Palms open, he delivered two more kinetic rams, squirting power from the cuff outlets of his battledress system. The construct vibrated with the double impact, taking the full force in its torso.
Mr Dine exploited his momentary advantage. He balled his left hand into fist form, invested primary power down his shoulder into his left arm, and punched.
A blow like that could split granite or fracture steel. It struck the composite alloy faring of the construct’s torso and made a significant dent.
The impact threw the Serial G backwards. It lost its footing entirely in the rain, flag-pole legs kicking helplessly, and crashed down onto its back.
Mr Dine didn’t hesitate. He fused his right hand into a blade form, like the end of an adze, and pounced to drive it down into the thing’s heart for a kill.
The Serial G was not done. Though it was down and floundering on its back in the rain, its grotesquely elongated limbs flailing, it was not done.
It lashed its right arm around like a bull-whip, and caught Mr Dine in mid air with a noise like two racing locomotives meeting head on.
‘Look out!’ Davey shouted, and threw himself into Toshiko. The pair of them tumbled over into the wet grass.
An instant later, the eggshell-blue potting shed they had been standing next to was comprehensively demolished, as if a cruise missile had struck it from the front. Pieces of tile and wooden lapping winnowed out from the impact.
Toshiko raised her head. Raindrops struck her. The Serial G was on its back like an upturned beetle, its limbs waving. With a hiss, its limbs retracted, impossibly, into its torso housing, vanishing entirely for a second. Then its legs re-extended, lifting the sculptural body back upright. It rose straight up to a height of nine feet, and then its arms extruded from the sides of the torso, sliding out of nowhere smoothly and fluidly until its vast hook hands dangled below its hips again.
It let out a hum, and the hum changed pitch. It turned its head and looked through the rain, across the ravaged allotment plots, directly at Toshiko.
No, not at her, she realised. At the wreckage of the potting shed.
It hummed again.
‘Had enough, have you?’ Davey asked, struggling to his feet. ‘Gave you a beating, didn’t he?’
A wavering hum.
‘Regroup? No? Just stop it now, eh? Just stop it now,’ Davey said.
The Serial G turned its head away and began to stride up the allotments towards the back wall.
‘No!’ Davey cried. ‘Come back here!’
It ignored him.
‘I think it’s a bit scared now, to be honest,’ said Davey to Toshiko. ‘Rattled, you know? It wasn’t expecting that. It intends to run, go to ground.’
‘It said that?’
Davey nodded. ‘It needs time to repair.’
He limped over to the ruins of the potting shed and pulled back some of the remaining side panels so he could look in. The steady rain pattered off the wood and the grass.
‘All right there?’ Toshiko heard him say. She clambered up and hurried to join him. The potting shed was just a tangle of debris, slats of wood, old duck boards, scraps of ply. Davey pulled himself in, wobbling precariously.
‘It’s OK, just lie still,’ he said.
She couldn’t see what he was talking to.
Something rose up out of the wreckage. Something like a man, or the shadow of a man. A matt-grey ghost with a strange, thorny outline. Pieces of debris fell off it as it stood up.
‘Davey,’ she warned.
‘It’s all right,’ he said, hushing at her with a wave of his hand. He kept his gaze on the figure.
‘Just stay put. It’s gone now. Just stay put,’ Davey said. ‘That’s a nasty scrape you’ve taken.’ He pointed.
The shadow looked down. It put its left hand against its side where a dark, ink-like liquid was seeping out. The hand came away, fingers soaked and dripping with the gleaming black fluid.
‘You should-’ Davey began.
The shadow simply wasn’t there any more.
‘Oh,’ said Davey. Unsteady on the tumbled kindling, he looked around at Toshiko. ‘It’s gone,’ he said.
‘It’s moving!’ Jack whispered.
The Serial G was plodding away up the allotments in the beating rain.
‘That’s the way James went,’ said Gwen. She leapt up and began to run after it.
‘For God’s sake, woman!’ Jack barked, and ran after her.
He’d reached the end wall. It was made of brick and seven feet high. There was no gate, no doorway.
James fell against the wall and slid down it. His breathing was ragged. His whole upper body hurt, especially his shoulder and his jaw. He spat out some more blood. It was hard to focus, to think. His head felt like it was coming off. His mind felt like it was boiling.
His hands were shaking.
James looked up. He heard a distinctive hissing, pneumatic tread. A hum.
The Serial G parted the elder bushes twenty feet from him in a spray of raindrops and stepped into view. James pushed himself backwards, willing himself into the unyielding wall. He held his breath.
The Serial G paused, then cocked its head and looked in his direction.
On the other side of the wall, James started to run. Another back lane, an alley, narrow and dank, filled with wheelie bins and soaked pieces of household junk. The lane ran along behind the walled backyards of another terrace.
It was quite painful to run. James faltered, and came to a halt. He leaned against the allotment wall, panting hard. He wiped blood from his nostrils. The rain dribbled down his face.
A sudden thought entered his head, unbidden, a realisation. How had he cleared this wall? How had he cleared this seven-foot wall?
How-
Twenty-five feet behind him, the wall in question exploded in a fury of phasic energy. Bricks flew and scattered, making the clip-clop sounds of horseshoes on the alleyway paving.
The Serial G stepped through the three-metre-wide hole it had made in the wall. The crumbling edges of the brick work glowed and smoked.
James started running again. The Serial G behind him snapped out a limb on elastic metal to grab him, and missed. Steel hooks the size of milk bottles clanked shut on empty air. The Serial G took off after him, taking huge strides on legs as long and thin as scaffolding poles.
James risked a look back. A serious error. He slammed headlong into a wheelie bin and came down with it, sliding along the paving, garbage spilling out around and over him.
He looked back. The Serial G bore down.
Mr Dine ignored the pain. He accessed reserve investment and cleared the wall in the rain. He landed in the alley behind the construct and leapt at its back.
The Serial G halted and writhed, trying to shake off the adversary clamped around its neck and torso. Its manipulator limbs snaked backwards, attempting to grasp Mr Dine and shred him.
Mr Dine plunged a blade fist into the base of its neck. The alloy there dented deeply.
The construct’s hum turned into a whine. It thrashed back and forth, slamming itself into the wet, alleyway walls, trying to wrench off its attacker. Bricks chipped and crumbled in bursts of dust as if hit by gunfire.
It succeeded in grabbing Mr Dine with the hooks of its right claw. It ripped the First Senior off its back and threw him sideways. Mr Dine punched through the back wall of a yard and then the kitchen wall of a house. He came to rest in the ruins of a kitchen table. His violent passage had torn the stainless-steel sink and drainer away from its cabinet mount, and water gushed, under pressure, from the broken pipes. The PVC replacement window, frame and all, fell out of its hole.
