‘Best we set ourselves a camp for the night,’ he finally conceded.
Tergal looked about dubiously, but it would be dark in less than an hour and there was no guarantee they would find anywhere better within that time.
Quickly they dismounted, trampled down an area of vegetation, and set up their camp. After eating biscuits and preserved sand oysters, they took turns on watch, though neither of them got much sleep, such was the lethal activity all around them.
At midnight, with Ogygian sliding above them like an indifferent steel angel, a quake loosened one of the electric fence’s posts, and a second-stager managed to knock it over. Anderson abruptly discovered how effective was his metallier carbine. It juddered in his hand, flash-blinding him in the night, the whole clip from it cutting the sleer in half from mouth to tail. It had not been his intention to fire on automatic, but in the frantic scramble there had been no time to check.
‘I think it’s dead,’ said Tergal.
Anderson stood blinking after-images from his eyes, his weapon empty. As his vision finally cleared, he saw that Tergal held his automatic pointing straight at his, Anderson’s, face. There was a certain inevitability about this, since Anderson could not be forever on his guard.
After a significant pause, Tergal lowered the weapon and holstered it, then went to heave the sleer off the fence and set the post back up. Something significant had changed, and now there was trust between them. Nevertheless, both he and Tergal were tired and miserable come dawn, and set out in desultory silence.
For most of the morning Anderson did not detect the brass man’s trail, and felt sure that in this tangle of canyons it was permanently lost. This sank him into a blacker mood. Then, with a smacking sound, Bonehead abruptly extruded its feeding head and began emitting a low grunting. A wild sand hog, smaller even than Tergal’s mount, was now setting up the same racket as Bonehead, and leapt high into the air, then fled ahead of them with something white clutched underneath it. Neither Anderson nor Tergal tried to divert their mounts from investigating the rest of the white remains.
‘Kilnsman Gyrol, that Golgoth policeman, said something about strange creatures out this way,’ said the knight.
The young sand hog had snatched the two-legged breeder segments, which were easily torn away from the rest of this albino sleer with its sapphire eyes, now pinned to the ground with one of its own torn-off pincers.
‘Our brass friend did this?’ suggested Tergal.
As their two mounts eased out their combined sensory and feeding heads to feast on this carrion, Anderson replied, ‘Certainly looks that way. Just as it would seem he is also heading for the Plains. So there’s no need for me to find his trail—I’m sure we’ll meet again.’
And, as if this statement suddenly cleared a black cloud, he looked up and saw one of the signs Laforge had mentioned, carved into the face of the nearest butte.
He pointed to it. ‘Anyway, no hurry now, and we do need to rest after last night.’
Tergal glanced up, puzzled for a moment, then grinning.
Following the directions given by each of the signs, the two travellers eventually came upon a concrete road running between the buttes, then the metallier village called Grit with its station and roadhouse. Against a sandstone cliff face, globular houses were raised up on frameworks above hog corrals, warehouses and enclosures for domesticated rock lice. Here there were cars like they had earlier seen in the city, but not so many, perhaps because the concrete road ended within sight of this place. Soon they had left Stone and Bonehead in a corral, munching on nicely stinking carrion, and were walking through a market towards the roadhouse’s access stair.
‘Busy place.’ Tergal was eyeing a stall displaying sand oysters, dried gulper meat, sulerbane pods and trays of writhing cliff eels.
Pointing to the far end of the road, where men were shovelling sand and cement into the rumbling drums of mixers, Anderson explained, ‘For the road crews,’ then gestured to treaded vehicles like the one owned by the mineralliers they had encountered, ‘and the mineralliers. Lot of useful ores to be found in the area, I hear.’
After dumping their gear in rooms paid for with some of Anderson’s newly acquired phocells, they wandered out to a busy bar and cafeteria, which opened on one side onto a balcony overlooking the village.
‘Oh dear,’ said Anderson, spotting Unger Salbec enjoying a meal inside. He quickly backed out of the room. ‘This could get complicated.’
‘Tell the local kilnsmen,’ advised Tergal belligerently, then suddenly looked confused.
‘I’ll be going back to my room now,’ said Anderson, amused. How righteous the boy was becoming, after having promised never to thieve again. But he did not know the full story, and Anderson had always valued prudence.
The re-entry pod was soon glowing red-hot, as it arced into atmosphere at twenty thousand kilometres per hour. Slowed to its terminal velocity by increasing air density, it punched through cloud cover, leaving a vapour trail scar, and used up all its small supply of hydrogen fuel in one decelerating burn. Then it blew its back hatch, releasing a monomer drogue to slow its descent further. Fifty kilometres above the ground the outer shell separated and spun away, taking the drogue with it, whereupon the telefactor it had contained descended on AG.
Planing on the gravity field, it fled across sandy flatlands. This barren landscape soon became broken up like a diseased skin, by gulches, arroyos and canyons in ever-greater complexity, until soon there were more of these than there was of the plain itself, and the telefactor was flying over a landscape clustered with sandstone buttes. Directed by its controlling intelligence, the machine finally descended into a long canyon to hover over a long straight scar in the ground. Its dishes whirling and other sensors extruded and functioning at one hundred per cent, it followed the course of this track to where it ended just before heaped sandstone rubble. Nothing else was visible to any of those sensors, in any spectrum, until the machine was nearly upon the pile of stone. Then, all at once, the maggot-shaped survey ship, the Vulture, suddenly became visible. The telefactor halted, backed up and, observing the ship fade seemingly out of existence at the chameleonware field’s interface, it advanced again.
The airlock was no problem for the little machine, as Jack had amply provided it with just about every safe-breaking tool known to man—and some unknown. With the outer door now open, it entered the lock and began drilling through the inner door. Soon it had extracted a ten-centimetre circle of sandwiched hull-composite, insulation and ceramal. Discarding this, it then extruded a sensor through the hole and into the ship, scanning its interior. A minute later, it rose back out of the lock, then out of the canyon, and at maximum speed hurtled back towards the plain.
The space around the planet was scattered with such vast numbers of U-space transceivers and detection devices that one had even been picked up by the Jack Ketch’s collision detector, and destroyed by autolaser as the ship surfaced from underspace. So Jack knew any attempt at concealment would be wasted, and immediately went into close orbit of the inhabited planet. Within minutes, he spotted the signs of a crash-landing, and now, after sending a telefactor to check, knew that Skellor was not aboard the Vulture, or anywhere in its vicinity. Nor could any link be made with the little ship’s AI, so it was probably dead.
Had Skellor been aboard, Jack’s subsequent actions would have diverged only a little, in that he would not have waited for the telefactor to get safely out of the way. The AI even considered delaying until Cormac was out of cold sleep, but calculated that the agent’s orders would not conflict. The Vulture, though damaged, still offered someone of Skellor’s capabilities a possible escape route: its own AI was not present; and there were the products of dangerous Jain technology aboard. End of discussion.