Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [252]
The bead of a laser-sight appears on it. Dee drops, tripping Ax so he tumbles to a landing that’s soft for him, though not for her. She rolls from under him, half-sits, and shoots back along the clearest avenue, towards some detected motion. Hastily she jams another clip in her pistol, and fires again. A flash replies and a bullet whizzes above her nose. She empties the clip with a random spray. The pursuer dodges behind a crate and Dee rolls again and crawls for the gap under the door. It’s too low for her.
‘Go ahead!’ she hisses to Ax. He needs no urging. He rolls under the door and leaps sideways.
She hears him yell: ‘No!’ and then fall silent. A pair of mechanical feet appear at the gap, striding to the middle of the door. Metal claws reach under the door and lift. The door rolls and ravels upward like a slatted blind. Whatever is lifting the door lowers its body at the same time, between its legs. A line of dust-particles flares above her head as an industrial-strength laser beam stabs into the darkness of the basement.
Hopeless now, Dee ejects the empty clip, and inserts another that she’s scrabbled out of her handbag. She’s definitely running low. She turns to face her new antagonist. It’s a squat, squatting robot. Its laser, protruding between its upper and lower shells, moves and ranges and fires again. There’s a yell from behind her, far too close.
‘I think I’ve blinded the bounty-hunters,’ the robot says. ‘But I think you should get out.’
Dee stares at it for a moment, and then recognises it as the robot that accompanied Wilde the previous night.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she says ungraciously, and scrambles out. The robot lets the door fall with a rattling crash and, for good measure, fuses the locking-mechanism with a close-up blast. They are standing on a quay at the back and bottom of the building, overlooking a fifty-metre-wide canal between the backs of other buildings. The canal is empty except for a few long, automatic barges going about their oblivious business in a world little more demanding than the toy realities of the first AI experiments. There may have been light under the door, but that was just the contrast; it’s dim down here, as it probably is even at brighter times than twilight. Ax is standing hesitantly a little distance away, keeping a suspicious eye on the robot. His clothes are torn; where the robot grabbed him, Dee guesses.
‘We’re OK,’ she tells him. ‘I think.’
‘I certainly mean you no harm,’ says the robot. ‘I have no intention of turning you in, as I think my actions have shown.’ It waves a limb, indicating a streamlined boat with a powerful outboard engine and, most welcome of all, a small but concealing cabin.
‘Come with me,’ it says. ‘We have much to do.’
‘Yeah,’ says Ax. He tucks his gun away inside his now ragged shirt. ‘Will you just look at the state of her clothes.’
As the boats of the litigant alliance moved away from the main canal-system and out of the human quarter into the sandflats and marshes, Tamara’s boat shifted towards the front. By the time they were no longer in recognisable canals but in reed-banked streams and barely navigable ditches, she took the lead. Somewhere far in towards the centre of the city, a hovercraft roared across the flats, sending birds scrambling skyward for kilometres around. A vee-line of geese flew overhead, golden dots in the deep-blue sky.
‘The things I see when I don’t have a shotgun,’ Tamara sighed.
Wilde slapped at insects. ‘Why the fuck,’ he demanded, ‘did we have to bring fucking midges across interstellar space?’
‘Ecology,’ Tamara said, with a trace of smugness. She passed him a tube of insect-repellent. Wilde rubbed it on and spent the next few minutes gloating as the tiny black devils landed on his skin and then dropped off dead, straight to whatever hell awaited their evil, two-byte souls. He expounded this unorthodox theological point