Five metres.
Here, Cento noted that some of his systems were coming back online; that the numerous warnings he had been receiving were growing fewer. Glancing down he saw that a curve in the slope now concealed him from the incandescence below, and checking his internal temperature, he saw it was dropping. Abruptly the motors in his hip joints came back on. Here, he realized he might be able to survive for as long as his power supply held out, and even then his mind might remain intact afterwards. Perhaps he should secure himself as best he could, and just drop to minimal function? Cento considered this for only a moment before removing his hand from the crevice and reaching above to clear away loose rock in search of a fresh handhold. Cento was ECS and, though as a free Golem he could choose between duty and survival, he chose duty.
Eventually he located a jut of stone that seemed sufficient to support him, clamped his hand on it and hauled himself up once again, but he could not get himself high enough to lodge his thighbone against that same stone. Lowering himself again, he cleared more rock and found a small hollow just below and to one side of the outcrop. He pulled himself up again, lodging the bone’s end in this hollow—easier now that he could actually move his thighbones about—and, from this precarious position, groped higher. Stone skidded as he pushed it aside, banging and clattering past him. Smooth intestinal stone above now; nothing to grip. Another sudden ground tremor bounced his leg bone out of the hollow. He flailed for a grip as he began to fall, his hand sliding over this treacherously smooth stone. Then before him there appeared a crack, leaking sulphurous gas under pressure, then his arm went through, in an explosion of such gas, and he found a safe grip inside another lava bubble.
Cento would have breathed a sigh of relief if he had not turned off his lungs while in the previous bubble. After using his head to break away more of the thin crust, he peered inside and saw that this cavity formed the terminus of a lava tube extending up the slope. Pulling himself inside, he began to inch his way up the smooth interior, using thighbones, head and arm as four limbs. Here he took more risks, as a fall now would only result in him ending up back at the bottom of the tube, not trying to swim in molten rock, and consequently he traversed its twenty-metre curving length in a matter of minutes. Now all he had to do was get out of there.
Wedged on his back, braced by head and thighbones, Cento drove his fist outwards at what he estimated to be an angle of ninety degrees to the slope itself. Stone shattered under this piledriver blow, and fell in on him to reveal a bruised sky into which poured black smoke and fountains of magma. Of course—the eruption about which they had been warned. Early. That figured.
Skellor stepped back and inspected his handiwork. Mr Crane raised his replacement arm and closed his hand into a fist. Fastidiously he then reached out and took up first his hat then his coat from where he had draped them over a nearby console. Placing the hat on his head, he tilted it to the required angle before donning his coat and with slow precision fastening each button. Why, when given limited freedom to act, the Golem had spent much of the voyage either using equipment and materials found aboard this ship to fashion such clothing, Skellor could not fathom. But it was part of the weird fascination Mr Crane held for him.
‘Quite the dandy, aren’t you,’ muttered Skellor, discarding the arm replaced down beside Salvar’s corpse—both now just organic detritus. Now Skellor smirked as he watched Crane step back, squat down on the floor and pull out his various toys. Joining the rubber dog, the acoms from blue oaks on Viridian, five cubes of survival rations and various other items gathered from inside this same ship, was now a piece of green crystal. Briefly linking inside the Golem, Skellor observed that the crystal and the dog had found their places in the matrix, which drastically increased Crane’s chances of putting the rest together in the right order. However, though the odds against him achieving the right combination before had been 3.6 x 1014 to one, they weren’t that much better now. Probing inside Crane to see how he had managed to achieve even this reduction of odds, he encountered a resistance that was integral to Crane’s entire mind. Skellor could easily have broken it, but in doing so he would lose that essential, fascinating Mr Crane. He turned away, stepped over the human remains on the floor, and seated himself in the pilot’s chair. If Crane ever managed to reduce the odds to, say, the chances of a meteorite striking him on the head, Skellor would take action. But now to the task in hand.
There were two areas of space, two possible destinations—one inside the Polity and one beyond its border. This much he had learnt from the Reverend Epthirieth Loman Dorth before killing the man. The network of Dracocorp augs that had been coming under the man’s control at Masada had initially seemed a complete entity. Further probing its structure, Skellor had ascertained it to be a slave cell that, upon reaching maturity (that point where Dorth gained absolute control over the other minds in the network), would link via other networks to an autocratic control. There were two such centres of control, with only vague locations—the two Dragon spheres. Skellor had of course already chosen the one outside Polity space. Even so, that particular area extended a hundred light years across, so locating Dragon inside it would be no easy task.
Skellor considered how he might achieve his ends. Previously, the most likely way of locating Dragon had seemed to be to find a Dracocorp facility and work from there, but his probes into the AI and virtual networks from Viridian had quickly disabused him of this notion. Dragon had foreseen that enemies would follow this trail and so, rather than erase it, had concealed it under a thousand false trails. Gaining information concerning even these had also quickly turned into a risky option when his searching attracted the attention of some seriously dangerous hunter-killer AI programs engaged on the same search. Obviously, ECS also seriously wanted to know Dragon’s location. No, he must use a different approach: tracing Dragon through the augs those facilities manufactured, and which were now in use.
The running of Dracocorp was not something Dragon had to remain wholly engaged in, but slow accretion of control through the networks thereby generated required it. To find the link from this distance Skellor needed to infiltrate network after network to follow it home. Better then to find such a network much nearer to that same home—nearer to Dragon. So thinking, Skellor affirmed the coordinates already input, and dropped the Vulture into underspace.
Alston supposed various factors were interacting in the man’s mind: obviously, the longer the interrogation, the longer he would stay alive. However, the longer he delayed answering questions, the greater would be his agony. Alston was therefore beholden to increase the man’s agony to that point where, in the hope of a quick death, he would become more forthcoming. Alston always loved the way his victims reacted when, having obtained what he wanted, Alston continued with the torture. There was horror and a kind of indignation at this betrayal of the unspoken contract between torturer and tortured.
‘I’ve been aware for some time that Arian wants me dead. That is hardly news to me, but I want details. When does he plan to launch an attack on my island? How many of his people will he send? What kind of armaments will they be carrying?’