Ana turned and exhorted him to keep up. He would have gladly replied with some sardonic quip, had he the breath to do so.
Ahead was a poly-carbon shack. The women darted behind it, and when Allen turned the corner he saw that they’d ducked inside. He staggered after them and pulled the door shut behind him.
The women were crouching at the far end of the hut, peering through a horizontal slit window. He joined them, glad of the respite, fell to his knees and stared out.
“What the hell,” he gasped, “is happening?” He stared at Nina as if she should know the answer.
“They’ve compromised the nexus the Serene had in place,” she replied.
Allen nodded. “Fine. Now, first of all, who are ‘they’? And second, what the hell is the nexus?”
Before answering she paused to look through the window. There was no sign of the advancing blue figures, though the sound of their handiwork carried through the humid air. Allen heard the regular sizzle of lasers, followed almost instantly by the abbreviated cries of the slaughtered.
“‘They’ are the enemy of the Serene, the Obterek. And the nexus is the charea paradigm the Serene set in place around the planet. I’m pretty sure the Obterek couldn’t have compromised the charea worldwide, just locally. At least I hope so.”
Allen stared at her. “How do you know all this?”
She shook her head, as if to say that here and now was neither the time nor the place to tell him.
“Do you think we are safe here?” Ana asked, staring at the Italian with big, frightened eyes.
Nina bit her lip. “As safe as anywhere,” she said. “I’m pretty sure the Serene will be working to seal the compromise. It can only last for a matter of minutes.”
But, to Allen’s ears, she didn’t sound so sure.
Through the slit window he saw movement beyond a row of shrubbery. Seconds later a striding blue shape crashed through the foliage, shouldering its laser and firing. Ten metres to the figure’s right, a second figure emerged, and beyond that another one.
They ducked beneath the level of the window and Nina hissed, “When they pass the hut, we get out of here.”
Allen’s heart was pounding in fear. “Where?” he asked, not sure if her plan to leave their hiding place was a good one.
She thought about it, but before she could reply the hut disintegrated around them. Allen yelled and rolled with the impact of something hitting him from the right. He fetched up on his back metres from the wreckage of the hut.
He saw Nina scramble from the shattered poly-carbon rubble and take off, heading for the cover of the melon vines. She never made it.
Beyond the collapsed hut, a blue figure turned and took aim at her. Allen, watching, had the urge to cry out in warning — but self-preservation stopped him. He played dead and stared at the blue figure as it fired.
The laser beam lanced out and cut Nina down. He saw a wound bloom in her torso and heard her startled cry as she fell.
The figure turned and marched away. Raising his head from the ground, Allen looked around for Ana. He saw her seconds later, cowering in the ruins of the hut, her slim body covered with what remained of the poly-carbon door. It had effectively saved her life, shielding her from the attention of the blue figure which had accounted for Nina.
Their eyes met, and Allen raised a hand in a gesture for her to stay where she was.
He knew that, lying on his back in the open field, he was terribly exposed. Should one of the figures — what did Nina call them, the Obterek? — return this way, or simply look back the way they had come, then he was dead.
Without conscious thought he rolled onto his belly and scrambled back towards the ruined hut. There were sufficient scraps and shards of poly-carbon remaining to afford him minimal cover.
He reached the hut and put the ruin between himself and the line of blue figures. Ana grasped his hand and he held onto her warm fingers as if for dear life.
He thought of Sally and Hannah, and felt a flash of terrible dread at the possibility that he might not survive what was happening here.
Ana’s grip tightened on his hand. “Look, Mr Allen…”
She was staring, open-mouthed, across the ground to where Nina’s body lay, bloodily butchered by the laser fire.
Beyond the body, emerging from the shattered foliage, was a golden self-aware entity. Allen watched it as it approached Nina’s corpse and, in a bizarre act at once intimate and brutal, fell on top of it.
Ana gasped. Allen stared, disbelieving. Where Nina’s body had lain, there was now only the golden self-aware entity, its pulsing outline mimicking the posture the Italian women had assumed in death. For a few seconds the golden figure remained perfectly still, face down, and then it slowly rose into a crouched position, like a sprinter, and took off at speed towards an advancing phalanx of blue figures.
And where Nina had sprawled, she was no more.
“What… happened?” Ana managed at last.
Allen shook his head, lost for words.
“Look,” Ana said, pointing.
More golden figures had appeared as if from nowhere and confronted the Obterek, whose lasers seemed ineffective. Each blast directed at the golden figures’ torsos merely halted them in their tracks, briefly, before they surged on as if having absorbed the energy and gained extra momentum from it.
The self-aware entities gained on the blue figures. Just as Allen was wondering how they might conduct the imminent fight, instead of slowing down to confront the killers the golden figures ran into the blue men and absorbed them. The golden entities pulsed brightly for a brief second, halted and stood foursquare, rocking slightly, as if the absorption of their enemies was taking its toll.
From the direction of the now vanished tower, more blue figures were striding forth, lasers poised but inactive as the human populace had either fled the scene or been killed.
From behind where Allen and Ana cowered, a second phalanx of golden figures passed and strode forward in line to confront the advancing Obterek.
The blue men raised their weapons and fired, their barrage doing nothing to halt the golden figures’ advance.
Allen was dazzled as something coruscated to his right. Belatedly he realised that it had been a laser beam, and only when Ana gasped his name did he turn to see her slump back, a bloody hole opened in her chest.
He cried aloud and reached out for her hand. Before he could complete the action, he felt a lancing pain in his lower back. He yelled and turned in time to see his attacker, a blue figure not five metres away, swing its weapon towards an advancing golden figure. The Obterek fired, to no avail, and seconds later was taken into the corporality of the self-aware entity.
Allen lay on his back, gasping. The beam had skewered his flank, slicing through his torso, and the pain was indescribable.
He turned his head. Ana was propped beside him, eyes open in death, blood leaking from between her small breasts. He wanted to cry out at the injustice of what had happened, protest at his approaching end.
He felt something slam into him. It was like a jolt of energy, a blast of pure force that seemed to lift him off the ground with its momentum. He realised that he was on his feet, surrounded by what felt like a cocooning flow of energy. He felt at once petrified and exhilarated, and heard a familiar voice in his head. “Do not be afraid…”
Then he was moving. Or, rather, he was moving not under his own impetus but under that of his saviour. He was aware of his legs working, describing the motion of running, though he felt neither the impact of the ground nor the exertion of the act of sprinting. He was being carried through the air, he realised, inside the body of a self-aware entity.