by Neal Asher
Kruger eased himself carefully to his feet, flinching every time Carroll moved. Carroll nodded to the door and with Kruger led the way out into the main room.
‘Sit down.’
Kruger sat, and Carroll sat opposite him.
‘What happened here then. Why are you still alive?’
‘It is not my fault.’
Carroll raised the Uzi higher and pointed it at Kruger's face. ‘I asked you a question.’
Quickly Kruger replied, ‘After you ran four of the others ran as well. They went in different directions. The rest stayed here. Sometime after that, I do not know how long, another Reaper came. He called me forwards and made me collect all his coins ... from the ground ... I think they are connected to us, for he selected four of them and ... I think he burnt the four who had escaped. He then called all who remained outside. They all came thinking it was another game. Then, while I stood by his throne he burnt all the others. I could do nothing. He said I was to become his General. Then he left. I do not want to be his General.’
Carroll nodded then stood up. Kruger watched him like a pheasant watching a fox, his face white and beaded with sweat. Carroll stared outside at the ash and bones. Dispensed with, simply dispensed with. He wondered what it would mean for Kruger to become the Reaper's General. Would he be made into a machine? He turned back to Kruger.
‘What happened to the discs? Did he take them with him?’
Kruger glanced outside. ‘No. He cast them on the ground again and told me to collect them up in readiness for his return. He also told me to clear up all the ash and bones and load it in sacks...’
A small rebellion, Carroll decided, but then what right did he have to judge? Put in the same position could he have down any different? Yes, because he would not have put himself in that position by betraying his fellows. Perhaps it was too harsh a judgement, but Carroll decided to keep to it. He gazed at Kruger expressionlessly.
‘I will give you five minutes. If I can still see you after that time I will kill you.’
Kruger did not hesitate. He leapt up and was out of the doors in moments. Carroll followed him outside and watched him fleeing towards the sun. After five minutes he was still in sight but Carroll did not shoot at him. He knew what awaited him out there and a bullet would have been a kindness. Carroll did not feel very kind. He returned to the building.
The place was empty of life now and Carroll allowed himself to relax. Dispelling Kruger from his thoughts, he took some tools from the craft and set about removing a partition from the wall. His task was not difficult as the building was of flimsy construction. Once he had removed it he went out to the craft and brought that inside. He then leant the partition back in place. With this done he went on to do the one other task he had set himself to do before he settled down to wait.
They were strewn all around where he had thought he had destroyed the Reaper’ soul discs, about twenty of them. Taking care not to miss any of them amongst the wreckage of this Reaper and this General, he collected them all up and weighed them in the palm of his hand. Like poker chips, he thought – the lives of twenty men. Which ones? He wondered. Which ones were Ellery, Julius, the Masai. Which one was Kruger? They all looked the same to him. He pocketed them and headed back to the building.
Inside he sat at the table where he, Ellery and Julius had played cards, while lumps of explosive had sweated nitro-glycerine in their pockets. He unpacked the supplies he had brought from the ship, as he dared not use his creation booth here, and he ate a meal he didn’t taste, then smoked, but even the cigarettes were tasteless. In time the Clown's diversion began.
It started as a barely discernible humming that built in intensity and power. Aware that this must be what he had been waiting for, Carroll stood and went to his craft. As he strapped himself in the humming became a resonant vibration. Chairs and tables began to rattle and tableware to crash upon the floor. Carroll moved his craft to where he had laid the panel back in place, and peering out through the jammed doors he saw five specks hurtling across the sky. Flashes of red light ignited the sky and one of the specks fell. The others continued on, sunward. Once they were out of sight Carroll eased his craft forwards pushing the panel over. Soon he was outside and able rise above the building and look around.
The specks, he guessed, were the Four, heading towards the Clown's ship. He had no ideas about the one that had fallen. Now was his time to move. A slight pressure in one of the indentations of the joystick and a forward pressure took him up at forty-five degrees at an acceleration that sucked his eyeballs towards his mouth. At a height of fifty feet he looked towards the sun and suffered a stomach turning disorientation. The sun seemed to have moved, and it took him a moment to dispel the illusion.
The Clown had told him that the steel plain was a gigantic matter converter – a tool used for the building of the solar disc, and by the way he had said it Carroll guessed it was not a permanent fixture. That must be what was happening: the Clown was moving the steel plain. Carroll slammed the joystick forwards. He had things to do.
The hexagons sped underneath him and for a time he felt as if he were flying high over a patchwork of fields in England. Soon he caught sight of the mount he had fought his way to the top of. It looked like an ants nest, a termite’s hill, but those were people down there. But as far as he could see no game was in progress, no pillars of smoke were visible, so what were they doing?
He came in low over the top of the mount and saw that the people were gathered closer around it. Closer, and he saw that they were all armed and that a number of them had gathered in a cordon around the Clown's soul disc. These men, fifteen of them in all, were armed with what looked like three-foot long toothpicks. In a gout of smoke ruby light flashed on his arm. With a flick of his wrist Carroll sent the craft high into the air with red light flashing and splashing ineffectually against its underside. He then sent it hurtling away from the mount until the firing stopped. Tearing open the fabric of his shirt he peered at a pencil-sized hole cut and cauterised through his left bicep.
His arm felt stiff but hardly hurt at all. Adrenalin, he decided – it would hurt later on, if he was still alive.
The men had obviously been placed there as a precaution. It was not their fault. They could not be blamed for not knowing he was seeking to end the game. They can be resurrected though, he rationalized, and turned his craft back towards the mount.
On his first pass he flew high and slow above the mount, the bottom of the craft continuously being struck with laser fire. He turned and circled and, with his arm beginning to ache, clumsily dropped CS gas canisters over the side to confuse matters below. Once all these were gone, he moved the craft aside to let it cool, watching as the mount became shrouded in tear gas cut through with random stabs of red light like needles in cotton wool. They couldn’t see him now, it seemed.
With his left hand resting on the controls that fired his missile launchers and machine guns he came in low over to one side of the cloud of tear gas, and opened fire with the guns on one side of his craft. No single shot could be heard – the sound like that of a wave hitting a shingle beach, only much amplified. As the belts chattered through cartridge cases swamped the deck and rattled off the side. The sound of the missiles going seemed like the concerted hiss of a disturbed snake pit.
Two explosions lit the cloud of tear gas, roughly on either side of the top of the mount. Carroll knew that the soul disc was indestructible but did not want to blow it from its position there. It would be rather stupid to go through all this and then be unable to find the damned thing. He next turned his craft and ran through the same routine with the machine guns and missile launchers on that side. Finally, when there was nothing left to fire, he donned a gas mask and spiralled his craft down into the smoke.
Those shooting at him from below had ceased to do so either because they could no longer see him, or because there was no one below to shoot at him. In moments he found the top hexagon and came in to land. Moans a
nd screams issued from the smoke all around, but he ignored them. This was the business he had been in all his life. All around the craft lay bodies peppered with bullets, but he took no chances, climbing from his craft with his Uzi in his good hand and grenades on his belt.
The Clown's soul disc was difficult to locate in the smoke. Twice he nearly stepped off of the edge of the hexagon and innumerable times he slipped in blood and stumbled over corpses. Eventually it loomed out of the smoke at him, swaying in its contorted silver frame. At the foot of it, like bloody offerings, lay two men, still clutching their laser weapons to their mutilated bodies. Carroll stepped over them and tugged at the clasps that held the disc in place, then he whirled around when he thought he saw a shadow moving through the smoke. No shadow. He turned back to the disc and inspected the clasps, which were supported by thin chains. He put the barrel of the Uzi against one of the chains and squeezed off a shot. The chain parted and the disc fell against its support and tolled like a doom bell.
Carroll holstered his Uzi then yanked the chain from where it had been fed through the frame. The disc came free and fell against his leg. He swore. It weighed about as much as a car wheel. He began rolling it back towards his craft thinking it might make a suitable wheel for some chariot of fire.
Ahead of him, the now thinning smoke was lit by a flash of red. A laser firing, but not towards him. He halted, lowered the disc to the ground, and drew his Uzi. The sounds of abrupt movement impinged. He waited, sweat running like ants through his hair. Finally he decided he could wait no longer, since the Four were probably on their way back even now. He unhooked a grenade from his belt, pulled its pin, and tossed it ahead of him, then crouched down using the Clown's soul disc as a shield. The detonation was sharp and powerful; a bright flash lighting the smoke before brushing it aside. Carroll stood in time to see the deadly scene before him.
The android with blind eyes was running towards him at phenomenal speed. In no way could this one have been mistaken for the man Carroll had fought and killed. This was the machine that had taken his head off with his own sword. It was not his only worry either. Off to one side, two men were levelling lasers in his general direction. He lifted his Uzi and fired as he dived to one side. The shots thwacked into the android but to no effect. Carroll dropped his Uzi, groping for a grenade. Suddenly the android became blackly silhouetted against this flare of red. Hissing, bubbling and boiling smoke the android flew in half along a line from its shoulder to its groin, showing sparks, cogs, and metallic bones all about.
Carroll pushed himself upright and watched in stunned amazement as a pair of legs kicked round in circles like an unwinding clockwork toy. He gazed at the metal skull attached to a shoulder and arm, the fingers of the hand still flexing. Then he looked up from these macabre debris to the two Egyptians striding towards him.
‘He thought us naive enough to believe this part of the game. We allowed him to think that,’ said one of them.
Carroll thought he recognized the manner of speech even though translated, and was not surprised when a passing band of smoke finally revealed Ramses.
‘Anubis?’ Carroll asked, standing up and removing his gas mask.
The two Egyptians came to halt before him, their eyes streaming but their expressions determined. For a moment he could not tell them apart until Ramses spoke again.
‘I will have my treasure and my slaves yet,’ he said, his eyes locking with Carroll's. Then he and the other Egyptian stooped down, took up the Clown's soul disc and carried it to the craft. No more was said for a moment, and Carroll, acting as vanguard, saw no further movement in the smoke. Once they had loaded the disc Carroll stepped aboard and strapped in before turning to Ramses and his twin.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
Ramses reply was, ‘Serve Osiris well soldier. I would burn no more.’
Carroll nodded in understanding and with no more to say took his vessel up and out of the smoke. It could have been his imagination, but as he came up into clear air he thought he heard a wild yell, and he thought he saw two flashes of red.
♠♠♠
Once up and out of the smoke Carroll sent his craft speeding in the direction of the Reaper's old base again. He could not return directly to the ship with the Four likely returning from there. All he could now do was go into hiding and await further instructions from the Clown, or until he knew for certain it was safe to return to the ship. And so he flew on, continually searching the sky for the four black specks that would mean failure and death for him. It seemed to take forever for the building to come into sight, but eventually it did. Gratefully he spiralled the craft down and taxied it within.
As soon as the craft settled to the floor Carroll opened up the medical kit he had brought along, since his arm was beginning to hurt rather badly now. He first injected a heavy dose of local anaesthetic, then he packed the plasma-seeping wound with cotton wool soaked in an antiseptic and bound it up tightly. By the time he had finished dressing it his arm was going dead and hung like something separate from him. He made a sling to support it then quickly moved to the partition and wrestled it into place.
Now as safe as he could be he went to inspect his cargo. It was, as he had thought from his first glimpse of it, just like a huge coloured CD. However, it was not made from plastic but the same material as the other discs – translucent and red and the texture of glass. It was a yard across, an inch thick, and had a hole at its centre an inch in diameter. Gazing at this recording of fantastic life, this prison, Carroll wondered not for the first or last time about the Clown. He took his own disc from his pocket and pressed it against the Clown’s disc. These things were made from a single information-carrying molecule, the Clown had told him. What information makes me what I am? All he knew and all he had experienced, was part of it, obviously. But he realized that stored on this disc must be the blue-prints for his body.
Carroll leant back against a table and flipped his disc like a coin. It was pertinent to remember that the being he would resurrect, of which the Clown was ghost, a mere trace, was older than human history, older in fact than the planet the human race had evolved on. The Clown was a being capable of engineering a construction beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend. And, shortly, he, Jason Carroll, would resurrect it. He flipped his disc again and pocketed it, wondering if he would regret what he intended to do. Four black shapes crossing the sky visible beyond the doors reminded him that he had few choices really.
‘Are you ready?’ came the Clown's voice from behind him.
He turned to view the innocuous spectre. ‘How can I be anything else?’
The Clown tilted his head and regarded him for a moment. ‘If all goes well, Jason Carroll,’ he said, ‘you and many others will be free of the Four.’
‘Yes, but will I be free?’ Carroll asked as he climbed into the seat of the craft.
‘Define freedom,’ said the Clown.
Carroll remained silent as he manoeuvred the craft to the wall partition. As it fell like a drawbridge before him he chuckled. ‘That's a difficult one. No one's free, I suppose.’ He turned to peered at the Clown, now hovering behind his seat. ‘I was just wondering what comes after the Four.’
The Clown replied, ‘When the Four are neutralised I shall finish the project I began. This solar disc will be made habitable and the human race will be resurrected to live upon it.’
‘Seems almost too good to be true,’ said Carroll.
‘You do not like happy endings?’
‘No, just a pessimist I suppose.’
They flew on, out over the steel plain and its abrupt ending, then out of the landscape of grey and red. Carroll had other questions he could have asked but he felt no inclination. The Clown would have answered him, but he knew he could never be sure of those answers until they were proven true or otherwise. He was tired now; tired of the fantastic and the strange. He wanted events brought to their resolution, to see the Four gone and to know the truth about the Clown. So th
inking, he increased their speed towards the ship.
Pillars of smoke again, he thought, when at last the ship came into sight. Then, irrelevantly, Pillars of Hercules. Of course, the Four had been here.
‘What attracted them here?’ he asked.
‘The steel plain, as you call it, I shifted by the action of one of the ship's motors. They came here to destroy the motor and the one they thought to be the culprit.’ Carroll thought back to the five black specks and the one that fell.
‘The robot,’ he guessed. The Clown nodded in reply.
Closer to the ship and Carroll saw that the smoke was coming from the fused remains of the massive turbine he had walked under before entering the ship. It was now an empty, holed and sagging husk, sitting in a pool of glass. He thought that a shame.
‘How did this motor shift the steel... the matter converter?’ he asked.
‘It generated a displaced gravity field,’ replied the Clown.
‘Oh, right,’ said Carroll, aware now that perhaps there were some things that could not be explained to him. In silent contemplation of gravity fields and matter converting machines the size of the isle of Wight he brought his craft down to the hole torn in the top of the ship and eventually to the chamber at its heart. Since he had left this place, and until the time of its destruction, it seemed the robot had been very busy.
The wreckage strewn all around those two megalithic constructions no longer looked quite like wreckage. Cables, pipes, and ducts linked fused mass to fused mass. Many areas had been cleared to make way for massive tanks and veined spheres, also linked into the network.
‘There,’ said the Clown, pointing to an area below the two megaliths. Snapping out of amazed reverie Carroll moved the craft to the area indicated. As he landed he could see what his next task would be.
Below the megaliths lay a lump of machinery like a grounded flying saucer, a ramp from the floor up to the top of it, in which had been made an indentation exactly the size of the Clown's disc. Carroll was already out of his seat and reaching for the disc when the Clown stated the obvious.
