He could not see the weapon. He only sensed the volume of data used for control and command processes, so he knew it was large, weighing about a ton. It was physical rather than informational, something that would bash his skull or lacerate his flesh rather than meddle with thought or perception.
From the information contour, the weapon was not chemical and not nanotechnological, and so it was technically inside what the Patricians permitted for automated death instruments. But what was it? He could not tell from seeing the thought-streams controlling it, because it did not fit any of the patterns he, or the Archangel of Bloodroot (whom he queried), recognized. It was an old command pattern. But from what nation of what world in what era long forgotten even Vigil the antiquarian could not say. The number of colonies planted was higher than the number of colonies that survived, and the history of off-world man reached back over sixty-eight thousand years.
And where was the weapon? Somewhere near, he knew. But there was no time and no information budget for a deeper scan of the area.
Vigil drew a breath, crossed himself, said a prayer, set his battle priorities, set his internal creatures to start selecting targets, spun the vendetta wand overhead, and ran toward the ambush with a shout on his lips.
The first and obvious choice was the scattered man. Vigil ran toward the medical slops can tucked in the weed-grown corner of the cobblestone alley, between a rain pipe leading down and an extraction pipe leading up, and almost before the ambushers knew their prey had found them, Vigil made the sign of Threatening Mudra, the tarjana, using an unusual left-handed stance, a fist with the index finger raised; next he tossed the wand from his right hand to his left, freeing his right hand to indicate harina, the Lion Gesture, thumb touching his second and third fingers, pinkie and index raised and crooked.
The result was immediate and startling: the scattered man, instead of abandoning the several parts of his body when their communication channels were jammed, pulled his limbs and organs from the various hiding places under eaves and springbird nests and streetlamps and ego slots together in one ugly mass of flesh. It looked like a shoal of fish, ruby red with blood, trying to form itself into a man’s shape.
The smell was vile; the sight was grotesque and mysterious. Vigil could not see how the body parts were moving through the air.
At the same time, the cart horse reared up, broke his traces, and fell forward onto the pavement, dead. The pack of dogs scattered, some howling insanely, fleeing and puking blood. Some ran a dozen steps and collapsed; others continued running and escaped. The teamster himself toppled headlong from the driver’s bench. His skull exploded outward as if from inner pressure.
Vigil was startled. He was expecting the scattered man to fall and the horse to charge, because the scattered man looked like a decentralized formation and the horse looked like savantry, a matter of brain download. Instead, the horse had been delocalized in the ether, and the man, one organism. The scattered man was something he had not seen before; a man with independent body parts, one part each given to one internal creature. He was like something from the legends of undead volcanoscapes and elfin sand dunes in nameless, nonconformist parishes beyond the Southeast, where lawless fauna thrived, programmed to survive any environment, no matter how dry, or to endure the plutonian winter.
The invisible figure was visible to his eyes, of course, wearing the wide-brimmed hat and ankle-length cloak, sand goggles and moisture veil of a Nomad from the small-crater prairie region of the Southeast, beyond the reach of the last canal. From the slight stature, the breathing pattern, and the set of the shoulders, Vigil could see it was a Nomadess, a woman of the Nomad race. In her hands was a breaching tool called a Halligan bar, with a fork at one end and an adze at the other. Not legally considered a weapon, it was ignored by most security protocols. The Nomadess had added an extender bar between two mating points, making the thing practically a pike.
She sublimated her goggles and veil so they disappeared into long streaks of light to the left and right. Beneath she was a Fox Maiden, or rather she wore a living mask that closely mimicked Fox Maiden features. This was a trick from a peddler’s tale, which should not have worked in real life, but Vigil felt the neural channels in his head leading to specific strikes and blows and battle reflexes jar themselves into stillness, as if paralyzed by the ancient instinctual rule preventing lesser races from harming foxes.
But no—he blinked, and in the afterimages, he saw that the goggles and veil, during the moment when they evaporated, had ignited to form a sketchy but legitimate mandala in midair—little more than a circle within a square—indicating Samadhi, or mental stability. That was what had actually frozen his impulses—that, and his unwillingness to strike an unmodified woman. It was a clever two-leveled deception.
Therefore, he stood stupidly, motionless, when she flourished the Halligan bar and it telescoped open at the speed of sound, making a crack like a whip, slamming into and through Vigil’s chest. The adze, covered in blood, emerged four inches from his back.
At the same time, the scattered man had mostly regathered and had one working leg and arm, and his head (which had the sharp features and high cheekbones of a Southeastern Nomad) was connected to his neck by a dozen pulsing red strands. Vigil recognized this order: the man was a Nukekubi, a colony creature with a detachable head. It was one of the racial absurdities left over from the Second Sweep, when the Myrmidons wanted to save on lift mass on starships and did not ship the colonist’s bodies with them, but insisted they be grown of native materials on arrival. The Fox Maidens by tossing their heads aloft had been trying subtly to warn him of this attack.
The man drew the broom handle, and it opened like an old-fashioned sword cane—one more thing from a peddler’s tale—and he feinted and lunged.
Vigil had sheathed his heart and lungs in layers of deflective tissue when he had first entered the alleyway, moved some organs into unexpected locations, and switched most of his body from biological to mechanical systems just before the blow from the girl’s Halligan bar struck home. (It was a technique from a race called the Hormagaunts, who dated from the brief and largely forgotten period between prehistory and posthumanity, between the invention of picture writing and the invention of ghost endorcism.) Vigil could move his limbs freely despite the horrific wound running through his chest cavity.
As the Nukekubi man lunged with his sword, he also threw his head from his body, bearing itself aloft with tiny pulses emitted from his dripping spinal column, and opened his mouth and screamed a verbal indication. The scream petrified Vigil’s nervous system, since it was a mudra, not a real scream (for the head while aloft had no lungs), and the head swooped to bite at Vigil’s neck with suddenly elongating teeth.
The perceptive internal which had been so subtly influenced by the Fox Maiden now saved Vigil, as it (for some reason) was not affected by the scream. That internal triggered Vigil’s battle internals, and his fighting reflexes took over.
Without knowing what he was doing or being able to stop it, Vigil drove the elbow of his right arm into the eye socket of the oncoming head, and with the same motion, he elongated the vendetta wand in his right hand to parry the sword blow from the scattered man’s still-fighting body. The nanotechnologically active dust flew from the blade like pollen, but pulses from the large red metal amulet on Vigil’s wrist neutralized the dust in a spray of sparks.