Suddenly the Prador turned towards him, then like a woman realizing her blouse is undone, began buttoning up its screens. Too late. Sniper now knew the shape of the beast. And the physical sample he retained inside himself from the drone cache gave him its genetic blueprint. The secret was out.
It was only as the armoured Prador sped away that Sniper realized something else about that individual, and he began laughing to himself over the ether.
‘What’s so funny?’ asked Thirteen, reopening com.
‘Yes, do tell,’ interjected the Warden, rather sharply.
‘In good time,’ said Sniper. ‘In good time.’ Then he locked the Warden out.
As she sat viewing the comscreen on her desk, Olian Tay felt more than pleased with her new incarnation as president of the Bank of Spatterjay. The huge wealth she was accumulating enabled her to pursue her life’s work; her museum. It just kept on growing as new evidence of Hoop’s rule here was unearthed. Items were also turning up on other worlds, for which mostly she was able to outbid the competition, and now, with the recent detente between the Polity and the Third Kingdom, she was able to purchase some things directly from the Prador themselves. Currently her bid for a man-skin coat once worn by Jay Hoop’s wife, Rebecca Frisk—who was floating in her preserving cylinder just outside the door—was the highest. She was also very excited by the possibility of actually travelling to the Kingdom to view at first hand Frisk’s erstwhile home on a Prador world. Everything was going wonderfully well. Till she heard the sawing explosions.
Olian stood up and walked around her desk. At that same moment the two skinless Golem currently serving out their Cybercorp indenture with her, and whom she had named Chrome, both of them, because she could not tell them apart, pushed themselves away from their normal stance at the walls.
‘What was that?’ she wondered.
‘It sounded like the blast of an energy weapon,’ one of the Golem replied succinctly.
‘Then I suggest you both arm yourselves. We’re closed to any withdrawals at present and I would like us to remain that way.’
One of them palmed the lock to a wall cabinet and opened it. He took out a riot gun and tossed it to his companion, then selected a Batian carbine for himself. As the two of them headed out into the foyer, Olian followed just in time to hear a hideous shrieking from beyond the twin doors accessing the museum. The Golem paused and glanced round at her; at her nod they opened the doors and went through. After a moment she stepped after them, then quickly to one side where she groped back to thumb the touch-plate right beside the pillar containing David Grenant. The lights came on.
The far doors into the museum were still closed, but there was obviously something wrong. By the statue of the Skinner loomed what appeared to be some metallic edifice, and the floor all around it was scattered with debris. She looked up and noted a large hole through the ceiling, then down again as that edifice screamed and extended wide metallic wings. Turquoise fire flashed between it and the statue. Olian threw herself to the floor as a boom resounded, followed by the sound of something collapsing.
Blinking to clear her vision, she looked up to see the Skinner statue was now a pile of smoking rubble. The other thing turned—and she now recognized the Golem sail whose arrival on Spatterjay had been the source of much speculation. One of her own Golem zipped back past her, and back into her office, returning with a heavy-duty laser of the kind normally mounted on a tripod.
‘We may not be able to stop him,’ the Golem warned, before darting off back into the museum.
At that point the other skeletal guard stepped out from his hiding place behind a thrall display case and started firing explosive shells at the Golem sail. Hitting one after another, his shots drove the sail gradually backwards but seemed to cause no damage. The intruder’s eyes glowed and then a particle beam swept across the room, chopping off the Golem’s legs before striking the display case. The Golem collapsed. Nothing happened to the display for a moment, but even tough chainglass could not withstand such abuse. It emitted a screeing sound escalating out of human hearing range, then flew apart in a glittering explosion. Olian quickly crawled backwards into the foyer, closing the doors behind her. Flinching at the sound of another case getting wrecked, she returned to her office and took a seat behind her desk.
Punching controls on her console she said, ‘Warden, I seem to have a little problem here.’ When there came no reply, she tried routing through the planetary server, then glared at the holding graphic on her screen. It meant the Warden was not answering calls.
From inside the museum, closer now, came the thrumming snap-crack of a laser firing. Olian closed her eyes and shook her head. This made no sense at all. What would a Golem sail want here? She began to stand up, then checked herself. If two Golem guards could do nothing, then there was nothing she could do either. Sitting down again, she grimaced upon hearing the foyer doors being ripped off their hinges, then ducked down as her own office door exploded inwards. She peered up over her desk just as the Golem sail loomed through, sat upright, flicking smouldering splinters from her jacket, then finally looked up.
‘Yes, what can I do for you?’
The sail just stood there, half extending its wings, then drawing them back. Its mouth opened and closed as if it had lost the power of speech, and that dangerous glow advanced and retreated in its eyes.
‘Olian Tay,’ it finally said.
‘Yes, I am. You do realize we are closed today?’
‘Olian Tay… open the safe.’
Oh right, Olian thought, a bank robbery.
Erlin had learnt that the Sable Keech’s engines were steam-driven—the steam pumped directly from fusion-powered water purifiers—and, being Polity tech, could run at full speed almost indefinitely. The ship would therefore reach the Little Flint far ahead of schedule. Even so, she wondered if any of the reified passengers would survive to see that place.
Stooping over one tank, she observed its gross contents, studied readouts and sighed. Some of the reified passengers would never again inhabit their own bodies, and others were irretrievably dead. This one, for example, had just been turned into an organic broth by his nanochanger. Even his bones were gone. All that remained were his reification hardware and memcrystal, and even they were under attack.
Erlin keyed a certain sequence into her console, and watched as the opaque fluid began to swirl, then bubble. It was risky to just dump the contents of a tank like this, as though it was unlikely the nanites could survive in the surrounding environment—being specialized and with special requirements—some of them might. The liquid began to steam, the smell of it horribly like cooking stew. When she was finally satisfied, Erlin keyed in another instruction and the tank began to drain. But even now the liquid was still dangerous, which was why it drained into a purification plant in the bilge, where the water was evaporated off and the residue treated with diatomic acid.
Erlin had drained three similar tanks only this morning, and retrieved three memcrystals. The crystals themselves she externally flash-sterilized before scanning them for active nanites. One was corrupted—some mutation of the nanites from the individual’s nanofactory eating into the crystal. Fifty-seven reifs had gone into the tanks, and thus far not one of them had attained resurrection. Fourteen in fact had been flushed into the purifier, and only nine of their memcrystals remained intact. Were she a reif herself, she would not think those good odds at all.