Another man, young and thin and hard, pushed by the sick-fat man and said to the two golden ones, “Get off the train. Train isn’t for you. Get off.”
Kix and Goldhawk didn’t even argue. Nor did they move. They sat there in their seats, and all at once, turning to each other, they smiled briefly into each other’s eyes.
That was when the young man drew his knife.
He shoved it forward, against the base of Goldhawk’s column of neck.
Goldhawk told him, lazily, “That won’t work, will it?”
“Who says?”
The thin man drew back his arm and brought it in again, slashing at the robot’s face. That took about three seconds.
I don’t know if it would have caused any temporary damage to the metallic skin. Maybe not. It didn’t, anyway, even at three-second speed, get the chance.
Goldhawk was standing, so quick he was a scintillant blur. In that instant, too, his clothing entirely altered. He was clad in black armor, something between that of a Samurai and a Medieval European knight. His hand, now in a gleaming, coal-black gauntlet, met the edge of the knife and it went reeling away. Then Goldhawk took hold of his thin human assailant, and lifted him swiftly up and up, and bashed his head against the roof of the carriage. Even over the noise of the train, we heard a horrible crack.
I thought, He’s broken his neck, or the skull—
Near me, a young woman leaned over and threw up on the aisle.
Goldhawk let go, and the body toppled back down to our level. It lay there, sprawled. The thin face astonished.
The male gold looked around at us. He said smoothly, that intimate voice that entered the ear and brain, “There.”
That was all.
Beside him, the female, Kix, was also on her feet and armored, but in light, insectile mail.
Neither of them now had any expressions.
What happens in this sort of situation? People cower, or run away as far as they can. Or they shout. Do they?
None of that.
It was the fat man who threw himself onto Goldhawk. And the rest of the passengers seemed to be pulled forward, as if they were tied to the fat man—and where he went they must, and what he did they must do—a mob.
Slabs of humanity—arms flailing, blows—thuds and yells now, a sort of stampede. Even the two or three women were part of it—wrenching, wrenching at black and green hair.
Only the sick girl and I stayed back. She was moaning, “I wan’ out—” lying on the arm of the seat, and throwing up again.
I thought, They’ll tear them in pieces.
Who did I mean? I think I meant the human mob would rend Goldhawk and Kix apart, like furious beaten children ripping up two dolls.
Or did I think that?
Can’t remember.
There’s a kind of gap there in my head, where thought might have been. No words had come out, nothing coherent. Only the pictures.
I saw Kix first. She jumped. Right up in the air, over their heads— How high was the car? Maybe seven feet. No one could jump clear up like that—yet she did. She was like a gold-black ball, curling over, compressing, and then again extending out. She had slewed her head and neck and upper torso—spine made of rubber-steel—over against the roof. Impossible. But I saw it. The lower part of her body was also busy. She was crouching on the shoulders of a woman—the woman who’d cried, “Say—are you the ones?” and who now buckled as if a ton of weight had slammed onto and was crushing her, not this slender, lightly armored, elongate and extraordinarily crouched-over insect, which next seized the woman’s head between its ankles.
“Oh, Christ,” hummed the girl lying on the seat near me. She was watching, no longer vomiting.
Both of us watched. The human woman, bleeding (ears, nose, mouth), sank right down. Her body was on the floor, lying over that of two men, dead, or unconscious.
For Goldhawk, too, had sprung
Now they stood off, balletically poised. They’d always been the fighters and acrobats. Hired for bodyguards. Now illegal.
From Goldhawk’s right hand a long dagger slid like a shining tongue. Even this was an englamored thing. The hilt was gold and had a black jewel in it. Why did I notice, at such a time? Because the gold and the jewel were all one and the same thing with the rest. Beauty and horror, inseparable.
The remainder of the people in the carriage—not many now—had at last pressed back.
So Goldhawk and Kix, free as birds, walked over to the doors, he with the blade swishing, like a walking cane.
All this while the train had been bolting on, going to Russia like it was scheduled to, not stopping anywhere, since no one had paid for those stations in between.
There was an emergency button by the doors. Not all trains have these. It’s to signal the main power artery if the doors jam. The message runs to the control cabin and the train—itself a robot—returns the proper answering signal that opens the doors. This can only happen while a train is at a standstill.
Kix put her delicate finger with its peridot nail on the door button.
If a human did that, it wouldn’t work. The safety override would snap in and stop it.
But the train was a robot, and so was Kix, and something occurred between them, some sympathetic communication.
Both doors shot open wide.
The train was going at about a hundred and thirty. When the doors unsealed, a kind of solid air, like chunks of matter, banged into the car. Against the unraveling turbulence of it, the two gold-black-green insect-reptiles were posed a moment, as if to take a bow. Then they flashed away. They were gone, jumped facile and secure off onto the track below. You knew they hadn’t lost their footing.
Down the whole length of the train wracked a raucous, deafening, terrifying squealing. Our car bumped as if it ran upward over big rocks.
This bit is difficult for me to recount. I saw—we were putting our hands over our ears—someone was at the doors trying to make them close, but because of the bumping he, too, fell away, outward, but not as the two robots had done. A woman was shrieking. Everyone was calling out. The girl next to me, her face white, took hold of me. The train was going upward, up a mountain—it was going—
There was a long sound. I don’t know what. Where I have only pictures just before, for this I only have a word: “sound.” I remember then it was like when you blink your eyes and for a second everything isn’t there, and then it comes back.
Something hit me across the shoulders. Then my head, but quite soft—
I lay there, and it was so quiet. It seemed to be about sixty seconds before any noises began again. It was almost peaceful, to lie there, on the motionless surface.
But then again there began to be continual screams and cries, and a drumming kicking, and a strange creaking juddering, on and on, and on and on.
The auto-medic ran its scanner over me quickly and told me I was fine. Nothing broken, some bruises, some shock. Here are some painkillers. Go home and rest.
I didn’t know what had happened to the others in my car, or on the remainder of the train. I really don’t recall what state the train was in. I saw it later on a VS. Not so bad, really.
They’d portioned us out, the seriously injured going in one set of robot ambulances, the lesser in others, a
