Ray Aldridge - The Orpheus Machine

“All right,” she shouted, repressing glee.

He stepped from concealment, and for the first moment she could not react. It was like the culmination of a lovely dream. He stood in plain view, motionless, arms crossed over his head, apparently weaponless. The faceplate of his helmet was tipped up, exposing his dark features. A Gench sidled out from the maze, close behind Ruiz Aw. The mindfire threw Ruiz into a burning white glare, a light that showed him to her in all his predatory glory.

His face was full of an alien emptiness, she noticed, as she settled her ruptor’s sights on his vulnerable beautiful head. Her finger was tightening on the trigger.

She was so full of a transcendent relief, so glad that she was going to survive, that she almost didn’t notice the tendril that penetrated Ruiz Aw’s temple. She almost killed him. Then she saw the tendril and jerked her finger out of the trigger guard.

The Gench had him. It was true. She laughed, triumph washing her fear away. She turned to the Machine, just to be sure. “Is it true? The Gench controls him?”

“Maybe. Yes, it seems so. But take no chances; kill him while you can.” The Machine’s foul breath made her head swim.

She heard the words and took from them the sense she wanted, though there was in them an echo of another person’s words, words which she had once bitterly regretted disregarding.

“Oh no,” she said joyfully, and went out to claim him.

Ruiz stood dumbly, watching Corean Heiclaro emerge from the Machine’s monomol shrine. He couldn’t see her face — just the bright glitter of her eyes through the narrow armorglass slot of her helmet. He hadn’t been so close to her since the day she had loaded him aboard the airboat, so long ago, in the Blacktear Pens.

He felt like a powerless insect, caught in some thick amber nightmare. How had this happened? How had he been so easily caught? He couldn’t remember, and the mindfire pulsed through him, hot and thick, frustrating his attempts to think.

She stopped before him, her splinter gun raised cautiously. “How sweet,” she said, in a voice that trembled with joy. She reached up and touched his cheek with a cold metal gauntlet.

He couldn’t answer.

She spoke to the Gench who had apparently captured him. “Come, monster. We’ll take him right to the Machine and make him safe.” She looked at Ruiz again. “Strange that it should end exactly the way I had planned it to end — but after so much pain, so much frustration.” She gestured sharply with her splinter gun. “Come, I said.”

The Gench made a hissing sound of negation. “I must see your face. Thus am I instructed by those who Become. Much trickery is afoot. We must know that you are the same woman whose soul we touched before.”

She took a step backward, then another. “You may not touch me again. Trickery is afoot.” She paused for a moment. “But I will show you my face.”

Slowly she unlatched her helmet and then pulled it off, cradling it in the crook of her elbow. She shook back her black hair. The splinter gun was for a moment directed elsewhere.

Ruiz felt a tiny cold sting as the tendril withdrew from his brain. Just before it broke free, he heard a voice speak with the power of a god. “Slay,” it said, and the order boomed along his nerves and muscles.

At the same instant, the Machine shrieked, a high grinding sound of despair.

Corean’s eyes grew wide as Ruiz launched himself toward her. He moved in a red merciless dream, his self still hidden away somewhere far from harm.

He came to himself, kneeling there in the Machine’s throne room, his gauntlet twisted in Corean’s silky hair, his knee against her back, forcing her down. Her arms beat against the floor as she tried to throw him off, and her sonic knife flared and buzzed, trying to reach him. In his hand he held a splinter gun, and it descended, as if it had a will of its own, to press against the back of her skull. But for some reason he could not pull the trigger.

He could hear the thin screams of Nisa’s clone, like whispering terror in his ear. He wondered distantly what could be frightening her so, and he glanced up.

The Moc was driving toward him, dragging its injured leg, only slightly hampered by the damage.

Time slowed.

Ruiz opened his mouth to scream, though at the same instant he knew the Moc would kill him before he could make a sound.

A blur slid into his field of vision and passed across the Moc. The great insect pivoted violently, as the blur chopped through its good leg. With a whistling shriek the Moc fell on the blur, which slowed and revealed itself to be an armored man.

There was a flurry of struggle, and then the thumping report of a ruptor. The Moc heaved and broke apart at its segmented waist. The pieces flailed aimlessly for a moment, and then the Moc’s torso finished ripping the arms off the armored man. The arms came away with a dreadful tearing pop, and there was suddenly a lot of blood on the floor.

This instantaneous sequence of events seemed to take a very long time, but finally Ruiz began to react.

His finger jerked against the splinter gun’s trigger, but his hand twitched the muzzle aside, so that the spinning wires bounced off the floor in a flare of pink sparks. Corean screamed and convulsed. She almost bucked Ruiz off, but he struck down with the barrel of the gun, hitting her behind her ear, and she went limp. He ripped her ruptor loose, flung it across the floor, and leaped up.

By the time he reached the remnants of the Moc, it was trying to pull Junior’s legs off, but its strength was failing and all it could do was twist at the joints. It had succeeded in turning one leg backward, but at Ruiz’s approach its torso turned the clone loose and scrabbled around to face him. It started to crawl forward, but Ruiz fired the splinter gun, holding down the trigger, so that destruction sleeted through the insectoid.

The wires chewed the Moc’s head off and blew the carcass across the floor, to fetch up against the wall with a crunch.

The legs continued to wave feebly, but the creature was no longer a threat.

Ruiz knelt by Junior’s torn corpse, careful not to slip in the blood. He unlatched the helmet gently, though he was sure that Junior was far beyond pain. He was therefore shocked, when he exposed the white face, to see life still in the opaque black eyes, and a small smile on the blue-lipped mouth.

He jerked a medical limpet from his rack and started to activate it.

“Don’t be a moron, Ruiz Aw,” said his clone. “Even if you could keep me alive for a while, how would I climb out of here with no arms?” The clone tried to laugh, but the attempt came out a wheezy gasping sound.

Ruiz shook his head, denying the obvious truth of this.

“Just listen to me for a bit,” said the clone, his chest heaving, his breath rasping.

It was the sound of a dying body, a sound Ruiz had heard a thousand times before. He wondered, his thoughts moving slowly and painfully, why it was affecting him so, now. Then he remembered: This dying body is mine… and I’m full of mindfire. “Sure,” he said, his useless hands knotted together. He refused to imagine what it must be like for his clone, the pain heightened and focused by the mindfire.

The clone’s back arched, and he made a sound halfway between a sigh and a moan. “No, no, wait, wait a minute,” he said.

He fixed pleading eyes on Ruiz. “Listen to me,” he said. “You’ve sinned, you’ve been a great monster in your life, but you’ve died for your sins. See? See how it is? Like Nisa did, remember? You’re clean now. Now.”

Fluid bubbled in the clone’s throat. “Now you’re clean,” said the clone in a gentle reflective voice. “And you can… you can…” Then he died.