On the Steel Breeze (31 page)

‘Risked,’ Pedro said. ‘I’ll take
risked
any day.’

‘We can’t blame Imris,’ Chiku said. ‘There was no time to think.’ As she spoke, her foot slipped into a depression, twisting her ankle and sending her sprawling into the hot dirt. The impact turned her around, facing back towards the ship. Beyond it, where a line of scrub marked the transition to thicker bush, she saw movement. Something was dragging itself into daylight.

It was a machine the colour of sand, like a crab with a squat, turretlike body and rows of jointed legs. The thing was half-shrouded in dirt and vegetation, as if it had just climbed out of a hole in the ground.

‘What’s that?’ Pedro asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Chiku answered.

‘An artilect,’ Kwami said, pausing to help her back to her feet. ‘Can you walk?’

‘I think so.’ The twist hurt, but she could still put weight on the ankle. ‘What do you mean, an artilect? Eunice is an artilect. So is Arachne. They’re nothing like that thing.’

‘It is a war robot, a military artilect.’

She forced herself to keep moving, eyes on the wall, anywhere but on the thing coming out of the scrub. ‘Nothing like that would be allowed here,’ she said, voice raw.

‘It has probably been here for several centuries,’ Kwami said. ‘There were many of these things at one time. They ran amok during the Resource and Relocation crises. There were many unpleasantnesses. Then they were outlawed. Please, let us make haste.’

Chiku was fine with making haste. Running was beyond her, but her lop-sided stagger was still covering ground. Half-lost in vegetation, an arched portico offered a way through the wall. Not far to go now.

‘I remember . . .’ she said, forcing out the words between ragged breaths. ‘My mother, back when she still told stories. Something happened to her when she was small. I think it was near here.’

‘It’s coming after us,’ Pedro said. ‘Why doesn’t it just shoot?’

‘Perhaps the weapon it used against
Gulliver
only has ground-to-air capability,’ Kwami said. ‘Maybe it has exhausted that particular type of ammunition.’

Pedro nodded. ‘I think it still wants to kill us.’

‘I concur with your assessment.’

The ground between them and the gap in the wall appeared to be dilating, stretching out the way spacetime did between galaxies, plumped by an infusion of dark energy. Chiku had been lost in dreams like this – running from something, unable to cover ground. The air quickening to something like aspic, jellying her into immobility.

‘This has to be Arachne’s doing,’ she said.

‘Again, I concur. If the artilect has been here for centuries, dormant, undetected, it provided her with another way to act without drawing direct attention to herself. All she had to do was infiltrate its dormant systems and rouse it from cybernetic slumber.’

‘Imris,’ Pedro said. ‘Would you do me a favour and stop talking as if all this is happening to someone else, on another planet?’

‘My apologies, young sir. I fear it has become something of a survival mechanism.’ A rattling sound came from behind them. Ahead, a line of holes appeared in the wall, to the right of the gate. ‘It is shooting at us now,’ Kwami said, ‘but its aim appears to be compromised.’

The machine fired again, then stopped. Chiku glanced back. It was limping across the open ground where
Gulliver
had fallen, two of its articulated limbs dragging uselessly. An unearthed horror that should have stayed buried. Something like this machine had tried to kill her mother, when she was very small. Or at least turn Sunday into something it could use. Chiku remembered the story now: the thing in the hole, speaking inside her mother’s head before it was taken away to be neutralised.

Kwami pushed through a tangle of undergrowth, opening the way through the gate. Chiku and Pedro followed him through into the household’s outer enclosure.

‘I do not know if this wall will hold it, but there must be deeper levels of the house that it will not be able to reach.’

Chiku was still having trouble with her ankle, but for now adrenalin was doing its job. They moved along dusty flower-beds, weed-choked and ruined, and skirted fountains that had not seen water in decades. In the shaded corner of one swimming pool, a snake insinuated itself into a burrow of leaves and dirt. Then they were through a second wall, into the inner courtyards. More empty swimming pools, overgrown ornamental gardens, dried-up ponds. ‘This way, I think,’ she said, leading them around the flank of the leftmost wing. ‘Imris – could there be another one of those things waiting for us in here?’

‘The Cognition Police were very efficient when they rounded up and
neutralised the military artilects,’ Kwami said. ‘I doubt they left many behind for Arachne to find. Besides, when we flew over the house, I think we would have seen the damage if one had already forced its way through the wall.’

‘Could one of them have tunnelled under the perimeter?’ Pedro asked.

Kwami reflected for a moment. ‘I suppose that is a possibility.’

‘I’m sorry I asked.’

They were coming around to the front of the household now. Chiku had given no thought as to how they would enter the building if the way were barred. The doors had always been open when she visited before, even when it was just Uncle Geoffrey and a handful of maintenance staff in residence. But then there had never been much reason to lock doors. One step at a time – if worst came to worst, they could return to
Gulliver,
perhaps, to fetch tools.

But the doors were open. They were ajar, hinged inwards. It was difficult to tell whether they had been forced or not, but it did not look as if a powerful machine had broken through them.

They all heard it at the same time: a crunch, metal on masonry. It was coming from around the side of the property, where they had passed through the wall.

‘It is still trying,’ Kwami said.

‘The place shouldn’t be this abandoned,’ Chiku said. ‘There should be watchdogs, robots . . . even if there’s nobody living here.’

‘If Arachne can infiltrate and commandeer an artilect, perhaps it is for the best that there are no robots within the compound,’ Kwami said.

They crossed the threshold. The house had been well designed for the local climate, cool within even on the hottest day. Chiku pushed the doors shut behind them. They would not be any kind of barrier to the artilect, but closing them made her feel better. Not safer, just better.

‘How long before help arrives?’ Pedro asked.

‘In what manner?’ Kwami asked, with perfect pleasantness, as they moved along one of the corridors, shoes squeaking on black and white marble.

‘Where the hell is the Mechanism?’ Pedro demanded. ‘We’re hurt. We’re being attacked! Shouldn’t some kind of intervention be under way?’

‘I fear, young sir, that matters may not be that straightforward.’

‘You think she’s in the Mechanism as well,’ Chiku said.

‘It was something June always feared. Arachne’s control cannot be absolute or she would have used direct neural intervention to incapacitate
or euthanise us. But it may well be within her means to block and confuse the Mechanism’s scrutiny.’

‘Probably doesn’t help matters that my family went out of their way to keep the Mech from penetrating the household,’ Chiku said waspishly. ‘They didn’t want the eyes and ears of the world stealing their precious commercial secrets.’

They descended steps. It was a blessing that it was daytime as there were no lights anywhere in the building, although some of the illumination cascading through the big windows above ground was filtering down to the lower floor. Chiku’s eyes began to amp up in response, making the best of the available photons. The prevailing colours sickened to grey-green as they went down another flight of stairs.

‘What we’re looking for is on this level, if Arethusa was right,’ Chiku said. ‘I never came down here much. I only ever visited to talk to Uncle Geoffrey, and he never had any reason to bring me downstairs.’

‘I don’t like it,’ Pedro said. ‘We should be running from that thing outside, not boxing ourselves in.’

‘If we abandon the household,’ Kwami explained patiently, ‘the artilect may smash it to pieces before anyone can stop it.’

‘And this is a problem because . . . ?’ Pedro asked.

‘With the house turned to rubble, you would stand little chance of recovering the Crucible imagery. I trust this remains of interest?’

‘It does,’ Chiku said, although it was much easier to say this than feel it.

She opened some of the doors as they moved along the corridor. One room contained about twenty identical black statues of Masai warriors, individually shrouded in plastic film, waiting to be given away as corporate gifts. Another contained a small private library. In a third was a stuffed lion, caged behind glass.

They had come to a point where the corridor met two others at an angle – echoing, Chiku presumed, the above-ground geometry. For a moment, she was disorientated, uncertain which way to go. They had been in too much of a rush to get inside for her to find her bearings accurately.

‘Which way?’ Pedro asked.

‘That one.’ But she immediately undermined her authority. ‘I think.’

Pedro was looking along the other corridor, with its ranks of doors. Some were open, some shut. It was much gloomier now, even their amped eyes struggling. ‘I think I saw something down there,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Something crossing between two of those doors. Fast. Like a shadow.’ He added: ‘Maybe I imagined it.’

‘The artilect can’t have got down here,’ Chiku said.

‘Maybe they’re not all as big as that one.’

‘We would know it, were one here,’ Kwami said. ‘Those that have survived are powerful and dangerous, but the military ones cannot move silently, or in such a confined area. I do not think what you saw was an artilect.’

After a moment, Chiku said, ‘I don’t think it’s this way after all.’ Now she was pointing down the corridor where Pedro thought he had seen something move.

‘We should have brought a torch,’ he was saying. ‘We have been to Saturn and back and we didn’t bring a torch.’

They went down three steps and started along the corridor. Chiku pushed open one of the closed doors, poised to spring back if there was something waiting inside. In the semi-darkness she made out more statues like the ones they had already passed. She was about to move on when she realised that these were not corporate gifts. They were proxies, waiting to be chinged by a remote client. Spear-thin, stick-figure sketches of people, their faces polished blank ovoids.

‘If she accessed one of them, could she harm us?’ Chiku wondered aloud.

‘One would be unlikely to pose a threat,’ Kwami said.

‘But what about two, or three—’

‘The Mech is thin here – she will have found it difficult to link into proxies. I believe we should continue.’

Chiku closed the door on the room full of robots.

‘I saw it again,’ Pedro said, frozen where he stood.

Chiku could feel his fear leaking from him like an airborne contagion. She knew that nothing she could say or do would make him go any further. Maybe he was right.

‘Are you sure—’ she began.

‘I have just seen it,’ Kwami said, cutting her off. ‘I think it may be an animal.’

‘What kind of animal?’

‘I only saw it fleetingly.’

‘An animal I could cope with,’ she said. ‘It might scare us, but that’s all. Are you sure?’

‘It was an animal. Some species of cat, I think.’

That was when she heard the scratch of nail on floor. It had come from behind them, not further along the corridor. She turned around
with fearful slowness. Something breathed in and out, quite rapidly, and then she heard a low, ruminative rumble.

‘Yes, cats,’ Kwami said.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

It was their eyes she saw first. Two pairs, hovering like binary stars. It took a second or so for her brain to make sense of the low, muscular forms to which the eyes were attached.

Panthers. She had no idea how she knew this, but her brain provided the information all by itself.

‘They can’t hurt us,’ she said.

‘Let us hope,’ Kwami said, ‘that their Mechanism inhibitory implants are still functioning.’ He closed his eyes, formulating a complex and deadly neural invocation. ‘I shall issue a kill command.’

He raised a hand, slowly, in the direction of the panthers and voked the mental instruction.

Chiku and Pedro did likewise. Every human knew how to do it, though few expected ever to put the knowledge into practice. Uncle Geoffrey, in one of their last conversations, had spoken of Memphis Chibesa killing a huge and belligerent bull elephant simply by willing it to death – dropping it like a sack of meat.

The panthers were still alive.

‘It is not functioning,’ Kwami said unnecessarily. ‘Either the Mech is too thin, or she has disabled the kill function, or these cats have always lived beyond Mech influence.’

‘Can they kill us?’ Pedro asked.

‘Left to their own devices,’ Kwami said, ‘they would not normally predate on humans, but it is well within their capabilities.’

Chiku dragged her eyes from the waiting cats and glanced in the other direction. If Pedro was right – and she was inclined to believe him – there was another one, at least, somewhere further down the corridor.

Cats. How clever of Arachne,
she thought.

‘They’re not strong enough to break down the doors,’ Chiku said. ‘If we all get into one of these rooms, then block the door from the other side . . .’ But her mind was already running ahead, pointing out
the foolishness of this plan. They could not stay here until the cats wandered away, not with the artilect moving around up there.

‘We must take our chances with the cats,’ Kwami said. ‘They may be beyond the Mech’s influence, but that does not automatically make them killers.’ And he threw up his arms and roared at the panthers, as if that might startle them into turning away.

It did not. Far from intimidating the panthers, his action only stirred them into motion. They began to advance down the stairs, side by side, black cat-shaped cut-outs moving through degrees of gloom. Their pupils were the only features in a head-sized void. It was as if their eyes moved on invisible rails, sliding along some geodesic curve of maximum feline stealth.