'Pickers run on chemical batteries that get warm,' she said.
He said nothing in reply to that, but it gratified her to see his expression when three pickers scuttled out of the field and headed for the house. He seemed about to ask something then, but he assumed a tired look and just watched the pickers go in through the door. Three explosions followed in quick succession. On a billow of smoke, a couple of black plastic legs came tumbling through one of the broken windows.
'Who are they - and who are you?' she asked.
'You got any more AGCs here?'
'No, and you haven't answered my question.'
Stanton shrugged and replied, because he could not be bothered not to reply, 'The ugly one is a Separatist bastard called Arian Pelter. The android is the psychotic Mr Crane. The rest are like me: mercenaries.'
'Why they here?'
'To die, if I have my way. Now tell me, where's the nearest habitation?'
Cheryl pointed. 'About ten kilometres that way.'
'And the runcible installation?'
'About a thousand kilometres beyond that.' Stanton looked in that direction, then back at the house. 'Right, I need the use of your medkit, and I need food and water. Consider these payment for your life.'
'Inside,' Cheryl said, and let him go ahead of her into the house. As he did so she sent the recording from her aug, and kept the channel open for real-time transmission. She thought it unlikely this man would reach his destination, once the police received her recording. She also thought it likely Viridian would be receiving a visit from ECS sometime soon.
From the mask, clean oxygen blasted into her face and she gasped at it. A light-headed euphoria flooded her, but only for a moment. Pain was secondary; oxygen was survival as it charged her cells. But as her organism became satisfied it now had attention to spare for that pain.
'One moment,' said a gruff voice.
There was a gentle fumbling in her neck ring, then pressure at the side of her neck as a drug patch was pressed into place. Through blurry eyes she saw a mesh ceiling and a thin bluish hand retreating from view. Out-linker, was her one thought.
'Fused across the join. We'll have to cut,' said the gruff voice.
'Then cut,' replied a woman's voice. 'She's probably still bleeding in there.'
A dentist-drill whine quickly followed on the words. She felt the Outlinker tugging at her suit. While he was doing that the edge went off the pain, but Jarvellis knew she needed more than a patch to block it completely. She was in a bad way. She didn't need to see her injuries to know that.
'That's got it. Get Sam over here.'
The suit seal crumpled as it disengaged and she felt the motors in the back of the suit hinging it open.
She screamed as something ripped in her hip.
'Shit, a lump of chainglass. Sorry, darlin'. Close off that artery, Sam.'
Jarvellis clamped down on another scream as something cold went into her hip. She heard wet slicing sounds and the pain became more intense. Another patch went down on her stomach and another on her knee. When she thought she could bear the pain no longer it started to fade a little. Now she felt something else pressed against her breast. A blessed cold numbness suffused it. She felt herself beginning to drift on the load of painkillers pumping round her blood supply. But the narrow hand would not allow this; it patted at her face.
'Stay with us. I want you to lift your head and look,' said the gruff voice.
Jarvellis just lay there. She didn't see any incentive to move. John was dead. The Lyric was gone. It was all over. The patting turned to a slap and the voice got angrier.
'Wake up, damn it!'
This seemed too cruel after all that had happened. Why couldn't they just leave her alone? She opened her eyes and raised her head to tell them to do just that, but in the end could not even manage to.
She lay on the ceramal floor of an airlock. To her left crouched a little robot the shape of a limpet. It had two multi-jointed arms, and she almost chucked when she saw how it had opened her leg to reach in and clamp the artery. The thigh, pad it was reaching over had a bloody dagger of chainglass right through it. Jarvellis did not want to know what might lie under the dressing on her breast. She inspected the other two occupants of the lock.
They were Oudinkers and they were old. The man and the woman were both dressed in baggy garments that failed to conceal how incredibly thin they were. Here were people whose forebears had gone in for radical adaptation. They were perfectly adapted for station life, for weighdessness. Put mem on a planet with anything approaching Earth gravity, and they would collapse like dolls made of tissue paper. Jarvellis noticed that the man had a crust around his mouth, and there were specks of blood on his bluish skin. She remembered now that Oudinkers could survive in vacuum for a short period of time. It must have been he who had retrieved her.
'This station is still revolving,' he informed her.
She tried to understand what he was getting at. The woman, standing nervously behind him, was holding a nerve-blocker. Why the hell didn't she use it?
The man went on. 'Listen carefully. You will the without proper medical attention. Out here on the edge we're at about a quarter of a G. I got you into here using a cable winder. I cannot get you further into the station by myself, and I do not have the equipment set-up to do so. It would take too long.'
Jarvellis let her head drop back. So that was it. Out here, for them, she was an impossible weight to move. They were probably having enough trouble keeping themselves upright. Habit took over then: the habit of survival. She licked dry lips and spoke with a cracked voice.
'My leg.'
The man said, 'I'll have Sam place a clamp, but that's all we can do for now.'
'Hell,' said Jarvellis, and looked up at the wall behind her. Cable snaked up from the back of her suit to a winder that had been hastily welded to the wall. with her right arm she reached up and gripped the cable. She did not look down in response to the sudden pain in her thigh as the littie robot called Sam placed the clamp. Inch by agonizing inch, she hauled herself back until her lower legs were free of the suit. Her right leg was no problem; her left leg was dead weight. When it came free she yelled, but just kept going. The Oudinkers moved back. An accidental blow from her - if she stumbled, anything - would snap their bones like sugar sticks. Finally she slid sideways from the suit. Actually standing was out of the question.
The man moved further back and pressed a button by the inner door. The door irised open with a cacophonous shriek. This place was old.
'There's an elevator fifty metres round from here. We'll walk just ahead of you. I'll not ask you if you can make it, because you have no other options.'
Jarvellis felt that she did have another option, but she began painfully dragging herself across the floor on her side. The litde robot zipped around in a U beside her and behind her, as if enjoying this one chance of experiencing its true calling as a sheepdog.
23
Skaidon was a genius. At age six he took one of the old-style IQ tests and was rated at 180. After he was congratulated, it is reported that he said, 'If you like I'll do a test to 190, now I know how they work.' Throughout his life Skaidon mocked those he called, 'Hard-wired lead-asses' Should you wish to know more about this, I direct you to one of his numerous biographies. This book is about runcibles. Today we are aware of the dangers of directly interfacing a human mind with a computer (not to be confused with the less direct methods ofauging or gridlinking). Skaidon was the first to do this and he died of it, leaving a legacy to humanity that is awesome. It took him twenty-three minutes. In those minutes, he and the Craystein computer became the most brilliant mind humankind has ever known. He gave us Skaidon technology, from which has come instantaneous travel, antigravity and much of our field technology. The Craystein computer, in its supercooled vault under the city of London on Earth, contains the math and blueprints for the runcible (for reasons not adequately explained, Skaidon loved the nonsense poem by Edward Lear and used its wording in his formulae to stand for those particles and states of existence we until then had no words for, hence: run-cible - the device; spoon - the five-dimensional field that breaks into nil-space; pea-green is a particle now tentatively identified as the tachyon) and to begin to understand some of this math let us first deal with that nil-space shibboleth wrongly described as quantum planing…