‘Let’s just shoot the fucker and run for the cave,’ came a communication from Chalder after the minute Cormac designated ran out.
Through his gridlink Cormac broadcast: ‘Start moving towards the cave, but try not to make it too obvious. Arach, the Legate has chameleonware so if it shows any sign of fading out…’
‘I was already doing that,’ the drone replied grumpily.
‘What guarantees can you give that you’ll stick to your word?’ Cormac asked out loud to the Legate. Scanning beyond it, Cormac recorded the scene in his gridlink then ran a comparison program to perpetually analyse that same scene moment by moment. It annoyed him that he had not thought to do so earlier.
‘The only guarantee I can give—’ began the Legate.
It was the trunk of a tree down in the jungle, slightly displaced for half a second.
Chameleonware.
‘Arach!’
‘I see it.’
The Legate disappeared. One of the spider-drone’s Gatling cannons whirred and fired, spewing fire across the intervening ten yards. The Legate reappeared only yards from Cormac, juddered to a halt and survived longer than seemed possible under such a fusillade, then exploded into metallic shreds. Arach’s other cannon whirred and spewed fire. To the right and left of where the Legate had been, huge shapes nickered in and out of being—flat louselike bodies supported ten feet off the ground by bowed insectile legs, their nightmare heads unravelling squidlike grasping tentacles. Both of them collapsed, pieces of them exploding away, clearly visible now as their chameleonware broke down. Cormac squatted for cover and glimpsed Arach springing from his perch just as turquoise fire splashed down onto the rock cube, turning its upper surface molten. The drone ran, with all his weapons now directed up at the sky. Darker shadow fell over them as another spiral ship shut down its chameleonware right above. High intensity laser punching down: five or more dracomen turned instantly to flames. Autoguns now trained on the ship above, but one of them suddenly blasted to silvery fragments. And meanwhile a hellish army swooped up the slope from the jungle.
‘Thorn, mine the entrance as we—’
Thorn turned towards him, grinning perhaps… then he stood in an inferno, coming apart, face melting away from a screaming skull, before toppling disjointed in clouds of greasy smoke. Gone: in an instant.
Thorn…
Further explosions lit the garish scene as the autoguns found targets on the ship above. Even while paralysed mentally Cormac continued to function on an instinctive level. He sent Shuriken streaking down towards a pack of quadruped machines like headless brushed-aluminium Rottweilers, who led the charge from below. The star threw its blades out to maximum extent and howled along just off the ground, as if carrying the anger Cormac should now feel. He took out his grenade and gridlinked to its control mechanism. He ran a simple program, so that the moment he lost consciousness the grenade would detonate. He placed it in the breast pocket of his envirosuit, then, standing fully in view, aimed his proton weapon and, picking his targets in the leading ranks, began to fire. He slewed emotion, became colder. Fuck them, what was the point now in retreating to the cave system?
Shuriken hammered into a thicket of legs, sending many of the dog-things sprawling. Cormac fired continually as silvery flat-worms slid up over the fallen grey bodies like running mercury, each hit of his converted these things to disparate segments—which then extended out tendrils to rejoin and draw together again.
‘Cormac, get to the cave,’ came Blegg’s communication via his link.
‘Go fuck yourself,’ Cormac replied.
‘Do you want reasons?’ Blegg asked. ‘Chalder just died trying to protect you, and others will now die to that same end. Get into the cave!’
A scan of his surroundings: numerous oily fires—difficult to discern which burning figures were human and which dracoman. From ten yards down the slope one of the flatworms reared up, its nose flaring open on a glittering interior. A stun blast smacked into Cormac’s chest and sent him staggering back, then down on his knees. Above him, a flattened torpedo shape, snakish legs tangled underneath, unravelling and reaching for him. Consciousness fading.
Let it go.
A black missile slammed into the hovering shape’s side, detonated and sent it cartwheeling out of sight, coming apart. Spider legs abruptly closed around Cormac and hauled him from the ground. Shuriken came screaming back to the rescue. He just retained the presence of mind to offline the grenade program, and recall the throwing star to its wrist holster, as Arach carried him to cover. Damp darkness then, and a blast throwing dust and rock past him. He finally let go of his consciousness—didn’t want it.
Stalactites poised above Blegg like dragon’s teeth. Damp air groped about his face and somewhere he could hear water trickling. But he focused his attention inward to view another episode in his life, another death, this time on the planet Cheyne III.
Walking out along the jetty towards the boat supposedly containing a Separatist arms cache, there had been no time for him to think his usual To die like this after so long. One moment the boat rocked there on the waves, solid and substantial, the next it turned into a spreading ball of flame. He recollected briefly seeing the jetty flung up like the rearing back of a snake, then the blast hit him. No pain, just a cessation. Then he woke up in the ECS Rescue ship, recovering from cuts, burns and concussion. The reality, he knew, was that nothing larger than what you might scrape up with a teaspoon then remained of the Horace Blegg who hunted Separatists on Cheyne III. Only memories, constantly copied via a link open to the runcible AI.
Here no such link existed, however, and should he die a new Blegg would only remember up to the point he went out of communication with the NEJ, from where Blegg’s memories had been regularly retransmitted to update his back-up. But of course this sort of thing had happened before—these breaks in the narrative of his apparently endless life. When he was thrown to the ground in the Highlands of Scotland, apparently by the blast from a satellite strike, that was a cut-off point. But he now remembered himself lying twisted on his side and gazing in puzzlement at the ribs of his own chest splayed out like bloody fingers, and seeing circuitry patterns etched into his bones. No bump on the head dispelling consciousness, and it hadn’t been a Shockwave that threw him down either, but an explosive seeker bullet. And he just died, very quickly.
But the false bit? Only these extra memories, only these undone deletions told him which they were. Earth Central falsified the day it took him to return to Geneva, probably only to add a certain variety. In reality, EC just took out of storage another body — another facsimile of humanity neither Golem nor human but something else. Another Blegg. When the antimatter bomb struck Tuscor City, the AI had simply placed on hold all his memories concerning events after he left the attack ship Yellow Cloud. So here, now, that whole episode culminating with the searing hammer of that blast finally reaching him, conflicted in his memory with another memory in which he never went down to the planet, since the arrival of the Prador destroyer gave him no time. The bomb on Amaranth Station turned him into slurry, but that small agonizing moment was deleted and replaced with the memory of him having transported himself out at the last moment. Of course, much that ensued was also false, until a new body could be put into place.
Lies, all lies. And what seemed even more cruel was his emulating a human so closely that he wanted to believe his own myth. The Atheter AI had known, for when he gave it his word it replied, ‘I know—it’s the word of a ruler.’ A partial truth perhaps, since he was merely the creation of a ruler. The Legate had known with its, ‘Had we broken them, be assured that you would now be under my control, as would all here, AIs or those using gridlinks or augs… Including you.’