

‘Yeah, I think he is. But he’s running clear, look. He’ll be OK.’

Gwen fought at Jack to get up.

‘Stop it!’ he snapped. ‘James will not thank me if I let you get smoked by that thing.’

Gwen gave in and slumped down beside Jack. She watched James’s distant, staggering form until it disappeared behind a thicket of untended elder.

‘You really think that robot thing is fighting something?’ she asked, wiping rain off the end of her nose.

‘You got a better explanation for its behaviour?’ Jack asked.

The Serial G swung its right manipulator limb at him. It was impressively fast, and agile for a construct. By comparison, the raindrops in the air were frozen and static.

Mr Dine was impressed. It had hurt him already. Tech level forty-one-plus. Cold-cast vitalium/terybdonum composite alloy chassis. Hazard (type 1) grade physical assault, hazard (type 1) phasic weapon array. Hyper-aggressive intercourse.

His shield barriers, both standard and custom, were taking a pounding. The phasic weapon had a bite to it, although it seemed to need a ten-second lag to cycle up and recharge for shooting during sustained discharge. Mr Dine had speed on his side.

He ducked the sweeping limb, and hit the Serial G with another kinetic ram, his palm extended. The construct staggered backwards, and blitzed Mr Dine’s shield barriers with a phasic burn at ninety per cent of power capacity.

Mr Dine leapt backwards, lifted slightly by the resounding impact. Coiling, he threw himself forward again under the grasping, groping claws of the manipulator limbs, and closed for contact.

Palms open, he delivered two more kinetic rams, squirting power from the cuff outlets of his battledress system. The construct vibrated with the double impact, taking the full force in its torso.

Mr Dine exploited his momentary advantage. He balled his left hand into fist form, invested primary power down his shoulder into his left arm, and punched.

A blow like that could split granite or fracture steel. It struck the composite alloy faring of the construct’s torso and made a significant dent.

The impact threw the Serial G backwards. It lost its footing entirely in the rain, flag-pole legs kicking helplessly, and crashed down onto its back.

Mr Dine didn’t hesitate. He fused his right hand into a blade form, like the end of an adze, and pounced to drive it down into the thing’s heart for a kill.

The Serial G was not done. Though it was down and floundering on its back in the rain, its grotesquely elongated limbs flailing, it was not done.

It lashed its right arm around like a bull-whip, and caught Mr Dine in mid air with a noise like two racing locomotives meeting head on.

‘Look out!’ Davey shouted, and threw himself into Toshiko. The pair of them tumbled over into the wet grass.

An instant later, the eggshell-blue potting shed they had been standing next to was comprehensively demolished, as if a cruise missile had struck it from the front. Pieces of tile and wooden lapping winnowed out from the impact.

Toshiko raised her head. Raindrops struck her. The Serial G was on its back like an upturned beetle, its limbs waving. With a hiss, its limbs retracted, impossibly, into its torso housing, vanishing entirely for a second. Then its legs re-extended, lifting the sculptural body back upright. It rose straight up to a height of nine feet, and then its arms extruded from the sides of the torso, sliding out of nowhere smoothly and fluidly until its vast hook hands dangled below its hips again.

It let out a hum, and the hum changed pitch. It turned its head and looked through the rain, across the ravaged allotment plots, directly at Toshiko.

No, not at her, she realised. At the wreckage of the potting shed.

It hummed again.

‘Had enough, have you?’ Davey asked, struggling to his feet. ‘Gave you a beating, didn’t he?’

A wavering hum.

‘Regroup? No? Just stop it now, eh? Just stop it now,’ Davey said.

The Serial G turned its head away and began to stride up the allotments towards the back wall.

‘No!’ Davey cried. ‘Come back here!’

It ignored him.

‘I think it’s a bit scared now, to be honest,’ said Davey to Toshiko. ‘Rattled, you know? It wasn’t expecting that. It intends to run, go to ground.’

‘It said that?’

Davey nodded. ‘It needs time to repair.’

He limped over to the ruins of the potting shed and pulled back some of the remaining side panels so he could look in. The steady rain pattered off the wood and the grass.

‘All right there?’ Toshiko heard him say. She clambered up and hurried to join him. The potting shed was just a tangle of debris, slats of wood, old duck boards, scraps of ply. Davey pulled himself in, wobbling precariously.

‘It’s OK, just lie still,’ he said.

She couldn’t see what he was talking to.

Something rose up out of the wreckage. Something like a man, or the shadow of a man. A matt-grey ghost with a strange, thorny outline. Pieces of debris fell off it as it stood up.

‘Davey,’ she warned.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, hushing at her with a wave of his hand. He kept his gaze on the figure.

‘Just stay put. It’s gone now. Just stay put,’ Davey said. ‘That’s a nasty scrape you’ve taken.’ He pointed.

The shadow looked down. It put its left hand against its side where a dark, ink-like liquid was seeping out. The hand came away, fingers soaked and dripping with the gleaming black fluid.

‘You should-’ Davey began.

The shadow simply wasn’t there any more.