M. Harrison - THE CENTAURI DEVICE

He shrugged.

He decided to go to Centauri anyway.

Perhaps the Device was calling subtly to its inheritor, perhaps he honestly wanted a confrontation. Certainly, as he slipped out onto the bitter streets of the port, black and ragged in his cloak like a wounded crow, he wanted revenge; by the time he'd passed the high wire fence of the landing field, he had convinced himself that his anger was more than personal; and he believed as he strode between the rocket pits under the white arc lights that the time for passive misery and acceptance was over.

It wasn't.

When he located the Ella Speed (he'd somehow forgotten the paint job and the new name), he found her loading ramp extended tike the tongue of an immense mechanical mouth.

Fix the bos'n was lying huddled up on it.

He was dead.

His lips peeled back from those sawmill teeth, he was curled foetally round a massive abdominal wound, as if his final horrified act had been an attempt to contain the several pints of fluid congealing on the diamond tread of the ramp beneath him. His eyes were narrowed, his fingers were all in a knot; under the port arcs, his features were composed of precise white planes and cold shadows, a brutal, quite alien morphology of emotion, memoir of a hard death.

Truck (down on his knees again, with his hands in the bos'n's blood and his mind on the corpse boats of Cor Caroli, where, under the same clinical illumination, there was at least a little peace, an order to the serried rows) heaved and retched. He wiped himself on Fix's yellow jerkin, coughing dismally. ('A pumpkin,' he explained, 'is what your head is. Don't forget, no vegetable seeds.') Since their government is semi-feudal, Chromians acquire early a deep familiarity with death, but: Oh, you poor sod, he thought, you poor little sod. This was nothing like the loss of Pater, whom he'd hardly known; or of Angina Seng, who hadn't died alone under bleak lights.

Images of Fix: mafeking across the Galaxy in search of freedom and dope and big Denebian whores, his grinning mouth hungry to eat it all down; shivering and blinking on the steps of courthouses in the morning, wondering where to go next after being busted and spending the night telling weird Chromian jokes (' — and were they tits? Not on your life. Intellectual melons!,' with nobody among the soreheaded jailed losers knowing quite how to laugh at this hick who found everything new they thought was old); Fix horrible in trashcan alley fights, the morals of a goat, vital, alive — dead.

'What can I do?' whispered Truck, cupping the back of the great round head in his hands. He couldn't even bring himself to close the eyelids. He got up. Someone was going to be killed. He gazed speculatively along the length of the boat toward the command bridge, then went inside.

My Ella Speed , a light haulage vehicle of the 'Transit' class, registered out of Carter's Snort, Earth, and licensed to transfer up to one thousand tons of freight over distances less than a thousand light years: she mounted three Dynaflow converters (each outputting about fifty/gigaton hours per every half ton of fuel consumed) and a 'Powerslide' rocket pile for sub-Dyne maneuvers such as planetfall; her cramped little hold had carried everything from neat nitromethane for the curious engines of Anywhere to five thousand live ferrets genetically modified to survive the curious atmosphere of Titus-Bode. Now, except for a few string-tied bundles of 'Some Words of Plain Good Sense in a Time of Trouble,' it was empty and hollow, amplifying the scrape of John Truck's bootsoles as he rifled Fix the bos'n's belongings in search of a gun.

He padded forward through that sweet and dirty ship. In the engine room, where instrumentation flickered and clicked and the display board said power down in arrays of colored lights, Fix had left himself a final note: CLENE HTE RUNIN GEER. Truck screwed it up and chucked it on the floor without so much as a smile. He put his shoulder against the command-cabin hatch and shoved. It was locked. Temper gone, he tried to kick it in and was rewarded by Tiny Skeffern's voice from the other side.

'Truck, there's some mad sod in here with a gun.' He sounded muffled and distant Truck said nothing. Damn him for being in the way. A scuffling sound. 'He says hell shoot if you don't come in quietly. I think he means it.'

'Oh, Hell ' Poor old Tiny. 'All right then.' The electronic lock hummed and chimed, the hatch slid open. Truck dropped Fix's chopper, and the sound clattered back along the sub-frame of the boat like a laugh. 'I'll get you, you bastard,' he said, holding out his hands to demonstrate their emptiness.

Tiny had got himself backed up into a comer, his hands well above his head, small beads of sweat on his bald patch. A shallow laceration with bruised edges ran down his left cheek. He looked accusingly at Truck and complained, 'I don't think much of your friends.' Track moved a bit further into the cabin, to discover Colonel Gadaffi ben Barka lounging against the approach-radar board with an arid smile on his thin lips.

'Don't think that'll help you when the time comes,' Truck told nun, nodding at the military issue Chambers gun that had lately blown such a large hole in Fix the bos'n's insides. 'I owe you for all this, ben Barka. Nobody threatens me on my own boat'

The Arab shrugged elegantly. He had crossed one leg over the other, his whole body unconsciously mimicking the feral repose of his own death commandos. His uniform was as neat as a pin. But he looked tired, and the desert, never very far away, was etching at his brain.

'You shot my bos'n,' Truck insisted.

Ben Barka's soft brown eyes hooded themselves for a heartbeat. He seemed to be studying his pistol. 'You can't think I'm unaware of that, Captain. Neither are you aware of how much is at stake. You did plenty of killing last night.' Another oasis choked to death in the long, empty night. 'He attacked me after fair warning. He was very brave. Do you think I did it lightly? I'm sorry if you do.'

John Truck had found Fix the dwarf washed up in the port hinterland of Gloam — disoriented and illiterate among the hustlers and prostitutes, having no real understanding of the twilight subculture that had swallowed him after his escape from the rural manors and squirearchies of Chrome. The two-thousand light-year brawl that had followed was Truck's responsibility; so was its end, down there under the arc lamps of Avernus. Like Annie Truck, Fix was a dependent.

'Are you apologizing to me? I didn't own him. Apologize to him!'

'Come, Captain — '

'I'm going to kick you to death some day, you bastard.'

The desert shifted, rustled, extended its perimeters: it had made vast inroads since the meeting in the ganger's shed; from being a means, a sympathetic terrain for imaginary revenges, it had mutated into an end. The olive groves had withered, the aqueducts fallen to rubble. Cairo and Alexandria was bleached shells in the ancient sunlight. High up in mountains ben Barka had never seen, exfoliation was cracking rock enough to make a Galactic sand-sea; sand was already spilling from his skull to submerge everything; in peace, he would slip along the wadies of the mind, stalking Reality's pitiful little punitive expeditions -

He made a small gesture with the pistol. 'If you'll take your place at the controls, Captain Truck. Your vessel has been commandeered.' His teeth were like bones exposed by the dry winds. 'Mr Skeffern, you'll note, is still alive and well.'

'Get your backside off the switchgear if you want the boat to go anywhere, ben Barka.'

The command-cabin of a Transit class hauler is laid out with dual controls and duplicated navigational aids; two acceleration chairs provide access to these, and a third can be brought up on runners from the rear of the bridge and locked abreast of the other two. It is a habit of transport pilots to leave this one permanently in place: ben Barka sat himself down in it and indicated that Truck and Tiny should strap-in either side of him. He put his pistol close to Tiny's ear.