The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [17]
Then he vanished.
Not quite vanished - Mativi and the troops both heard the bones in his hand snap, saw the hand crumple into the canvas like a handkerchief into a magician's glove, followed by his arm, followed by his shoulder, followed by his head. They saw the flare of crimson his body turned into as skin, bone, blood vessels, all the frail materials meant to hold a body together, degenerated into carmine mulch and were sucked up by the structure. A crimson blot of blood a man wide sprayed on to the canvas - out of which, weirdly, runnels of blood began trailing inward towards the hole, against and at angles to gravity.
The police troops turned and looked at Mativi, then looked back at the tractor.
"Alors, chef," one of them said to him, "qu'est-ce qu'onfait maintenant?"
"It's loose," said Ngoyi, his eyes glazed, seeing the ends of worlds. "It's loose, and I am responsible."
Mativi shook his head. "It's not loose. Not yet. We can still tell exactly where it is, just by feeding it more policemen. But its casing's corroded. It's sucking in stuff from outside."
"Not corroded," Ngoyi shook his head. "It won't corrode. It's made of nickel alloy, very strong, very heavy. It's one of the cases we bored a hole in deliberately, in order to shine in the infrared beam. There'll be another hole in the casing on the far side. Where the gamma comes out."
Mativi nodded. One of the machines the demons live in.
Ngoyi still seemed to be wary of even looking at the container. "Could it topple over?"
"No. If it begins to topple, it'll right itself immediately. It's probably scrunched itself down into the top of the tractor doing that already. Remember, it's a small thing rotating, rotating fast, and it weighs over a thousand tonnes. The gyroscopic stability of an object like that doesn't bear thinking about —"
"CETAWAYO BRIAN MATIVI! I AM HEREBY BY THE ORDER OF THE UNITED NATIONS PEACEKEEPING FORCES OF THE CONGO PLACING YOU UNDER ARREST."
Mativi turned. The voice had come from a senior police officer. The amount of shiny regalia on the uniform confused matters, but he was almost certain the man was a lieutenant.
Mativi sighed. "Lieutenant —" he began.
"Major," corrected the major.
"—Major, I am engaged in preventing a public disaster of proportions bigger than anything that might possibly be prevented by arresting me. Do you know what will happen if that load falls off that wagon?"
The Major shrugged. "Do you know what will happen if I see you and don't drag you down to the cells? I will lose my job, and my wife and children will go hungry."
Mativi began to back away.
"Hey!" The Major began to pointedly unbutton his revolver.
"I know what will happen to you if you don't bring me in. And you forgot to mention that there'll be no power in the city either, and that as a consequence a great number of wives and children will go hungry," said Mativi, circling around the danger area of bowed-headed, permanently windblown grass near the tractor's payload. He waved his arms in the direction of the dark horizon. "You can see the evidence of this already. The device on this tractor has been uncoupled from the grid, and immediately there is no power for refrigeration, no power for cooking or for emergency machinery in hospitals. I know all that." Slowly, he put his hands up to indicate he was no threat. Then, with one hand, he swung himself up on to the side of the tractor, with the payload between himself and the Major. "But you truly cannot begin to comprehend what will happen to those wives and children if I allow this load to continue on to Djelo-Binza, sir. You see, I understand at a very deep level what is in this container. You do not."
"I must warn you not to attempt to escape custody," said the Major, raising his pistol. "I am empowered to shoot."
"How can I be trying to escape custody?" said Mativi, looking down the barrel of the pistol as if his life depended on it, and sinking in his stance, causing the Major to lower the pistol by a couple of centimetres, still training it on his heart. "I'm