eyeball lolled out of its socket, trailing a rope of greasy fibre optics. The golem’s intelligence, in so far as it had any, was distributed throughout its entire anatomy. But the eyes were still its primary visual acquisition system.
She stood next to it, hands on knees, waiting for the fog of exhaustion to clear from her vision.
The golem looked at her. The good eyeball tracked her in its socket, the other one twitching like a fish on land. The mouth moved, clicking open and shut in the manner of a ventriloquist’s dummy, as if operated by a crude mechanism. For the moment, there was no animation in the face. It was like a limp rubber mask with no person wearing it, sagging in the wrong places. Then Lucas seemed to push through, his personality inhabiting the golem. The face tautened, filled out, and the mouth formed a smile.
‘I’m in trouble,’ Sunday said over the suit’s general comm channel. ‘I can’t reach the aug, and aside from my brother and some people I don’t trust any more, no one knows I’m here. That leaves you, Lucas. And I don’t even know if you’re hearing this, or if you still have a ching bind back to Earth.’
The golem spoke. She heard it in her head. ‘I think we’re both in trouble, Sunday.’
‘When was the last time you received an update from Lucas?’
‘I’ve been autonomous for hours now. I’m afraid it’s highly unlikely that there’ll be any re-establishment of contact, at least not before I become inoperable.’
‘Is Lucas aware of my whereabouts?’
‘Lucas knows that I followed you into the Evolvarium, and that your probable target was Eunice’s landing site. However, he didn’t know that for a fact.’
Sunday looked around. Gribelin and the hammerhead were a long way off now: from this distance, she couldn’t see much more than the rover’s dust plume. She hoped Gribelin was still maintaining his lead.
Jitendra staggered to a halt, bracing his hands on his hips. He saw the golem, shuddered instinctively. It was a natural reaction. It looked so plausible, so lifelike.
‘It should never have come to this, cousin,’ Sunday said, with genuine sorrow.
The golem’s one good eye twinkled with bitter-sweet amusement. ‘I was always prepared to put the family before my personal advancement. It’s just a shame you didn’t feel the same way. What have you gained, though? They took the item. You came all this way for nothing.’ The face smiled. Purple ichor drooled from its lips. ‘You wasted everything, Sunday.’
‘I wouldn’t say that.’ She planted a foot on the golem’s skull. ‘There are always compensations.’
She felt the plastic crack wetly under her weight, like some large, brittle, yolk-filled egg. The pettiness of the gesture sickened her to the marrow. There was spite in her that she had never once suspected.
But at the same time she did not regret it at all.
Jitendra had been digging through the wreckage of the rover, the parts that hadn’t been completely pancaked, for many hours now. He was looking for something, anything, that might enable them to send a distress signal. Sunday had helped, at first, but then the futility of the exercise had burst over her in a wave of bleak despair. He would not find anything of use, nor would they succeed in contacting anyone who could help. If they tried to walk, they’d still be inside the Evolvarium when night returned, and their suits would certainly not keep them alive for more than a couple of days. It was already long past noon and the sun was hurtling back down towards the horizon with indecent haste.
‘I don’t think we should stay here,’ she said, for the third or fourth time. ‘If the hammerhead comes back to take another look at the wreck . . .’
On the other hand, by remaining close to the wreckage of the rover they might be less conspicuous than two figures out in the landscape, far from any other manufactured thing. Did the machines hunt by heat or sound, primarily? And was there sense in staying close to the drill site, in the faint hope that the golem had managed to report home? She might have spurned the family, but they wouldn’t let her die out here. Not knowingly, she hoped.
Gribelin was dead. She was certain of this now. Almost at the point when the dust plume faded into the pink haze of distance above the horizon, there had been a bright and soundless explosion. She had felt the report of it seconds later, rumbling through the ground like elephant talk. She imagined him allowing the hammerhead to come as close to the rover as he dared, before triggering something aboard the vehicle: a cache of explosives, some illegal weapon. Whether it had been enough to destroy the hammerhead, or merely to exclude the possibility of its catching Gribelin alive, there was no way of telling. A bonsai mushroom cloud had curled up, a brain rising swollen and cerebral from its own spinal cord, and there had been no sign of the hammerhead after that.
But the hammerhead was not even an apex predator.
‘I want Eunice,’ Sunday said. ‘She’d know what to do. She always knew what to do.’
Jitendra kicked aside a buckled metal plate. ‘There’s nothing here we can use. And I’m not even sure it’s a good idea to keep communicating like this. Maybe we should go into radio silence from now on.’ He paused, his breath ragged from the exertion of searching the wreck. That was Jitendra’s way of coping, Sunday thought: keep busy, until even he had no option but to admit the futility of it. ‘So, which direction do we walk? The winds haven’t been too bad since we came in. If our air recyclers hold out we can probably follow the vehicle tracks all the way back to Vishniac, even if we lose suit nav.’
If they lost suit nav, Sunday thought, getting lost would be the least of their worries. It would mean the suits were dying on them, and that life support would be among the failing systems. ‘Maybe another Overfloater will take pity on us.’
‘Yes. They do appear to be the kind and considerate sort, based on Dorcas’s example.’
‘I’m just saying. When you’re out of options, you cling to the unrealistic.’ But Sunday had been searching the sky for hours. There were no other airships up there. ‘I could kill her. Better than that. I will kill her, if I ever get the chance.’
‘I don’t think she meant us to die. On the other hand, I don’t think she thought things through particularly well.’
‘Do me a favour,’ Sunday said. ‘Can you – just for once – stop trying to look on the bright side
