‘Look!’ Erlin shouted.
Ansel glanced at her, then to where she was pointing. A shuttle was limping through the sky above them.
‘It’s Hendricks. He’s alive. He’s going for Kelly!’
‘Climb,’ said Ansel. The Golem was on the jetty now and it was gazing up at them. There was a chance now. If they could get to the shuttle … He noted that Erlin was flagging. She was an Earther and her legs could not match his. He considered leaving her behind, but decided not to. Fuck the Company. He halted.
‘You keep going,’ he said. ‘I’ll slow it.’
She watched him unshoulder his pack and open it.
‘Go!’ he shouted.
Erlin went.
Ansel ran through his mind all he knew about Golem Nineteens. They possessed a ceramal chassis wrapped round their more delicate components, so with the munitions he carried he could not hope to destroy it. Raking through his rucksack he pulled out a short cylindrical carton, out of which he tipped four flat discs each bearing digital displays. Studying the Golem’s progress, he set the display on the first disc and left it on a step. After climbing for a minute, he set another disc, then the third higher up. He was setting the last disc when the first blew with an actinic white explosion, showering stone across the mountainside. He glanced down.
It had missed, but an area of the stairway had been converted to rubble. This slowed the Golem, but only a little. Ansel ran up after Erlin, reaching her as she reached the head of the stairway. Cut into the face of the mountain was an area of level stone.
‘Drop the weapon, assassin!’
Hendricks leant against the back of the shuttle, between the two thrusters. The man’s face was twisted with pain, for his left arm was gone at the elbow and through the charred holes in his clothing burnt skin showed. He had placed an emergency dressing over the stump and some sort of cream on the burns, but Ansel supposed the man had not wanted to dull his senses with painkillers. Erlin stood to the right of him, and another figure stood nearby with his face turned away from Ansel.
‘We don’t have time for this,’ said Ansel.
Hendricks fired once between Ansel’s feet, erupting splinters of stone that smacked against Ansel’s legs. Ansel went down on one knee, then very carefully he removed his thin-gun from its holster and tossed it down.
‘I’ve told him,’ Erlin told Hendricks. ‘I think he’s with us.’
Ansel did not know if the monitor had heard her. Despite avoiding painkillers the man seemed out of it, his attention wandering. An explosion from below brought that attention back to Ansel.
‘The Golem is coming up here,’ said Ansel.
‘It’s true,’ said Erlin.
Hendricks glanced at the third figure. That figure turned towards Ansel and exposed the horror of his face. One side of it was eaten down to the bone; the man’s eye on that side a lid-less ball in its socket. Kelly. There came a third explosion from below.
‘We have to get out of here,’ said Ansel.
‘No can do, assassin,’ said Hendricks. ‘AG burnt out when I landed.’ Hendricks closed his eyes for a moment and his head dipped. Ansel stood and took a step towards his gun. He had to resolve this, and fast. The fourth explosive disc blew. He wondered if the Golem had been near any of them. Even if it had been right on top of one, the blast would only have stripped its covering.
‘Am thirty-seven,’ slurred Kelly. He held a thick book pressed to his chest.
‘Where’s your shuttle?’ Ansel asked him.
Hendricks’s head came up and he stared at Kelly. Kelly returned the look then pointed up the mountain. Just then Ansel heard a scrambling on the stair behind him. He dived and rolled, snatching up his thin-gun as he went past, turned and fired. The Golem was up on the edge. It seemed a fairly normal man with a shaven head, and carried a weapon similar to the one Hendricks held. Ansel’s first shot hit it in the chest as it stepped forward. The explosion ripped a hole to expose gleaming ribs underneath. It tried to aim at him, but he hit it again and again.
Abruptly pulsed-energy fire hit it from Hendricks’s weapon. The Golem staggered then leant into the fusillade. Its face became a blackened pit and syntheflesh fell burning from its arm. Its weapon was trashed and it threw it aside, but it continued to advance. All Ansel could do was keep firing, even though he knew his and the monitor’s combined fire would not be enough.
‘Get down, assassin!’ Hendricks yelled.
What the hell for?
Instinct took over before Ansel could think of an answer to that question. All fire ceased and the Golem was running towards them. Suddenly there came a roar and blue fire speared above Ansel. The heat of it seared his back and he saw the Golem take that fire full on. It was stripped down to its metal chassis in an instant. It leant into flame then started to bend and distort. Abruptly it was coming apart and the blast picked it up and flung it over the edge. When the thruster motor cut out Ansel stood and glanced round at Hendricks.
‘AG was out,’ said the monitor. ‘Not the thrusters.’ He dropped the remote control he held, but managed to holster his pulse-gun before he fainted.
Ansel walked over and gazed down at the monitor. He owed the man. He turned and looked at Kelly. So easy now to complete his mission. Feeling an unaccustomed discomfort he became aware that Erlin was studying him.
‘Come to kill me?’ Kelly managed.
‘Not now,’ said Ansel, holstering his thin-gun.
‘Hendricks wouldn’t. Too. . moral.’
Ansel understood in an instant.
Kelly limped forward and held out the book to him. Ansel could not understand how the man was not screaming. His clothes were stained horribly and he must be losing the flesh of his body just as he was losing the flesh on his face.
‘Take it,’ Kelly said.
Ansel took the book and tucked it under his arm.
‘Are you a … good friend?’ Kelly asked, and turned his back on him.
‘I am,’ said Ansel, and he drew his thin-gun and brought it up. Erlin’s protest came half a second after the dull concussion that took the top off Kelly’s head.
‘Of course,’ said Hendricks, a sneer in his voice, ‘in those first thirty-seven years THC offered more than generous wages and free symbiont implantation so the colonists could partake of Fores’s bounty. When the first colonists died in ways too horrible to imagine THC came storming to the rescue: “Look,” they said, “we have this drug that seems, if taken in regular doses, to prevent the symbiont attacking its host. Admittedly it is expensive.” Work it out for yourself, assassin.’
As he engaged AG and lifted it out of the valley, Ansel stared out of the screen of Kelly’s shuttle. He knew how the Company operated, since he had spearheaded some nasty operations himself. But he had never expected to be on the receiving end. Forty years of loyal service and they had done this to him.