“I can see it,” said Herb dully.
“Get it.”
He reached out and took it, gasping with the pain. “…Got it.”
“Nearly there,” said Robert. “One more stop and then we’re there. Do you think you can make it?”
Herb winced. “Yes.”
“Good. Okay, we’re about to jump…”
The ship wobbled a little, sending further thick, sick waves of throbbing pain through Herb. He looked around the interior of his once beautiful ship, at the broken ornaments, the thick weal of the badly healed scar in the ceiling, the cracked and warped parquetry of the floor, at the torn and leaking remains of the two white sofas, and finally, at Robert. The once immaculately dressed robot now sat in a torn suit, his shirt and jacket covered with a spreading bluish grey stain, one arm missing and his legs in a twisted heap beneath him.
For the last time, they reinserted into normal space, close to a planet’s surface. Above them, in the night sky, the biggest fleet of spaceships Herb had ever seen filled the viewing fields, stretching from horizon to horizon, stacked up into seeming infinity. The ship was falling fast, down toward the strangely warped city that reached, grasping, at them through the lower screens. Herb shivered at the grotesque, tangled forest of skyscrapers that sought to engulf them. It looked strangely familiar, then he remembered: the files that Robert had shown him, back when they had hovered over Herb’s badly converted planet. Looking now around the wreck of his ship, feeling the pain in his left side, that time now seemed like paradise.
“No…” said Robert. “Too soon…”
“What is? What’s too soon?”
“The Enemy ships. They’re here already. They must have a tracking device on this ship…Of course, that’s it: those VNMs must have done more than dissolve our engine…But where is it? I can’t see it…”
“Never mind that,” said Herb. “Jump, jump again.”
“No point, they’ll just follow us again. We need to find it first. But where is it?”
The ship shuddered, and a strange note filled the air, half warning signal, half death song. There was an edge of finality to it, and Herb suddenly knew that the ship would not be leaving this planet.
“What’s that…?” he asked, his voice faltering.
Robert didn’t answer. His face had gone completely blank. Herb knew that was a bad sign. Robert was having to concentrate entirely on something else.
Slowly at first, the twisted towers of the Necropolis began to move toward them. Herb felt a strange feeling in his stomach. He was now in free-fall; the gravity generators had finally given up. If the ship were to be hit now, there would be no dampening effect. He would be rattled around like a pea in a bottle.
Robert snapped out of his trance.
“That’s it, Herb. I can just about land this ship, but nothing else.”
Herb picked up the silver machine. “Shall I press the button?” he asked, his voice shaking. Nonetheless, he suddenly felt very brave.
“No point. We’re in the wrong place.”
Herb felt despair settle upon him. So that was it.
“So we’ve failed. I don’t understand. I really thought you knew what you were doing.”
Robert smiled. The care lifted from his face, and he was his old self again: the original, irritating, cocksure, supremely arrogant man who had stepped through the secret trapdoor all that time ago.
“We haven’t failed,” he said. “I’m sorry, Herb, but you’ve been tricked.”
Herb said nothing. He was beyond surprise.
Robert grinned. “You’re not the real Herb. You’re just another personality construct, living in the processors of the ship. The real Herb got on that other copy of your ship just after it was replicated, back above your misconverted planet.”
“You’re lying. This is just another one of your tricks. I’m in so much pain.”
“That’s just part of the simulation.”
“Then it’s cruel.”
“I know. But necessary. I had to distract the Enemy AI. It had to believe you were really on this ship. It had to detect human thinking and reactions.”
“Why?”
“So that it wouldn’t see the real you approaching until it was too late.”
“So what will the real me do?”
Robert grinned. The pain in Herb’s side suddenly vanished, and he was standing upright in the middle of the ship, a perfectly healthy young man again. Then he was standing in a room halfway up one of the towers of the Necropolis. Robert was standing next to him. A whole Robert Johnston, both arms intact, dressed in an immaculate navy blue suit, a matching hat tilted on his head.
They both gazed through the wide picture windows at the tattered wreck of Herb’s spaceship as it plunged to the ground before them. It landed with a jarring thud that both flattened and split it at the same time. It bounced once and skidded to a halt. No explosion. There was nothing on board that would burn. It simply lay, squashed and lifeless, against the side of the building.
“What was that?” asked Herb. “Something tumbled from the ship just before it hit the ground.”
“The Ouroboros VNMs we took from that planet a few jumps back. This place is a mess. It could do with starting again.”
Herb looked up at the twisted towers, the trailing strands of deformed buildings.
“You’re not kidding,” he muttered. “And what about us? What do we do now?”
Robert smiled, but it was a pleasant smile. A friendly smile. Herb found himself warming to it.
“Well,” said Robert. “You like VNMs, Herb. I thought maybe you’d appreciate the opportunity to do something positive. I thought that maybe we could help the transformation along. Would you like that?”
“Do I have any choice?” Herb said, almost out of habit, then he paused. Whether he was the real Herb or not, he’d realized something back on the ship. Something he needed to think about.
His life so far had been a complete waste. Maybe it was time to try acting in a different fashion.
Maybe here would be the perfect place to begin thinking about it. And why not think about it while doing something for someone else for a change?
“Actually, maybe I will help.” Herb began to smile, too. “I think I would like that.”
eva 5: 2051
Eva walked into the Watcher’s lair. Her emotions were all there: fear, curiosity, even excitement, but they were muffled. It was as if her mind was at the end of a very long tunnel looking down at her body in the here and now, watching the strange figure that stumbled along in the cupped hands of the green-forested hills.
Alison strode ahead of her across the dusty yellow gravel of the enclosure, heading for an abandoned yellow digger that stood at the center of the flat, cleared area.
Ramshackle buildings cobbled together from concrete and corrugated metal lay silent around them.
Alison began shouting to someone, her head jerking this way and that.
“Well, I’m here! I’ve brought them with me!”
Katie shuffled along behind her, her head down, hands clasped tightly together. Eva paused just inside the gate and looked around in wonder. It was an old quarry site. Nestling among many taller ones, the top of a hill had been sliced away as neatly as the lid of a boiled egg to leave an area where trucks could park to be loaded up with yellow stone. The dusty grey windows of the surrounding buildings gazed blindly on. Long conveyor belts ran back and forth, still bearing fragments of yellow stone. The place looked deserted. Dead. The rusty old digger that Alison headed toward made Eva think of the picked-over skeleton of a dinosaur. Its tail scoop was stretched out on the ground behind it, lifeless as everything else in that dry place.
And yet there were the pylons. Heavy cables, humming with current, trailed to a building at the far side of the square. Something here needed power.