Mark Lawrence - Road Brothers

‘Your name, ghost.’

‘Kalla Lefarge. I—’

‘Open this door, Kalla.’

‘You must understand, Jorg, mechanisms have finite duration. I need biological units to carry out my work. To carry me even. Projection has its lim—’

‘Now,’ I said, and banged the vials against the metal.

‘Don’t!’ She held out a hand as if that might stop me. The very first thing she said to me was to put them down. It pays to notice priorities. She’d said it as if they were of no great importance … but she said it first.

‘Or what?’ I clonked the end of the stand against the door again and the vials clinked together.

‘If a class alpha viral strain contaminates this facility it will be purged. I can neither override that protocol nor allow it to happen.’

A flicker of concern over those perfect features. Builder-ghosts were woven from the story of a person’s life – every detail – extrapolated from a billion seconds of scrutiny. This one I felt had drifted far from its template, but not so far it couldn’t still know fear.

‘Purged?’

‘With fire.’ Kalla’s face flickered briefly to a look of horror, returning to its customary serenity a moment later. I wondered from what instant that look had been stolen and what had set it on the face of the real Kalla – flesh and blood and bone like me, dust these many centuries. Had the creature before me grown far from its roots or had Kalla shared this madness? ‘Enough fire to leave these halls hollow and smoking.’

‘Better open the fucking door then.’ And I banged the stand in earnest.

‘Careful!’ A hand flew to her mouth. ‘There! It’s open!’

The hall beyond lay crossed with shadow and lit by irregular patches of light bright enough to make me squint. Steel tables lined each wall. A stench of rot filled my nose, along with something sharp, astringent, chemical. Corpses lay on every table. Some in pieces. Some fresh. Some corrupt. Organs floated in glass tubes running from ceiling to floor, threaded with bubbles – hearts, livers, lengths of gut. Behind the table closest to me a metal skeleton, or some close approximation, leaned across yet another corpse. Despite lacking muscle or flesh the thing moved, the cleverly articulated fingers of one hand swiftly driving the needle of a drug-vial into vital spots all across the cadaver before it. The other hand moved from unstrapping the remains to depressing raised bumps on certain mechanisms that replaced sections of the body such as the elbow joints. It finished by turning a dial on some engine sunk deep into the chest cavity.

I held the stand out between us, vials clinking, ready to fend the thing off if it jumped me.

‘This is the last of my medical units,’ the ghost said, voice wavering between two pitches as if unable to settle. ‘I’d ask you not to damage it further.’

As the skeleton straightened to regard me with black eyes bedded in silver-steel sockets, I noted across its bones the white powdery corrosion that I’d seen back on the lock to my sleeping chamber. The thing stepped away from the table, favouring one leg, a gritty sound accompanying each movement of its limbs. Only the nimble fingers seemed unaffected by the passage of a millennium.

The corpse, on the other hand, moved with far more surety and only the slightest whine of mechanics as it sat up between us.

‘Hakon.’

They’d done something to his eyes, rods of glass and metal jutting from red sockets; his hair and beard had been shaved away, but his smile was the same.

In my moment of hesitation Hakon, or his remains, took hold of the stand. I tugged at it but his grip had no give.

‘This one nearly succeeded,’ he said. Or rather it was the ghost’s voice, but firmer, and sounding from the box in his chest. ‘He can support me, but his brain degenerates under fine control and the degree of putrefaction about the implants is too great to be sustained in the longer term.’

‘And I was to be your next … steed?’ I tugged at the stand again.

‘You still will be,’ Kalla said, her voice coming distractingly from both the ghost and the box in Hakon’s chest. ‘The last faults have been analysed. This time it will succeed. Nor will your life be forfeit. Even this one isn’t dead – not truly.’ Hakon slipped from the table and stood before me, both hands tight about the stand. ‘Carry me for long enough to complete three alternate hosts and I’ll send you on your way with nothing but a few stitches.’

‘Why me?’ I glanced around, looking for the way out. ‘Get some new bodies to play with.’

‘You’ve broken my last sedation units.’

‘Mend them—’ I lunged forward and tore one of the vials free.

Releasing the stand, I stepped away, holding the vial overhead, ready to smash it.

‘Don’t—’

‘Who was the other one? The ghost who put on the skull-and-bones show for us, tried to scare us off?’

‘A colleague at this facility, also copied and stored as a data echo. She … disapproves of my work here. We’re isolated in this network. Security they called it.’ She made a bitter noise. ‘Our research too classified to risk a leak. And so until I find a way to have our data physically carried to another portal we’re cut off from the deep-nets. Just us two … arguing … for a thousand years. I have the upper hand now though, especially in here. The outer part of the station collapsed long ago and our projection units are outside. She lacks the power to interfere for long.’

I spotted a door and backed rapidly toward it. The ghost winked out but Hakon followed me, carrying the stand like a quarterstaff, a touch awkward in his gait. I wondered if he was still in there, fighting her, or were the important parts of his brain floating in some jar on a high shelf?

‘Where’s Katherine?’ I asked it to keep Kalla occupied, though perhaps when a machine does your thinking for you distraction is impossible. Maybe all my parameters were already calculated within the Builders’ engines, wheels turning through each possibility like the mathmagicians of Afrique, the odds sewn tight against me.

‘So you did have help?’ A flicker of annoyance in the voice, though Hakon’s face revealed no emotion. ‘It was a subtle thing, detected only after analysis. A manipulation at sub-instrumental levels. Sleep psionics of advanced degree …’

I found the door and tugged at it. Hakon took three quick steps and I set both hands to the vial, making to twist the top. ‘Do it and I’ll open Pandora’s Box here and we’ll see what ills emerge.’

‘If you leave I am finished,’ Kalla said, flexing Hakon’s hands.

‘Not at all.’ I hooked the door open with my bare foot and retreated through it. ‘If I break this, you’re finished. If I leave you still have a chance. Use Hakon, steal another subject. Some chance is better than no chance.’

‘You don’t seem to accept that logic yourself.’ Kalla kept pace with me as I backed down the long corridor.

I smelled fresh air but didn’t risk a glance back as I retreated. ‘I’m not afraid to die, ghost.’ I spoke the truth. ‘You’ve spent a thousand years cheating death. That kind of dedication is built on fear. I’ve spent much of sixteen years hunting it. We’re very different, you and I.’

I passed a great and twisted door, propped against the corridor wall. The remains of needle-bugs told me I’d reached the point where they first took me. A breeze played against my neck, back, thighs, reminding me of my nakedness. My hand hurt, almost as much as when I first ripped it free – the feeling in it perhaps woken by the scent of the green world outside.

I saw my sword, still lying there in the dust by the broken door, as if it held no value. I’d no time to pick it up and little good it would do me in my left hand. Even so it pained me to leave it as I carried on down the corridor.