Dan Abnett - Border Princes

‘Oh,’ said Davey. Unsteady on the tumbled kindling, he looked around at Toshiko. ‘It’s gone,’ he said.

‘It’s moving!’ Jack whispered.

The Serial G was plodding away up the allotments in the beating rain.

‘That’s the way James went,’ said Gwen. She leapt up and began to run after it.

‘For God’s sake, woman!’ Jack barked, and ran after her.

He’d reached the end wall. It was made of brick and seven feet high. There was no gate, no doorway.

James fell against the wall and slid down it. His breathing was ragged. His whole upper body hurt, especially his shoulder and his jaw. He spat out some more blood. It was hard to focus, to think. His head felt like it was coming off. His mind felt like it was boiling.

His hands were shaking.

James looked up. He heard a distinctive hissing, pneumatic tread. A hum.

The Serial G parted the elder bushes twenty feet from him in a spray of raindrops and stepped into view. James pushed himself backwards, willing himself into the unyielding wall. He held his breath.

The Serial G paused, then cocked its head and looked in his direction.

On the other side of the wall, James started to run. Another back lane, an alley, narrow and dank, filled with wheelie bins and soaked pieces of household junk. The lane ran along behind the walled backyards of another terrace.

It was quite painful to run. James faltered, and came to a halt. He leaned against the allotment wall, panting hard. He wiped blood from his nostrils. The rain dribbled down his face.

A sudden thought entered his head, unbidden, a realisation. How had he cleared this wall? How had he cleared this seven-foot wall?

How-

Twenty-five feet behind him, the wall in question exploded in a fury of phasic energy. Bricks flew and scattered, making the clip-clop sounds of horseshoes on the alleyway paving.

The Serial G stepped through the three-metre-wide hole it had made in the wall. The crumbling edges of the brick work glowed and smoked.

James started running again. The Serial G behind him snapped out a limb on elastic metal to grab him, and missed. Steel hooks the size of milk bottles clanked shut on empty air. The Serial G took off after him, taking huge strides on legs as long and thin as scaffolding poles.

James risked a look back. A serious error. He slammed headlong into a wheelie bin and came down with it, sliding along the paving, garbage spilling out around and over him.

He looked back. The Serial G bore down.

Mr Dine ignored the pain. He accessed reserve investment and cleared the wall in the rain. He landed in the alley behind the construct and leapt at its back.

The Serial G halted and writhed, trying to shake off the adversary clamped around its neck and torso. Its manipulator limbs snaked backwards, attempting to grasp Mr Dine and shred him.

Mr Dine plunged a blade fist into the base of its neck. The alloy there dented deeply.

The construct’s hum turned into a whine. It thrashed back and forth, slamming itself into the wet, alleyway walls, trying to wrench off its attacker. Bricks chipped and crumbled in bursts of dust as if hit by gunfire.

It succeeded in grabbing Mr Dine with the hooks of its right claw. It ripped the First Senior off its back and threw him sideways. Mr Dine punched through the back wall of a yard and then the kitchen wall of a house. He came to rest in the ruins of a kitchen table. His violent passage had torn the stainless-steel sink and drainer away from its cabinet mount, and water gushed, under pressure, from the broken pipes. The PVC replacement window, frame and all, fell out of its hole.

Mr Dine rolled over and got up. Black fluid spattered the quarry tile-effect vinyl flooring. He made a tactical assessment, scanning.

James got up and started to run again. There was an archway between houses, a walk-through, to his left. He darted down it, heading for the street.

The Serial G followed him.

Mr Dine read, quite clearly, that the construct was moving laterally to his left flank, ten yards away.

He turned, raised his arms in a protective cross in front of his face, and started to run. He exploded through the glass-panelled kitchen door, sprinted along the beige carpet of the hall and punched the front door clean out of its frame as he powered through it. He cleared the front garden wall, and landed on all fours like a cat on the roof of a parked car. The car’s alarm began to peal as his impact dented the roof.

The local police had emptied the street about fifteen minutes earlier. At the far end, locals residents and policemen turned at the tape line when they heard the impacts and the alarm. They stared, mystified, down the street, through the rain.

James ran out of the walk-through into the road, soaked. He fell down and rolled in the puddles. The cloud cover was low and dark. Some of the street-lamps had come on.

Rainwater dripping off it, the Serial G strode out into the street behind him. It had retracted its legs considerably to duck under the walk-through. Now its legs extended again. It rose up, fourteen feet tall, its arms stretching out in proportion to its lower limbs.

Crouched and tensed on the roof of the car, Mr Dine waited for a second. Rainwater streaked down his grey, thorny body, diluting the inky black streaming from his side.

He took a breath.

He jumped.

The car he’d been crouching on bounced up and down on its shocks as he left it. He slammed into the construct and brought it over.

The huge metal figure toppled sideways under the force of the intercept, and demolished the ground-floor wall of a neighbouring house.

The impact threw Mr Dine clear. He rolled, and landed on his feet on a leatherette sofa. Unseated by the collapsing wall, a large television toppled off its stand in a flurry of sparks. A cracked aquarium began to gush its contents out onto the carpet. Dying, fragile, multicoloured fish flopped and wriggled as they were evacuated out onto the sopping pile.

In the street, James got up, leaning for support against a parked car, hearing the parping alarm of another car nearby.

The Serial G struggled and attempted to right itself.

‘No. Not this time,’ said Mr Dine. He leapt off the sofa and came down on top of it, a blade fist extended.

The tips of his reinforced fingers punched into the construct’s chest and the alloy shattered like pie-crust. Mr Dine reached into the glowing interior, grabbed the construct’s pumping, sentient CPU, and ripped it out.

The Serial G went into flatline arrest. The tiny reactor that powered it began to spin out wildly and overheat as system death overtook it.

Realising what was about to occur, Mr Dine turned to run.

The reactor superheated and winked out of existence. The Serial G exploded with it. So did the house, and the houses either side. Mr Dine was hurled like a limp rag across the street by the bow-wave of the detonation. At the end of the street, residents and police officers alike were knocked flat.

Jack and Gwen ran out into the street.

Pieces of up-flung debris were still coming down to rest. A gap where three houses had once stood blazed in the middle of the terrace row, churning thick, soot-black smoke into the sky. At the end of the street, people were shouting and screaming. Burning wreckage littered the road, sizzling in the rain. Everything was lit by the combusting ruins of the houses.

Jack lowered his revolver.

‘Shit,’ he said.

Gwen saw James, curled up in the middle of the road. She ran to him.

‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ she sobbed, cradling him. Blood ran out of his slack mouth.

Jack walked across the street. Something with a vaguely human shape had landed on the roof of a parked Vauxhall Astra. The roof was crumpled and the windows burst out.