“I understand, Milo.”
“Then do it.”
Ezekiel repeated Milo’s instructions to the cowering and shocked group surrounding them. After some nervous muttering three women were despatched to fetch the required items. One returned shortly and deposited a bundle of clothing in front of the cyberoid. Milo said to Jan, “Go down and get dressed. I’ll stay up here and make sure our friend behaves himself.”
Jan climbed down off Ezekiel’s back and warily moved around it, keeping an uneasy eye on its massive legs. She still didn’t trust the machine creature, in spite of its new-found docility. She examined the clothes. They were anything but clean and smelt bad, but nothing like as bad as the garments that had been cut from her. She selected a pair of baggy pants with fewer holes than the others, a shirt made of a coarse, heavy material and a pair of battered leather boots. As she was dressing the other two women returned bearing her and Milo’s weapons, two water bags and a sack which presumably contained food. The two women—one of whom was nothing but a bent skeleton covered in withered skin—nervously put their burdens within Jan’s reach and hurriedly backed away. Like the others they kept casting looks of shocked disbelief at Ezekiel.
When she’d finished dressing and put on her weapons harness she climbed back up on to Ezekiel with the food and water. Milo showed her how to put the wires together inside Ezekiel that would cause him extreme agony, then descended to dress and pick up his own weapons. Jan looked at the three strange beings on the wheels. She shuddered at the state of their shattered limbs but was relieved to see that they were either unconscious or dead. She hoped it was the latter.
Milo rejoined her. She said to him, “You could have saved them too. Why didn’t you?”
“Those toys?” He glanced briefly at them. “No. The timing would have been wrong. I had to take the cyberoid by surprise.”
“You could have done it, Milo,” she told him coldly. “But you wanted to see the girl suffer and die, didn’t you?”
“Believe whatever you want. It’s no matter to me. But just remember that you’re still alive and those toys are dead. Or soon will be.”
Yes, I’m still alive, she thought, but for how much longer? “Why do you call them toys?”
“Because that’s what they were. Or rather their grandparents or great grandparents were. Sex toys, created to provide sexual pleasure for their owners. Many of the toys didn’t breed true but the ancestors of these three obviously did.” He suddenly slapped the top of the cyberoid’s head. “Now, 0008005, it’s time we got moving. But before we go, a question—are any of your weapons in operating order?”
“Yes. Not my guns. I have no ammunition for them. But my laser is still functioning.”
“Good,” said Milo, pleased. “That house, thirty degrees on your left. The one nearest to us. Fire your laser at it.”
The bundle of metal tubes on the top of the head swivelled round. Jan saw a bright red line of light form between the end of one of the tubes and the ramshackle building that Milo had indicated. Almost immediately the whole structure burst noisily into flames. The people moaned in terror. Milo, plainly enjoying himself, instructed Ezekiel to set fire to another building. As this one began to catch alight there were screams from inside. A door flew open and children of various ages, and a number of younger women carrying babies, came pouring out. All, to Jan’s eyes, looked starved and in bad health. “Stop!” she cried to Milo as the cyberoid continued to fire at the building. Milo ignored her. Only when the building was completely in flames did he direct Ezekiel to turn the laser on another ramshackle structure. Soon most of the settlement was on fire, the flames spreading to the camouflaged netting above.
“Was all this necessary?” cried Jan over the crackle of burning wood and the screams of the fleeing inhabitants.
“Why waste your sympathy on these scum? They were about to murder you just to placate their God.” He banged his fist on the cyberoid’s head again. “Right, 0008005, let’s get moving. Head towards the city. You know which direction it’s in?”
“Yes,” it replied and began to walk.
Very soon they were out in the bright sunlight again. Behind them the grim settlement of Ezekiel’s people blazed furiously, sending up a column of black smoke above the blight land.
The cyberoid swayed violently from side to side as it walked and Jan found it difficult to hang on to the small handholds, which Milo had told her were there for the benefit of maintenance engineers. He also told her that Ezekiel must have access to some functioning power source somewhere which enabled him to recharge his fuel cell. It was probably located in the city.
After they had been travelling about an hour Jan was relieved when Milo suddenly ordered the cyberoid to halt. “What’s wrong?” she asked as Milo peered intently into the trees on their left.
“I saw something glinting. Like glass. It’s gone now.”
“I didn’t see anything.”
“No, you wouldn’t have,” he said smugly and then directed Ezekiel to veer to the left.
They hadn’t gone far when the dead trees thinned out and they entered a large clearing. In the centre of it was a jumble of white stones scattered over a considerable area.
“Looks like the remains of a villa. A big one,” he said as the cyberoid approached the outskirts of the ruin. “I wonder what it was I saw flashing around here?” He ordered the cyberoid to stop. “You get down and check the place out,” he told Jan. “I’ll stay up here and make sure our fundamentalist tin-can doesn’t get any funny ideas.” Gratefully, Jan got down from the machine-creature’s back. “I’m going for a pee first,” she told Milo and headed for the nearest of the stone blocks. She had almost reached it when a cry made her turn. …
She was just in time to see the cyberoid pluck Milo off the back of its head with its mechanical arm, fling him to the ground and then crush him under one of its great metal feet.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“And I will set my glory among the heathen, and all the heathen shall see my judgement that I have executed, and my hand that I have laid upon them!”
Ezekiel roared out these words as it kept stamping on Milo. Jan started back towards them then stopped; it was plain there was nothing she could do to help Milo. His body was already a shapeless mass of bloody meat. He had to be dead.
Milo the immortal. Dead.
Ezekiel stopped stamping on Milo’s gory remains. The binoculars on their metal stalk turned in Jan’s direction. The collection of tubes on the cyberoid’s head followed suit. Jan flung herself on the ground. The red beam burnt through the air above her. She rolled, scrambled to her feet and ducked behind the block of stone.
“I am Ezekiel, Hammer of the Lord!” roared Ezekiel and she heard the sound of its great feet as it approached.
Keeping the stone block beneath her and Ezekiel she ran deeper into the ruins. She ducked and weaved around the scattered masonry, hoping to lose the cyberoid in the maze, but Ezekiel’s roaring voice grew louder. “Therefore as I live, sayeth the Lord God, I will prepare thee unto blood, and blood shall pursue thee; sith thou hast not hated blood, even blood shall pursue thee!”
Jan ran faster. She ducked round another corner. … and found herself in a cul de sac.
Broken walls and stone blocks formed a kind of alleyway that ended in a blank expanse of white stone that was too high for her to scale. It was too late to back-track; Ezekiel was too close. She was trapped.
The consciousness that was observing Jan was not human and it was observing her with an objectivity that was chilling in its absoluteness. Though it had organic components within its system these components were entirely synthetic—the product of a long-vanished laboratory—and lacked the attributes common to all natural life. The entity literally had no emotions; no fears, no desires, no curiosity, no empathy at all with the world it observed through its myriad sensors. It had been programmed to preserve itself, but did not possess the innate drive to survive shared by all natural organisms forged in the genetic furnace of evolution. It was just mind, pure and simple, and therefore not really alive.