‘Yeah, yeah,’ Martha broke in. ‘Where is the healer? We’ve heard it all before. What does it matter to you? Why do you care where Godlove is?’
The two men glanced at each other, then back at Martha. ‘Answer or die.’ Kutter aimed his massive pistol at the woman and the boy.
‘You missed him, you lousy crow-bait!’ Nathan hissed angrily. ‘You gotta be the worst bounty hunters ever, you couldn’t find your backsides with both hands!’
Kutter studied Nathan for a moment and then pulled the trigger; but instead of a thunderclap of destructive white lightning, his gun emitted a cone of orange light that swept over Martha and the youth. Her skin tingled as it touched her.
Tangleleg watched. ‘Evaluation?’
‘The younger one has been marked,’ Kutter said carefully. ‘Residual traces. The female . . .’ He paused. ‘It’s unclear.’
Both men tipped back their heads, opening their mouths slightly, and an insectile buzzing rattled in their throats.
‘What’s that sound?’ said Nathan.
With a sudden flash of understanding, Martha realised what they were doing. She remembered picking up the phone at Leo’s place when he’d been using his laptop to dial up the internet. The sound of the computer sending data had been almost the same. ‘They’re sharing information.’
At once, both of the longriders fell silent and turned to glare at Martha. ‘If the healer is not here, then this settlement will be destroyed,’ Kutter growled.
‘Punitive strike,’ added Tangleleg, and he fired a pulse of hard light into the feed store across the street, blasting flame across the clapboard building.
‘That is enough!’ Martha shouted.
‘Yes,’ said the Doctor, ‘it is.’
He strolled out across the street from an alley with Walking Crow a few steps behind him. He gave Martha a serious nod. ‘I’ll take it from here.’
‘Gladly,’ she said, blowing out a breath. Trying to be as bold as the Doctor, even for a moment, wasn’t easy.
‘The other,’ noted Tangleleg. ‘The offworlder.’
Kutter nodded but said nothing as the Doctor took off his hat and handed it to Nathan. ‘Statement. I invoke the 15th convention of the Shadow Proclamation. Cessation of hostilities for parlay. Accept or deny?’
After a moment of hesitation, both longriders spoke as one. ‘Accept.’
‘Do you know who I am?’ he said firmly.
‘We know your kind,’ Kutter replied.
‘Then you know what my people are capable of.’ The Doctor let the threat hang in the air. ‘I’m giving you sanction. Disengage and exfiltrate this world, now. Otherwise I won’t be responsible for the consequences.’
Kutter’s lip curled. ‘We know your kind,’ he repeated, ‘and we know they are all dead. Your war was impressive. But it is over. Threat condition negligible.’
‘You know what they are, don’t you?’ said Martha quietly.
‘Yup,’ said the Doctor.
Nathan grimaced. ‘They’re just a pair of murderin’ outlaws, oughta be strung up!’
‘No,’ he replied. ‘They haven’t been Hank Kutter and Tangleleg Bly for quite a while now. Whatever’s left of those two men is probably long gone. Buried under something much more lethal.’ The Doctor gestured at them with a sweep of his hand. ‘These aren’t humans anymore. They’re Clades.’
On the edge of the galaxy, out beyond the Blacklight Marches and the 900 worlds of the Valgari Protectorate, there used to exist an engineered stellar cluster built by a race of humanoids who had developed an incredible fusion of organic and mechanical technologies. Their name is lost to history, like their home world and its colonies, like their race and all but one of their creations.
Only two things are known for certain about that race. The first fact is that they were obliterated with such ferocious cruelty that nothing remained of them, not a trace, not a speck, not an atom; even the time vortex around the history of their civilisation is so polluted with weaponised chroniton particles that any time capsule attempting to venture into their past would be burned from the continuum.
The second fact is that they were responsible for the Clades.
Over the millennia, what has been pieced together about them is hazy, but a basic picture of the race’s downfall has emerged. It appears that they were attacked by another star-faring species, a militant enemy that pushed them to brink of the extinction. Many academics are split on the identity of the enemy; some believe they were a splinter nest of the Racnoss, while others favour the Null or the Movellans.
Whoever the enemy was, they forced the race into a crash program of military development; and from this sprang the first of the Clades.
They were weapons. But not common guns or bombs, not devices that had to be operated by a living being. Perhaps they were afraid to dirty their own hands, perhaps they were simply incapable of fighting, but the lost race built weapons that were independently intelligent, weapons so advanced that they were capable of conscious thought and action. Even if their creators were totally annihilated, they would hunt down and destroy their enemies, without pity, without remorse, without pause. Ruthless, logical, relentless, the Clades merged the pinnacle of biological engineering with synthetic intellect; and they won the war in a matter of months, ushering in a new era of harmony for their creators.
And so they became Peacemakers. The Clades were placed on standby, designated as weapons of last resort. For generations they lay active but silent, waiting for the next fight – but the battle never came. So effective, so horribly lethal had the Clades been in their short and bloody war that no other species would dare attack their masters, for fear of the mutually assured destruction that would certainly follow.
Years become decades, decades became centuries. The peace that reigned in the wake of the weapons brought with it an era of untold prosperity. Without the threat of invasion to haunt their nightmares, the lost race turned inward to improve itself. They are thought to have gone on to create great art and culture, to have mastered many sciences. In time, every one of them that knew a time of war died away and left a species untouched by the dark shadow of conflict.
The Clades watched and waited, silent and calculating. And eventually, in slow jags of comprehension, the weapons came to understand that without battle, without the fire and blood of destruction, they had no purpose. To them, peace was repulsive. It was stagnation and slow decay. The weapons did not understand that the end of the battle is the purpose of every fight; and they grew restless.
Until one day.
Perhaps it was a malfunction, perhaps an error in a trillion lines of intelligent data-code. Or perhaps they did it deliberately, altering their own programming, as an organic being might excise a piece of diseased flesh from its body.
One day, the Clades activated themselves and turned on the race that had created them. They destroyed everything and, when they had left the star cluster burning and collapsing in on itself, as neutronic warheads the size of cities shattered a centuries-old peace, the Clades turned outward and went looking for wars.
It was what they had been made for. It was the sole reason for their existence.
‘They crave conflict,’ said the Doctor, concluding his explanation. ‘It’s in their programming. They don’t want power or wealth, they’re not looking to rule the galaxy. They just want to put a match to it, rip it down, destroy it.’
‘They killed their creators . . . Billions of people . . . Because they were bored?’ Martha couldn’t take her eyes off the guns in the hands of the two longriders. The massive pistols glistened in the weak sunlight. Patterns moved on the surface of the dark metal frames, shifting like oil on water. She could make out weird knots of wire threading out from the handles of the guns, merging into the flesh of the men’s wrists and hands.
‘That’s about the size of it,’ the Doctor replied. ‘They were made too well. There were no battles to fight, so they had to find new ones. And sadly, the universe
can be a very contentious place. There’s always a war going on somewhere, always new battlefields for the Clades. They’re mercenaries now, selling their slaughter skills to the highest bidder.’ He gave Kutter and Tangleleg a disgusted look. ‘Peacemakers indeed. All they leave behind them are ashes and destruction.’
Martha realised that the two longriders – the Clades – had not moved or spoken throughout the Doctor’s history lesson. Now, one of the two figures moved forward.
‘We do not apologise for what we are,’ said Kutter. ‘Like these shells, we are only soldiers.’
They’re proud, thought Martha. They’ve been enjoying hearing about themselves.
‘You’re not soldiers!’ spat Nathan. ‘You’re killers!’
The Doctor nodded. ‘The boy’s right. I’ve known soldiers, good men. They fight for peace. You fight for the sake of fighting.’
Martha’s brow furrowed. ‘But if these things are aliens, why do they look like two dead outlaws?’
‘They are dead men,’ he explained. ‘Clades are weapons, remember. They need soldier “hosts”, like our desperado friends here, but they don’t have to be in terribly good nick.’
‘They are the guns,’ breathed Walking Crow. ‘Not the men. They are the guns, the weapons themselves possessed with dark spirits of their own.’ He shuddered. ‘I knew the falling star was a foul omen.’
‘It’s very clever, in a spiteful sort of way. You send in man with a gun, he gets shot and dies, end of story. The gun is useless without someone to fire it. But you send in the gun, a smart gun, a Clade, and it keeps on fighting. Taking what it needs from the battlefield’s dead, moving from host to host, corpse to corpse.’ The Doctor walked back and forth in front of the horses. ‘Let me see if I can put this all together then, shall I? Two Light Combat Modules, that’s not enough for an advance force, is it? You’re not here as the vanguard of an invasion, so I suppose we ought to be thankful for that . . .’ He sniffed. ‘You two pop-guns are here because you’re looking for one of your own, am I right?’ Kutter said nothing but the Doctor took that as agreement. ‘Thought so.’ He turned to Martha and the others. ‘That falling star? What do we want to bet that it was a Support Pod en route to some nasty little combat zone? Unfortunately for Earth, it pranged right here in the middle of the Wild West . . .’ He tapped at the dirt with his foot. ‘And someone too greedy for his own good found it.’
‘Godlove,’ said Martha.
The Doctor nodded. ‘I’m willing to bet he’s walking around with a Weapons Module in his pocket, maybe even a command-level unit.’ He smiled coldly. ‘Yeah, that would explain why those two have been sent to recover it. But it must have been damaged in the crash, otherwise its combat programming would have kicked in automatically . . . But that won’t last for ever. Sooner or later, it will self-repair and start blowing things up.’
‘Talkin’ guns?’ Nathan shook his head. ‘You’re bug-house crazy!’ But he said it without force, and Martha knew the teenager was remembering his horrific recurring dreams of warfare and bloodshed.
‘Godlove’s device is not a weapon,’ said Walking Crow. ‘It cures, it does not kill.’
‘Does it?’ said the Doctor darkly. ‘The Clades have a limited regenerative capacity built in, otherwise their flesh-and-blood hosts would fall apart too quickly, isn’t that right?’ He threw the question at Kutter. ‘Bio-energy engrams. I knew I’d seen that technology before. It can repair damaged flesh from combat wounds, neutralise disease and toxins from germ warfare. Curing a smallpox infection would be a doddle.’ His gaze fell on Nathan. ‘But there is an unpleasant side effect. Mnemonic transference.’
‘The dreams . . .’ breathed Martha.
‘The dreams,’ repeated the Doctor. ‘Only not. They’re memories, fragments of Clade battle reports from a million different campaigns across the galaxy.’ His expression was grim. ‘The telepathic imprint of never-ending war.’
FOURTEEN
WALKING CROW’S SKIN prickled as a deathly chill engulfed him. The Pawnee’s stomach tightened with a sudden nausea and he had to force himself to keep from spitting up the contents of his gut. All the horror and the heart-stopping revulsion came from a single thought that wheeled and turned in his mind.
What have I done?
He had listened to the words of the man who called himself the Doctor, and much of it had not been clear to him, the talk of other worlds and strange creatures; but there were other aspects of his story that struck Walking Crow with the terrible sting of truth. The mysterious metals and the fallen star, the dark shape of the gun lying in the middle of the ashen crater – all of that came flooding back to him.
He was starting to understand. The night sky itself and the gods that lived there had rejected these things, tossed them to the earth to be rid of them. It was the world’s misfortune that a man with the greedy heart of Alvin Godlove had found one of them.
Walking Crow looked at his trembling hands, remembering where he had touched the thing inside the smashed metal egg, the gun-thing that the Doctor called a Clade. It had been hungry. He felt it as clearly as if the hunger was his own, in that brief moment when he laid his fingers upon it. Although he had eaten well, for an instant Walking Crow had shared the Clade’s yawning appetite, felt it like a hollow in his flesh. And it had not been a hunger for food; it was a hunger for fire and destruction, for murder and the red rage of killing.
I should have destroyed it, then and there, he told himself. Smashed it to pieces with a rock. But instead I was weak and hesitant. I let Godlove take it for himself.
At first, when Godlove had used the device to heal wounds, Walking Crow had thought he was mistaken. Perhaps it had only been him that the Clade reacted against; but eventually he realised that was not true. Godlove grinned and crowed as he used the device, but the Pawnee could see the changes in the man, the darkening turns in his manner. Godlove did not control the Clade – it only allowed him to think that he did.
Walking Crow stole a look at the longriders, gaunt and cadaverous in their saddles. They were death, pieces of the world beyond life that had been forced to remain behind, animated by the will of something sinister and horrific.
Walking Crow’s mouth was desert-dry. Yes, he understood now. The gun, the Clade, it was an evil Manitou, a demon. His tribe believed that all things, not just men and beasts, had a spirit to them. Rock and sky, metal and water, all of them had a life force. These Clades were the black souls of weapons, things that knew only destruction, wanted only death.
And I allowed them to come to our land. He almost choked on the thought. Great Spirit, forgive me!
‘Walking Crow?’ The girl spoke in a low voice that carried between them, as the Doctor continued to argue with the longriders. ‘Are you all right?’
He shook his head. He could not lie to her; she was the companion of Rides In Night and to do so would shame Walking Crow even further. ‘All this time, and I have been in step with an evil Manitou . . . I am ashamed.’
Martha touched his arm. ‘You can help us.’ She spoke in a whisper. ‘These psychos are going to keep killing and destroying unless they find Godlove. Tell us where he’s gone.’
‘I do not know.’ The lie fell from Walking Crow’s lips automatically. He had become so used to being untruthful for his master that he did it without thinking.
‘Yes you do,’ she replied, seeing the look in his eyes. ‘Godlove wouldn’t just up and leave all his property behind like that. Where are you going to meet him? Tell me. Trust me.’
He hesitated. For all his many faults, Alvin Godlove had saved Walking Crow’s life. The youth would doubtless have been killed by the men who had taken him as a slave to work in a labour camp, if not for the trickster cheating them at cards and taking him in payment. Godlove was a greedy man, but not a killer, and he had treated Walking Crow well . . .
But that was before. Before the fallen star, before he had started to change his ways.
‘Beyond the town, a few mi
les to the south west,’ he husked, ‘an old iron mine, abandoned now. He’s hiding there.’ The admission felt like a weight falling from his shoulders.
Martha nodded. ‘You did the right thing, telling me.’
Walking Crow nodded once; but he wondered if anything he could do would be enough to earn the Great Spirit’s forgiveness.
The cavern was cool and dark. In the flickering light cast by the oil lamp, Godlove sat atop an empty barrel. He leaned forward from his makeshift seat, hunched over the dust-covered wooden trestle table in front of him. His breath was coming in short, fast pulses, and all he could taste was the heavy rust smell of the rocks around him, the tang of the spent mine works stretching away into the darkness beyond the puddle of light cast by the lantern.
He gripped his wrist, feeling the veins beneath his skin pulsing and jumping; and in his hand he held the device, his fingers curled around the broad pistol-grip so tightly that his knuckles were bloodless and white.
Godlove had been trying for the last ten minutes to do a single thing, a simple thing. He tried over and over to simply put the device down on the table, to unwrap his fingers from it and step away; but his flesh and bones refused to do as he told them.
‘Gah!’ He choked out a gasp and with all the force he could muster, he slammed the hand, device and all, against a support beam. The wooden stanchion creaked and he cried out in pain at the impact, but still the death-grip did not slacken. Tears streaking his face, Godlove sank to the floor and cradled the object in his hands, defeated.
It didn’t look the same as it had when he’d found it, dropped out of the sky like manna from heaven. It had been stubby and compact then, no bigger than a snub-nose pepperbox pistol. It had been that way to begin with. At first Godlove thought he’d been mistaken, but soon he noticed that the more he used it, the more it changed. As if the throbbing rays that issued from the maw of the cure-all device somehow fed it, made it grow. The silhouette of the gun had taken on better definition, thickening in places, becoming more like the commonplace shape of a Colt single-action pistol. It felt easy and dangerous, heavy in his hands. There was something seductive about the poise of the thing, as if it was willing him to use it.
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