To the right, the giant incandescent orb of an F-class sun filled half their visual field. It was milky emerald, with the contrasting yellow of a titanic flare looping out from its surface, and other fires of orange, red and violet rippling out from a pox of sunspots like mosquito bites turned bad. To their left, a dark dwarf sun revolved with slow dignity, turned jade by reflected light, with the flickering dots of meteor impacts occasionally appearing on its matt, and apparently smooth, surface. Between the two suns, the occasional rocky moonlet—or maybe planet, as there was no real sense of their scale — tumbled through space.
‘It can loosely be described as a planetary system.’ Cento gestured: ‘The brown dwarf is small enough and cool enough to be defined approximately as a planet, and its mass is such that it orbits the sun here. Jack’s contracted the view so we can see both of them. In reality, if they were as close as they seem to be, they would be drawn in towards each other in a matter of days, and the cataclysm would be visible a thousand light years away, a thousand years hence.’
Cento now turned to Thorn, then glanced beyond him. Thorn himself turned as Cormac stepped out of the dropshaft.
‘I had hoped,’ the agent said, ‘that Jack would have finished scanning this system by now.’ He grimaced. ‘We had to check it, even though it seemed unlikely that either Dragon or Skellor would be here.’
Thorn rubbed his face—he still wasn’t up to speed, and he desperately wanted that coffee.
Cormac went on, ‘Of course Skellor could be present on any of those planetoids, under a chameleonware shield. We are actually looking for Dragon, and by finding him will eventually find Skellor.’ He looked up at the brown dwarf. ‘Anything more, Jack?’
‘Excuse the delay.’ The AI’s automaton suddenly came to life, tilting its head back to take in the external view. ‘On one of the planetoids exists a species of rock-boring worm, and a deeper scan was required to confirm that its tunnels were not the result of draconic pseudopodia.’
‘Then what are we waiting for?’
The automaton turned to frown at Cormac. ‘Must I explain to you the interaction of solar and U-space mechanics?’
Thorn watched as, with something odd in his expression, Cormac gazed out at the F-class sun. The agent replied, ‘No, you don’t. It’s a matter of extra minutes only on our departure time, which could add or subtract days from the duration of our next journey.’ He tilted his head, reaching up to press the tips of his fingers against his temples. ‘The solar gale will hit soon, and the distortion wave can carry us out, accelerate us…’
There were tides and currents in U-space, Thorn knew, and sometimes leaving a system later meant your subsequent journey took less time. Now, by his expression, Thorn realized Cormac must be conducting a silent conversation through that damnable impossibly functioning gridlink of his. Then the view winked out and he felt the strange slew of the Jack Ketch in a direction he could neither see nor indicate. Cormac still stood with his eyes closed and his fingertips to his temples. Thorn thought he himself must still be suffering the after-effects of surgery when the agent wavered and grew thin, so it seemed Thorn could see the drawing room showing right through him. Then, for a fraction of a second, Cormac was gone, then reappearing a pace to the left of where he had been standing — and Thorn knew that what he had seen was real but inexplicable.
Sunrise usually quelled sleer activity, but this morning not so much as usual. Light cutting down the canyons and ravines now revealed a world of violently contrasting colour. As always, there were the beige, pink and sepia tones of the surrounding sandstone below the turquoise sky, but now dark green and purple shoots were spearing up everywhere from the ground, light-green roundish leaves ringing their bases, and nodular yellow growths spattering the butte faces and spreading to smear together in resinous masses. And the armoured brethren and prey of the sleers were also appearing.
Readying Stone for departure, Tergal observed a line of four small sand gulpers hoovering their way down the canyon towards them, sand spewing from their throat sieves as they worked, and only stopping when they lifted their heads to swallow vegetation compacted in their crops. He also noticed a large rock crawler, its piton feet wedged into stone while it sucked up yellow fungus with twin trumpet-shaped siphons.
‘Maybe we should try to get to a drier area,’ he suggested.
The changes in their relationship were quite plain. Anderson was not treating him very differently — still discussing things, still imparting his encyclopedic and sometimes boringly extensive knowledge of the fauna and flora—but Tergal knew he was now on trial and there would be no appeal. Out here, if Tergal fucked up, he knew the knight would kill him. But Tergal’s respect for Anderson had increased tenfold. He realized he wanted this man’s good judgement.
‘My intention entirely,’ Anderson replied as he strapped himself into his saddle up on Bonehead’s back.
‘Which way?’ Tergal asked.
‘No idea.’ Anderson shrugged. ‘If we just continue towards the Plains we stand as much chance of coming out of this as anywhere else.’ He rapped his goad on the shell immediately behind his hog’s raised sensor head. It extruded an eye-palp towards him as if to say it knew they were setting out and there was no need for his impatience, then it stood and, with a steady gait, tramped down the canyon towards the sand gulpers.
The gulpers, without even looking up, parted to allow the sand hogs passage, then closed together behind them. As he and Anderson moved on, Tergal observed something else, with thin fragile legs at least three metres long and similarly elongated pincers, reaching up sandstone faces to pluck down both yellow fungi and rock crawlers, stabbing both with its siphon pincers to suck them dry.
‘Stilt spider,’ Anderson observed. ‘Quite slow, but a bastard when you’re camping at night—steps straight over the camp wires and’ll suck you dry easy as it does rock crawlers.’
Tergal glanced at the knight and noticed how he wasn’t paying much attention to the distant creature, but was studying the ground just ahead of Bonehead.
‘You’re following that brass man,’ he said. ‘Is that such a good idea?’
Anderson looked up. ‘Aren’t you curious?’
‘Yeah, I guess… Who do you think he was?’
Anderson directed his attention to a trail that the fresh growth was making indistinct. ‘Not so much a case of who as what. I’d say he is a machine—“android” was the old word—probably left over from colonization time. He could have been wandering around Cull for centuries, recharging himself from sunlight and maybe repairing himself with the skill of a metallier—who can say?’
Tergal’s instinct was to tell Anderson he was talking rubbish. But he had seen a man, apparently made of brass, twist off a half-tonne sleer’s head as if taking the top off a bottle of quavit. Trying to sit back and fit such an event neatly into the pattern of everyday life was not easy.
‘Maybe he was a metallier in some sort of armour?’ he suggested.
‘Strong fella, then,’ opined Anderson. And of course the suggestion had been ridiculous.
At midday they halted to eat oatmeal biscuits and brew amanis tea. Tergal noted that the young sulerbane plants were now standing higher than his ankles, and their ground leaves, trapping the moisture in the canyon floor, were beginning to overlap each other. Finishing their tea quickly when a swarm of snapper beetles, attracted by the heat of their stove, veered towards them, they continued their journey. Later they came upon the remains of an albino second-stage sleer, its legs pulled off and scattered about it. Anderson stopped to study it, before letting Bonehead and Stone share it between them.