Tynan was smiling—staring up the slope at Thorn and smiling. After a moment his smile turned into laughter.
So close. So bloody close.
THORN DESCENDED the slope, knowing this was the end. "You're hurt," Tynan said, waving his gun vaguely. Thorn glanced around at the loose flap of skin, then reached back to tear it away.
"It's only flesh," he said, throwing it down at Tynan's feet. "There are more important things."
Tynan raised an eyebrow. "You're no trader, are you?"
Thorn stood there silently.
"1 can always find out who you are," Tynan said. "Drugs. Torture. There are ways." But he was looking down at the thick flap of flesh. It lay there, glistening in the sunlight, the blood still wet on its surface.
"Nothing could make me say."
Tynan looked up, mouth open, realization coming slowly to him. He stared at the singed threads of clothing that hung from Thorn and thought of the huge hole in the electric mesh he had seen.
Overhead seabirds wheeled and cried.
Thorn looked away, thinking of all he'd seen: of the Myghtern's town, shining in the darkness; of the small dark bird with golden eyes; of the great laboratory complex in Treviscoe Valley; and of the Myght-ern himself, so strong, so vividly alive. He sighed, feeling the wind on his artificial skin, and sucked the sweet, cool air into his genetically designed lungs, knowing it would not be long now before he would feel nothing.
"Well, then," he said. "What now?"
Tynan raised the weapon. It was a sophisticated laser, not the crude weapon he had been armed with earlier. Aiming it at Thorn's chest, he depressed the trigger. At once, a beam of brilliant light flowed from the tip of the barrel, seeming to connect Thorn to the gun. Thorn's flesh began to peel back, blackening, boiling away into a mist. All about Thorn's torso thick bands of vivid light played, encircling him. The air was filled with the reek of charring flesh.
Thorn staggered, his eyes flickering as if in a fit, then he lurched forward and grabbed the weapon from Tynan's hand, crushing it.
He turned, beginning to climb the slope once more, smoke spiraling up from the dark patch on his chest. Faint traces of static flickered from the exposed metal plate on his back.
Tynan drew a second laser and fired. The beam went wide, setting fire to the grass at Thorn's feet, then found its target, searing the flesh from Thorn's right shoulder.
Thorn stumbled and went down, then, pulling himself up again, headed for the narrow wooden bridge that led across to the settlement. But he was in severe difficulty now; his movements were growing more erratic and with every step he grunted as if short of breath.
Tynan caught up with him and fired the laser from less than an arm's length away, holding the beam steadily on Thorn's side. The flesh boiled and bubbled, but still the trader didn't cry out. He swayed and half turned, looking back sightlessly at Tynan, then began to climb again.
Tynan threw the gun down, then stood, watching him. Thorn was on the narrow bridge now, looking down at the water far below, as if fascinated by the way it crashed against the black, slaty rocks. Then, very slowly, he turned, facing Tynan. His mouth opened, as if to speak, but there was only the hum of static. He tried to smile, to raise his hand in farewell, but nothing functioned properly now.
Tynan was staring at Thorn in astonishment, realizing at last exactly what he was. Thorn, looking back, would have laughed, but he had lost too much. He swayed and reached out for the frail wooden support. For a moment it held, then—with a resounding crack!—it gave.
The animating signal stuttered and then failed. A wave swelled and splintered on the steep black slope of rock, dragging the machine under. There was a momentary glint of metal and then nothing, only the rise and fall of the sea, the crash of the big waves against the rocks, and the sound of seabirds calling in the sunlight.
PART 3 SPRING 2222
Toward Evening
Toward evening there was thunder and Lightning. Why was the lady sad? The high lord did not reveal his majesty. What was he seeking?
—ch'u yuan, "Tien Wen"
("Heavenly Questions"), from the Ch'u Tz'u (Songs of the South), second century B.C.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Between Cities
IT WAS DAWN, yet inside the Rift it was still dark.
To the north the vast clifflike face of the North European Enclave was studded with gun turrets and observation blisters. An irregular tangle of huge buttressed gantries loomed over the gap, camouflage nets of fine mesh ice draped between them like giant, glittering webs. Buzzing cycloids patrolled the upper air, giant black-shelled scarabs, their searchlights probing the air, while in the depths below deadly mechanopods, sprint-fast and armed with warmtrace homers, sought out their targets tirelessly.
To the south, exactly two li away, lay the White Tang's City, its face the mirror image of the Enclave's; a Great Wall of weaponry that ran three thousand li from Le Havre in the west, through Niirnberg and Dresden, then northeast to Stettin on the Baltic coast. Between, in a wasteland known to both sides as the Rift, a war was being fought—a war that had gone on for almost six years now. Two thousand one hundred and four days, to be precise. Fifty thousand, five hundred and eleven hours. Three million and thirty thousand six hundred and ninety-four minutes. And not a minute had passed without blood having been shed, lives lost. More than twenty million at the last count. The Rift crawled with machines. Robotic mines, programmed to move in random patterns, scuttled about, like crabs at the bottom of the ocean, while ticking android bugs flittered and sprang, or hovered on see-through polymer wings, looking for prey. Only one thing was certain: nothing was what it seemed. Larger machines lumbered about slowly on tracks or jointed legs, heavily armored against their smaller brethren. Some were semisentient, some genetic sports. Among them were spies and mimics—infiltrators trying to win some brief advantage. But no advantage was possible here. The only reality was death.
And among it all went the men—the jou chi ch'i, or "meat machines" as the more cynical of the old Rift hands called themselves. Men who, in this deadly, mechanical cauldron, had been honed to machines themselves: the nerveless and psychotic, the brain-dead and the idiot savants. The only common factor among them was the presence of some deep-rooted character abnormality in their psych profiles. Normal humans didn't survive here.
War here wasn't a game or some temporary aberration, but the very condition of existence. War shaped the Rift. It also shaped all those who dared to enter it.
Karr's craft moved slowly, a shadow among shadows, remotes hovering at random distances from it sending out false radar images to the ever-vigilant eyes of the enemy. Karr himself lay on his back in the webbing couch, twin display screens above him showing both real and enhanced visuals of what was outside. Beside him lay his pilot, a middle-aged Han named Jeng Lo, his deeply lined face hidden beneath a Wrap. Right now the old Rift veteran was twitching like an epileptic and mumbling incoherently into his lip mike as the images danced across the insides of his eyes.
Karr watched, fascinated, as things swam toward them on the screen, were captured visually, identified, or—if unknown—destroyed with a short laser burst from one of the wall-mounted guns which were acting in close coordination with their craft. They themselves were unarmed.
Routine, Karr thought, trying to relax; to let his pulse rate return to normal. But he had not been out before, he had only read reports.
They drifted on. Beside him Jeng Lo twitched and mumbled, his right hand trembling jerkily, the fingers depressing touch-pads in a seemingly random fashion, moving with an eye-defying quickness across the control panel built into the couch's arm.