The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [120]
Apparently the rest of his party had fled safely to their rendezvous, while Skeleton Man had suffered some malfunction, shown up too late … Likely it was the weight of all the loot he was carrying, for he had a frame pack that latched and snapped with obscene design precision into his exposed skeleton ribs. The pack was bulging like he’d stolen the family silverware. His loot was heavy and jumbled and awkward …
His treasure stank. It smelled to high heaven, a burned-plastic smell. Like a factory fire.
At first she’d imagined that the stench must be coming from his flesh or his peculiar hardware, but no. He was freshly dead, and he had been a professional … Not a soldier exactly, not her kind of soldier, but some global tech-support cadre. He wore charcoal-black civilian utility gear and no shoes at all—for he seemed to live entirely in the skeleton—and he didn’t have one speck of ID on him, not a badge, not a pip, not a shoulder patch.
With that black mustache, with those skin tones, he might have been from the wreckage of India, or the wreckage of Pakistan maybe—but he was Acquis. He was definitely Acquis, for he was exactly the kind of young gung-ho global fool that some Acquis net committee could hustle up in fifteen minutes. Speed and lightness, the Acquis. They were always good at speed and lightness.
The pursuing harpy had shot at him repeatedly, because its small-caliber rounds kept bouncing off his exoskeletal ribs, but its efforts had finally put a dispassionately calculated entry hole through the left side of his torso and he’d died almost instantly.
It was hard to hate the machines, with that neat way that they killed. They had no more moral judgment than bear traps.
His exoskeleton was still functional. The robot suit was trying to do something about its human occupant, putting jolts through his dead flesh as if trying to wake him up. It was searching for his departed soul like a lost Martian probe contacting a distant antenna.
Sonja heard faint repeated gunshots. Then the Badaulet appeared, empty-handed. He looked from her, to the dead Acquis cyborg, and back again. “Many more planes are coming.”
“Where’s the pack robot? Where’s your rifle?”
“I gave the rifle to the robot. That robot is a weapons platform. The rifle knows its targets now. It will kill those planes till it runs out of ammunition. More planes are coming, many more.” He flicked his fingers repeatedly. “I think they have hundreds.”
“And you’re still alive? You are lucky.”
Lucky began piling loose cobbles and boulders into a crude barricade. “The planes will see our body heat. We must hide behind rocks.”
“Our dead friend here brought treasure with him. He just gave his life for that.”
The Badaulet whipped out his long knife with instant fluid ease and slashed the backpack free from the dead man. Then, with a burst of wiry strength, he hauled the dead cyborg away from the rocky overhang.
Lucky propped the mechanized corpse into plain sight of the sky, half leaning it against a broken boulder.
The corpse was standing there, and it had a human silhouette. That was clever. Maybe luck was mostly a matter of experience.
Sonja hastily emptied the dead man’s pack, hoping to find something useful for a last-ditch defense. The raider was carrying circuitry. A glued-together, broken mess of boards and cards. All of it old technology, maybe twenty years old. All of it burned, warped, smoke-blackened. This trash had been torn loose from some larger network installation, precisely slotted electronic hardware hastily knocked loose from its matrix, maybe with the looter’s skeletal fists.
That was what he had come for, that was his mission: stealing garbage. There was nothing else in his backpack, not a ration, not a bandage, not a paper clip. He’d died for this worthless junk.
She threw the empty pack frame onto the barricade and helped the Badaulet pile rocks.
Sadly, not many rocks were handy. The nearest heap of useful rocks required a dash across open ground. Their crudely piled wall was the length and height