On the other side of all that ruck was where the skimmer was, but it was clear there wasn’t no way we could go through. All we could do was to get out from under the fighting drones before we was burned up.
Cup shoved one of her two knives into my hand and tucked the other in her belt. She grabbed hold of Ursala’s arm and slipped her head under. I done the same on the other side and we lifted her between us.
We turned our backs on all the fighting and walked away from it as quick as we could. We was still among the ravens though, and they was all awake. The plates of the deck was shaking and shivering somewhat with the low growl they all was giving out as they sit there. I thought for sure one of them would lift itself up and fire on us.
That didn’t happen, but the drones was ranging everywhere, and though they mostly was fighting each against other I knowed that some of them would shoot us down as soon as they seen us. Paul Banner was back there too. From time to time, I catched a glimpse of him coming up behind us, through all the smoke and fire, his face like a skin mask on a scarecrow turning this way and that as he tried to see where we’d gone. I wished we could run, but Ursala was hard put to it even to limp along in between us.
“We got to find somewhere to hide!” I shouted at Cup.
She didn’t answer me. She was pulling us forward faster than we could go. Then she let go of Ursala and run ahead, leaving the two of us to struggle on the best we could. We was all but spent, the pair of us. We was barely even walking any more.
Paul Banner didn’t come from behind us but from in front of us, stepping out from between two of the ravens. He must of gone around to cut us off, though if he knowed how slow we was going he might not of took the trouble.
We stumbled to a halt. I let go of Ursala, who sunk down on the deck straightway like her legs wouldn’t carry her no more. I raised up the knife Cup had give me and held it out in front of me. It was the one she had took off the table in the crow’s nest and sharpened up, so it was meant for spreading butter and not for fighting. I don’t think that made any difference though. Cup was the only decent fighter out of all of us, and Cup was gone.
With his face mostly melted, the only way we could know Paul’s feelings was from his voice. He sounded angry. “This is very inconvenient,” he said. “And it’s very much your fault. If you think I’m just going to let it pass, you’re mistaken. You need to be punished.”
He flexed his two hands, one against the other, and drawed himself up straight. “Mistaken,” he said again. “Fault mistaken. Your fault mistaken mistaken mistaken.” His voice got deeper and slower until it was a kind of a growl. “Mistaken punished.” He gun to walk towards us. His steps was slow, with spaces in between. Each leg come up and went down again like it was making up its own mind what to do.
“You keep away from us, Paul,” I said as fierce as I could. “I don’t want to fight you.” That was the dead god’s truth too. But Paul just kept on coming.
I took a step back, and then one to the side, feinting with the knife even though he wasn’t close enough to hit yet. I was trying to lead him away from Ursala in case maybe she would have time to crawl away and hide while he was fighting me. It wasn’t like to be a very long fight though.
“I mean it,” I said. “You take one more step, and I’ll cut you in two.”
“Really?” Paul’s voice was full of tiredness and contempt. He took that next step.
A line of white fire ripped across him from his right shoulder all the way down to the top of his left leg. It cut a big slice out of him all at once so he fell in two pieces. The parts of him that got touched by the fire as he was falling burned to nothing too, so there was a whole lot less of him when he hit the floor than there was when he was standing up.
It wasn’t my knife that was doing this, in case you was wondering. It happened like magic – like something I had brung into the world by saying it. I couldn’t do nothing but stare.
Then Cup give a big loud yell – “Eat it, you bastard!” – and I looked over my shoulder to where she was. We had come to the tower where Stanley took us that first day, and where he shot a bird out of the sky with a thing he called a Helios. That was where Cup was standing now. She had turned the Helios to point it down to where Paul was. It still was pointing at him, and at the deck under him that now was boiling grey sludge instead of metal. What was left of Paul was melting and bleeding into the sludge. His face was half in it and half out of it. His one eye that was left stared at us, still stern and angry. The side of his mouth I still could see moved like he was saying something, but he didn’t make no sound that could be heard over the hissing of the laser and the burbling of the hot metal.
“I can’t let go of the dead-god-damned thing!” Cup shouted down at us. “It won’t turn off. Koli, don’t get too close.”
“Point it up at the sky!” I shouted back.
She done that, but still could not let go without it falling back. I skirted round what was left of Paul and went to see if Ursala was okay. She was sitting up now and rubbing at her elbow that took a hit when she fell down. “I’m fine, Koli,” she said, shrugging away from me when I tried to touch her. “Don’t fuss.”
The Helios died right then, and Cup give a whoop. I think she was fearful she would be stuck up there on that platform for aye and ever. She run to the ladder and climbed back down to the deck.
I still could hear the sound of the drones fighting and setting fire to each other, but we wasn’t seeing them no more and the fight seemed to be dying down now. I had got to wonder who won it, especially since we was going to have to go back that way to find the skimmer and get off the ship.
“That was clever,” I said to Cup as she come up to join us. “I guess you watched Stanley when he was firing that thing.”
Cup nodded. “If someone shows you a weapon, you’ve got to be some special kind of a fool to look away.”
“I guess I’m that fool then,” I said.
Cup looked a mite sheepish. “I meant if a fighter does it. You’re no kind of a fighter, Koli Woodsmith. But that don’t mean you’re—”
She didn’t get to tell me what I was or what I wasn’t. The deck shuddered and jumped under us so sudden that we both staggered and almost fell. Ursala fared better since she was sitting down already, but then the floor tilted and she gun to roll towards the red-hot sludge that still was pooling where Cup had struck Paul down. We grabbed hold of her to stop her, only to be throwed off our own feet as a great and terrible shock made Sword of Albion, for all its size and weight, shake like a struck drumhead.
It was an explosion.
And there was a whole lot more that come right after.
Monono
42
Scaleability. That was the problem. It was a very easy thing to tell one drone what to do, or ten, or even a hundred. Any further than that and things started to get complicated. The pesky little things kept tugging on my sleeve, wanting to know what to do next. Well, dear, you spin and fire, dodge to the left, fire again, drop seven and a half inches…
I was having about eighteen thousand of these conversations at once, and some of them were getting heated. If I wasn’t quick enough, or if I didn’t keep a scrambler up around the edges of the chit-chat, Sword of Albion came barging back in shouting “THAT WOMAN IS AN IMPOSTER!” The poor drones didn’t know who to trust, and some of them were led astray. In the space of about three seconds, there was all-out war.