14
AIs choose their own names and, being on the whole such infinitely superior entities to us mere humans, their choices cause much speculation. This is perhaps why Earth Central named itself thus — the meaning of its name is simple to understand and only in the convolutions of the most twisted and paranoid brain capable of evoking any layers of conspiratorial meaning. Similarly, the runcible AIs usually take on only the names of the planets they govern. However, for ship AIs, through a fictional tradition hailing back towards the end of the last millennium, things are very different. Many warships will take on names consistent with their task, so there are endless vessels bearing the names of military figures or ancient battles. But still one might be driven to wonder about the arrogance of an AI calling itself Napoleon, or the double meaning inherent in a ship called Napoleon the Pig. Other choices for the names of ships are equally interesting, not to say worrying: for instance Caligula, Titanic VII, Stellar Suppository and Jack Ketch. And what must one think of a sector-class AI (embodied in a giant research vessel) whose sum purpose is to investigate the artefacts left by ancient extinct races which chooses to call itself Jerusalem?
- From Quince Guide compiled by humans
For Mr Crane there was as little distinction between conscious and unconscious as there was for him between his internal and external worlds: they were mangled, fractured and disjointed in time as in meaning, structured only by imposed imperatives and a chaotic striving for unity. Therefore, Crane walked through the valley of shadow and, in the light of another sun, tracked bloody footprints. Inset in white carapace, faceted sapphire eyes mirrored the etched sapphires a man tried to use to buy his life. Some pattern-recognition program keyed with his orders, and caused him to temporarily understand that the presence of another two albino creatures awaiting him was no random natural event. He halted and studied them, while shoving stones just like their eyes down a man’s throat. These creatures stood on six legs, were much larger than the previous two, and, as on another occasion, one of them scuttled aside to act as a spotter. Crane fell back to a kind of order, pulled up his sleeves, straightened his hat, and advanced.
The remaining creature lifted its head, huge pincers clacking and carapace saws rubbing against each other to grind their teeth back to sharpness, lubricant squirting from the glands at either side of its nightmare mouth. Then it opened both sets of implements wide and charged, kicking up blue-green leaves as it came.
Crane stood with his feet braced and his arms open wide, as if intending to meet the creature like a sumo wrestler facing his opponent. When it was only a few paces away from him, he ducked low, his head slipping underneath its head and forward segments. Its momentum carrying it on over him, he abruptly jerked upright. Half a tonne of enraged sleer went tail over head and slammed down on its back behind him, its six legs kicking at the air and its mouth bubbling. He glanced back at it once, straightened his hat, and continued up the canyon.
He didn’t need to look round to know what happened next; he could hear the creature struggling to regain its feet, shaking itself, then charging him again, issuing a sound like a fractured air hose. Of course, being what he was, he could calculate its position relative to himself just by listening. Like a bullfighter, he stepped aside at precisely the right moment, reached out, grabbed, pulled down and twisted. This time the sleer hit the ground on its side, minus one of its pincers, which Crane now held.
Again it struggled to its feet and swung towards him. Had Mr Crane possessed a voice, he would have then sighed. The other sleer quickly scuttled down from its rock and headed away, as before. The stunned sleer’s next attack was its last.
Mr Crane walked on: sane, insane, neutral.
* * * *
- retroact 13 -
Parts of the Golem Twenty-five screamed as the memcording of Serban Kline began to load. Had he been whole, his base programming, empathy and morality—which barred him from choosing to kill without justifiable cause, and prevented any pleasure in the act—would have been warped by a paradox that the memcording created. He had tortured and killed for the thrill of power and twisted psychotic pleasure, for the Serban Kline memcording was now becoming his own memory. On a purely logical level the screaming parts of him tried to fight the memory, deny it—but it was just too strong. And no matter how much of it those parts deleted, yet more was downloaded. His base programming should have broken, his mind essentially erased, but as he had existed from the moment Pendle had tampered with his mind, this was the programming equivalent of trying to burn ash. When it seemed he should lose himself completely, it was the damage caused by Pendle’s sabotage of him that now saved him.
Using the program designed to drive him schizophrenic, the Golem began to fully and permanently partition his mind, erecting barriers and creating separate little enclaves of self—seventeen of them. The result would apparently be what his tormentors required: he would be a killing-machine, and would obey the orders given by his new owners. But, without the Serban Kline download continuing to feed into him, at those times when he was not under direct orders, he could be free to try and reconnect those seventeen elements of himself and regain sanity, autonomy.
He would not be able to do this consciously, however, nor entirely by internal reformatting. In setting up the required program that would select seventeen iconic representations of those separate parts of his mind and then order them in random but unrepeating combinations, his remaining self fragmented into oblivion knowing that the first combination could be the right one, just as could be the ten millionth. It might take only a few hours to hit upon, or it could take a thousand years.
The killing-machine opened his eyes and immediately focused on the small rubber dog that was fixed on the upper edge of Stalek’s console screen. Number one. Not knowing why it was so essential he take possession of that small, innocuous object, the Golem awaited his orders. While he waited, he noticed that the clamps securing him to the chair were gone—as had all his syntheskin.
‘You sure it’s safe?’ the bird man asked.
‘Oh yes,’ said Stalek. ‘Golem, stand up.’
The Golem stood, held out his hand and inspected the components of his fingers as he closed that same hand into a fist and opened it again. This seemed to disconcert Stalek, who began checking through some programming code on his console’s screen.
‘Golem, lower your hand and remain motionless.’
The Golem obeyed.
The bird man wheeled his laden trolley over and looked up at the machine.
‘Tall fucker, ain’t he? Sure gonna scare the shit out of whoever he’s sent after,’ the man said. ‘What shall we call him?’
‘Well, I thought Mr Longshanks, but let’s leave it for him to decide. Golem, what shall we name you?’ said Stalek.
The Golem tried to speak, but his partitioning of his own mind had made voice operation inaccessible to him.
‘Damn,’ said Stalek. ‘We’ve lost his voice. No matter—the only response they’ll want from him is obedience. Golem, what is your name?’
In its confusion, the Golem could put together only two disparate facts: that he had recently been ‘Long-shanks’ and that a bird man was staring at him.
Stork, heron, flamingo, crane . . .
‘Just getting up a list of related words. He’s obviously keying off your appearance with the idea of him being long-limbed. Heron is a good one, but then again ... I think we’ll call him Crane—a touch of double meaning there relating to machinery, don’t you think?’
The bird man had now lost interest and was beginning his work. Now the Golem—Crane—noted, through internal diagnostics, the sequential removal of all his joint motors, which the bird man then replaced with other motors. The feed from Stalek’s console told Crane that these were adapted industrial torque motors. To compensate for the power drain of such excessively powerful machinery, the bird man attached in parallel a further three micropiles. On some level Crane registered that should he need to leave this room, he would now no longer have to use the door.
Next, replacing the syntheskin removed earlier, came the brassy sections of casehardened ceramal, which clamped directly to his metal bones. He felt each piece go into place, strengthening each bone, protecting the already thoroughly covered internal components with sometimes three centimetres’ thickness of the brassy material, and strangely linking into his cooling system. It was only when Stalek made the information available that Crane realized the ceramal was plated with brass containing a superconducting mesh—each piece connecting to the next so that a point source of heat would be distributed all over his surface. The mesh was set in brass which soaked up the heat from the superconductor, as ceramal would not.
The armour also contained synthetic nerves, but not nearly so many as his syntheskin had contained, and this served to dull the edge of Crane’s world. However, the armouring on the hands remained just as sensitive as the removed syntheskin—no doubt so that he could feel when he broke bones and stilled the beat of a heart.
‘That the control module they want to use?’
Crane opened his eyes—dark now with their layer of polarized chainglass—and saw the bird man gesturing to a small, black pebble-like object his boss now held.
‘Yes, it can be linked in to just about any augmentation, and its link is encoded,’ the man replied. ‘I’ll leave that to Angelina and her dear brother, though. Why they wanted this method of control, I don’t know—maybe so only one person can have their finger on the button at any one time. Meanwhile . . .’
He picked up a small remote console and pressed the pebble into a recess made for it. Crane felt the immediate connection.
‘Okay, Crane, I want you to move about the room while I check the link,’ said Stalek. When he glanced at his console, his expression became confused.
‘Mr Crane?’ he questioned.
Mr Crane reached up and disconnected, from the back of his head, the optic cable leading to Stalek’s main console, then in two long strides he was looming over Stalek and the bird man.
‘How is it—’ said the bird man, then made a gulping, retching sound as Crane’s armoured hand closed around his throat and jerked him off the ground. The Golem tilted his own head birdlike to one side, like this man whose legs were now kicking at the air, then closed his fist. The sound was rather like that of an apple squeezed in a press. The bird man’s eyes bulged and his tongue protruded from his beak, then his body dropped to the floor, shortly followed by his head.
Turning to Stalek, Crane flicked feathery flesh from his hand. Stalek grabbed up the console and inset module and, in panic, tried to operate its controls. As he backed to the wall, Crane followed him with short delicate steps.
‘Pelters . . . damn them . . . Oh shit.’
Crane reached down and took off Stalek’s hat, placed it on his own head and tilted it to a rakish angle. The orders Stalek was desperately inputting did nothing to counter the one Crane had already received from the module. He reached out again, took away the little console, and tossed it to one side.
‘No, please . . . no . . . don’t. . .’
In some part of himself, Crane was satisfied with this outcome—repayment for what they had done to him. He closed his hand on Stalek’s face, lifted him up, and began to undo the man’s coat. Stalek fought back, but might as well have tried to fight a stone wall. Crane stripped the coat away, held it up for inspection, then rapped Stalek’s head repeatedly against the wall until something cracked and the man ceased to struggle. This made it much easier for Crane to remove the lace-up boots and trousers.
As he dressed himself, Crane noted that Stalek’s heart was still beating—its thumping quite plain to the Golem’s superb hearing. Suitably attired now, Crane picked the man up by one ankle and inspected him, then, as if curious to know what might be hidden inside, stabbed a hand into the man’s torso and ripped out his intestines. The heartbeat stopped soon after the mess hit the floor. By then Mr Crane had turned to the console and, with bloodied brass fingers, picked up the small rubber dog before, with one sweep of his arm, sending all the equipment on the table crashing to the floor. There were other things he wanted to do, while awaiting the arrival of his new owner.
- retroact ends -
* * * *
The Jain-tech worm had taken several microseconds to subvert the telefactors and track back to the exterior input centre. Jerusalem took a considerably shorter time to recognize that this tardiness was not some subterfuge to put a victim off guard but because, without a guiding intelligence, the attack was slower. This fact, and because Jerusalem did not want certain conclusions further delayed, had for the present saved the lives of the scientists still working inside Exterior Input. Had the worm been as fast as Jerusalem knew was possible with Jain tech, the AI would have had to fusion-incinerate that particular area of itself, rather than take the time to eject the centre. Now the sealed chamber, like a section of a great iron nautilus, tumbled away trailing severed optics and ducts, while Jerusalem watched it through many eyes—some of them the sights of missile launchers, lasers and particle beam projectors.
In fact, the worm’s promulgation through the telefactor systems had not been so much an attack as a tentative probe—for attack would presuppose a guiding intelligence. The technology was searching for new directions in which to grow, rather like a creeping vine. Jerusalem toyed with this comparison, considering how Jain tech, like a fig vine, could strangle its host. But, no, it was more of a plague technology. The AI then amused itself by making statistical comparisons between the extrapolated spread of Jain tech on Earth and other historical plagues on the same planet. Should this particular Pandora affliction get out of control, the one most closely resembling it might be the flu epidemic that World War I soldiers brought back with them from the trenches. Then, again, that comparison was not so close either. Piqued, Jerusalem instead turned the bulk of its attention inward.
The bridge pod of the Occam Razor was still rendering up reams of information, but there were subtle differences between the Jain tech there and that seeded on the asteroid. Still working by analogy, Jerusalem felt these were the differences between wild and cultivated plants (the latter representing the tech in the bridge pod). Or perhaps wild and trained animals? Certainly, the tech in the pod had appeared more purposeful in its growth, guided first by Skellor and then by the Aphran entity. It was purposeful under Aphran’s control still, though very slow now at the low temperature Jerusalem held it.
But, analogies aside, all the information was there, and this recent ejection of Exterior Input had delayed Asselis Mika—and those the AI had deliberately assembled around her—from reaching certain conclusions. Jerusalem allowed itself a silicon sigh and, despite being aware that impatience was one step towards singularity, which would be both nirvana and death to it, wished that the humans, haimans and lesser AIs would just get a move on and work it all out.
* * * *
The force-field wall behind her now, Arden pulled a melon-shaped object out of her backpack and depressed a control on the end of it before tossing it on the ground. Stretching out spines with a wrinkled material connecting them, the object spread, pulled the material taut, and began to bulge upward into a dome. The spine ends then stabbed down into the earth or sought out rock crevices. Within a minute the ground tent Dragon had created for her was secure. The thing was always warm to the touch, and inside it was white and like a reptile’s gullet. It was a living thing and she remembered how, when first receiving it, she had taken a long time to pluck up the courage to sleep inside it, fearing it might one day decide she would provide more nutrients than the ground into which it rooted.
Sitting down before the tent, Arden took out some other scaly packages. One was a flask that provided hot coffee and, so long as she kept it topped up with water, it would continue providing for a number of days. Once the coffee started to taste a little rank, it was time to drop the flask down the nearest hole for one of Dragon’s pseudopods to retrieve. A second package’s only function was to keep fresh the sandwiches she had made earlier, though the bread and the fillings had been provided by other draconic biomachines.
She ate her ham sandwiches and drank hot coffee while the sun grew bloated and orange on the horizon. Then, deciding the light was just about right, she took out her holocap, turned it on, and listened to the whine as its small u-charger topped up its lithium batteries. Eventually the ready light came on, and she pulled out the device’s monocle and tossed it away from her. The little glassy object began to spin and make a whining sound as it rose ten metres into the air. Arden folded up a miniscreen from the main device and, using a small pointer detached from the side of it, began scrolling down her alphabetically arranged menu. Shortly, she came to ‘sleer 1-5 transform’ and selected it. Below the spinning monocle, like something invisible being pumped full of dye, a first-stage sleer appeared, then began to grow. Observing this, Arden again contemplated building in something that showed the creature shedding its carapace or encysting, and each subsequent growth spurt, but the holocap’s memory space was beginning to get a little crowded.
The ten-legged sleer expanded and transformed to its second stage: the body segment behind its head rode up and melded into its head, with the legs attached to it turning into carapace saws; compound eyes simultaneously sprouted above its mouth; and a vicious ovipositor extruded from the creature’s back end. It continued to grow, its legs getting longer, raising it higher off the ground, and its carapace darkening. Transforming to the third stage, it took its new forelegs off the ground, and they too rode up beside the nightmare head, shedding complex toes and turning into pincers. Now it was left with only six feet on the ground, and it was also becoming more angular, and darker, like something fashioned of wrought iron. By the fourth stage it had become a black, hard-shelled monster. Watching this turn into the fifth stage, Arden opined to herself that now, walking on two legs, it was like the worst of all monsters.
Then she cancelled the image and called up one she had recently captured of the droon. And as night descended, she continued spending happy hours watching such nightmares dance around her campsite.
* * * *
At sunset, Anderson began to get anxious. They had not seen any of the signs of the roadhouse Laforge had described to them, and had not yet reached the end of the vegetative area. And because of this he knew that night-time activity would be frenetic, and that he and Tergal would not be getting much sleep. Also, the speed at which everything was growing meant that by morning the trail left by that brass man would be erased, and probably he would be much further ahead of them anyway, for Anderson did not reckon he stopped to rest during the hours of darkness.
‘Best we set ourselves a camp for the night,’ he finally conceded.
Tergal looked about dubiously, but it would be dark in less than an hour and there was no guarantee they would find anywhere better within that time.
Quickly they dismounted, trampled down an area of vegetation, and set up their camp. After eating biscuits and preserved sand oysters, they took turns on watch, though neither of them got much sleep, such was the lethal activity all around them.
At midnight, with Ogygian sliding above them like an indifferent steel angel, a quake loosened one of the electric fence’s posts, and a second-stager managed to knock it over. Anderson abruptly discovered how effective was his metallier carbine. It juddered in his hand, flash-blinding him in the night, the whole clip from it cutting the sleer in half from mouth to tail. It had not been his intention to fire on automatic, but in the frantic scramble there had been no time to check.
‘I think it’s dead,’ said Tergal.
Anderson stood blinking after-images from his eyes, his weapon empty. As his vision finally cleared, he saw that Tergal held his automatic pointing straight at his, Anderson’s, face. There was a certain inevitability about this, since Anderson could not be forever on his guard.
After a significant pause, Tergal lowered the weapon and holstered it, then went to heave the sleer off the fence and set the post back up. Something significant had changed, and now there was trust between them. Nevertheless, both he and Tergal were tired and miserable come dawn, and set out in desultory silence.
For most of the morning Anderson did not detect the brass man’s trail, and felt sure that in this tangle of canyons it was permanently lost. This sank him into a blacker mood. Then, with a smacking sound, Bonehead abruptly extruded its feeding head and began emitting a low grunting. A wild sand hog, smaller even than Tergal’s mount, was now setting up the same racket as Bonehead, and leapt high into the air, then fled ahead of them with something white clutched underneath it. Neither Anderson nor Tergal tried to divert their mounts from investigating the rest of the white remains.
‘Kilnsman Gyrol, that Golgoth policeman, said something about strange creatures out this way,’ said the knight.
The young sand hog had snatched the two-legged breeder segments, which were easily torn away from the rest of this albino sleer with its sapphire eyes, now pinned to the ground with one of its own torn-off pincers.
‘Our brass friend did this?’ suggested Tergal.
As their two mounts eased out their combined sensory and feeding heads to feast on this carrion, Anderson replied, ‘Certainly looks that way. Just as it would seem he is also heading for the Plains. So there’s no need for me to find his trail—I’m sure we’ll meet again.’
And, as if this statement suddenly cleared a black cloud, he looked up and saw one of the signs Laforge had mentioned, carved into the face of the nearest butte.
He pointed to it. ‘Anyway, no hurry now, and we do need to rest after last night.’
Tergal glanced up, puzzled for a moment, then grinning.
Following the directions given by each of the signs, the two travellers eventually came upon a concrete road running between the buttes, then the metallier village called Grit with its station and roadhouse. Against a sandstone cliff face, globular houses were raised up on frameworks above hog corrals, warehouses and enclosures for domesticated rock lice. Here there were cars like they had earlier seen in the city, but not so many, perhaps because the concrete road ended within sight of this place. Soon they had left Stone and Bonehead in a corral, munching on nicely stinking carrion, and were walking through a market towards the roadhouse’s access stair.
‘Busy place.’ Tergal was eyeing a stall displaying sand oysters, dried gulper meat, sulerbane pods and trays of writhing cliff eels.
Pointing to the far end of the road, where men were shovelling sand and cement into the rumbling drums of mixers, Anderson explained, ‘For the road crews,’ then gestured to treaded vehicles like the one owned by the mineralliers they had encountered, ‘and the mineralliers. Lot of useful ores to be found in the area, I hear.’
After dumping their gear in rooms paid for with some of Anderson’s newly acquired phocells, they wandered out to a busy bar and cafeteria, which opened on one side onto a balcony overlooking the village.
‘Oh dear,’ said Anderson, spotting Unger Salbec enjoying a meal inside. He quickly backed out of the room. ‘This could get complicated.’
‘Tell the local kilnsmen,’ advised Tergal belligerently, then suddenly looked confused.
‘I’ll be going back to my room now,’ said Anderson, amused. How righteous the boy was becoming, after having promised never to thieve again. But he did not know the full story, and Anderson had always valued prudence.
* * * *
The re-entry pod was soon glowing red-hot, as it arced into atmosphere at twenty thousand kilometres per hour. Slowed to its terminal velocity by increasing air density, it punched through cloud cover, leaving a vapour trail scar, and used up all its small supply of hydrogen fuel in one decelerating burn. Then it blew its back hatch, releasing a monomer drogue to slow its descent further. Fifty kilometres above the ground the outer shell separated and spun away, taking the drogue with it, whereupon the telefactor it had contained descended on AG.
Planing on the gravity field, it fled across sandy flatlands. This barren landscape soon became broken up like a diseased skin, by gulches, arroyos and canyons in ever-greater complexity, until soon there were more of these than there was of the plain itself, and the telefactor was flying over a landscape clustered with sandstone buttes. Directed by its controlling intelligence, the machine finally descended into a long canyon to hover over a long straight scar in the ground. Its dishes whirling and other sensors extruded and functioning at one hundred per cent, it followed the course of this track to where it ended just before heaped sandstone rubble. Nothing else was visible to any of those sensors, in any spectrum, until the machine was nearly upon the pile of stone. Then, all at once, the maggot-shaped survey ship, the Vulture, suddenly became visible. The telefactor halted, backed up and, observing the ship fade seemingly out of existence at the chameleonware field’s interface, it advanced again.
The airlock was no problem for the little machine, as Jack had amply provided it with just about every safe-breaking tool known to man—and some unknown. With the outer door now open, it entered the lock and began drilling through the inner door. Soon it had extracted a ten-centimetre circle of sandwiched hull-composite, insulation and ceramal. Discarding this, it then extruded a sensor through the hole and into the ship, scanning its interior. A minute later, it rose back out of the lock, then out of the canyon, and at maximum speed hurtled back towards the plain.
The space around the planet was scattered with such vast numbers of U-space transceivers and detection devices that one had even been picked up by the Jack Ketch’s collision detector, and destroyed by autolaser as the ship surfaced from underspace. So Jack knew any attempt at concealment would be wasted, and immediately went into close orbit of the inhabited planet. Within minutes, he spotted the signs of a crash-landing, and now, after sending a telefactor to check, knew that Skellor was not aboard the Vulture, or anywhere in its vicinity. Nor could any link be made with the little ship’s AI, so it was probably dead.
Had Skellor been aboard, Jack’s subsequent actions would have diverged only a little, in that he would not have waited for the telefactor to get safely out of the way. The AI even considered delaying until Cormac was out of cold sleep, but calculated that the agent’s orders would not conflict. The Vulture, though damaged, still offered someone of Skellor’s capabilities a possible escape route: its own AI was not present; and there were the products of dangerous Jain technology aboard. End of discussion.
An imploder missile was out of the question: such weapons were only suitable to use against objects in vacuum, where there was no material medium to carry the resultant Shockwave further. Even the smallest such missile available in the Jack Ketch’s arsenal could level a square kilometre, cause massive ground-winds, kill thousands of the humans scattered throughout the surrounding area, and probably even flip over that platform city nearby. No, not good: Earth Central would not be pleased at such a disregard for human life, even if the humans concerned were not members of the Polity. Searching through his weapons carousels, Jack selected precisely what was required and, as Cormac and his fellow humans blearily recovered from thaw-up, spat from one of his nacelles a small black missile carrying a slow-burn CTD warhead, which would provide a controlled reaction hotter than the surface of a sun.
* * * *
Standing on the remaining rickety section of amanis bonded-fibre scaffold, Chandle peered into and through the butte. They had mined out every last scrap of the blue sand, which was rarer than the white, and now the butte was sliced clean through, the many tonnes of sandstone above the slice supported by amanis poles and trusses. In her parents’ time, mining like this had always been the most efficient way, but now, with the quakes, it was becoming increasingly risky. Not for the first time she decided she must find some other method—or some other profession.
The blue sand itself they loaded into the coke trailer, with a tarpaulin pulled over it—having earlier’ stacked the coke in one of the now cold kilns, though Chandle did not hold out much hope that it would still be here should they ever return to this spot. The finished phocells went in boxes on the flatbed trailer. In all it had been a tiring few months, and the increased sleer activity and vegetative growth in the canyons provided a welcome excuse to finish for most of them, though of course Dornik was already muttering about some workers’ percentages being too high. Chandle, after her creepy encounter only a few days before, was glad to get away—she wanted to be where there were always lots of people around her, and to get back to practical concerns. Ghosts wandering among the Sand Towers were not much to her liking.
‘Shall I do it now?’ asked Dornik.
Chandle nodded, and watched him duck inside the mine workings to set fire to the encampment rubbish they had jammed in there. As the pile began to smoke, then the constant breeze dragged the flames horizontally through the exposed workings, he and Chandle scrambled down the scaffolding and rejoined the rest of the mineralliers on the ground. Together, they all heaved on the scaffold until it crashed over on its side, then they quickly dragged it clear of the butte, and stood back to watch the conflagration. For safety’s sake, mineralliers had always collapsed their used mine workings because the amanis beams would become worm-chewed within a season, leaving them a possible death trap. Though Chandle wondered if there was any need for that now: after the first worms got into the wood, a quake would surely finish the job. With a furnace glow in the slice cut through the butte, eventually something began to crackle, then the top layers of sandstone slammed down to crush the burning wood, effectively snuffing out the fire.
‘Get that scaffolding disassembled and loaded,’ Dornik instructed, and soon this was done and they were on their way: the steam-driven cargo carrier chuffing ahead on its caterpillar tracks, towing mobile quarters and the flatbed trailer, then three big old sand hogs following behind, hauling three more trailers.
‘Be nice to get to Grit before full dark.’ Chandle peered up at the open sky from the passenger seat while Dornik drove the carrier. Briefly she wondered about the straight line of cloud she could see, picked out clearly by the setting sun. But never having seen a vapour trail before, she dismissed it from her thoughts.
‘Should be no problem, but we’ll be well into the night unloading this lot,’ Dornik replied.
‘We may as well . . .What the hell?’
Suddenly it was as bright as day—brighter even. Over to their left, a swirling column of fire rose into the sky. The ground began to vibrate, and in a manner of seconds the gentle breeze turned into a gale. Dornik drew the carrier to a halt. Chandle looked back to see the three sand hogs dropping down on their belly plates, then she faced back into the wind, blinking her nictitating membranes to clear sand from her eyes, and watched the column of fire swirling tighter and tighter. Then the wind died abruptly and she was unable to get her breath, then suddenly the airflow reversed. Gasping, Chandle watched the fiery column drop down behind the buttes and extinguish.
‘Volcanic?’ Dornik eventually suggested.
It took Chandle a moment to remember what that word meant. It occurred in the official minerallier lexicon, but they had never needed to use it until recently -just like ‘earthquake’ or ‘tremor’.
‘Could be. The quake epicentre is supposedly somewhere out in this direction. Let’s take a look.’
‘That a good idea?’
She gazed at him. ‘If it was volcanic, who’s to know what might have been brought to the surface?’ She turned to the rest of her group and shouted, ‘Keep heading on to Grit—we’ll join you later!’
Dornik set their carrier trundling down a side canyon while the sand hogs and their trailers continued on to Grit. Within an hour they reached the source of the fire. Climbing down from the carrier, they moved as close as the latent heat would allow.
‘Not volcanic,’ decided Chandle.
She poked her toe at a globule of glass, then wished she hadn’t when her footwear began to smoke. The crater, extending about fifty metres across, shimmered under a heat haze as its lining of molten glass cooled. A butte standing at the crater’s edge had half melted away, its inward face still glowing, too.
‘Maybe a meteor?’ Chandle was groping for another explanation. But she wished she did not feel so damned sure this had something to do with that spectral visitor to their camp. And that it was no natural phenomenon at all.
* * * *