‘Are you lost?’ Tergal nervously addressed the figure. ‘Where’s your hog, or the train you’re with?’
No reply.
Tergal again glanced across at Anderson, who was now staring with a worried frown at their new companion. Behind this frightening individual, a hiss issued from the sleer.
‘Don’t fret, just nervous reaction,’ said Anderson woodenly.
Tergal noticed how the knight was resting his hand on the butt of his own new handgun, and decided to keep talking. ‘Where are you from? Are you from that minerallier encampment back there?’
Still no reply.
Tergal then noted how the metal gloves were intricately jointed. They had to be a product of the metalliers. They glinted now, as the sun suddenly broke from behind the back edge of iron cloud.
‘You’ve come from Golgoth?’ he persisted, his nervousness making him gabble.
The sunlight was harsh and bright after the storm’s darkness, and now Tergal saw the glint of metal underneath that wide hat, too. He remembered legends of strange creatures wandering the wilderness, of unholy spectres unable to find rest after violent deaths, and banshees howling on the storm wind.
‘Why don’t you speak?’
The sunlight was suddenly hot, and steam began rising from damp stone surfaces, from sand, sulerbane leaves and the back of the dead sleer. Tergal supposed it was this heating that caused the sleer to hiss again. But when, with a rippling heave, it pulled itself up onto its feet, he realized he was mistaken.
‘Oh bugger,’ said Anderson.
Tergal couldn’t agree more—that comment defined his entire present circumstances. He was transparent to the knight, who knew him for the scum he was. The sleer was clearly not so dead as either of them would wish. And now their storm-visitor had just raised his head to show merciless black eyes set in a face of brass.
Anderson leant over and grabbed up his new carbine, while Tergal drew his handgun as the sleer turned towards them scattering showers of melting hailstones in every direction. The brass man looked over his shoulder at the creature, as Tergal dived one way out of the shelter and Anderson the other. Tergal levelled his weapon, but was reluctant to fire it, as that might draw the sleer upon him. He was also not sure what should be his primary target. Anderson perhaps held back for the same reason.
The sleer was now rocking its head from side to side, as if dizzy or confused. The brass man stood and turned in one swift movement, and in four huge, rapid strides was standing before the creature, which snapped forwards, its pincers closing on his torso with a solid clunk. But he reached down, pushed those pincers apart as easily as opening a door, and shoved the sleer backwards, its feet skidding on and then tearing up the ground. He next turned the pincers like a steering wheel, one, then two full turns, till with a loud snapping crackle the sleer’s head came off. Behind it, the body just collapsed. The brass man held the heavy head to one side, in one hand, its pincers still opening and closing spasmodically; then, as if suddenly losing interest, he discarded it and strode off down the canyon without looking back.
Tergal gaped at the departing figure, then turned to stare at Anderson. The knight stared back at him without expression. Tergal carefully reholstered his weapon and the two of them returned to their temporary camp. There were a thousand questions for them to ask, and a thousand discussions they might now have, but right then neither of them felt like saying a word.
Reconnecting himself to the systems originally occupied by the Vulture’s AI, Skellor assessed the damage to the ship. Structural cracking and distortion were minimal, for the hull was a tough composite manufactured to take the impacts inevitable while surveying asteroid fields, but the fusion chamber and all its injectors were a charred and radioactive ruin. He soon realized that, with half the chamber’s substance blown away into atmosphere, he needed to obtain materials to rebuild it. Pressing his hand down on the console, he extruded from his body a Jain filament to track back through the ship’s optics to find what remained of the chamber’s sensors.
Thickening the filament into substructure, to carry more material from his body and more information back to it, he then divided it at its end and began sampling and measuring. He needed silicon, which surrounded the ship in abundance, but also rare metals. He could not rebuild the chamber in situ, for its inner layer needed to be pressure-cast at temperatures more often found on the surface of a sun, and subsequent layers consisted of nanofactured chain molecules. After absorbing all measurements and all parameters, building an exact virtual representation of the item in his mind, he began to withdraw. Soon, he stepped back from the console, headed for the airlock, and back outside.
The earlier storm had cleared the dust from the air and, even as the hailstones were still melting, Skellor saw shoots of blue-green plants spearing up from the canyon floor, while yellow nodes of other growth were appearing on the multicoloured layers of the sandstone buttes. But this though was of passing interest, he concentrated on other aspects of this place. He reached down and scooped up a handful of wet sand, clenched it tight, and injected Jain filaments to analyse it. The handful did contain some of the trace elements and metals he required, mainly in the form of salts and oxides. Assuming all the sand in this area was of the same constituents, he calculated just how long it would take him to find in it enough of what he required.
But that wasn’t the biggest problem: concentrating all his resources on obtaining these materials in the quickest time, he would need to root himself here and, given the possibility that ECS might arrive at any moment, he would then be a sitting duck. There was also little in the way of fuel for him to power a furnace. The ship’s little reactor could provide some, but the logistics of that were nightmarish. He needed help, willingly given or otherwise.
Skellor turned and looked back at the Vulture, then, from one of the many devices built inside his body, sent a signal to the first addition he had made to the little ship. All around it the air rippled, and starting from its upper edge a deeper distortion—like a cut into reality — slowly traversed down the ship, erasing it utterly. Best, he thought, to use the ship’s reactor to power the chameleonware generator. Now, where to go?
Breathing, Skellor analysed the air in his lungs and immediately detected trace hydrocarbons, partially oxidized. Using the full spectrum of emitted radiation senses he possessed, he studied the sky. He observed some kind of bird winging its way across, then he concentrated on air currents and spectral analysis of the compounds they contained. Shortly he detected the column of rising air thick with hydrocarbons, which the bird used to ride higher into the sky. Not far away, someone was burning coke. Skellor smiled evilly and set out.