Burping dyspeptically, Vulture understood that sleers caused acid indigestion. Or perhaps the imminence of death did that? The little AI would not have minded Arden and her new companions coming here, but the droon was a different matter entirely. Vulture knew that Dragon would kill her, somehow, if she did not complete her task—the entity had probably written it into her avian wiring—so she must stay with this game. But now remaining here had also become a fatal option. All she could hope was that Arden and crew could deal with the unwelcome monster. She returned her attention to Crane as he reached out to make his next move.
The random nature of Crane’s search for the right arrangement caused a bit of a problem. Again he was reaching towards the piece of crystal that Vulture had made the one stable point in the pattern. It was frustrating. Beyond Crane, she observed Arden and the rest dismounting and dispersing amid the surrounding ruination, while the Rondure Knight positioned his lance in its frame. His seemed like the best plan, but she wondered how he would persuade the skittish sand hog to charge at the droon, or how he would avoid being himself dissolved in the monster’s volatile saliva. Suddenly irritated beyond patience by her ridiculously fatal circumstances, Vulture gave a savage peck, her beak clonking on Mr Crane’s brass fingers.
The Golem froze, and Vulture was sure she could see something flickering in his right eye. He withdrew his hand and raised his face to look at her directly. Vulture waited taut seconds, expecting to have her neck wrung, but Crane dipped his head again, bird-like, and there seemed a strange symmetry to that. Instead of reaching for the crystal, he reached for one of the acorns.
Vulture ahem’d loudly and Crane’s hand wavered, dropped instead on the laser lighter, shifting that. Vulture edged forwards one of the miniature sand hogs with its rider, who used his lance to prod a blue acorn into a new position. Everything seemed to be working out okay—at least in the game.
But Vulture decided to be sure. The little ship AI retreated to a small virtuality maintained by a draconic mechanism buried underneath the fossilized apek. Here a human would have perceived twelve oddly shaped fragments of crystal dancing around each other, sometimes meshing, sometimes parting, and another five fragments permanently joined into one lump. But Vulture, with the perception of an AI capable of guiding a ship through U-space, saw so much more. She saw acceptance of horror by something ostensibly incapable of causing it, she saw timelines aligning and disparate subminds feeding the yet evanescent concept of self. She saw an ego growing: tender, hollow growth ready to be filled with steel. Yes, it was working. Returning to strange reality, Vulture was surprised to see Mr Crane staring at her again. It was ridiculous really—he did not have what Vulture would call a mind—but she was sure he knew she was helping him.
Arden had nothing but admiration for the Rondure Knight’s courage and wished their acquaintance might not be so brief. But very shortly the man was going to be dead, and she doubted the rest of them would long survive him. Trying to steady her shaking hands, Arden unwound the two feed wires from the holocap’s universal power supply. Being a rugged and utilitarian device, it had the facility to power itself from just about any electrical source. Arden had once even powered it (very briefly) from a piece of copper and a silver ring jammed into a citrus fruit, so there should be no problem with Anderson’s primitive battery.
She eyed Thorn, who was crouching behind a nearby boulder draped with a fiat and slightly putrescent pseudopod that Dragon had discarded. He was checking the action of the carbine Anderson had given him. Off to her other side, Tergal clutched both handguns. As well as an expression of fear, he also wore his gauntlets, wide-brimmed hat and thick coat. This extra clothing might protect him somewhat from acid splashes, but would not help if the monster went after him exclusively.
She then glanced behind to where Anderson had mounted his old sand hog and couched his lance. He had told her, only a little while ago, how he had come here on a knightly quest to kill a dragon. A test—a trial. He then quipped that the droon would suffice, and having dispatched it he would consider his trial over.
The holocap read the new power source, adjusted itself accordingly and powered up. Arden detached the monocle, and for the first time looked up and ahead. The droon was a hundred metres away, closing the gap between them by three metres with every stride. Arden placed the monocle in her eye, gridded the creature, taking in the surrounding area as a projection stage, then removed the monocle and tossed it away from her. Hopefully, no droon acid would hit the monocle itself, because then it would all be over, as it was the last one she possessed. With a mosquito whine, the device shot out over the droon and hovered, invisible. Going to her menu, Arden selected a second-stage sleer and projected it onto a boulder to the droon’s left.
The monster spun, ejecting a sheet of white mucus straight at the projection. Arden made the second-stager leap about a little before shutting the thing off. The droon stooped low, its head darting from side to side as it tried to locate its prey. It reached down with one many-jointed arm, hooking underneath a rim of stone with a paw like a battered mass of scrap metal, and flipped the boulder over. Then it bellowed in frustration and randomly spat acid all about itself.
‘Seems rather irritated,’ Thorn observed.
‘I’ve studied them for a while and they possess only two states,’ Arden said, ‘irritated, as you put it, or motionless.’
‘And when are they motionless?’ Tergal asked.
Arden glanced at him. ‘Usually after they’ve fed.’
‘And why isn’t this one motionless, then?’
Arden shrugged. ‘Perhaps it’s unusually irritated.’
She now made another second-stager appear, this one on a rock to the monster’s other side. The droon ejected another sheet of mucus, which passed through the hologram and drenched the rock below it. Again the prey danced about a bit, then disappeared. Arden gave the monster quite a chase with a third-stager, leaving behind a trail of boiling smoke and steam. Onto the illusory apek it emptied gallons of vitriol, but the image of itself only seemed to confuse it. Then, as it seemed to be now spitting dry, she conjured a fourth-stager to draw it round to the rim of the arena, to finally face Anderson.
Thorn and Tergal stood up and circled round, ready to act as picadors. Meanwhile Arden recalled the projection monocle and caught it in her hand. Projected images would now only confuse the issue, and might even put Anderson off his stroke. Unless… Arden brought the monocle up to her eye and once again cast up a grid.
The Jerusalem was a vast and cavernous ship full of echoes and, as she returned to her research area and quarters, Mika heard a constant din of distant industry. Skinless Golem were apparent everywhere inside the great ship, and also outside on its hull. Other more esoteric robots scuttled along walls and ceilings, like an infestation of chrome deathwatch beetle.
These were the more visible robots. Mika had also seen ones no bigger than ants repairing delicate circuitry, millipede plumbers only momentarily visible in the breaks in pipes or ducts they were fixing, also roving crab drones floating on personal AG and muttering to themselves, and the glittering fungal movement of Polity nanotech at work repairing stress fractures in structural members. Mika herself had just put in a long shift in Medical—repairing humans and haimans—and her own arm still ached. Now her shift was over, and it was at last time for her to do her own thing.