Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [51]
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It didn’t sound like a bot. Powerless Friendless had dealt with a lot of them, over the years – most of them securitybots, admittedly – and he knew how they talked. Pedantic. Literal. Uncompromising. Not like this one.
The bot made a sudden movement towards Powerless Friendless.
He
flinched, but all it had done was raise its hand and look at the back of it.
In some strange way, the bot’s inflexible face radiated regret.
‘Well,’ it said, ‘like the back of another hand, a long time ago.’
A metal fist lashed out, smashing into the wall and crumbling the stone to dust. Powerless Friendless’s basal foot lost its grip on the wood, and he fell backwards. The bot strode forward, the walkway trembling beneath its heavy tread. A flattened hand sliced towards Powerless Friendless’s face. He ducked, and the metal caught his eyestalk, momentarily blinding him.
Blue blood was pouring into Powerless Friendless’s mouth. He wiped a pseudo-limb across his face as he writhed backwards. Krohg shifted in his rucksack. Briefly he considered pulling the creature out and throwing it at the bot in an attempt to blind it or distract it, but he knew that it would only buy him a few seconds at best.
A metal foot sent him flying through the air, his torso a mass of pain. He hit the walkway, sending ripples along its length. The bot strode towards him: implacable, unstoppable. Powerless Friendless couldn’t raise his head from the planks. A pseudo-limb crept up one of the cables, trying to find some purchase, some grip with which he could pull himself up, but the plastic was slippery with the rain, and his pseudo-digits just slid vainly along it.
The bot stopped beside him. A metal hand reached down.
The unyielding fingers closed around his eyestalks.
Powerless Friendless could feel the pressure building up. A red haze crept across his vision. His lymph pump was beating wildly, pumping fit to break through the muscle sheath of his chest. He couldn’t feel his pseudo-limbs or his basal foot. He couldn’t feel anything apart from the pounding of his blood, the pressure in his head and the spikes of pain where his eyestalks were being dragged from their roots. He could see nothing apart from the silver face that gazed impassively down at him.
With his last ounce of strength, Powerless Friendless lashed out with his basal foot, kicking not against the bot but against life itself, against every human who had ever hit him, or laughed at him, or ignored him. He felt his foot crash against something hard, something that sent shock waves rippling through his body. There was resistance for a moment, then there was nothing.
The pain eased miraculously, leaving a sick residue behind. The red haze vanished.
Powerless Friendless pulled himself slowly to his foot. The bot was on the edge of the walkway, holding onto one of the thick cables that supported 88
it with one hand while the other flailed around, searching for something to grasp. Its feet had slipped off the rain-slicked wood.
Powerless Friendless stared at it.
The bot’s hand slipped a few inches down the cable.
It smiled. ‘Another time,’ it promised.
Something died within the bot’s eyes. The hand spasmed open, and the bot dropped away, like a falling statue.
The splash when it hit the canal seemed to go on for ever.
As the purple canopy of the jungle rose up to greet them, Private Enquorian kept his eyes firmly fixed upon the kirilian scanner. A number of life-forms were registering, but two of them were larger than the rest.
‘Enquorian, report,’ the under-sergeant growled. The way his skull-like cybernetic face reflected the orange sky made him look as if he was aflame.
‘Auras are still steady,’ Enquorian said. The other nine Landsknechte in the flitter were silent, but he could feel the tension as they came in to land.
‘Bearing?’ the under-sergeant growled. Behind him, two winged reptiles were heading for the flitter. Their heads seemed to be made almost entirely of teeth.
‘Unchanged on vector five-five-niner.’
‘Let me know if they move.