Hugh Cook - The Worshippers and the Way

As Hatch watched, tubes sprouted from the wall and crawled into Fax's nose to feed him oxygen. A surgeon descended from the ceiling and hung just above Fax's face, suspended by a thick and flexible hose of fluorescent orange. The surgeon was a globular machine which sprouted scalpels and suction tubes, and it got to work on Scorpio Fax right away, cutting and slicing, sucking and dicing, squirting out flesh-paste and moulding it into position.

"I've seen enough," said Shona. "Come away."

Hatch lingered just a moment longer, then began making his way back to Forum Three in Shona's wake.

"Well, Hatch," said Manfred Gan Oliver, as Hatch entered Forum Three. "Are you ready to die?"

"Die?" said Hatch, startled and confused. "Did you come here to murder?"

"I came here for the pleasures of the Season," said Gan Oliver.

"This is no Season," said Hatch. "This is but – "

"I spoke as a poet," said Gan Oliver. "A poet of blood, though I have no words to my name. As for what this is or is not – don't lecture me, Hatch. Here I trained. Here I grew from boyhood to manhood. I know this place as well as you or better. My son will see you dead in this Season of ours."

"The illusion tanks – "

"I'm not talking illusion!" said Gan Oliver. "Once you leave this place, you're marked for death. The Free Corps is going to put an end to the Frangoni, Hatch."

"The emperor – "

"The emperor is gone, Hatch. Missing or dead. We've overthrown him."

Hatch was fast losing track of what had actually happened in Dalar ken Halvar, or what was claimed to have happened.

"You might have grabbed the palace for the moment," said Hatch, presuming from Gan Oliver's lordly attitude that the man had reason to think himself the master of the city, "at least in the night's confusion, but tomorrow – "

"Hatch, you fool," said Gan Oliver. "The Free Corps has been planning its coup for the better part of a generation. We were waiting for the moment, that's all. This revolution, so called, it gave us our moment. Make it easy for yourself, Hatch. Find yourself a sword, then fall on it."

This was almost too much for Hatch to absorb at once. What was happening here? Had the Free Corps truly seized effective control in Dalar ken Halvar? And did the Free Corps think it could hold the city permanently? Would Gan Oliver really have Hatch murdered once he left the protection of the Combat College, or was that threat merely an exercise in psychological warfare?

"You're pirates," said Hatch, hoping to push Gan Oliver into self-revelation. "And pirates tainted with treachery at that."

"We are the bringers of a new age," said Gan Oliver, with what sounded like level-headed sincerity.

"Not while I have anything to do with it," said Hatch.

"You don't have anything to do with it," said Gan Oliver.

"You don't and you won't. My son Lupus will kill you in battle in the world of illusions. Then you will leave the Combat College.

Then I will kill you for real. Our swords are waiting in the kinema, Hatch. Once you step outside the lockway, you're dead."

"Kill me you may," said Hatch, giving way to his inborn love of rhetoric. "But the blood that lives will seek vengeance."

"Who will revenge you, Hatch?" said Gan Oliver, sneering at this sally. "Your sister? Your brother? They're doomed to the same fate, Hatch. Once the Free Corps has won Dalar ken Halvar, we will cleanse Cap Uba and have done with the Frangoni."

"You would not dare!" said Hatch, hoping that Gan Oliver would not dare, and hoping that this twice-repeated threat of genocide was sheer bluff. "We have a Treaty."

Here Hatch spoke of course of the Treaty between the Silver Emperor and the Frangoni people. That Treaty made all Frangoni males in Dalar ken Halvar the slaves of the Silver Emperor, but also safeguarded the rights of the Frangoni to enjoy peace and safety on their own rock on the western side of the city.

"You had a Treaty," said Gan Oliver, emphasizing the past tense. "But your Treaty was with the Silver Emperor, who is missing, believed dead."

"We had a Treaty, yes," said Hatch, "and have a treaty now."

"And I," said Manfred Gan Oliver, "have a fist."

Gan Oliver's easy confidence was as inscrutable as anything else Hatch had ever had to deal with. It was impossible to know whether the man was serious. Hatch needed information, lots of it, and fast. How many men had the Free Corps rallied? How many officers of the Imperial Guard had thrown in their lot with the Free Corps? Where were the revolutionary leaders? What exactly had happened at the silver mines?

"Well, Hatch?" said Gan Oliver, as Hatch counted his question marks. "What do you say to that?"

"Asodo Hatch has no time left for argument," said Paraban Senk, intruding on this debate. "The arc is half-gone and combat begins at the end of the arc. Combatants should now proceed to the initiation seats. Asodo Hatch. Lon Oliver. Proceed to the combat bays." – Half an arc?

– Time enough.

So thought Hatch.

But he knew he would have to hurry.

Free Corps: an association of Startroopers and would-be Startroopers who think of themselves as citizens of the Nexus stranded for a lifetime amidst the barbarians of Dalar ken Halvar.

These people typically speak the Code Seven Commonspeak of the Nexus and dream of the Day of Days when the Chasm Gates will be resurrected, and the local universe will once more be linked to the multiverse of the Nexus.

So sharpening his sword – a hero.

Then cut himself, and in that taste – He found his throat split open, split to bleed And red poured rust to waste – on desert sands – Hastening from Forum Three, Hatch took himself off to the Combat College's cure-all clinic, and was shortly bending over the patched-up body of Scorpio Fax, and endeavoring to rouse Fax to wakefulness.

"Can you hear me?" said Hatch, uncertain whether Scorpio Fax was resting, sleeping or sunk in a coma.

Fax's eyes flickered, opened.

"Grief," said Fax. "That dorgi."

"Give you a hard time, did it?" said Hatch.

He recalled that the dorgi had been sulking in its lair when he had last entered the Combat College. After such sulks, it often challenged people with a ferocity just short of the homicidal.

"A hard time?" said Fax. "Did it ever! I came through the lockway, I was – I was cut up bad and it – you can imagine."

"I can imagine," affirmed Hatch.

The dorgi was a constant cause for worry. These sentrymachines were deliberately designed to be slightly erratic, marginally unpredictable and most definitely stupid. The random elements in their behavior were (in theory) supposed to make it difficult for any intruder to plan a path past them with confidence.

So dorgis made good perimeter guards (in theory, at least), but on account of their inherent and progressive instability they were supposed to be checked out by a machine psychologist at least once every three years. The beast which guarded the lockway was more than twenty thousand years overdue for such a check, and was getting more and more eccentric with each passing century.

Hatch suspected that, had the Chasm Gates not collapsed, all dorgis would soon have been done away with, for surely the Nexus authorities would have realized that a machine created in the image of erraticism was not a good idea. But the closure of the Chasm Gates had made every passing technological caprice of the Chasm Gate era into a semi-permanent fixture of the Combat College.

Semi-permanent, rather than permanent, because everything wears out sooner or later. The Combat College dorgi should have worn out long ago, since it had a design life of only seven thousand years. But this one was still going strong, and sooner or later it would kill one person – or several. Hatch was sure of it.