Cormac tried to recall Shuriken, but the small comscreen on his wrist holster began running alien code diagonally across it. He stripped the holster and threw it aside as if it had become infectious, as it in fact had, then drew his thin-gun and backed away as Shuriken ripped through the telefactor once more. This time the weapon hit a component that ignited like an arc rod and showered out molten metal. The telefactor dropped out of the air as if its strings had been cut, crashed against the side of a butte, then tumbled into the canyon below, where a final bright flare from a discharging power supply killed it.
This, now, was a scenario Cormac had often contemplated, and had played out a couple of times in VR. Knowing how effective Shuriken was in his hands, he had wondered what would happen if he ever came up against someone wielding a similar Tenkian weapon. In none of those scenarios had it been his own weapon, in none of them had he got a blind spot in the centre of his vision into which the lethal device disappeared every time he looked at it directly. Nor had he a head that felt as if it had been slammed in a door five or six times, nor had he OD’d on analgesic patches. It occurred to him then that if Skellor were trying to kill him now, it would at least be quick. Then he told himself not to think like that—speaking to himself was still a very strange experience—and concentrated on the task in hand.
In his gridlink, Cormac created a visual patch to fill his blind spot—and felt something like a knife blade going into his cortex. Skellor, it seemed, was playing with him, for Shuriken was now darting around the butte like a mosquito in search of bare skin. Cormac tracked it round, focusing, pushing himself into a fugue of concentration. He could not allow the slightest shake or jitter, as he would get few chances at this. Finally he fired twice, missing the first time with a ranging shot, but hitting with the second. Flung back, with chipped and cracked chainglass blades extending, Shuriken turned upwards so it resembled a gleaming eye gazing down at him. Cormac fired again, centred perfectly on target. Shuriken pulled in its blades like a sparrow folding its wings and dropped out of the sky as had the telefactor before it.
It occurs to me that it is time I used my hostages, Skellor sent.
What do you mean? Cormac asked, not worrying about his signal being located, as Skellor certainly knew where he was right now.
Well, there’s these to begin with.
Images now came through. Cormac was wary of them, expecting some attached virus. He ran them through a scan program, viewed them. The creatures he had earlier seen were turning on each other, tearing each other apart. Why was Skellor doing this?
They’re not sufficiently human, I suspect, Skellor pondered. How about a little look through Tanaquil’s eyes?
Now Cormac’s point of view was of someone up on the city platform and, bleeding through with that, Cormac could feel the rigidly suppressed anguish of this victim of Skellor’s. Tanaquil turned to look as people came towards him from the surrounding buildings. Zombie-like they moved past him, gathering into a crowd rubbing shoulders. The sense of anguish increased and, in the network he was partially in contact with, Cormac could feel the silent screams. The first one to reach the edge, a man dressed in thick clothing and a long padded coat, paused before climbing the two steel fences there, and just stepped off. He bellowed—Skellor returning to him enough control to do that—then others were following him, seemingly eager to throw themselves to their deaths.
No…
The one word came through; Skellor ruthlessly suppressed anything else. Tanaquil now watched a naked woman climbing the same fences. She too went over the edge, screaming. The eyes Cormac was seeing through now blurred with tears. Jeelan. The name broke through Skellor’s rigid control. Just audible came the sounds of bodies impacting far below.
What do you want? Cormac asked.
Why, you.
I should give myself up to save a few natives?
With what felt to Cormac something like a mental shrug, Skellor set a man walking towards the fences. Cormac could hear the man bellowing inside his head, then begging as he climbed the fences. Cormac wanted to shut it out, but was not sure he should.
I’m not so convinced about your lack of empathy, said Skellor. I’m sure you are a very moral man.
Okay, you can have me if you stop the killing.
I’m walking to my way off this world, right now, said Skellor.
Something then came through from the biophysicist, and Cormac routed it into safe storage in his gridlink, expecting this to be an attempt to enslave him. Using the programming equivalent of donning thick gauntlets and safety goggles, he inspected what the biophysicist had sent, and was surprised when all he received was coordinates—an area outside the Sand Towers, some fifty kilometres away from where he stood.
Best you hurry to join me, said Skellor. Let us say, for every fifteen minutes you are out of my sight, I’ll walk another one of them off the edge.
Fethan adjusted his vision to infrared and gaped at the hellish scene in the Undercity. Though aware that people often misapplied the term ‘unnatural’ to alien life, that would not have been the case here. The creatures he saw were not the result of evolution, nor, it seemed to him, were they designed for any more useful purpose than to horrify. Why give a human mandibles, why give a huge insect soft hands—and why that other thing with the screaming human face? Yes, he guessed that some reasoning could be applied: give a man mandibles so he could handle alien food, or give that insect hands so it could manipulate tools as easily as a human. But that took no account of the personal suffering caused by such experiments. Anyway, Skellor could not have had time to do all of this, so that left only one other culprit. Fethan shuddered, and wondered what Dragon had been trying to achieve here.
Though many of the creatures in the Undercity were fearsome indeed, none of them attacked Fethan, and he soon realized that they were all aug-controlled and mostly heading away from him, like a procession of the damned heading out for judgement. It was a mystery he decided he might pursue some other time, for the aug creatures he had followed under the platform were teeming here, and he tracked their lines of progress easily back through the darkness. He followed one of these lines, perpetually slapping away those of the insects that dropped onto him from above, also deliberately crushing the same things underfoot. Eventually, in this horrible place, he passed corpses bound to the ground by filaments and sucked dry, with tentacular things writhing in the dirt underneath them. Then he spotted the source of the aug insects.
Fethan would not have recognized the bloated thing as once being human had it not been for some fragments of clothing clinging to its bruised skin and a bracelet buried in the flesh of the one limb that had not been fully absorbed. The head was just a hairy nub over a frogmouth orifice that continuously leaked a foamy mucus squirming with aug insects. This mouth was not for feeding. Fethan guessed that the tentacles extending below this… creature were intended for that, and that it had not already dragged him down because he was inedible.