‘He’ll give evidence. He is evidence,’ said the monitor, prodding Ansel in the back with his pulse-gun.
As he walked ahead, Ansel noted that the bearded villager carried his pack. Perhaps his thin-gun was in there, along with those other lethal devices to which the monitor had referred.
When they reached one of the houses the monitor leant close in behind him. ‘Remember this, assassin: you’re just as much evidence dead as alive.’
Ansel nodded. Whatever this bullshit was he knew he would never testify in an EC court.
The Company had too much pull and he would be bailed and gone in an instant. But he had no intention of it coming to that. The pistol snout nudged him in the back again and he entered the house.
‘Where’s Kelly now?’ Ansel abruptly asked.
Before the monitor could stop her Annette answered, ‘My father is upriver getting the Book of Statements.’
Ansel noted the reverence in her voice. He smiled to himself as the monitor shoved him forward.
‘Secure him,’ said the monitor tightly.
They tied him in a back bedroom, rough ropes securing his wrists and feet to the bedposts. He guessed the monitor did not want him aboard the shuttle where he might get free and have access to whatever weapons might be there. As soon as the door closed he tested the tension of the ropes. Steady flexing did not loosen them, it only drew them tighter on his wrists and ankles, but the frame of the bed moved. Its creaking brought the bearded one to the door.
Ansel closed his eyes and decided to rest. Later.
When he woke he checked the timepiece set in the nail of his right forefinger. Two hours had passed and he hoped everyone in the house was asleep. He steadily pulled on the ropes securing his wrists and managed to slide himself far enough down the bed to hook his feet under the bottom rail. There was one weapon the monitor had been unable to remove, and perhaps had been unaware of: Ansel’s home planet had a gravity of one and a half gees, and though he looked just like an Earthman, he was much stronger. He gripped the ropes around his wrists and pulled hard with his feet. There was a loud crack and he lay still, listening. No movement. He pulled again, steadily, until the tenon holding the bottom rail to the bottom bedpost broke through and the rail pulled away. With the toe of his boot he levered the rope that secured that leg up and over the post. Lying still, he listened again. Nothing. He levered the rail back and forth with his foot until the other tenon began to work free, finally pulling the rail all the way back onto the bed so that when it came out of its mortise hole it did not drop to the floor. With both legs free it was then a simple task to snap the top rail and get his hands free. He was removing the rope from his wrist when an explosion rattled the windows and fire seared the darkness.
Ansel was off his bed in an instant. The door was locked, but he turned the handle until something broke with a dull thud. Easing the door open, he peered through, just in time to see the bearded man rushing outside. On the table in that room rested his rucksack, which he stepped in and grabbed, before retreating to the bedroom. From outside came another explosion, and he could hear yelling. He did not speculate about the cause since he would find out once outside. In his rucksack he found his thin-gun, which he holstered, before opening the bedroom window and stepping through.
‘It’s the shuttle,’ said the woman.
He spun to see her squatting in the darkness a few paces behind him. Automatically he drew his thin-gun and aimed it at her. Then he looked ahead and saw that the barn was burning.
What the hell?
‘Where’s the monitor?’ he asked.
‘In the shuttle,’ she replied.
Ansel made no comment about that.
There were villagers running out of the houses, hastily clothed, yelling questions to each other. Ansel stayed where he was. The woman moved closer and he saw that she wore a pack on her back and held her cutting laser.
‘You can drop that,’ he said.
After she did as he instructed, he snatched the device up and put it in his belt. He then gestured with his gun for her to move where he could see her more clearly, before turning most of his attention to the fire and the villagers. Silhouetted against flame came a striding figure.
‘Jesus,’ said Ansel.
‘Who is it?’ the woman asked.
‘Not a who, a what.’
Ansel suddenly had a very bad feeling about all this.
Two villagers ran towards the dark individual. One of them went in close as if to grab him, but was grabbed in turn by his throat and hoisted into the air. Whilst holding him there, the figure drew a weapon and fired it at the other villager. The second one flew backwards with smoke and flame trailing from where his head had been. The first villager the figure dropped to the ground. He did not get up again.
‘What is that?’ the woman hissed.
‘Cybercorp Golem. Series Nineteen.’
‘But Golem don’t kill.’
‘They do when the Company gets hold of them. They crack the moral governors by giving them a full sensorium download from the mind of a psychopath. This one’s probably a Serban Kline.’
‘It’s probably here for you,’ she said.
Ansel chewed that over. He could not understand why the Company might want him dead.
It seemed more likely to him that the Golem was here after her and the monitor. But he had an inkling of doubt — the kind of doubt that had saved his life more than once. He could of course go and ask the Golem, but knew that if its answer was yes, it would be brief and nonverbal. He needed time, and he needed to know what this woman and the monitor had been on about earlier. He gestured for her to move into the darkness behind the house ahead of him.
‘What’s your name and what are you?’ he asked her.
‘Erlin. I’m an xenobiologist, mostly,’ she replied.
‘Do you have another shuttle, or a way of calling one in?’ asked Ansel.
‘Hendricks had a comlink.’
Hendricks. So that was his name.
‘Hendricks is toast. Keep moving. Head for the jetty.’
As Erlin led the way down to the river, Ansel gazed back towards the village. The Golem was calmly entering each house. Each time it came out, that house would burst into flame. It quite dispassionately shot anyone who came within a few hundred metres of it. The villagers were beginning to get the idea, and they too were running for their lives.
‘Move it!’ Ansel yelled at Erlin.
They reached the jetty ahead of some of the villagers. Ansel quickly untied a skiff powered by a hydrodyn outboard of Company manufacture. He saw that only two other skiffs bore outboards. He drew his gun, adjusted a setting on the side, and fired at each of the motors.
The gun itself made not a sound, but the casing of the first outboard cracked open and leaked smoke, and the second motor blew in half, then fell off its boat and sank.
‘What are you doing?’ Erlin asked.
‘It’s after you or me, not your precious colonists. I’m slowing it a little,’ he replied.
They scrambled into the boat. Ansel started the motor, turned the boat out into the river and headed upstream. As he wound the throttle round he looked back towards the village. All the houses were now burning and the villagers streaming down to the jetty. Behind them, silhouetted against the fire as it stepped over corpses, came the Golem.