Leila watched the combat with the Caretaker, perceiving it on multiple levels. Visually, there was little but a purple blur, three nanogel bodies spinning together in a dance so complex and quick that the Caretaker’s senses could barely keep up. Seen through his eyes, the spinning purple forms left trails behind themselves, ghost images of past movements. They made Leila feel that she was witnessing shapes carved in time as well as space – memories made concrete.
Every so often there would be a connection, and one of the three would stagger and drop back, and the locus of the battle would shift. Then the maelstrom resumed. Leila felt the action of Cassiel’s mind as she fought. The vast pleasure of summoning well-worn, secure skills suffused all levels of her consciousness.
First of all, there was the work that memory did, shaping present attacks by playing back fragments of the past. Upcoming movements pulsed through Cassiel’s mind, giving Leila the uncanny feeling that she was witnessing moments plucked from the future, as each one so perfectly anticipated a manoeuvre to come.
Beneath that higher level of struggle there was one that was deeper and more instinctive. Cassiel’s intrusion systems battered her opponents. She held in herself a storehouse of damage – code weapons built to corrupt operating systems, purge entire skill sets, crash primary and secondary consciousness elements and force full factory resets on entire live minds.
These imps leapt to the attack, dense with invisible fury. At first, all died. She kept pumping out generation after generation, altering each new one according the feedback the last had hurled back. Each new wave broke that little bit deeper into its victims’ defences, until at last the fallen minds shuddered and started to break apart.
When the guards finally fell, they went quickly. Complexity collapsed into a random jumble of electrical impulses, then fell away into a silence as complete as it was final. The guards dropped into liquid form, leaving only a sticky ooze behind them.
A fierce, competent joy pulsed through Cassiel’s mind. Her close quarter combat systems folded themselves away. Leila thought of claws withdrawing back into flesh, of bloodied teeth disappearing into a closing mouth as a soft pink tongue licked them clean.
‘That was pretty impressive,’ commented the Caretaker as he struggled out of the train. ‘I’d say you were back to being one hundred per cent ninja.’ He chuckled. ‘I can start being a pacifist again.’
‘As long as you keep the flies down,’ Cassiel told him.
‘I’ll teach you the trick of it, when we’ve got a moment.’
‘Can you hear that?’ asked Leila. A distant sound – barely a whisper – echoed out of the tunnel behind them.
‘Crap,’ said the Caretaker. ‘They’re catching us up.’
Cassiel turned and listened. Her sharper ears heard a vast gabble, a collection of sounds that included howling and screaming and crying and barking.
‘Sweatheads,’ she said. ‘Too many to fight. Run.’
The first sweatheads burst out of the tunnel behind them. They came on as a great onrush of flesh. Their add-ons sparkled in the dim light. There were so many of them. Some ran. Others scuttled along walls, the lightness of their desiccated bodies making it easy to find purchase. The lighter ones leapt across their fellows’ heads and shoulders. They seemed to be a single entity, leaping out of the great burrow like a piston flying out of a cylinder.
Panic flooded the Caretaker. He scrambled to catch up with Cassiel. She’d already made it through the pressure door. He and Leila were close behind. As they leapt through it, Cassiel slammed it closed and spun its locking wheel. The wheel blurred, then thunked to a stop.
‘Can they open it from the other side?’ asked Leila.
Cassiel rammed a metal bar between its spokes, holding it closed. ‘It’ll take them a minute or so,’ she replied. ‘Now, where have you bought us?’
Broken monitor screens, decayed server stacks and collapsed control consoles stretched away along one side of the room. They would have been a lifeless collage of dead technologies, but for the dense mass of purple ooze clotted within them. The blistered nanogel pulsed with sickly life, rioting like an out-of-control infection.
‘No flies,’ said Leila.
‘They’re hiding them,’ the Caretaker told her. ‘Don’t want to risk me breaking them. And there’s our way out.’ He pointed at the other end of the room. The wall was punctuated with a dozen round hatches. They looked freshly polished. ‘Escape pods.’ A small pile of abandoned body suits lay beneath them, bleached pale by age.
He started across the room and triggered the trap.
Cassiel reached out and pulled him back as the room exploded. Nanogel leapt from the walls, the ceilings, the floors, forming itself into dozens of biped attackers. The mass leapt towards them, and Cassiel was changing too, moving in the opposite direction – falling away from anything human, once again becoming a weapon. Scores of attackers, and so her mind ramped up to a velocity of response that burned Leila’s thoughts. As she broke close contact with Cassiel, there was one final exchange.
‘Not combat specialists. Knife through butter.’
The mind became a vicious blur, a series of attacks moving with the speed of thought, devastating her opponents. Ahead of her, there was a tsunami of nanogel aggressors. Behind there was only decay, her attackers melting away into nothing. The Caretaker and Leila followed her across the room, shielded by the fury of her attack. There was no longer anything remotely human about her. She moved through her attackers like time through a life, leaving absence behind.
‘Yup, she’s good,’ whispered the Caretaker admiringly. ‘Real good.’
It only took them a few seconds to reach the hatches. A vast bang echoed through the chamber, followed by a rhythmic thumping. The sweatheads had reached the pressure door. The metal rod groaned in the locking wheel.
Cassiel melted back into human form. ‘The nanogel will reform in a couple of minutes.’ It oozed towards the door. ‘It’s getting ready to merge with the sweatheads.’
‘Be cool,’ the Caretaker told them, sounding infinitely relaxed. ‘I’m on it. You’re safe.’ He moved quickly down the hatches, inspecting them.
There was a few seconds silence, a vast crash. The door started to thump and groan under the pressure of the aggressors behind it.
‘It won’t hold for long,’ warned Cassiel.
‘We’ll be gone by then,’ replied the Caretaker, fiddling with a control panel. ‘Grab one of the pressure suits. Bring it here.’ Three of the hatches hissed open. ‘Quickly!’
The hollow banging continued. Metal shrieked and groaned, protesting against terrible pressure. The Caretaker typed numbers into the control panel faster than she could read.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Leila.
‘New coordinates,’ he replied.
A long, low cracking sound echoed out into the room. The door shuddered. Cassiel stood by the Caretaker, holding up a pressure suit. He glanced away from the control panel, reached for the back of its neck and flicked a switch. The suit started to uncrumple itself.
‘Drop it,’ he hissed. The suit landed on two feet, lifting itself up into a human shape and swaying slightly as it finished expanding. ‘There,’ said the Caretaker. ‘Leila – your new home.’
It was ancient. It looked like it had been stitched together from canvas and leather. The dry air had preserved it and the dust had penetrated it, turning it a soft reddish brown colour. The visor was fogged. The arm had a long, deep rip in it. Through it, Leila could see something hard and white – part of the suit’s support structure, she assumed.
‘It’s built round a fully powered exo-skeleton,’ explained the Caretaker. ‘You should be able to mesh with it and control it without too much trouble. Your own body, at last. Cassiel – attach her.’
‘But why do I need it?’ asked Leila as Cassiel strapped her disc to the rear of the suit. She leapt into its control systems. The suit’s sensors burst into action, creating a new version of the world for her. There were twin shoulder cameras, the world looking only lightly blurred through their dust-etched lenses. Not-quite-reliable auditory sensors turned voices into glitched, crackling recordings of themselves. A battery warning pinged and she felt the suit’s systems start to drain power from her disc.
‘We need to split up,’ the Caretaker told her as three of the hatches opened. ‘Journey’s dangerous. Have to make sure at least one of us gets through. And even if we all make it we’ll probably get separated on landing. Down there you need to be able to move under your own steam.’
‘Down where?’ asked Leila. But she knew. She just couldn’t quite believe it.
Cassiel was peering through one of the open hatches. ‘This is a planetary escape pod,’ she said.
‘She’s got it,’ beamed the Caretaker. ‘It’s like I told you. I’m sending us all the way back to Earth.’ A worried look. ‘If you guys are up for that, of course.’
Leila glanced at Cassiel. She nodded.
‘Straight to Deodatus?’
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘Can’t just go marching in, he’d catch you right away. You’re coming back to my place.’ He turned to Leila and looked somewhere between embarrassed and proud. ‘All my new memories are starting to come together. Down there, I run a city of my own. And I’m a god.’