‘We will be gone before then, whether I obtain a sample or not,’ Cento replied.
They trudged on down the slope, eventually reaching the position indicated. Cento unshouldered his bolt gun and looked around. Noting an area clear of ash, he walked over, pressed the device down and triggered it, firing a fixing bolt into stone. Discarding the bolt gun, he then unreeled, by its end-ring, the monofilament line from the abseil motor on his belt. Stooping to click the ring into place on the bolt, he heard Ulriss begin yelling over com.
‘What! No! Stop! No!’
Cento stood and whirled to see the poor man suspended off the ground, held there by his biceps in the grip of a hugely tall humanoid, who was walking him back to the crevasse edge. Cento reached down to detach the ring, but suddenly became aware of another humanoid. This one was standing beside him, clad head to foot in some sort of biotech suit. How he had not detected the approach of this one, Cento could only put down to the use of sophisticated chameleonware. In less than a second he had assessed the situation: the likely source of the tech meant these two must be somehow connected with events on the planets Cheyne III and Masada, and therefore with how things would now proceed. Ignoring the smaller individual and leaving the ring attached, he accelerated towards the big one, who was now holding Ulriss out over the white-hot river. That the larger humanoid intended to drop the man, Cento had no doubt. The abseil motor screaming as it wound out monofilament, Cento leapt, just as the figure did drop Ulriss. He should have been able to grab him a couple of metres down from the edge… Before he even went over a big hand slammed into his chest and stopped him dead. The big humanoid… Golem… To move that fast…
‘Oh God! No! Nooo!’
Cento stabbed his hand towards the big Golem’s chest just as he heard Ulriss’s gasp of shock as he hit the magma. There would still be time—the man’s hotsuit would take a minute to give out. But the second hand clamped around Cento’s wrist. The big Golem pulled and turned, easily spinning Cento over and slamming him down on his back. The monofilament was now caught up under Cento’s armpit and biting through his suit. Cento tried to turn as the other Golem wrenched him to his feet and the filament cut deeper. He felt the arm disconnect—sheared clean away at the shoulder — then a backhanded blow deposited him at the edge.
‘No! Oh fuck nooo!’
Cento rolled over in time to see Ulriss fighting to stay on the surface of the magma, his suit splitting and beginning to belch flame. His final scream truncated as his suit blew away and he burned incandescently. Something black and skeletal skittered like a spider on a hot plate. Briefly, a cloud of black oily smoke occluded the view and when it cleared only the silvery remains of the man’s hotsuit floated on the magma.
‘Not fast enough, Cento.’ It was the one in the bio tech suit who spoke.
Cento rolled as he came upright, so the monofilament was no longer twined around his chest. Perhaps he could pull it across the big Golem’s legs… He glanced at the speaker. ‘Who are you, and what do you want here?’
‘Your arm.’ The man pointed to the severed limb.
‘Why should you want my arm?’ said Cento as he moved sideways, dragging the filament across with him.
‘Because it’s his.’
His?
Cento gazed back at the big Golem, noting that his arms were not evenly matched. His own severed arm, lying on the ground still wearing the sleeve of his suit, was a brass-coated metalskin limb—both a replacement and a trophy from a battle fought years ago on a planet called Viridian.
Mr Crane?
How could this be Mr Crane? Cento clearly remembered their fight. Crane nearly destroyed him once, and it had needed both himself and his companion Golem Aiden to finish the monster. They tore him apart, destroyed his crystal matrix mind. Yet now the same Golem was back, and it seemed much stronger and faster than before. That made no sense.
Abruptly Cento leapt to one side intending to pull the monofilament across Crane’s legs, but the big Golem leaped nimbly and accelerated. Cento braced himself, but Crane outweighed him three to one, and easily knocked him back over the edge. Scrabbling for grip with his remaining three limbs, Cento slid down a slope angled thirty degrees to the vertical. Stone just broke away from his grasp, but when the abseil motor started whining, he managed to reach down and initiate its brake. The line jerked him to a halt only a metre above the magma.
‘That was close.’
Cento looked up and saw both of them gazing down at him.
‘I wonder what happens if I do this?’
Cento fell, hit the slope and slid further down, jamming his hand deep into a crevice to halt that slide. Monofilament fell about him like spindrift. With the spectrum of senses he possessed, he did not need to look down to know that he was up to his thighs in magma. His hotsuit gave out as quickly as Ulriss’s, fire and smoke gusting around him as syntheskin and the other combustible components of his legs burnt away. Now glancing down he saw metallic traces mirroring the surface of the molten rock. When the magma flow finally pulled his lower legs away, it was something of a relief, as now it no longer threatened to drag him down. Glancing up again, he saw that this respite would not last. With slow but inexorable care, Mr Crane was climbing down towards him.
Cento did not highly rate his chances now against the huge Golem. He glanced from side to side hoping to see something, anything that might enable him to survive. To his right, just above where the crystal layer slanted down into the magma, was the open end of a lava tube, just under a metre wide. Maybe he could swing himself in there? Even though he was aware that these tubes usually extended no more than a few metres—bubbles of gas in the cooling magma rather than a flow of it having formed them—this seemed his only option. Perhaps ensconced in such a place he could even defend himself.
On his remaining arm he levered up his now reduced body weight. Glancing down he saw that his legs had separated at the knee joint and that only his bare hip bones protruded from the remains of his suit. The magma had melted the components in his knees, but not the ceramal of his bones. Looking up and seeing that Crane was now only a couple of metres above him, he began to swing himself from side to side to get up enough momentum. He released just as a boot slammed down towards his wrist.
He hit the edge of the lava tube, groped inside it, his hip bones scrabbling away below him like a dwarf’s legs; then he was inside and turning himself round—the tube, as expected, being only a metre deep. Shortly, Mr Crane’s head appeared upside-down in the tube mouth, peering in through the visor of his hotsuit. Cento finally admitted to himself that he was dead: there was no escape. The big Golem, with his full complement of limbs and obviously superior strength, would just reach inside and drag him out, probably to send him after Ulriss. Sure enough, the big hand now groped inside like a fat spider, slapped away Cento’s defending hand, and closed over his face. There came a long pause, then the hand released him.
What now?
It wasn’t possible to read the expression on that brass face. Mr Crane suddenly reached down to the bottom of the lava tube, to the layer of crystal that formed its floor. He groped to the edge, where the crystal was jagged, and snapped a piece off, which he brought up and held before his visor for inspection. He then closed his hand around it, holding out only one long forefinger, which he brought back to his visor. He placed it vertical to his mouth: Shush now, be quiet.
Mr Crane hauled himself out of view.
While the metallier licked his lips and weighed yellow jade, Tergal studied the display of weapons in the cracked glass case and speculated on what Anderson’s reaction might be to learning how he had obtained that precious stone. He realized the knight did not trust him, had been keeping a close eye on him. And well he might. Though the attraction of the knight was that he was everything Tergal wanted to be, as soon as that attraction waned, Tergal would rob him and move on. It was what he did—he was scum.