"Use of Weapons" - читать интересную книгу автора (Banks Iain)

Two

The dam lay wedged between the tree-studded hills like a fragment from some enormous shattered cup. The morning sunshine shone up the valley, hit the concave grey face of the dam, and produced a white reflecting flood of light. Behind the dam, the long diminished lake was dark and cold. The water came less than halfway up the massive concrete bulwark, and the forests beyond had long since reclaimed over half the slopes the dam's rising water had once drowned. Sail-boats lay tethered to jetties strung along one side of the lake, the chopping waters slapping at their glistening hulls.

High overhead, birds carved the air, circling in the warmth of the sunlight above the shadow of the dam. One of the birds dipped and swooped, gliding down towards the lip of the dam and the deserted roadway which ran along its curved summit. The bird pulled its wings in just as it seemed it was about to collide with the white railings which ran on either side of the road; it flashed between the dew-sparkled stanchions, executed a half roll, partially opened its wings again, and plummeted towards the obsolete power station that had become the grandly eccentric — not to mention pointedly symbolic — home of the woman called Diziet Sma.

The bird settled belly-down to the swoop, and, level with the roof garden, flung out its wings, grasping at the air and fluttering to a precipitous halt, talons tacketing down on a window ledge set in the highest storey of the old admin block apartments.

Wings folded, soot-dark head to one side, one beady eye reflecting the concrete light, the bird hopped forward to a slid-open window, where soft red curtains rippled out into the breeze. It stuck its head under the fluttering hem of the material and peered into the darkened room beyond.

"You missed it." Sma said with quiet scorn, happening to pad past the window just at that moment. She sipped from a glass of water she held. Droplets from her shower beaded her tawny body.

The bird's head swivelled, following her as she crossed to the closet and commenced to dress. Swivelling back, the bird's gaze shifted to the male body lying in the air a little less than a metre above the floor-mounted bed-base. Inside the dim haze of the bed's AG field, the pale figure of Relstoch Sussepin stirred, and rolled over in mid-air. His arms floated out to either side, until the weak centering field on his side of the bed brought them slowly back in towards his body again. In the dressing room, Sma gargled with some water, then swallowed it.

Fifty metres east, Skaffen-Amtiskaw floated high in the air above the floor of the turbine hall, surveying the wreckage of the party. The section of the drone's mind that was controlling the guard-drone disguised as a bird took a last look at the filigree of scratches on Sussepin's buttocks, and the already fading bite-marks on Sma's shoulders (as she covered them with a gauzy shirt), and then released the guard-drone from its control.

The bird squawked, jumped back from the curtain, and fell fluttering and frenzied off the ledge, before opening its wings and beating back up past the gleaming face of the dam, its shrill alarm-cries echoing back from the concrete slopes and disturbing it further. Sma heard the distant feedback of commotion as she buttoned her waistcoat, and smiled.

"Good night's sleep?" Skaffen-Amtiskaw inquired as it met her at the portico of the old admin block.

"Good night, no sleep," Sma yawned, shooing the whining hralzs back into the building's marble hall, where Maikril the major-domo stood unhappily with a bunch of leads. She stepped out into the sunlight, pulling on gloves. The drone held the car door open for her. She filled her lungs with the fresh morning air and ran down the steps, boot heels clattering. She jumped into the car, winced a little as she settled in the driver's seat, then flicked a switch that started the roof folding back, while the drone loaded her luggage into the trunk. She tapped the battery gauges on the vehicle's dash and blipped the accelerator, just to feel the wheel motors strain against the brakes. The drone secured the trunk and floated into the rear seats. She waved to Maikril, who was chasing one of the hralzs along the steps outside the turbine hall, and didn't notice. Sma laughed, stood on the throttle and slipped the brakes.

The car leapt off in a spray of gravel, took the right-hander beneath the trees with centimetres to spare, shot out through the station's granite gates with a farewell shimmy of its rear end, and accelerated hard down Riverside Drive.

"We could have flown," the drone pointed out, over the rush of air.

But it suspected Sma wasn't listening.

The semantics of fortification were pan-cultural, she thought, as she descended the stone steps from the curtain wall of the castle, gazing up at the drum-shaped keep, hazy in the distance on its hill behind several more layers of walls. She walked across the grass, Skaffen-Amtiskaw at her shoulder, and exited the fort through a postern.

The view led down to the new port and the straits, where seaships passed smoothly in the late morning sunlight, heading for ocean or inland sea, according to their lanes. From the other side of the castle complex, the city revealed its presence with a distant rumble and — because the light wind came from that direction — the smell of… well, she just thought of it as City, after three years here. She supposed all cities smelled different, though.

Diziet Sma sat on the grass with her legs drawn up to her chin, and looked out across the straits and their arching suspension bridges to the sub-continent on the far shore.

"Anything else?" the drone asked.

"Yeah; take my name off the judging panel for the Academy show… and send a stalling letter to that Petrain guy." She frowned in the sunlight, shading her eyes. "Can't think of anything else."

The drone moved in front of her, teasing a small flower from the grass in front of her and playing with it. " Xenophobe's just entered the system," it told her.

"Well happy day," Sma said sourly. She wetted one finger and rubbed a little speck of dirt from the toe of one boot.

"And that young man in your bed just surfaced; asking Maikril where you've got to."

Sma said nothing, though her shoulders shook once and she smiled. She lay back on the grass, one arm behind her.

The sky was aquamarine, stroked with clouds. She could smell the grass, and taste the scent of small, crushed flowers. She looked back up over her forehead at the grey-black wall towering behind her, and wondered if the castle had ever been attacked on days like this. Did the sky seem so limitless, the waters of the straits so fresh and clean, the flowers so bright and fragrant, when men fought and screamed, hacked and staggered and fell and watched their blood mat the grass?

Mists and dusk, rain and lowering cloud seemed the better background; clothes to cover the shame of battle.

She stretched, suddenly tired, and shivered with a little flashback of the night's exertions. And, like somebody holding something precious, and it slipping from their fingers, but them having the speed and the skill to catch it again before it hit the floor, she was able — somewhere inside herself — to dip down and retrieve the vanishing memory as it slipped back into the clutter and noise of her mind, and glanding recall she held it, savoured it, re-experienced it, until she felt herself shiver again in the sunlight, and came close to making a little moaning noise.

She let the memory escape, and coughed and sat up, glancing to see if the drone had noticed. It was nearby, collecting tiny flowers.

A party of what she guessed were schoolchildren came chattering and squealing up the path from the metro station, heading towards the postern. Heading and tailing the noisy column were adults, possessed of that air of calmly tired wariness she'd seen before in teachers and mothers with many children. Some of the kids pointed at the floating drone as they passed, wide-eyed and giggling and asking questions, before they were ushered through the narrow gate, voices disappearing.

It was, she'd noticed, always the children who made a fuss like that. Adults just assumed that there was some trick behind the apparently unsupported body of the machine, but children wanted to know how it worked. One or two scientists and engineers had looked startled, too, but she guessed a stereotype of unworldiness meant nobody believed them that there must be something odd going on. Anti gravity was what was going on, and the drone in this society was like a flashlight in the stone age, but — to her surprise — it was almost disappointingly easy just to brazen it out.

"The ships just met up," the drone informed her. "They're transferring the stand-in for real, rather than displacing it."

Sma laughed, plucked a blade of grass and sucked on it. "Old JT really doesn't trust its displacer, does it?"

"I think the thing's senile, myself," the drone said sniffily. It was carefully slicing holes in the barely more than hair-thin stems of the flowers it had picked, then threading the stems through each other, creating a little chain.

Sma watched the machine, its unseen fields manipulating the little blossoms as dexterously as any lace-maker flicking a pattern into existence.

It was not always so refined.

Once, maybe twenty years ago, far away on another planet in another part of the galaxy altogether, on the floor of a dry sea forever scoured by howling winds, beneath the mesa that had been islands on the dust that had been silt, she had lodged in a small frontier town at the limit of the railways" reach, preparatory to hiring mounts to venture into the deep desert and search out the new child messiah.

At dusk, the riders came into the square, to take her from the inn; they'd heard her strangely coloured skin alone would fetch a handsome price.

The inn-keeper made the mistake of trying to reason with the men, and was pinned to his own door with a sword; his daughters wept over him before they were dragged away.

Sma turned, sickened, from the window, heard boots thunder on the rickety stairs. Skaffen-Amtiskaw was near the door. It looked, unhurried at her. Screams came from the square outside and from elsewhere inside the inn. Somebody battered at the door of her room, loosing dust and shaking the floor. Sma was wide eyed, bereft of stratagems.

She stared at the drone. "Do something," she gulped.

"My pleasure," murmured Skaffen-Amtiskaw.

The door burst open, slamming against the mud wall. Sma flinched. The two black-cloaked men filled the doorway. She could smell them. One strode in towards her, sword out, rope in the other hand, not noticing the drone at one side.

"Excuse me," said Skaffen-Amtiskaw.

The man glanced at the machine, without breaking stride.

Then he wasn't there any more, and dust filled the room, and Sma's ears were ringing, and pieces of mud and paper were falling from the ceiling and fluttering through the air, and there was a large hole straight through the wall into the next room, across from where Skaffen-Amtiskaw — seemingly defying the law concerning action/reaction — hovered in exactly the same place as before. A woman shrieked hysterically in the room through the hole, where what was left of the man was embedded in the wall above her bed, his blood spattered copiously over ceiling, floor, walls, bed and her.

The second man whirled into the room, discharging a long gun point-blank at the drone; the bullet became a flat coin of metal a centimetre in front of the machine's snout, and clunked to the floor. The man unsheathed and swung his sword in one flashing movement, scything at the drone through the dust and smoke. The blade broke cleanly on a bump of red-coloured field just above the machine's casing, then the man was lifted off his feet.

Sma was crouched down in one corner, dust in her mouth and hands at her ears, listening to herself scream.

The man thrashed wildly in the centre of the room for a second, then he was a blur through the air above her, there was another colossal pulse of sound, and a ragged aperture appeared in the wall over her head, beside the window looking out to the square. The floorboards jumped and dust choked her. "Stop!" she screamed. The wall above the hole cracked and the ceiling creaked and bowed down, releasing lumps of mud and straw. Dust clogged her mouth and nose and she struggled to her feet, almost throwing herself out of the window in her desperate attempt to find air. "Stop," she croaked, coughing dust.

The drone floated smoothly to her side, wafting dust away from Sma's face with a field-plane, and supporting the sagging ceiling with a slender column. Both field components were shaded deep red, the colour of drone pleasure. "There, there," Skaffen-Amtiskaw said to her, patting her back, Sma choked and spluttered from the window and stared horrified at the square below.

The body of the second man lay like a sodden red sack under a cloud of dust in the midst of the riders. While they were still staring, before most of the raiders could raise their swords, and before the inn-keeper's daughters — being lashed to two of the mounts by their captors — realised what the almost unrecognisable lump on the ground in front of them was and started screaming again, something thrummed past Sma's shoulder and darted down towards the men.

One of the warriors roared, brandishing his sword and lunging towards the door of the inn.

He managed two steps. He was still roaring when the knife missile flicked past him, field outstretched.

It separated his neck from his shoulders. The roar turned to a sound like the wind, bubbling thickly through the exposed wind-pipe as his body crashed to the dust.

Faster — and turning more tightly — than any bird or insect, the knife missile made an almost invisibly quick circle round most of the riders, producing an odd stuttering noise.

Seven of the riders — five standing, two still mounted — collapsed into the dust, in fourteen separate pieces. Sma tried to scream at the drone, to make the missile stop, but she was still choking, and now starting to retch. The drone patted her back. "There, there," it said, concernedly. In the square, both of the inn-keeper's daughters slipped to the ground from the mounts they had been tied to, their bonds slashed in the same cut that had killed all seven men. The drone gave a little shudder of satisfaction.

One man dropped his sword and started to run. The knife missile plunged straight through him. It curved like red light shining on a hook, and slashed across the necks of the last two dismounted riders, felling both. The mount of the final rider was rearing up in front of the missile, its fangs bared, forelegs lashing, claws exposed. The device went through its neck and straight into the face of its rider.

On emerging from the resulting detonation, the machine slammed to a stop in mid-air, while the rider's headless body slid off his collapsing, thrashing animal. The knife missile spun slowly about, seemingly reviewing its few seconds" work, then it started to float back towards the window.

The inn-keeper's daughters had fainted.

Sma vomited.

The frenzied mounts leapt and screamed and ran about the courtyard, a couple of them dragging bits of their riders with them.

The knife missile swooped and butted one of the hysterical mounts on the head, just as the animal was about to trample the two girls lying still in the dust, then the tiny machine dragged them both out of the carnage, towards the doorway where their father's body lay.

Finally, the sleek, spotless little device rose gently to the window — daintily avoiding Sma's projected bile — and snicked back into the drone's casing.

"Bastard!" Sma tried to punch the drone, then kick it, then picked up a small chair and smashed it against the drone's body. "Bastard! You fucking murderous bastard!"

"Sma," the drone said reasonably, not moving in the slowly settling maelstrom of dust, and still holding the ceiling up. "You said do something."

"Meatfucker!" She smashed a table across its back.

"Ms Sma; language!"

"You split-prick shit, I told you to stop!"

"Oh. Did you? I didn't quite catch that. Sorry."

She stopped then, hearing the utter lack of concern in the machine's voice. She thought very clearly that she had a choice here; she could collapse weeping and sobbing and not get over this for a long time, and maybe never be out of the shadow of the contrast between the drone's cool and her breakdown; or.

She took a deep breath, calmed herself.

She walked up to the drone and said quietly, "All right; this time… you get away with it. Enjoy it when you play it back." She put one hand flat on the drone's side. "Yeah; enjoy. But if you ever do anything like that again…" she slapped its flank softly and whispered, "you're ore, understand?"

"Absolutely," said the drone.

"Slag; components; motherjunk."

"Oh, please, no," Skaffen-Amtiskaw sighed.

"I'm serious. You use minimum force from now on. Understand? Agree?"

"Both."

She turned, picked up her bag and headed for the door, glancing once into the adjoining room through the hole the first man had made. The woman in there had fled. The man's body was still cratered into the wall, blood like rays of ejecta.

Sma looked back to the machine, and spat on the floor.

"The Xenophobe's heading this way," Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, suddenly there in front of her, its body shining in the sunlight. "Here." It stretched a field out, offering her the little chain of bright flowers it had made.

Sma bowed towards it; the machine slipped the chain over her head like a necklace. She stood up and they went back into the castle.

The very top of the keep was out of bounds to the public; it bristled with aerials and masts and a couple of slowly revolving radar units. Two floors below, once the tour party had disappeared round the curve of the gallery, Sma and the machine stopped at a thick metal door. The drone used its electromagnetic effector to disable the door's alarm and open the electronic locks, then inserted a field into a mechanical lock, jiggled the tumblers and swung the door wide. Sma slipped through, immediately followed by the machine, which relocked the door. They ascended to the broad, cluttered roof, beneath the vault of turquoise sky; a tiny scout missile the drone had sent ahead sidled up to the machine and was taken back inside.

"When's it get here?" Sma said, listening to the warm wind hum through the jagged spaces of the aerials around her.

"It's over there," Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, jabbing forward. She looked in the direction it had indicated, and could just make out the spare, curved outline of a four-person module, sitting nearby; it was giving a very good impression of being transparent.

Sma looked around the forest of masts and stays for a moment, the wind ruffling her hair, then shook her head. She walked to the module-shape, momentarily dizzied by the sensation that there wasn't anything there, then that there was. A door swung up from the module's side, revealing the interior as though opening a passageway into another world, which was — in a sense, she supposed — exactly what it was doing.

She and the drone entered. "Welcome aboard, Ms Sma," said the module.

"Hello."

The door closed. The module tipped back on its rear end, like a predator preparing to pounce. It waited a moment for a flock of birds to clear the airspace a hundred metres above, then it was gone, powering into the air. Watching from the ground — if they hadn't blinked at the wrong moment — a very keen-eyed observer might just have seen a column of trembling air flick skyward from the summit of the keep, but would have heard nothing; even in high supersonic the module could move more quietly than any bird, displacing tissue-thin layers of air immediately ahead of it, moving into the vacuum so created, and replacing the gases in the skin-thin space it had left behind; a falling feather produced more turbulence.

Standing in the module, gazing at the main screen, Sma watched the view beneath the module shrink rapidly, as the concentric layers of the castle's defences came crashing in like time-reversed waves from the edges of the screen; the castle became a dot between the city and the straits, and then the city itself disappeared and the view began to tip as the module angled out for its rendezvous with the very fast picket Xenophobe.

Sma sat down, still watching the screen, eyes searching in vain for the valley on the outskirts of the city where the dam and the old power station lay.

The drone watched too, while it signalled to the waiting ship and received confirmation the vessel had displaced Sma's luggage out of the trunk of the car and into the woman's quarters on board.

Skaffen-Amtiskaw studied Sma, as she stared — a little glumly, it thought — at the hazing-over view on the module screen, and wondered when the best time would be to give her the rest of the bad news.

Because, despite all this wonderful technology, somehow (incredibly; uniquely, as far as the drone knew… how in the name of chaos did a lump of meat outwit and destroy a knife missile?), the man called Cheradenine Zakalwe had shaken off the tail they'd put on him after he'd resigned the last time.

So, before they did anything else, Sma and it had to find the damn human first. If they could.

The figure slipped from behind a radar housing and crossed the keep's roof, beneath the wind-moaning aerials. It went down the spiral of steps, checked all was clear beyond the thick metal door, then opened it.

A minute later, something that looked exactly like Diziet Sma joined the tour party, while the guide was explaining how developments in artillery, heavier-than-air flight and rocketry had made the ancient fortress obsolete.