hammer drove down onto the rover. The head angled back, swung again. The rover was being crushed and pulverised. Sunday thought of the golem inside, what must now be left of it. She hoped it had come alone.
They had reached the truck. The hammerhead had smashed the other vehicle six or seven times now. Bits of it had broken off, and now the Evolvarium machine was employing its cilia-like legs to pick through the debris. There was something obscene and avaricious about the haste with which it went about the task of recycling the broken machine, shovelling the prime cuts into a ring-shaped aperture just under its hinge-point. A horror of counterrotating teeth spun at high speed inside the maw, grinding and slicing.
Gribelin hauled himself onto the side of his truck. He looked back, still holding the piton-gun, and then switched his attention to the hammerhead. Sunday looked at it as well. It was still next to the wreck, but it had interrupted its feeding. The ‘head’ was swivelling slowly around, like a battleship turret moving onto its next target.
‘It knows we’re here,’ Gribelin said.
‘Then we’d better do what Dorcas just said,’ Sunday answered. ‘Get the fuck out of here.’
‘Lucas couldn’t outrun it, could he?’ Jitendra asked, fear breaking his voice. ‘What hope have we got?’
‘Maybe Dorcas can scare it away,’ Sunday said. Instead of heading towards the hammerhead, however, the airship was moving in the opposite direction.
‘And maybe I trust Dorcas about as far as I can piss, right now,’ Gribelin said. Through his visor, the set of his face was grim and calculating. He glanced at the hammerhead again, then his truck, then Sunday and Jitendra.
‘Run,’ he said.
Sunday frowned. ‘What do you mean—’
‘Run,’ he repeated, lowering the muzzle of the piton-gun in her direction to dispel any remaining doubt. ‘Run, sweet cheeks, and keep running. Hammerheads lock on to the biggest target they can find, and they’re smart enough to go after a machine rather than a person in a suit. Until the machine escapes, or they catch it. Whichever happens first.’
Sunday wasn’t processing. All she was seeing was a man pointing a non-weapon at her, blocking her access to the one thing that stood even a remote chance of outrunning the Evolvarium creature. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Let us in.’
From his position on the truck’s side, Gribelin kicked hard. His boot caught her in the middle of her chest. She crashed back, falling against Jitendra, who stumbled and flailed before finding his balance. ‘Gribelin!’ he called. ‘You can’t do this!’
‘Run,’ Gribelin said again. He was in the truck now, venting its cabin air in a single explosive gasp so that he didn’t have to go through the airlock cycle. Still on her back, Sunday watched him settle into the control position and work the levers. The stabilising legs spidered away. The wheels churned, found their grip.
‘He’s abandoning us,’ Jitendra said.
‘I’m not so sure,’ Sunday replied as the truck backed away and turned. She rolled onto her side and forced herself up. She remembered what Gribelin had told her, that they should do exactly what he said if the shit came down. This predicament, she decided, adequately satisfied the requirements. ‘But I do think we should run.’
So they ran, as fast as the suits allowed, which was nowhere near as fast as she would have liked, and maybe a fifth of the speed of Gribelin’s rover, now scudding away from them with a huge peacock’s tail of dust behind it.
‘It’s taking the bait,’ Jitendra said, between ragged breaths. Sunday barely had breath herself. They were pushing the suits to their limit, their own lungs and muscles doing at least as much work as the suits’ servos.
‘Keep moving,’ she said.
But she couldn’t resist a look back. The hammerhead had abandoned its first kill. Now it was going after Gribelin, but not with any sense of urgency. Conserving its energy, knowing that it could catch him up in patient increments, over kilometres. She forced herself to keep running, or to maintain what was now little more than an exhausted shambling jog. She was starting to feel light-headed, with stars spangling the edges of her vision. The faceplate readouts were all in the red, warning her that she was pushing the suit beyond its recommended performance envelope.
There’d been no stated intention, no agreement between them that they should run in a certain direction, other than away from the truck. But that had been sufficient shared volition, Sunday realised now, to send them towards the golem’s wreck. It had looked awfully far away, but distances on Mars were deceptive. She crested a shallow ridge, and with a dreamlike lurch of contracting perspectives it was suddenly much closer.
It looked bad, too. She’d never had any real expectation that the attack had been survivable, but any hopes she might have entertained were now obliterated. The rover was in pieces. It had been ripped apart and pounded into mangled and flattened shapes, now barely recognisable as the vehicle parts they had once been. She thought of Dali again: of sagging watches draped over leafless branches. The Evolvarium creature had turned the rover into art.
The suit’s warning alerts were now more than she could endure, and her own heart felt like a piece of machinery about to burst from her chest. Her lungs felt as if the sun had been poured into them. She could not keep running.
Lucas’s proxy lay on the ground.
The golem had no need of a surface suit, and was dressed as it had been in the Red Menace. For an instant her eyes tricked her, telling her that half of it must be buried under dust, until she realised that half of it was missing. The golem consisted of a head, an upper torso, one left arm. Lucas’s proxy body had been severed in a diagonal line from the upper-right shoulder to the left hip. Sunday could not see the rest of it. Perhaps the other parts were in the remains of the rover, or scattered, or had already been digested by the Evolvarium creature.
It was the first time she’d seen the inner workings of a golem. There were glutinous layers, sheaths of active polymer, a skeletal structure of translucent white plastic, fibrous bundles of nerves and power-transmission circuits. A blue-grey blubber of artificial muscles, precisely veined with fluid ducting. Not much metal, and very little in the way of hard mechanisms. Purple ichor, some kind of lubrication or coolant medium, had spilt out of it and was already freezing on the Tharsis ground. The right side of its face was mashed in, the ear and scalp missing. An
