Use of Weapons (7 page)

The
view led down to the new port and the straits, where seaships passed smoothly
in the late morning sunlight, heading for ocean or inland sea, according to
their lanes. From the other side of the castle complex, the city revealed its
presence with a distant rumble and - because the light wind came from that
direction - the smell of... well, she just thought of it as City, after three
years here. She supposed all cities smelled different, though.

Diziet
Sma sat on the grass with her legs drawn up to her chin, and looked out across
the straits and their arching suspension bridges to the sub-continent on the
far shore.

'Anything
else?' the drone asked.

'Yeah;
take my name off the judging panel for the Academy show... and send a stalling
letter to that Petrain guy.' She frowned in the sunlight, shading her eyes.
'Can't think of anything else.'

The
drone moved in front of her, teasing a small flower from the grass in front of
her and playing with it. '
Xenophobe
's
just entered the system,' it told her.

'Well
happy day,' Sma said sourly. She wetted one finger and rubbed a little speck of
dirt from the toe of one boot.

'And
that young man in your bed just surfaced; asking Maikril where you've got to.'

Sma
said nothing, though her shoulders shook once and she smiled. She lay back on
the grass, one arm behind her.

The
sky was aquamarine, stroked with clouds. She could smell the grass, and taste
the scent of small, crushed flowers. She looked back up over her forehead at
the grey-black wall towering behind her, and wondered if the castle had ever
been attacked on days like this. Did the sky seem so limitless, the waters of
the straits so fresh and clean, the flowers so bright and fragrant, when men
fought and screamed, hacked and staggered and fell and watched their blood mat
the grass?

Mists
and dusk, rain and lowering cloud seemed the better background; clothes to
cover the shame of battle.

She
stretched, suddenly tired, and shivered with a little flashback of the night's
exertions. And, like somebody holding something precious, and it slipping from
their fingers, but them having the speed and the skill to catch it again before
it hit the floor, she was able - somewhere inside herself - to dip down and retrieve
the vanishing memory as it slipped back into the clutter and noise of her mind,
and glanding
recall
she held it,
savoured it, re-experienced it, until she felt herself shiver again in the
sunlight, and came close to making a little moaning noise.

She
let the memory escape, and coughed and sat up, glancing to see if the drone had
noticed. It was nearby, collecting tiny flowers.

A
party of what she guessed were schoolchildren came chattering and squealing up
the path from the metro station, heading towards the postern. Heading and
tailing the noisy column were adults, possessed of that air of calmly tired
wariness she'd seen before in teachers and mothers with many children. Some of
the kids pointed at the floating drone as they passed, wide-eyed and giggling
and asking questions, before they were ushered through the narrow gate, voices
disappearing.

It
was, she'd noticed, always the children who made a fuss like that. Adults just
assumed that there was some trick behind the apparently unsupported body of the
machine, but children wanted to know how it worked. One or two scientists and
engineers had looked startled, too, but she guessed a stereotype of
unworldiness meant nobody believed them that there must be something odd going
on. Anti gravity was what was going on, and the drone in this society was like
a flashlight in the stone age, but - to her surprise - it was almost
disappointingly easy just to brazen it out.

'The
ships just met up,' the drone informed her. 'They're transferring the stand-in
for real, rather than displacing it.'

Sma
laughed, plucked a blade of grass and sucked on it. 'Old
JT
really doesn't trust its displacer, does it?'

'I
think the thing's senile, myself,' the drone said sniffily. It was carefully
slicing holes in the barely more than hair-thin stems of the flowers it had
picked, then threading the stems through each other, creating a little chain.

Sma
watched the machine, its unseen fields manipulating the little blossoms as
dexterously as any lace-maker flicking a pattern into existence.

It
was not always so refined.

Once,
maybe twenty years ago, far away on another planet in another part of the
galaxy altogether, on the floor of a dry sea forever scoured by howling winds,
beneath the mesa that had been islands on the dust that had been silt, she had
lodged in a small frontier town at the limit of the railways' reach,
preparatory to hiring mounts to venture into the deep desert and search out the
new child messiah.

At
dusk, the riders came into the square, to take her from the inn; they'd heard
her strangely coloured skin alone would fetch a handsome price.

The
inn-keeper made the mistake of trying to reason with the men, and was pinned to
his own door with a sword; his daughters wept over him before they were dragged
away.

Sma
turned, sickened, from the window, heard boots thunder on the rickety stairs.
Skaffen-Amtiskaw was near the door. It looked, unhurried at her. Screams came
from the square outside and from elsewhere inside the inn. Somebody battered at
the door of her room, loosing dust and shaking the floor. Sma was wide eyed,
bereft of stratagems.

She
stared at the drone. 'Do something,' she gulped.

'My
pleasure,' murmured Skaffen-Amtiskaw.

The
door burst open, slamming against the mud wall. Sma flinched. The two black-cloaked
men filled the doorway. She could smell them. One strode in towards her, sword
out, rope in the other hand, not noticing the drone at one side.

'Excuse
me,' said Skaffen-Amtiskaw.

The
man glanced at the machine, without breaking stride.

Then
he wasn't there any more, and dust filled the room, and Sma's ears were
ringing, and pieces of mud and paper were falling from the ceiling and
fluttering through the air, and there was a large hole straight through the
wall into the next room, across from where Skaffen-Amtiskaw - seemingly defying
the law concerning action/reaction - hovered in exactly the same place as
before. A woman shrieked hysterically in the room through the hole, where what
was left of the man was embedded in the wall above her bed, his blood
spattered copiously over ceiling, floor, walls, bed and her.

The
second man whirled into the room, discharging a long gun point-blank at the
drone; the bullet became a flat coin of metal a centimetre in front of the
machine's snout, and clunked to the floor. The man unsheathed and swung his
sword in one flashing movement, scything at the drone through the dust and
smoke. The blade broke cleanly on a bump of red-coloured field just above the
machine's casing, then the man was lifted off his feet.

Sma
was crouched down in one corner, dust in her mouth and hands at her ears,
listening to herself scream.

The
man thrashed wildly in the centre of the room for a second, then he was a blur
through the air above her, there was another colossal pulse of sound, and a
ragged aperture appeared in the wall over her head, beside the window looking
out to the square. The floorboards jumped and dust choked her. 'Stop!' she
screamed. The wall above the hole cracked and the ceiling creaked and bowed
down, releasing lumps of mud and straw. Dust clogged her mouth and nose and she
struggled to her feet, almost throwing herself out of the window in her
desperate attempt to find air. 'Stop,' she croaked, coughing dust.

The
drone floated smoothly to her side, wafting dust away from Sma's face with a
field-plane, and supporting the sagging ceiling with a slender column. Both
field components were shaded deep red, the colour of drone pleasure. 'There,
there,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw said to her, patting her back, Sma choked and
spluttered from the window and stared horrified at the square below.

The
body of the second man lay like a sodden red sack under a cloud of dust in the
midst of the riders. While they were still staring, before most of the raiders
could raise their swords, and before the inn-keeper's daughters - being lashed
to two of the mounts by their captors - realised what the almost
unrecognisable lump on the ground in front of them was and started screaming
again, something thrummed past Sma's shoulder and darted down towards the men.

One
of the warriors roared, brandishing his sword and lunging towards the door of
the inn.

He
managed two steps. He was still roaring when the knife missile flicked past
him, field outstretched.

It
separated his neck from his shoulders. The roar turned to a sound like the
wind, bubbling thickly through the exposed wind-pipe as his body crashed to the
dust.

Faster
- and turning more tightly - than any bird or insect, the knife missile made an
almost invisibly quick circle round most of the riders, producing an odd
stuttering noise.

Seven
of the riders - five standing, two still mounted - collapsed into the dust, in
fourteen separate pieces. Sma tried to scream at the drone, to make the missile
stop, but she was still choking, and now starting to retch. The drone patted
her back. 'There, there,' it said, concernedly. In the square, both of the
inn-keeper's daughters slipped to the ground from the mounts they had been tied
to, their bonds slashed in the same cut that had killed all seven men. The
drone gave a little shudder of satisfaction.

One
man dropped his sword and started to run. The knife missile plunged straight
through him. It curved like red light shining on a hook, and slashed across the
necks of the last two dismounted riders, felling both. The mount of the final
rider was rearing up in front of the missile, its fangs bared, forelegs
lashing, claws exposed. The device went through its neck and straight into the
face of its rider.

On
emerging from the resulting detonation, the machine slammed to a stop in
mid-air, while the rider's headless body slid off his collapsing, thrashing
animal. The knife missile spun slowly about, seemingly reviewing its few
seconds' work, then it started to float back towards the window.

The
inn-keeper's daughters had fainted.

Sma
vomited.

The
frenzied mounts leapt and screamed and ran about the courtyard, a couple of
them dragging bits of their riders with them.

The
knife missile swooped and butted one of the hysterical mounts on the head, just
as the animal was about to trample the two girls lying still in the dust, then
the tiny machine dragged them both out of the carnage, towards the doorway
where their father's body lay.

Finally,
the sleek, spotless little device rose gently to the window - daintily avoiding
Sma's projected bile - and snicked back into the drone's casing.

'Bastard!'
Sma tried to punch the drone, then kick it, then picked up a small chair and
smashed it against the drone's body. 'Bastard! You fucking murderous
bastard
!'

'Sma,'
the drone said reasonably, not moving in the slowly settling maelstrom of dust,
and still holding the ceiling up. 'You said do something.'

'Meatfucker!'
She smashed a table across its back.

'Ms
Sma; language!'

'You
split-prick shit, I told you to
stop
!'

'Oh.
Did you? I didn't quite catch that. Sorry.'

She
stopped then, hearing the utter lack of concern in the machine's voice. She
thought very clearly that she had a choice here; she could collapse weeping and
sobbing and not get over this for a long time, and maybe never be out of the
shadow of the contrast between the drone's cool and her breakdown; or.

She
took a deep breath,
calmed
herself.

She
walked up to the drone and said quietly, 'All right; this time... you get away
with it. Enjoy it when you play it back.' She put one hand flat on the drone's
side. 'Yeah; enjoy. But if you ever do anything like that again...' she slapped
its flank softly and whispered, 'you're ore, understand?'

'Absolutely,'
said the drone.

'Slag;
components; motherjunk.'

'Oh,
please, no,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw sighed.

'I'm
serious. You use minimum force from now on. Understand? Agree?'

'Both.'

She
turned, picked up her bag and headed for the door, glancing once into the
adjoining room through the hole the first man had made. The woman in there had
fled. The man's body was still cratered into the wall, blood like rays of
ejecta.

Sma
looked back to the machine, and spat on the floor.

'The
Xenophobe's
heading this way,'
Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, suddenly there in front of her, its body shining in the
sunlight. 'Here.' It stretched a field out, offering her the little chain of
bright flowers it had made.

Sma
bowed towards it; the machine slipped the chain over her head like a necklace.
She stood up and they went back into the castle.