‘Useful toy,’ Cormac commented, when he could recover his breath.
‘ECS upgrading,’ Arn replied. ‘There’s a lot of it going on now.’
‘This is the first I’ve seen,’ commented Gant.
Cormac glanced at him. ‘Seems we both need to catch up on events a bit.’ Silently he then queried the runcible Aclass="underline"
Viridian, this vehicle is definitely not standard issue…
It is becoming standard issue.
Why?
It is considered a suitable response.
To what?
To possible enemies.
Cormac didn’t pursue that. He had no doubt that was ‘suitable response’ to the threat of Jain technology getting into the wrong hands… again. Through his gridlink, he reached beyond Viridian and felt the huge flows of ECS information—a sure sign of much activity, industrial and military, all across the Polity.
After two hours of stratospheric flight, Arn decelerated and brought the stratocar down in a spiralling glide. Cormac recognized the curving chain of the Thuriot mountains and, when they were closer, the surrounding landscape of moorland scattered with copses and forests of blue oaks and chequer trees. He did not recognize the precise area where a low cruiser with a treaded excavator mounted on its back had been parked, until he actually climbed out of the car. Then he spotted the shattered trees and knew that this was where it had happened. He gazed for a moment beyond those trees, remembering that here was where he had killed Arian Pelter, then returned his attention to his immediate surroundings.
There were four people waiting by the cruiser, and shortly two of them approached: male and female, both ophidapts, with scaled skin, reptilian eyes and skull crests. No doubt they also possessed folded-back snake fangs, not usually employed for injecting fatal poisons but just the poisons their sexual partners preferred. Cormac recognized the type, and if that fact was not enough to put him on edge, their physical similarity to dracomen was.
“Where do you want us to dig, soldier man?’ the female asked Arn.
He turned to Cormac, who stepped forwards.
‘Scanning first—then maybe some digging. You have ground scanners?’
‘Excavator has them.’ She indicated the machine. Studying it, Cormac realized it was a robot, very probably with AI. Soil would be its essential environment: it could probably feel it through its digging buckets, its sifters, its blowers and its washer. Almost as if this brief mention of it was all that was required, a ramp swung outwards from the cruiser, hinged down to the ground, and the excavator rolled off. Out of the corner of his eye, Cormac caught Gant dropping a hand to his holstered pulse-gun. He grinned to himself.
‘Over here,’ he said, leading the way to where he remembered the camp having been located.
The woman hissed something and the excavator trundled over.
‘Somewhere here—’ But before he had finished, the excavator accelerated forwards and began digging. Cormac was about to demand what was going on when the excavator backed up to reveal an arm, then meticulously but swiftly continued unearthing the rest of the corpse it had detected the moment it turned on its ground scanners. It uncovered a second corpse shortly after, while Arn and Gant still inspected the first.
‘Buried alive,’ said Arn.
Briefly studying the second corpse, Gant added, ‘Bled to death.’
Cormac noted the burnt-out Dracocorp augs both corpses wore, and thought about where he had seen that before. He later found the crushed remains of Arian Pelter’s skull—unearthed from the foxhole in which the clean-up crew had buried him.
He was unsurprised to discover later that of a brass man—or its parts—there was no sign.
Upon seeing the watchers, Anderson ordered no more quavit and instead filled a larger glass with water from the jug provided on the table. Often, of late, he was becoming recognized in large population centres, and always for the wrong reasons. Perhaps, in this case, those watching him were just curious about a Rondure Knight—Anderson had already received many a strange look while in this city. But over the last twenty years he had brought to book a gang of five outlaws responsible for terrorizing a district for many years, as well as three murderers and twice as many thieves. And it always seemed that such vermin came from extended families with much the same proclivity. He placed a hand on the gun now holstered at his hip, and glanced down at the other packages resting by his feet. No, he would not attempt to use these weapons here for, having had no practice with them, he would likely end up killing some bystander. Usually his muzzle-loader was sufficient for such situations—its one loud crashing shot being enough of a distraction for him to close in and use it as a club.
These four—one woman and three men—were dressed just like gully traders, but it struck Anderson as more likely they had stolen this clothing from their last victims. Perhaps he was being paranoid—but he thought not. Gully traders were genuine humans, so did not need the sand goggles these individuals all wore either suspended around their necks or lodged up on their hat brims. Nor did gully traders carry thuriol hooks, which were used by rarely encountered hog trainers… or by villains to disable sand hogs during a highway robbery.
Anderson swore to himself, abruptly realizing that his eyesight was not so good nowadays. He now knew the woman: Unger Salbec. She was the sister of Querst Salbec, whom Anderson had, many years ago, dragged back to the same town where the man had raped a woman, then killed her. Receiving the customary punishment for such a crime, Querst Salbec had been thrown into a sleer burrow, where probably he had remained alive for several days, paralysed by sleer sting, while awaiting the hatching of the eggs attached to the rocky walls and then the voracious attention of the sleer nymphs.
As the four now began to rise from their table, Anderson felt the leaden inevitability of his past catching up with him. Unger Salbec nodded to him, smiling without much humour. Damn, she was still as attractive as ever.
‘Anderson Endrik?’ said a voice.
Anderson cursed himself for being a fool, as three others surrounded him from behind. So much had he been concentrating on the four in front of him in the adjacent bar, he had forgotten to watch his back. The speaker pulled out a chair and sat down, placing on the table a carbine similar to the one contained in the bag at Anderson’s feet. The other two remained standing, their large assault rifles held across their stomachs, their gazes fixed on the other four who, after a muttered exchange, now carefully retook their seats.
Anderson noted that the three surrounding him all wore the same style of clothing: hip-length jackets with some sort of armour woven into the material, cloth trousers with similar armouring over the thighs and knees, heavy steel-toecap boots, and peaked helmets. This was the kind of attire worn in a foundry, but Anderson knew the purpose to which it had been adapted. He allowed himself to relax a little.
‘Yes—I’m Anderson Endrik.’
‘I hope you know that freelance work is frowned on in Golgoth. If you have come here to collect a bounty on someone, you can forget it. Everyone within city limits comes under my jurisdiction, and no one touches any lawbreakers but my men and me. Of course,’ he glanced over at the four, ‘if you are aware of any who might have committed capital crimes elsewhere, they will assuredly be ejected from the city—and what happens outside city limits is none of my concern.’