Monono told Cup everything she had told me and Ursala. That Paul and Lorraine was not people, but monsters made out of tech. That they was copied from Stannabanna’s mother and father. That Stannabanna wasn’t a demon but a Rampart of the before-times, and that Sword of Albion was the name he give to them that followed him.
Then I come in with what I knowed, which was not much. That Ursala wanted to finish her work on the dagnostic, and then for all of us to take it up and run away with it. That she wanted us to find some way off the ship, if only we could get ourselves free to do it. And that there was someone on board who had left a message for us, warning that we was not to trust nobody at all – and also that we was not to let Sword of Albion get to land. I didn’t say that Ursala had found a way to change Cup’s body from boy to girl. I had got to keep Ursala’s secret like she asked me to.
The drone mostly kept up a steady pace all this time, but sometimes it stopped going forward and moved around us instead, like it was checking to see if we was up to something. We stopped talking when it did this. We didn’t know how much the drone could understand, or if there was someone else looking at us through what Monono called its cameras.
“And the message said we should watch ourselves around Stanley?” Cup asked when I had told her everything there was to tell.
“It said the boy. I guess it meant Stanley. He’s the onliest boy we seen so far anyway. And I guess he doesn’t like us much. Most of the time anyway.”
“I guess. He landed me a good one back there. He might be different than he seems though. When we was fighting, he pushed this into my hand.”
She was walking with her arms at her sides. Now she tilted her right hand towards me and opened it up, just for a second. Then she clenched it shut again. In that short time, I seen what was there in the middle of her palm. It was a flat circle of silver metal. I knowed what it was, and I marvelled at it.
“That’s just exactly like the thing Lorraine uses to open the doors!” I whispered.
“I know that, Koli. I got eyes. I thought Stanley was the meanest piece of shit I ever come across. But maybe he only started that fight so he could give me this.”
I wasn’t so sure about that. “Did you see his eyes though? He looked like he was losing his mind. Like all them stupid things he was saying was being squeezed out of him the way juice comes out of a plum.”
“His heart rate sped up to over two hundred beats a minute,” Monono said.
“When I hit him?” Cup asked.
“No. Before that, when he was talking to you. It was a really sudden spike, as if he was having a panic attack. And it came down again just as quickly. After you’d hit him, which should have been when he was feeling the most pain and stress. There’s something super-weird going on with him.”
“You think he’s made out of tech like Lorraine and Paul?”
“Paul and Lorraine don’t have heartbeats at all, little dumpling, so no. It’s not that. But his reactions are very messed up.”
I thought I recognised the hallway we was in. If I was right, we was almost come back to our rooms. “The key though,” I said. “I mean, the unlocking thing. We should use it tonight. We can try to find a lifeboat, or The Signal if it’s yet afloat.”
Just as I said it, another drone come gliding out of a side passage and fell in next to the yellow drone that Lorraine called Ixion. This one was silver like Paul’s drone, but it had a red stripe on one side and a kind of thin blade up on top of it like a fish’s fin.
The two drones stayed with us all the way back to the hallway where our rooms was. Then the yellow one went with Cup and the silver one went with me. When I got to my room, it stopped still in the air, around about the height of my head. I went inside and shut the door.
“How many of them damn things have they got?” I muttered.
I wasn’t really aiming that question at Monono, but she answered me anyway. “I wish I knew, Koli-bou. If it’s any consolation, I can read the drones’ EM signatures and tell you where they are out to a distance of about a hundred metres. That’s a good slice of the ship.”
“Where’s my one then? The silver one, I mean.”
“Right outside your door. It looks like it’s settled in for the long haul.”
“They don’t mean to take their eyes off us again,” I said. “What are we going to do?”
“Watch and wait, little dumpling. And when a chance comes, take it.”
23
Everywhere we went, the drones went with us. That day and the next day and the day after that, there wasn’t no getting free of them. If Cup and me was together, then just one drone would be there. If we was made to split up, a second one come so there would be one for each of us.
It was always the same two that we seen, the yellow one and the silver one with the fish’s fin. That was some kind of a comfort, for it give me to believe that these two – and Paul’s drone that was watching Ursala – was all they had. Three was bad enough, but I’d been afraid there might be dozens of the dead-god-damned things.
We took to watching the drones close to see what we could figure out about how they worked. Ursala had told me once that they was drawed to heat, especially the heat that come from people’s bodies. She said a lot of the tech that was in them when they was first made had stopped working, but the parts that knowed warm from cold was still good and that was how they hunted. These two seemed like they could see us though, and tell us each from other. If we moved apart, the yellow one would stay with Cup and the silver one would go with me. They never made no mistake about that.
Stanley was the other thing that was always with us. Lorraine had made up her mind that we had got to be together as much as possible, and we didn’t get no say in it. She took us to a different place each day. One day it was a place called a swimming pool, which was a wide tank of water that was just exactly like the tanks in the aquarium except there was no rocks in it and it was open on the top. Also, the water was blue instead of green. We was meant to swim in it, only I didn’t have the skill of doing that. I had got to stand in the part where the water was shallowest, while Stanley and Cup swum around. Lorraine said they should race each against other, but Cup said she was damned if she would do that and Stanley didn’t say nothing at all.
The funniest part of that day was we had got to take our clothes off to go into the pool. Stanley kept looking at Cup’s pizzle, then at her breasts, and then at her pizzle again. I guess he never seen a girl that had both of them things. Anyway, he didn’t seem to know what to make of her, and I was hard put not to laugh out loud when I looked at his face.
The day after that, we went to a place that Lorraine called a movie house. It was called that because there was pictures put up on a wall in a dark room full of chairs, and the pictures was moving. When I say that, you might think of a shadow show such as Issi Tiller used to make back in Mythen Rood, but it was not like that at all. The pictures in the movie house had colours and they moved and spoke up like they was real. It was more like you was looking through a big window into another place that was a long way away. It was a great wonder, only I don’t have no proper words to tell it.