'We're going now,' he said, and nodded towards Mika's AGC. The three fell in with him as he strode towards it.
In a moment they were airborne and gone.
'Goodbye,' said the sergeant, with a complete lack of sincerity. A few days before he had been eager for the chance of action. Now he just wanted to reach a safe retirement.
Cormac checked his watch after he had set the cruise-control on the AGC. 'Should be there in under an hour. Aiden, what are the precise co-ordinates of where the Maker went to ground?' Aiden told him, and Cormac nipped a map-screen from the console and checked them. 'Seems there is a cave mouth there. I'll be going in to set the CTDs. I am going alone. You, Thorn, are not capable at present, and I do not see why Mika should be exposed to the danger.'
Aiden said, 'But I see no reason why I should not accompany you.'
'You would not - and that is because you're not in possession of all the facts. You'll stay with the AGC. That's a direct order.'
There was no answer to that, so none was given.
Fifty minutes of flying brought them to a position directly above the given co-ordinates. Cormac brought the car down to twenty metres above ground level, then looked down at the cave mouth. It was a ragged rent in the side of a mountain, but easily accessible. He landed the vehicle a short distance away.
Before he left the car, Cormac reached back and said, 'Give me your thermal scanner, Aiden.'
The Golem handed it over: a grey box the shape of a soap bar, with a single screen and ball control. Cormac turned it on the three of them, and saw how little of a reading he got from Aiden. There were separate heat sources at his chest and groin, but the rest of his body was almost invisible. Mika and Thorn were statues of molten glass on the screen. Cormac moved the ball control and the area covered by the screen expanded. Positions relative to the sensors on the end of the scanner were given in metres, in three dimensions. He tilted the scanner and saw that these measurements did not change. The device was keyed to a ground level, then. He nodded with satisfaction and put the scanner in his pocket. When Aiden moved to hand over Thorn's proton gun, which lay on the back seat, Cormac held up his hand.
'I won't be needing that,' he said, and got out of the car. In silence they watched him go. He walked away with the rucksack slung over one shoulder: a tourist out for a brisk hike.
As he reached the cave mouth, Cormac ran a quick diagnostic on shuriken. It might have been damaged by the android, or by the seeker bullets. The miniscreen pointed out a slight aberration in the programming sequences, and some minimal damage to the chainglass blades. Both defects were acceptable. The blades were still more than serviceable, and he reckoned the source of the slight aberration was Tenkian himself. No way had he programmed shuriken to intercept seeker bullets, then hang in the air like a bristling terrier.
Cormac entered the cave.
A rush of creatures that he at first took to be bats fled past him. A close inspection of them showed him that they indeed had batlike wings - but seemingly no body or head. There was also something insectile about them. The cockroaches and burrowing beetles on the floor of the cave were terran, but the blue-metal centipedal creatures that seemed to be preying on them were from somewhere else entirely. Cormac trudged on through fallen bodies like dry leaves and turned on Aiden's scanner.
It indicated that there was something large about fifty metres ahead, and twenty metres further down. He advanced cautiously, wondering if he had been foolish to refuse the proton gun. He had not wanted it because shuriken seemed capable of dealing with anything the Maker might put in his way, and a proton weapon might well have brought the roof down on him. He paused for a moment and opened his rucksack. The box he took out was from Thorn's kit - he suspected it had belonged to Gant. He opened the box and took out one drone light, initiated it, then tossed it into the air. It ignited and shot off ahead of him.
The drone light bobbed down into darkness, and Cormac caught a glimpse of mirrored reflection. He halted and punched a particular attack program into his shuriken's holster, then took it out and tossed it into the air in front of him. It spun up and hung there, revolving like a metal-saw, but with its blades moving in and out as they had after it had destroyed the seeker bullet that had Cormac's name on it. Cormac viewed it with suspicion: it was not supposed to do mat. Tenkian, again. No one really knew what the weapon-smith did with his microminds, but it was often said that some of his weapons developed minds of their own, so to speak. Just so long as shuriken did its job, Cormac would be happy.
Twenty metres more and Cormac saw a flailing of chrome legs - as the drone light shot to the side of the tunnel and went out. He halted and listened at the dark. There was no alternative. He reached down to the holster and felt his way to the enable button. He pressed it and listened to shuriken whir away from him.
Only a few seconds after shuriken had gone there was a crashing from the darkness, and a familiar sound as of an air-compressor starting. He heard a scrabbling, the crash of a heavy body going down, then the metal-saw whine of shuriken striking. Sparks flared in the tunnel ahead and in their light Cormac caught a glimpse of a nightmarish shape. The sparks went out, flared again with a second strike, then a third, a fourth. When the only sound he could hear was the sound of those strikes, Cormac advanced, sending another drone light ahead of him.
The creature that lay dismembered on the tunnel floor resembled the one in the shaft on Samarkand only in that it was silvered and had insectile legs. Cormac realized immediately that the Maker had taken as its template the same centipedal things he had previously observed. Sure now that the creature was not going to be getting up again, he hit the recall on shuriken. It poised over the body with its blades going in and out, as if wondering whether to disobey and hit it again, but then it returned to its holster. Cormac plucked the drone light from the air, punched a different setting on it, and sent it out at a constant twenty metres ahead of him. A glance at the scanner showed some anomalous readings not so far ahead and a bit below: the Maker. He advanced.
Thorn stared up at the cave mouth and swore creatively, then pushed his hand against his stomach and winced. Mika had done an excellent job of knitting his intestines together, but no way was he in any condition yet to go potholing. He turned to her.
'We shouldn't have let him go alone,' he said.
'He gave orders and instructions, which amount to the same. Let me pose a question to you: would you disobey him?'
It did not sound like a question from Mika's lips, more like some sort of didactic exercise.
'I know what you mean,' said Thorn. 'He's all perfectly logical and reasonable mostly, but you know that he could quite logically and reasonably cut your throat, then wander off to find himself a cup of tea.' He turned to his other companion. 'Aiden, couldn't you follow him in at a distance.'
'He specifically ordered me to stay here. He is an agent of Earth Central Security, and we were told to put full trust in him and obey him. This was at the request of people we respect, as we otherwise have always been taught to question all orders. Cento and I did some checking and found he was gridlinked for ten years more than is normally acceptable, simply because he had become almost indispensable to Earth Central. The runcible AIs rank him not far below Horace Blegg.'