She let the memory escape, and coughed and sat up, glancing to see if the drone had noticed. It was nearby, collecting tiny flowers.
A party of what she guessed were schoolchildren came chattering and squealing up the path from the metro station, heading towards the postern. Heading and tailing the noisy column were adults, possessed of that air of calmly tired wariness she'd seen before in teachers and mothers with many children. Some of the kids pointed at the floating drone as they passed, wide-eyed and giggling and asking questions, before they were ushered through the narrow gate, voices disappearing.
It was, she'd noticed, always the children who made a fuss like that. Adults just assumed that there was some trick behind the apparently unsupported body of the machine, but children wanted to know how it worked. One or two scientists and engineers had looked startled, too, but she guessed a stereotype of unworldiness meant nobody believed them that there must be something odd going on. Anti gravity was what was going on, and the drone in this society was like a flashlight in the stone age, but — to her surprise — it was almost disappointingly easy just to brazen it out.
"The ships just met up," the drone informed her. "They're transferring the stand-in for real, rather than displacing it."
Sma laughed, plucked a blade of grass and sucked on it. "Old JT really doesn't trust its displacer, does it?"
"I think the thing's senile, myself," the drone said sniffily. It was carefully slicing holes in the barely more than hair-thin stems of the flowers it had picked, then threading the stems through each other, creating a little chain.
Sma watched the machine, its unseen fields manipulating the little blossoms as dexterously as any lace-maker flicking a pattern into existence.
It was not always so refined.
Once, maybe twenty years ago, far away on another planet in another part of the galaxy altogether, on the floor of a dry sea forever scoured by howling winds, beneath the mesa that had been islands on the dust that had been silt, she had lodged in a small frontier town at the limit of the railways" reach, preparatory to hiring mounts to venture into the deep desert and search out the new child messiah.
At dusk, the riders came into the square, to take her from the inn; they'd heard her strangely coloured skin alone would fetch a handsome price.
The inn-keeper made the mistake of trying to reason with the men, and was pinned to his own door with a sword; his daughters wept over him before they were dragged away.
Sma turned, sickened, from the window, heard boots thunder on the rickety stairs. Skaffen-Amtiskaw was near the door. It looked, unhurried at her. Screams came from the square outside and from elsewhere inside the inn. Somebody battered at the door of her room, loosing dust and shaking the floor. Sma was wide eyed, bereft of stratagems.
She stared at the drone. "Do something," she gulped.
"My pleasure," murmured Skaffen-Amtiskaw.
The door burst open, slamming against the mud wall. Sma flinched. The two black-cloaked men filled the doorway. She could smell them. One strode in towards her, sword out, rope in the other hand, not noticing the drone at one side.
"Excuse me," said Skaffen-Amtiskaw.
The man glanced at the machine, without breaking stride.
Then he wasn't there any more, and dust filled the room, and Sma's ears were ringing, and pieces of mud and paper were falling from the ceiling and fluttering through the air, and there was a large hole straight through the wall into the next room, across from where Skaffen-Amtiskaw — seemingly defying the law concerning action/reaction — hovered in exactly the same place as before. A woman shrieked hysterically in the room through the hole, where what was left of the man was embedded in the wall above her bed, his blood spattered copiously over ceiling, floor, walls, bed and her.
The second man whirled into the room, discharging a long gun point-blank at the drone; the bullet became a flat coin of metal a centimetre in front of the machine's snout, and clunked to the floor. The man unsheathed and swung his sword in one flashing movement, scything at the drone through the dust and smoke. The blade broke cleanly on a bump of red-coloured field just above the machine's casing, then the man was lifted off his feet.
Sma was crouched down in one corner, dust in her mouth and hands at her ears, listening to herself scream.
The man thrashed wildly in the centre of the room for a second, then he was a blur through the air above her, there was another colossal pulse of sound, and a ragged aperture appeared in the wall over her head, beside the window looking out to the square. The floorboards jumped and dust choked her. "Stop!" she screamed. The wall above the hole cracked and the ceiling creaked and bowed down, releasing lumps of mud and straw. Dust clogged her mouth and nose and she struggled to her feet, almost throwing herself out of the window in her desperate attempt to find air. "Stop," she croaked, coughing dust.
The drone floated smoothly to her side, wafting dust away from Sma's face with a field-plane, and supporting the sagging ceiling with a slender column. Both field components were shaded deep red, the colour of drone pleasure. "There, there," Skaffen-Amtiskaw said to her, patting her back, Sma choked and spluttered from the window and stared horrified at the square below.
The body of the second man lay like a sodden red sack under a cloud of dust in the midst of the riders. While they were still staring, before most of the raiders could raise their swords, and before the inn-keeper's daughters — being lashed to two of the mounts by their captors — realised what the almost unrecognisable lump on the ground in front of them was and started screaming again, something thrummed past Sma's shoulder and darted down towards the men.
One of the warriors roared, brandishing his sword and lunging towards the door of the inn.
He managed two steps. He was still roaring when the knife missile flicked past him, field outstretched.
It separated his neck from his shoulders. The roar turned to a sound like the wind, bubbling thickly through the exposed wind-pipe as his body crashed to the dust.
Faster — and turning more tightly — than any bird or insect, the knife missile made an almost invisibly quick circle round most of the riders, producing an odd stuttering noise.
Seven of the riders — five standing, two still mounted — collapsed into the dust, in fourteen separate pieces. Sma tried to scream at the drone, to make the missile stop, but she was still choking, and now starting to retch. The drone patted her back. "There, there," it said, concernedly. In the square, both of the inn-keeper's daughters slipped to the ground from the mounts they had been tied to, their bonds slashed in the same cut that had killed all seven men. The drone gave a little shudder of satisfaction.
One man dropped his sword and started to run. The knife missile plunged straight through him. It curved like red light shining on a hook, and slashed across the necks of the last two dismounted riders, felling both. The mount of the final rider was rearing up in front of the missile, its fangs bared, forelegs lashing, claws exposed. The device went through its neck and straight into the face of its rider.
On emerging from the resulting detonation, the machine slammed to a stop in mid-air, while the rider's headless body slid off his collapsing, thrashing animal. The knife missile spun slowly about, seemingly reviewing its few seconds" work, then it started to float back towards the window.
The inn-keeper's daughters had fainted.
Sma vomited.
The frenzied mounts leapt and screamed and ran about the courtyard, a couple of them dragging bits of their riders with them.
The knife missile swooped and butted one of the hysterical mounts on the head, just as the animal was about to trample the two girls lying still in the dust, then the tiny machine dragged them both out of the carnage, towards the doorway where their father's body lay.