Border Princes Page 20

  She paused. ‘What the bloody hell is that?’

  There was another thunderclap burst of phasic discharge. Gwen jumped.

  ‘Get down,’ Jack said, pulling her towards an old tin bath serving as a water butt. Rainfall speckled the surface of the bath’s contents. ‘The technical name for it is very bad news. It’s real nasty. A twenty-seven. Scratch that, it’s a one hundred and twenty-seven. It’s way out of Torchwood’s class. We’re just bystanders.’

  ‘Christ...’

  ‘But look at it, Gwen. Look at it and tell me what you think it’s doing.’

  ‘Scaring the crap out of me is what.’

  ‘No, look at it! What does it look like it’s doing?’

  ‘It’s fighting,’ whispered Toshiko. ‘It’s fighting something we can’t see.’

  ‘Speak for yourself, Miss,’ said Davey. ‘Oh, it doesn’t like it. Not at all.’

  ‘Mr Morgan? Davey? Please tell me right now what you think you can see.’

  ‘That bloke, of course. That bloke there in grey, giving it what for.’

  Move. Don’t lie there. It’s not safe.

  James woke up. Pain flared through his shoulder and neck and jaw. His mouth was full of blood. He stirred. He was vaguely aware of a huge din close by, metal on metal, whoops of superheated air. The ground shook. Rain soaked him.

  Move. Get up and move now. It’s not safe.

  ‘What?’ he murmured. He raised his head slightly and blood ran down his chin from his mouth, and down his upper lip from his nose. He couldn’t focus properly.

  I will not ask you again. Get up and move.

  The voice was gentle, and oddly unaccented. It lacked even the slightest trace of region or background.

  Get up and move.

  James blinked and shook his head. He felt the downpour on his scalp. He knew he was hurt, quite badly hurt. His vision cleared slightly.

  He saw the Serial G.

  It was facing him, less than twenty yards away. It was behaving oddly, swinging its arms, its legs braced. It was the most active and mobile James had seen it, almost urgent.

  He got up very shakily, soaked to the skin. He’d lost a shoe somewhere, and his shirt was ripped. There was blood down the front of it. His own blood.

  He started to move. He broke into a limping run, hobbling up towards the northern limits of the allotments, away from the Serial G. The allotments ended in a bank of thick bushes, then a wall, behind which were the backs of houses. If he could get as far as the wall...

  He fell twice. He felt stricken and woozy. He spat out more blood and part of a tooth and ran on.

  ‘James!’ Gwen cried. ‘It’s James!’

  ‘Get down!’ Jack bellowed, and jerked her back into cover.

  ‘He’s hurt!’

  ‘Yeah, I think he is. But he’s running clear, look. He’ll be OK.’

  Gwen fought at Jack to get up.

  ‘Stop it!’ he snapped. ‘James will not thank me if I let you get smoked by that thing.’

  Gwen gave in and slumped down beside Jack. She watched James’s distant, staggering form until it disappeared behind a thicket of untended elder.

  ‘You really think that robot thing is fighting something?’ she asked, wiping rain off the end of her nose.

  ‘You got a better explanation for its behaviour?’ Jack asked.

  The Serial G swung its right manipulator limb at him. It was impressively fast, and agile for a construct. By comparison, the raindrops in the air were frozen and static.

  Mr Dine was impressed. It had hurt him already. Tech level forty-one-plus. Cold-cast vitalium/terybdonum composite alloy chassis. Hazard (type 1) grade physical assault, hazard (type 1) phasic weapon array. Hyper-aggressive intercourse.

  His shield barriers, both standard and custom, were taking a pounding. The phasic weapon had a bite to it, although it seemed to need a ten-second lag to cycle up and recharge for shooting during sustained discharge. Mr Dine had speed on his side.

  He ducked the sweeping limb, and hit the Serial G with another kinetic ram, his palm extended. The construct staggered backwards, and blitzed Mr Dine’s shield barriers with a phasic burn at ninety per cent of power capacity.

  Mr Dine leapt backwards, lifted slightly by the resounding impact. Coiling, he threw himself forward again under the grasping, groping claws of the manipulator limbs, and closed for contact.

  Palms open, he delivered two more kinetic rams, squirting power from the cuff outlets of his battledress system. The construct vibrated with the double impact, taking the full force in its torso.

  Mr Dine exploited his momentary advantage. He balled his left hand into fist form, invested primary power down his shoulder into his left arm, and punched.

  A blow like that could split granite or fracture steel. It struck the composite alloy faring of the construct’s torso and made a significant dent.

  The impact threw the Serial G backwards. It lost its footing entirely in the rain, flag-pole legs kicking helplessly, and crashed down onto its back.

  Mr Dine didn’t hesitate. He fused his right hand into a blade form, like the end of an adze, and pounced to drive it down into the thing’s heart for a kill.

  The Serial G was not done. Though it was down and floundering on its back in the rain, its grotesquely elongated limbs flailing, it was not done.

  It lashed its right arm around like a bull-whip, and caught Mr Dine in mid air with a noise like two racing locomotives meeting head on.

  ‘Look out!’ Davey shouted, and threw himself into Toshiko. The pair of them tumbled over into the wet grass.

  An instant later, the eggshell-blue potting shed they had been standing next to was comprehensively demolished, as if a cruise missile had struck it from the front. Pieces of tile and wooden lapping winnowed out from the impact.

  Toshiko raised her head. Raindrops struck her. The Serial G was on its back like an upturned beetle, its limbs waving. With a hiss, its limbs retracted, impossibly, into its torso housing, vanishing entirely for a second. Then its legs re-extended, lifting the sculptural body back upright. It rose straight up to a height of nine feet, and then its arms extruded from the sides of the torso, sliding out of nowhere smoothly and fluidly until its vast hook hands dangled below its hips again.

  It let out a hum, and the hum changed pitch. It turned its head and looked through the rain, across the ravaged allotment plots, directly at Toshiko.

  No, not at her, she realised. At the wreckage of the potting shed.

  It hummed again.

  ‘Had enough, have you?’ Davey asked, struggling to his feet. ‘Gave you a beating, didn’t he?’

  A wavering hum.

  ‘Regroup? No? Just stop it now, eh? Just stop it now,’ Davey said.

  The Serial G turned its head away and began to stride up the allotments towards the back wall.

  ‘No!’ Davey cried. ‘Come back here!’

  It ignored him.

  ‘I think it’s a bit scared now, to be honest,’ said Davey to Toshiko. ‘Rattled, you know? It wasn’t expecting that. It intends to run, go to ground.’

  ‘It said that?’

  Davey nodded. ‘It needs time to repair.’

  He limped over to the ruins of the potting shed and pulled back some of the remaining side panels so he could look in. The steady rain pattered off the wood and the grass.

  ‘All right there?’ Toshiko heard him say. She clambered up and hurried to join him. The potting shed was just a tangle of debris, slats of wood, old duck boards, scraps of ply. Davey pulled himself in, wobbling precariously.

  ‘It’s OK, just lie still,’ he said.

  She couldn’t see what he was talking to.

  Something rose up out of the wreckage. Something like a man, or the shadow of a man. A matt-grey ghost with a strange, thorny outline. Pieces of debris fell off it as it stood up.

  ‘Davey,’ she warned.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, hushing at her with a wave of his hand. He kept
his gaze on the figure.

  ‘Just stay put. It’s gone now. Just stay put,’ Davey said. ‘That’s a nasty scrape you’ve taken.’ He pointed.

  The shadow looked down. It put its left hand against its side where a dark, ink-like liquid was seeping out. The hand came away, fingers soaked and dripping with the gleaming black fluid.

  ‘You should—’ Davey began.

  The shadow simply wasn’t there any more.

  ‘Oh,’ said Davey. Unsteady on the tumbled kindling, he looked around at Toshiko. ‘It’s gone,’ he said.

  ‘It’s moving!’ Jack whispered.

  The Serial G was plodding away up the allotments in the beating rain.

  ‘That’s the way James went,’ said Gwen. She leapt up and began to run after it.

  ‘For God’s sake, woman!’ Jack barked, and ran after her.

  He’d reached the end wall. It was made of brick and seven feet high. There was no gate, no doorway.

  James fell against the wall and slid down it. His breathing was ragged. His whole upper body hurt, especially his shoulder and his jaw. He spat out some more blood. It was hard to focus, to think. His head felt like it was coming off. His mind felt like it was boiling.

  His hands were shaking.

  James looked up. He heard a distinctive hissing, pneumatic tread. A hum.

  The Serial G parted the elder bushes twenty feet from him in a spray of raindrops and stepped into view. James pushed himself backwards, willing himself into the unyielding wall. He held his breath.

  The Serial G paused, then cocked its head and looked in his direction.

  On the other side of the wall, James started to run. Another back lane, an alley, narrow and dank, filled with wheelie bins and soaked pieces of household junk. The lane ran along behind the walled backyards of another terrace.

  It was quite painful to run. James faltered, and came to a halt. He leaned against the allotment wall, panting hard. He wiped blood from his nostrils. The rain dribbled down his face.

  A sudden thought entered his head, unbidden, a realisation. How had he cleared this wall? How had he cleared this seven-foot wall?

  How—

  Twenty-five feet behind him, the wall in question exploded in a fury of phasic energy. Bricks flew and scattered, making the clip-clop sounds of horseshoes on the alleyway paving.

  The Serial G stepped through the three-metre-wide hole it had made in the wall. The crumbling edges of the brick work glowed and smoked.

  James started running again. The Serial G behind him snapped out a limb on elastic metal to grab him, and missed. Steel hooks the size of milk bottles clanked shut on empty air. The Serial G took off after him, taking huge strides on legs as long and thin as scaffolding poles.

  James risked a look back. A serious error. He slammed headlong into a wheelie bin and came down with it, sliding along the paving, garbage spilling out around and over him.

  He looked back. The Serial G bore down.

  Mr Dine ignored the pain. He accessed reserve investment and cleared the wall in the rain. He landed in the alley behind the construct and leapt at its back.

  The Serial G halted and writhed, trying to shake off the adversary clamped around its neck and torso. Its manipulator limbs snaked backwards, attempting to grasp Mr Dine and shred him.

  Mr Dine plunged a blade fist into the base of its neck. The alloy there dented deeply.

  The construct’s hum turned into a whine. It thrashed back and forth, slamming itself into the wet, alleyway walls, trying to wrench off its attacker. Bricks chipped and crumbled in bursts of dust as if hit by gunfire.

  It succeeded in grabbing Mr Dine with the hooks of its right claw. It ripped the First Senior off its back and threw him sideways. Mr Dine punched through the back wall of a yard and then the kitchen wall of a house. He came to rest in the ruins of a kitchen table. His violent passage had torn the stainless-steel sink and drainer away from its cabinet mount, and water gushed, under pressure, from the broken pipes. The PVC replacement window, frame and all, fell out of its hole.

  Mr Dine rolled over and got up. Black fluid spattered the quarry tile-effect vinyl flooring. He made a tactical assessment, scanning.

  James got up and started to run again. There was an archway between houses, a walk-through, to his left. He darted down it, heading for the street.

  The Serial G followed him.

  Mr Dine read, quite clearly, that the construct was moving laterally to his left flank, ten yards away.

  He turned, raised his arms in a protective cross in front of his face, and started to run. He exploded through the glass-panelled kitchen door, sprinted along the beige carpet of the hall and punched the front door clean out of its frame as he powered through it. He cleared the front garden wall, and landed on all fours like a cat on the roof of a parked car. The car’s alarm began to peal as his impact dented the roof.

  The local police had emptied the street about fifteen minutes earlier. At the far end, locals residents and policemen turned at the tape line when they heard the impacts and the alarm. They stared, mystified, down the street, through the rain.

  James ran out of the walk-through into the road, soaked. He fell down and rolled in the puddles. The cloud cover was low and dark. Some of the street-lamps had come on.

  Rainwater dripping off it, the Serial G strode out into the street behind him. It had retracted its legs considerably to duck under the walk-through. Now its legs extended again. It rose up, fourteen feet tall, its arms stretching out in proportion to its lower limbs.

  Crouched and tensed on the roof of the car, Mr Dine waited for a second. Rainwater streaked down his grey, thorny body, diluting the inky black streaming from his side.

  He took a breath.

  He jumped.

  The car he’d been crouching on bounced up and down on its shocks as he left it. He slammed into the construct and brought it over.

  The huge metal figure toppled sideways under the force of the intercept, and demolished the ground-floor wall of a neighbouring house.

  The impact threw Mr Dine clear. He rolled, and landed on his feet on a leatherette sofa. Unseated by the collapsing wall, a large television toppled off its stand in a flurry of sparks. A cracked aquarium began to gush its contents out onto the carpet. Dying, fragile, multicoloured fish flopped and wriggled as they were evacuated out onto the sopping pile.

  In the street, James got up, leaning for support against a parked car, hearing the parping alarm of another car nearby.

  The Serial G struggled and attempted to right itself.

  ‘No. Not this time,’ said Mr Dine. He leapt off the sofa and came down on top of it, a blade fist extended.

  The tips of his reinforced fingers punched into the construct’s chest and the alloy shattered like pie-crust. Mr Dine reached into the glowing interior, grabbed the construct’s pumping, sentient CPU, and ripped it out.

  The Serial G went into flatline arrest. The tiny reactor that powered it began to spin out wildly and overheat as system death overtook it.

  Realising what was about to occur, Mr Dine turned to run.

  The reactor superheated and winked out of existence. The Serial G exploded with it. So did the house, and the houses either side. Mr Dine was hurled like a limp rag across the street by the bow-wave of the detonation. At the end of the street, residents and police officers alike were knocked flat.

  Jack and Gwen ran out into the street.

  Pieces of up-flung debris were still coming down to rest. A gap where three houses had once stood blazed in the middle of the terrace row, churning thick, soot-black smoke into the sky. At the end of the street, people were shouting and screaming. Burning wreckage littered the road, sizzling in the rain. Everything was lit by the combusting ruins of the houses.

  Jack lowered his revolver.

  ‘Shit,’ he said.

  Gwen saw James, curled up in the middle of the road. She ran to him.

  ‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ she sobbed, c
radling him. Blood ran out of his slack mouth.

  Jack walked across the street. Something with a vaguely human shape had landed on the roof of a parked Vauxhall Astra. The roof was crumpled and the windows burst out.

  ‘I want to help you,’ said Jack. ‘Can I help you?’

  Mr Dine slowly raised his head. He heard the voice.

  ‘Please,’ said Jack.

  Mr Dine sat up. His investment was ebbing away. He was starting to crash, and the crash would be a bad one. He had been seriously damaged.

  He rose and slid down off the buckled car roof. On his feet, he rose and looked at Jack Harkness.

  ‘Please,’ Jack said. ‘I can help you.’

  He held out his hand in the rain.

  Mr Dine ignored it.

  ‘Please,’ Jack repeated.

  Mr Dine turned and began to walk away. The damage overwhelmed him for a second, and he staggered, falling against the car. Jack shot out his hands to support him.

  Mr Dine looked at Jack.

  ‘Contact is not permitted,’ he said. ‘Contact is not... advisable.’

  ‘I’m a broad-minded soul,’ replied Jack.

  ‘Contact is not permitted,’ Mr Dine repeated. Then he was gone.

  Jack Harkness was left looking at the inky black stains on his hands that the steady rain was already washing away.

  In the allotments, Toshiko was slowly leading Davey Morgan back down towards the path. A cat mewed quietly and Davey scooped it up.

  ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘You must be starving.’

  Then, a moment before the blast lit up the row of houses behind them, Davey shuddered.

  ‘Oh,’ he said to her sadly, ‘it’s gone.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  Jack sat in the Boardroom. He idly checked the cleanly dressed injury to his arm, and then buttoned on a fresh shirt and waited.

  One by one, Owen, Gwen and Toshiko wandered in and sat down. Toshiko simply sat and closed her eyes. Owen rolled back in his chair and put his feet up, as if he intended to snooze. Gwen flopped down, and sank her head over in her hands.

  No one said anything for quite a while.

  ‘Go on, somebody,’ said Jack at length. ‘I got nothing.’