Cybelle did not scream, or shout, or even (contra the urban legends surrounding the state of those unfortunates who shared her present degraded state) groan “brainssss.” She simply leapt from the top of the sarcophagus, conserving her energy—a single bound that, in a hundredth of a gee, took her the entire width of the nave, across the screen, over the altar, and down into the organ crypt.
The strength of the famished is notorious, and in no way exaggerated: Someone whose higher functions have been sidelined by starvation will, without hesitation, exert themselves to the point of dislocating joints and delaminating motor-tissue bundles if they are in sight of food. Had Dennett not hunched forward over his keyboard without warning, Cybelle would have landed on his back and sunk her fangs into his throat on the way down. But by luck or happenstance, Dennett removed himself from the target of her slow-motion leap. Overshooting, Cybelle crashed against the imposing array of pipes and tubes jutting from the top of the commander’s console: Dennett, looking up in surprise, caught a foot in his face and squawked loudly as he recoiled.
“Muh— Your Grace?” He tumbled backward from the bench seat as Cybelle turned.
Behind her, the valve work sputtered and hissed, deliquescing under her touch as hungry skin ’cytes pumped corrosive digestive fluid against everything they touched. Nothing of intelligence showed in her slitted emerald eyes as she looked around, searching for further food. “Ssssss—”
Dennett clapped one hand to his damaged cheek, mouthing in pain as he realized his predicament. Then he hurled himself at the nearest exit in a dash for life, a split second ahead of Cybelle’s whiplash pursuit.
Cybelle rebounded from the floor: By the time she recovered, she was alone in the vaulted space of the chapel. She looked around, hissing mindlessly: There was nothing to eat here. And so she gathered her strength and sprang once more in pursuit of her target. She had no choice, even had she mind enough to consider her options: For if she didn’t find nutrition soon, her still-starving techné would declare her identity bankrupt; tear her brain to pieces; then secede from her body in a ravenous tide of solitary micromechanical predators.
And so the wild hunt began.
The stalker explored the darkened corridors of the chapel carefully, skulking from shadow to crypt, sending her knives ahead in brief whirring stabs of exploration.
Her wake-up call had come days ago, when the chapel commenced acceleration. Opening her eyes in the frigid darkness, she knew—for even the unconscious have mechanisms for reasoning—that the denizens of the mission would not expect an intruder at this late date. Nevertheless, she took pains over the air lock, investigating it with fingers and cunning tools, searching for sensors that might alert the occupants, then listening (with her head pressed against the wall) for any vibration that might betray the presence of a guard before she finally rotated the lock compartment round into the light and warmth and air of the interior.
The interior of the vehicle had proven challenging for the stalker. She had been designed and trained to operate in certain types of environments: Had she found her target aboard a passenger liner or a beacon station, her behavioral repertoire would have sufficed to deal with the situation. But the mission planners had not anticipated that Krina would outrun the stalker for this long, much less that she would hide in the anonymity of poverty or work her passage as a lay crew member aboard a religious mission. It was easy enough for the stalker to blend in with the dense, anonymous population of a commercial hub or a city, or to casually impersonate her target among near strangers; but a dimly lit chapel occupied for the most part by silently toiling skeletons was an entirely different matter. So when she fell back on another preprogrammed behavior, her attempts at misdirection and camouflage were not entirely successful.
The second time she resumed her active hunt, the chapel’s acceleration had increased. Not by much—it was barely a thousandth of a gee—but it was a significant change. Increased acceleration was an indication of urgency, energetically expensive. That made it an anomaly, and anomalies frequently presaged opportunities, or at least useful distractions for potential witnesses. Had she been capable of introspection, the stalker would have been smacking her lips with anticipation as she gathered her knives and stealthily retrieved her external monitor to review its memory.
The tiny camera had spent the past week and a half clinging inconspicuously to the door of the cell the stalker had selected for a home. It awakened to capture an image whenever anyone passed by. Eleven motorized skeletons had clattered slowly along the passage, dusting and polishing. Twice on other occasions, a dark-robed figure had passed: and three times, a slightly built female similar enough to be the stalker’s long-lost sib, this one carefully checking the lights and ventilation ducts as she went.
The stalker tensed when she recognized her prey. It wasn’t a high-resolution recording (the camera was the size of a pinhead), but it was good enough; in particular, the motion kinematics were intimately familiar, burned into the stalker’s memory. Krina had passed this way, attending to her chores, barely a day ago. Moreover, judging by her speed, she was in slowtime, metabolic rate and reflex speed lowered considerably. Excellent. The probability of a rapid kill and successful substitution had risen considerably. And so the stalker made some small adjustments to her appearance—bringing her hair and facial appearance closer into line with her target’s—then opened the door and slithered out into the darkness of the graveyard shift.
She made her way through avenues of bones, along lightless ducts, through burnished metal docking nodes and flag-floored chambers. She charted her course by sound and memory: the distant creaking and groaning of wood and stone in flight, the pings and ticks of expanding and contracting metal, and the distant sigh of air rushing through ventilation ducts. Somewhere beyond the walls of the companionways, creatures scuttled in the darkness: cleaner worms, perhaps, or smaller quadrupedal hangers-on. They were of no significance to her. Only people were of interest to the stalker—and her knives, hovering quietly and alternately darting ahead of her, then falling behind to take up the rear.
Quite by accident, the target came to the stalker. “Hello?” it piped, tumbling out of a side passage right in front of the stalker as she worked on a hatch, preparing to expand her search pattern to take in another ring of access tubes. Something was clearly wrong: The target’s metabolic rate was high, her activity frenetic.
The stalker, surprised, looked up. The target was completely unafraid. “Who are you?” it asked. “Have you seen Cook?”
There was no program for this. But the stalker had to be sure. “What is your name?” she demanded, reaching for her assault dagger.