Part II

The lines between sciences have, in the last few centuries, become wide grey wastelands where questions of science become questions of philosophy and sometimes of religion. If you can build a human, molecule for molecule like any other human, then is he a human? Perhaps it is a question that will not need to be answered. Though we have the capability, we do not have the inclination. We can build better than nature now. We can now design and build machines that make some of the creations of evolution seem comparatively clunky. Of course, you then have to think about whether or not this is merely a continuance of evolution, then you're back to philosophy again.

From How It Is by Gordon

Twenty years in the ES regulars had left Cheryl with a jaundiced view of human nature and an almost supernatural recognition of potential shitstorms. When she saw the huge figure standing amongst the rows of vines, she did not shout a greeting nor ask that figure its business. She immediately ducked down, accessed her aug, and sent out a recall to the pickers. A two-and-a-half- metre-tall metal-skin would not come to the crop house to enquire about the passionfruit business, nor to purchase juice for one of the wine makers. Cheryl kept utterly still and hoped that the android had not heard her, and she felt some relief when the first of the pickers came along the rows.

These pickers were something to make the skin crawl on anyone who had not been born on Viridian. They were made so that they could scuttle through the vines without causing too much damage as they selected fruits of the required ripeness. Upon finding such a fruit, they did not actually pick it, but they would grip it in their mandibles and suck it dry; and once their sacklike bodies were full, they would go to empty themselves at one of the juicing stations. The AI that had designed them had taken their template from an Earth lifeform perfectly suited to this task. That lifeform was good at both scuttling and sucking things dry. Each picker, as a result, was a black plastic spider with a body the size of a football.

The android flicked its head from side to side as the spiders moved past it. Cheryl set a loop in their programs so they would keep searching the rows in that same area, then very carefully backed away. Now, with any luck, the android would not hear her: the scuttling in the growths might cover the sounds of her breathing and her heartbeat. When she had put four rows between herself and potential trouble, she crouched down by the small silo of a juicing station and put a call, through her aug, to the authorities in the capital. She was unsurprised to find her signal blocked. Just as she was unsurprised to see a man, another two rows across, walking towards the crop house. This man was dressed in plain businesswear, had black hair, and a black sun-band across his eyes. The giveaway was the Drescon assault rifle he had hanging from a shoulder strap.

Cheryl very carefully moved in the opposite direction from him. His attention was firmly fixed on the crop house and he was speaking into a comunit. So, there were others. Cheryl was very glad of the habit of dress she had acquired during those twenty years, a habit reinforced by the tendency of some Viridian inhabitants to sneak in and empty juicing stations in order to make a shilling or two with the wine makers. Her ES battle fatigues were chameleon cloth. Had they not been she felt sure she would be dead by now.

Five small thuds came in quick succession from her right. Not from the man she had already spotted. She froze and felt a sudden surge of fear. Until the moment she heard the horrible mosquito whining that followed immediately upon the shots, this had almost been like a training exercise. Seeker bullets! Whoever these people were, they were using seeker bullets. The sound of smashing glass leavened her fear. The shots had been fired at the crop house. Had she been inside, the bullets would have found her by now, homing in on her body heat to detonate at her skin in a blast of micro-shrapnel. A couple of small explosions then came from the house. The bullets had probably decided on hitting the most likely heat sources. That meant the central heating in the house would be gone.

Cheryl reached round to the back of her head and undid the neck pocket of her fatigues. She pulled the hood over and fixed the mask across. Now she could take the risk of standing and having a look. Three men walked out from between the vines and into the yard of the crop house. They were talking and gesturing. The android just stood there with a briefcase clutched in its brass hand. It gave her the creeps. She auged up a visual intensifier program, and got XI0. Now she could study these intruders more closely. Two of the men looked the typical suited thugs that some organizations recruited. The tüird man, in his mesh shirt and baggy fatigue trousers, seemed to be in charge. There also seemed to be something wrong with him. She downloaded what she was seeing as a visual file, then slowly dropped back down. The face of the man she enclosed in a frame, and had the aug tidy up, was a mess. He had some sort of optical link that did not seem to have taken so well, and his face was haggard and scabby. She stood again to see what they would do next, and now set her aug to record everything she was seeing and hearing.

One of the suits crossed the yard to the transporter: an AGC that was simply an open-backed truck with a framework able to carry juicing stations. The other suit walked around to the back of the house, and soon returned driving Cheryl's personal AGC. So that was what this was all about: they just wanted transport. Good. Once they secured it and went on their way, whatever blocker they had would go with them. She watched while the android tore the framework from the back of the transporter and tossed it aside before taking its place there. Foamed steel frame: it had to be strong to take the weight of the juicing stations. Cheryl swallowed dryly. She had definitely made the right move. The other suit got into her AGC - she would have liked to have known how they broke the security lock - and the leader sat at the controls of the transporter. Soon they were up in the sky and roaring overhead, all turbines opened at full. Cheryl waited until they were out of sight before heading back into the crop house. She had almost reached the door when a hand caught her shoulder.

Cheryl reacted. She caught the hand, pulled on it, and drove her elbow back as hard as she could. No pulling punches; this was life or death. Her blow elicited a grunt. The next thing she knew there was a grip on the back of her fatigues, on her arm, and she was airborne. She hit the ground flat on her back, spun her legs to give her momentum, and then nipped up into a fighting crouch. The man standing before her was heavily built, had cropped ginger hair, and seemed to have been in the wars. As she pulled her pathetic chainglass pruning knife, just one thought went through her mind. Fuck: boosted.

'I could have let you go in,' said John Stanton, holding his hand to his torso and looking ill. Cheryl paused at that. If she ran, she would probably get it in the back. 'What do you mean?' she asked.

'They stole a personal AGC. So they'd have known someone was here.'

'So?'

'You army?'

'I was.'

'Then you should know about seeker bullets. Programmed levels of targeting. Five shots and two explosions. What does that mean, soldier?'

Cheryl got a sudden cold shudder when she realized what he was saying. 'You're not with them?' she asked.

'Not now,' said Stanton. 'And I suggest we put a bit of distance between us and this house.'

Cheryl put her pruning knife back in her belt and stood upright. She nodded and walked back to the edge of the vine field. The man walked along with her, and she noted how gingerly he was moving and that there was a drug patch on his neck. She wondered if he had not replied to her attack with a killing blow simply because it would hurt him too much at present. After a moment she took her attention away from him and directed it towards the field.

'Pickers run on chemical batteries that get warm,' she said.

He said nothing in reply to that, but it gratified her to see his expression when three pickers scuttled out of the field and headed for the house. He seemed about to ask something then, but he assumed a tired look and just watched the pickers go in through the door. Three explosions followed in quick succession. On a billow of smoke, a couple of black plastic legs came tumbling through one of the broken windows.

'Who are they - and who are you?' she asked.

'You got any more AGCs here?'

'No, and you haven't answered my question.'

Stanton shrugged and replied, because he could not be bothered not to reply, 'The ugly one is a Separatist bastard called Arian Pelter. The android is the psychotic Mr Crane. The rest are like me: mercenaries.'

'Why they here?'

'To die, if I have my way. Now tell me, where's the nearest habitation?'

Cheryl pointed. 'About ten kilometres that way.'

'And the runcible installation?'

'About a thousand kilometres beyond that.' Stanton looked in that direction, then back at the house. 'Right, I need the use of your medkit, and I need food and water. Consider these payment for your life.'

'Inside,' Cheryl said, and let him go ahead of her into the house. As he did so she sent the recording from her aug, and kept the channel open for real-time transmission. She thought it unlikely this man would reach his destination, once the police received her recording. She also thought it likely Viridian would be receiving a visit from ECS sometime soon.

From the mask, clean oxygen blasted into her face and she gasped at it. A light-headed euphoria flooded her, but only for a moment. Pain was secondary; oxygen was survival as it charged her cells. But as her organism became satisfied it now had attention to spare for that pain.

'One moment,' said a gruff voice.

There was a gentle fumbling in her neck ring, then pressure at the side of her neck as a drug patch was pressed into place. Through blurry eyes she saw a mesh ceiling and a thin bluish hand retreating from view. Out-linker, was her one thought.

'Fused across the join. We'll have to cut,' said the gruff voice.

'Then cut,' replied a woman's voice. 'She's probably still bleeding in there.'

A dentist-drill whine quickly followed on the words. She felt the Outlinker tugging at her suit. While he was doing that the edge went off the pain, but Jarvellis knew she needed more than a patch to block it completely. She was in a bad way. She didn't need to see her injuries to know that.

'That's got it. Get Sam over here.'

The suit seal crumpled as it disengaged and she felt the motors in the back of the suit hinging it open.

She screamed as something ripped in her hip.

'Shit, a lump of chainglass. Sorry, darlin'. Close off that artery, Sam.'

Jarvellis clamped down on another scream as something cold went into her hip. She heard wet slicing sounds and the pain became more intense. Another patch went down on her stomach and another on her knee. When she thought she could bear the pain no longer it started to fade a little. Now she felt something else pressed against her breast. A blessed cold numbness suffused it. She felt herself beginning to drift on the load of painkillers pumping round her blood supply. But the narrow hand would not allow this; it patted at her face.

'Stay with us. I want you to lift your head and look,' said the gruff voice.

Jarvellis just lay there. She didn't see any incentive to move. John was dead. The Lyric was gone. It was all over. The patting turned to a slap and the voice got angrier.

'Wake up, damn it!'

This seemed too cruel after all that had happened. Why couldn't they just leave her alone? She opened her eyes and raised her head to tell them to do just that, but in the end could not even manage to.

She lay on the ceramal floor of an airlock. To her left crouched a little robot the shape of a limpet. It had two multi-jointed arms, and she almost chucked when she saw how it had opened her leg to reach in and clamp the artery. The thigh, pad it was reaching over had a bloody dagger of chainglass right through it. Jarvellis did not want to know what might lie under the dressing on her breast. She inspected the other two occupants of the lock.

They were Oudinkers and they were old. The man and the woman were both dressed in baggy garments that failed to conceal how incredibly thin they were. Here were people whose forebears had gone in for radical adaptation. They were perfectly adapted for station life, for weighdessness. Put mem on a planet with anything approaching Earth gravity, and they would collapse like dolls made of tissue paper. Jarvellis noticed that the man had a crust around his mouth, and there were specks of blood on his bluish skin. She remembered now that Oudinkers could survive in vacuum for a short period of time. It must have been he who had retrieved her.

'This station is still revolving,' he informed her.

She tried to understand what he was getting at. The woman, standing nervously behind him, was holding a nerve-blocker. Why the hell didn't she use it?

The man went on. 'Listen carefully. You will the without proper medical attention. Out here on the edge we're at about a quarter of a G. I got you into here using a cable winder. I cannot get you further into the station by myself, and I do not have the equipment set-up to do so. It would take too long.'

Jarvellis let her head drop back. So that was it. Out here, for them, she was an impossible weight to move. They were probably having enough trouble keeping themselves upright. Habit took over then: the habit of survival. She licked dry lips and spoke with a cracked voice.

'My leg.'

The man said, 'I'll have Sam place a clamp, but that's all we can do for now.'

'Hell,' said Jarvellis, and looked up at the wall behind her. Cable snaked up from the back of her suit to a winder that had been hastily welded to the wall. with her right arm she reached up and gripped the cable. She did not look down in response to the sudden pain in her thigh as the littie robot called Sam placed the clamp. Inch by agonizing inch, she hauled herself back until her lower legs were free of the suit. Her right leg was no problem; her left leg was dead weight. When it came free she yelled, but just kept going. The Oudinkers moved back. An accidental blow from her - if she stumbled, anydüng - would snap their bones like sugar sticks. Finally she slid sideways from the suit. Actually standing was out of the question.

The man moved further back and pressed a button by the inner door. The door irised open with a cacophonous shriek. This place was old.

'There's an elevator fifty metres round from here. We'll walk just ahead of you. I'll not ask you if you can make it, because you have no other options.'

Jarvellis felt that she did have another option, but she began painfully dragging herself across the floor on her side. The litde robot zipped around in a U beside her and behind her, as if enjoying düs one chance of experiencing its true calling as a sheepdog.